giant shrimp

don't know if this is an ambitious menu, but it is certainly long, based in thailand but with short side trips to other asian countries. next time, i will skip vietnam and its quietly flavored shrimp garden rolls. on to thailand, the chicken coconut soup is all about the dark meat, which is what stands out in a fairly standard presentation. salmon in a panang sauce is ok, a little dry, and stir fried beef with chilli and garlic is even better than ok, though not much heat comes through. as of now, the kitchen appears to be afraid of heat offending the diners, so you should emphatically ask for it. an early impression, and it's based on only a fraction of what's being offered, is that the thai cooking here is run-of-the-mill for the area, where thai restaurants settle in fast, the good ones opening with a bang and then trailing off into a hit-or-miss mediocrity that is saved nevertheless by lemon grass, galangal, coconut and other exotic flavors that usually always make a favorable impression. one other thing, i associate this cuisine with sharing, but at this point the restaurant does not. two entrees are served on small platters too big to sit on the table along with two plates, making sharing an awkward business. i'm sure this can easily be remedied, although the diners around us seemed perfectly happy to be digging into individual entrees, which are on the generous side. ironically, they don't seem to be afraid of the heat upstairs where good indian cooking is standing by, although it never hurts to nudge them in that direction. two back-to-back dinners found the upstairs and downstairs playing in two different leagues. the service, cited a while back as a problem in the indian dining room, is exemplary these days. it almost seems as if the servers have even been trained. in the opening days, the service downstairs is friendly, but not assured. i hadn't been to busara for some time before it closed, but it started off on a strong note, emphasizing modern presentations. the opening here is not as impressive, but who knows where it is headed. right now, this is an effort to drum up some business in an expensive space that was underutilized for years. maybe a consultant told heritage to dumb down asian cooking. i would have told them to try and coax taw vigsittaboot, or someone of his caliber, to their stoves. they are playing it way too safe.

i guess it's worth going through this rigamarole to be able to eat the food, which was the best thai cooking for miles around the first and last time i tasted it maybe a year ago. it was better than the thai cooking you can find these days in wheaton. but i would not want to eat in the cramped dining room, although i didn't mind waiting there for half an hour watching other people eating there, practically looking right over their shoulders, or literally climbing over them to finally retrieve my order. reserving a day in advance for carryout is on the extreme side, if you ask me. it's a case of further reclusion. this place is never coming out of its shell.

the last time i was there, maybe a month ago, the mandus, a special appetizer, were the best thing we ordered. they were indian, and really delicious, but not what i was accustomed to seeing on the menu -- more like something i would have expected to find at the small chinese restaurant downstairs that i have never visited even though i continue to hear good things about their dumplings. anyway, it's hard to imagine serving thai and indian in the same dining room, so i am guessing that maybe the thai food is in the bar area downstairs, which never seemed to do any business and where the furniture was for sale. if that's the case, i'm going to have a hard time choosing thai over the reliably good indian cooking that is upstairs. if the two cuisines are being served in the same restaurant, maybe i'll just duck into the chinese restaurant.

you can also cook the vegetables directly in the rice, tossing them in several minutes before the rice is finished cooking. this interrupts the flow of adding stock to the rice a bit, because there is some liquid initially added by the vegetables, but the consistency of the rice gets back to where it should be fairly quickly. i guess this is the easy and obvious way of making risotto. alice waters suggests cutting the asparagus on an angle into quarter-inch pieces. (i like making purees, and use a blender and have gradually learned how to do this without having the hot contents erupt -- in my face and all over the kitchen. but i like the soft crunch of the whole asparagus pieces.)

considering i'm still eating them, i'd say it's been a long season for asparagus. five or six weeks, if i'm not wrong. the hot weather usually rolls in a couple weeks earlier. i've seen peas stay longer as well. it's the cherries i'm always worried about disappearing.

