PollyG

We went to Joe's on January 2 after my impatient teen passengers were not willing to wait at Bob's for soup dumplings. A&J was also crowded but we sauntered right into Joe's, which was only about half full. In deference to our two guests, we ordered mostly on the non-spicy side. The sophistication and depth of the seasoning is behind Chang's at his peak and behind Hong Kong Palace today. The salt and pepper squid appetizer was the standout; the squid was tender and the spicing on the breading was subtle, with salt, pepper, and an undertone of sugar. I would not drive all the way to Rockville for Joe's, but if I am in Rockville, hungry, and not willing to wait anywhere, it remains a legitimate contender.

We spent December 19-24 at Disney World, staying at the Dolphin (see very end for a word about that). Highlights: Blue Zoo at the Dolphin. Todd English's establishment may have changed very little over the years but manages to deliver a relaxed, uncrowded experience despite its Disney location. They continue to provide excellent fresh seafood and not destroy it by drowning it in trendy ingredients. Our server was over the top in caring for my 4 and 7 year-old nephews and my own 16 year-old. We all noticed and admired a drink that was emitting a pool of fog as we walked past the bar area. Our server identified it as being dosed with liquid nitrogen and offered to dose drinks for the kids. Downside "“ the happy hour specials are not available in the main dining room even during happy hour. Morimoto in Disney Springs. Warning - only a passing resemblance to the Philadelphia Morimoto. This is a pan-Asian menu with heavy Korean, Chinese, and Japanese offerings. Everything was excellent although you can do better in DC for every dish we tried. But we're spoiled here in DC. Lowlights: Flying Fish on the Boardwalk. Maybe I have unrealistic expectations, but any restaurant within the Disney World compound ought to be more than familiar with the needs of families who have young dining companions. Based on our dining experience, the staff at Flying Fish rarely encounter children. We had a barbarically early dining time of 5:15 so we could attend the Fantasmic fireworks show at Hollywood Studios. While we were seated promptly, appetizers (ordered pretty promptly) did not arrive until 5:45, and they did not put our dinner orders into the kitchen until after the appetizers had been served. This means that all of us, including the little guys, were waiting until about 6:25 for our entrees. FOH staff, including the managers we tracked down, were utterly unconcerned when we began asking about entrees. While bread was available, we did not want to stuff the kids with bread, although that is what happened. By the time entrees arrived, the little guys were too stuffed (and antsy, because who keeps a 4 year-old at the table for more than an hour if they can avoid it) to eat them, they had mucked up a sauce-on-the-side request, and delivered one mushy jumbo shrimp of the 4 in someone's shrimp entrée. Other than that, the food was decent if you are into one of those "let's drown our seafood in a gazillion trendy ingredients" menus. They do get points for a beautiful delicate buffalo mozzarella and ripe tomatoes in my heirloom tomato salad. But with kids and on a deadline? Never again. Be Our Guest at the Magic Kingdom. Be Our Cash Cow would be a better name for the Magic Kingdom's latest sit-down eatery. Guests are issued a GPS-equipped plastic disc shaped a bit like a rose and herded into a cattle chute-like chamber equipped with one menu for every 4 guests or so. They eventually reach the business floor where they are led to their Very Own Machine to choose food. Need that mustard on the side? Forget about it! There are zero options to customize the limited menu of sandwiches. At that point the guests are turned loose to mill about the dimly lit cavernous dining hall where they can fend for themselves in finding a table. The food is rolled out on a cart to your table, which the servers locate via the GPS discs. It's an overpriced pretentious cafeteria. The Magic Kingdom's food is a whole new level of suck compared to the rest of the parks, but this is just egregious. Trying to find breakfast if a park has Magic Hours that start at 7 am. If you stay on the Disney properties, you will have access to Magic Hours, usually 1-2 hours at the beginning or sometimes end of one or more of the 4 main parks each day. Woe betide you if you are relying on Disney transportation and the Magic Hours start at 7 am and you actually want to be there. You will be waiting for your Disney Transportation before 6:30, so the hotel's breakfast options won't be open. And when you arrive at the park? None of their food is open either! About the Dolphin: It is my hope that when Marriott takes over the Dolphin in 2016 as part of its acquisition of Starwood, they will make a few improvements. The side of the hotel that faces the lake between the hotel and Epcot (and Hollywood Studios) needs a serious soundproofing upgrade. The passenger ferries on the lake toot their horns until they stop running around midnight. It sounds as if you're sleeping in a NYC tenement with honking traffic. The Epcot fireworks show is largely visible from the hotel, but if you should be exhausted at 10:30 pm and trying to sleep, it is going to sound as if you are in a crackhouse shootout. Staff at the Dolphin are doing a terrible job of policing the hallways for food service items; we would see items 8-10 hours later. Every dresser drawer reeks of mildew and even with the AC running, clothing was damp.

