ol_ironstomach

All good reccs. Donnelly's pieces will be in the finest condition, and priced to match. Modern Mobler is a personal favorite; the Georgia Ave location is larger, but I think they tend to put their most interesting wares out in the Kensington showroom, so you really do need to visit both. Peg Leg has to do a lot with a little space, and I think their acquisition style is more eclectic, but they also have a bunch of MCM tchotchkes that the other two don't carry at all. FWIW, should you find yourself in Atlanta GA, pay a visit to RetroPassion21. The owner buys MCM in Europe and ships containers over a few times a year. And while you won't find too many of the famous Danish makers that everyone else carries, she favors German and English MCM makers you probably won't find elsewhere. And other anonymous items that fit the bill. We loaded up on a couple of teak floor lamps very cheaply; they needed a bit of rewiring and refinishing but look great now. Sadly, Mid Century Salvage in Charlotte NC is apparently no more.

I, for one, find myself liking Briggs & Riley more and more each time I acquire a piece. Once the poor man's substitute for Tumi, they keep evolving clever improvements to their bags, from the ratcheting expansion/compression system to the tethered piggyback strap, and are arguably the innovators in the category. Unlike Tumi, they've retained a lifetime repair policy across their line. The bags have become significantly lighter over the years, albeit at the cost of some toughness. If there's anything that annoys me, it's that the ratchet system cannot be rigidly locked into position to force an expanded bag to stay oversized to create airspace around fragile contents. My earliest piece, not quite 20 years old, is a fully-framesheeted tank of a rollaboard, and so long as I'm on a carrier with no carryon weight limit, it's my go-to for getting bottles home safely. +1 on Eagle Creek pieces. Their bags are a bit light-duty for my tastes, but their packing cubes and suit/shirt folders are still great for internal organization.

Intriguing. And the choice of name leads to this marvelously poetic Google Translation of the wiktionary entry for "saut-de-loup":

It is indeed the aspic. The canonical English pork pie has a curious history not unlike that of prosciutto di Parma: Leicestershire housekeeper Elizabeth Scarbrow invents a particularly delicious cheese for her gentrified employer ("Lady Beaumont's Cheese", prior to 1730); neighbor commercializes cheese which develops a following along a major coach route at Stilton, which becomes the name by which the cheese is known (mid-18th C); Stilton production increases rapidly to meet growing demand, resulting in surplus of whey; whey gains popularity as a pig feed among farmers in surrounding Leicestershire; now faced with a surplus of pork, the butchers of Melton Mowbray develop the pork pie as a convenience food (approx 1831). If you have the chance, you could do a lot worse than to spend a few hours making a pilgrimage to Melton Mowbray, eating cheeses and pies. I did last year...and it's a good thing that I don't need Lipitor...yet.

Baltimore catering driver applies body spray in delivery minivan, lights cigarette, blows up. "In Baltimore County, a Man Sprayed Deodorant and lit a cigarette in His Car. And Then It Blew Up." by Christina Tkacik on baltimoresun.com An instant lesson in aerosol explosions to be sure, but double ewwwwww on smelly activities that should not be done near food, much less in an enclosed car interior with food.

Lesson from today’s jackfruit: Tecnu outdoor hand wash, commonly used to remove poison ivy oils from skin after unintended contact, is also effective for washing jackfruit latex off your hands. --- Jackfruit (Katya4me)

IMHO it’s a fantastic location if available, close to the Beltway and just over the bridge from Va.

I gotta say that it's apparently a love-it-or-hate-it fruit. I've always loved its tropical esters, but it turns out that gubeen doesn't. So when I brought home one of those quarter-fruit chunks from an Asian supermarket, she complained about the heady aroma, and I ended up eating it all by myself. She's lucky that I'm not so keen on durian! And it wasn't nearly as messy as I had feared. I'd previously only had canned jackfruit, and my South Asian friends had told me all sorts of stories about its stickyness and using oil, or taking it apart submerged in water, but ultimately I ended up hovering over the sink with the chunk of fruit and pigging out over a few sessions. Here's the thing - you're only eating the ripe arils surrounding each seed, which resemble juicy multilayered flower petals, but the whole damn "fruit" is actually a "multiple fruit" of arils surrounding their respective seeds. The chunk I chose must have ended up being something like 90% ripe jackfruit by volume; there was little more than the outer hull remaining when it was over. Pluck out a drupe, pop out the seed, eat, eat some more arils that you missed, repeat.

And the semifinalists are

As the port of entry, you will have to clear passport control in Munich, claims your bags and clear customs, and then recheck them through to your final destination. But at that point, you're in the Schengen Area, you won't need to reclear passport or customs between member states until you leave. I hope you do take the Weihenstephan option. If your diet will allow, dig in to a crispy and succulent schweinshaxe in the brewery's Braustuberl. I haven't been to Freising since 2000 though, so I don't have any specific current suggestions for you.

