kb
Member since Aug 25, 2014
Recent Comments
Re: “Monday Meal: Beef Stroganoff”
Much like the excellent recipe in The Four Season's Cookbook.
Stroganoff is one of those dishes that lends its self to variation-- vary the %s of beef & sour cream, use shallots instead of onion, use or don't mushrooms, try a little or a lot of paprika.
Re: “Monday Meal: Ted's Chile Verde”
Ted blew it big time on this one. Chilli Verde (green chilli) means that green, not red tomatoes, were the basis for this dish.
Some say that chilli verde means using tomatillos instead of red tomatoes for chilli verde, but the Gold Cookbook specifies unripened (green) red tomatoes (green Celebrity tomatoes work really well).
Re: “Monday Meal: Tax Day Chicken with Leeks”
Modification from Richard Olney's "Simple French Food".
Instead of pan roasting, pile the Leek greens on top of the chicken, cover, poele for about 40 minutes.
Adds remarkable depth of flavor.
Re: “Bourgeois Bargains”
I must assert that Ted is full of it. All Bordeaux wines are grossly overpriced because wine snobs like Ted persit in the fiction that these are "great" wines. Not so. For the most part, they are second rate, overpriced wines easily beaten by almost anything from California and by much of the production of S America, Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand.
Adjusted to toady's prices, we once spent $350 on diner for two at a two star Michelin Restaurant on fresh killed wild boar accompanied by a Premier Grand Cru St Emmilon (a top rated Bordeaux whose major grape is the Merlot). Years later we discovered that an $8 California Merlot was a better wine.
The last French Bordeaux we bought was a case of 1975 Lafite which was selling for $168 a bottle when we drank our last bottle. Again, for less that $10, we could have enjoyed a superior California Bordeaux.
I am not a Francophone when it comes to wine. Our favorite wine ever was a 1976 Burgundy that cost $8 in 1978 ($35 today). Our wine merchant had 26 cases of this wine. I bought all of them. That was a bargain, a real steal, but today, I'd never buy any French wine because none of them are worth the money, especially Bordeaux.
Re: “Modern French Cuisine”
Precious? No.
Pretentious? Yes.
Glad to see Ted finally gets it-- the absurd corruption of so-called fine dinning over the last 20-25 years, but it didn't require a trip to Paris to figure it out. We knew it the first time we ate at a Park City restaurant highly recommended by Ted when we moved to Utah 19 years ago-- pretentious in the extreme, only differentiated from the Paris rip-offs Ted describes by larger serving sizes. So pretentious was, and is, Park City dining that we quickly coined a term for this novelle cuisine-- California Yuppie Food. That's an insult. And it took a trip to France for Ted to finally decipher California Yuppie Cuisine. Good on Ted. Its about time, but if Ted really gets it, he will never again recommend any Park City restaurant and will retract about half his SLC recommendations.
Ted goes on to say, " I realized during this trip to France that the food I love in France is much like the food I love here in American. It's regional." Nope. Wrong again, Ted. It might have been regional food, but that was not the key to a good meal in France. The key was that these were places where the French Joe Six-pack eats. Take the $125 lunch Ted reported on. Do that every day of the year, and its cost exceeds the average annual income of a Frenchman. Can't be done. THE FRENCH DON'T EAT LIKE THIS. To appreciate French cuisine, you must eat like the French eat, and that means forget the Michelin stars. That’s not French food. That’s Michelin food– California Yuppie cuisine in spades.
How to find a real French restaurant:
1] Find a hotel that looks like it caters to traveling salesmen and eat at its restaurant.
2] As a local where he/she eats most often when eating out.
3] Walk down the street reading the menus posted in front of the restaurants. Pick one in your price range or pick one where something on menu appeals to you. This works because there are no bad restaurants in France
4] Use the Michelin Guide but ignore the famous stars and use the secondary rating system which look like x-xxxxx.
Re: “Dim Sum Drinks”
I once put the question to the manager of Washington DC's famed Tung Bor Restaurant where we had Dim Sum every weekend for 15 years if we were at home. He answered, "Little snacks eaten while drinking tea". Tea. Not wine. Tea. Not beer. Tea and only tea is drunk with Dim Sum.
Tung Bor provided a choice of 4 teas with Dim Sum-- Jasmine, automatically severed to non-Asians, but after we asked the manager if there was choice of tea, he said "Jasmine, Oolong, Chrysanthemum, or Pu Lai."
We tried them and all and settled on Pu Lai, a famous Chinese banqueting tea.
Apparently non-Asians drinking Pu Lai tea is so rare that after a few weeks of our weekly Dim Sum with Pu Lai tea, our preference became known to the service staff. As soon as we entered the restaurant, a cry spread across the large seating area from server to server, "Pulai ta. Pulai ta.", and as soon as we were seated, a pot of Pu Lai tea was placed on our table. Non-Asians were automatically severed Jasmine Tea. Asians were asked to what tea they wanted to order. We got Pu Lai because we were the weird Americans who liked Pu Lai tea. .
Never never never never never drink booze with Dim Sum. Dim Sum is made to accompany drinking tea, and pray you can find a Dim Sum joint that offers a choice of teas.
My recollection is that you can get Pu Lai tea at The Hong Kong Tea House, but not at Ang Hong.
Should you be lucky enough to find a Dim Sum restaurant that serves Pu Lai tea, you must order your Dim Sum meal in this sequence:
1] when the waitress comes to your table, the first works out of your mouth must be, "Do you have Pulai ta?"
2] If the answer is yes, you must say, "Bring us a pot of Pulai ta and then we will order. "
Unlike all other teas, the longer Pu Lai steeps, the better it gets. Other teas get bitter if they steep too long, but not Pu Lai.
But Beer with Dim Sum? Wine with Dim Sum? Pleeeeeeze. Give us break. How parochial can you get? You want to see just how backward Utah culture is? All you need do is look at the advice to drink beer with Dim Sum.
Re: “Monday Meal: Easy Pasta Alfredo”
classic Alfredo is butter & cheese. Butter/cream or cream with no butter are nice variations, but however you do it, don't get too fixed on the quantity of ingredients used. The key to Alfredo is to have the cheese absorb all the butter (or cream etc) and the combination to stick to the pasta. Variations in the ingredients and who knows, maybe even the humidity, make it impossible to get the right quantities of cheese and butter except by trial and error.
Cook the pasta, drain, return to the pot and add butter. Then start sprinkling in cheese while stirring. Keep adding cheese until all the butter is absorbed by the cheese. That is Alfredo. If you add any more cheese, you have Alfredo with cheese, not Alfredo. Do it right and it elevates the dish to an even higher level.