Poivrot Farci

Consider the Zappa & Vongerichten's & Keller's & English's & Colicchio's & Palmer's & Batali's & Ramsey's et al Mothers'... “We're Only in It For the Money” album.

It is not unheard of sacs exploding under high heat. The surprise "pop" is almost as exhilirating as the splashing of hot fat onto neck, arms and face.

Washington is likely to have a Michelin guide within a few years (albeit diluted like the NYC/SF in comparison to the European one) and just as the science pages will regale us with foreign Nobel winners and the sports pages yachting results from the southern hemisphere, news of a highly regarded restaurant compendium whereupon all others are judged against is interesting to anyone curious or passionate about comestible culture and its tangents. Many in this forum who read the Post may be pleased or inspired to read of M. Barbot's 3rd star despite only 27 seats or Mme. Pic's 3rd generation continuance of the family tradition.Happenings outside the beltway are appropriate for a publication such as the Post and the DC demographic. Readers might wonder about the logistics of supplying lobsters from the northeast to the rest of the country and worldwide or how flying squirrels are followed to find truffles in the northwest. The Post shouldn't bore readers with pedestrian Hallmark recipes. If this pegboard in any indication of the time people spend on distractions while milking the clock, those who care enough are capable of finding them somewhere on their own.

Is the WashPo food section intended to be a "Local news"-caliber collection of corny food related diary entries rather than reflections on or news from the bigger picture...perhaps the new Michelin guide that comes out today, spring produce forecast or something relevant other than rice pudding and linguine recipes for the home cook. Can we expect a fold-in, picture hunt or instructions for making a novelty Steve Martinish asparagus-through-the-head gag next month?

Cardoon soup! (insert "nausea" emoticon).

The source of the product reflects integrity and selfless consequences. Whether it be blood diamonds, sweat-shop shoes, mega-mart sales, unsolicited irritating penis enlargement doo-dads, inefficient vehicles or farms that pollute drinking water. In some western countries, restaurants and such are held accountable to what is claimed to be made in house under penalties of consumer fraud. Food is the foundation of our existence and restaurants have thrived before the resourceful advents of Messrs Birdseye and Appert, despite seasons. If even the French were eventually able to properly fry a previously scorn potato, surely Mr. Keller's empire can figure out the solanum tuberosum matrix. Discriminating consumers who cannot appreciate the charming nuances and virtues of handblown glasswares over Libby's Dollar store chalices might as well chug-a-lug from the bottle. However, while I may not be able to differentiate a genuine Roycroft antique from a replica, were I to purchase the forgery from a well reputed dealer who, while making no claims of the authenticity, is well renown based on exclusive awards for their inventory/practice/trade/workmanship, I would consider the sale of a cheap duplicate veiled deceit.

If Mssrs Keller, Richard and others are rewarded Michelin stars and all but Michelin sycophantic praise (so far) for the quality of [their] frozen vegetables and preprepared items, whose consistency or taste they are not able to replicate themselves, they are frauds, undermining craftsmen and Holden Caulfields who continue and pursue an honest trade on a personal level. Either the lab technicians in R&D or those who place the orders in F&B should be mentioned in the establishment's highest culinary distinction. A chef's merit is based on their ability to work a product from raw to plate, not from catalog. They rest on their gilded laurels and are a detriment to others' work by cheaply inflating their mystic standards. Furthermore, prices relayed onto the consumer should reflect labor rather than shipping, so long as they can differentiate hand-made from factory.

Piquez

Iberian White Chili. Coco beans, salt cod, panceta, chipirones, bay scallop, shrimp, pickled white anchovy, mussels, fennel, spanish onion, lemon and parsley bound with an espelette béchamel. Accoutrements of grated garrotxa and peppered crème fraîche. Awarded cheers and no less than the 9' non-functioning-sombrero-and-cactus-light-string-thing blue ribbon & mini rum bottle at NOAA's 1st and possibly only Chili Challenge Whathaveyou. Unceremoniously redubbed Cheater Chili by disparaging no-hopers and bitter Waterloo revisionists. Jeers and a humiliating Hormel Trophy went the stillborn SPAMish gruel which best exuded chili atrophy; the winning gov't employee cried...heh-heh.

