pcollins

Since I'm local to Charlottesville, here's some sourcing options:

I think an excellent place to check in with is the Charlottesville farmers market's. See who has items that you'd like to work with and ask them how they can help. The downtown market is much more established than the new Stonefield one, but both have vendors that you won't find at the other. Mona Lisa Pasta in town does fresh pastas and sauces and can be used as a way to shorten your prep time on your Italian menu. Albemarle Baking Company, Timbercreek Market, Feast!, and Foods of All Nations would be other sources that would have a more local flair.

I've been doing an awful lot in my pressure cooker these days (see this thread), so that tends to be what I think of immediately for helping out on quick add ons. I've certainly done pastas in there before.

Three fox, Barrel Oak and Cobbler Mountain Cellars are all in the same area as RdV. I've specifically had recommendations to go up to Barrel Oak and I haven't been yet.

I could give a lot more useful tips for the greater Charlottesville area, so unfortunately I can only give that word of mouth tip for the north.

3 hours ago, gibmrm said:

Going to Milwaukee next week, only spending a day in the city, and unfortunately will not have a car to drive to nearby locations. Any more recent recommendations besides the ones already listed here? 

I'm going to go the opposite direction and recommend a classic, the Serb Hall. I got a kick out of watching the presidential campaigns make a stop there and see it was still serving up Wisconsin's favorite, Fish Fry.

My favorite Milwaukee burger (and some excellent Bloody Mary's) remains Sobelman's, but there's a lot of options around. 

If you give us more of an idea of what you're looking for, we may be able to give you some better hints.

I did just get back from a trip visiting relatives. Madison keeps changing rapidly, so you get much more trendy spots like the Alchemy which had an exceptional steak special while I was there. But once you get outside of town, there's plenty of character. Enjoyed burgers at Wedl's and Crawfish Junction. Wedl's is more of a slider type, whereas Crawfish is a more traditional burger, but with a surprise of a homemade bun. There are excellent custard stops in Milwaukee proper, it's hard to beat the ambiance of a drive in stop at The Kiltie for a dessert after Memorial Day grilling with the family. My Fish Fry stop was the Klassik in Verona. You don't go there for the decor, but instead the excellent fish, surprisingly good tartar sauce, and I highly recommend getting your side as the cheesy potatoes. 

9 minutes ago, cheezepowder said:

"Alamo Drafthouse Close to Its First Deal in DC" [Rhode Island Center in NE DC] -- Washington Business Journal.

They're also putting one down in Charlottesville, VA, opening next summer.

17 hours ago, DonRocks said:

Do me a favor: Make yourself a copy of *anything* you post here today. I can't guarantee it's going to be right, but a cursory glance looks like it is. But still, please make a copy of any post, just today, so I can check it later tonight.

My post that I made just after the board came back up is still there with all of it's content. No complaints here.

Hope the weekend will help with this stressful week for you. Rumor is we may even get some sun.

Considering the weather this week I am hoping that Stonefield gets the clue and switches the market's orientation to use the sidewalks instead of the grass. This rain lately is something else.

Otherwise this post is just to get a little activity to check the board stability. Glad to see it back up and trying to keep the Cville thread alive.

On 5/5/2016 at 4:39 PM, LauraB said:

I see that this market is being run by Central Farm Markets.  We used to be regulars at their Bethesda, MD market location on Sunday mornings and we loved it.  We thought it was very well run with a lot of great vendors.  And bonus: they allow dogs at the market, which I realize is not to everyone's liking, but we enjoyed it.  Hopefully this new location will be equally successful.  

It seemed fairly successful for their first day. There was a tactical error though. The market was on a green grassy field and Charlottesville's had as much rain as DC has lately. So that meant there were puddles everywhere and just a lot of mud by day's end. It certainly isn't the downtown market, but it was nice to see a few new vendors in the area. I'm going to keep watching it.

On 5/5/2016 at 4:57 PM, LauraB said:

Simon, I am so glad you are here!  Please keep posting.  I love Charlottesville 29 and read it regularly. We still live in the DC area, but are hoping to make the move to C'ville within the next couple of years.  Do you know where Jose de Brito is going?

The Inn at Little Washington - http://www.c-ville.com/jose-de-brito-joins-kitchen-staff-inn-little-washington/

7 hours ago, Simon Davidson said:

 

At the risk of self-promotion, IMHO, your best place to start for restaurants is The Charlottesville 29, my website about Charlottesville food and drink.  Among other things, it answers the question: if there were just 29 restaurants in Charlottesville, what would be the ideal 29?  For those restaurants, it includes ordering guides, with recommendations from the chef of the restaurant as well as from other chefs and food personalities around town.

Thanks for joining the site! I'll agree, Simon's got a great website and way for others to find out more about the city. Even if I think he could have put La Michaocana in the spot vacated by El Tepeyac for good cheap Mexican in town...

