giant shrimp

actually, i was referring to local sightings in the vicinity of cafe atlantico.

what happened to jose andres? maybe it's just my imagination, but wasn't he just here? many years ago he used to be in the kichen at cafe atlantico cooking, and the food was so good he would promenade in the dining room.

i really like the show, but last night there was absolutely nothing to eat.

but the fish flesh zimmern was eating was putrid. the texture looked disgusting. i fairly recently ran into a small group of vultures along the river who were feeding on washed up fish that looked just as tasty. they thought it was good and were reluctant to give it up even long enough to let me pass, which i did as fast as possible to avoid the stench.

it was absolutely revolting -- a puke feast! bile sauce? eating the raw contents of the stomach of a just slaughtered cow? a salad with leaping shrimp? fish that has rotted for three days?

for an inexpensive bottle purchased a couple of years ago, i might not bother. i have had corked bottles from whole foods and have returned them, but it felt like a bother even though they are just down the street. however, you shouldn't expect to be treated like a jackass. i have been treated like a jackass there before, but that's because i was probably behaving like one. if the bottle is defective, they should refund your money without much of a hassle, even if they have to trust your memory of what you paid for it. i can't predict what will happen, they may not like it that you purchased the bottle in another area, that you don't have a receipt, that it's not in their database, that you may not have stored it correctly, etc. but i would say it is definitely ok to return with the bottle, explain the situation and ask for a refund. what's the worst that can happen?

i don't get it. they really don't seem to deliver on what their name suggests. i know that there are actually erotic bakeries out there from having watched "curb your enthusiasm," and this is definitely not one of them. why give a cupcake just a nipple's worth of frosting?

i have nothing against tipping anyone you feel like tipping. however, i would feel awkward tipping a butcher, for example, or an employee at a fish counter, who isn't really serving me except to provide a product so that it can be sold. even the person behind the counter at starbucks is in a somewhat ambigous situation regarding tips, which is reflected by the informality of the tip jar. sometimes i buy the new york times at starbucks, which is just about the only thing i buy a starbucks, and i don't tip. someone left a coat at a hotel after a raucous bat mitzvah party, and didn't do anything about it for several weeks. after it was established that the coat was still there, being held by security, i was asked if i could pick it up, since i work in the vicinity. the head of security brought me the coat. i know you tip just about everyone working in a hotel, but somehow it just didn't feel like it would have been the right thing to do. i know not to tip pharmacists because they're well paid, but i don't tip someone for selling me a cake, putting it in a box and then in a bag. i don't assume someone who sells bakery goods is necessarily well paid, but still i don't tip them, so there is ambiguity and discretion here that's not necessarily related to how much a worker is paid.

please let us know how this turns out.

why would you tip to buy seafood at blacksalt?

deborah madison has a nettles soup recipe in her "local flavors" book, although there is more chard in this than anything else. it's a good soup though, a puree, based on an easy vegetable stock. (google deborah madison and nettle soup, and it will come up.) it's best to cook your nettles first, briefly, before stemming them when the stems are thick. they also last a long time in the refrigerator. i checked mine this morning, more than a week old, and they were still stinging.

the asparagus salad is inspired. the egg was soft boiled, breaded and fried, the potatoes just off to the side dark and perfectly cooked, the parmesan cream deliciously dressing the asparagus with a whisper of lemon tanginess. i like that pea shoots are all over the place at radius, although they are not needed that much here. a bit cumbersome to eat, you have to reach through a tangle of them to get to the spears, but it does prevent you from wolfing them down, the spring pizza really sings with peas, the best use of peas i have found in a long time, and nothing i can remember ever having encountered before on a pizza.

artichoke soup on monday's all-cafe menu, creamy and frothy with lemony buttons of preserved artichoke. and artichoke leaning up against a small block of rock fish, and a baby artichoke salad. stinging nettles showed up as well, in the pasta, making the short haul from arlington. a plus on mondays is that you can add bacon to your cheeseburger.

