A thread to catch up with Tep, who cooked some stuff and did some things

So I have a shitload of those in the cabinet waiting for projects.

And I was curing pork butt for bacon, cause it was on sale and all, and the fat content of sliced pork butt is about right, though it won't cook the same as belly or jowl, I realize.

For curing pork, you use a combination of salt, sugar, and seasoning.

These Pop Rocks are salt, a higher percentage of sugar, and seasoning.

So it kind of had to happen. I added some curing salt to the Pop Rocks to pinken the bacon and bring the salt level up, and we'll see how she does. It won't be carbonated, so the Pop part of the Rocks is irrelevant to this project.

Ma po tofu last night, sort of. Turns out I'm out of Chinese black beans -- I moved recently and am still in that "oh wait did I let her keep the such and such?" mode, which is a bitch in the kitchen -- so it was really just tofu simmered in a spicy pork-and-soy-and-ginger sauce.

Hummingbird cake. Lord love a duck. One of those platonic Southern cakes in that it's sweet as goddamn, a carrot-cake-like cake with mashed bananas, crushed pineapple, and pecans, topped with a cream cheese frosting. I'm gonna have to freeze most of it, it's maybe the richest cake I've ever tasted.

Cured the bacon, put some steak tips in the fridge for dry-aging -- I duct-tape a mesh lemon bag to the side of the door and put paper-towel-wrapped beef in it so the air circulates and the towels wick. Um, tried to do a key lime pie foam, but I have not mastered the air whipper thing and always get something wrong with it. Made some pesto with a lot of basil and some pecans, because I use pecans for almost everything nutty.

Today I've got one of those family packs of boneless chicken thighs, so I'll have Thai basil chicken for dinner/lunch I think, and pre-cook the rest with some vegetables for a chicken cobbler type thing tomorrow (I'd make chicken pot pie but have frozen biscuits and not pie crust).

I think that's it so far.

Oh! Roasted lemonade. I might make roasted lemonade. This needs to be mentioned, everyone should do this:

1: Take a bunch of lemons. Most of a bag's worth if they came that way. Wash them well if necessary to remove wax. Meyer lemons are very good for this but probably not worth the extra price.

2: Chop them all but one in half. Reserve that loner for later.

3: Put them in an oven dish with enough water to come up at least halfway and about as much sugar as you reckon's good for a pitcher of lemonade, maybe a little less. Call it a cup if it's a big pitcher, even if you like your lemonade on the tart side.

4: Bake for an hour or so, 375, stirring a few times -- you want the lemons very soft, browning in places, but the liquid still there.

5: Let cool to room temp. Squeeze all the pulp from the lemons, which is easiest when not yet cool.

6: Puree the liquid and pulp with at least two lemons' worth of the rind/pith. I tend to puree all of it, but most don't. Strain into a pitcher, squeezing out as much liquid as possible. Freshen with the juice from the reserved lemon. Sweeten to taste.

What you end up with is something with the flavor profile -- the slight bitterness with the sour and the sweet -- and the opaqueness of white grapefruit juice, only lemon. Very different from juice-and-water style lemonade, and since the lemon oil is involved there, even the lemon flavor itself is a little different, a little less ... sharp?

Makes a great Salty Dog or Greyhound, too, the gin kind, not the damn vodka things.

Thank you :) You're on LJ, though!

Rock: Very worth making. I did it once because I had a bunch of Meyer lemons that needed to be used very soon, and it's been a staple since. Though maybe less so now, I'm out of gin.

Still adjusting to the food differences up here -- just to stick to that thread -- what with the approach to seafood being so vastly different from Louisiana's but the availability of it being the opposite of in Indiana. The sheer indifference towards food here -- and especially to flavor -- is disheartening, though I realize my stint in Indiana was colored by the puddles of pocket money that accumulate in college towns.

The cornbread's sweet and the tea isn't, and I think I'm the only one buying the okra. But the sandwiches are nice.

What's the address of this food blog? Also: I loved New Hampshire when I lived there in college. Where are you located (generally)?

