Anna Phor

Thanks! I actually ended up making a kind of savory bread pudding with the croutons (which weren't really croutons, actually--just stale bread that I'd cubed and put in the freezer. Future croutons, more than anything). Croutons, shredded spinach, meatballs, and a can of crushed tomatoes with a beaten egg stirred in.

We did, eventually, get those malasadas. Also--a technicality--"native Hawaiian" usually means, in Hawai'i, people of Hawaiian ancestry. Hula Girl serves what I'd call "local" food; local is the unique culture of Hawai'i that emerges from the blend of Hawaiian, Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Portuguese, haole (white) and other people who populate the island.

I am on a mission to eat things out of my freezer to clear space. Using the following ingredients (plus numerous other pantry staples on hand but limited other veggies), what can I make for dinner? Croutons Swedish meatballs from ikea half a bag of fresh spinach frozen broccoli frozen peas

Recipes that have been in my possession since before ... about 2010, I think ? ... are in a spiral bound notebook. Some are hand written in, some are pasted in. There is the semblance of a table of contents at the beginning that runs for at least the first half of the book. Newer recipes are in dropbox; accessible from my phone so I can shop for ingredients, accessible from my laptop in the kitchen so the small assistant can read them to me and I can make on-the-fly changes. Some recipes are in books and I remember which book and which recipe, mostly. A few family recipes reside somewhere within gmail and are searchable. Mostly these are recipes that my mother has emailed to me. ("Brandy butter" lives in gmail, but I have a terrible time finding it every year.) It's entirely chaotic but works beautifully.

Linguists do a bunch of different things--from writing dictionaries to studying language structures to working with communities to revive dying languages. I work primarily on language learning, especially ESL learning in US schools and the needs of kids who are working on learning English.

Anna Phor, Consulting Linguist. Reasonable rates. No job too small. Lexicography, grammatical analysis, IPA transcription. Contact through PM for details.

Dear Palena, Your pastries and baked goods are delicious. Please shovel your sidewalks. -your neighbors

For my money, Fresh Med, right across the street, blows Byblos right out of the water.

Hula Girl Truck is parked, temporarily, in the space previously occupied by Pulpo, on Connecticut Ave in Cleveland Park. (Not literally. The truck is not actually in the restaurant.) The restaurant will be open Tuesdays through Sundays until mid March, according to the staff. A short menu of plate lunch staples--kalua pork & cabbage, huli-huli chicken, teriyaki beef/pork/tofu--anchors the menu. Served with two scoops of rice and your choice of mac salad or green salad. We started out with a fresh, slightly spice and gingered poke, served with sweet potato (or maybe taro, but I don't think so) crackers. The prices are decidedly not in the Rainbow Drive-in range--plates run around $16--but portion sizes are extremely generous. Our party of two adults and one preschooler ordered one kalua pig and one huli-huli chicken, and went home with leftovers. The huli-huli chicken is baked in the wood-fired oven, and comes out sticky and smoky and moist and delicious. The kalua pork is shredded and served with cabbage (and I could have used more of that cabbage!). We were seated under a poster of Leonard's Bakery in Honolulu, famous for its malasadas; little Portuguese yeast donuts covered in sugar. Apparently Hula Girl will be adding malasadas to the menu next week, and will be expanding other menu options also.

This is long--a series of multiple blog posts, but one of the best things I've read recently. http://jayporter.com/dispatches/observations-from-a-tipless-restaurant-part-1-overview/ An extended essay on tipping from the point of view of a San Diego restarauteur who implemented a straight service charge and disallowed tipping in his establishment. He has a lot to say on why he thinks eliminating tipping made his restaurant better--because it meant that the employees were paid by the person who had the most at stake in making the restaurant good, namely their employer, rather than their customers, who have as a key goal making their own dining experience good. And that it means that servers don't act to maximize tips but are more likely to act to maximize performance (which is a different thing). He also has a lot of very interesting stuff to say about people who get pissed off when they can't tip--that basically one of the things that he learned was that some people like the kind of power relation that emerges when they get to reward or punish their server; and also a lot to say about how servers and management use stereotypes to figure out who they think is likely to tip more, and how this means that some folks get worse service because it is assumed they will tip less.

Wanted to give a shout out to a new vendor at this market. Number One Sons (on the southern half of 20th St., on the west side) is selling a variety of pickles and fermented veggies, including dills, sauerkraut, and the like. I picked up a "rosetido"--their take on curtido, made with radishes and cabbage. Taco night is a staple in our house, but suffers greatly in the winter months from a lack of fresh tomatoes for salsa. This is just the ticket! Hightly recommended.

Why not, if you don't mind my asking? I tried the taza disk--the coffee flavored one--once. In ten minutes it took me from skin-crawling caffeine jitters to vicious migraine. Just wondering if you (or others) had a similar effect.

