Eggnog

We had a delicious homemade eggnog over the holidays using the recipe for making it in quantity in Joy of Cooking. I've used this before but it was particularly successful this time for reasons that escape me.

I halved the full recipe, which calls for 12 egg yolks beaten until light in color, then beat in gradually 1 lb. confectioners' sugar and 2 c. of liquor (dark rum, brandy, bourbon, rye or a mixture of these -- I used bourbon). Let this mixture stand, covered, for 1 hour "to dispel the 'eggy' taste." Then beat in 2 to 4 c. more of liquor, 2 quarts heavy cream and an optional 1 c. peach brandy. I had some old peach brandy in the cabinet but it tasted musty and got thrown out so I did without. Cover and refrigerate this mixture for 3 hours. The final step is to beat 8 to 12 egg whites "until stiff but not dry" and fold this into the egg mixture. I grated fresh nutmeg over the individual servings.

This was of course very rich and creamy. Everyone who visited and tried it loved it. The liquor component might be too strong for some people even using the lower range specified. I beat everything, including the egg whites, by hand and that certainly worked well. What was nice this time was that it remained creamy and frothy over 3 days (even a half portion was a lot to drink). Other times I've tried this it separates out a bit into a frothy top and a more fluid eggnog.

Hemingway 51: Green Isaac's Special

I was surprised at Philip Greene's presentation last month when he said Hemingway was way ahead of the trend for coconut water, because I had never heard of it. But sure enough, it is now a very trendy drink and Whole Foods has a whole shelf full of coconut water, so I tried out this cocktail from Islands in the Stream.

It starts with 2 oz. of gin, mixed with 4 oz. of coconut water and 1 oz. of lime juice, along with 2 to 4 dashes of Angostura bitters, shaken and poured with ice into Collins glass, and garnished with a lime wedge. It was eminently drinkable, though something of an acquired taste that is probably acquired much more easily on a hot day in the Caribbean than in a Washington winter. It is refreshing (coconut water is supposed to restore those elusive electrolytes), though not immediately competition for a gin and tonic. I'll try it again in the summer.

Greene notes the drink is also called a "Tomini" and in another place a "Tom Collins" with the ingredients specified.

Al Dente

Zagat sent out a helpful post this week about a dozen new popular restaurants and this casual dining place by chef Roberto Donna was one of them. It's located in the old Sutton Place Gourmet on New Mexico Avenue in the same complex as Chef Geoff's and we were able to get a reservation for a bar seat.

The food was quite good. My roast veal with porcini sauce and potato tart was tasty and a nice dish for the price ($19). Andrea's "Del Plin" pasta -- a fresh, short pasta -- stuffed with potato and leeks and topped with a crumbled sausage called cotechino (and butter and parmesan) was outstanding. The pasta was warm and yummy and the sausage very flavorful; it was served in a broth that combined all the flavors. The Caesar salad we split as a starter was plentiful and fresh. Bread was a nice hard crust and the wines -- a Soave and a Barbera -- quite smooth and moderately priced.

The ambiance, however, is not great. The decor is what I would call early Euro trash, made more garish by the bright neon lighting. It looked more like a truck stop in Belgium, or Italy, than a warm and cozy restaurant. A former gourmet foodshop with big plate-glass windows may not be an ideal location for a restaurant. The music when we arrived, somewhat on the early side, could only be described as horrid, a loud rap that might have appealed to the bar crowd over at Chef Geoff's but hardly to the clientele of families and middle-aged couples we saw here. They transitioned later to Christmas crap as the restaurant filled up. A final, niggling complaint -- the parking attendant neglected to observe the validation and failed, as we only realized later, to give us the proper discount on parking.

All that said, the food will certainly bring us back. Prices are on a par with Arucola and the quality is a step or two up.

Braised 'fresh bacon'

Tom Colicchio couldn't  help bragging that GQ voted this recipe their favorite meat dish of the year, but only after debating whether to call it "fresh bacon" or "pork belly." I prefer the traditional name. Fresh bacon is a bit pretentious, though it does establish the link between this fatty cut of pork and the streaked bacon you buy.

This is one of the recipes he uses to demonstrate braising and it is excellent. It takes a long time, but is very easy. Put the 2 lbs of pork belly in a skillet with 1 Tbl of peanut oil, fat side down, and cook for 15 min over medium heat. Remove pork and drain off all but 2 Tbl of fat. Add 1 chopped onion, 2 chopped carrots, 2 chopped celery stalks, 2 peeled garlic cloves and sautee for 20 min, until vegetables start to turn brown. Put pork back in, fat side up, with 2 c. chicken stock (he calls for his brown chicken stock where he cooks a chicken stock a second time with brown chicken pieces but I just used store-bought). Bring to a simmer and put in 350-degree oven. After 1 hour, add another cup of stock and cook for another hour. Let it cool in braising liquid. Remove pork (take off skin if you were lucky enough to find pork belly with skin on), cut into 4 serving pieces and make cross-hatch pattern in the fat. Strain braising liquids, discard solids. Bring liquid to simmer and skim off fat. Return pork to pan and put it in 400-degree oven for 20 min. Serve in shallow bowl with some braising liquid. I served tiny boiled purple potatoes with it which you could mash in the bowl and soak up the liquid.

The meat has an intense pork-y flavor not at all like bacon but more like a juicy bit of braised shoulder. It is of course super-tender after all this cooking and the braising liquid is flavorful and surprisingly light.

Roast chicken

I'm delving into Tom Colicchio's Think Like a Chef with his simple technique demonstrations. I usually find chef cookbooks too complicated and precious for home cooking, but this stuff seems harmless enough.

His technique for roasting a chicken has two unusual twists. The first is to brown the chicken in the skillet on top of the stove. You put the chicken "on its side" and brown for 7 min. then turn it over to the other side for 7 min. Then set it breast side up and put the skillet in a 375-degree oven. The chicken was washed, patted dry, salted and peppered, 2 sprigs each of rosemary and thyme in the cavity and trussed before being browned in 1 Tbl of peanut oil.

The second twist is to add 2 Tbl butter to the skillet after the first 20 min of roasting, then roasting another 30 min., basting every so often. When done, let the chicken rest for 15 min., carve and sprinkle coarse sea salt over the pieces. The chicken was very flavorful, and the browning and butter gave the skin a nice taste, while the basting kept the breasts moist. The thighs had a bit of that burnt grease flavor that using a roaster grid is designed to avoid, but I don't mind that.

'Ask your butcher'

One of my pet peeves about cookbook authors is their pretense that we all live in a world with a friendly neighborhood butcher who is waiting behind the counter with every conceivable meat product ready to carve and cut it to my exact specifications.

What world are they living in? I don't think even most residents of New York or San Francisco have a butcher like that, let alone the rest of us in industrial foodland USA.

Tom Colicchio -- who is not necessarily the worst offender, only the most recent -- says in a recipe for pork belly "to be sure to have your butcher leave on the skin."

Me, I'm just happy that Whole Foods has started carrying pork belly regularly so that I don't have to chase around to a Korean supermarket to find it. Here's how the dialogue goes with the person who happened to be behind the WF meat counter yesterday as he put two slabs of pork belly with no skin onto the scale for me:

Me: "I don't supposed you have any pork belly with the skin on."
Him: "Naw, we don't sell it that way. Anything else, today?"

End of conversation. What next, Tom? Whole Foods is one of two places where I can conveniently shop for high-quality meat. A computer decides what cuts they are going to offer based on which product moves the most through the store. Truth be told, there was one meat-cutter at WF who I could talk to about things like my pork rib roast "honor guard" last year, but I haven't seen him for months and there is no discernible continuity in the people behind the meat counter. Only the expensive cuts are displayed in the case and everything else is packaged in cellophane in another meat case. What you see is what you get and I've not found them in general to be responsive to requests.