So, the foie gras. I don't remember how much of a lobe I used, but it wasn't a whole one, so I had no qualms about cutting it up further -- not grinding or mincing it, but sort of cutting it into chunks after it was deveined. Put those in a preserves jar, with a splash of good bourbon and some minced cooked excellent bacon (smoked pork jowl, Indiana's best product). There was probably a little white pepper in there too. I don't think I added any duck fat but I may have -- don't think it needed any, though, judging by the size of the fat cap on it now.

Put the jar in a pot of hot water that came up about 2/3 of the way and left it barely simmering for an hour-ish -- cooking slowly, but cooking. Capped it. I'm sure there's a canning procedure that should have then been followed, but I haven't been botulized.

I wind up having to remelt the fat periodically to maintain that fat cap on top, but it has this deep, deep flavor -- the bourbon comes through in a big way, and I really didn't use much of it. Also very good on hamburgers -- that's where the rest of that foie had gone, mixed in with chili-grind beef for burgers, a sort of dairy-free butterburger.

I'm in Nashua, in southern NH -- the next town over, Hollis, is where I grew up and where my family still lives. I was away for thirteen years, with maybe ten visits in that time. If there is anything stranger than major culture shock within walking distance of where you spent half your life, I haven't experienced it, and it probably involves cosmic rays or subway wizards.

I mean, I went out to dinner with my mother and her boyfriend the other day and was almost immediately hugged by a woman I didn't even slightly recognize -- who turned out to be someone with reasonable hugging rights, the mother of a girl I went to school with, who had given me a copy of Fahrenheit 451 when I graduated 6th grade. But I hadn't seen her in 15 years.

Pretty much every time I go anywhere, I have to apologize for not remembering somebody. My mother's the tax collector, so everyone knows her and they have a context by which to remember me.

At the same time, the grocery store where I used to have trouble finding Tabasco sauce now has fresh ostrich (though their tofu selection was limited to two packages of extra-firm!), everyone has wireless internet, and there's a Starbuck's down the street sharing a parking lot with the Denny's that poured hot coffee over a tumbler of ice when I asked for an iced coffee in 1994. So the familiar ... isn't.

At the same time, I never had NESN when living in New England, so being able to watch every Red Sox game on television and rerun twice ... whoa. I had right field roof seats for a May game, and I've got standing-room on the Monster for the last game of the year.

Okay, now you're just trying to make me cry. Bad enough that Fox bought Turner South and dumped the TBS broadcasters, but now TBS themselves are dumping the Braves starting in '08. I will probably get MLB Extra Innings starting next year.

At the same time, the grocery store where I used to have trouble finding Tabasco sauce now has fresh ostrich

Unfortunately, that hasn't happened here and I don't think it ever will. Nobody can get a toehold against Wal-Mart and the usual fast food franchises, and it's ugly to watch some brave souls try it, and sad that there are fewer and fewer braves souls each year. When Wal-Mart added Sriracha to the Asian foods section, I was happy for a minute and then just got madder. What the fuck kind of success is that?

Okay, now you're just trying to make me cry. Bad enough that Fox bought Turner South and dumped the TBS broadcasters, but now TBS themselves are dumping the Braves starting in '08. I will probably get MLB Extra Innings starting next year.

It looks worth the money if you're home for enough games -- do they have an associated On Demand service? If it makes you feel better, I pay through the nose for cable -- $60 for basic digital, and I don't have HBO because it's $26 a month (vs $10 in Indiana). It's crazy up here.

But yeah, having local baseball broadcasts ... wow. I mean, they show minor league games when the Sox have a night off, all the fluffy but awesome pre-game shows ... I don't think the novelty is going to wear off. Nor my crush on Kelly the Ball Girl.

Unfortunately, that hasn't happened here and I don't think it ever will. Nobody can get a toehold against Wal-Mart and the usual fast food franchises, and it's ugly to watch some brave souls try it, and sad that there are fewer and fewer braves souls each year. When Wal-Mart added Sriracha to the Asian foods section, I was happy for a minute and then just got madder. What the fuck kind of success is that?

