zoramargolis

I looked at a few pages at the end. My advice to waiters--don't wait on Jennifer Lopez. She's a serial stiffer.

I got inspired by this, and picked up some pretty pickling cucumbers last Saturday--some green ones and some little yellow ones. They're in a quart jar on my counter now. I made the concoction on Sunday afternoon, following Zoramargolis's description as well as a recipe from a cookbook by Sally Fallon.

I've been turning the jar once or twice a day, and so far no overflowing or explosions! But I haven't seen any bubbling, either. Tonight I'll put the jar in the refrigerator. I hope this works!

If you refrigerate them now, you will have almost-raw half-sours, which can be very good. They won't have all of the qualities I associate with a dill pickle, though. If your kitchen is air conditioned, it may take several days for the fermentation to start. I had mine on my un-airconditioned service porch, and they were bubbling like crazy after two or three days. I brought them into the cooler house, to slow the process down. I made a second batch, and both are now finished and residing in the refrig. I noticed a white scum on the dill weed at the top of both jars, when I decided they had fermented enough. I removed the dill weed and discarded it, and lest there had been some bacterial activity at the top of the jar, I poured off a bit of the brine and topped up the jars with plain water. The pickles are crisp, garlic-y, just salty enough and are a uniform khaki-green throughout. They taste fantastic with pastrami sandwiches!

And what, pray tell, is a Polyface chicken? I'm guessing it's not, as my imagination hopes it is, a crazed mutant chicken with two heads.

It's beyond organic, sustainably raised chicken from Polyface Farm in Swoope, VA recently made famous in Michael Pollan's book, _the Omnivore's Dilemma_. It's sold at the Dupont Circle Farmers' Market by Eco-Friendly Foods, which is owned by Bev Eggleston, who built a small meat-packing plant in the Shenandoah Valley, also now made famous in Pollan's book. These are chickens who follow the grass-fed cows into the pastures, eat bugs and grubs and grass in the sunshine and live happy, though short lives, are humanely slaughtered and taste absolutely delicious.

Cooked fennel is only occasionally served chez moi, since my daughter only likes fennel raw in a slaw with olive oil and lemon, and my husband doesn't like it at all. I roasted some fennel wedges the other night, with Meyer lemon olive oil and ended up eating the leftovers for lunch--delicious.

Last night, I did a charcoal-roasted, herb-brined Polyface chicken, which was about as good as a chicken can get. Served it with fresh corn polenta-- creamed corn combined with corn off-the-cob, slowly stewed with butter. And braised chard. Chilled 2003 DuBouef Julienas Cuvee Prestige. Watermelon for dessert. Ah summer. Food--yay! Weather--boo!

I've noticed the Aaron's Best brand at Trader Joe's. So much for kosher butchers being more ethical/humane.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...6071401158.html

Magruder's Mayhem

I went to a Magruder's for the first time tonight - the one sort of on Seminary off 395. Can someone explain to me what the appeal is?

I haven't been to that one, but I once walked into a Magruder's--I think it was in Falls Church--and found fresh banana leaves--three of four of them for maybe $2. I'd never seen fresh ones before. Frozen banana leaf is hard enough to find. On subsequent trips, I haven't seen them. But there might be red bell peppers for 99 cents a pound. Okay, you have to dig through the pile to find a few that aren't wrinkled. It's not one of my regular stops, but they occasionally will have amazingly low prices on Fran Keysela Spanish wine, or maybe nothing at all. I agree about the meat, though. Very unappetizing. The one in Vienna is marginally less grungy.

Everyone who loves food should read this book and pass the message on. Brilliant insight into the very different worlds of industrial, organic and sustainable farming.

I just finished reading it--Pollan is a brilliant writer and thinker. I really enjoyed his chapter on hunting and foraging. While I haven't hunted, I have a friend who brings me local wild venison, shad and herring, duck and goose to cook, and I have been a wild food and mushroom forager for many years. There is a primal pleasure in the treasure hunt that Pollan totally captured on the page.Though I have been a farmers' market devotee since the mid-eighties when I lived in Santa Monica, he's inspired me to eat locally even more than I have been, and to spend fewer of my food dollars on industrial organic stuff from Whole Foods.

Nina Planck, whose parents own Wheatlands Farm in Loudon Co. was on WAMU this morning plugging a book she's written about eating local, sustainably raised food and debating a scientist from the pleasure police, who was plugging yet another book insisting that we eat a very low fat, no meat-eggs-dairy, whole grains, no fun diet. N.P. has gone from being a vegan to eating grass-fed meats, raw milk, eggs and cheese as well as veggies, and says she is healthier in many ways than she was before.