The other place where I regularly buy meat is Broad Branch Market, which obviously has a very limited selection of just certain cuts, and the kids behind the counter serving you don't know the difference between a strip and a ribeye. Lots of people like Chevy Chase supermarket, but everything there is pre-cut and wrapped in cellophane, which of course is the way most supermarkets these days handle meat.

More specialized butchers are few and far between. Wagshal's is too far and more often than not service there has been surly when I do venture to make the trip. Some the new boutique butchers springing up in Alexandria and other snob locales basically seem to be adjuncts to restaurants, to off-load what chef doesn't sell, so you can get what they have or of course special order it a week in advance.

Which is the way it is, but it would be nice if cookbook writers could abandon their fictional bubble and talk to people who live in the real world. For instance, Colicchio could have said: "In this recipe, leaving the skin on enhances the flavor if you can find pork belly like that, but otherwise it tastes fine with the skin removed."

Hemingway 52: Cognac and Benedictine

This was actually the second drink we had at the Last Exit when author Philip Greene was guest-bartending. He found this straightforward combination, served in an Old Fashioned glass with ice and a lemon peel, in an unpublished short story of Hemingway's, "The Mercenaries: A Story." Hemingway had just returned from ambulance service in World War I and his narrator meets some professional soldiers in a dive in Chicago. They introduce him to this drink, which they first tasted in Sicily, even though it combines two French cordials.

Greene says Martell's is the cognac called for and it's clear you don't want a really good one to mix in a drink. It tastes a bit like a stinger -- brandy and white creme de menthe, also served over ice -- without the cloying sweetness of the creme de menthe. Instead, there is the herbal smokiness of the Benedictine, redolent of monastic incense. As Greene notes, you can now buy B&B in a bottle all its own.

I have a fondness for these herbal liqueurs, Chartreuse being the most representative. Perhaps it is an acquired taste, because I know many people are repelled by them. I had ordered this drink for Andrea, thinking she wouldn't like the Jack Rose, but it turned out she preferred it to this one, so I finished it.

I don't regularly keep any of these liqueurs and haven't had one since the last bottle of Chartreuse ran out. But I may get some Benedictine as the next herbal cordial to have on hand.

The vintner's wife's pork chops

I'm grateful that many cookbook authors don't hesitate to include even very simple recipes because it helps turn a quick weekday meal into something tasty and different. This recipe from Susan Herrmann Loomis's Cooking at Home on Rue Tatin is basically just a fried pork chop, sauteed 3 to 4 min on each side and then cooked with the skillet covered for another 7 min. Remove the chops and cover with foil to keep warm. Add 1/2 c. water to the skillet and a finely chopped shallot and garlic clove. Stir to deglaze the pan and reduce the sauce. Add 4 chopped cornichons and then 1 Tbl Dijon mustard, stir to combine and pour sauce over chops. Sprinkle minced parsley over them.

Though attributed to a vintner's wife, there is no wine in this recipe, but the combination of mustard and shallots makes a hearty red wine appealing and I had a southern Cote du Rhone.

Among the minor marvels at Broad Branch Market is their tub of cornichons for 4.99 a pound -- which gives you a nice pint for less than 3. They are real French-style cornichons and I usually have a tub in the fridge.

Salmon fillet poached in olive oil

We liked Paula Wolfert's Pork coddled in olive oil so this seemed like a good simple recipe to try for a weekday meal. Sprinkle a 1-lb center cut salmon fillet (skin removed) with salt an hour before cooking and put back in fridge. Meanwhile, heat 2-1/2 c. (!) olive oil in a skillet just big enough to hold the fillet to simmering point with 3 sliced garlic cloves and a sprig of thyme and cook until garlic turns golden brown. Turn off heat and let stand until ready to cook the salmon. After an hour, rinse the salmon and pat it dry. Remove the garlic and thyme and heat the oil back to 155 degrees (using a candy thermometer to measure), put in the salmon, adding more oil to cover if necessary, and poach for 12 min. at 145 degrees. Turn off heat and let it cook further in the oil until it is opaque and flaky.

The fish came out silky and tender -- not at all oily! -- gently infused with the thyme and garlic flavor. It was heavenly. Yes it's a lot of olive oil and a bit of an extravagance since we are not likely to be able to re-use the oil, but it's a very nice way to cook salmon for a change of pace.

Wolfert suggests a salad of arugula with shaved rhubarb and cucumber to accompany. Obviously there's no rhubarb available this time of year, so I just left it out. The peeled cucumber gets sliced on a mandolin, then tossed in salt and left for 10 min. Rinse and drain the cucumbers, add to a couple handfuls of arugula, toss with lemon juice and sprinkle shredded mint leaves over the top. The wonderful tangy taste of the arugula comes through unadorned and sets off the salmon very nicely.

Hemingway 53: Jack Rose

As part of his unceasing efforts to promote his book on Hemingway's cocktails, Philip Greene worked as guest bartender at the Last Exit in Mount Pleasant one night this week offering various versions of the Jack Rose cocktail. There is the bar's version, made with Calvados; the classic version with just Laird's applejack, lemon juice and grenadine; and the more elaborate version he attributes to Harry MacElhone of Harry's New York Bar in Paris and which he thinks is the one Hemingway meant when he referred to the drink in The Sun Also Rises.

I went straight for this version, which adds gin, red and white vermouth and orange juice to the original ingredients. It was very good -- refreshing with a good kick to it.

I was curious about the drink since the Jack Rose bar in D.C. is one of my new favorite places. Oddly, there is no whiskey in the cocktail that lent its name to this fabulous whiskey emporium but it's a catchy name in any case.

Harry's Bar was a favorite of mine in Paris. One of its claims to fame is that the Bloody Mary was invented there (there are other claimants as well). One day I was there and Harry's son, Andy MacElhone, was explaining to a TV crew that the original Bloody Mary never had celery in it as they filmed one of the crack bartenders mixing up a sample.

The bartender put the finished drink on the bar with a flourish, MacElhone finished his explanation, the TV crew turned off their spotlights and began packing up to leave. So I said, "What's going to happen to this drink?" MacElhone laughed and said, "Give it to him, he thought of it first."

Palena Cafe

When some friends suggested going to a wine-tasting at Weygandt's with Eric Asimov I took advantage of the expanded Cafe Palena's ability to take reservations and booked us a table there afterwards. I was keen to finally try Frank Ruta's signature roast chicken and it lived up to all my expectations and more.

As one of our friends said, "This may be the best roast chicken I've ever had." Crispy, browned skin, moist interior just cooked through, piping hot from the oven, with just a garnish of braised greens, it was simply delicious. There's a lot of speculation online just how he does it. There seems to be more flavor than just the lemon and lemon zest Ruta gives in a roast chicken recipe in Food and Wine, but maybe something short of a marinade. The chicken is undoubtedly organic and spends time in the fridge to dry out the skin so that it roasts crispy. It is prepared completely on order and takes a good 30 to 45 minutes (though waiting with a perfect Sazerac, Palena's delicious selection of bread and good company is no hardship).

My already favorable impression of the Cafe soared. Everything was just right -- the service was impeccable and friendly, the bread was oven warm and tasty (the bread sticks were fabulous), the butter was soft, the Sazerac -- did I mention? -- was perfect, the Caesar salad Andrea and I split was like a Romaine wedge with parmesan, the glass of Cote du Rhone was smooth, the coffee was fresh and robust.