and i wish they would quit asking me at the checkout if i found everything i was looking for. i always tell them i found more than i was looking for -- which i suppose is the point of moving everything around all the time. whole foods is one store where you should never count on finding something the same place twice. try to find the dried mushrooms at the p street store, or dried peppers. i know where they are right now, it think, but it's not where they used to be and hardly where you would expect to find them. also, what's with this walling up the end aisles so you have to go down additional aisles to get to the inside aisles? they're treating us like rats.

don't know who was on duty last night, but the kitchen, at least temporarily, had gone from declicious back to unremarkable. two duck confit spring rolls couldn't have been greasier, served with a thick pineapple ginger sauce that was weak and watery in flavor. half of an immense roasted chicken that, from the sourcing, can be assumed to have lived a healthy lifestyle, came to a dry end, absolutely not a contender. to compare this bird to palena's is sacrilege and they are priced about the same. accompanying collards were overly vinagery. the safest bet at our table was a reasonably well prepared bacon cheeseburger. aside from the spring rolls, nothing terrible, but about average for what you would expect to find in a typical bar. i would not come here for the food, but maybe the kitchen performs differently at different times. i would come here for the beer. on a far-ranging list, there's much to explore. not sticking our necks out far at all, we settled for a bells oberon and new holland black tulip on tap, refreshing and affordable, $6 or $7 a glass.

and nettles stinging through plastic bags.

i don't mind its flavor, which iproves if you steam it in the oven. it's at least as sour as my disposition some days, and a wedge can cost as much as an entire loaf. it's fairly elastic but clumpy in texture, to the extent that if you placed a heavy dictionary on it for a few minutes you probably would be left with a thick crusted pancake. most of whole foods bread these days is best for conducting mold growing experiments, although we still buy the odd loaf for the convenience. if you want even more convenience, instead of buying a pineapple for $2.99, for about $8.00 you can purchase just about the same pineapple that has been cleanly pared and cored for you and sealed in a plastic container. this is much easier and lighter to transport in your recyclable plastic bag, and when you get it home you will save at least five minutes having to prepare the pineapple yourself.

i can't find the effing yelp review. someone must have paid them off with chocolate bunnies. anyway, you've got five stars (which i realize is meaningless, but it is the most you can get.) edited to add: actually, taking a closer look i did find the delusional entry; it's now tucked away. you never know what someone might be thinking to themselves. the best example is the priest in bunuel's "el" who imagines he is being ridiculed by his congregation, and lots of other things, although i haven't seen this movie in a long time, so i could be wrong. in any case, i do know he would probably cause a scene in a candy shop, if only in his mind.

actually, some chopped parsley and red onion were added, but even so, as you point out, the ingredients were just too simple to amount to anything interesting.

