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Seanchai

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Everything posted by Seanchai

  1. Pizzeria Orso, while never at the highest level, has also declined from what it was. I had a pizza there last month that was basically at a Matchbox level in quality and construction.
  2. OK, seriously thinking about getting the multi-fuel (pellets, charcoal, wood, gas) Ooni Pro pizza oven for the back deck. Thoughts? (not on the back deck, I know we need to repair some planks and stain )
  3. Regarding the crust, two thirds of the pizza was among the tastiest crust I've ever had if you picture the remaining one third as the inner circle of the middle of the pizza. That crust was so thin as to be annoying when trying to eat it with the toppings. And I did order it well done to try to get it a bit sturdier.
  4. What I hope won't happen again is what happened last year at the KKK rally that preceded the Unite the Right mess in August. There were some counter-protester activists who insisted on aggressively engaging the police. Given that there will be an overwhelming police presence in Charlottesville this weekend, that is the more likely outcome than Nazis attacking and that in turn might give fuel to the "both sides" nonsense.
  5. Wishing for the best for both DC and Charlottesville this weekend. Downtown Cville will practically be under martial law with tons of cops; still, we'll make an effort to support the businesses that have vowed to stay open.
  6. Has anybody else repeatedly gotten the "burning" error message? I lift the lid, see nothing amiss, reset the insert inside the pot, and still get the message. As dinner time was marching closer, I had to abandon the pot and move to Plan B, which was frustrating. This happened one other time as well but three other times cooked with no problem at all. Any tips on what I 'm doing wrong?
  7. Thanks again for the above suggestions. We decided to stop at the Skylight Inn as I wanted to continue my check-off of iconic BBQ places (Sweatmans in SC and Wilbur's in Goldsboro were previous stops). The whole hog was delicious with the skin cracklings mixed in. We got to see the cleaver dance as my son called it, the two handed chopping and mixing of the various pig parts. In Wilmington we really liked Fork and Cork's pub food, especially their duck wings. Another nice stop was Benny's Big Time Pizza, which doubled as a southern take on Italian food in addition to the pizza.
  8. Heading down to Carolina Beach/Wilmington this week. Anybody have any updates? Planning to hit OG Carolina BBQ joint Skylight Inn on the way down and will stop in Kinston on the way back for Vivian Howard's Boiler Room oyster bar. Also, apparently Wilmington has a new and vibrant brewery scene so will stick my toe in that water as well.
  9. Of course the tricky thing in the very serious business of compiling these lists is in measuring the impact these players had in their own era. My blasphemy: would Wilt Chamberlain be exceptional if he played today? He was the Shaquille O'Neal of his time times 10, being bigger, stronger and more athletic than anyone playing his position. Given today's players, I think a lot of that advantage would be mitigated. Whereby I think Bill Russell's ability translates well to today's game ...
  10. For those of us who live in Charlottesville, the whole "two sides" argument is particularly jarring. The hate merchants were almost uniformly from out of town and I know so many ordinary Charlottesville residents (non-antifa) who went downtown to witness and challenge these hate-filled assholes (sorry Don). This video does a nice job of capturing the general feeling of the weekend to a local Cville resident. I was lucky enough to have about 50-75 of these jackasses walk past my house on the way to the "back-up park", carrying the swastika and Confederate flags through my neighborhood and screaming obscenities at my wife who video-recorded them as they went past (we decided that me being out there with her would be too provocative, especially given what we just witnessed over the Internet of what went down downtown). I'm glad some national media recorded a close approximation of what actually happened .
  11. For me, Letterman and Conan are not great joke-tellers but are more hilarious absurdists, Letterman being the alpha there. Watching Letterman in college was a cult-like thing among my crowd. He made me laugh uncontrollably on occasions beyond counting. His sarcastic take on everything was like a pressure relief valve on the tension (for me) of the Reagan/Bush era. For all I know he might be a miserable human being. The full length book that Bill Carter did (The Late Shift was definitely more sympathetic to Letterman over Leno and probably helped set the backdrop to your original post.