Colman Andrews is the Editor-in-Chief of Sauveur Magazine, and is a legendary hedonist. He used to write for the Los Angele Times, back when they had a great food section, and if you have read Ruth Reichl's memoirs, you may recall that when Ruth first moved to Los Angeles from Northern California, Colman Andrews was the one who introduced her to various pleasures that contributed to the dissolution of her first marriage...

One of my favorite books in the genre that you are exploring, is _Simple French Food_ by Richard Olney. He says in the intro that it discusses food from all parts of France, but that he can't help it if Provence dominates, since that is where he lives and where his culinary heart resides, so to speak. Richard is no longer with us, and the book may be out of print. I have it in paperback. But if you are searching for out of print books online, and come across that one, it is definitely worth owning, and may just do the trick in terms of your trip.

I finally found the 2005 Muga Rose´at MacArthur, which I have been waiting for. It's one of our perennial favorites. Very pale color, slightly candied nose. Fresh and crisp--not nearly as fruity and intense as the Turkey Flat we've been drinking a lot of. But it went really well with our dinner of tapas (marinated white beans, jamon serrano, roasted asparagus, olives, yellow cherry tomatoes, pecorino) and shrimp bisque-stew.

Drawing inspiration from zoramargolis’ lavender, Monique DC, LaShanta, Corrine and yours truly, gathered for potluck. All dishes used lavender

Legant: lamb strips with a balsalmic-honey-lavender glaze served with (lavender-infused) orzo pasta with goat cheese:

LaShanta: Chicken, marinated in thyme and lavender, served over rice:

Corrine: Cornish hens, rubbed with a lavender butter, served on a bed of spinach and couscous:

Monique DC: Bread pudding with blueberries, strawberries, and raspberries with a lavender crème anglais. [sorry, no pictures; we were too busy smacking our lips.]

Thanks Zora!

OK, girls. I am going into Jewish-shrewish mother mode here. So, this is how you thank me? You prepare a fabulous meal like this, with the lavender I gave you, and you don't invite me? All I get is pictures? Would it have killed you to pick up a phone and call? But, no, really, don't worry about me. I'm fine. I'll have a Cup o'Noodles, and that'll be plenty. I don't need much. And besides, my doctor told me to watch my lavender intake. So you go ahead and have the leftovers, too. Gesunter hayt!

This just came in an e-mail from Paul's of Chevy Chase about upcoming tastings

Pauls is 5205 Wisconsin NW (at Harrison St.) 202-537-1900

Saturday (7/15) 12:00 to 3:00 --Terry Theise Selections

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"No one man has introduced Americans to more great wines than Terry Theise of Terry Theise Estate Selections," claims Food and Wine Magazine, who voted Terry Theise "Importer of the Year" in 2005. Join us this Saturday as we taste some of Terry's exciting German and Austrian wines, and look forward to new arrivals from Terry Theise for the Fall season.

Hiedler, Grüner Veltliner, Loess, 2005

$10.99 (regularly $12.99)

One of the best Austrian wine values of the incredible 2005 vintage, this wine shows lemony and rhubarb fruit characteristics, good palate weight with elegant texture. Delicious with salads, grilled vegetables, shrimp, virtually anything.

Hirsch, Grüner Veltliner, Heligenstein, 2004

$16.49 (regularly $19.99)

A bit richer and spicer, this wine has more yellow fruit flavors (peach, meyer lemon) as well as intense minerality. It is equally at home with grilled swardfish or roasted chicken dishes, even with stronger sauces such as mustard.

Schloss Gobelsberg, Riesling, Von Urgestein, 2004

$16.49 (regularly $19.99)

This is an up-and-coming international star; the wine is an incredible value. From young vines in the Grand Crus Gaisberg and Heiligenstein, this wine has striking complexity and minerality.

Theo Minges, Riesling, Halbtrocken, 2004

$13.99 (regularly $16.99)

A fresh, dry style of Riesling from the Pfalz, this wine is a delicious aperitif; or pair it with salads, Asian cuisines, or your favorite grilled preparations of poultry or seafood.

Kerpen Wehlener, Sonnenuhr Riesling Kabinett, 2005

$15.99 (regularly $18.99)

Excellent value single-vineyard Riesling from the Mosel. Appley and fresh, with hints of pink grapefruit, smoke and mineral.

Schmitt Wagner, Longuicher Herrenberg, Riesling Spätlese, 2004

$16.49 (regularly $19.99)

Produced from some of the oldest vines in the Mosel, this wine is described as a "sleeper" by importer Terry Theise. Classic slate minerality appears in this complex wine.

Try Leopold's in Cady's Alley, just below M Street near Key Bridge in Georgetown. They serve modern Austrian-European food.I had a superb veal schnitzel there. Jonathan had sausage and red cabbage and was very happy with it. We haven't been back to explore more of the menu, but not because it wasn't good.

