Ilaine

From the blog by Ruth Reichel, I was intrigued by Edouard de Pomiane's fresh tomatoes a la creme. The recipe is simple, and yet mystifying. Cut six tomatoes in half, widthwise. Put a lump of butter in a frying pan. Put the tomatoes in the pan, cut side down. Pierce the shoulders of the tomatoes. Let them heat for five minutes. Turn them over. Salt them. Let them heat for ten minutes. Turn them over again. The juices should run out and spread in the pan. Turn them over again. Pour in three ounces of thick cream. When the cream bubble, it is done. Serve very hot. Well. It doesn't state the temperature. After experimentation, I went with medium low. It doesn't state the amount of butter. Not a problem, I like butter. It also doesn't specify, and this is important, the tomatoes should all be the same size. Also, for this recipe to work, they should be on the small side, say three inches in diameter. I used three on the small side, and three on the large side, and that wasn't good. Fished out the small ones and let the big ones cook longer. They should also be cored first. The skin is unpleasant, but it slips off. This might be better if you skinned the tomatoes first. I used heavy cream, but probably something much thicker is called for, sour cream, or creme fraiche, and those may be too thick. Others who have tried this recipe rave about it. I will try again with all small tomatoes and creme fraiche, but I suspect that letting the tomato juice and cream cook down would lend a better result.

There are other restaurants in Mosaic. While I have not eaten at any of them except Gypsy Soul and Brine, I think Don is probably right that Brine is now the best of them. I will give the seafood pop up a try, I will give Kapnos a try. But not $8 tzatziki. $8 for cucumber and yogurt? My soul rebels.

$8 for tzatzki better be some pretty spectacular tzatzki. Might fly in DC, maybe even Ballston, but I wonder if Mosaic can support those prices. Yeah, it's fancy for Virginia, but it's still Fairfax County.

I will give this place a try this weekend. Too bad I didn't read it earlier, I was in the vicinity and would have swung by to pick up a tamale. I am a big fan of Guatemalan tamales, since mcbriden says they are dry I assume not Guatemalan, but never had a chicken mole tamale before.

Well, it's getting to be that time of year again. We had wonderful steamed blue crabs at Cantler's (Annapolis) about a month ago, but there was over an hour wait to get seated. I sat in the car slowly inching my way toward the parking lot, husband went ahead to put our name on the list, and after I was parked no place to sit, and we still waited. I needed to use the restroom, waited in line for that, and right before I was able to go in, the toilets broke. In both the ladies' and mens' rooms. That said, the crabs were almost worth the experience. Cantler's crabs are always extremely good. Last weekend, we were in Ellicott City, MD, to buy something at a vape store there, and I was looking for crab houses in the fly. The guys in the vape shop recommended Sea King, which was only two blocks away. Three stars on Yelp. i haven't reviewed them, but would say the crab soup was meh, the steamed crabs very good, and the container of beautiful jumbo lump crab meat I bought to take home was spoiled when we got where we were going, which was about an hour away. Not worth driving back for a refund. Moral of the story, smell the container before you leave. Even though we live very close to Captain Pell's, I don't like it much. Can't put my finger on it. The people are nice and all, plenty of room to park, never have to wait for a table, but the crabs are meh, most of the time. So, where next? Mikes in Annapolis? Maine Avenue? Quarterdeck? We live in Fairfax, willing to drive an hour or so.

In case you ever wondered, do I have to peel tomatoes before freezing them for sauce later, if you have a high powered blender, in my case a Vitamix, the answer is no. I filled a full 64 oz container worth of fresh tomatoes, quartered, worried they'd stick because not liquid added, but with the aid of the pusher, they spun down nicely, and skins were turned to smithereens. Filled two 32 ounce Chinese restaurant containers with room for expansion from freezing. Contemplated using 16 ounce containers, but this stuff cooks down quite a bit, and everything we use tomato sauce for, we use a lot. Expecting more tomatoes, will go to 16 ounce next, maybe dehydrating. The battle between blight and ripeness still tied.

Just stumbled across a potential game changer for tomatoes. Researchers at the University of Florida have developed tomatoes that have the disease resistance of hybrids but the flavor of heirlooms. Also high yield. Garden Gem and Garden Treasure, not available commercially yet, but you will get a pack of twenty seeds for each variety if you donate $10 to the University of Florida. Click. Someone who planted them reported on the researcher's Facebook page that the tomatoes are surprisingly firm, which is consistent with varieties developed for commercial production, but good texture and nice, acidic taste. Interesting article about Garden Gem tomatoes on Slate. In the meantime I've decided that Rose heirloom tomatoes are not worth it, and neither are Costuloto Genovese. Neither has much flavor. Or maybe it's just this season's growing condition. Whatever, not planting them again. Wish I'd planted Sungold.

