PollyG

My 12 year-old "discovered" fresh mozzarella recently. Yesterday's main course for lunch was an alternating stack of sliced tomato, mozzarella, and basil leaves from the garden, plus some EVOO and a little fresh ground pepper. We're transitioning her into making her own lunches, so I think this will be a regular dish for another 2 months or so, until we get into pink styrofoam tomato season. It is fast, easy, and delicious. She's a little underweight, so the fat content of the cheese is not currently a concern.

We dined there yesterday. The food quality was good, and I particularly enjoyed the fact that no one in our group (shoyu, miso, and spicy) felt their broth was oversalty. The pork was tender and sweet. My family are not big egg eaters, but my daughter's friend remarked that the egg was her favorite part. However, service left much to be desired. We were shown to a table but had to ask for utensils after our first appetizer (an ume/cuke roll) had been sitting on the table for 10 minutes. Our second appetizer did not show up, but was on the bill and had to be removed. We look forward to them working the kinks out of the service. Meanwhile, there's A&J in the same plaza, with fast, efficient service.

Good Land Organics has Caviar (Finger) Limes available to order. $30 for a half pound...

I'm on their mailing list and may indulge later this summer---need the time to organize my own Iron Chef Finger Lime dinner with a few friends.

Love my KitchenAid meat grinder. For baby food purees, why not use a stick blender? Even the low end ones do a really nice job, though you will need a little liquid in the mix. I've had my $20 model for over 12 years now and it shows no signs of wearing out.

Grand Marts seem to vary a lot by location. I agree that the one in 7 Corners was nasty the last time I went there, years ago. And the Bestway in Herndon lost my business the day I could smell the fish counter, which is in the very back of the store, the moment I walked inside.

Jimco, contact me via PM if you want some volunteer tomato plants. We suspect they are Matt's Wild Cherry, a prolific producer of intensely flavored little nuggets of tomato goodness. The one we nurtured carefully is already yielding, and these, as well as Sungolds, will keep giving you fruit until the frost kills them.

Basil loves heat, so if you water it, you will have happy basil all summer, even with a late start. You just need to be vigilant about pinching it back so it doesn't go to seed.

Super H in Fairfax (Rt. 50/29) remains consistently bright and clean. Lotte in Chantilly is huge, with good produce, but I am not as impressed by their seafood section. The new Super-H in Centreville (28/29 intersection area) was owned by another company recently and is about as nice as the Fairfax location, but a bit smaller.

My local Grand Mart on Rt. 7 in Sterling has good produce, and gets kudos for doing a very thorough disposal of perishables following the power outages. I was there today and entire sections have been emptied. I'm sure that some stores have been tempted to hedge a bit on what is perishable and what is not.

Great Wall's produce selection is impressive, but I have a hard time getting past the overall grunge factor of the store.

We use pine nuts for many dishes in our house and I get some and then freeze them. So, they don't go bad and nothing is wasted. Those Spanish pine nuts at WF are quite wonderful--we just need to think of the cost as something similar to caviar. But there is no way I'm gonna pay that kind of $$$ for a Chinese product, eventhough we haven't suffered from that "metallic mouth" syndrome that seems to occur with some frequency with the Chinese product. I'm just upset that something that is supposed to support American farms has nothing to do with that.

That does sound as if it merits a call/email first to the manufacturer, and then to the Federal Trade Commission if the manufacturer does not respond to your satisfaction. We have similar issues with dog food items --- front labels often proudly state that the company is a US company, but then there is small print on the back telling you that the chicken comes from China.

As a victim of TJ's pine nuts, I'll pay through the nose for Spanish ones next time. I don't use that many, and I do keep them in the freezer. 2 weeks of pine nut mouth was more than enough.

It is rare when a thread has multiple posts over the course of several years without a single negative comment, but Huong Viet fits the bill. Any recent experiences confirming the above glowing recommendations, or to the contrary?

We visited Huong Viet with a fellow chow-family a few weeks ago as our pre-Post Hunt early lunch. We overordered a bit, but had a top-notch meal. Their cha gio remain our standard for what cha gio should be--crisp outside, fully cooked insides, neither too mushy nor firm--my raves from a few years ago still hold true. The grilled pork over vermicelli features intensely marinated meat grilled to moist perfection. We also enjoyed lotus root salad and the caramel fish. The caramel fish may have been just a touch too sweet.

I had a group dinner at the very highly rated Slanted Door in San Francisco a few months ago. About half the dishes we ordered were classic Vietnamese dishes, and for every one of those, Huong Viet kicked the Slanted Door's high end rump, at a fraction of the price.

Had a little miscommunication at the market this week and ended up with beef heart instead of tongue. Any tried and true ideas for how to cook beef heart? I don't have time to cook until Tuesday.

Thanks!

I think you want to find a recipe for Peruvian anticuchos. These are beef heart kabobs, marinated with cumin, among other things. They're quite delicious.

With the exception of xiaolongbao, which are really specialized shumais, buns are leavened. Chinese buns can be sweet or savory, filled or unfilled. Their main characterists are that they are cooked by steam and are leavened (typically with baking powder though occasionally with yeast).

Can't bao also be baked?

Great idea. I made a donation to the clean birth kits project.

