Hannah

I have not been to Hama in years (I am thinking it has been at least a half dozen), but what I loved was an outstanding roll called the Hama Roll, it was a crab salad and avacado, then each slice was topped with a mayo based chilie sauce and grilled. They do not list it on the menu that is posted online, but if they still have it (and it is even half as good as it once was) I would jump at the opportunity to order it again.

I've seen it on their specials board from time to time, so you could probably call ahead and see if it's on that day.

Mikaku is affiliated with Sushi Taro downtown (some sort of co-ownership thing), and isn't Korean in style at all - the menu's pretty traditional Japanese, except for the couple of nods to American tastes with the spicy and tempura maki. They've got a pretty good selection of non-sushi Japanese food as well - there's a great little small plate of Kurobuta pork sausage on their specials at the moment.

Hama Sushi, also in Herndon, is another good bet - they have consistently good sushi, but will also do shoyu or miso ramen, which Mikaku doesn't. (Mikaku only does udon and soba).

Comparing the two, I'd go to Hama if I specifically wanted hamachi, assorted maki, or soup, but if I was craving toro or cooked nibbles I'd go to Mikaku.

I hope they'll keep running the original Iron Chef episodes when they swap over from FLN to Cooking Channel; I've gotten re-hooked on them.

It is some pretty boring eating and, if my gallstone attack hadn't been so brutal, no doubt I would have fallen off the wagon by now. Nothing like searing pain to keep you on track. Setting the surgery date also helped -- open-ended boring eating was not working for me. The good news is that life will gradually get back to some semblance of normal. Multi-day high fat revelries will be out but that is probably good for multiple reasons. Plus, I'll be back to eating acidic foods in time for tomato season.

Ugh. Having spent the better part of last year with various gall-bladder-related problems, I sympathize. As far as bland-but-edible, I can also highly recommend turkey, and, if you need something by way of quick-cooking convenience food, the Uncle Ben's ready rice mixed with some kind of vegetable; that was my go-to when I knew I had to eat something and was too miserable to cook.

The latest word from my contact in Charlottesville: click.

Where the hell is Short Pump?

It's Richmond's version of Tyson's Corner.

Yeah, and there's no "marrow fat" in mushy peas either - they're made from a kind of peas called marrowfat.

Finally got a chance to make it outside to the Curbside truck today; both the coconut and red velvet are entirely acceptable. I'd give their red velvet the nod over Georgetown Cupcake's; I think the texture of Curbside's cake is better, and the cream cheese icing on Curbside's isn't as sweet. I do wish the icing was a little more spread out rather than being a large piped blob on top of each cupcake, but at least it's good icing. I've still got a carrot cake cupcake left to go, so we'll see if it's as good as the other two.

Heidelberg's hot cross buns were a tad dry for my taste; I was really surprised. Wegmans generally do pretty well with theirs; they do use raisins instead of currants, but they're nice plump raisins, and the rest of the fruit's reasonably good.

REALLY? Geez, I haven't gotten a decent loaf from WF in a long time. The La Brea breads at Harris Teeter are passable, though I still usually have to bake them some more.

The sesame semolina's acceptable, and the big round potatoey thing (forget what it's called) isn't bad either. The baguettes are really terrible, though.

The quality of Whole Foods baked goods has been increasingly disappointing in general, but the hot cross buns I picked up yesterday are possibly the worst bakery item I've ever purchased. Dry and stale, with big raisins instead of currants & candied fruit and not even a hint of cinnamon or allspice. The frosting forming the cross was flavorless and dried out enough that it could be lifted off. Just horrid. Entemanns would have been better than this. If I don't have time to make them again next year, then we will just skip it.

I got a marble pound cake at WFM the other day that I could swear they forgot to put butter in. I still have pretty good luck with the bread though.

Nope, the OED says that the last syllable is pronounced. The Online OED renders non-ISO-Latin glyphs through tiny images, so I've re-rendered the IPA pronunciation here to match. Note the symbol that resembles the mathematical integral symbol ('esh') followed by a second schwa and optionally an 'r' sound.

I think what we've run into here is not an argument over pronunciation, but rather terminology. It turns out there's a separate entry for "Worcester sauce."

Not according to Merriam-Webster...

But yes according to the OED; over here it's woostersher, there it's wuhster. Or you could just call it Lea and Perrins, which works for everybody.

Now you're sounding like Gillian. I don't think there's anything wrong with a customer asking this question...

