Malawry

Has anybody sampled the restaurants at the massive Whole Foods in the Fair Oaks part of Fairfax? I had lunch at the smokehouse stand recently, and my verdict of it was so-so. There's also an Asian place with sushi and some dim sum, and some kind of seafood restaurant too. The store is kinda strange, it's almost like Eatzi's with a few sit-down restaurants and some typical organic-crunchy groceries besides.

In my vegetarian days, the Vegetable Garden in Rockville was a standard. It's pretty close to White Flint Mall on the opposite site of the Pike, and rarely took me longer than 20 minutes to reach from Takoma Park. Buddhist Chinese vegetarian food, and I'm pretty sure it's all vegan. I preferred it to Yuan Fu back then, partly because Yuan Fu was a much greater distance from my home. It's not fine dining, but it's a pleasant enough room for a Chinese place in a strip center on Rville Pike. What about that Rock Creek place?

Just a note for anybody ordering from the Organic Vanilla Bean Company: if you pay via PayPal, they may ship to your PayPal address regardless of what address you gave the company when filling out the order form online. Therefore, make sure your PayPal address is accurate before ordering from them. Apparently somebody in Takoma Park got real lucky with a free half-pound of vanilla beans while I'm sitting here in WV wondering where the hell they went.

I hate it when there's no changing table and no room at the sink to change my son in a restaurant bathroom. I WILL NOT get on the floor of the bathroom to change him, nor will I change him anywhere in the dining room. I sometimes end up taking him out to the car. Please, restaurateurs, put a changing table in the bathroom! I have been to airports in Florida, Iceland, England and Illinois as well as around DC with my son, and all of them had decent changing facilities in the bathrooms, usually with small sink for handwashing and dedicated trash can. I am flummoxed at the concept of changing a baby on the seats outside a gate.

Hey StorageLady, welcome to DR. Where is Marsalas? I meant to make it to LJ and the Kat on my birthday this past fall, but we failed to find a babysitter--and it doesn't seem like a child-friendly restaurant. Eve Zibart of the Post reviewed it and seemed to like it but thought many dishes were too salty.

How long did your beans take to arrive? I ordered on the 23rd and got an email saying my order was being shipped that day, so I'm surprised not to have them yet.

Dayum, those are good prices. I was planning to buy some at Costco but became too gunshy after Cjsadler's post about their poor quality. Now that I have a half-pound of beans coming my way, does anybody have recommendations for how to use them? I remember making an awesome vanilla bean cake once, but I lost the recipe. I'm planning to make some vanilla pudding and some ice cream and also get a batch of vanilla sugar working. With that many beans in the house, though, I'm definitely open to suggestions for other uses.

This is the recipe I use: Pizza Dough 2 tsp yeast 1.5 c warm water 2 tbsp olive oil 1 tsp salt 4 c flour Cornmeal Combine water and yeast. Whisk in oil and salt. Gradually add flour. Push together and knead by hand until smooth. Put in oiled bowl, cover with plastic, and let rise until doubled. Punch down and let rise overnight in refrigerator. Scatter cornmeal on peel. Pull dough into a round of desired thickness. Place on peel. Top as desired and shake onto stone. Bake at 500 degrees in a stone oven, usually about 10 minutes. This recipe makes two medium-sized pizzas with a nice, not-thick not-thin crust. Be sure you heat the oven with the stone for at least 45min before you bake the pizza. Also, jerk the peel with the dough on it around a few times before you top the pizza to be sure the pizza is moving (if not, take the dough off and add more cornmeal). Top it quickly because if it sits on the peel with a bunch of wet toppings for too long, the dough gets wet and sticks to the peel. Also, I don't own a peel so I use a medium-sized wood cutting board instead (use wood because if it touches the hot stone it won't melt). I usually slide an offset spatula under the pizza before I pull it out to make sure it's not sticking to the stone.

Personally, I like Zinfandel any time of the year.

I'd try it on something super-sticky like brioche dough. Also on a buttercream to see how the ridges affect the air-whipping action. Please let me know how it goes, if you like it I'll buy one for myself. ETA: I just realized I use the whip attachment for buttercream, so maybe that's not the best example to test this gadget.

Hi Scott, thanks for showing up here. Since Frederick does not yet have a Wegman's (or even an opening date for the yet-unbuilt store), a Trader Joe's or a Whole Foods, it seems like your primary competition is Common Market. And Common Market is pretty close to your store. Common Market carries more of the products I use and is a laid out in a more appealing shopping environment, so they are currently my first choice. (I'm not a member of Common Market and have no vested interest in choosing them, but they do remind me an awful lot of the beloved TPSS coop I belonged to back when I lived less than a mile from their flagship store.) How do you plan to differentiate the Frederick store from its competition? I'm especially interested in your decision to take out the Spring Mill kiosk and replace it with a sandwich bar. What else will you do to differentiate yourself in that market?

