PollyG

So I know absolutely zilch about gardening (although I think I once smelled a tulip), but I've got a townhouse with a yard. Since we haven't touched the landscaping in the year we've lived here, it's starting to look like something from Life After Humans. Plus, I'm sick of paying $2.99 when I want a sprig of fresh rosemary. Tomatoes, some aesthetically pleasing bushes...

What's a good place to start? Can someone recommend a good book for the clueless?

And I mean REALLY clueless... like, do I need to buy dirt? Can I plant whatever whenever wherever?

Not looking for answers to any specific questions... just a good way to edumacate myself.

I'm not looking for a book written by an expert who really knows their shit, I'm looking for a book for someone who isn't an expert and doesn't know shit.

Herbs will be your friends. Most of them are hardy like weeds. They do like sunlight, though my mint varieties thrive in the heavily shaded back yard. Rosemary likes to be dry, and you will want to purchase a winter-hardy variety that can stand our cold snaps. Give yours at least a 3 foot wide space because it will grow quite large in 2 years. It is possible, with care, to trim it like a hedge.

I agree about tomatoes. If you want one that can survive almost anything, go for a Matt's Wild Cherry, available from DeBaggio. This is a prolific producer that will, if unpinched, sprawl 6 or more feet from its main stem. We grow ours in the front yard behind the azelea hedge, which provides support. The tomatoes are tiny but full of flavor and it will produce until a killing frost.

The DeBaggio's catalog usually has some basic information about care of the various herbs.

The results of testing:

It does a good job of scraping the bowl and comes close to eliminating the need to use a spatula. I used my spatula only to scrape down the thin smear that accumulated over the upper wiping blade. The downside? All those little fins make it much harder to get all your batter off the blade. I had unpleasant flashbacks to my mother unreasonably accusing me of leaving several cookies worth of dough in the bowl.

I've bloody well given up on the spouse ever sending me the digital pics I took, so no photos.

I think it is about an equal tradeoff of the annoyance of having to scrape the bowl with a spatula several times during mixing vs the annoyance of getting all the batter off the blade. However, if I was working something delicate that could not stand overmixing, this blade would be a good idea.

We'll continue to use it but I'm not buying any more as presents for the rest of the family.

When we were in Eden Center a week ago, we saw a big sign outside Saigon Garden proclaiming that it is now some sort of joint featuring crawfish. We were headed elsewhere so I didn't check to see if they still have their old menu as well; they used to have a baby clam on rice in a hot iron pot that was a real winner.

I am resigned to the fact that I am the Black Thumb of Death, and it is no shame to support a gardener. I'd love a place to buy potted herbs; normal stuff like basil, rosemary, cilantro. Generally I pick up the weak kneed specimens at Trader Joe's and kill them within months.

My husband is officially retired and I've put him in charge of rescuing our plants. Yay!

Where can I go to buy good fresh potted plants, organic ones if possible. Any suggestions?

DeBaggio's isn't organic, but they can probably tell you exactly what they do use. They have a huge selection of varieties.

Your problem with rosemary is almost certainly that you are overwatering it; treat it almost like a cactus. In our region, cilantro bolts pretty early outdoors and basil needs to come inside at night until mid-May. DeBaggios sells several varieties of winter-hardy rosemary that will survive our local weather; my Arp Rosemary bush is 7 years old now and gets a little brown during ice storms but recovers each year in my Herndon front yard with southern exposure.

Any olive that is not a garlic and oil-cured Niçoise olive is not really a serious olive. TAY.

I like my olives frivolous. Mediterranean Bakery in Alexandria and Aphrodite in Bailey's Crossroads are good places to experiment with the wide world of olives--both have extensive selections and prices significantly below Wegman's otherwise attractive olive bar.

The one thing that canned black Lindsay olives have going for them is that they make superior caps for juvenile fingertips when you decide to play 5 on 5 olive finger football.

I want to make my own bacon!

Can anyone recommend a good online resource for learning about the process and different ideas for brines/smokes?

I'll also need a place to get my pre-bacon (i.e. the pig part), preferably somewhere out in Fairfax or through the mail. Thoughts?

Has anyone found a source for Decaf Sumatran that isn't overroasted? The Caribou in Herndon just closed, which means our local source for borderline acceptable beans is gone. We used Peets for several years, but they're really a little too roasted for our tastes.

Huong Viet is better than Four Sisters, you wouldn't be going for the service or the atmosphere. It's divey but delicious. Love the lotus root salad with pork and shrimp, their caramel fish and some of the noodle soups.