it really wouldn't have seemed right to spend $8 for four or five mid-sized cucumbers at last weekend's dupont market, so i didn't. it is hard to imagine they were that good, but i will never know. however, i did run into some moderately pricey tender chervil ($3 the clump), which i happily have used so far in asparagus and pea risotto and salads. last weekend may have been the time to say goodbye to local asparagus until next year. i know it was absolutely wrong to spend almost $10 for four or five smallish heirloom tomatoes from the fruit stand. i didn't have my thinking cap on; at $6 a pound they add up fast. and they weren't really that good -- too early to be at their best raw and too expensive to cook. english peas, while still good, and still as expensive as in previous weeks (i just found out about the mt. pleasant pea purveyor), are growing bigger and harder by the day. there's just no time better than eating peas early in the cradle. a week ago, at the mcpherson square market, where there are virtually no lines and you don't have to fight for your strawberries, i also spent $8 for two pints of small yellow squash. they are tender in these parts all summer long, so i am hoping the price goes down.

i would just take my chances and go even if it's not a chicken night, which i guess is easier to say after you have gone on a chicken night or two, because the chicken is one of the best around, different from down the street so i won't compare the two. one small chicken is from the start a different experience than half of a larger one. (if i remember correctly, the last one i had, and it has been a while, gained a rustic feel from mushrooms.) anyway, you never know exactly what will be on the menu, which makes life more interesting. that's always been the case at this restaurant, even when there was less to choose from on the menu. a plate of roasted ramps, green garlic and scallions exceeded my expectations a couple of weeks ago. going allium family all the way suggests a one-note meal, but this wasn't, with contrasting flavors. i notice on the web site that this can come with zucchini, so it's a changing cast of characters. the ingredients are similarly coming and going in palena's recipes, so that you can order some of the basically same dishes two weeks in a row and they won't exactly be the same. maybe it was called a rhubarb tart, but the crust was leaning toward shortbread and this was a terrific dessert, proving that rhubarb can be better on its own, without the strawberries. saffron was in the creme brulee, a mild twist for me; it's familiar tasting but somewhat different against a custard background, the spice vaguely supporting the bitterness of scorched sugar and tempering the sweetness.

it almost doesn't seem right spending $8 at the farmers market for two small boxes of peas that when shelled yield about two modest servings. but when sauteed in a little butter and salt, a few drops of water, these are as good as any vegetable i have found this spring, sweet and not even a hint of the starchiness that makes you forswear them. peas shouldn't be a luxury, but these are, not in a small way. locally, this seems to be a better than average year.

one way to do it is grate the cheese and pack it into the bread; when the butter is hot, sautee the sandwich in the skillet over low medium heat, cover it for a minute or two at the start, flip it when the bread is brown (you might have to add some more butter), and watch the heat, gradually raising it as the cheese gets going. you wouldn't do it this way in a restaurant. it's too slow, can take 15 minutes. i slice the bread fairly thick, so often use a kettle filled with water to press it flat, depending on the texture of the bread, which helps things move along. you can just let the kettle sit on the bread, but not for long without checking your progress. in a big pan you can cook two big sandwiches at a time, but not much more. if you are using cheddar, which is on the hard side, you can mix it with a cheese that is softer. i know the cheese is molten when a small amount starts running out of the bread; i push it back against the bread with a spatula and watch to make sure it doesn't burn. this is not a wonder bread grilled cheese that comes to the counter with a dill pickle. it is considerably more substantial. i can afford to eat something like this maybe once a month. i probably shouldn't eat something like this at all.

Good cavatelli always has some bite left at its core, I have found, as it consistently has been cooked here the few times i have enjoyed this dish. to get out the core you almost have to boil these to death. But the fettucini here is al dente as well, fatter and more substantial than it is often prepared, and leaving a good impression. i had two of the ramp bulbs, if that is what they were (i was thinking something in the baby red onion family), but the important thing is that they were pickled, spiking things up here and there, reminiscent, again, of how this kitchen does some things the same way as palena. this is pasta rubbing up against good ingredients, with an especially generous amount of peas. (i am always happy to leave the expense and shelling of those, and fava beans, to someone else.) maybe next time i will get to the ice cream, which i did notice on the menu, although this probably will mean forgoing the pizza, which won't be easy.