Hurley's Tavern is a nice new break from the row of chain restaurants studding 29 North until you get to Timberwood Grill in Forest Lakes. I had a tasty (if overcooked) burger at Hurley's the other day and I will be back for more. It's obvious that they're pushing for the sports crowd, but we don't have that many options for that sort of thing that actually have a good parking lot. Don't go expecting the special combos the likes of the downtown burgers; you will be making your creation a la carte on the toppings, and it will be served on Texas toast instead of a bun.

The drama will start this weekend as the new mall at Stonefield will be starting a rival Farmers Market to the beloved City Market in downtown on Saturdays. There was disgust dripping from people at the downtown market telling me that Stonefield's was run by folks from Northern Virginia. Laughing at the attitudes aside, it will be good to get another market going to bring a local flavor to the north side of town and for the folks who live out by Greene who don't want to make the drive all the way to downtown Charlottesville.

On 9/23/2013 at 0:22 PM, ktmoomau said:

 We also ate at Sedona which is in Millbrook, that was really good, I liked their small plates, crabcakes, tacos and gorgonzola salad with steak were all good.  Very large beer list with lots of local beers on tap, multiple TVs at the bar make it a good place to go to watch a game if unlike my FIL and Hubby you don't want to sit in the rain at Scott stadium.  Looks so much better than the restaurant that was in that space previously.

I know I'm pulling up an old post, but I recently saw that Sedona Taphouse has been in expansion mode. There are locations in Fredricksburg, Troy MI, Norwalk CT, and soon in Mamaroneck, NY. This marks another Charlottesville restaurant that has gone chain out of our market and even into NYC (Carpe Donut also comes to mind).

As for the BBQEX sides conversation, I find the more adventuresome I get the more interesting the sides are. I will routinely get their pickled hot peppers and use them to wake up most any sandwich that I put them on, BBQ or cold cut. Their collard greens are also a favorite, but I make sure to give them a liberal dose of the NC vinegar BBQ sauce to jazz them up. Check to see if they have any special sides. I know I had a bourbon baked beans on one weekend trip that were a clear improvement over their standard ones. I haven't tried their slaw or potato salad because I've gone out to the stranger offerings each time.

The joke was made earlier, but the facebook group regularly refers to themselves as Potheads.

A cookbook that was recommended to me previously but was out of print has just come back. I haven't picked it up yet, but if you prefer working from a recipe book rather than a website, it's an option.

The two main resources I turn to are the Instant Pot Facebook Group which is fairly high traffic, and this site:

Pressure Cooking Today

You should be able to find recipes for most anything between those two locations. The single recipe that has been go-to is probably the basic but crowd pleasing Mac and Cheese:

"Pressure Cooker Macaroni and Cheese" by Mike Vrobel on dadcooksdinner.com

I do not know that there is any benefit to using the Poultry setting. I've only ever set it on Manual.

Specifically the Rio Hill Kroger is known for its wine selection, due to an uncommonly devoted manager at that store. We have a boatload of Kroger locations around and not all are up to that quality.

Granted, I didn't visit long, but the best I had was at Mama's Pizzeria in Bala Cynwyd.

I need to make another visit up there for work, so other than bringing back bundles of things from Reading Terminal Market, I'm always looking for other spots to try for Cheesesteak.

The first seating when the restaurant opens is the most common way for me to get a seat. There's usually not a line out the door waiting for them to start (but I have seen that happen).

I would recommend that if you are attempting to go there to just always have a second plan in case it is busy.

Had a great birthday lunch at Lampo the other day.  The Hellboy pizza with soppressata piccante and the honey scorpion pepper sauce was amazing per usual.    We also hugely enjoyed the General Tso's Sweetbreads appetizer.  Made with a sauce of Calabrian pepper, honey, garum (kind of an Itailian fish sauce I'm told) and braised celery (I think; garlic scapes are used in season) covering batter-fried sweetbreads, one local food website called 2015's Charlottesville dish of the year.http://charlottesville29.com/2015/12/23/2015-dish-of-the-year-general-tsos-sweetbreads/

We in Charlottesville are lucky to have an affordable restaurant of this quality in our humble college town.

Garum's an interesting flavor, agreed. They had a side for a while of roasted cauliflower with garum, mint and some chilis which I can recommend, but I haven't yet tried the sweetbreads. Thanks for the read.

For any of the other readers who are thinking of making Lampo a stop on a visit to the area, it's best to note the downside of the restaurant: it is small, no reservations, and no takeout. You can have over an hour wait without too much effort and you're going to have trouble with anything more than four people at a table. I love the restaurant, but I have to schedule the times I visit there more than any other in town.

I've really enjoyed Kenji's food lab book - though it comes with the caveat that I've been a pretty avid follower of him on seriouseats for a couple years now.

I'll echo this assessment. The book may be semi-random at times where it will suddenly give you two pages on asparagus techniques but it has all been useful information. On several of the step by step recipes there are additional pictures to aid in the process. Because it covers so much ground, this could be useful for entry cooks/dabblers who want a wider base or more experienced chefs who want to get some of Kenji's specific tricks to improve what they already know.

The other cookbook I received over the holidays was the latest Food52 release, their baking cookbook. I've found all of their cookbooks to be extremely strong on the pictures, but some of the recipes can be overly basic. Considering that I am still fairly inexperienced at baking this was right up my alley.