FWIW Montgomery Parks generally prohibit alcohol except at two parks. I don't know what they intended by "litter bottles": https://www.montgomeryparks.org/services/permits-rentals/faqs/ State Parks in both states are similarly restrictive, although alcohol permits exist for some areas. On top of the site rental and permit fees, per-car entrance fees appear to be in effect for quite a few of these, as well as at some NoVa Parks facilities. http://www.dnr.state.md.us/Publiclands/Pages/alcoholfaq.aspx

Okay, this explains so much, including the disappearance in the early '90s of the traditional Stolichnaya flavors (Pertsovka, Limonnaya, and Okhotnichya, plus the premium Cristall) and their subsequent replacement with fruit flavored vodkas with fake Russian names like 'Razberi', 'Ohranj', and the like. The move to Latvia followed the collapse of the Soviet Union and subsequent acquisition of the brand by one billionaire oligarch named Yuri Shefler. https://www.cnn.com/videos/cnnmoney/2018/01/22/stolichnaya-russia-wants-its-vodka-back-lon-orig-mkd.cnn Although it sounds like the original Russian distillery has regained control of the brand in Russia and a few places, I am a bit sad to learn that Pertsovka has been out of production for about a decade. I don't know about the others.

Cookbook swap? Ventworm-themed food and apparel? Orphaned wine bottle extravaganza? Massive tasting of <insert food category here>? DanielK hauling paper utensils back and forth? Let’s do the thing!