there was nothing controversial about his cooking the one time we visited his restaurant in washington at the st. regis. the food was definitely good, although i don't recall anything about the meal except that he was visiting tables. the dining room was not crowded at all, and i'm not sure the business ever picked up to what it might have been. i would have, should have returned, but it was fairly expensive, and didn't last all that long. i'm hazy on the history, but the french restaurant preceding it in the same space (?) was also relatively short-lived, and even more expensive, too expensive for me in the first place, but i never went in the second place because of a review by joel siegel in the city paper, who didn't have anything especially favorable to say about his lunch there. i am also dim on the controversy. did it have something to do with overpublicized race comments, followed by accounting problems? anyway, he will be interesting to watch. of course, how well or badly you perform on a television competition show doesn't necessarily have much bearing on what you are sending out of your kitchen, as the current top chef masters program is demonstrating. (going back to the race issue, anyone interested in an enlightening perspective might want to read "the history of white people.")

i saw some last weekend at the dupont farmers market; forget the name of the farm, but it is the stand just down from blue ridge dairy, heading to mass. ave. the people runninig the market can direct you, and probably tell you who else might have lovage. a little lovage goes a long way.

don't break the egg until you've had enough clarity is my advice. however, my yolk settled slowly and didn't totally take over; there was still enough clear consomme to be had around the edges of the bowl. i was intrigued, actually, by how the two different consistencies worked into each other, not all or nothing, with in-between spots.

salt is what almost ruined a small plate of eggplant, but a revelatory ricotta, glistened with olive oil, is what saved it. and i like that ramps have appeared on the special pizza so rampantly this spring. i like artichoke on my pizza as well, though i am not sure that accompanying it with pork wins me over; its flavor then veers too much in the direction of a discordant lemon. the small lamb meatballs in tomato sauce, if you like meatballs, that pop up as a special appetizer (and appear on the regular abruzzese pizza), are a good deal and would be enough to sauce a big bowl of pasta -- although i suppose there's scant room in the kitchen for pots of boiling water. ask for some bread and you can make a meal out of this. gragnano was out last weekend, a supply problem, which wasn't a problem for me because i've been exploring the beers on draft (which typically cost $12; one of them has myrrh, which i was able to recognize from my wide familiarity with bathing products). the effervescent wine will return, however, if it hasn't already.

two sundays ago we had a really nice meal here, which was a bit surprising because a month or so earlier we encountered some disappointing food, including greasy, chewy, fatty steak. (also, i often wonder about restaurants not functioniing at their peak during sunday dinners, especially if they serve popular brunches.) the pork shoulder was one of the things we recently ordered and it was easy to believe it had been cooking all day, as we were told, falling apart at the touch of a fork, not what you describe, and an antidote to the curious disaster we encountered at blue ridge and may never forget. green beans were perfect, shriveled by heat to gather their flavor, yet firm. a plump lamb hotdog was fun, served with an assertive mustard. i'm already hazy about the dessert, a napoleon engulfed by a loose apple butter and cream pudding with a line of caramel running through it. it was one of the best desserts i have encountered recently. i feel like i'm off my rocker quite often when i order things at restaurants that sounded great when i read about them and then turn out to be disappointing by the time i get to them. (todd kliman this week cited weak drinks as a deficiency of las canteras, a restaurant he has been pretty high on lately. our drinks were just the opposite.) thoreau wrote something about never walking down the same path twice, and in my experience this applies to restaurants big time.

chocolate angel food cake. from a recipe from sally schneider's "a new way to cook," which in turn was taken from rose levy barenbaum. my wife baked the cake, and i haven't compared the recipes, but the revamped version seems about the same as the original, with the addition of some instant espresso and cognac/armagnac. those, plus cocoa powder, are intended to temper the sweetness. more sugar is called for than in a regular cake to stabilize the egg whites. the recipe uses the whites from 16 extra large eggs. the idea behind schneider's book is to suggest imperceptible changes that result in healthier, less fattening dishes, but in this case i believe it's a matter of proposing a cake that by its very nature is fat-free, not in altering anything. of course, this leaves you with 16 big egg yolks, and that, in a way, can defeat the purpose, unless you chuck them. that may be the only healthy alternative in a household with two adults who wouldn't ordinarily have the need to work this much egg yolk into their cooking for quite some time. some people don't like angel food cake, i know, for the texture, i guess, which is moist and light, but not light as an angel feather, and not exactly light as a sponge either, although this is a cake that feels like it can be wrung out. there is what might be described as a characteristic faint chalkiness. anyway, it's a unique flavor that goes back to my childhood and i have always liked. the chocolate in this cake is quite constrained compared to a truly chocolate cake, and this cake isn't radically different from angel food that relies solely on vanilla flavoring. either go well with strawberries, and since they are sweet, they can compensate for early strawberries that tend to be less sweet than those that come in when the sun is stronger. also in the ambrosial dessert department, i love the old-fashioned tapioca recipe that is based on egg whites, a predilection i realize many people do not share.

