PollyG

The key to squid is that you either cook it for a very short time--until it has just turned opaque, or for a very long time. Chewy is what happens between those two time frames.

We've offered to have my daughter's friend snowed in with us, so it will be all comfort foods to accommodate an unadventurous eater. I have the makings for a roast chicken, spaghetti and meatballs, and build-your-own pizzas. We also have a ton of milk and a recent cupboard reorg unearthed multiple canisters of cocoa. I'm going to make yeast-raised waffles for breakfast. The girls can earn their keep by baking a dessert for us all. I'm going to turn them loose with one of Maida Heatter's books. Trader Joes in Reston was crowded but not impossibly so at 10 am this morning.

We visited New Fortune yesterday around 1:00. The place was bustling upon our arrival. Unfortunately, the bustle did not add up to warm food. Nearly every dish we got was stone cold, including the turnip cakes and pot stickers we ordered from the griddle cart. Our reaction to these dishes was uniformly that they would have been much better hot. Dishes from the steam cart were warm, and if we go again, we may just stick to the steam cart offerings. The high point of our meal was the banana and shrimp rolls, which were full of crispy bits of water chestnut to offset the gooey banana.

We were unable to resist the Epoisse at the Sterling CC this week. It had an expiration date of Jan 26, and we had it last night. It was not as perfectly ripened as the far more expensive one we bought at Wegmans for Thanksgiving, but we will probably buy another one and consume it a few days closer to the expiration date.

We made it to day 5 post partum, then we took our daughter to dim sum. She slept through the whole thing, including the incriminating photos of me offering shrimp heads to a sleeping infant. Pediatric advice varies in part on the health of the newborn as well as the pediatrician. Preemies are supposed to be isolated from the public for longer than full term infants. Like everyone else, we found that the best results are obtained if you feed your infant, provide a clean diaper, and then drive to your destination, carry sleeping infant in their car carrier. Of course, you should also use your good judgment and time this with your child's existing sleep cycle. As your child starts to be awake during dining experiences, we heartily endorse dim sum with cart service. Food comes quickly, eliminating the wait time that is deadly for a bored or hungry child, and the carts provide a lot of visual distraction. And in a few short years, you will have a child who confidently orders from the cart. Fortunately, we got her hooked on the ginger steamed tripe before she hit the stage of wanting to know which part of the animal was involved.

The GrandMart in Sterling (Rt 7) has Vita Coco coconut water (no sugar and no preservatives other than ascorbic acid) in 11.2 oz paper boxes at $0.99 each now. They're in the Asian soda section. That store also expanded their seafood section over the past year and has a small wall of live fish tanks.

From Gourmet I use Arp rosemary from my front yard--it's under snow right now, but hardy down to -10 or something similarly ridiculous.

Post shoveling: Mexican hot chocolate (we had a box of the sugared chocolate bars for this) spiked with Kahlua. Lunch: Welsh Mac-n-cheese, essentially Welsh Rarebit over mac. For dinner: Rack of lamb with oven-roasted spiced potatoes and baby choy. We'll be doing "yellow snow" later today, which is maple syrup over snow. I may also do a green tea powder version. And, of course, for the adults only, we have all these beautiful, brightly colored liquors to pour over snow. Holiday baking: Rosemary shortbread Lemon Crisp cookies Chocolate cracks Dark Chocolate dipped Biscotti.

Anyone have a synagogue or temple willing to host? Have Cuisinart and fry-pan, will travel.

I'm not sure if the DC store is participating or if you'd have to pay shipping to get it from the internet/NY store.

$22 a pound via www.Leonidas-Chocolate.com now through Oct 7, 2009. These are damned good chocolates at their normal price. At $22, they will make someone in your life very happy. Maybe that someone will even share with you. Or maybe that someone is you. After all, a pound or two of chocolates will probably bring you more joy than that trip to the masseuse. I've used Leonidas chocolates for corporate gift-giving for the last 10+ years and they've never screwed up an order. They're also happy to create selections that aren't on the web site; we usually order a 1 lb ballotin of all darks for my milk chocolate-hating family.

