PollyG

We visited on Saturday and it is the best dim sum we have had in NoVa in years. Dishes were mostly hot, with the kitchen staff coming out to restock the carts as they rolled around, rather than leaving things in the kitchen to cool down. The one exception was the clams in black bean sauce, which were cold--in retrospect, we got them from a cart where they were the only plate of clams and we should have checked for warmth. We had: Clams in black bean sauce--very good rendition of the sauce, I really want to try this hot next time. stewed tripe with turnip--very sweet from the turnip and probably some added sugar, but this was a real comfort food dish stewed pork skin--less successful for us than the tripe; just not enough variety in taste and texture to keep us interested shrimp dumplings--a good version of this dish eggplant stuffed with shrimp/fish paste; fluffier paste than we're used to getting, but a tasty dish fried chive dumplings--the strongly flavored chive filling was studded with chunks of shrimp. My 12 year-old found it too strong tasting (she's generally a big fan of this dish) but the adults liked the strong, very fresh taste. steamed tripe with ginger. Tasty, though they really should have cut the tripe a bit smaller. fresh tofu with sweet ginger sauce baked char sui bao --these came from the dessert cart and would have been better hot steamed baby cuttlefish in a light garlic sauce. I've never had these before and they are very good. Portion size was big for two adults. My daughter declared them too cute to eat.

Still in stock yesterday at the Reston store.

Lobsters, $5.99/lb this weekend. They looked lively. We'd just eaten a huge Korean lunch and no one felt as if they could deal with a lobster dinner, so we passed.

One alternative is to use a new (or insanely clean) thermos for this purpose. Remember to pre-heat the thermos with hot water. I've used this method many times to make overnight creme fraiche. Unless I have an emergency need for creme fraiche, I just can't see paying the premium price for store-bought when it is so easy to make at home.

Like Kibbee, my personal experiences are insanely out of date. However, here are a few tips: If a menu item is translated along the lines of "white beef" or "white steak," it is not veal. It is pork. And that's fine, unless you have given your waiter specific instructions about how you want it cooked so it is bloody and pink inside. Schwarma beat the hell out of anything I've had stateside. This includes turkey schwarma. In general, vegetarian dishes are excellent. Falafel bars rock. Be careful about ice cream--make sure you are not getting a non-dairy version! The same goes for whipped cream. Standard advice for tourists is to avoid eating food at open-air markets. Street dust gets over everything and sanitation may not be up to your standards. That being said, Israeli yogurt is pretty good and seems to help fight off foul bowels. If you are a drinker of decaf coffee only, might want to bring an emergency supply. It was hard to find.

At Rays the Steaks, the server was gracious about my unbelievably picky inquiry concerning the scallops and whether they could be absolutely sure no sodium tripolyphosphate had touched them. She checked with the kitchen, and I was able to enjoy the first scallops I've had in restaurants in years. We're cursed with a pair of rather unusual food allergies (sodium tripolyphosphate and in the +1's case, porcinni mushrooms) and have found it helpful to make sure the server understands that these are genuine food allergies rather than picky eating disguised by a claim of allergy.

Crunching Autumn's leaves without encountering poo rocks my world and shoes. www.pooprescues.com (Okay, okay, 100 words? Outsourcing this part of dog ownership became a necessity when it became all to obvious that no one in the family was going to live up to their shoveling obligations. Poop Rescues will reliably show up on scheduled days. They've been great about checking my elevated deck to make sure the dog who is too dainty and special to use the muddy yard hasn't made it into a poop deck again. We haven't found any missed doggy piles, but they offer a rescoop guarantee if you are not happy with the "coverage" on a visit. I also have confirmation that Poop Rescues indeed donates 10% of your bill to the pet group of your choice. I received a nice note from our designated dog rescue group yesterday after they received a check from Poop Rescues identifying us as the people who designated them.) PollyG Polly Goldman