Back at my last desk job (at a trade assn), one of our board members sent us a 5lb box of Enstrom's toffee every year. And our office only had about 12 employees! It was a bacchanal of top-notch candy. I still miss getting that toffee every year, and I quit that job in 2002 to go to c-school...

I make glace de viande once a year, usually in January when it's blustery. I make a batch with 25lbs of bones and turn it into a roasted, brown stock. Some I freeze in ice cube trays and pop into a Ziploc, some I freeze in deli cups. I also sometimes give some to a friend to help them boost their cooking.

The Jamaican market on New Hampshire about two blocks south of the intersection of University Blvd carries it. So does the Giant on Arliss Street in Silver Spring.

The plain Captain's Wafers were standard in any basket of breads and crackers in restaurants when I grew up in NC. They were cello-packed in 2s. I ADORED them. Salty-sweet-creamy crackers. They don't seem to be available locally, not even in Harris Teeter, unless you buy them sandwiched with cream cheese and chives.

Has anybody had the dog at the Mighty Midget in Leesburg? I was there recently and thought the fries seemed pretty good, so that's one part of the equation anyway.

It's the butterscotch-almond ice cream recipe from David Lebovitz's The Perfect Scoop, only no nuts and I added a bunch of calvados instead of scotch to the base. I'll let you know how it turned out--I churned it the other day and haven't tasted it since it ripened in the freezer. (It tasted frickin awesome straight out of the ice-cream maker, though.)

Tonight, we're having a butter lettuce salad with pickled onions and blue cheese dressing, followed by a baked country ham with biscuits, creamed corn and haricots verts. For dessert, something apple (I have a peck from the farm down the road owned by some friends), with butterscotch-calvados ice cream on top. Ahh, fall.

I have successfully cooked provolone cheese on a griddle before. It gets crisp and brown. If you use a smokier provolone it, too, has bacon-y flavor aspects. You can use it as a sub for bacon in a BLT for vegetarians, which I used to offer when I was a sorority chef to my vegetarian girls. It's a lot cheaper than halloumi or kasseri cheeses, but it's not nearly as tasty as those other cheeses either. There's a place in Connecticut--I think it's called Shady Glen--where they fry cheese for all their sandwiches. I ate ice cream there once in college and was amazed to see these wings of cheese surrounding every sandwich--I guess they let the cheese droop onto the griddle on all sides of the burger or whatever and then served the sandwiches surrounded by crispy cheese. It's where I got the idea to try the provolone.

I've seen smaller packages of Cuisine Solutions products in a special freezer case at Wegman's, if you don't want to commit to Costco-sized quantities to sample their products...

Staunton; Winchester The buzz over on the RoadFood forums is that Mrs. Rowe passed away a few years ago, and her kids aren't exactly maintaining her standards. Too bad, because I drive right by it en route to my parents and would love to stop there for a meal if it was like it was in its heyday. On an unrelated note, in Winchester, there's a decent frozen custard place on Route 7--if you're driving westbound it's on the left just before I-81. I liked their banana custard quite a lot. It's called Pack's Frozen Custard, although the big sign on the building that you can see from the street does not say so. I'm not sure if they're open year-round. It looks like a dump with walk-up windows, like all good frozen confection places should.

I'd make chocolate-chip cookies together before the movie, too. Or maybe lay in a supply of Reese's Pieces if they don't have nut allergies. You could also do real popcorn on the stove. I've taught kids to do that and they're amazed that all popcorn doesn't come out of a microwaveable bag.

If you're out 270, Frederick Community College offers recreational cooking classes (I teach there). Also, if anybody else lives here on the rural edge of suburbia, there are recreational cooking classes on offer via the Jefferson County (WV) Schools Adult Education program. I'm taking this quarter off from there due to health problems, but there's another lady who teaches detailed Indian cooking lessons. I've talked to many people who have taken her classes and they're supposed to be pretty solid. Check county school adult education programs and community colleges wherever you live. I got the teaching gigs just by calling around and seeing who offered classes and then sending my resume to the program director.

If you don't want to pay for a text or are driving (I know ya'll don't drive and text), try calling 800-GOOG-411. The voice recognition program does a pretty good job of getting your restaurant if you are reasonably articulate, and they let you review the address or connect you to the phone number. All free!

You could make a tomato-zucchini tart and kill two birds at once: http://www.journal-news.net/living/article...articleID=11578