It's not particularly cheap -- $21 may strike some as high for chicken, but it's a full half and a bargain at this price; there is a token extra charge for the bread and there was even a charge for splitting the salad. But, hey, you're getting the full quality of the prix fixe restaurant for a fraction of the price.

Birch & Barley

This restaurant at Logan Circle has an upstairs bar, the Churchkey, featuring 50 craft beers on tap and another 500 in bottles, so I've been meaning to try it out and finally did this week. I hit a day when they were having a special event celebrating 21 years of the Schlafly brewery, a craft brewery in St. Louis, with 21 of their beers. This was fine with me, since I grew up in St. Louis and I'm glad that the city of Anheuser-Busch and Falstaff is also a leader in the craft revolution.

I started with the 2 oz. samples and liked that so much I stayed with it instead of picking a beer to have a full glass of. Keep this in mind as I rattle off the beers I tried, all 8 of them, because it is only 16 oz. of beer, or the same as one normal pint. The bartender recommended going just two at a time to keep them straight, so I started in the "crisp" category with Schlafly Pilsner and Oktoberfest. Both good, with the Oktoberfest a little spicier. Then two pale ales from Schlafly: the dry-hopped American pale ale and the Tanzanian IPA. Both good as pale ales but I like pilsners better. I took a break from Schlafly to try two cask ales: Oxbow and Winter Storm. Oxbow had a murky, new beer look and I didn't much care for it; Winter Storm was very spicy in a pleasant sort of way. I finished with two dark beers from Schlafly: the Porter and the Reserve Stout. I find most of these dark beers too raw -- can anyone really beat Guinness? -- so the smoother Porter was my preference here.

I'll suspend judgment on the food -- the bar has its own menu of bar-type food while the downstairs restaurant has a more ambitious menu. I tried the signature "brat burger" -- which adds some pork and sausage spices to a hamburger -- and was not impressed. It was supposed to have sauerkraut on it but the amount was small you could hardly taste it. Why get fancy? Serve brats, for god's sake. Also the ubiquitous and detestable coated fries accompanied it. They get good marks for grilled cheese and other simple fare, so will try that next time.

The beer is great, super-fresh, with a lot of attention paid to temperature and a studied array of glasses to serve the various types in. Arriving at 5:30, I got a bar stool, but when I left an hour later it was three deep at the bar.

Small plates

Various dishes for lunch and dinner that have been successful:

Eggplant parmesan: This Marcella Hazan recipe is an old favorite of mine that I hadn't tried in a long time. It's very simple and sinfully delicious. So even though it's hardly eggplant season, I cooked it over the weekend to accompany some lamb chops from Blue Rooster Farm.

Peel and slice the eggplants vertically into 3/8-in. slices, salt in colander and let stand for at least 30 min., pat dry. Fill skillet to 1 in. with vegetable oil and fry slices in repeated single layers until they are golden brown, drain. I have to say, whether it's because I used a cast iron skillet or that I finally did pour in oil up to 1 in., this was the best success I ever had with this step. The eggplant slices absorbed very little oil and came out light and fluffy. Layer the slices into a greased baking pan alternating with a layer of coarsely grated mozzarella and chopped can tomato with a Tbl of parmesan and a pinch of oregano and salt. End with a layer of eggplant, sprinkle with parmesan and dot with butter. Put into a 400-degree oven for 20 min., check for excess liquid and bake another 15 min. Let cool a bit before serving. I only used 1-1/2 lbs eggplant instead of the 3 in the recipe (which somehow she gets from 2 medium eggplants), so I only had 2 layers of eggplant with one layer of cheese and tomato in between. Scrumptious.

Pan-roasted red snapper with Old Bay: I adapted this from Steve Sando's bean book to go along with a batch of his flageolet beans. I got a nice small filet from A&H, and coated it in a mix of flour and Old Bay (a new tin as part of my effort to use fresher spices), then fried on top of stove before putting briefly in 400-degree oven to cook through. It was delicious with the beans.

Bean and tuna salad: Another adaptation from Sando, using some of the flageolet beans again. I got some expensive Spanish canned tuna from A&H -- it really does taste a whole lot better than the Whole Foods brands -- mashed it in a salad bowl, then added sliced onion and chopped parsley (didn't have the celery that Sando adds), the beans (slightly warmed), oil and vinegar and salt and pepper. Toss. Great lunch!

Hemingway 54: Whiskey and soda

Continuing the countdown of Hemingway cocktails in Philip Greene's To Have and Have Another, this week's featured drink is whiskey and soda, which may not seem too exciting but was a staple for the writer and a good everyday drink for yours truly.

As whiskey aficionados seek to outdo each other in finding obscure single malts and Johnny Walker continues to add new colored labels, workaday blended Scotches appear old-fashioned, especially mixed with ice and soda. But it still works and for this countdown I retrieved the bottle of Dewar's White Label, mentioned by Greene as one of Hemingway's favorites, from the back of my cupboard and had one, then another.

When I first turned of drinking age (a youthful 18 in those days), I was told that if you drink Scotch, you should drink a good one, and if you drink a good Scotch, you shouldn't sully it with anything other than a splash of water. So I was surprised sitting on one of my early transatlantic flights when a young Scot sitting next me ordered some ginger ale with his Scotch. "Surprised?" he said, shaking his head. "Americans think you should never mix anything with Scotch but we think it tastes good with ginger ale." I tried it, and it did taste good, but I can't say it changed my thinking or my drinking habits (in fact I rarely drink ginger ale at all).

The short story mentioned in this chapter is "Night Before Battle," set again in Chicote's bar in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War, when the narrator meets a tank commander who's convinced he will die in the next day's battle. It's an interesting story, and has this great line about drinking (NOT quoted by Greene), as the narrator mulls over his day's effort to film a battle: "When things are all right and it is you that is feeling low a drink can make you feel better. But when things are really bad and you are all right, a drink just makes it clearer." Needless to say, he concluded that the latter applied to this particular day.

Ripple

Of course the big joke about the name of this restaurant for people my age is that before the wine revolution in this country, Ripple, a rotgut sold in plastic bottles, was probably the best-known wine in the country.

The wine here is certainly not rotgut, though the offerings by the glass are extraordinarily expensive, in the 12-15 range. Maybe that's what the Cleveland Park after-work market will bear. It is a bright and warm restaurant with a long, inviting bar made of colorful segments of polished tile. We came early, sat at a bar table and watched the place fill up.

We split a cheese plate for starters. Like cheese plates everywhere, the portions were very skimpy but the cheeses were good. I had the venison, which came with things like apple tahini and salted beef stems. It was tender and tasty, cooked to a nice medium rare with the emphasis on rare. Andrea had the stuffed lamb shoulder, which was also good though a little mushy for my taste. The entrees without extra sides make for a meager meal, but we like to pretend we're on a diet so that was OK.

An overall positive experience but probably overpriced for what you get. I'll go again, but won't rush back.

Hemingway 55: Gin & tonic with bitters

To paraphrase Julie Powell's year-long effort to cook all of Julia Child's recipes -- "365 days, 524 recipes" -- how about this: 52 weeks, 55 cocktails!

Philip Greene discussed his new book To Have and Have Another: A Hemingway Cocktail Companion in a presentation at the Washington Club last night that included an open bar and hors d'oeuvres. Greene, a scion of New Orleans' Peychaud family and a founder of the Museum of the American Cocktail there, has chronicled the various drinks in Hemingway's life and works. His engaging book devotes a chapter each to the 55 cocktails he tracked down (and one other chapter on a good way to drink cognac).

It seems to me to be a fairly easy challenge to have one or two of these cocktails each week for the next year. Few of them are new to me, but some are. This version of a gin & tonic is different, but actually quite pleasant -- it's the drink I got at the open bar last night. Hemingway seemed fairly fond of bitters in general (and Greene of course is not going to leave this out).