We got back into town on Christmas Eve and had the traditional Jewish Chinese take-out for that dinner because we landed too late to attend a friend's Feast of the Seven Fishes. For Christmas Day dinner, we used the leg of lamb I'd left thawing in the fridge during our absence to make a garlic crusted leg of lamb. There is no precise recipe for this. You toss all the garlic you can find (it needs to be near 1 lb of peeled garlic or there really isn't enough) into a Cuisinart with fresh rosemary, matzoh meal, olive oil, and lemon juice to make a thick paste. Trim the external fat from the lamb, crust the lamb with the garlic paste and allow it to sit several hours, or overnight if possible. Cook at 350 until it reaches your preferred "done" temperature. That's about an hour. This also works with fresh oregano instead of rosemary. If you are using a boneless leg of lamb, unwrap it and include garlic paste on the interior. As a side benefit, your home will be vampire free and roasting garlic > air fresheners.

Ripe papaya. I like green papaya in SE Asian salads just fine. But there is something about ripe papaya that does not work for me. The texture is mushy, the taste unappealing. I used to think I disliked Brussels Sprouts. But an encounter a few years ago with them at a restaurant and a "don't be an idiot who refuses to try them because you hated them when you were 10" attitude changed that. I like them if they aren't cooked into stinky soft oblivion. I cannot abide the aroma of cooked cabbage but like pickled versions. Gin and Vodka both remind me of rubbing alcohol. johnb and I had mirror image mothers. In my case, I knew there were plenty of references to kids not liking cooked liver, but I did not understand why until I went to college. My mother used calves liver, soaked in milk, cooked to pink in the center and smothered in caramelized onions. It was delicious.

They were delicious today. We had grilled lemongrass pork, the pork belly, and today's special, pork buns. The pork buns suffered a bit from traveling home with us because the buns were starting to get a bit soggy, but the roast pork inside was delicious. The pork was similar to what you might find in a ramen soup, rather than a Chinese-style roast pork. We've yet to try the pate and pork bahn mi that are waiting in our fridge. The interior is charming and anyone who needs to pick up some French sweets should be delighted with some of the packaged selections.

All of the big brands travel to Europe. Maple sugar candy (World Market stocks some) is a good bet. There are also some Tabasco flavored chocolates that they stock.

Thanks for sharing. Discounted booze sounds a lot better to me than Black Friday madness.

You could always go super non-traditional and offer the sauce to a chicken picata. I have no idea what an actual recipe for this looks like, since my Mom taught me, but you make a roux with flour and butter (either sift that flour first or use Wondra, available locally from Harris Teeter) and slowly add hot stock, then capers and lemon juice. I usually add my capers before the stock, but I think it is easier to avoid breaking the roux if you add them later. I brine my bird (and will be smoking it too this year, the test turkey we made was very good) so I usually make a quick stock with the unbrined neck to use in the gravy.

We have a ton of kids in our neighborhood, but very few made it to my door. The HOA's halloween party (candy-free since it was just before trick or treating hours, but heavy on the beer/booze for adults) had 35+ kids; fewer than half of them made it to my block. The houses at the end of the street don't give out candy and with few lights/pumpkins visible from the top of the hill, I think the kids go for the better pickings on the cross-street. 2 bags of candy would have been plenty.