a recent new york times recipe by martha rose shulman for warm chickpeas and chard with vinaigrette, billed as healthy sustenance for the frugal farmers of provence, turned out about as unexciting as i might have expected had i read what i was getting into before rounding up the ingredients. this is really a simple recipe, with some overelaboration on the author's part. boil chard greens for a minute or two and then plunge them into an ice bath. i have never had a problem with overcooking chard, or spinach, this way, and with a minimum of counter space, an extra bowl is something i try to avoid, but i guess this approach is something that a finnish sauna lover with a frosty pond out back would readily understand. you are then instructed to allow the pot of water to cool for 15 minutes before adding the chickpeas and bringing it back up to a boil. does anyone know what the interlude is for? i suppose there might be the possibility of an adverse reaction from chickpeas heated up too suddenly, but i have never encountered this problem, and with the prospect of an additional hour or more of simmering time, i chose to ignore this instruction. maybe i was just foolishly lucky. the chickpeas are prepared in their chard water along with a bouquet garni comprised of a bay leaf, a few sprigs of parsley and thyme and parmesan rind. this provides a fairly thin infusion of flavor and not much of it rubs off on the chickpeas, but it does help make the water worth saving for starting a soup. the recipe provides the option of serving this as a soup, instead of a salad, and maybe it's good, but the thought of vinaigrette in water just didn't seem right. preparing the vinaigrette is the most interesting part of the recipe. judicious amounts of lemon juice and red wine or sherry vinegar are combined with one-third cup of olive oil and minced garlic. briefly whisking results in a thick emulsion, close to aioli. the cooked chickpeas and chopped greens are combined with the vinaigrette, which, unfortunately, gets thinned out a bit by residual water in the chard, even when you've squeezed out just about as much as seems possible. the warm chickpeas cool down fast in this salad, and they tasted plain to me. i was missing maybe tomatoes, or added zest from someplace that was not to be found in this recipe. the night before, a lasagne recipe from deborah madison's "local flavors: cooking and eating from america's farmers markets" scored far greater success even in the absence of tomatoes. the filling is a whip of the same boiled chard used in the recipe above, but two big bunches of it, along with generous amounts of ricotta and mozzarella and some parmesan. the chard is finished by sauteeing it with garlic, developing good flavor, and chopping it up finely. roasted english walnuts -- the last of my stash from the farmers market last autumn and still far superior months later to the nuts you can gather these days at the grocery store -- are also sprinkled over each layer of the pasta. the top layer is finished off with a final sprinkling of nuts and mozzarella. cheeses were from blue ridge. milk is the sauce and unhomogenized works best. mine was from the market, but whole foods has been moving this product into its dairy case lately. cooking time is roughly half an hour covered in a 400-degree oven and 10 minutes uncovered until golden. then you are supposed to allow an additional 10 minutes of cooling down time.

does anyone know what to do about carpet beetles? by the way, some of the approaches above to eradicating rodents are terribly inhumane. mice, at least, are fairly easy to befriend. eventually, you can get them to sleep in your bed. then, while they are slumbering, suffocate them with a pillow. if children are at home, you can run over them with tonka trucks. we came home late one night to a honey ant invasion where the entire sink looked like it had sprouted a beard. my wife spent about five minutes whipping the ants with a dish towel but not killing many, and then gave up. the next morning they had all gone -- a mass exodus, we presumed, back down the drain from which they had come.

can't say the same for the Web site: http://8407kb.com/ Pedro Matamoros is an underdog of deliciousness? too modest. why not make him a wonderdog?

we order this fairly often from tenleytown: Angelico Special Pizza Tomato sauce, mozzarella cheese, pepperoni, Italian sausage, ham, caramelized onions and roasted red peppers not saying it is out of this world, but considerably better than doughy and bland and also not greasy. also, considerably better than what's been coming out of the oven at armands lately, even if deep dish is a style you like. they are in such a rush to deliver the pizza they almost forget to cook it. there's a new angelico near good guys, but haven't tried it.

here's the exchange: Alexandria, VA: Hi, I know that you've recommended Etete for Ethiopian dining. Any idea if Meskerem is just as good? Todd Kliman: Meskerem is not just as good. If you're looking for another Ethiopian restaurant in the city, I'd recommend Madjet, on U St. It's not as good as Etete, either -- the cooking tends to be heavier -- but it's good, and a fantastic experience in addition because of the tight quarters and the lively atmosphere. Service is more approachable and personable, too, than Etete. I also like Axum, one of the stalwarts of DC's Ethiopian dining scene. Axum has been around a long, long time.

the skinny on fatt from the wp: The owners have tapped Wade Hoo Fatt to serve as executive chef. Born in Jamaica and trained in Canada, the 50-year-old is the owner of CateringbyChefs in Alexandria. A self-described "gypsy of cuisine," Fatt said he plans to focus on a variety of small plates and offer baby lamb chops with a wine reduction, seared scallops with capers and a paprika-spiced grilled chicken, among other dishes.