It's very chain-y up here too, and the Mexican and Chinese seems to lean sharply towards the inedible or unrecognizable. There are French-Canadian restaurants -- for real! -- a couple towns over, but still.

I got spoiled by so much stuff in Bloomington, especially the butcher and Asian groceries -- no idea where I can buy pig ears here, or roosters, or sweetbreads. It keeps weirding me out that I'm in a larger, more urban area, but with fewer things available in so many categories.

OH. Speaking of which: I have to share this strangeness: 100,000 people in Nashua and NO MOVIE THEATERS. Not even a shitty dollar theater or something. They have all shut down and not yet been replaced. You have to drive 20, 30 minutes to get to a movie theater -- and many of them are nice, but man, I don't drive. I'm going to have to make some movie-lover free-time-having friends.

We had a movie theater in Hanover, but no fast food restaurants (not a bad thing, mind). Sadly, as college towns go, it's got to be one of the worst, because of all the ordinances against fun stuff.

This intrigued me: if you don't think a sprinkle of homemade pickled garlic makes a difference in your red beans and rice, you haven't tried it.

How do you pickle garlic?

Crazy! Even in Amory, a town of 6500, we have our beloved Twin Enema.

I had hoped you would move to D.C.! No chance of that now???

xpost Hi Geeta! We met at T&A wedding and I was in awe b/c you are ILX royalty.

I haven't even looked for a bar yet, because I'm just so ... much of an asshole. Well, I mean, I got into cocktails, in a big way. But real cocktails. When I make an Old-Fashioned, I don't fuck around with club soda and enough fruit to make it a weak-ass Pimm's Cup. When I make a martini -- well, I don't drink martinis often, but if I did, I wouldn't use those vermouth spritzers, I'd just use good vermouth, and if any word like "apple" or "mango" came before "tini," I would frown like a motherfucker. So outside of the cocktailian retro type bars that aren't really around me, bar drinks just aren't for me. I have a small amount of nice components in my cabinet.

Pickled garlic! I wonder if I have a recipe handy. I have some homemade green chile pickled garlic handy, but that doesn't do you much good. Essentially, you want to combine vinegar, water, and sugar -- just a touch -- until it tastes palatable. Not too vinegary or the garlic is going to be super-sharp, not too watery or it won't be pickled. I'd say two parts vinegar to one part water. Season it however you like -- definitely a pinch of salt, maybe some pepper, in my case a can of diced green chiles and a bit of Mexican oregano. Simmer it bout five minutes to get the raw taste out of the garlic -- if you want to make sure it's still crispy, I guess you can probably heat the liquid to boiling and just pour it over the garlic -- and put in a sterilized glass jar and refrigerate. Good on sandwiches, perfect with beans or greens. I use it in my collards.

Now, if you were to raise the sugar so that it was a 1:1 ratio with the liquid, you'd pretty much be making a relish -- though that's more of a gastrique, I guess maybe 2:1 with the liquid, or 3:2, in that range. Enough sugar that the liquid becomes thick and sticky and holds the solids together without solidifying in the fridge. I made a mess of cilantro-habanero relish when I had a bunch of habaneros I knew I had to keep around somehow, and I use it on hot dogs and burgers a lot.

Forks: thank you for knowing hummingbird cake! It should be a well-known classic, it's got everything in its favor that carrot cake does, except I guess maybe you're less likely to happen to have the ingredients around coincidentally.

geeta: Thank you!

quincie: Well, D.C. didn't go as planned, partly on account of one thing not working out and partly cause we decided instead of movin' we'd just break up. I had been hoping to check out Minibar and the Nationals, but both will have to wait for a vacation of some kind. I got family in Virginia just a little ways away.

Thai basil chicken: this is one of those things I make a bunch of ways depending on what I have around, but ultimately I like it to be simple and very very flavorful, so:

Diced/minced boneless chicken thighs

Stir-fried with {diced or sliced onion | sliced red bell peppers | diced Thai chiles | minced garlic}

Seasoned with {minced ginger | Chinese dark soy sauce | a pinch of sugar | a dash of rice vinegar or Filipino coconut vinegar if it's handy | Thai fish sauce}

With some kind of heavy spice -- sriracha, if there are no Thai chiles involved. I've tried the new Tabasco Sweet and Spicy and am deeply disappointed in it -- apparently it's the first product since the new owners took over.