The two dashes of bitters rounds out the flavor of the drink. Bitters are a bit old-fashioned, of course, and the authentic Hemingway version with Gordon's gin and Schweppes tonic water may seem dated in this age of craft gins and homemade tonic, but it's hard to beat a classic. While I always think of gin & tonic as a hot weather drink and usually have it only in the summer, the addition of bitters helps make it palatable in cold weather as well.

Greene quotes liberally from Hemingway's work and the chapter on this drink features Islands in the Stream and the short story "The Denunciation," neither of which I've read. It would truly be a challenge to read the works cited each week but I won't commit to that.

It was quite a surprise when Greene said in answer to a question that his research had not taken him to Paris, which was a very long chapter in Hemingway's drinking life. You can't escape the writer if you go out drinking in Paris. I once met a prospective employer in the Hemingway Bar at the Hotel Ritz on Place Vendome. Harry's Bar, Closerie des Lilas, the Dome all have their memories of Hemingway.

During my own brief flirtation with bartending a few years ago (bartending school, two bartending gigs), I began a card file of drinks mentioned in literature just for the fun of it. I didn't get very far, but Greene's book appealed to me immediately for that reason. It turns out that Greene, who is an attorney at the Pentagon, is actually a neighbor here in Chevy Chase, and occasionally does guest bartending gigs in local venues, so chances are good I will run into him again as I count down the Hemingway cocktails.

Update: Perhaps reading the short stories is not too big a commitment. I found my Complete Short Stories and put it in a handy place. "The Denunciation" is pretty much as Greene described it. What struck me was how well Hemingway conjured up the bar, not only in its physical detail but in the esprit that inhabited it. As Greene says: "Here's hoping you've known a place like Chicote's in your life." It is a bit of a "Cheers" phenomenon -- you feel comfortable, everybody knows your name. The closest I've come, I suppose, is the Cafe de l'Esperance, my neighborhood cafe in Paris, but it was more of a cafe really than a bar. In terms of bonding with the proprietors and their longtime waitress, however, it had something of the same meaning for me.

Guinea fowl with marscapone

I keep coming across recipes for guinea fowl so I resolved to bring home one of these pintades whenever I saw them on sale. Perhaps because of the holidays, WholeFoods had a big case of diverse poultry the other day -- goose, duck, pheasant, turkey of course, and guinea fowl -- so I finally got one.

There were a couple of recipes for guinea fowl and savoy cabbage but I went instead with Anna Del Conte's recipe from Lodi in the Lombardy region. It appealed to me because of marscapone in the cavity and a combination of white wine and white rum as braising liquid. The recipe is simple -- put 4 Tbl (!) of butter, a cut up carrot, a cut up onion, and 2 cut up celery stalks and 4 whole cloves in the pot; spoon 2 Tbl marscapone into the cavity of the bird, salt and pepper, place in the pot on top of the vegetables, pour over 4 oz wine and 2 Tbl rum, bring to a boil, cover and put into 400-degree oven for 1 to 1-1/4 hours.

Though the recipe didn't call for it, I turned the bird halfway through since I had to put it in the pot sideways. When the bird is tender, remove and cut into 4 serving pieces. Remove the cloves (if you can find them) and purree the cooking liquid and vegetables into a sauce.

Guinea fowl, needless to say, tastes a lot like chicken. I find it a bit gamier, with a texture and color somewhere between chicken and duck. It doesn't have nearly as much fat as duck or goose. This came out tender and moist because of the braising and the marscapone. If you find yourself gravitating more and more to the dark meat in chicken and turkey, you will like guinea fowl. The sauce came out a surprising color of yellow and was delicious on the meat.

I toyed with the idea of serving Grunkohl, which I'm belatedly realizing is green kale, prepared in the German fashion (blanched, chopped and braised in onion and broth), but opted instead for a separate Anna Del Conte recipe for -- savoy cabbage! This recipe is from the Veneto region and starts with a soffrito of 4 oz. of pancetta, an onion, 1 Tbl rosemary needles, 1 garlic clove all chopped up together in a food processor then sauteed briefly in 2 Tbl. of olive oil. Trim and cut the cabbage into quarters, remove the core and cut into half-inch strips, add to pot and wilt, add 6 oz. white wine, cover and stew for 1-1/2 hours. It goes really well with guinea fowl.

I used a nice sauvignon blanc for cooking and accompanied the meal with the great Alsatian riesling we got at Iron Bridge, which manages to be bone dry and fruit forward at the same time. A bit extravagant for a weekday meal, but very nice.

Spices

I like to celebrate the fact that we are in a privileged place and time where we can cook virtually any world cuisine we want and fix a wonderful variety of dishes at home. I'm realizing belatedly that one drawback to all this diversity is that some of the staples used in cooking -- particularly herbs and spices -- are not as fresh as they would be if we stuck to one or another cuisine.

In Mexico or Morocco or India, the home cook would constantly use the same spices and these would be used up and replaced often so that they generally would be fresh. That's not the case for me, cooking different types of food just a couple of times a week for two people. With all the food habits I've changed in pursuit of good eating, there is one bad old habit I haven't shaken: I somehow think that I should be able to buy a spice or dried herb and keep it on my shelf for months, and often years, and that it remains a legitimate ingredient.

But it's not! Why should I think that I can be spared the expense of regularly replenishing oregano, for instance, that costs $6.95 in the little supermarket bottle or much less in bulk, when I routinely spend much more for fresh ingredients, including fresh herbs, for just one dish?

I went to make a tagine recipe calling for ras-el-hanout this week and ended up concocting an approximation of it from spices I had on hand. But I'm fairly certain none of them was fresher than 6 months and most of them were much older than that. So the dish lacked the zing you might expect from exotic spices -- big surprise!

I was proud of myself last year when I reorganized my spice shelf with generic bottles so I could buy spices in bulk. Two local stores at least, Broad Branch Market and the Silver Spring Co-op, sell spices in bulk and you can fill one of these little bottles with a $1.50 worth of spices. I vaguely thought of labeling the spices with a date and throwing them out after 6 months or a year, but I never followed through on that.

But I think I will make more of an effort. It would mean throwing out virtually all the ground spices and dried herbs I have. One approach would then be to buy ingredients only as needed, label them with the date, and replace them the next time I used them if they were no longer sufficiently fresh. I've ordered Herbs & Spices: The Cook's Reference by Jill Norman and will see what kind of suggestions she has about how fresh individual spices should be.

Beef tagine with sweet potatoes

I love turkey and we had our usual splendid Thanksgiving feast this year with Andrea's family. But after the wholesome American flavors, it seemed like some exotic food would be the perfect change of pace. Over the weekend we went again to Masala Art and had some of their sumptuous Indian food, and yesterday I dusted off my tagine and tackled this recipe from Ghillie Basan.

The full title is "Beef tagine with sweet potatoes, peas, ginger and ras-el-hanout," and clearly the key to whole recipe is the last ingredient, a Moroccan spice mixture. I thought I had found a bottle somewhere but it wasn't on my shelf, so I went online to find various recipes for the mixture, usually with only 10 spices, compared to the 30 or so in the real mix, which includes some ingredients not readily available here.

Not a big deal except it brought me to the realization, which I will discuss more in my next post, that my spices are not really fresh. Using Urban Accents Moroccan Road mix as a base -- according the website it is just coriander, cumin, cinnamon and mint -- I added an assortment of other spices -- turmeric, clove, white pepper, aleppo pepper, piment d'esplette, ginger, black pepper and maybe one or two others -- all in minuscule amounts to total the 2 tsp. called for in the recipe. It was fine, but lacked the exotic zing that fresh spices would have brought to it.

