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gastronomnivore

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Elvin Hayes

Elvin Hayes (12/123)

  1. okay, margarita gurus (now THAT's a multicultural image!), what about glasses? any opinions on stems vs. highballs? I have a slight preference for highballs, myself -- even though I love those kitschy green-glass stemmed margarita glasses, I find stems are too easy to spill (horrors!) and it's hard to fit more than 1 rock in them. But I'd love to hear from the experts if anyone thinks otherwise.
  2. After years living in a New York City apartment with storage space at a premium, my unbreakable ironclad rule is No Single-Use Gadgets. (And 2 uses may not be enough, either!) Current winners include a silpat knockoff from Sur La Table (the first thing I've ever found that was actually CHEAPER there) -- great for minimizing the clean-up burden after kneading bread dough, as well as the usual applications. But the list of doodads I couldn't live without is pretty short. How about a thread about hardware-type tools we use in the kitchen (recognizing the Microplane as grandaddy of them all)? I'm very fond of the needle-nose pliers I use to pull bones out of salmon fillets...
  3. "as I have said and so fervently believe, the glories of wine are it's diversity....[edited for brevity, lacking in the original] .... to arbitrarily call for wines to be made by some strict and ancient recipe" apparently the glories of wine are also it's punctuation [sic] ... and it's opportunities ... to boldly madly repetitively ... and smugly split infinitives... while never using commas where needed... and wildly abusing the ellipsis... Is this really Parker writing so appallingly? no wonder the Brits hate him - probably has nothing to do with wine, and all to do with his slaughtering the Queen's English!
  4. I've eaten at Acadiana a couple of times over the past several months, and I think that while there's truth to the mixed reviews, it's still worth checking out - and perhaps ordering with caution. The service is rocky -- at least at lunchtime, some of the servers are distinctly amateurish, engaging in that supremely irritating game of trying to snatch your plate away at the earliest possible moment, whether you've finished eating, or your table has finished eating, or not. I actually had someone try to take my plate away while my fork was in the air en route to my mouth -- and there was PLENTY of food left on the plate. The food can be a bit erratic. The first time I went, I ordered the fried green tomatoes and damn near had a religious experience -- crispy tangy tomatoes, piles of huge perfectly cooked shrimp, great pools of rich remoulade, ooh baby. Ordered them again the next time, near distraction from anticipation -- and was completely let down; the tomatoes were soggy and greasy, and the shrimp couldn't bail them out. The biscuits are consistent -- go ahead, ruin your appetite. And I for one think their shrimp and grits, which I have tried more than once to confirm (given my FGT experience), is the best in town, an honor I formerly would have given to Vidalia, with maybe DC Coast as a distant second. Big chunks of tasso ham, cheesy grits, shrimp for days, beautifully seasoned (or perhaps, thinking of Sietsema's comments, they just didn't HAVE to season it because the ham and the cheese did the honors) -- bring it on.
  5. I have a Kyocera too -- cost about $25 at Williams-Sonoma. You can hook it on a bowl so your slices drop right in, which is very handy; also you can run it through the dishwasher. Love it but I find I don't use it as much as I thought I would when I was lusting for a mandoline. It does come with a food-holder thingie, but that's kind of useless most of the time -- if you're making crosswise slices on a cucumber, you can't control the cuke with this plastic doodad 8 inches from the bed of the slicer; you just need to hold it with your fingers till it gets down to the last inch or two, PAY ATTENTION, and then switch over to the holder-thingie at that point. Given that I don't really use it all that much, I'm very glad I didn't pay more for a fancier one - would rather have a new knife.
  6. Ah, but OT won't LET you overbook -- if you already have a reservation within 2 hours of the time you're trying to reserve, you can't make another till you cancel the existing one. I suppose if you go on OT as an admin assistant and make reservations under different names you can get around this, but it's tacky to do anyway so I don't really mind that the system won't let you do it.
  7. That is true about the clamshells -- all sizes, max about $5 each. I have several, but I find I only use them for knives I don't use much. My real knife-storage score came from Target -- it's a rectangular molded-plastic tray, similar material to the clamshells, with 2 humps in it (running crosswise) and 4 slots in them for knives. Fits in a drawer and holds the 10" slicer, the 6" chef's and 2 paring knives, which are the workhorses I use on a more-than-daily basis. It cost maybe $2 or $3, back in the housewares section with all the little drawer trays. It's probably made for something else - who knows? Personally I think those knife blocks get nasty fast -- dust and kitchen spatters and you can't run them thru the dishwasher -- feh.