We were reminded this weekend how much we love Huong Viet. The cha gio were the Platonic ideal of cha gio; crispy on the outside, thoroughly cooked on the inside with a stuffing that wasn't too firm or too mushy. We tried a new appetizer on the menu which was a variant on the garden roll made with a "pork paste." The pork paste turned out to be a moderately peppery slice of pork pate, and the rolls were nicely set off with long strips of Chinese chives. We're big fans of their lotus root salad but it was just too cold outside to contemplate one yesterday.

Entrees consisted of :

- perfectly grilled lemongrass pork atop rice noodles, smothered in scallions and fried shallots

- caramel fish, with the fillets a bit thicker than most places. Naomi is a huge caramel fish fan and said this was the best ever.

- squid sauteed with sweet leeks and bean sprouts. The "sweet leeks" were small; I think they were an Asian relative rather than baby versions of our more familiar supermarket variety. I would have loved a little more leek in the dish, but the flavors and textures worked well together.

We arrived around 11:15 am and were seated immediately; by the time we left about 45 minutes later, the place was full and people were waiting.

It's cash only, but that is always a good assumption for the Eden Center.

Tab was the worst diet drink ever made.

You've obviously never sampled the horror that was Vernor's 1-cal, an aggressively bad diet soda from the upper mid-west in the early 80's. It has since been replaced with a different diet formulation of their root beer.

How bad was it? When I was a half-starved teenaged camp counselor, someone gave us a six pack of this noxious brew. People would come in, grab a bottle, take a single gulp, and hastily discard the bottle. Yep, rejected by teenagers. It was thin, tasted more of watered apple cider than of ginger, and dominated by whatever witches brew of artificial sweeteners they'd decided to use.

Wegmans in Sterling had Ting in the international foods section when I was out there yesterday.

I'm not a hot dog fan, but Wegman's has an extensive selection, including brands usually not seen outside upstate NY.

My guess is that the small amount of matter in the bowl in the video is so you can see how well it does actually scraping the sides. With much more stuff in the bowl the side-scraping action would be obscured. Would have been nice to see both though.

I believe a standard Tollhouse cookie dough fits that description. I have childhood memories of the handheld mixer pooping out on Tollhouse, and I still get a kick out of the way Ol' Blue powers through it. Ol' Blue now fits its name, being 21 years old, but we've never really strained the motor.

My current plan:

• Tollhouse cookies
  
• Rosemary Bread from Field's Italian baker. Obviously I'm not going to try to make this new blade do the actual kneading, but that recipe is a 2 blade affair.
  
• chocolate bourbon chess pie. This one is a much looser batter.
  

I'm out of town this weekend, but may be able to do the testing over MLK weekend, assuming timely arrival of the blade.

Full disclosure here-- my uncle owns A&J. I saw the recent reports that spicy dishes haven't been as spicy lately so I asked the manager (a/k/a my mom) what's going on. She said that the inconsistency in spice levels may be due to the actual chiles/peppers in the recipe. There have been no changes to the recipes. It's like when you eat a jalapeno and sometimes you get one that's really spicy other times you get ones that aren't that spicy. This happens to me a lot with banh mi.

Please let the waitress know if you feel like dishes don't taste the way they usually do, we're very concerned with consistency. Also rest assured- there is no "dumbing down" of spice levels at our restaurant for non-Chinese customers. Everyone gets the same menu and the same food and hopefully you all like it.

Thanks for the feedback everyone-- please feel free to PM with questions, comments or concerns. And sorry Soup- I can't reveal the ancient family recipes

Our most recent discovery, thanks to the couple who were seated at the big communal table with us, is the black vinegar, which you can request to go with the pan-fried pork dumplings. It's an even better pairing than the white vinegar that is at each table.

Is there any chance you can convince the family that Herndon/Reston really, really needs an A&J? Given that we couldn't even support 1 authentic Korean restaurant out here, I don't have much hope.

Shocked to see that this was not a figured out long before this.

http://sideswipeblade.com/index.html

I haven't been able to at Whole Foods, but I would love to find any place in the DC area that carries it. Ever since coming back from Japan I've had a craving for dashi-based dishes and don't have the time to make it fresh. If anyone knows a place for instant dashi please chime in?

You will find it in most well-stocked Asian markets in the Japanese section. You can purchase either teabags or a granulated freeze-dried powder that comes in a little bottle that looks a lot like bottled yeast. My last bottle came from the tiny Apsara market in Herndon. 291 Sunset Park Dr, Herndon, VA 20170, in a little industrial park off of Spring Street between Herndon Parkway and Fairfax County Parkway.

I buy my miso-with-dashi at Grandmart in Sterling; I go through a lot of it as my hot liquid of choice at work when I'm feeling under the weather.