  12. Alpha King and Three Floiyds' have already gone through their expansion and retrenchment phase. Their beers were available in Virginia briefly a while back and haven't been seen since the brewery discovered that they can't even meet Chicago-area local demand for their beers.
  13. Here's a question about waiting in lines, which I hate to do for food or beer but will if necessary. Next summer I will be going to Austin for the first time but will only be there for two nights and one day. I have a hard time justifying to my wanderlust self that with a whole city to explore and one day to do it, anything more than 30 minutes waiting in a line for BBQ is worth what I'd be missing out. Is it unavoidable for really good BBQ? Are the places without the long waits not nearly as good? Is Micklethwait Craft Meats my answer (or one of my answers)?
  14. I first heard this version of the popular song from the 80s maybe about 5 years ago. It was so beautiful and ethereal that I went back to the original, wondering what I had originally missed. Just a stunning stripped down iteration that makes you wonder where some beloved recorded songs would fall without their original embellishments/production.
  15. I enjoyed bellyQ on my last trip to Chicago if you like an Asian twist on BBQ.
  16. A cookbook/diatribe/confessional I've been enjoying very much is A Super Upsetting Cookbook About Sandwiches by Tyler Cord, the chef proprietor of the No. 7 sub shops in NYC. Aside from the bizarre ingredient combinations that he promises will work very well, I think this book is freaking hilarious. There's an on-going sub-conversation between him and his editor Francis Lam that reminds me of the editorial asides that Jim Gaffigan inserts in his comedy routines. It's probably not for everyone, but I'm really glad I'm reading it and look forward to trying some of his crazy-ass recipes.
  17. I think what the recent explosion in the number of breweries and the different kinds of beer styles have accomplished is just expand and deepen the continuum of beer choice. Back in the day people had little choice between which fizzy yellow beer they could drink. Other options were out there as Don originally referred to, they were just harder to access. Now, as TedE wrote so well, there are a number of goses commonly available. Some suck, some are amazing, some are middling. Same with IPAs, double IPAs, stouts, pale ales, saisons, etc. Once the final frontier of different or "extreme" beer styles has been explored, what I see signs of is a number of craft breweries doubling back and focusing on the "old school" styles like pils, lagers, red ales, brown ales, and the like. At that point there will be amazing, middling, and sucky examples of them also commonly available. I don't think having that choice is a bad thing at all.
  18. Damnit people, the discussion should be about a chicken parm hero! Oh, sorry, my apologies. My Queens, NY soul spoke for me. And I actually had a delicious one at G Sandwich. Non-traditional version with the lemon zest but still ...
  19. Little bit of Cville trivia. I know the Rio Hill Kroger wine manager at one point (and maybe still is) was named Gregg and was previously the manager of Crush, the shuttered Belmont wine shop that now houses Tavola. And so it goes in a small town.
  20. Between Christmas and my recent birthday I've received a number of Amazon gift cards, so this is a very dangerous thread for me. One cookbook I've enjoyed cooking out of recently is Lucky Peach's 101 Easy Asian recipes. As a neophyte cook of Asian food I find it straddles the line of accessibility and challenge quite nicely. I echo the praise for the Food Lab and Smoke and Pickles cookbooks; everything has come out great so far. Both have a nice mix of easy and more complex depending on your mood and what you have time for.
  21. Had a great birthday lunch at Lampo the other day. The Hellboy pizza with soppressata piccante and the honey scorpion pepper sauce was amazing per usual. We also hugely enjoyed the General Tso's Sweetbreads appetizer. Made with a sauce of Calabrian pepper, honey, garum (kind of an Itailian fish sauce I'm told) and braised celery (I think; garlic scapes are used in season) covering batter-fried sweetbreads, one local food website called it 2015's Charlottesville dish of the year.http://charlottesville29.com/2015/12/23/2015-dish-of-the-year-general-tsos-sweetbreads/ We in Charlottesville are lucky to have an affordable restaurant of this quality in our humble college town.
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