A selection of food impressions from our trip, not necessarily in chronological order. During our stay, NZ$1 ~= US$0.70. And my apologies in advance to any New Zealanders for the gross generalizations I'm about to make. The fact that their monetary unit is also called the dollar leads many Americans to experience a misleading amount of price shell-shock. Remember that you have to apply an exchange rate, and that all taxes are included, and generally so is service (i.e. your server makes a living wage). Most of the card payment terminals don't even offer you a tipping option. My general observation was that prices at the market for in-season produce and meats were very reasonable if not downright inexpensive; prepared and packaged foods and beverages were quite expensive, especially individual bottles of soda; ordinary meals were slightly expensive (on par with major metro area prices in the US); fine dining was often a bargain. At most places, portions are generally quite large...what much of the world might consider American-sized. A lot more food is cooked to order than I would have expected. Be prepared to wait a while. Entrées are such in the French sense, and meant to be followed by your mains. But don't be surprised if you don't have much room left. Bacon. As you might expect, the default is a rasher of bacon, British-style. Streaky bacon is also available. But bacon is generally just barely cooked, and limp...rashers are little more than warmed through, like a slice of ham. You'll probably want to ask for your bacon "crispy" at a minimum. If you actually want crispy bacon, consider asking it to be extra crispy. Many other foods hail from other corners of the former British Empire but have gone off on their own evolutionary path. Fish and chips are everywhere, but the batter is tempura-influenced, and of course the fish are southern hemisphere substitutes. Popular ones include several soft-skinned shark species. Sausage rolls use a finely minced meat with what seems like quite a bit of filler, and little sage. On the other hand, small meat or fish pies are ubiquitous, and usually good (and held in extremely hot warming displays). There is a lot more biltong than jerky around. Condiments tend to be sweet, especially ketchup. Restaurant websites are often unusable. Although most places have one, nobody seems to know what to do with the Web. Consequently, online menus are often not updated, and hours of operation are completely unreliable. YMMV. Oysters. Ummm...more about this later. North Island (north to south) Mangonui Everyone said to stop at the Mangonui Fish Shop (adjacent to the town pier) for fish and chips. They were right. One of the two best fish and chips shops of our trip. Lemonfish was less than NZ$7 per piece; add NZ$3.50 for a scoop of chips. Ahipara North Drift Cafe, owned by an expat Texan, turns out a great breakfast in this small beach town, including some outstanding Eggs Benedicts (though on toast, not on muffins), and good homemade granola. Kerikeri Citrus-growing country. Worth a stop at nearly any stand, but look for the signboards by estate driveways for citrus grown on the property. The funny thing is that most of the Asian citrus varieties all look like oranges: grapefruit the size of oranges, lemons as round as small oranges, limes nearly as pale as the lemons. But the intensity of flavor will spoil you for nearly anything grown in Florida or California; even the navel varieties are richly orangey. They don't seem to have giant processing plants all over the place like in Florida, so the double-edged sword is that it's only available in-season, but then supply so far outstrips demand that it's absurdly inexpensive. In October (early spring in NZ), we paid NZ$7 for a large bag of excellent tangelos; everywhere people were giving away grapefruit. Also picked up some ridiculously good Hass-type avocadoes at one of the orchard markets whose staff seemed to be entirely Thai. The generically named Food At Wharepuke turns out good Thai fusion dishes in a gorgeous wooded setting. Service is rather leisurely, though. Paihia Decent but not stellar seafood at Alfresco's Restaurant and Bar. Auckland The city is home to a series of night markets which combine a food court scene with the usual flea market vendors. We went to Thursday night market in Henderson (West Auckland) which is conducted in the parking structure beneath K-Mart. Lots of different ethnic foods to choose from, but I headed straight to one of the two vendors of Pasifika cuisine for some Tongan/Samoan specialties and my first taste of NZ lamb in its own country. Lu Sipi ($10) combined lamb, coconut cream, and shredded taro leaves, all braised together in a whole taro leaf purse wrapped in aluminum. Ulu (breadfruit steamed with coconut cream) completed this rich calorie bomb. Also in West Auckland, Criollo Chocolates makes excellent sweets and baked goods. Both pastry chefs have been successful in international pastry team competitions; a link to their bios is here. Paeroa We didn't actually eat here, but it was on our route so we posed for a selfie with the giant Lemon And Paeroa bottle in town. L&P is NZ's de facto national soft drink, and sort of occupies the niche that Irn-Bru does for Scotland. We are new fans. Hamilton Mavis Made To Order is the café branch of a farmer's market-driven local restaurant group. After overindulging on meat pies for several days, it was just what the doctor ordered. Plenty of fresh green things, made well, conveniently located in Hamilton's central business district. My only quibble might be that their risotto balls would be even better if they undercooked the rice a smidge before frying. If you wander across downtown to the Riff Raff Statue, you can get a passable NYC-style slice at Sal's Authentic New York Pizza (locations across NZ). The kids staffing the counter might not know much about pizza and the red pepper flakes might be way too weak, but it passes the fold test and the flavor is right. They import all of the pizza ingredients from the US, except for the water...go figure. Rotorua Just north, in the town of Ngongotaha, we probably set a personal record for least $ per pound of food on this trip at Ngongotaha Ocean Seafoods, a local fry-basket joint whose sandwich board proclaimed "fresh fat oysters!" And so they were, but the NZ$15 fisherman's basket came with a veritable mountain of chips, not to mention a generous quantity of residual grease. It hit the spot, though. In Rotorua proper, there's a night market held on Thursdays, which spans not quite two blocks of downtown. We chose the burger stand for a pretty good venison burger (FWIW, the recently introduced venison burger at Arby's owes its existence to the growing red deer ranching industry of NZ's South Island), in part because the line for the all-kinds-of-steamed-dumplings stand was long. Noteworthy although we didn't stay for any: the local Māori also use geothermal features to cook in, so there are a number of hangi available in the area which are prepared in natural ovens instead of in fire pits. Napier In the Art Deco Capital of the Southern Hemisphere, we found Bistronomy to be so good that we ended up eating there three times: for lunch, then for afternoon happy hour and dinner the next day. The food is modern, inventive, and often surprising, including a brilliant expression of vanilla roasted kumara (the traditional Polynesian sweet potato) with sweet and sour tamarillo, walnuts, and goat cheese. I couldn't make sense of whatever concept they might have been reaching for with some of the more precious presentations (the long cantilevered stainless utensil jutting out of driftwood, holding my black pudding ball comes to mind) but the six-course prix fixe (NZ$75, +NZ$45 for matched wines) was an absolute bargain. There was also a nine course option (NZ$100). Relaxed dress. We also took in a superb meal at Pacifica which, despite its self-description as "relaxed fine dining", felt very much like a place worth dressing up for. The 5-course degustation menus are available with a choice of 'seafood' or 'mixed', at the ridiculous bargain price of NZ$50 (NZ$100 with wine pairings). These are several-perfect-bite portions, so the total experience left us just sated. I thought the preliminary fry bread was a bit of a misstep since it was a heavy way to commence the meal and guaranteed to leave you with messy fingers, but that quickly gave way to course after course of really good work. The menu is constantly changing, but my particular standout courses would have to include the "fresh pasta, chicken puree, parmesan foam", and "truffle sweetbreads, pork brawn, cauliflower & chicken liver pate". But really, we loved it all. Reservations required. Wellington NZ's capital and second most populous city has a bustling restaurant scene, particularly in the central Te Aro neighborhood. The food at Ortega Fish Shack was excellent, with intense flavors and rather formal place settings in an otherwise pub atmosphere, but even more impressive was their wine list, which was very accessibly laid out and apparently very sensibly chosen. We had tasted a number of mediocre yet crowd pleasing white wines elsewhere in NZ by this point, but the somm brought out a surprisingly good match for gubeen's shellfish in a 2016 Neudorf "Rosie's Block" Chardonnay (Nelson, South Island; number 58 under the "voluptuous whites" section of their current list), a more minerally Chablis-esque expression despite the wine list description of its toasty citrus notes. The 2015 Quartz Reef GV was a similarly successful pairing with her main of Blue Moki with white bean puree, asparagus, ricotta, rosemary & orange dressing. We booked two seats for the chef's bar (kitchen table) tasting menu (5 courses, NZ$85, NZ$135 with wine pairings) at Field & Green, which describes itself as "European soul food". On a Wednesday night, it was a treat to have chef/co-owner Laura Greenfield (formerly of London, and the long time head chef at Sotheby's Cafe) and her sous largely to ourselves in the kitchen while the rest of the patrons took dinner in the dining room. Another very good meal; my standout was the salad of pork belly, pickled rhubarb & fennel, green peppercorn vinaigrette. But absolutely, absolutely remember to save room for the ice cream and sorbet list, which had 13 housemade flavors while we were there. Our tasting menu included four scoops each, so we managed to cover a pretty good range.