Combined with handfuls of Thai basil {and/or fresh mint | sweet basil | holy basil, I think} in the last thirty seconds of cooking

The holy basil needs a note: I got addicted to this stuff this guy sold at the farmer's market that he called holy basil and that the Tibetan monks told him was holy basil but that bore no resemblance in appearance or taste to what the internet says is holy basil. It is not good in this recipe, but real holy basil supposedly is. This stuff, whatever it was, smelled like a combination of flowers and sex and hotel soap and bubblegum -- sounds fucking holy to me -- and I mostly used it to make this funky ice cream.

slocki: No :/ I need to find someone who a) doesn't mind trying new places, b) has free time, and c) can be talked into trying poutine reasonably sober, since they have to drive. There's one place that does poutine with anything in the kitchen, whatever you ask for. Salmon pie's big too.

It was amazing. I don't even remember what else I served, because it paled in comparison. I wound up making slight variations of the p.q. for a long time -- adding super-crispy bacon, or hot sauce, or blending the demiglace with a little hot sauce, cream, and pecans, which is one of my standard sauces for beef/pork/fish. Man, I want some right now, but I haven't got any demiglace.

Pay me in sushi, and at least there's a starting point for negotiations.

BUT - my wedding last year delivered a bounty of pro-quality cooking utensils, and I am slowly but surely adding to my repetoire of foods.

Currently doing (as I type, no less) - a roasted limeaide, based on your recipe above with one large difference (hmmm).

Within the last week, I did a mint/ginger/soy/honey chicken kabob with roasted red peppers and red onions. It was really nice and subtle, and the marinade had a totally different and interesting version of sweet mint than the typical sugar/mint combo - I actually tried a honey/mint mint julep later that night and it went perfectly with the Wild Turkey 101 that I have...I suspect a sweeter bourbon like Maker's would be too sweet for something like this.

Anyway, I'll let you know how the limeaide turns out, and its good to meet you. I look forward to learning a bunch and hopefully sharing a thing or two, too.

BTW - you should TOTALLY make it to Minibar when you get a chance. It is flat-fucking amazing, and for a person who experiments in the kitchen, it is truly a mind-blowing experience.

There's a massive Japanese ex-pat population around here and at least four good sushi spots within two blocks. Ergo, you have to come over. (Whether or not I'll give you the money for these places is another matter.)

Roasted limeade! I'm curious about it. Limes have a sort of ... tougher rind, I think, but since you're straining it, that probably won't matter if you wind up with bits that don't puree or something. I have enough limes I could try it myself if yours comes out nicely.

Minibar is one of those restaurants that is on my ... wishlist, I guess you'd say. Minibar, Babbo in New York, Alinea and Moto in Chicago (very Minibar-like), El Bulli in Spain, and St John in London. That list isn't gonna diminish any time soon, but you know. They're places I keep an eye on. And most of them are perfect examples of what appeals to me most about restaurants, as a customer: they can provide me with a meal I cannot prepare at home, not for reasons of unattainable skill but because of the tools involved and the disproportionate amount of work it would take for one serving.

The nice thing about Adria is that -- and I find this is true of Grant at Alinea, too -- he's so enthusiastic about food that you can get ideas from him that you can use without needing to have his kitchen and his laboratory. Some of it's just about flavor combinations or textures. Cantu at Moto, I don't usually respond that way -- I love what he's doing, and he does this thing with carbonating fruit (fizzing grapes!) that I think will catch on commercially, but rarely does he do something that makes me think about how I'll apply it to my kitchen because it's just so tool-dependent.

One thing that I am going to do is make a tequila/lime chicken for dinner tonight or tomorrow. Take the strained bits, mix in some tequila, and let the chicken marinate in it for about an hour before grilling. I'll keep you posted on that one as well.