I can't make it, but look forward to the writeup. We've really enjoyed our dim sum expeditions and want to try the full menu for dinner in the future.

Did they ever open a Fairfax location?

The Fairfax location is at the intersection of 50 and 29, near Super H, in a tiny new strip mall that is mostly restaurants/food counters.

Yum Woo Sen and Thai iced coffee for lunch today. The Yum Woo Sen was exploding with perfectly balanced fish sauce and lime, with a nice tingle of hot pepper. Total cost, $10, including tip to the counter staff. The smokey aroma of their expertly wokked noodles made me pause in the parking lot, tempted to go back in for a second course. Why is this place not bursting at the seams?

If anyone is interested in free, organic garlic chives for the garlic chive soup recipe in today's Post (http://projects.washingtonpost.com/recipes/2012/04/18/chilled-garlic-chive-soup/), I have an overabundance of them in the Herndon area. PM me and I can provide the details. A substantial portion are going to get weed whacked next week.

If you are looking for soup dumplings in Manhattan, Shanghai Cafe Deluxe delivers some pretty nice contenders. This is a small place (100 Mott St., near intersection of Mott & Canal) with a fairly extensive menu. We have visited twice now and ordered rather heavily off the dumpling side of the menu. The soup dumplings are the first two items on the dumpling menu--one version is pork only and the second is pork and crab. My daughter and I preferred the pure pork version; our other dining partners found the two versions equally good. The kitchen lines the bamboo steamers heavily with greens to prevent the dumplings from sticking and every dumpling has still contained its generous load of soupy goodness.

We had an excellent "cabbage and black mushroom" dish which was baby choy and shitake, recommended by our server. The baby choy were cut in half and just a bit big to eat easily without a knife, but the shitakes were perfectly sauced and had a silky, meaty texture to them.

Yelp is full of complaints about rude staff, but we have not had that experience at all. Yes, they are likely to be a bit aggressive about clearing your table, but they have a tiny space and I don't blame them for wanting to turn tables quickly.

Cash only, "A" health rating on the door.

This grower says it's a summer, fall, and early winter crop, but you can sign up for notification of availability.

This one lists several stores in the area that carry their products. May be worth a call to the customer service line to see if any are carrying finger limes.

Let us know if you are able to track any down in the area!

Unfortuntely, the Melissa's site seems to only indicate which stores carry their line, not which ones carry a particular item.

I'll investigate this when they come into season again -- perhaps I can organize a group buy if they're not making it to our local stores.

If so inclined again, here's the skinny on hake at Monterey Bay Seafood Watch; Whole Foods is not as scrupulous about sustainability issues as one might think. MBSW must have a phone app by now.

They do. Look for "Seafood Watch." It is fairly slick and can use your location to tailor the provided information. It even has the option for you to recommend restaurants as offering good sustainable seafood.

Has anyone spotted finger limes in the area? (http://www.saveur.com/article/Kitchen/finger-limes). I think they are toward the end of their season, and may not be making it past the west coast yet, but I would sure like to get hold of some without paying astronomical shipping costs.

I struck out at the Reston Whole Foods this weekend.

I tried the $3.45 wonton soup for the first time this week. The broth is weak--very lightly flavored, but the wonton dumplings appear to be the same dumplings that are served with a hot sauce as szechuan dumplings and they really shine with the light broth. They are perhaps half a teaspoon of filling in a square skin, shaped like comets. The soup had at least half a dozen of those little gems. It's probably the perfect meal if you're joining someone at A&J but not feeling all that great.

We have not needed to purge mussels, though we have done a clam purge on occasion.

I've had very good luck with Great Eastern brand mussels from Maine and those from PEI. The mussels are rope grown** (we got a very nice tour of PEI mussel farming during a seal watching trip a few years ago) and a far cry from the muddy, sandy mussels of my youth, which were a genuine labor of love to prep. In general, I rinse them, inspect for dead or cracked mussels, snip off any beards, and cook. Any mussels that are partially open are rapped on the shell and put on the side of the sink for reinspection at the end of prep time--if they have closed by then, they are still alive. Prep time is maybe 10 minutes for a kilo bag. I do make note of any brands that have too many dead mussels or are not very clean---the el Mar brand that a lot of the Korean groceries stock is on my never again list. There are too many reliable mussel purveyors these days to put up with mussels that are a pain to prep.

** The PEI operation is aquaculture done right. No foreign mussels have been introduced; they use natural mussel spawn and just take advantage of the fact that mussels love to attach to hanging ropes. The ropes are then kept in ideal feeding conditions, but are eating only what nature gives them; no artificial foods. Farmed mussels are on the Monterey Bay Aquarium's "best choices" list.

Nut-free chocolate coated toffee. It's currently sitting outside hardening. We found with our first batch that the texture changes remarkably if we refrigerate it; it becomes far more tender.

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.
  

If you like the dark chocolate sea salt caramels, it's that time of year again! I was in the Davis, CA store this week and the stocking manager said that they had sold out of them within a few days, and that he was so far unable to order more! So it's not just us. They are currently in stock at the Fairfax store. Get 'em while you can! I think last year they were out shortly after Thanksgiving.

Still in stock yesterday at the Reston store.