If I were the one behind the counter, I'd find it pretty damn insulting to have spent all this time and effort on my product only to have some idiot ask "is it good?" There's a lot of time, effort, and care invested in it being good. What people ought to do is say "okay, I like [insert type of chocolate here] - which of these should I try?"

It may be a problem in New York, but apparently it's not so much in Virginia - per the story in the Post food section a couple of weeks ago. A lot of small slaughterhouses have actually reopened because of demand from local producers, which works out for everybody.

A friend of mine was recently gifted with some homemade Kentucky moonshine.

He's not sure what to do with it. Other than drinking it straight, do you mix it with anything? Serve room temperature or chilled?

If it's aged like the stuff we got a while back, you can pretty much treat it as you'd treat bourbon. How you treat white lightning basically depends on how good it is; some of it's drinkable straight, some takes better to being chilled and/or mixed to smooth it out a little.

They've just finished converting the formerly non-supercenter Walmart in Sterling into a supercenter with grocery, presumably in an attempt to compete with Wegmans. They've got a long way to go; the produce section is maybe a third the size of the one in Wegmans Dulles, and while there may be some organic produce somewhere in it, there's no big obvious display of it. They also didn't appear to have organic/local dairy products, other than Stonyfield Farm yogurt that's available at pretty much every grocery store anyway.

I did find a few regional specialty items (White Lily flour, Martha White cornmeal, Odom's and Swaggerty's sausage, etc.) but Harris Teeter carries the flour and cornmeal, so the only thing that's really going to get me back in there is the sausage and the fact that Walmart is the only place I can ever seem to find taillight bulbs.

You're unlikely to get a really hot madras unless you specifically ask for it to be hot; they tend to fall more or less in the middle of the continuum at most places. Vindaloo is always going to be at the hotter end of the scale at any restaurant; Haandi is quite capable of producing dishes that will blow the top of your head off, so if you're ordering vindaloo there it's best to tell them "medium" unless you really, really want something intestine-scorchingly hot.

Wegmans Fairfax was an absolute zoo today, given the large number of Japanese embassy staff who were crowding the sushi bar area along with the regular Saturday afternoon shopping crowd, but it was worth every bit of the wait. The sushi I got was stunning (maguro, unagi and hamachi); they were handing out samples of nabe that I hope they're going to have again at some point, and I managed to score the last decent package of miso black cod, which will be tonight's dinner.

I've actually seen the inner workings of the Post's chat software, so I can speak to this one. What happens is that the washingtonpost.com producer looks at all the questions, then edits the questions they're going to put into the queue as necessary and puts them into the answerer's queue. Tom can then choose to answer any of the questions that are in that queue, but unless he's arranged with his producer to send him absolutely every question that's submitted, it's highly unlikely that he sees everything. So yes, he is picking the questions that are answered to a certain extent, but he's almost certainly picking from a pool that's been substantially limited.

I've had pretty good results with both the Cento and the Flora whole San Marzano tomatoes, as well as various other brands of DOP San Marzanos picked up here and there. I haven't noticed an enormous taste difference between puree and juice-packed once they're turned into sauce; the puree's a bit of a time-saver since the sauce takes slightly less time to reduce, but I haven't generally gone out of my way to choose one over the other.

Yes, mathematically you are correct ... but one must consider the POS that was in use at the time. A (y + z) was likely programmed into the computer as a "special" and since the diner never technically ordered the "special", each order of y was perhaps treated as a normal order as was the final order of z. Although the server might have been compelled to do the right thing, the computer system won over.

Yeah, this makes sense. There's a very good chance that the POS will only allow the lower price of y when it's rung in as a combination with z, and the systems are designed not to let a standard user make changes to pricing or item combinations - basically, you would have had to say something and have the server get a manager to override that pricing in the system to get the lower price on y on its own.

As far as Babbo goes, I'd do the regular tasting menu over the pasta tasting menu - you're going to get plenty of pasta on the standard tasting menu, but you'll really miss out on the non-pasta dishes if you only get pasta. That being said, the filled pastas are excellent, particularly the goose liver ravioli - if it's not on the tasting menu, it's worth ordering a separate portion or negotiating for it to be one of the courses.

(The filled pasta on the regular tasting menu is often the mint love letters, which I don't personally care for, but the general critical opinion is that they're really good as well.) I also really liked the pumpkin lune.

Even with that assumption, you're still going to be surprised at the end.

If I think Ellen Tigh on BSG is totally Lady Macbeth, is that a sign of snowverload?

Only if it took you more than one episode to notice it..

Wegman's has Maldon, Williams-Sonoma has various French fleurs de sel. And isn't the Balducci's in Mclean still open?