I know, she was a fish out of water. And the Julia Child impression was priceless.

This is the type of show you would never see on the Food Network these days. Take some of the best chefs and actors in New York and film them eating a family-style meal of baby goat after hours? With no script, no cheeky nicknames for ingredients, and no voiceovers? It'll never sell!

Zora, did the scallops look even better in HD?

Mario's Julia impression is the only one I've seen that's better than mine. Ask me to do my version of Julia doing the Witch's Recipe from Macbeth sometime.

All the food looked fabulous.

Some of the first wine I smuggled from my parents' liquor cabinet was homemade dandelion wine - there is a reason it is not available at your local wine purveyor.

My husband's uncle showed up at our place in Vermont years ago, with some homemade dandelion wine he'd made. He was so anxious to try it, he hadn't strained out the flowers, and it was still fizzy, because the fermentation wasn't yet complete. Gaak. He also introduced us to the dubious pleasure of eating sliced puffballs fried in cheap margarine. If you can imagine the flavor and texture of hot pencil erasers, you've got it. He was a wonderful, eccentric fellow. He got us started with beekeeping and extracting honey, and taught us how to make pickled herring. And rebuilt the engine in our VW Squareback for us, after it had thrown a rod.

It's on Comcast, somewhere up in the 200's, and is part of their basic digital cable package.

The one annoying thing is that all shows are in letterbox, essentially, because it's an HD channel. So the top and bottom of the screen will have grey borders unless you have HD.

Caught a few minutes of 'Three Sheets' last night and am not an instant believer, but I'll pay more attention to it in the future.

I went looking again last night (on our HD tv instead of the other one) and found it. I was able to watch After Hours with Daniel Boulud. What the heck was Cat Cora doing there?

The food court of the Museum of Native Americans has the best food/most interesting choices of all of the Smithsonian Museums. I don't know if they open early enough for breakfast, but lunch is recommended. Picky eater might find something she likes at the Plains Indian counter--they might even have mac and cheese. Or maybe she'd go for a buffalo burger. And then everyone else could have lots of cool options, like tamales, enchiladas, chili, planked salmon. Sounds like this kid might be holding everyone in the family hostage. Why not bring an "instant" mac and cheese option to put boiling water in, if she refuses to eat anything on the menu? Maybe, when she sees everyone else enjoying delicious food, she might be willing to "try a taste" of something different.

The cafe in Eastern Market -- could someone provide the address? It's a great, cheap place for breakfast in the Capitol Hill area.

Has anyone seen some of the food-related programming on INHD?

Comcast doesn't seem to offer this channel, unfortunately. Hundreds of channels of crap, and one with shows I'd really like to see isn't available to me...

Most of those ingredients release a ton of water - did you drain liquid off after blending?

I didn't, but as I recall it was fine. I served it in demitasse cups as an amuse.

I made watermelon gazpacho recently, that was very refreshing and tasty. It was an improvisation, but as I recall, the ingredients were watermelon, Vidalia onion, cucumber, jalapenõ pepper, cilantro and lime juice.

Not a scrap, but I'm personally a fan of dandelion greens. The last time she visited, my grandmother went into my yard to pick them before preparing dinner. I love the idea that something that most consider a weed is a delicious meal in and of itself.

Dandelions are the traditional "spring tonic" of many cultures, including 18th and 19th century America. In the days before industrialized agriculture and food preservation via canning and freezing, people subsisted through the winter months primarily on root vegetables, such as carrots, potatoes and turnips, and salted cabbage. The earliest harbinger of spring, in many places was the emergence of grass and weeds. Grass is not digestible in the human stomach, but many weeds are. Before anything in the garden had grown enough to eat, there were edible wild greens like dandelion, cress and lamb's quarters, which are very high in vitamins and minerals. Our ancestors may not have known about vitamin deficiency, but they knew that eating dandelion greens in the Spring, after a long winter of nothing green to eat, made them feel better.

we know some paths through the park to foxhall road and the girl's college, which is just up the hill from macarthur boulevard, but haven't checked that area out since around the time they converted the theatre next to our lady of victory into a cvs. also, my wife always complains when we walk through the woods at night because she is afraid of creeps. we are the creeps, i tell her.

The "girl's college" (Mount Vernon), was bought by GW a few years ago, and is now one of their campuses. It has been a long time since you've been to the Palisades neighborhood, which is where I live.

You are missing out on Kotobuki, across from CVS, which has excellent $1 per piece sushi, and a limited menu of other tasty Japanese home-cooking-type dishes (kamameshi). Also, BlackSalt, in the former MacArthur Pharmacy space, which is an excellent seafood restaurant and fish market.

My tomatos are coming along nicely this year, but there are only two of them on the giant vine, and as much as I look forward to enjoying them later in the season, for now I am addicted to stooping down to smell their leaves, which have a wonderful, peppery tomato fragrance. Can I eat them?

