zoramargolis

3 hours ago, Genevieve said:

I recently bought some sumac and was looking through here for ideas on how to use it. The Ottolenghi recipe looks very tasty - zoramargolis, if you see this, do you do the marinating before roasting? We sometimes skip a "marinate for a few hours" step in recipes in the interests of getting a weeknight dinner made (not thinking ahead enough to allow time to do that in the morning).

All of Ottolenghi's chicken recipes use the same method. The chicken is mixed with aromatics, vegetables, spices, and other flavoring ingredients first--ideally for a few hours or overnight. And then arrayed in one layer in a baking dish and roasted in a hot oven. The only thing that changes is the marinating and secondary ingredients. You can mix the chicken with the spices and cook immediately if you want, just know that the chicken itself won't be as intensely flavored, and since the salt in the marinade acts as a brine or dry brine would in maintaining moisture in the meat, the chicken may turn out drier than if it had marinated for a few hours. Why not plan ahead, and mix the chicken with the spices the night before you plan to cook it, and store it in a zip-lock bag in the fridge? Then you can come home from work, turn the oven on and have dinner ready in less time.

Don, you should also say that he is a wicked wit of the east, and also a helluva nice guy.

Hi Smoky-- a former DR.com stalwart alerted me to your post, on Facebook, natch. Yes, I moved to Maine in April, 2015. While my friends in L.A. were sweltering in 100+ degree heat last week--you might have been, too-- I was enjoying the mid-70's, with a gentle breeze off the Sheepscot River behind my house. I've met some local food writers here, and there is a very active farmers market/local agriculture scene here. It's beautiful here.

I frankly can't recall my comment about brownies on the NYT--I'll have to go back and read what I said. But thanks for the kudo!

Steve Siegel came to my farewell happy hour at Baby Wale. I was pleased and somewhat surprised to see him. the event was only publicized on DR.com, so unless he heard about it from mutual friends like Daniel or Lydia, he read about it here.

I prefer the flavor of dill weed, not seed. I've been pinching my dill plants so they won't flower. No cucumbers of any kind yet, in the farmers markets here in Maine.

Anyone know somewhere not too far from Arlington, Va where you can get starter "mother"for vinegar?  I want to make my own red wine vinegar.

I do it by buying a bottle of an unfiltered cider vinegar at WF or another natural foods market, and using up or carefully pouring off the vinegar from the top of the bottle and retaining the "unfiltered" portion at the bottom of the bottle, which contains mother. Then top off the bottle with red wine and leave it sit for about a month. Voila. Continue to top off the bottle with left over red wine indefinitely.

Harmless Harvest available at Costco Fairfax this week. This is far and away the best cocnut water I've ever tasted that was not coming straight out of a young coconut. I believe it was $15.99 for a 4pk of 16oz bottles.

Have you tried Trader Joe's maple water? It is just maple sap, straight out of the tree, with nothing added. Very slightly sweet with a hint of maple flavor. It takes 20 gallons of sap boiled down to make one gallon of syrup. I'm not sure that there is enough unprocessed maple sap in the world to turn it into a craze, but it is very refreshing and worth trying.

Shemali's Cafe, in the New Mexico Ave. office building that houses Ace Beverage has a vertical grill for chicken schwarma, which they serve either as a platter or rolled in a flatbread with lettuce and tahini sauce.

Penzy's?

What is it, dessicated, ground porcinis?

It is probably made with the detritus, broken bits and stems of dried porcini that aren't primo enough to charge the big bucks for. It is much cheaper than buying dried porcini and grinding them up yourself. It is a very fine powder, like wheat flour, that mixes invisibly into whatever. I haven't used it as a steak rub.

I had an excellent dinner at North Fork Inn a few years ago. How sweet that you will get to work with Claudia Fleming, although I understand that she is quite involved with caring for her husband, who IIRC has ALS. (I am fortunate to own Fleming's great dessert recipe book, The Last Course which is out of print, but still much in demand. Perhaps you could encourage her to consider re-printing it. Used copies are, apparently, selling for more than $100.)

And there are some very exciting things going on around there with farm products, wine, and fresh seafood and fish. Summer near Long Island Sound and Shelter Island -- not too shabby, as the saying goes.

For quite a few years, porcini powder has been one of my favorite non-secret "secret ingredients" for adding umami and depth of flavor to soups, braises, and tomato sauces. It's cheaper and easier to use than dried porcinis--no soaking or chopping needed.

Don't know if I have ever seen it locally--it'd be at Balducci or Dean and DeLuca if it's available around here.

I get it at Kalustyan's in NYC and at Surfas in Culver City (West Los Angeles). Both places sell online.

And darkstar965 is correct. I have talked about it here.

Well, thanks so much to everyone who turned up at Baby Wale tonight to hang out, eat, drink, and wish me bon voyage. We also toasted DR.com and our dear leader on the upcoming 10th anniversary of this site. So great to see old friends and more recent ones. Many thanks to Barbara for organizing this. I have many people I consider friends as the result of DR.com, and I will miss you all. And I will stay in touch.

Look up Allium on Wikipedia for the answer to the question "what is an onion?"

Storage or cooking onions are mature bulbs of white, red, brown, or yellow onions that have been pulled from the ground and allowed to dry, so that the outer layer firms and forms a papery covering. By the time the bulb has matured, the top, the part of the plant that grew above ground, has withered. Growers generally cut off the dried tops for storage. Dried garlic tops can be braided together to form a garlic braid which can be hung up for storage. Onions can be braided as well, but they are quite heavy and often the dried top isn't strong enough to hold them for very long.