GQ did an interesting article on the "new" Chicago restaurant scene, and Alinea and Moto were both featured (I think). They both sounded very similar to Minibar in their experimentalism, but WAY beyond anything traditional at all - LASERS? Vanilla infused GLASSES?

Anyway, cheers, and I'll keep you updated. Failing anything else productive today, I've made a new friend to rap with about cooking. Awesome!

I tried doing a rinds and all limeade once and it was insanely undrinkably bitter. I think I stewed it though. Try diluting it, I find that even making limeade from concentrate will get you bitter limeade if there is not enough water!

Achatz is somewhere in between. Or maybe seems it because the eGullet forums had a long in-depth look at his restaurant while he was organizing it, so I've heard him talk about food more than Cantu (although I got the idea for umeboshi-cured bacon from a post of Cantu's). I'm pretty sure he still kicks back with a hot dog or a bag of chips pretty often.

The bitterness in the limeade would probably be less noticeable in a mixed drink of some kind, I'd bet, but I don't know -- is it a grapefruity sort of bitterness?

xpost; helllooo, teeny! Yeah, no GenCon. I even have my ticket! But no way to be there or to afford doing anything while there. It's a shame, I wish I'd made a point to get together with you last year.

Alright, I got something for the thread - whats up with ribs? What are y'all's (plural possessive) preferred ways to prepare them? Pork v. beef? Dry v. wet? Charcoal v. wood?

Okay:

Beef ribs are very underrated. Beef short ribs can be pretty damn good.

I used to love boneless country ribs, but now I only buy them to cook in some non-rib-like way: grinding up the meat for some damn thing, or stewing them, that sort of thing.

At an actual barbecue joint -- smoke, fire, pit -- I tend to prefer pork because of the sweetness and the generally more marbled fat. Cooked dry or finished with sauce, and sauced afterwards. I understand the appeal of dry, unsauced ribs, but I'm not that sort of purist -- I like some bite, some tang, something to offset that sweetness and unavoidable grease.

Venison ribs are great. Buffalo ribs are good but not worth the mark-up buffalo usually gets -- it's nice to get a buffalo cut with fat on it for once, though, because the positioning of it as The Lean Mammal has dried out a few too many meals.

Curing pork ribs can be nice, too, because they come out ham-ish, but not like ham since that's not the cut one would usually use for ham. Cured beef ribs, I'm not as crazy about -- they sort of imply the possibility of an interesting combination of "corned beef" and "well-marbled beefy beef," but I think ribeye would be the better cut to bring that out.

I have procured (a free give away) a small (~50 lb of meat) smoker. I have not used it yet, as I am currently studying for the bar exam. But, once that's done, I plan on breaking the thing in proper. I was thinking of doing two things -

One - smoking the ribs instead of charcoaling them. Is this practical for eating purposes?

Two - I am DYING to make some Andouille of my own. Any tips/thoughts/places to look? You SAID you call NOLA home...

1: Yes. Definitely! Make sure to find dependable-sounding instructions, but Carolina whole-hog barbecue, for instance, is often smoked (though it's also often cooked over fairly high-heat fire, with the smoke incidental to the cooking process; all that fat and skin keeps it from overcooking). With ribs, you can't really go wrong from what I understand -- other things, it varies. I'm not crazy about smoked duck, for instance, but I love smoked chicken wings. My Absolute Perfect Lobster Roll uses smoked lobster.

I don't have a smoker, but I have found that if you have a cast-iron pot with a tight-fitting lid, something small enough to fit in it, a nearby door, and your girlfriend isn't home, you can pretend you do.

2: Now, andouille I'm not at all sure of. I would think it would be pretty slowly-smoked, which might be hard to do in a home smoker. But I could be wrong. I'd check the Louisiana forum at eGullet, do a search for andouille -- I'm sure it's come up. (Oh, and the Charcuterie thread, in the Cooking forum I believe -- might be there too, not sure how much they've talked about smoking.)