Tagines are a great weekday meal because the pot does the work. I sauteed chopped onion and shredded ginger in ghee, then added 2 lbs lean beef (I used chuck) in bite-sized chunks and browned it, stirred in the 2 tsp of spice and covered with water, covered the pot and simmered for 40 minutes. Then I added 2 cubed sweet potatoes and cooked for another 20 minutes. Then 1 lb of frozen peas (a lot!) and 3 tomatoes, peeled, seeded and chopped, for another 10 min. It gets topped with chopped cilantro and preserved lemon (which I forgot). It worked great as a beef stew, producing a nice broth, but was missing that taste of the bazaar.

Iron Bridge Wine Co.

This place outside Columbia pretty much in the middle of nowhere looked like fun when our friends suggested meeting there and turned out to be even better than we anticipated. It certainly confirms my belief that the food revolution has penetrated deep into rural corners you wouldn't expect. We decided that it would be hard to find a place that combined the high quality of food with the energy of an unfussy ambiance anywhere in Bethesda.

Our friends had snagged one of the best tables, in the corner behind the fireplace, so that we benefited from the hubbub but could still carry on a conversation. The food looked so appetizing, we went whole hog with drinks, appetizers, main course, dessert and coffee -- and of course a bottle of wine.

Three of us took the special of the day -- braised lamb shoulder with Swiss chard and mashed potatoes -- and Andrea got the duck breast. I had the buratta with tomato and fennel jam as a starter, and it was very fresh and creamy with a slight tang set off well by the jam. The lamb was incredibly tender and very flavorful and perfectly complemented by the sides. Andrea's duck was also very good, tender and moist, and her house-cured salmon starter was excellent. The desserts were all good -- my bourbon pecan tart, Andrea's cranberry bread pudding and the flourless chocolate cake and creme brulee ordered by our friends. I tried the old-fashioned with bacon-infused bourbon -- not the most successful experiment -- and we ordered a bottle of Descombes Nouveau Beaujolais in honor of the season, and it may have been the best NB I've ever had.

The restaurant, which has a sister location in Warrenton, is also a wine retailer with an excellent selection (and the markups at dinner are quite minimal). We got some of the Beaujolais and an Alsatian Riesling to bring home.

It was such a pleasant surprise to find all this in what we tend to call BF Maryland that we resolved to meet our friends again soon in another such location. They live in Baltimore and have made a practice of exploring the hinterland for these hidden gems. Our next venture will probably be to the Bistro Blanc, a new restaurant started nearby by the former chef at Iron Bridge. Others on the list are Woodberry Kitchen in Baltimore and Tersiguel's in Ellicott City.

Ici Urban Bistro

This relatively informal restaurant in the Hotel Sofitel provided what I wanted -- a place downtown that's easy to get in and out of but civilized enough to have a conversation. I was meeting an old friend from London who wanted to grab a quick bite before catching his flight and, since we were in Paris together, this French-type place filled the bill.

That said, I don't think I'd go here for the food. The menu was quite limited and it may be that both the ingredients and preparation are fresh but it would be hard to prove it by my baked red snapper, which was a tad overdone and not the freshest fish I've had lately (for instance, not nearly as fresh as the snapper I had at the Big Fish Grill just the week before).

The wine was good. My friend ordered it, so not sure what it was beyond that it was a crisp French white. The ambiance was pleasant enough, though it couldn't help feeling like International Hotel in the middle of anywhere. Le Bar next door is very popular and the foot traffic outside at the busy intersection of 15th and H supplied a certain energy and bustle.

Poached halibut with mustard sauce

I've had a hankering for halibut for several weeks. When we went to Pesce a few weeks ago, I was dreaming of the poached halibut they serve there, but it wasn't on the menu that night. When we visited friends at Beach Haven in September they said their fishmonger was bringing them halibut from the market on Long Beach Island, but he came back with grouper instead. At Rehoboth over the weekend, the restaurant where we had dinner had a halibut special but I didn't like the accompaniment (and someone who ordered it left the sides on the plate).

It turns out it's not that hard to poach halibut and this recipe from Mark Bittman fully satisfied my craving. Although he says this Dutch recipe works for any North Atlantic white fish, he thinks poaching is the best way to cook halibut to keep it from drying out. This comes out creamy and delicate and the understated mustard sauce does not overpower the sweet fish flavor.

For some reason, Bittman always specifies halibut steaks for his recipes, whereas we prefer fillets and that's what The Fishery sells. So I got a nice piece of fillet with the skin on and used the recipe's third option for poaching liquid -- 4 c. of water and white vinegar on an 8:1 ratio (the other two options were Court Bouillon or Fast Fish Stock). It did the trick and is a great option for a weekday meal. Bring the liquid to a boil in a skillet just large enough to hold the fish, put the fish in, adding more liquid to cover if necessary, and simmer at medium low until opaque throughout.

The fillet was not the same thickness and my skillet was too shallow for the thickest part, so I had to carefully turn the fish as it cooked. But this gave me a chance to remove the skin.

For the sauce, cook 1 Tbl flour in 1 Tbl butter for 3 or 4 min until brown, then add 1 c. of the poaching liquid. Cook and thicken for another 4 to 5 min. then add salt and pepper and 1 Tbl Dijon mustard. Serve the sauce over the halibut and sprinkle with chopped parsley.

Bittman recommends boiled potatoes to accompany (it is a Dutch recipe, after all), but we had lentils. I used a preparation I found in an Epicurious recipe (from Gourmet) for Sauteed Cod with Lentils. It calls for French green lentils, and we used the Zursun Idaho heirloom lentils that we bought at La Cuisine in Alexandria. Bring 1 c. lentils to a boil and cook 12 to 25 minutes until tender, then drain, reserving the liquid. Cook 1 c. chopped onion and 1 chopped garlic clove in 2 Tbl. butter in a covered pot for 10 min., stirring occasionally, then uncover and cook another 5 or 10 min. Add the lentils and 1/4 to 1/2 c. of their cooking liquid to moisten, heat through, then add 1 Tbl. lemon juice, 3 Tbl. chopped parsley and 1 Tbl. olive oil. Lentils were delicious and paired perfectly with the halibut.

Big Fish Grill

I may have visited this Rehoboth institution once before but too long ago to remember. Our lunch there this weekend with a group of 10 was very enjoyable. We sat in the annex where the bar is rather than in the main dining room and had a large table at bar-stool height. The favored option was one of the fish of the day on a salad and I got a grilled red snapper on a chophouse salad. The fish was great -- fresh, grilled just right, and the salad with a garlic ranch dressing was a perfect fit.

The Big Fish Grill is on Highway 1 just down the street from our host's house, so it was a convenient spot for those of us who had convened for the weekend. In a thoughtful move, given that most of the better restaurants were closed for off-season, our host thought it would be fun to eat dinner at the Boardwalk Plaza Hotel, where the dining room is right on the boardwalk. Though the faux-Victorian decor inside was a bit over the top, the view was very nice -- even in the dark since floodlights illuminated the boardwalk and dune grass -- and the food, while not imaginative, was quite good. I had the New York strip with wild mushroom risotto and roasted asparagus -- hit the spot! Several bottles of wine made the whole meal quite convivial.

Chicken in piquant tomato sauce

Another stewy, tomatoey dish from Italy, this time courtesy of Domenica Marchetti. It benefits from the rich, hearty flavor (and economy) of chicken thighs, though I think I inadvertently downplayed the piquant part.