Starting tomorrow, even with the predicted snow, is Charlottesville's winter installment of the restaurant week

Had a mixed meal over at Moe's yesterday at lunch. Tried the Brisket platter, collard greens and the brisket stew. The brisket was meaty and juicy, but lacked much of a smoky flavor to it. The collards were pleasant, if lacking some kick to them. I'm not sure if I received the brisket stew or some variety of baked beans, but whatever it was it was outstanding. Plenty of beans, brisket and flavor in there.

Was surprised that they only have one house BBQ sauce and no other varieties. If you wanted something spicier, you had bottles of Crystal available.

Not sure how well this chain will do in town with other local BBQ options available, but I'd go back for another try.

If you haven't stocked up by now, you may be in for trouble.

While I'm down in Charlottesville, the roads have been fine here but the grocery stores have been insane. Security guards are out and many shelves are out of bread and eggs.

Lowes was supposed to get more salt and snow shovels in stock, but they were out last night.

Hope everyone weathers the storm well or that it is more moderate than is feared.

This is one of the only restaurants to serve Uighur cuisine in the country (there are probably 5 total, from my limited googling, and none in the east coast).

I'd offer that there are several options in greater NYC for this cuisine. Kashkar is an example, but I'm sure there are others in Flushing.

I had a couple meals in Shanghai from some locals who were originally from Uighur. I'm certainly interested in how this works out as I am normally closer to DC, so please don't look at this as just a thread dump.

There are also versions of Global Entry for the UK and Mexico (only good at certain airports). If you're a frequent traveler you may find some benefit in that membership as well.

Ever since I tried them from Fresh Crunch, I've been a fan of pickled cauliflower. Pickling liquid can double as a salad dressing.

The miles of rolling strip malls, box stores, and national restaurant chains that surround Tampa are the last place any if us would probably expect to find a little Austrian schnitzel house, but that's exactly what we stumbled across driving down Dale Mabry Highway near Raymond James Stadium today. Austrian Peppers (I don't get the name either) is five tables in front of an open kitchen, German-language radio playing from the speakers, an Austrian mountainscape photo plastered on one of the walls, and individual framed portraits of famous Austrians at each booth (we got Arnold Schwarzenegger, the couple across from us got Christoph Waltz).

Sadly, Austrian Peppers has closed and is only a foodtruck.

Global Entry is of great use if you will be travelling by yourself or with others with the Global Entry process. This means all travellers will be moving at the same speed. Just because you have the access doesn't mean your spouse or business traveller will have it, so be prepared for that. Bypassing the passport area, which while better than it used to be, is the first bottleneck. The next line/wait is luggage. If you have any sort of method for your bags to be priority unloaded, then that can be fast. Otherwise you may have a wait here. The last is the customs line. You also get to have a much shorter trip through that. On a good day, these shortcuts don't save much time at all. On a bad day (I travelled back to the US on Thanksgiving weekend. That was *bad*) it can be a sanity saver. The wait time for an interview in the DC area used to be painful, so I ended up doing it over a visit to family out in Milwaukee which literally had walk in availability.

The PreCheck access is something you get automatically if you have Global Entry. The biggest benefit of PreCheck is if you are carrying on something that would normally be a complete hassle to go through security with. For my job, I often have to travel with a large amount of testing devices and other electronics. I've had 15 trays go through the baggage scanners before just because they were so bothered by all of my equipment. With PreCheck, I only take out the laptop. There's a massive difference in the speed in that case. If you use a smaller airport, it's very likely you won't have a PreCheck security lane as an option and you are forced to go with the rest of the unwashed masses, so also the benefit is less if you use those often.

Mobile Passport looks interesting enough, but I haven't seen it as being too much of a benefit over the cities which the kiosks that people go through the passport lines in. As I highlighted earlier, that helps with only one of the three bottlenecks of international arrivals.

For credit cards with lounge access, I recommend the LoungeBuddy app. Put in which cards/access you have and it will identify where you can head to. This has helped with a number of trips where the Priority Pass website tends to be a bit more arcane.

I tend to avoid doing international arrivals at Chicago if I can help it. I was stuck in their queues for over two hours one day. No thank you for a return. Short connections in Charlotte are another no no. You often have to sprint across terminals to make your flight. I think most travellers make their own personal do's and dont's after accumulating scars.

I'll agree with the recommendation of the ITA Matrix. You can make some really granular queries with that tool (down to the routing codes) which I haven't been able to manage elsewhere.

And if you're in Racine, pick up a kringle. If you've never heard of it, do it anyway.

You don't have to trek all the way to Racine to get kringle. There is a limited selection that folks can find in Trader Joe's during Nov/Dec from O&H Danish Bakery. November is the Pumpkin kringle, and December is their almond. I highly recommend the almond flavor as a family favorite.

Additionally, if you are in the Milwaukee area, or stuck near the MKE airport, there is an output of their bakery about 15 minutes south. They have the full selection of kringle as well as other dangerous forms of pastry. Do not try the Seven Sisters cake unless you are ready to have family debates on who gets the servings.