I got to know Alicia Wolman, the owner of Sublime Canine, at the Reston dog park, where she had an uncanny ability to keep an eye on all of her client dogs. My standard poodle, Storm, is downright crazy about her. Storm is not the easiest dog to handle at the dog park because she plays hard** and has the doggie equivalent of asperger's syndrome and can't read other dogs' body language to know when to back off. Alicia took this all in stride and gave me some useful hints for distracting Storm when she starts overwhelming other dogs. Alicia offers a number of services, including LONG dog park expeditions with the dogs getting 2 or more hours of serious, supervised playtime, which she calls the "puppy pack." She also does behavioral work with dogs, including long-term work with timid, fearful dogs. Alicia tries to pair your dog up with at least one other compatible dog when suggesting a schedule for her puppy pack service. The puppy pack goes to several area dog parks and the large fenced back yard of one customer. An exhausted dog is a happy and well-behaved dog, and mine are exhausted after their weekly puppy pack outing. Alicia is also flexible enough to take my dogs on an as needed basis when work drags me out of the home office for more than an hour or two. Facebook Page [see below] Alicia Wolman, Sublime Canine, sublimecanine@gmail.com **This is typical for standard poodles. That show haircut is a total lie; they love to box and wrestle. If Storm is on her back, it's because she wants to wrestle from below. She doesn't understand the whole rolling over onto your back submission thing. PollyG aka Polly Goldman

Lions are not endangered and breed well in captivity. Excess offspring were an ongoing issue in the South African preserves and parks we visited last year. It takes a lot of land to support a lion pride, and having lions tends to make the other game less plentiful, not necessarily a good thing when your tourists are wanting to see lots of animals. So I'm not a bit surprised to learn that here in the US people are finding a a new outlet for their excess lions. In South Africa, they get shipped off to canned hunting parks where people pay a fortune for the privilege of shooting a lion that may well be imprinted on humans. I'm guessing that we just don't have enough demand for that here to use the entire supply and thus they're ending up on plates.

I think Meshelle's point is valid for the vast majority of families with picky eaters. The exceptions are kids with sensory issues -- no amount of exposure and modeling is going to get them over that. Parents are not eating a wide variety of food in front of their kids, not modeling enthusiasm for new and different foods, and/or not finding an approach that works for their kids to try new foods. When I talk to parents who are complaining about their kids picky eating, I start asking about family meals. In most cases, there are very few family meals, particularly for younger kids. One or both parents get home late enough that there is a kid's meal and a grownup meal. Where there are families who have family meals and picky eaters, when I've had a chance to observe what the parents eat, the parents have had a very white bread approach to food. The kids are actually no pickier than their pickier parent. In contrast, we have family dinners almost every night from a wide variety of cuisines and our daughter dines with at least one parent when we're not all together. No one is eating Cup-o-noodles in the car for dinner. Our daughter eats what we eat, except when we have a main dish that she tries, but does not enjoy. At that point, we hit the emergency stash of shelf-stable tofu. The messaging is that you tried it, you didn't care for it, and we will offer a palatable but boring alternative---we are not going to starve anyone but we also aren't going to cook a whole second meal for her, either. While we went through a peer-pressure induced contraction of her palate during early elementary school, we seem to be mostly over that. At age 11, she is all over the place with what she likes and dislikes--generally dislikes spicy food, but will eat ALL the cashews at Ray's, and requests and devours the spicy cumin lamb at Hong Kong Palace. Our biggest challenge right now is leafy green vegetables. Something about the texture of fresh or cooked leafy greens seems to be a turn-off, though she will happily munch on fresh basil or mint leaves from the garden. She devours asparagus, broccoli, tomatoes, cukes, sweet peppers, carrots, jicama, and edamame, so we're not without vegetable options. Given the chance, she will also happily eat the heavily manufactured foods like Chef Boyardee, Kraft Mac & Cheese (though she does prefer my from-scratch version), so there's no question that the manufacturers of those foods have found something that makes them extra palatable to kids. But like Kraft, we are able to influence our children's reaction to new foods through a bit of marketing. We introduced asparagus with the line, "it tastes great AND it makes your pee smell funny, how cool is that?" The Iron Chef Broccoli battle turned her into a big fan of broccoli. And it is pretty hard for a kid to resist things they help grow in the garden.

Zora, are you putting yours straight into the fridge without any room temperature fermentation?

I've been crazy busy (having Pine Nut Mouth syndrome just before a trip to Hawaii sucks ventworm nuts), but I do have the remainder of the bag which I intend to return to TJ's. They have not yet responded to my emailed complaint. This stuff is unfit for human consumption.

Not bloody much. Spicy foods seem to help temporarily. I had a big group dinner at Hong Kong Palace during the worst of my Pine Nut Mouth syndrome and the peppers kept the nasty taste at bay during dinner and for about an hour afterwards. Baking soda in water worked for me as well. Likewise Eno, an antacid dissolved in water that can be found in most Indian groceries. I can't vouch for Alka-seltzer, because I can't tolerate the aspirin found in most versions of it. All relief is temporary. The worst of it was over in 1 week, but I occasionally still get that damned metallic/bitter taste.