My preferred everyday chocolate is the Ritter Sport dark. A couple of squares with a glass of smoky scotch after dinner. Also, it has sport in the name, which I am assuming means that it contains some sort of calorie-negating exercise. Please do not disabuse me of this notion if you know otherwise.

thank you--those are helpful links, and I'm glad! I do also like fresh sardines, but they don't keep in my pantry cupboard for a hundred years* and the canned ones are a perfect pantry staple that needs just a few other ingredients to become a meal. *approx

Is anyone here knowledgeable about sustainable fishing and sardines? My son and I like to share a weeknight supper of spaghetti and sardines on nights when it's just the two of us, and I was thinking I was being virtuous nutritionally, parentally, and environmentally. A friend has just shared an article about west coast sardine fishery collapses. Thoughts as to whether it seems like a good idea to lay off the little creatures for a while?

I didn't grow up with a Thanksgiving tradition, so I'm not sure I'm aware of a difference! We spent both Christmas and Thanksgiving with my in-laws (as we do often--my parents are on the other side of the world). My mother-in-law made Thanksgiving dinner so my husband and I cooked for Christmas. We've adopted beef wellington as a Christmas tradition; this was our third (?) year, I think. Appetizer was a salad of julienned beets, fennel and ruby red grapefruit, served with fresh parker house rolls. This was the course in which I broke my MIL's veggie slicing device (one of those "as seen on tv" numbers). Next course was the beef wellington with bourdelaise sauce, roast potatoes with mint butter, roasted carrots and parsnips, roasted brussel sprouts and steamed broccoli. In this course, I broke the corkscrew and also part of my hand. Finished with traditional Christmas pudding with brandy butter and whipped cream. I was more careful with this, cognizant of the fact that last year, I had dropped a half cup of flaming brandy on the hardwood kitchen floors, lovingly hand-finished by my in-laws. I'm just lucky I've already produced a grandkid, I guess.

Daveo, are those figures publicly available (i.e. are you doing searches on google?) or are you using some other kind of instrument? (Asking because sometimes I use google search figures for back-of-the-envelope social science inquiry, and I'm always looking for tricks of the trade!)

1. I did not know I could get a dough attachment for my food processor. That's awesome. 2. No knead bread. I've made Bittman's; I love it. I'm just never organized enough to make the dough 18 hours before I'll have three hours at home to let it have the second rise and then bake it. If anyone knows of a method to do this that would result in fresh baked break on a worknight Tuesday, I'd love to know about it. Could the second rise run more than two hours? Like nine hours? (Now that I've thought of this, I might use a bit of my vacation time to find out. Will report back if I get a chance to try it out.)

Thanks, Zora! It's not so much the cost of the stand mixer--it's the real estate on the countertop. And frankly, I don't make bread often enough to make the investment, in money OR space.

Baking question(s). I'm thinking of getting dough hooks for my hand mixer. 1. Should I bother? 2. Are mixer parts interchangeable between models? I have a toastmaster mixer which doesn't appear to have additional parts available. If I buy somebody else's dough hooks, will they fit?

Shortbread! Proper Scottish shortbread like my grandmas used to make. It had always been a bete noire of mine; when I made it, it was always far too crumbly in the pan to cut. I have one of my grandma's recipes (maternal, probably, as my mother is far more a keeper of recipes than my father; although they really did both make the same dish), but I never had watched closely to see how the dough was made. The recipe: 8oz butter; 8oz flour; 4oz cornstarch, 4oz confectioners sugar. (I added a pinch of salt). I'd been making this like a shortcrust pastry and rubbing the butter in until I had pea-sized lumps, taking care not to let it get too warm. That left me with a crumbly dough to press into the tin. This time, I kept working the dough until it really was a ball of dough that held together, and that made all the difference. Prick the top with a fork to make a pattern, bake 50 min at 350F, sprinkle with sugar.

This is not an answer to your question, but is staying in a hotel cheaper than getting a car (taxi or otherwise) to take you to the airport? Or is there just nobody running car services on Christmas? (I feel for you. I am familiar with the long haul flights--it's a 30 hour trip for me to see family.)

Yes. A thousand times yes. I live in DC. DCA is 20 min/$25 by cab, or 30 min by metro from my house. With a little kid, metro is preferable if I have the time, since I don't need to worry about a car seat. BWI and IAD are both more than an hour. $100 for a ride, more or less, or, if it's the right time of day and there's enough time, I can do metro-MARC-shuttle to BWI, which takes I-don't-know-how-long. DCA also has the fastest security lines. The food is fine, especially if you go there often enough to have figured what to get.

I lived a block from Larry's from 2003-08, and enjoyed the ice-cream on many occasions. Larry never seemed Soup-Nazi-ish to me at all!! He did, however, have one forearm that was significantly more muscular than the other, presumably from many many years of scooping ice-cream. They also do pints to go.

The Bittman recipe I'm using is very similar in the batter, but I can see how this comes out as a thin cracker-type item. I have been cooking it in a cast iron pan with about 1/2 - 3/4 inch of batter. In texture it comes out not unlike a dense cornbread or a thick unleavened pancake. So I guess it's not really socca I'm making. OTOH, it's easy, it's delicious, and my family will eat it, so I'm not taking it off my dinner rotation any time soon!