My results were similar, using little more than a jade abacus, Casio wrist-watch and physics post-doc nerd friend from Rockefeller U.Is there a runner-up silver burrito offer? mathing.pdf

Hey Don, Love your foodie bulletin board! Couldn't get the NY Post this morning so I gave the WaPo edition a shot. YMMV. WTF?! FYI, IIRC we're only 28 days into 2007AD? Who is this guy? Rasputin? LOL!Powdered food? OMG that's crazy! 65 degree eggs? Like a little less than room temperature? Has this Morou guy ever tried this wacky 5150 stuff before, B/C someone just like him was doing it a few years ago at Signatures. Are any other chefs in the USA making weird LASER/SCUBA food thingies this year? FWIW I've been experimenting with WF sea sprinkles, GM AP powdered wheat, PCP, cocaine, 4C bread dust and NASA dried ice-cream at home since 1986. Does that count? ROFLOL!!! BTW, AFAIC, Tom's WYSIWYG happy-go-lucky surgical wit must make it easy to write a M*A*S*H episode, Care Bear Movie script and Horatio Cane's opening CSI crescendo in the same day! ROLFLOLBAG!

Cash In AdvanceCulinary schools do not guarantee success. The institution may have a perennial reputation which not every goofy assuming alumni inherits. Many venerable trades are humbly and frugally learned though self-tutelage or apprenticeship. Resourcefulness and passion often trump bankroll.

A river of Pitu cachaça, tears of orgeat, splash of DC tap water. Helps to appreciate the conotation/denotation of Modern Marvels' "balls" episode.

What paranoid fantasies have led women to choose passive aggressive over assertive in shooing away check-out courters or delivery-type flirts who have been designated as harmful serial perverts? No XX's have the primordial courage or decency, it would appear, to directly inform retail-Romeos that their philandering puppy eyes are creepy, rather, it has been recommended that the object of the Pizza guy's desire rebuff the advances with such inefficiencies as ambiguous body language or anonymous phone calls to the manager. Which forms or grocer gallantry won't get seducers maced?

Olive, butter, duck and pork fats do not make humans “fat”; sequestered lifestyle, processed corn syrup, metabolic stinginess, denial soft-drinks and pyrite chip-snack methodology does.

A pox upon the Gallic vacuum-seal nomenclature and all the suck-ass neophytes who hock it. I reckon one might get the same results confiting directly in fat without compromising the environmental resources wasted on plastic bags and their disposal. Premise is the same, be it 1 duck leg in fat in a bag or 20 legs in fat in a large earthenware cauldron lined with pork skin. So long as the temperature is constant and low 200-225 F the results will be virtually the same, duck-juice not being able to easily diffuse through fat. The sous-vide prestigitation is a Brookstone gimmick teet onto which so many cooks unfamiliar with the most basic properties of kitchen science and folklore have attached their gumming chops. They groom their asshairs with Mach-7 combs and slash short-cuts rather than celebrating the cobbled course of traditional cookery, validating their expensive techno-cappucino warmers, whose cost could be better spent hiring a prostitute off Craigslist and instructing her to lower or raise the flame conversely to a thermal G-spot on the meat-probe whilst I sip my snifter of Cynar in the salon and delight myself with those cheeky Hustler cartoon double-entendres... With exceptions of forcemeats where the egress of fat is detrimental to the final product, if the liquid that entertains the transfer of juices and whatnot of your protein/veg/whatever is properly flavored and seasoned, cooking vessel of constricting size and the temperature is s/low, your results will rival those of clowns who can't read a sundial or tend their follicles without gadgets... unlike Carls Sagan and Yastrzemski.