i have eaten a whole flock of chickens at palena over the years, but the chicken i had last weekend was the best cooked chicken i have ever had here. the brining was subtle, the meat absolutely cooked to perfection, juicy and tender with a range of chicken flavors. i would opt for the chicken over the burger any day of the week, but my wife doesn't feel that way, which explains why she has eaten, well, probably not a herd of cattle, but a lot of beef at palena. I usually get a taste, and the burger this week was the best i have ever had here. it had to be the best in town. for me, there is often too much salt in the burger; this time the seasoning was exactly right. spring brings on some of the best dishes at palena, and there's a lot to choose from. served in a crayfish consomme, i put the spinach raviolini in the soup category, which is one of the kitchen's most notable strengths. the pasta are the size of square postage stamps, perforated at the edge, supple and packed with flavor. asparagus, fava beans and morels make a delicious seasonal appearance (although i have been mostly disappointed by the character of the morels you find at the market these days, especially considering their price; it could be just my worn-out taste buds, but there is something missing, here too). you often hit solitary notes in the small dishes, and a licorice tarragon was one of them. bringing the whole thing together is a poached egg that blossoms into the clear liquid when you release the yolk, which adds a dimension of texture and flavor to a bowl that starts out calm and composed and then intensifies. strawberries are now on the menu. they are teamed up with rouget, if i am not mistaken, in the second-course options, and i have vaguely happy memories of that dish from a year ago. a soft-crusted lattice pie with rhubarb shows strawberries at their best, accompanied by a sweet splay of the berries and a few drops of balsamic vinegar set in a mint-shaped dollop of cream.

looking at the sunday times recipe redux for asparagus alla fontina, 1977 made me think of the special pizza on the menu at comet recently, and it is probably still there. the main difference would be that the egg cooked into the part quiche/part frittata of yesteryear appears boldly at the center of the pizza, the handsomest egg i have seen in a while, with a luxuriously bright yolk that looks like the setting sun, orange turning red. the pancetta is worth adding; it's more robust than what goes for italian. The charge is $4, bringing the pizza up to the $18-$20 range, don't recall exactly, but this is enough food for two. the pizzas here have gradually morphed from their original paddle shape into the familiar round pie. i like the crust for what it is, which is pretty much standard these days. admittedly, some of the excitement has gone elsewhere, but not everyone appreciated the quirkiness of the earlier kitchen, and eating here now is a smoother experience. buffalo wings were on the dry side, not bad, but i have had them better here, under the current regime. the chickpea salad picked up some emulsion by mashing a few of them, or rubbing them together. they can tend to be almost undercooked, so this is an improvement. as far as the times discussion of whether or not asparagus should be blanched first, i lean to sautening them directly in the pan. i don't know how they handle this at comet, but the asparagus was perfectly cooked -- tender and crisp. one way or the other, i would be worried about not giving them a head start on the stove before putting them in the oven. carole greenwood didn't seem too open about telling you how she accomplished things. i would suspect the new kitchen wouldn't be as tight lipped if you were looking for an answer.

i noticed the headline and read the lede but would have skipped this story if i hadn't noticed the controversy here. maybe it will arouse new interest in a cold case, but it is rather lurid and casts a cloud of suspicion over just about everyone who appears in it. this is almost something you might expect to see in the police gazette, if there ever was or still is such a thing. there is some provocative interviewing going on and unsettling or suggestive findings from the journalistic detective work, but not enough hard facts in between, so naturally the imagination will wander. i would say it's made for television, a promising outline for a medium where the writers and producers would have a freer hand in filling in the blanks. it's far too late to take a stand against sensationalizing the news, but i can see how it would bother anyone actually acquainted with the people getting this treatment and seeing a reporter push them almost into a fictional realm.