Word. Good on both tips. I think that I shall celebrate with ribs and smoked wings. Or, if I can track it down beforehand, some smoked turkey legs!

Jesus, I cannot wait until a time when cooking is what occupies my Saturdays.

Last time I went to Louisville, I was on the lookout for smoked mutton, which is a regional barbecuism in western Kentucky, and I found one place that did it -- and was alle xcited -- and it was the last thing we did before leaving ...

... and it was terrible. I'm sure the meat was good, you could smell it driving up. Rich and smoky. But they served everything sauced, and the sauce was like some foul abuse of seasoning, some ... I don't know. I don't even know what they got wrong, it was just rank and horrible. And overpowering.

So I have not yet really done the smoked mutton thing, unfortunately.

Ah fuck, its like 4 hours until dinner and I'm already starving.

Dammit. That's always the way, you talk about the food you're not having.

Oh! But they also have Fluffernutter ice cream. The local ice cream here is pretty fantastic, and they've got some nice flavors without being too out-there -- black raspberry chocolate chip, Grape Nuts, and now this. Peanut butter ice cream with peanut butter cups and a marshmallow swirl. It's exactly what I've gotten from Coldstone Creamery a million times, but it's nice to have it right there in the freezer.

kudos

1: It is a head.

2: The whole damn thing is edible, other than the bones. I mean, you have to eat something like the head to appreciate this. You can -- as I did -- cut off the jowls and deal with them separately (oh my god pork jowl adobo), and you can do various things with the ears, and ... the whole thing is breakdownable, you know, it's meat Legos or some damn thing.

But if you roast it mostly whole (jowl-less), out comes this thing, and it's all ... food. But so many different textures and tastes, all of them recognizably pork. It's seriously kind of amazing.

3: And it is so tasty. That pliable pork skin over a piece of tender meat? You can just sit there picking at it all day with a little vinegary hot sauce and a beer. The pig is nature's bacon.

xpost: i actually lied...i made a meatloaf last night. it was...okayish. but i'm off my game.

The other ten percent, it's pretty much a matter of being at the store and seeing they got a pig's head.

code around the "a.m."...jesus) and going back in at 9. but that ends this week and i am looking forward to eating things outside of a styrofoam container. (how is it possible to lose weight when you eat nothing but things that have been deep fried or put into a tortilla?)

and welcome back dude.

and i meant to say this thread will probably be useful when i do.

Damn, pig's head, huh? I think the wife might flip out on that one, but I totally have some dudes who would be down.

The problem is when the cooking takes on a life of its own instead of being something I do when I have time -- like today, I could be getting a headstart on writing an encyclopedia entry on Santeria (that's what I do now), but I made a chicken pot pie and am watching Desperate Housewives in French. When I'm really working hard on something, I tend to have cheeseburgers every day until I run out or finish the draft.

xpost; I want to come over for the pig's head!

One of reasons I'm moving my office back into the house next month is so I'll be right next to the kitchen. I can't cook at all now when I'm busy because it's too much running back and forth.

I can't get ostrich meat down here, but I could bury you up to your neck in pig ears.

Rock: I would take pig's ears over any part of the ostrich any day. I love ostrich, but at the end of the day a steak is just a steak. (At the beginning of the day, a steak is just a chicken-fried steak and eggs.)

I am currently in South Pasadena, CA, although I know that you were asking Jess about her B-more residency.

And yes, pig's ears over ostrich.

i will eat just about anything that's fried, but a hot dog gives me pause. (health, not taste.) (this is also not to say i wouldn't gobble that fucker up.)

I didn't have it with gravy, that seemed a little cocky.

omg hot dog with gravy.

I know ILX World FAP will never happen, but an ILX Foodies Convocation would be an awesome thing. God help the restaurants of whatever city it happened in, though.

an ILX Foodies Convocation would crush. I say we plan that muhfucker. My vote is Chicago.

Off to try the limeaide...