The recipe calls for 10 thighs to serve 5 or 6 people. My value pack from WF actually had 11 bone-in, skin-on thighs of various sizes. The chicken gets browned in two batches, starting skin side down for 5 min., then flipped over for another 5 min. Marchetti says to drain off all but 2 Tbl. of the rendered fat afterwards and then saute 1 big or 2 medium chopped onions for 5 min., add a clove of minced garlic for a couple of minutes, then sprinkle 1 or 2 Tbl of flour over it and pour in 3/4 c. white wine. Boil this down for a while, then add 4 chopped anchovy fillets and a pinch of red pepper flakes.

Here's were I downplayed the piquancy. The recipe calls for Rizzoli anchovies packed in a piquant sauce or any other anchovy fillets. So of course I got any other, and didn't think about compensating for the lack of piquant sauce by adding more red pepper flakes. So the sauce wasn't too piquant, but still very delicious.

The final ingredient is a 28 oz. can of whole tomatoes, mashed up to crush. Add the thighs back to the pot. Marchetti recommends taking off the crispy skin, arguing that it has made its flavor combination and that if you leave it on it will just turn flabby and make the sauce fatty. So I did and I think she's probably right. (Cook's bonus: Crispy chicken skin tastes really good.) Put the covered pot into a preheated 350-degree oven and after half an hour take the cover off and cook for another hour. It looks quite outstanding when it comes out (alas, I neglected to take a picture). Serve over polenta. So easy and cheap for a hearty weekday meal, with, obviously, plenty of leftovers.

Pork stew with paprika

This northern Italian version of goulash is easy and delicious and gave us several good meals. I used pork shoulder (Boston butt) to cut into stewing chunks, rather than the "pork steaks" called for by Anna Del Conte. Also, tomato passato is apparently something you can find in Europe but not here, so I used crushed tomato. In any case, the stew was meaty with a rich tomato sauce.

My pork weighed in at somewhat more than her 1-3/4 lbs so I increased the other ingredients proportionately. I had no luck finding smoked pancetta so I used guanciala, which is probably a little fattier. The recipe calls for 4 oz., which is cut into cubes and sauteed in 2 Tbl. butter for 5 min. Then you add 8 oz. sliced onion and cook for 20 min. Then mix in the pork and brown for 10 min. before sprinkling in 1 Tbl. paprika (I always use sweet unless the recipe specifies hot) and 1 Tbl. flour. Cook for another minute then add 7 oz. wine and bring to a boil and cook for a couple of minutes before adding 10 oz. of the crushed tomato, a dozen fresh sage leaves snipped into pieces and 2 bay leaves. Cook for 1-1/2 to 2 hrs. Del Conte recommends serving with polenta, but we accompanied with creamed purree of cauliflower.

Mushrooms, beans

More by coincidence than anything else, our dinners this week have been vegetarian. I was attracted to the Creamy Porcini Soup in Domenica Marchetti's The Glorious Soups and Stews of Italy because it gave me a chance to use some of the chicken stock I made last weekend when I cleaned out my collection of frozen chicken parts.

I used Marchetti's recipe for the stock as well, though it is the same as most -- simmering the chicken with carrots, onions, celery, parsley, thyme, garlic, black peppercorns (she also calls for fennel stalks but I didn't have that), then straining.

The soup recipe calls for 1 oz. of dried porcini and a bunch of fresh mushrooms in lieu of the fresh porcini available in Italy. Unfortunately, WF has gotten so spotty in its stocking, they had no porcini, so I got dried chanterelles and ended up making creamy chanterelle soup. The recipe uses 1 lb. of cremini and white button mushrooms to make a soup base, and then another pound of mixed portobello and shitake mushrooms to saute and add separately.

The first batch is cooked in oil, butter, onion and garlic until their liquid has evaporated and they are tender. Then you add the soaked and drained dried mushrooms and 3/4 c. white wine and boil that away. Let the cooked mushrooms cool, then purree with some of the strained soaking liquid from the dried mushrooms. Sprinkle the purree with 3 Tbl. of flour and then gradually stir in 5 c. of chicken or meat broth. Saute the sliced portobello and shitake caps separately, stir into the soup, whisk in 1/2 c. heavy cream and 2 Tbl. of cognac and serve the soup with chopped parsley.

After Andrea pointed out that a mushroom soup, even if rich and hearty, is still just a soup, I scrambled to find something to accompany and found a recipe for skillet cornbread on a website called "The Pioneer Woman." It was super-easy, delicious and doubtless a keeper. Mix dry ingredients -- 1 c. cornmeal, 1/2 c. flour, 1 tsp. salt, 1 Tbl. baking powder -- in a bowl. Mix liquid ingredients -- 1 c. buttermilk (she helpfully reminds you that if you don't have buttermilk just add a splash of white vinegar to milk), 1/2 c. milk, 1 egg, 1/2 tsp. baking soda -- and combine with dry ingredients. Stir in 1/4 c. melted shortening, then pour batter into cast iron skillet with 2 Tbl. shortening. Cook for 1 min. on top of stove, then put into preheated 450 degree oven for 20 to 25 min. until golden on top and crispy at the edges. Worked perfectly.

The bean dish from Deborah Madison's Local Flavors was also based on shopping at the farmer's market, because it calls for redbor kale and Sheridan School had a great selection of kale. I used the Rancho Gordo Rio Zape beans (a type of red bean) I had in the cupboard, soaked for several hours and then cooked for 1-1/2 hrs. with a diced onion, 2 bay leaves and 1/2 tsp. thyme leaves. The kale was stripped from the stems and cut into pieces, boiled in salted water for 5 to 7 min. and drained. Then 1/2 c. chopped onion held back from that whole onion used in the beans is sauteed in olive oil with 1/2 c. chopped cilantro until the onions are soft, and then the beans and kale are added and cooked together for 10 min. or so to blend the flavors. Serve with more chopped cilantro, crumbled feta cheese and a drizzle of olive oil. We had leftover cornbread with this dish for another great meal!

Both of these cookbooks are organized by season, so it's particularly easy to locate the recipes that match well with what's available at the farmer's market.

Eat Rome

Some friends just returned from a week in Rome and regaled us with stories of a wonderful food tour they took with Elizabeth Minchilli, an American food writer who lives in Rome. They took the Campo de Fiori and Jewish Ghetto tour you can see under the Food Tours tab at Minchilli's website. Their description was mouth-watering as they ate and drank their way across Rome through markets, cafes, butchers and bakers, and prompted us to move Rome up near the top of the list of our next trips.

Minchilli also has a blog that you can subscribe to by email and the EatRome app for iPad and iPhone ($2.99) that lists great places to eat all over the city (including an interactive map that informs me, sadly, that I am currently some 7,400 km away from the restaurant). There is also an app for Florence.

I have spent some wonderful times in Rome and had some great food, from a hostaria I literally stumbled into and ate their delicious menu du jour to an elegant restaurant with a patio overlooking some of Rome's hills where I had my first sole filleted at the table. One of the nicest meals I had was at the home of some American friends in Rome who I was visiting over Christmas, because good food and the good cheer that goes with it is not confined to restaurants.

There are many other reasons to visit Rome -- art, architecture, history, shopping, and for many, a pilgrimage to the Holy See. But I'm fairly certain that our trip to Rome will put a top priority on a food tour from Elizabeth Minchilli if it can be arranged.

Sauteed sweetbreads with lemon and parsley

Another happy encounter between Anna Del Conte and Blue Rooster Farm, which offered both "beef" and lamb sweetbreads at their last visit to Sheridan School. I'd cooked sweetbreads two or three times before but fortunately Del Conte takes you through all the steps -- the soaking, the blanching, removing the membrane, etc.