I agree, Ting rocks. Jamaica Jamaica in Herndon definitely has it, as well as some serious down-home unpretentious but good cooking. You may want to call a few Giant Foods before trekking out here, though. I have occasionally seen Ting in Giants, some of which also carry the outstanding Grace Foods habanero sauce at about $1/bottle.

My Cobalt Blue model is about 20 now, and still going strong. I have the mid-range model, with about 25 watts more than the lowest one. We opted against the mounted bowl, taller and stronger version because our condo in Arlington didn't have a lot of clearance under the cabinets.

I still chuckle on the rare occasion that I make chocolate chip cookies. I have childhood memories of Mom's Oster or Sunbeam hand-held and stand mixers giving up on the stiff dough at some point and having to finish the dough by hand. Ol Blue does not shirk his duties and completes the dough for me.

We use Ol Blue to make bread a few times a year and again, he does a nice job as long as I remember to stop the dough from crawling up the collar.

I'd say that Ol Blue gets used about as often as the Cuisinart, which is to say about once a month, but I just purchased my third Cuisinart in 20 years. (The bowls die on me and are almost as expensive to replace as a new model on a good sale, have yet to burn out a motor).

Our experimental dessert this year was persimmons (the Fuyu variety) scooped out and filled with a mixture of balled persimmon flesh and home made cinnamon ice cream balls. Much to our surprise, several of our guests had never had persimmons! This dish had its genesis at Makoto a few months ago when their persimmon and tofu cheese just wasn't "working" for me and we started tinkering with ideas to make the dish work for our palates.

We'll probably make it a permanent addition to the menu; heavy desserts don't appeal to me after such a big meal.

A chicken's weight can be up to 15% some sort of solution? WTF?

You make me feel like a natural...

Who will prevail? The lobbyists, as usual. Another example of the United Corporation of America.

I am so sick of having the hubby pick up meat on sale only to discover the small print proclaiming that it has been adulterated with this crap. I've managed to pick it up by mistake once or twice, too. The adulterated pork Giant sells is inedible to me; it has a strong metallic tang. Not only is this stuff unnatural, there ought to be a law requiring a BIG sticker to warn us about it.

I am craving a good hot dog. Fried, soft but buttery toasted bun, yellow mustard, small diced raw onion.

It's nice if there are good fries, too. Medium handcut and extra crispy.

You know, not that I want perfection or anything..

This is a rare treat for me so don't worry about salt, fat, grease, et al. No veggie dogs. Nothing with chicken. I want it down and dirty. I want to feel my arteries chug for a couple of hours.

ETA: I would not snub red onion sauce like you see in the NY area.

If no one identifies a restaurant for you, the Sterling/Dulles Wegmans has a wide variety of hot dogs, including NY regional dogs and some of the sauces.

The spouse and I are interested. Extrasuperfattybeefalicous.

20. Silverware. You have the right to receive new silverware with each course; busboys should not ask us to keep our icky forks. You have the right to a cocktail fork when ordering oysters and a steak knife when ordering steak or when your lamb shank's undercooked.

A pet peeve of mine. Why some otherwise nice restuarants will have a server handle your knife and fork and place it back on the table and expect you to be happy about eating with them is beyond me. And no, it is not much better if I am asked to remove my silverware from the plate and put it back on the table myself. Is it that much time, effort, and/or expense to make sure a diner has new silverware with each course?

It also ensures that we have the correct silverware for each course. About 15 years ago, I went to Switzerland on business with a group of wonderful, food-ignorant people from a small town in Colorado. We stayed at a meals-included high end hotel. Hilarity ensued. The guys started judging meals based on the number of forks that were on the table at the beginning of the meal. Throughout, the gracious waitstaff would carefully remove the used fork at the end of a course and, if the wrong one had been used, remove the right fork and provide a clean version of the misused fork for later in the meal.

What dishes do you recommend? I have not ordered from here yet, as I just assumed it was like all of the other standard chinese restaurants in Vienna.

We just ate there fort the first time last week; it's beyond our usual food boundaries, but we had a show at the nearby Jammin Java. We had a pork with sliced hot pepper dish that was eye-opening, and the home-style tofu, which was lightly fried and had an interesting contrast of textures between the chewy outside and silken middle.

As a side note I do not know if people know this, but MDH is one of the larger wholesalers of cooked duck, pork and other products to other restaurants. I tell you this because I have a friend that hates MDH, but swears by the duck at this other place. However that Duck is sourced from MDH.

As far as you know, do they supply to any of the places that have hanging displays of roast duck, sides of pig, etc.? We've been on a roast pig kick for a bit and are working our way through most of the NoVa places that sell it. So far, Cho Chu Saigon in one of the Eden Center's interior corners is our favorite. We haven't made it to Mark's for the pig yet.