That pimento cheese made my eyes water. My husband, who is a chili pepper head, loves it. Not your mother's pimento cheese.

Hersch, everything I have purchased from Anson Mills is top notch, and wonderfully delicious. Rice, rice grits, rice flour, oats, corn flour, corn meal, polenta, Sea Island beans. I can't eat many carbs because I have diabetes, so, when I do, I want them to be the best. They grow heritage varieties, low yield, organic methods, old ways of processing, hence the cost. If you're the kind of person who lives on rice, buys big sacks every week, yeah, it's pricy for that lifestyle, but you owe it to yourself as a treat. Seanchi, that recipe looks really good, and I learned a cooking term I never knew, au sec, and a technique I've never used, but should.

Rennet. I tried to make homemade cultured cottage cheese. You mix milk, buttermilk and rennet and leave on the counter for 12-16 hours. Nothing happened. Turns out rennet has a shelf life. 24 months for tablets, 9 months for liquids. Mine is so old it doesn't have a date stamp. Perhaps decades. Btw, after letting it culture there are many other steps. Complicated but there are videos on YouTube. A lot of work but I am craving that cultured flavor but using full fat milk, not skim. Edit: found it at Moms in Merrifield.

Never tried peas in my jambalaya but it sounds good. I am in love with Anson Mill's Carolina Gold Rice. It absorbs flavors well and has a lovely taste all on its own, and a good texture.

Depends entirely on how gluten free you need it to be. If all that is needed is no wheat in the dish, don't trust the server, have them ask the chef, and, even then, I'd stick with plain seafood, broiled, or boiled. And be conscious of the fact that many flavors and additives such as hydrolyzed protein are wheat in disguise. I'd trust a high end place with an intelligent and reliable chef to tell me the truth. I had some lovely sauteed soft shell crabs done with rice flour in New Orleans, Restaurant August, which I keep hoping to see other places. Rice flour also works perfectly for dishes like karaage. Nice and crisp. More restaurants should try it. Also, use your common sense. If it seems to be too good to be true, it probably isn't true. I was assured at Mezzanine, Carytown, Richmond, that the shrimp and grits were made without wheat. Lie. I got "glutened." If the issue is celiac, I'd stick with a place that is totally gluten free, which are few and far between.

This is actually the first year we attended the Alumni Association crab boil, rather than the Louisiana State Society boil, which was not held this year, for some reason. The crawfish and jambalaya were really, really good, but the lines were very, very long. If you plan on driving, get there very early. We only got a place to park because I have a handicap hanger. I also advise bringing folding chairs, some kind of table, a cooler of ice, water, and drinks, maybe even a little tent or pavilion. I hope the Louisiana State Society has a crawfish boil next year, they've been having them at the Navy Yard and there are many fewer people. We've also tried crawfish boils at Society Fair and Jackson 20 and been sadly disappointed. I think maybe those crawfish were flown in. Both the Lousiana State Society and the Louisiana Alumni Assocation crawfish boils feature truckloads of crawfish hauled in live and boiled on site by professionals. Really, the Alumni Association gets better crawfish, it's just that the Louisiana State Society has a nicer location, right on the Potomac. The only person I know who will eat crawfish other than me and my husband is my son's girlfriend, who couldn't make it this year. If she comes next year I can count on my son to help set up a base camp in Fort Hunt Park.

Bart, Daconil is not organic, as the term is used in the sense of organic gardening. My husband, a chemical engineer, would agree that it's an organic compound, in the sense of being based on carbon. It's poison. If you look at the label, it tells you that it is toxic to aquatic life, etc.

Hersch, yeah, I wouldn't have eaten even a tiny piece if I knew in advance that the brine was half strength. It was on the basis of that taste that I realized I'd messed up. It should be obvious that I am a novice at lacto fermenting pickles. Yesterday, I stuck my head in the pantry to see what's going on, and after just two days, there was a strong aroma of dill pickle that I did not get from the first batch, even after two weeks, and bubble of foam on the surface, so now I know what it's supposed to do. For other novices, I recommend reading the Chowhound post I linked above, and all almost 500 comments, which take place over several years. One poster in particular, acgold7, apparently a restaurant owner, gives very good advice, although he loses patience with people who will not weigh their salt. If you use the ratio of Diamond Crystal Kosher salt as given in the recipe, you don't need to weigh, because, as I found by weighing and measuring, it automatically gives you a 5% brine, but if you use ANY other salt, you MUST weigh your salt.

Talk about counting your chickens before they hatch, or your tomatoes before they ripen. In just ten days, I've gone from anticipating a bumper crop of tomatoes to angsting over whether the blight will kill the vines before they ripen. That was fast. Planted all heirlooms. Keeping track of who got blight first. Looking at you, Brandywine.