It's not hard, but important to follow. The blanching is done in water brought to a boil with a small stalk of celery and slice of onion in it, then add 1 Tbl. wine vinegar and salt and put in the soaked and drained sweetbread for just 5 min. or so, and then remove the membrane. Del Conte emphasizes the two different parts of the sweetbread (the thymus gland of a young animal, which is why "veal" or "calf" is more appropriate in describing it) -- the heart, a big rectangular shaped piece, and the throat, several smaller pieces. So for the heart piece she recommends slicing, breading and sauteeing, whereas this recipe is the one she recommends for the throat pieces.

Realistically, we're not going to cook the different parts for different meals and were not going to do two recipes for the same meal, so I opted to cut the heart piece into slices for this one. You coat the pieces in flour and put into a skillet with lots of sizzling butter and a "bruised" clove of garlic, flip the pan a few times to get them browned all over, and then, according to the recipe, add 5 Tbl. of meat broth for another minute then toss with the juice of a lemon and 3 Tbl. chopped parsley. I doubled the times since I wasn't sure about how long the heart slices would take to cook -- so I browned the pieces for 4 min. and cooked in the broth for 2 min., and I don't think they were overcooked.

We accompanied with the polenta left over from the previous day, cut into strips, brushed with oil and put under the broiler until a bit crispy on the outside, and a nice, crunchy green bean and red onion salad from Broad Branch.

Lamb stewed in wine

This delicious dish was the product of a perfect storm in home cooking -- a great recipe from my cookbook of the month, Anna Del Conte's The Classic Food of Northern Italy; a lamb shoulder roast from Blue Rooster farm in Pennsylvania, which sells its own meat products once a month at our Sheridan School farmer's market; and the simmer burner on our new Bosch gas cooktop, which truly does allow a slow simmer.

Almost any lamb stew is going to taste great, but this soupy stew from Tuscany is a real winner. The 2-1/2 boneless lamb shoulder was tied up as a roast but of course is ideal for stewing. I trimmed out most of the fat and cut into small chunks. The recipe calls for "lamb neck fillets" but Anna Del Conte clearly lives in a different world than I do, where your choices at supermarket butcher counters are limited to lamb chops and leg of lamb. You heat up olive oil and briefly flavor it with peeled garlic cloves, removing them when you smell the garlic, then brown the meat, in batches if necessary, and salt when done. Pour in 2 c. of dry white wine to cover and add the unpeeled cloves from 2 heads of garlic and 2 or 3 dried red chiles soaked in warm water and broken up into pieces (I used New Mexico chiles I had on hand). Simmer for half an hour then add 2 Tbl. tomato paste and 1 Tbl. chopped rosemary and simmer for another hour. Del Conte seems worried that the stew might dry out and you'd need to top up with boiling water, but I don't think that's possible with as much water as meat today gives off. In any case, my stew remained very soupy.

The meat was incredibly tender and the flavor intense but well-balanced. I served it with soft polenta, baked in the oven without cheese according to Paula Wolfert's great technique. A nice 2009 Bordeaux to accompany and you've got a great meal -- on a weekday!

Typically, and what makes this cookbook so wonderful, Del Conte got this recipe from an innkeeper in the little town of Pitigliano, where the dish appears on the menu as Buglione dell'Albergo Guastini.

More whiskey

Went back to Jack Rose to sample more of their whiskeys. I asked the bartender about the Island single malts and he said they tend to have a tangy taste because of their proximity to the sea, a bit like oyster brine. That sounded appealing so I ordered an Arran bourbon cask and found it very nice -- indeed tangy/briny. I was less happy with the Ledaig hogshead from Mull because that tanginess was missing. I would definitely buy a bottle of Arran if I see one in a store.

Switching to bourbon for a change of pace, I tried an Evan Williams single barrel that had a nice complexity and strong vanilla notes. Back to single malts, Speyside this time, I tried an Auchroich Chieftain that seemed a little thin to me, though it had nice flavors. My drinking buddy had a Benromach 18 yr that I tasted and found, by contrast, very full and rich.

These trips are undoubtedly fun but it is a hugely expensive hobby. You can sample more with the 1 oz. pour, but that is ultimately a little unsatisfying. Whether 1 oz. or 2 oz., however, you pay an average $10 an ounce. Clearly, I will have to space out my trips.

The two whiskey consultants are Aaron and Roberto, though this time we just relied on the bartender.

Chicken with cream and mushrooms

I recently ran into the friend who originally recommended Anna Del Conte's The Classic Food of Northern Italy, and she related that she had used it for a period to cook her way through several Italian regions. This reminded me that I had hardly used it even though I had not long ago promoted it to the cookbook shelves in the kitchen.

So I used her recipe for this classic flavor combination and it was very good. She calls for a chicken cut into 8 pieces (I actually did something I rarely do and bought a cut-up whole chicken so it was 10 pieces, following her direction to cut each breast in half). Then you remove the skin and rub the meat with cut lemon, brown the chicken in olive oil and put it in a casserole. Saute a finely chopped onion in butter, then add dried porcini reconstituted by pouring in boiling water and soaking for an hour, cut into small pieces. After 5 min. add about half a pound of chopped brown mushrooms. Finally, ta-da, add 10 oz. of heavy cream and some of the porcini soaking water strained through cheesecloth. Pour this mixture over the chicken and put casserole into a 350-degree oven for 30 to 40 minutes.

Great earthy mushroom flavor. We had just with sauteed broccoli, though leftovers will be served with brown rice. I'll be doing more of these recipes!

Mr. Coffee

I bought a Mr. Coffee coffee maker when they first came out and drip brew began to replace percolators. They seemed primitive and after I went to Europe and had a succession of Krups and Braun coffee makers, I thought I'd left this cheap American product behind.

My favorite in Europe was a coffee maker whose manufacturer I can no longer remember. It was said to be designed according to Norwegian specifications -- they are the biggest per capita drinkers of coffee in the world -- and what distinguished it was that it flooded the coffee with water, much as brewing by hand does, so that the grounds steep a bit.

In my latest search for a machine that makes a clean, crisp pot of coffee, I did come across a coffee maker that sounded similar but it was out of stock and no guarantee it would ever be back in stock. So I bought a Melitta with a thermos carafe. It cost a sufficient amount of money to make me think I was getting a solid product and I was curious to try a thermos.

I didn't much like it, however. It was not handy and the thermos was heavy and hard to use. The worst part was that it appeared to build up some muck in the cap of the thermos, which of course has some tricky design to open up for the brewed coffee to enter but close to keep it warm. After a couple of days, the coffee tasted muddy and I had to run an "empty" cycle to clean it out.

Back to the drawing board. I was tempted just to get the Cuisinart, which seems to be the current favorite. When I went to Macy's, Cuisinart was running a promotion that had literally pushed all others brands off the shelves. But in Beach Haven the weekend before, the rental house had a Mr. Coffee model which looked fine and brewed a pretty good cup of coffee. That particular model is no longer available, but I got the model they had at Macy's for $30.

Guess what -- at least for the moment I'm getting that clean, crisp pot of coffee. I didn't need the water filter because I now filter my own water. I'm beginning to suspect that the "cupcake" filter might actually be better than the cone. It's a trade-off having the glass carafe on a hot plate instead of the thermos, but it suits my coffee drinking habits. So until I find that perfect coffee maker, it looks like good old Mr. Coffee is going to do the trick.

Winter squash

The nature of the seasons is such that you have time to forget what a nuisance it is to fiddle with winter squash and how little rewarding it is by the time it is in season again. If you put enough butter and cream and salt and pepper into a butternut squash soup, of course it tastes good, and I will probably go that route soon. But Deborah Madison let me down with a recipe for winter squash that came out flat and insipid, and I don't think it was due to faulty execution.