The fried chicken is available as a reservation item for enough people. I was just checking because my mom will be in town in November and has had her eye on the bo ssam for quite some time.

Thanks, all.

This sounds interesting, but does beg the question: at what point do ingredients depart from "pesto" so much that you shouldn't be calling it pesto? The sundried tomato version comes to mind as well in that category although it is more of a traditional pesto with the addition of a lot of sundried tomato.

The Blue Lagoon is expensive and set up like a very high end tourist trap. Go anyway. We went during spring break 2 years ago and it was not crowded; the tourist scene during the summer is not the same as the tourist scene during cooler weather. Try the local chocolates. For a country of under half a million people, they have quite a few confection companies. Chocolate and licorice together in a bar sound weird, but it works. Reykjavik itself is surprisingly warm due to the gulf stream and bay effect; when it is 11 degrees here in Herndon in January, it is 39 in Reykjavick. Once you leave the immediate environs of Reykjavik it will be much colder. Layer and splurge on a ridiculous Icelandic wool hat. We rented a car and found parking conveniently 1 block from our hotel in the downtown area. With 3 of us, being able to drive ourselves rather than pay for the bus tours was a significant cost savings. Be warned, you need a roadmap even if your car has a GPS. Our GPS-equipped car had some problems dealing with Icelandic characters and the transliteration into a 26 letter alphabet is not consistent. On one occasion, we had to aim for a town NEAR one of the national parks, expecting, correctly, that as we approached, we would see signs directing us to the park. The tunnel between the Reykjavik area and Akranes is an engineering marvel and well worth the toll just to drive through. We ended up going through it on our northern lights quest; there is a web site that shows in great detail where the cloud cover is expected to be on a given night, as well as an activity level forecast. Expect outstanding lamb and salmon, and damned little in the way of fresh vegetables. The hot dogs really are superior and worth a try.

There are two related reasons to eschew pine nuts in pesto. The first is sustainability; as the linked article below in the NY Times indicates, world demand for pesto is creating unsustainable harvest techniques. The second is pine nut mouth syndrome; a topic we've explored previously here. (http://www.donrockwell.com/index.php/topic/14674-toxic-pine-nuts/?hl=%2Bpine+%2Bnut+%2Bmouth#entry168906) I believe these are related because one of the suspects in pine nut mouth syndrome is use of specific pine species from China or Russia. As a past victim of pine nut mouth, I am steering clear of them these days. I use macademia nuts as my alternative nut. They typically do not show up on the list of alternatives, but I think they are the best match for the oily/sweet/soft profile of good pine nuts. What is everyone else using? http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/19/opinion/making-pesto-hold-the-pine-nuts.html?ref=dining

As more restaurants go to a no-tipping policy, it would be nice to see states pass legislation requiring menus to state whether servers are receiving tipped worker wages or not. There are so many order-at-the-counter places that have tip jars out, adding to the confusion. Requiring a restaurant to list how much it pays its servers/hour might also have the benefit of educating foreign visitors.

Our smoker cookbook indicates that the texture is not as good with frozen poultry. I am not expecting great skin on a smoked bird, but if you've had good results, all the better.

Any thoughts about where I might find a fresh turkey in NoVa in October? We have a new smoker and plan on smoking the Thanksgiving turkey this year, but want to do a trial run in advance. My understanding is that thawed frozen poultry is not great on the smoker and we need an unbrined bird.