I generally work from home in the Herndon area if DanielK needs help trying some of the local joints. There is also an Ethiopian place at the Spring Street (Sunset Hills)./FFX County Parkway intersection and there are several good sources for kabobs.

Tarin Thai is also not terribly far from where you are. I know they do a buffet lunch, but have never tried it and would expect it to be inferior to their regular fare, which is pretty good. Try the spicy beef salad--they do not skimp on the heat.

The new Lotte in Centreville has fresh mangosteens at $6.99 a pound, pre-packaged in bags which I guesstimated to weigh between 1 and 2 lb.

It doesn't have to be vicarious if you want to try your hand at cooking. Korean will be your safest cuisine, and there are some fairly accessible cookbooks. If you go to your nearest Korean market (Super-H, Grandmart) and purchase kalbi (aka LA-style short ribs)and a pre-made jarred kalbi marinade, you will be able to check ingredients and make a pretty good kalbi on the grill at home. Trader Joes also has a frozen pre-marinated kalbi which is not bad, and they tend to be very careful about ingredient lists. In addition to oysters slipping into various Korean pickled vegetable sides, both dried shrimp and dried fish show up in them as well. Dried fish may be shredded and hard to spot. I wouldn't touch the banchan at a restaurant with your allergy for that reason unless I had a Korean-speaking dining companion who could explain your allergies to the staff.

There may still be an appliance repair shop in Baileys Xroads, sort of behind the ToysRUS (Gorham St. and Seminary Rd). They carried parts for Kitchenaids and would be worth a call. They set me up right when we managed to destroy the auger on our sausage attachment about 15 years ago.

Did you miss the rule about having a 2 drink minimum prior to posting?

We went in looking for canned coffee and ended up eating lunch there and dropping $50 on groceries. The food court offers Vietnamese, Korean, Korean-Japanese, and Korean-Chinese, with space for one more store. There are also, in other parts of the store, a bakery, a second Korean food counter, and a sushi counter. We had a haemul dosol bibim bap (mixed seafood over hot rice in a blazing hot stoneware pot) and a kimchi chigae (kim chi, tofu, and pepper stew) from the Korean counter in the food court, both of which were decent, but not outstanding. We also had a kim chi pajon and a haemul pajon (kim chi pancake and mixed seafood pancake, respectively) from the Japanese-Korean counter, both of which were subpar. Our 9 year-old opted for a fairly good pho from the Vietnamese counter. The broth was unusually sweet with a ton of star anise, and she ranked it below pho hot in Annandale, her favorite. As Soup mentioned, it is big and clean. It has a more open, airy feeling than Super H in Fairfax. It is a LOT cleaner than Great Wall. The offerings of prepared banchan are very extensive. The refrigerated cases are scattered in several sections in the store, and it can be hard to figure out where to find what you are seeking. The spouse ended up near the banchan, where there were some kim chis made in-store, in his search for the "big jar of kim chi" he was sure we needed. (He was right, we can go through a 32 ounce jar in 2 days if it is on the table at meal times.) Meanwhile, I was on the opposite side of the store, standing in front of the 12 food wide refrigerator trying to decide which of about 9 different types of jarred kim chi to purchase. Lobster was on sale at $6.99/lb. People were crowded around the seafood cases. I didn't have a chance to look too closely at the meat selections. The produce section was extensive and if you've ever wanted a 20 lb jackfruit, it's available at $1.99/lb. These were easily twice the size of the one we bought in Hawaii over the summer. I didn't see any produce that looked past its peak other than a moldy strawberry or two. There's also an in-store barber shop, advertising eyebrow threading, not exactly what I had ever thought of combining with a shopping trip. On the whole, we felt as if we barely scratched the surface of the store. We will probably avoid eating there again in the future, though with a nine year-old in tow, I won't rule it out.