Documented a weight loss contest 2 years ago. Inexplicably, all contestants decided to bulk up before the first weigh-in. In the end, The Dark (meat) Horse won after a strict 3 month regimen of cottage cheese, turkey and skim milk and found a new girl-friend.

A pox and beaucoup passive curses upon my Gallic patrimony, and traitor Alexandre Cammas for introducing “Le Fooding” nomenclature into Francophony: an illicit bastardisation of L'oncle Samuel's “Food” et “Feeling.” Good times, perhaps, however, should the burgeoning blossoms of French comasticureanism really be inbred with generic cowboy vernacular?

garlicy, tasty, hairy... please reserve the ((Y's)/why's) for adverb usage. Not withstanding; ...why I hardly get soignė laid by salty strumpettes at Gov't holiday parties anymore.

Clearly Mr. Siestsema's subliminal vocabulary enhancing tapes are working. Mr. Pulitzer would no doubt high-five the Machiavellian delineation of burnt toast. and low-five on the flip-side his whimsical dumb-down of a spiral.

Mr. Sietsema's despertate Mad-Lib Bebo flattery is a scribbled blight in the year's final WashPoMag.Perhaps he should review how inconspicuous dining stealth ensures most of the vapid flavors we anonymous peasants are served, or reveal the secret fraternal ritual of arbitrary ratings. "Home cooking" does not validate mediocrity nor justify sloth and should reach further into a talented repertoire than making chicken stock & tube steak.

Go fish

Jansson’s Temptation (Jansson’s frestelse)A traditional Swedish holiday thing aside from intensely repressed glögg inebriation: Scalloped potatoes baked in cream with a middle layer of caramelized onions and pickled sprats -bit smaller than a herring. Anchovies erroneously found their way into the American version since sprats are called ansjovis by Swedes, whereas anchovies fall under the sardeller appellation. (Domku’s herring sampler looked suspiciously similar to the jarred Abba brand variety) The three folkloric Norse origins of Jansson’s Temptation’s legend are inconclusive and subject to very little debate by neither mythological conspiracy enthusiasts nor epicurean historians. Some suspect the namesake of the dish to be Per Adolf “Pelle” Janzon, a gluttonous 19th century opera singer whose troubadour regimen allegedly consisted of beer, schnapps and the dish which won him marginal posthumous celebrity on the 40th anniversary of his expiration date. Gunnar Stigmark, author of the Gastronomisk Kalender hopelessly attributes the dish to the eponymous 1928 Swedish silent-movie box-office flop starring Edvin Adolphson. Hippie publishers of the 1967 American Heritage Cookbook believed that Erik Jansson, the really pious Swedish religious reformer who founded Bishop Hill, Ill in 1846 (2000 census pop. 125) was spied eating a decadent dish of anchovies and potatoes bound with rich, creamery butter and farm fresh milk. Janssonist zealots considered Jansson to be the second coming of Christ and cursed the dish as Jansson’s Temptation. He was murdered in 1850. Rumored inspiration for the Swedish chef is also lukewarmly contested. Um der cleeckee

As a jock, nerds are my bespectacled mortal enemies. Monsieur This, however, is glassesless and upstages Harold McGee with “Révélations Gastronomiques” (not in English yet) by combining scientific properties and respective weight-measured recipes, offset by culinary anecdotes such as the heptagonal efficiency of turned vegetables and relevant historical quotations/ references from les big fromages: Brillat-Savarin, de La Reynière, Carème, Bras...McGee. Virtually every cookery technique, property and method - emulsions, yeast, butter, starch, eggs, fats, puff pastry, protein coagulation, mousses, searing, poaching, braising, micro-waves, civet, brining, infusing, pastry dough, baking... are explored, explained and demonstrated with each composed dish. Far more practical toilet read than McGeek’s “On Food and Cooking” for tangible executions, and without the shame of Henri Miller.

One is right to spite an establishment that is too busy to seat others promptly by never going there oneself, and to vehemently protest future patronage over noisy cash transactions.