We visted for lunch today and were favorably impressed. We never made it to Konami, so I'm not sure how much they revamped the interior. My 15 year-old liked the vibe. (So did we, but really, she's the style maven of the three of us.) There are two distinct areas, divided by a screen, one of which is more bar-style, albeit with some very big high tables. We sat in one of the booths, with a surprisingly peaceful view of the bamboo that screens part of the restaurant from Route 7. We had gyoza and the fried brussel sprouts as an appetizer. The gyoza appear to be made in house and are larger than usual, but the filling was tasty and had a good texture. The fried brussel sprouts were breaded but not seasoned much beyond that, served with a spicy mayo, and really too large a portion for 2 adults. The spouse and teen each had the tonkatsu ramen, while I went with the shio. The teen and I swapped bowls midway through as it turned out that we each preferred the other's broth. Both broths have a depth of flavor that goes far beyond "bones and MSG" as ingredients and tasted nothing like pre-packaged ramen broths. The spouse and I thought they are more complex than Tanpopo's. The bamboo shoots had been marinated and had no "canned" flavor; we have occasionally gotten sour bamboo shoots that taste like old cans elsewhere. Both broths were liberally studded with black garlic oil. The standout, though, was the chausu pork. It was either grilled lightly or touched with a blowtorch before it hit the soup, carmelizing some of the fat and pork. We arrived right as they opened at noon and by the time we left, it was about 2/3 full, with lots of family groups. We'll be back.

We were in Maui this August (2015). Food highlights: Da Kitchen, Kahului location. Bring your appetite! Portion sizes are huge and there may well be a line; you can phone ahead to get your name on the list prior to your arrival at the door. This is not fine dining, but there are plenty of competently executed versions of classic Hawaiian food. I couldn't bring myself to try the deep fried spam musubi, but I did have their unfried version. I'm not sure that "good" is the right word for it, but it was interesting. I'm not much of a spam musubi person but theirs was a lot better than any other version I've had. Hali'imaile General Store. We have had lunch there on two occasions; this was our first dinner. We opted for the quieter, almost empty back dining room. The menu may not have changed much over the years but they are still paying plenty of attention to details in the kitchen. The roasted meyer lemon half chicken was superb. Order the pricy sashimi Napoleon if you like raw fish. We thought the fish was top quality and it is an unusual and tasty composition. Izakaya Matsu. This is a dive in Kihei. The food is as good as ever, maybe better, but the interior is bare bones and you need to go well after sunset because they have the door open to the heat. If they had AC and spent a couple of hundred dollars on a fresh paint job and some pictures, they'd be packed from open to close. I believe they are open for dinner only. We went multiple times during our trip; pricing is DC level or lower. This is an izakaya, not a sushi bar, but if there is sushi or sashimi on the specials menu, get it. Some of the specials change daily and are clearly what the chef spotted in the market and wanted to make that day. The grilled fish is particularly good; it may be some time before we have a grilled yellowtail collar (hamachi kama) again because theirs put every other rendition we've had to shame. The place is tiny and reservations are a good idea. Yelpers like to whine about rude service there; we had no complaints. Should you come early enough, the shave ice stand in the parking lot has a decent selection of natural flavors and the lady running the stand is very friendly.

Were I a more artistic person, I'd be posting a picture of someone doing a keg-stand with a big parma ham.

Good question, The Hersch. I'm not the person who originally termed it as such, but I would assume it referred to the fact that it is sometimes served with soft yolk intact. Rice knocks me out cold if eaten for lunch, so I only had it the one time. I need to be pretty careful about my intake or even a Thai iced coffee won't keep me conscious.

Look for Kai Rabert on the main menu. At least in the Sterling location, I believe it is up on the board under "Adventurous."

If you are getting headaches, are you eliminating caffeine on your fasting days? I ask because there is a drastic difference between the Yom Kippur experience (total fast, no liquids either) if you are caffeine free and if you are not. Virtually everyone who routinely has caffeine in the morning has a nasty headache by 11 am. We caffeine-free folks have a much easier time of it.

For those curious about the ginger ale: http://byo.com/grains/item/1255-pop-art-brewing-excellent-soda. The recipe I wrote up there is for 5 gallons; I used my smaller 3 gallon keg and went with 2 cups of sugar, 16 oz of honey, and omitted the dried ginger because I wasn't sure if we would have small kids. With younger kids, you need to reduce the "bite" of the soda. I regret not tasting the cherry whiskey; I meant to but it was so darned hot my brain was not working quite right.

My daughter would love the recipe for the Slutty Brownies. Thanks, everyone. My family now adds its vote to moving the picnic to a cooler month!