Yeah, unfortunately, it wasn't a matter of freezing or getting kicked out or anything like that...the editor just plain truncated everything past the first paragraph. That was also the same amount that draft recovery was able to restore. Anyhow...

We're back, after a five week adventure ranging over both of New Zealand's main islands. But the #$@! Invision post editor demolished my first post about NZ cookbooks when I was about 90% done with nicely formatting it with links and pictures, and then barfed on undoing whatever it thought I had asked it to, so it'll be a while before I have anything to say again. Buggy POS. Short version: lucky month to catch recently-released cookbooks. The _New Zealand Restaurant Cookbook_, edited by Delaney Mes, is a mid-sized coffee book title that visits with 50 of NZ's best-loved restaurants. Softbound, with interviews and recipes. Released in October; not available in the US. https://www.penguin.co.nz/books/new-zealand-restaurant-cookbook-9780143770756 Al Brown's _Eat Up New Zealand_ is a wonderful collection of recipes featuring the chef's take on both traditional and modern NZ dishes, interspersed with short essays. Hardbound. Released in September; will be available in the US in May. https://www.amazon.com/Eat-Up-New-Zealand-Recipes/dp/1877505773

Any updated reccs, particularly on New Zealand?

Just felt a need to bump this legitimate question about the desirability of Pappy 20 in 2006. Time flies. :-)

FWIW, Sierra Trading Post currently lists a 5.5 qt Fontignac cocotte on closeout for $99 in red or blue. Unclear what the lid knob material is, but the specs say oven safe to 485 F. And to clarify earlier posts, these are made in France. I should say that the smaller one I purchased last year has been excellent so far, and I just came back from glamping with it for 1 1/2 weeks as my primary pot. The enameling may not be as glossy on the exterior as Staub's, but for performance and durability on the interior it has been first rate. https://www.sierratradingpost.com/fontignac-round-cocotte-with-lid-55-qt~p~223gp/

Word out of Austin this morning is that Hurricane Harvey's outer band winds blew embers out of Franklin Barbecue's pits and started a heavy fire overnight. Pits damaged, but restaurant saved; they are expected to recover. http://kxan.com/2017/08/26/franklin-barbecue-is-on-fire/

I can't get overly excited about the contents, but THE BOTTLE, man... Ustianochka vodka is an inexpensive and relatively new Russian import (to Pennsylvania) that sports a particularly nifty bottle closure. The cap assembly has an internal helicoid that releases a pop-up cap and raises a pouring spout when untwisted. Twist the cap back down to retract the spout, and snap the cap back into place. Apparently it's unique to this brand at the moment, but I'd be surprised if somebody else doesn't pick up on the design for rail liquors. http://ustianochka.com/unique-cap/

Ahem 1 2 (IIRC their fall festival is usually in early October) Also, the little St. George Coptic Orthodox church tucked away in residential Cabin John has their annual Egyptian festival coming up on the weekend of Sept 9-10, 2017.

I can understand how *I* completely missed the news of Le DeSales opening in DC a scant three months ago, but...how did we as a group manage but one description and no discussion of a two-Michelin-starred chef coming to DC from Le Cirque ex-Hélène Darroze at the Connaught? The latter gets grief for not having much changed its menu lately, but Francois earned them two stars, and my meal there in January was excellent. Were we all distracted by the excitements of Sfoglina and Mirabelle? I know that I was. And now he's already gone. Dang it. :/

Pupatella RVA in Richmond, first of the franchises, opened Friday.

Congratulations to the entire team at The Columbia Room, winner of the 2017 Spirited Awards "Best American Cocktail Bar", announced tonight at Tales of the Cocktail.