Pat

Nachos with red chili at the Hard Times in Clarendon. I think they may have changed their tortilla chips, because I didn't like these as much as I usually do.

This thread got me digging around for a raspberry scone recipe I have not made in quite a while: Raspberry-Buttermilk Scones. The amount of baking powder should be 1/2 tsp. It's missing in the original post. I'll have to make these again soon and see if they're as good as I remember.

Leftovers last night: pulled pork with bbq sauce lobster macaroni and cheese corn spoon bread

Baked potato with lowfat sour cream and chives; coarse sea salt and pepper.

That would be my suggestion as well.

Baked chicken breasts Leftover lobster macaroni and cheese Spoonbread with fresh corn

Whoa. Is this what the membership card gets you?

I usually blanch it.

I have not looked at this book, but someone on a cooking mailing list I'm on got very interested in presentation a couple of years ago and recommended it: Christopher Styler, Working the Plate, the Art of Food Presentation, ISBN 0-471-47939-X. Presentation is something I can generally do fairly well without thinking about it. I'm afraid if I gave too much attention to it, I would overthink it. My guiding principle is to balance colors. I also pay attention to shape and texture, but color is the thing I pay most attention to when composing a plate. I try to get a variety of colors on the plate. On the occasion that everything is shades of one color (say, pork chops, mashed potatoes, and creamed onions), I work with garnishes to add color. You don't want too much of the plate exposed. In the photo above, you've worked two points on the outside of the plate and left the middle empty, save for the parsley. The effect of that garnish, however, is to draw attention to the center of the plate and to the fact that the center of the plate is empty. Arranging food along the edges in two spots and leaving the remaining edge of the plate empty also draws attention to that open space. Perhaps I would have scattered parsley over the veal, put the polenta off center in the middle of the plate and put some color on the left side: green beans; peas and carrots; a few strips of roasted bell peppers of one or mixed colors; or a small amount of green salad. The veal could be arranged a little more neatly or evenly, but that's not the first thing I would change about the plating.

Last night I made a crockpot pork loin coated with harissa and also the lobster mac and cheese recipe from the most recent episode of The Next Food Network Star. The pork loin was a small end piece and dried out a bit too much. It made for nice pulled pork, though, mixed with some premade bbq sauce. My husband loved it mixed in with the macaroni and cheese. For the most part, I followed the mac and cheese recipe, though I didn't start with fresh lobster. I bought one tail and half a dozen or so claws pre-cooked. The only part of it that didn't quite work right was the panko topping. I think it's because I cut back on the amount of cheese I put on top. (It called for 4 cups of cheddar, in addition to what was already in the sauce.) Overall, it came out pretty well. It made a lot, though, and with the lobster in it, we're going to need to eat it fairly quickly. I should have scaled it back to half a recipe.

Spinach-Artichoke dip with some kind of bread? That can be held to be cooked when you arrive or be cooked ahead of time and reheated.This is one I like. It's a little labor-intensive starting with fresh spinach, but it's very good.

I resisted that directive when I was there and then, after a few bites, decided I needed to cut the burger in half. It was a little too late by then, as the bun had started to disintegrate from everything being smushed together. I look forward to trying the new rolls on my next visit.

I was talking to someone who tried to go there for dinner this week (Wednesday, I think) and got there about 5:20, only to discover that they had sold out of everything during lunch and were closed from 3:30 to 5:30 to restock. It didn't sound as though it was a set policy, but maybe they've needed to make it one. They seem to be more slammed than they anticipated. (The same person who had this experience also reported having tried the mushroom, turkey, and beef burgers. He thought they were all good but raved and raved about the turkey burger.)

Another thought I had was to remove them from the casings and cook up for a spaghetti sauce. Eat some of the sauce now and freeze the rest.

It would certainly be possible to match from reservation lists, especially Open Table. I generally assume when I post about a meal I had on a particular day, including a description of the food I ordered, that it would be obvious to the restaurant who I was if they wanted to locate me in their reservation database. They also have phone numbers and/or email addresses, depending on how reservations are made. Even without reservations, if you pay with a credit card, they have a name. It would just depend on how much effort someone wanted to put into compiling a list.

Turkey burgers* topped with fresh mozzarella, served on onion rolls spread with tapenade Eastern Shore corn on the cob, buttered, with sea salt and freshly ground black pepper White rice, black beans, and tomatoes with cholula Excellent meal. The turkey requires some aggressive spicing, and this did it. *Half breast meat and half thigh; chopped scallions; chopped cilantro, harissa, horseradish, sriracha sauce, garlic powder, salt and pepper

One thing I discovered while making Ethiopian food at home is that it, too, uses a large amount of butter. When I lost a lot of weight on a lowfat diet several years ago, my husband (who did not need to lose weight), lost weight too, and his cholesterol dropped from a bit high to the normal range. We hardly ate out at all, since I was being careful and there was no way to know what was going into restaurant foods. My one splurge would be to go to Montmarte, which, at that time, had salmon with leeks and wheatberries on the menu, a preparation that seemed healthy enough that I didn't concern myself with the amount of fat that might have been added in cooking. I need to dig out my lowfat recipes again. There were some pretty good ones I relied on. There's a Mayo Clinic/Wms Sonoma Cookbook that has some nice lowfat recipes, a lowfat Moosewood cookbook I liked, and a few spa cookbooks (hit or miss overall but with some good recipes). My recollection is that for meats I used a lot of ground turkey (breast with some thigh meat, since otherwise there's no fat at all) and pork tenderloin. I also employed a tasting menu approach, making small amounts of different lowfat foods (and a few pieces of "good" fat items such as avocado and nuts), all artfully arranged on the plate.

I've never made this, but I think I would allow enough time for the stock to get back down to room temperature/lukewarm before adding the egg whites.

Tonight apparently was pork night Iceberg salad with cucumber, tomato, yellow bell pepper, nicoise olives, and red wine vinaigrette Pork rib chops wrapped in bacon, pan seared and then baked; caramelized red onions Spaghetti with tomato mushroom sauce and salami

I can't keep track of different updated versions of the article, but I hadn't noticed this line before I don't know if that's a change to the article or I missed it before.

I often refrigerate the dough for a little while once I mix it up and then take the bowl back out to make individual batches. I prefer working with dough that's fairly cold for chocolate chip cookies. I haven't kept cc dough refrigerated that long, but I do it with the sand tarts I make at Christmas sometimes. It takes so long to make them that I stretch it over several days.

In my experience, mint is pretty hard to kill. That article struck me as odd. It said she used one mint leaf. How much pesticide residue could be on one mint leaf to make that many people sick? Or was that supposed to mean a sprig with multiple leaves on it? I'm really thinking there had to be something else wrong with the stew.ETA: The most recent version of the article is different and says "leaves," plural. Never mind.

I knew i was going to miss something! I was doing several things and wasn't looking at the tv full-time.

Absolutely! (Did I see starfish too?)

Well, in the first minute or two of this throwdown, Flay has placed the restaurant in NW and I've seen and heard Hillvalley.