Make good decaf coffee with a bit of ground cardamom added to the beans. Sweeten with sugar, honey, or molassas. Cool to room temperature. Fill your blender 1/3 full of ice cubes and add cooled coffee mix to the half way mark in the carafe. Blend. This becomes incredibly frothy; you do not need milk. Serve in tall glasses with a straw. I'm also pretty fond of minted lemonade. We have a ton of mint in the back yard starting in May and we make a minted sugar syrup as the base. (Sorry, no exact measurements.) For something more exotic, try making a Korean Persimmon punch, which tastes more of ginger and cinnamon than the persimmons. It is a really impressive orange color. There are multiple recipes online, and all of our Korean grocery stores in the region have the persimmons, sometimes in the freezer section. I made a carbonated version of this once and it was quite nice.

Kudos to your team for providing a kid's menu that is not limited to chicken nuggets, mac-n-cheese, grilled cheese, burgers, or hot dogs. At most restaurants, our daughter orders from the adult menu because we aren't interested in feeding her a bowl of fat. So many restaurants fail to consider that they might actually provide the kids with a smaller, kid-friendly version of some of their signature dishes. Case in point: the kid's menu at Red Hot & Blue in Herndon has no barbeque! To get back to the original post, most of our dining is at inexpensive Asian restaurants in the region, where we can always find something reasonably priced and delicious for the kid.

Seen Jan 16 2009 at the Giant in Reston's North Point shopping center. There were only a few boxes, all raspberry fillings, IIRC.

Nope.

I had onglette regret last night; ordered the petite strip with the bone marrow topping and it was good, but not the eye-rolling good of the hanging tender. Our 9 year-old ordered the grilled salmon for the first time and it was much too garlicky for her tastes; we had been expecting a plain grilled salmon. They're definitely shaking out a few kinks from the move to a much larger location. We thought the crab bisque was served a bit cold (or had chilled from having very cold crab dumped into it just prior to serving), and like others, the potatoes seemed a bit less rich than before. Servers were bustling so much that they were bumping into tables a fair amount. And our daughter was disappointed that the check didn't come out with the tiger fudge. On the other hand, my mother was delighted to hear about the possibility of reservations for her next visit to the area. It is pretty much impossible to get meat of RTS's quality where they live. As to what Michael could do with a skirt steak, the mind boggles. That's what we cooked for our dinner this evening and the topic of "someone must have made a skirt out of this and photographed it" came up during dinner conversation. So far, have been unable to find any actual images on the web, though there are a ton of food porn pictures of more conventional skirt steaks.

No, you should just hang out here, you clearly belong. Spend the money on good food instead. We have reservations for 6 this evening, definitely nice to be able to do that. My 9 year-old is eagerly anticipating her crab bisque.

ARA isn't a tofu house. They're a solid restaurant with a great selection of soups and other lunch special offerings by daylight (38 lunch specials from $3.99 to $8.99, plus a few on-the-wall additions), and a far-too-cool-for-us Karaoke bar in the evenings. It advertises itself as a "Fusion Restaurant Karaoke Bar." The interior is attractive, with dark wooden tables. We noticed a few semi-private rooms with curtains. Banchan come out on trendy little 3-part appetizer plates. Portion sizes on the main menu are large. The grilled pork belly with grilled kimchi (grilled in the kitchen, not at table) is a generous serving for $12.99, and the Seafood Okonomiyaki at $16.99, listed as a two person serving, is probably more of a 4-6 person serving in lieu of an appetizer. This came out as a large pizza-shaped concoction, totally covered in bonito shavings, which moved from the heat of the dish. If you're not familiar with this feature of bonito flakes, it could be downright disturbing. Underneath was a mix of seafood and flour pancake, with a bit too much mayo for my taste. Unlike the seafood pancakes (haemul pa jon) we often get at Korean places, this one was only crispy on the bottom; it was soft on the top, more like a pizza.