i had my first experience of sous vide cooking at El Celler de Can Roca in Girona maybe five years ago, and it was pretty exciting, unconventional and really delicious. there's a good chance i will never get back and an equal chance that i will never again encounter sous vide chefs who are as expert as the Spanish in this technique. i think you really have to immerse yourself in it and experiment to get the most out of it, and that is typically not the way restaurants in these parts work. on a lesser note, because it's more a garnish than anything else, i think foam has gotten a bad rap around here. don't know the extent to which they are being used now, but they showed up at several restaurants in barcelona and were impressive. i've had good foam here, too, at palena, for one, but most of the foams i've encountered since aren't the combination of essential flavor and air they are meant to be and all too often collapse into a puddle.

will he be showing his face, or wearing the cloak of anonymity with a recyclable bag over his face (with holes cut out so he can see to read and sign books and breathe to live for the next stop on his tour)? or does everyone know what he looks like anyway? (from the recent paparazzi shots of tom sietsema and sam sifton i have seen, i can hardly tell the difference between the two.)

For a person with almost as big a sweat head as marion barry, the chupe de camarones is needless aggravation on a Saturday night when the steam is in town and you need to cool down. Im staring into a big hot bowl of milky chowder, looking for the soulfulness that caused todd kliman to twitter a few weeks earlier after he had some. A few size-husky prawns slip out of their orange heads and shells fairly easily, revealing pink meat that is tender and sweet. Stirred into the filling soup are an egg cooked beyond coddling, chunks of potato, a segment of corn cob with its kernels loosening up, peas (fava beans are on the menu) and a handful of rice thats dropped to the bottom. The starches are bland as its their nature to be and nothing but starch has been coaxed out of them, and theres not enough of the legumes to gather much flavor, but they do stand out as bright dots of green. Swirling through the mix is a yellow pepper sauce, so there is a simple tangle of flavor holding the whole thing together. the liquid, however, is not entirely pristine, with a hot spot or two of clotted spices lodging where the shrimp used to hold their brains. This is maybe not what you want for dinner on a sweltering night out, but it is filling enough to begin and end a meal. Its humble and basically good, not something to raise much deep emotion, as far as I can tell, but nothing regrettable either. Beef heart anticuchos are a good start, and they are carved from cows with big hearts, big enough to shave them into flat, thin fillets, with robust steak flavor. Eating them is like eating tender steak, except theyre softer. This is hardly the best grilled meat in the world. For one thing, theres no crust, and theres no intensity of flavor. It doesnt suggest mastery in the kitchen, but quiet competence. Im not ready to proclaim this restaurant a gem, but its right up there with a sparkly piece of quartz. The pisco sours were quite strong, and it is fortunate that I did not have more than two of them. Otherwise I suspect that once back out on 18th street I would not have been able to tell myself much apart from the crowds shuffling up and down the sidewalk carrying slices of giant pizza, just warming up for a long night of libations, poured over and over, just like the live band somewhere in the vicinity of tom tom that sounds like its ready to revisit the same dave Brubeck tune for the rest of its set.

okay, getting back to serious matters (although i would still like someone to tell me what happened to sansar and if there is a connection to new heights), i doubt that this is a serious protest. big frogs will gulp down smaller frogs, they are friendly that way. and while there is no good reason for high school students to be allowed to work on any living creature in biology lab, as you go down the chain there is a point at which many scientists will maintain that the animal does not feel pain in the human sense. for example, in one experiment a bee is carefully sliced at the waist while it sips sugar water and then just keeps on drinking until it keels over from exhaustion. at least that's what i read in insectopedia, which also contains information on eating crickets and locusts.

the furniture store with unique stuff was sansar -- local makers and crafts. it had relocated from the tenley mall and supplied furnishings for new heights is what i recall. maybe there is a brother and sister connection between the two places, don't quite remember. (i was told a few months ago by a frequent visitor to the downstairs bar at new heights that her ex-husband and sister-in-law own petits plats across the street. i believed her.)

frozen is no excuse for frog legs not being absolutely delicious. dredged and being sauteed in the pan, they remind me of a degas painting. haven't been to rio grande (bethesda location) in a couple of years. do they still have the cabrito? that was good in the early days, served on thursdays if i recall correctly. was sansar one of the stores you were looking for? i know it's not where it used to be, around the corner from the ignoble barn of a bookstore. i believe there is an association, interior decor and otherwise, with new heights. or at least there once was.