TJ's is currently stocking toasted pine nuts from sources in Vietnam, Korea, and Russia that have inflicted a nasty case of Pine Nut Mouth syndrome upon me. I am not amused. I had to toss out a batch of pesto made from my own basil, and I'm now stuck with a nasty bitter/metallic taste in my mouth that may linger for weeks. So beware, it is not just pine nuts from China that are causing this problem.

It is the Cel-Ray that makes Dr. Browns special. The rest of their sodas are fine, but nothing all that special. It was surprisingly easy to make a celery soda that was a decent knock-off of Dr. Browns. If I remember right, I used a quarter cup of celery seed into my just-boiled soda base (2 lb sugar, 2 lb honey for 5 gallons), let it steep for a bit, then strained, cooled, and carbonated.

We were at HKP for dinner this weekend, dragging my visiting mid-70's parents with us. We had the chengdu dumplings, the chicken and spicy potatoes, cumin lamb, and the fried chicken with sesame-stuffed peppers (specials menu, bottom row, second from left, first two characters look like open mouths), and the egg-battered corn. All went over well with my folks, though they felt the salt level was excessive. The only dish that was a dud was the chengdu dumplings, which were boring. I should have gone with a different dumpling, but we had the pan-fried dumpling addict 11 year-old to appease. I've had all these dishes before except the dumplings,and spiciness was not reduced for my parents, nor were any of them below the quality I've come to expect from HKP. Spicing levels were borderline over the top for my mother, but a beer helped fix that.

I've found TripAdvisor to be better on lodging and attractions than on the food. We used them as a cross-check for our lodging on last summer's trip to South Africa and it was very useful in that regard. Nearly all postings on TripAdvisor seem to be from tourists, rather than locals, so it is much harder to get a take on whether you can trust a particular reviewer's tastes.

Alas, it is now closed and out of business. This location has failed to sustain 2 internationally oriented supermarkets now, and if my daughter's nearby elementary school is any indicator, the population in this part of Reston is very international. Could it just be that the Tall Oaks Plaza is too darned out of the way?

A salad filled with tiny white spiders from a neighbor's garden still haunts me. It was all too obvious that the lettuce hadn't been washed at all, and my mother was elbowing me and telling me not to make a fuss. Live fricking spiders. Thanks, Mom. I've always done what Beachgirl54 did at restaurants--had a quiet chat with the waiter. The waitstaff is far more likely to believe that you didn't introduce the offending item/creature if you're low key about it.

Watched the video, and I'm wondering if hallucinogens are included. They would appear to be necessary.

It's been a few years since anyone posted, but I wanted to mention that Huong Viet is still cranking out remarkably good food. The spouse has a cold and has been craving hot and spicy soups -- we've been out for Korean soups most days this week. Amid yesterday's rain, he had the Hue spicy beef noodle soup, which had some split pig feet in the generous bowl. I had the lotus root salad, and was immediately reminded why Huong Viet makes my favorite version of this dish. It's the mint leaves that bring it to a special level of wonderfulness. And of course, the cha gio were without flaw, sliced on a diagonal for a more elegant presentation. On a past visit a few months ago, we tried the mussel special (still on the menu), non-spicy version, and were impressed by the quality of the mussels. These were giant, plump, sweet mussels, the kind you always want to get and so seldom receive. Cash only, as always.

Paczki spotted today at the Northpoint Reston Giant, right in the front of the store as you come in. They looked a LOT like jelly donuts.

Maybe you can talk to the bakery dept at Giant and get a frosting made without any coloring? We had an amusing blue poo incident once after my daughter consumed some blue frosting on cupcakes that I think were from Giant. My kid despises sheet cakes. I don't blame her. Shilla Bakery has become our go-to for her birthday cakes. We just bring her there and let her pick from among whatever they have on display. Their cakes tend not to be oversweetened, so they work for the adults, too.

Tom DeBaggio, known locally for his tremendous section of herbs and heirloom tomatoes, passed away yesterday. We started buying his plants when he was still using his backyard green house in the Clarendon area, and have been making annual trips to the Loudoun county farm in recent years, where his son has been running the business. http://www.npr.org/2011/02/22/133971224/Alzheimers-Advocate-Thomas-DeBaggio-Dies

Scored a 12 pack of Vita in the original paper boxes at the Sterling Costco yesterday, for just a bit over $1.00/ box. The box indicates that the juice was produced in the Philippines, and that Vitamin C has been added. This is probably a sneaky way of adding ascorbic acid as a preservative. The box now has 230% of the RDA for Vitamin C