-- I will commence to drop a knowledge bomb. (crump...), July 15th, 2006. (Rock Hardy)

I too moved back to my hometown after twelve years away, and that was in 1984. Time flies. A lot of my old classmates had (have) gone nowhere. They showed a total lack of curiosity about where I'd been all those years, greeting me as if they'd just seen me the day before. Ah, New England taciturnity.

its a very concentrated lime syrup. From there, you can
a) add water, ice, sugar and/or liquor, and have a VERY refreshing drink
b) Use it as a marinade, which I will be doing tomorrow with chicken
c) freeze it, and use it as ice cubes for drinks like gin and tonics, although it may be a bit too much lime there. A mojito, on the other hand....

alright...I've got 30 more questions to to go and then I'm doen for the day. Cheers to all, and I'll let you know how the marinade does tomorrow.

(And I STILL have cops slowing down when they drive past me, but I think it's because of tattoos instead of clunky boots now.) (Probably the same cops, too!)

The pig's head had mostly been singed, but I took some stragglers off with my creme brulee torch, which was very ... disconcerting, because burning hair is a very human smell. Luckily sputtering roasted pig fat is not.

xpost; Oh crap! The limeade, I left out the "dilute with water" step, didn't I? Well no wonder.

To be determined later....

I'm down to like my last 1/2 ounce, unfortunately. My cocktailing depleted much of my bar, such as it is.

Not what the Long Pig aficionados say.

Did I know this? Why don't you post more on the LA CA USA thread? You hurt me in my heart etc.

if you haven't smelled people cooking

Pardon, my cannibalism is underdone.

A lot of this talk is interesting because I've realized that I don't cook meat that much (and kinda don't want to, not because I won't eat it, perish the thought, but because I think I want to learn more dishes that I could cook for literally anyone, except vegophobes, I guess).

I wind up going through phases, but I do keep coming back to meat, and maybe in part because my influences are meat-centric -- and because I've gotten so fascinated with "offal," with ordering pig stomach at Chinese joints and eating the shrimp heads off other peoples' plates when it's clear they aren't going to bother. Duck heart on a biscuit, cured lamb tongue, pig ears braised and baked and dipped in hot sauce. Meat's got more parts to it -- so playing around with citrus means more like finding the unusual species, not the unusual parts of the fruit you're already familiar with.

But I've been cooking a lot of okra lately, and there was a while where I was eating yucca every day, and I'm big on chicory right now.

The Minas Brazilians here on the Vineyard (whose cuisine is not as spicy as the Bahian but makes use of lots of pig parts—you'd love it) put farofa—toasted mandioca starch—on everything, as a gritty starchy topping. At first I thought huh? But then it grew on me.

I make feijoada a lot when I have enough pig parts for it, but I've never had the farofa to serve with it.

Next time, perhaps.

my friend jacky just went to el bulli for lunch. $600 for 2 people. her last name rhymes with chan, so i think they were expecting the moviestar to show up. but anyhow, she said it was amazing.

It's so nice to see Tep posting again! I just checked out the food blog, it is amazing.

Tomatoes in the fridge turn all mealy, if they're good fresh tomatoes. I think it has to do with the sugars. The dense-ish tomatoes you get at the supermarket, not the vine-ripened ones but the others, those won't really be affected -- so if you really want a cold tomato and don't mind those, go for it. But otherwise I never refrigerate tomatoes or citrus. (In the case of citrus, it's just because it's easier to juice warmer citrus and my fridge is cold enough that I don't want to get that "oh man cold teeth!" thing going on when I eat an orange.)

I've got a tomato plant on my deck right now, but every time it starts to thrive, we get hit with a bunch of rain and it damn near washes away. (Right now my living situation is in flux. I may stay here with the deck and let my brother's ex move in, or I may relocate to the apartment she's living in, and be in walking distance of farmstands. It's all defined by vegetal proximity somehow.)

I was just trying to remember how long it's been since I was reading ILE regularly, and it must be since 2004, because when I met teeny at GenCon in August 2004 I hadn't been reading. Since I was only posting on ILE since late 2002, I have been not-reading for as long as I was reading uninterrupted, which is weird. You realize most of the novels I've written, I've written since starting on ILE? Well no, there's no reason you would realize that, but still. I'm on the ninth or tenth now, I forget which.