A housecooling weekend, with visiting relatives--J's two siblings and one spouse staying here and going through stuff in the attic. Friday night I made masa corn cakes with green chile and refried beans. I had planned to grill marinated chicken thighs, but for one reason or another it didn't happen. Saturday night, dinner for nine with a niece and her spouse and a cousin with his spouse added to the group. A challenge, since a lot of our wine glasses are already packed, and my cutlery set is for eight. Still, we made do. Cousin is a genius bread baker, and he brought two loaves of freshly baked levain, which we ate with the appetizer of creamy baked asparagus and aged gouda dip (a modern German dish recently featured in the Post). First course was fresh pea soup made with homemade corn cob stock. One BIL and his daughter are vegetarians, so I accomodated them as much as possible. The levain went well with the soup, too. Green salad followed, while I fired the mixed grill: lamb kebabs marinated with yogurt and fresh mint, hanger steak and pork sausage from Organic Butcher of McLean, and the marinated chicken thighs, and portobello mushrooms for the veg-heads. Mains were accompanied by a wheat berry salad with roasted red pepper, dill, and feta, and roasted haricots verts and asparagus. Dessert was Tunisian blood orange olive oil cake with mixed berries and vanilla whipped cream.

We had muscadet and a Weinbach riesling with the appetizer and first course. One fun feature of the meal on Saturday was the opening of three bottles of 1975 Stonegate Petite Sirah that we recently unearthed from the bottom of the wine closet, to see if they were drinkable. Remarkably, the wine (at least the first 2/3 of each bottle) was clear, ruby-red with no bricking and still full of fruit. very delicious wine. There was a lot of sediment in the bottom 1/3 of each bottle. We also had two bottles of 2000 Edmunds St. John Bassetti Vineyard syrah with the meat.

We all had lunch at Peter Chang's on Sunday, and later in the afternoon opened some other old bottles: 1975 Simi cabernet (blech), 1976 Dehlinger cabernet (delicious), and 1975 Stag's Leap Wine Cellar cabernet (also delicious). I guess the storage wasn't as inadequate as I imagined, and we bought some well-made wine back in the late 70's. All the bottles still had their price tags on them, which ranged from $6.99 to $8.99. Those were the days!

Chinese chicken salad (traditional style by request, including canned mandarin oranges and packaged crispy noodles)

a 2011 Muscadet from the back of the wine closet that was still very good

Recently, a friend revealed that he is having a recurrence of leukemia that had long been in remission. I saw him a few days before he was to embark on an experimental treatment at NIH. I promised to cook something for him when I returned from a brief trip up to my new house in Maine. When I asked what he wanted/would be able to eat during the treatment, he said that whatever I wanted to cook was what he wanted to eat.

I was thinking comfort food, and since he and his wife are former Texans, I decided to make posole verde for him. I made it yesterday, using pork shoulder and pork ribs from Whole Foods. (The shoulder they sell is boneless, and it is just better when it has been cooked with some bones, so I bought a few ribs to cook in the pot.) I used homemade chicken stock, and the same kind of mote corn that they use at Taco Bamba in their posole, which I soaked overnight and then pressure cooked for 35 minutes before adding it to the pork, roasted poblanos, tomatillos and aromatics. It cooked for several hours, and J and I had some for dinner last night.

I had communicated with my friend's wife about the best time to bring it over, and she asked if I could come this morning and plan to have breakfast with them. J came with me, and when we arrived, my friend was full of energy (I expected him to be weak and ill from chemo) and in great spirits. The experimental treatment he is undergoing has recently gotten a lot of press, because it is revolutionary and has resulted in quick remission--eradication of the cancer, actually-- with few side effects in almost every one of the less than a dozen people who have undergone it. He just happened to have the exact type of leukemia that has responded so quickly to this new type of treatment that targets the cancer cells.

It seemed ironic that I had cooked for someone I thought of as sick, and he was bustling around, preparing breakfast for me. The posole was heated up and served along with scrambled egg and potato tacos, home made bacon, and fruit salad. Also there for breakfast was another friend, formerly from Austin, who was visiting from Baltimore. She was excited, because she hadn't had posole verde in years.

Well, suffice it to say that my food was savored, exclaimed over and greatly appreciated. Which feels nice, because while J told me it was tasty last night, he eats it frequently, so it isn't that special for him. But it made my friend happy, and he is convinced that food cooked for him with love is curative. And there was a lot left over for him to have more.

I hope to see all of y'all there, so I can say "so long, it's been good to know ya"! That means you, too, DR!

LPerry and porcupine are both expert gardeners, so seek them out to answer your questions, and you will get reliable advice.

minestrone based on smoked turkey broth

chives are a member of the allium family, but they are an entirely different onion than green/spring/scallions, which are young onions, which if the bulbs are allowed to fill our and mature, are harvested after the tops wither and are sold as cooking onions.

OK. So does that mean "green onions" are synonymous with....scallions for $500?

I think the distinction is geographic: we called them green onions on the west coast; they are referred to as scallions here in the east.

Red Apron chorizo, potato, and roasted poblano tacos

pico de gallo

home made refried pinto beans

Fat Tire

BreadFurst chocolate chip cookies and almond milk

Shemali's, in the same building on New Mexico Ave. as Ace Beverage, sells Jordan almonds. Although I don't know which brand they sell. they do have high quality products from Lebanon, Greece, Turkey, etc. so I imagine that this would be a good place to get them if you live in the District,

oven-braised ayrshire farm short ribs, after 5 days in cooked wine marinade

roasted carrots, rutabaga, and butternut squash

steamed new potatoes

mushroom barley pilaf

bosc pear and fig newmans

2009 La Grande Ribe cdr

A slice of Bread Furst's corn rye bread, slathered with Kerrygold unsalted butter -- bread purchased just a few minutes ago at the Whole Foods on P Street!