Reporting back on first experiments. Time to confess that I am really, really, really math impaired. I always wanted to be a doctor, not a lawyer, but I simply cannot do math. Haven't passed a math class since tenth grade geometry, which I flunked once but made an A on the repeat. Only way I graduated from college is that they let me substitute symbolic logic and Fortran, neither of which use numbers, just words. I am otherwise very intelligent, so when I make mistakes like this people who know me (engineer husband, for example) actually drop their jaws in astonishment, even after all these years. The lactofermented okra pickles and the sauerruben came out great. The pickled cucumbers were a disaster. The recipe calls for two tablespoons of Diamond kosher salt per pint of water. When I scaled up to four pints of water, I only put four tablespoons of salt. Brine ratio is critical, so critical that if you aren't using Diamond kosher salt, you need to weigh it. Kosher salt granules are big, sea salt or pickling salt granules are fine, so measure for measure, weigh about twice as much as Kosher salt. So, you gotta weigh your salt. But, in this case, since it specified Diamond brand, I thought I was ok. Oops. I did weigh the salt for the okra. The first thing I saw was a huge mishapened bloater floating on the top. The ones underneath were not bloated but not at all sour after two weeks in the brine. After I checked the recipe again, and realized my mistake, I threw it all out. The garlic made me nervous. Garlic will grow botulism in a non-acid environment at room temperature. Glad I only ate a tiny piece. Starting over now, one batch conventional pickling cucumbers from the farmer's market, one batch of absolutely beautiful organically grown pickling cucumbers from Mom's, with a noticeably thin skin. Engineer husband will supervise the brine. Edited to add: curious about the strength of the brine, which comes from a post with almost 500 follow ups(!) on Chowhound, FINALLY... a real, honest-to-Hashem method for making real lower east side SALT FERMENTED KOSHER DILL PICKLES, as directed by Moe, a 90+ year old former pickle masterThat's the one that specified two tablespoons Diamond Crystal Kosher salt to one pint of water.Weighed some Diamond Kosher salt. Four tablespoons of that salt is almost exactly 50 grams, with the inexact nature of using spoons to measure. One quart is almost exactly the same volume as one liter (1 quart = 0.95 liters). So, it's a 5% brine, which is standard for fermenting vegetables. Feeling encouraged, I also started a couple of jars of dilly green beans. A small Mason jar filled with water almost fills the opening of a quart Mason jar, and weighs down the ziplock bag full of pie weights, and a jar of roasted red peppers fits even better, no ziplock required.

Husband was begging to go back, and Don's post above stimulated me to say, "sure, why not?" My opinion hasn't improved but it hasn't gotten worse. Got there at six on a Saturday, out by 7:15 p.m. In the interim, it went from less than half full to mostly full, and the noise level went up accordingly. Speaking objectively, I would describe the decibel level as "brutal." Not actually a problem for me. After raising two sons, I can tune out a lot of noise, but if you can't do that, well, you've been warned. It would take a lot of wall hangings and whatnot to dampen this down. The hard chairs don't help. Food. It's July and deep in my heart eating oysters in July is just wrong. In my old home town of New Orleans, the Acme Oysrer bar would close for the summer. But the oysters were fine. Excellent. We asked for a dozen each, got only one dozen, perhaps dur to decibel level, although we always have a hard time explaining to waitstaff that we want a dozen (or more) each. Why, I don't know. Surely the decible level contributed to the only other snafu. Husband ordered yellowtail carpaccio, waiter thought he said gaspacho. Carpaccio, gazpacho, easy mistake? The gave him the gazpacho and then the carpaccio, and the manager came by to apologize. Gazpacho puréed, tasty but obviously not carpaccio. He liked both. I thought the carpaccio filets were excessively large but he was pleased. He also managed to eat almost all my crab chowder when I wasn't looking. I passed the bowl to him for a taste, and when I looked up, he was scraping the bowl with his spoon. My crab cake was a typical Maryland style crab cake. It was fine. The menu mentioned lump crabmeat, and there was probably a mention of lump crabmeat in the crabcake, but pretty much all shreds of back meat. Some filler but not a lot. Old bay. The usual. Neither here nor there. Charcuterie also hit and miss. Ham surryano and duck rillette hits, pate a miss. Side of grilled corn, WTF? Modern type sugar sweet corn, nicely grilled, slathered in crema and fresh cheese, except for the unepected sweetness of the corn, well executed. The WTF moment came from the wedges of lime on the side, doused with the crema. If you're going to pick up a crema doused wedge of lime and squeeze that juice on your corn, you're a something or other person than I am. Radish salad, WTF, as well. For $7 for a radish salad, I expect, well, radishes. Most of the plate was big chunks, I mean a couple inches square, of a very pretty purple "radish" that after eating, I swear was a turnip. It was very hard, and had a thick skin. The only way to eat it was by gnawing it. The taste was pretty ok, but that big of a hunk of hard vegetable should have been sliced thinly. I dunno, Brine.