Um, what else. I fell asleep prematurely last night reading All the Pretty Horses (not the book's fault, I'm amazed by it so far) and so I'm awake prematurely today feeling disconcerteder than usual. Okay, job stuff: I have parleyed ten-ish? years of college into being an "independent scholar," which is my compromise between writing fiction full time (good) and being an actual academic (bad): I write encyclopedia entries and chapters of high school textbooks, and will probably do similar things along those lines (readers' guides and so on). I don't mind the work, I just need to pick up more of it because I'm completely broke. I'm doing everything I can to avoid overly respectable work -- ties and offices and things like that, that would drive me batshit.

I've also decided I have to try uni the next time I go to this nice sushi place that my one friend I kept in touch with from high school has taken me to before, which I figure I'll do with the next check that comes in.

what were the names of the games you've written?

I like the idea in theory, but basically I make up for it by working disproportionately thoughtful descriptions of food into my fiction.

Kingfish: Oh yeah, I've been back sporadically (that would be pretty dope of us). The Passion, Jesus Christ what a mess.

I wrote:
http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b288/lasttycoon/sscover2e.jpg

And there was another game in the works that never came around because the publisher essentially stopped publishing, and a third that I stopped working on because the labor was exceeding the projected return by too wide a margin.

http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b288/lasttycoon/rox0r.jpg

l-r: fork stolen from T.G.I. Friday's, me, Pop Rocks, Pop Rocks bacon, diet Moxie.

The bacon isn't burnt, though it looks it (out of the photo too): the cure had too much sugar in it, and the cooked-off liquid burned in the pan. All in all: a little salty, and a little tough (too soon to know if that's the fault of the batch or this cut of meat for this application), and very very little perceptible Pop Rocks flavor. So we haven't so much moved closer to Pop Rocks bacon, just verified that you can substitute Pop Rocks for its constituent parts, but it sounds cooler to say, yeah, I made bacon with Pop Rocks.

The trick with the real actual Pop Rocks bacon -- bacon you pop in your mouth, and it pops, without having any Cantu/Achatz/Adria technology available -- will be to heat the Pop Rocks very quickly so they'll adhere to the crispy bacon, without compromising the integrity of ... uh, the candy shell that holds the fizzy stuff in? I have only a vague idea of the Pop Rocks anatomy.

Also excellent: cherry shrub. Don't remember if I mentioned it. Drink concentrate, Colonial-era, still around in the South; fruit (cherries, here) steeped in vinegar a couple weeks, combined with sugar, diluted with still or sparkling water (and/or booze). Better vinegar would yield better results, but this is awfully good and I'm going to make some tomato and jalapeno shrubs later.

Hi Tep! glad to see you're doing well. I won't tell you about the things I eat b/c it would make you cry.

Habanero poppers?

Fire?

Good Mexican would be enough to make me cry. There's a great place in Bloomington run by a Mexican family, which puts me in the odd position of missing Indiana for its Mexican food.

Hi Sam :) Likewise!

Have had good mexican lately. But no culinary feats at home.

You're pregnant! Congratulations! I can't wait for ILX: The Next Generation, when they let the Klingons start posting.

I like how this thread is promoting conversation among lots of different ILXors.

Hi Haikunym ... nim!
(Nim is not a word, damn it.)
Hi cuckoo haiku.

The next time I resume playing the GBA -- I go through phases -- I'm going to check out ILG. My power cord's being all weird and it's not fully recharging anymore, so if it dies I'll wind up buying a DS and OHNOetc. But mostly, honest to God, I'm happy enough playing the same games I played 20 years ago (plus Pokemon).

Yeah, that's what I was thinking. I liked how BLAM and Ned had a little back-and-forth up there, which doesn't often happen because BLAM often sticks to the D.C. thread. You know, just as a for-instance.

hey, here are my friends photos from meal at el bulli. so funny looking, the food

http://www.flickr.com/photos/chezpim/sets/307952/

The pea ravioli always looks so gorgeous. And the apple caviar!