According to McGee (p. 330), I can, and cites the example of some chefs who add them to their tomato sauces. But can they be used like celery leaves, chopped onto a salad like fresh herbs? I wonder if this would add some tomato-ey zing to my next bowl of mixed greens. And what about those beet stalks, which greatly outsize the bulbs at the end? What about the leaves at the end of the stalks? Are these destined to be refuse, or can they serve some other purpose? Obviously peel of lemon, lime and orange, etc. can be candied or zested and used in numerous dishes and desserts. Are there other fruit or veggie scraps that typically get thrown away that shouldn't be?

I don't care for the taste/aroma of tomato leaves. I would treat them as a rather pungent herb, though, and just use a fine sprinkle of chopped leaves lest they overwhelm whatever they are eaten with.

Beet greens (from red beets) are a traditional pot herb. They are tender, delicious and loaded with vitamins. They are best eaten young, however. I suppose you could eat the greens of mature beets, but they'd be tougher, take longer to cook and might be bitter. The tops of golden beets are not good to eat, apparently. They are thicker and fleshier than the red varieties. I don't imagine they'd make you sick, but I've always taken the advice of the experts and not cooked them. I'd prefer to focus on delicious food rather than just "not letting things go to waste." I imagine you could add them to a vegetable stock, if they weren't bitter. As far as the stems of red beets go, if the greens are very young, I chop and cook the stems with the leaves. Older beet stems would probably be tough and a bit woody.

Jacques Pepin is of the "let nothing go to waste" school. He saves all vegetable peelings and uses them to make stock. When I had an organic vegetable garden, I used to make compost with all the garden detritus and vegetable garbage, including coffee grounds and egg shells. If you live in an apartment or don't have room for a compost pile, you can find compact, container-style composters if you look in Organic Gardening Magazine or at the Rodale Press website. I'm sure that they can be found in other places, too, but that's the most obvious one off the top of my head. The compost you make can nourish your plants, and you can feel virtuous about not letting anything organic go to waste, even if it isn't edible.

I came across a recipe online called "Meatless Scrapple" which was really a grits cake. I adapted the recipe considerably, and have made it several times with great results. It goes without saying that this is made with long-cooking grits, not the "quick-cooking" or the abominable instant type. I have added different flavor elements, and add-ins, based on what I had on hand or was able to find in the market that day. It makes a great vegetarian entree or a side with other dishes.

GRITS CAKES

5 cups water

1 tsp. salt

1 cup grits

1/2 cup masa harina

Small onion, chopped

clove garlic, roasted preferably, chopped

roasted poblano chile, chopped (or canned green chile)

small can white hominy (posole), drained & rinsed (or use canned or frozen sweet corn if no hominy is available)

1 cup grated cheese (I have made this successfully with jack, cheddar, goat gouda, in combination with parmesan--I really think most any grating cheese will work)

2T butter

Heat water and salt until boiling

Add grits in a stream, stirring until well incorporated

Turn heat down and simmer, stirring occasionally for 15-20 minutes

In a saute pan, cook onion in a T or 2 of olive oil, add garlic and green chile

When grits have thickened, stir in sauteed veggies, drained hominy and simmer together for 5-10 minutes on low flame. Add cheese and stir until cheese has been incorporated. Add butter. Check seasonings.

Pour grits into a buttered rectangular casserole dish and smooth until even thickness. Allow it to cool for 45 min. to 1 hour. Cut solidified grits into large squares and then cut the squares diagonally into triangles. Remove grits triangle from pan, coat lightly with flour or masa harina. Brown in a skillet with olive or other vegetable oil until brown and crusty on both sides. Serve immediately as a side with something stew-y or soupy like chicken and green chile or shrimp creole, or as a main dish. The cheese gets melty inside and the grits are creamy under the crust, and it has an earthy, hominy flavor.

This can be made with a more "American" and less Mexican flavor, by making it with straight grits* instead of part grits/part masa harina and by eliminating the green chile and substituting sweet corn for the hominy.

*Use 1 1/4 cups grits/ 5 cups water

forager's wild oyster mushroom tart

charcoal grilled ribeye

corn off the cob

spiced new potatoes

2002 Ch. Reignac St. Emilion

watermelon cubes

I'm among friends, right? So I am going to spill my guts, confess to you all, that despite being a Maryland/DC resident since 1979, I hate picking crabs. Lump crab, fine. Bring it on. Sitting down with a hammer and trying to extract my own? Uh uh.

Do I have to move now?

You and me both. The ratio of work/pleasure involved does not work for me. Lobster, on the other hand...Some of my most cherished culinary experiences have involved eating lobsters boiled in seawater overlooking small harbors in Maine.