Every house in our subdivision was built by the same builder, and every one of the similar models has the exact same kitchen, but every single house I've looked at around here has what I call a soffit, might be more accurately called a duct, on three walls, but not four. I scraped off some paint and it's metal underneath, so say it's a duct. But why a duct? I accept that the one over the refrigerator is an air duct because there is a vent in it. I can't accept that it's all an air duct because the part over the stove has a vent for the exhaust, and the part over the sink has a light. I suspect they did it like that for uniformity. I'm willing to pay to have it moved. I just called a client who is a sheet metal worker involved in installing such things in a commercial setting, hospitals and government buildings and so forth, and he's willing to work on it if I have someone take a look at it first and figure out what's what. So, my question to you, dear friends, is what kind of someone do I need? Architect? General contractor?

This is premature but wanted to post this while I was thinking about it. I posted earlier about all the green tomatoes, wondering when they would ripen. Mostly still green, three are a little red, but I predict many, many more tomatoes than we can easily eat. So, wanted to pass along something I had read on DonRockwell.com, that really works. Too many tomatoes? Freeze them. They take up a lot of space, so next day, or when you have time, thaw them. Put the whole shebang through a food mill to remove the skins. Freeze the pulp. Takes up less space. And fresh tomato sauce is wonderful. Simmer it with fresh herbs while you are cooking dinner, it doesn't take long to turn into sauce. Tastes as fresh as the day you picked them. I did this with non-paste tomatoes, mostly Brandywines.

Having only eaten at Brine once (so far), opening week, after reading all the reviews above decided to say something nice about it. We've eaten at all four of the RR Rivers restaurants, the best one being Merroir, in Topping, VA, on the shores of the Rappahannock River. We love their oysters. We love the crab cakes. We love love the oyster chowder. My husband loves the clams. That said, most of the time we stick to the basics and don't venture very far out on the menu. Which is what we did when we ate at Brine, although did try the ceviche (good) and the charcuterie (pretty good). I don't think the issue is having more than one location. I think they may be punching above their weight. They're trying to pull off very sophisticated dishes, but really, Merroir is about their style. Grilled Caesar salad, "stuffin muffin" (oyster stuffing), shrimp and grits, angels on horseback. Southern comfort seafood. Stick to the basics and you'll be fine. Like me, you mave have a great time. If you've never heard of it or had it (looking at you, Dr. Xmus), ask first or don't try it. (BTW, no non-Baltimore crabcake is ever going to satisfy a Baltimorean. Bet your mother-in-law makes the best ones at home.) Avoid the noise, go early.

Pickling cucumbers, including Kirby, have a thinner skin and a smaller seed, so they make crisper pickles than slicing tomatoes. They have a distinctive look, short, narrow in diameter, and typically a spiny skin rather than warty. I know I've seen baskets of them at the end of the season going dirt cheap, but I am in the mood to pickle some now. Similarly, dill heads are something you are more likely to see in later summer.

Kirby cucumbers, unwaxed, preferably organically grown? Dill heads? In Virginia only. I assume they're showing up in farmer's markets, but not mine.

As I surf the lactofermentation food bloggers, I see most of them tout the Pickl-it systems, which are hideously expensive. $23 for one liter, up to $39 for five liter. They also have affiliate links, which makes me suspicious. Phickle is a welcome contrast, and I am intrigued by her suggestion to put pie weights or marbles in a cotton reusable bag suitable for infusions. I used pie weights in a ziplock, which did the trick, but now am worried both about plastic and forming too tight a seal so gasses can't get out. I have no problem using bisphenol free plastic for storage and really have no idea whether the acids created by fermentation will interact with the plastic. Picklemetoo is so uptight about plastic that she worries about the plastic liners on Mason jar lids. On the other hand, Sandor Katz, the fermentation guru, has no problem fermenting in food grade plastic tubs. Who knows? Two jars of pickled okra, two jars of sauerruben, one part each shredded turnip, kohlrabi and rutabaga. Did not wash the dishes last night, and the kitchen counter has a brassica funk, but not the jars, which are in the pantry, with air locks. I may have overfilled one of the jars of sauerruben, there's brine in the airlock. I don't see bubbles but there is a faint fizzy noise.

Good advice, but not what I need. Discretion being the better part of valor, for my small ferments in Mason jars, decided to weight as well as use an air lock. Small freezer grade zip lock bags with some pie weights inside should do the trick. The usual suggestion is fill the bags with brine so if they leak it won't spoil the ferment. Washed and boiled rocks are said to be tradional for kimchee. Last night at Gypsy Soul our charcuterie plate was garnished with okra quick pickled in vinegar. Woody but tasty. Coincidentally, yesterday I read Sandor Katz to the effect that lacto fermenting okra digests the woodiness. Must find okra.