  8. Interesting - to me, this puts a finger right on why I don't pay much attention to Parker ratings, and it's not because I'm such a super-knowledgeable connoisseur, because I ain't. It's because I don't have a good sense of what HE likes and whether it tends to line up with what *I* like. To me the analogy is movie reviews: For years the NYTimes had a film critic I never, but NEVER, agreed with. It was extremely useful to me to read her reviews, though, because if she loved a movie, I'd avoid it like the plague, and if she hated one, the odds were I'd enjoy it. I haven't done that kind of calibration with Parker, so I don't pay attention to him. Here's my problem: I love my quirky knowedgeable locally-owned neighborhood wine store, even though their selection is narrow and their prices are about 20% higher than Costco and Total Wine, and I try to buy there regularly just because I want them to stay in business. (Illogical, but I like the idea of having this cute wine store down the street.) The problem is that I seldom seem to like any of their staff recommendations, and I'm not sure how to articulate what I want that I don't find in their choices. (And I can't just assume that anything they DON'T recommend, as with the movie critic, is something I'll love!) I could meet my ethical goals (of supporting them) by just buying things I already know there, and if they're pouring something I actually like, pounce on it -- but that seems a bit of a wasted opportunity. Joe, your thoughts?
  9. so do yours vary that much in temp from top to bottom? because dual-zone sure kicks up the price points! It looks as if you can buy a lot more storage for the bucks if you're not shelling out for dual zone controls. [LOL at your space-required calculation, BTW - thanks!]
  10. any thoughts on home wine refrigerators? I've put wine-rack shelving in an interior room (NOT a basement) but am thinking that more consistent temps, and lower summertime temps, would be good for the handful of good bottles I've got, and I also think it'd be nice to keep some whites chilled so I can make last-minute pre-dinner decisions about what to drink that aren't driven by what I remembered to put in the fridge. So how useful or important is it to have dual-zone controls? what about other features - slide-out shelves, interior lights, etc. - how important are they? are flat shelves better than contoured? should I worry about warranties (do these things break down a lot)? any brands people like or don't like?
  11. I had dinner at Matisse earlier this week and was pleasantly surprised. This was a business dinner and the host chose the place; after a few rounds of anxious research here and elsewhere on the web, my expectations were not high, but the evening was quite nice. We were at the chef's table/wine room, which is a sort of open corner (2 sides lined with wine racks) off the kitchen. Caveats - this was a six-course fixed-menu large-group meal, with dedicated servers and such, so I don't think it's necessarily representative of a regular dinner experience there and I have no idea what anything cost. Also, I think there must be another kitchen farther back or something, because I didn't see much action -- if your idea of a chef's table is to watch flashing knives and flames, you won't see much of that here. That said, the food was thoughtful, creative and for the most part meticulously prepared. Matisse's web page calls it French-Mediterranean, but I'd say it's just French - we're talking cream and butter here, not olive oil and basil. Take an extra Lipitor and enjoy yourself. Standouts included the cocktail snacks (perfect little crab cakes the size of bay scallops, just slightly crunchy and spicy), a demitasse of creamy/spicy pumpkin-coconut soup (a flavor pairing new to me that I thought came off brilliantly), a cheese plate (hooray!), and squab with foie gras in a cabernet reduction. (A couple of quibbles about that one: with such a small amount of squab, I was puzzled as to why I got a nearly-meatless length of bone with mine -- not even enough to gnaw off; I didn't find that the chestnuts added much to my experience; and the wine paired with it, a white Bordeaux if memory serves, was startlingly sweet and I didn't find it worked for me.) Portions were small but satisfying; with six courses, I was grateful they weren't larger. Wines paired with the menu were generally delightful, and a Stemmler Pinot Noir was a big hit. (I was making big plans till I looked it up on Total Wines the next morning and found out it retails for $30/bottle!)
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