It sounded great -- winter squash braised in apple cider. We got the fresh apple cider and some very fragrant rosemary from the farmer's market, and the butternut and delicata squash called for in the recipe. I laboriously hacked the butternut into cubes and the delicata into rounds as specified. I melted the butter and flavored it for 3 min. with the chopped rosemary, than added the squash and cider and water to cover and cooked until the squash was tender. However, the liquid did not boil down into a syrupy coating but remained in great abundance that not even the recommended fix of boiling it down at higher heat could not dent. The squash would have been total mush if I had continued, so I removed it with a slotted spoon. As a result, however, there was very little buttery, rosemary or cider taste, but just watery, bland squash. It would have no doubt helped if I had used a skillet instead of sauteuse, which probably just held too much liquid, but I can't imagine this really turns into syrup if you actually cover the squash with water.

Society Fair

In my constant hope to find a decent butcher in the metropolitan area, I trekked out to Alexandria to Cathal Armstrong's Society Fair after getting an email about if from CityEats. It's billed as Epicurean Emporium "Devoted to Food."

Another disappointment. It is a small, precious store that looks like a dollhouse version of a real market with a tiny bakery stand, a tiny butcher counter and a cheese display so lame you wonder why they bother. Cheese and meat both are packaged up in cellophane in such small portions they seem designed for a dieting single person. There was a fair selection of meat cuts in these miniature, package portions and we brought a couple home.

The biggest disappointment was that the premium product -- and premium prices -- were not matched by premium service. I had hoped this might finally be Washington's first beachhead in the new butcher movement because the website boasts that "we love to talk meat." The butcher who waited on us was not at all interested in talking meat with us. I had the impression we were an unwelcome interruption to his important work in the back cutting up teeny portions of tri-tip and sealing them in cellophane.

I was still hoping in spite of the unappealing nature of the store to establish a relationship in order to pre-order hard-to-find cuts for a Saturday morning pickup. This guy told us that tri-tip is too small to use for roasts (surely news to Molly Stevens, who devotes several pages to it in her roasting cookbook and to Andrea, who distinctly remembers tri-tip roasts in California) and that leg of lamb is preferable to lamb shoulder for stewing. Thanks, I can get all the leg of lamb I want at WF.

We're not buying much in the way of bakery goods these days, but we couldn't help but notice there was no bread at the bakery counter. Oh, we were told as were leaving at about 11, it will be coming out shortly. Lame, lame, lame.

Update: Regarding the meat we bought, mixed reviews. The Toulouse sausage, which we ate with pepper and onions, was quite nice, though the thin membrane burst during cooking. The pate de campagne was very good, too. The roast "beef," however, this Randall Lineback cut between veal and beef, had a funny off-taste, which may have been due to its being neither fish nor fowl, or to the skimpy bacon covering it, or to being wrapped without air in two layers of cellophane (for too long?). It was tender, but the taste was not good. Won't rush back.

Ristorante Tosca

I'd heard for some time that the pre-theater menu at Tosca was one of the best restaurant deals in town and we finally got a chance to test it late last month when a group of us met for an early dinner before some went to a performance downtown.

It's true! For a prix fixe of $38 you get three full-sized courses of really excellent food. I had the carrot-flavored pappardelle with rabbit ragu for a starter and the braised veal cheeks with polenta for a main course, ending up with the warm chocolate cake. It was all delicious, but the real show-stopper was the truffle risotto one of our group ordered and we all tasted -- out of this world (no longer showing on the new October/November menu).

The decor is bland but sophisticated and our waiter -- who afterwards talked with us about his hometown of Dubrovnik -- was excellent. The wine list, predictably, was a little pricey, but we had an excellent Tuscan Sangiovese, 2009 Rosso di Montalcino "Casanova di Neri," that was moderately priced at $60.

I would not hesitate to return for this menu again (cut-off time is 6:30) and would grab the truffle risotto if it was available.

Asian spice-rubbed pork chops

Another fusion recipe from Bobby Flay's Boy Gets Grill, and a particularly good one. I used those thick-cut Niman Ranch loin chops from WF, cooking an extra one for leftovers. The rub has the usual paprika, mustard, cayenne, salt and pepper, but adds ground versions of star anise, ginger and allspice. I only had whole star anise of I used the big mortar and pestle to grind it down. It was the most distinctive flavor in the rub, which is put on only one side of the oiled chops and grilled first to form a crust.

The accompaniment, keeping to the Asian theme, is a "wild" mushroom salad with soy vinaigrette. I like to clean and slice mushrooms (as long as I don't have to do it every day), so I got a mixed pound of cremini and shiitake (Flay also lists chanterelle and oyster with these two kinds, by way of example). It's not mushroom season and WF yet so those were my only two choices besides portobello. You sautee sliced shallot, minced fresh ginger and chopped garlic in some peanut oil, and the mushrooms and cook until tender, then stir them into a vinaigrette made of soy sauce, rice vinegar, honey, and toasted sesame oil, add some chopped cilantro and season to taste.

I got small portions of Brussels sprouts and stir-fried Asian style cabbage from the prepared foods table to have something else on the plate and it made a terrific weekday meal.

Pork tenderloin, butterflied chicken

Two more grill recipes from Bobby Flay, who livens up traditional dishes with fusion elements or adapts classic treatments to the grill.

His Grilled Pork Tenderloin with Guava Glaze is attributed to a Cuban friend and he considers it predominantly Cuban. He suggests apricot jam as a substitute for guava jelly, so that's what I used. The glaze combines the jam with Dijon mustard, orange juice and salt and pepper. There is also a "mojo" consisting of red onion and garlic sauteed in vegetable oil, then adding several cups of orange juice and lime juice with a chopped half of a habanero chile and boiling that down by half, then stirring in chopped cilantro and cumin seeds. So you grill the pork tenderloins, brushing with the glaze (save some to brush on after taking them off the grill), then slice and serve with the mojo drizzled on top. The pork absorbs much of the flavor from the glaze and the mojo rounds it out deliciously with just a little kick from the chile.

We paired this with Sarah Jenkins' Moroccan Salad, which, although it may seem an ocean removed from Cuba, was actually a very harmonious combination. The salad consisting of finely diced and chopped tomato, cucumber, yellow bell pepper, onion, parsley and cilantro, is dressed with lime juice, olive oil and ground cumin. Simple, easy, tasty.

Flay's Butterflied Chicken with Rosemary-Lemon-Garlic oil was less satisfactory. The problem here is that grilling a whole chicken in the manner described by Flay means you have all the fat dripping onto the charcoal and flavoring the meat with that burnt fat smell. Also, even butterflied, a whole chicken is hard to cook through on a grill, and not possible at all in the 25 minutes specified in the recipe. So the marinade was great and the finish with a sprinkling of Parmesan cheese and coarsely ground pepper was a nice nod to a classic Italian treatment, but we will not be repeating this recipe.

Jenkins's shaved fennel salad, dressed with lemon juice, parsley, olive oil and a big pinch of piment d'Esplette was an easy and fresh accompaniment.

Jack Rose

This place has to be seen to be believed. They claim to have the largest collection of whiskeys in the western hemisphere, and there is no reason to dispute them. They have some 1,500 whiskeys, including more than a thousand single malts.

There are helpful whiskey consultants so my out-of-town guest and I each had a flight -- three 1-oz. pours -- of single malts you will never find in a store and would have trouble finding in Scotland. They were without exception outstanding. The one cask strength was very strong, so you should be sure you have acquired that taste before ordering one of those.

The decor, which displays bottles of whiskey in floor-to-ceiling shelves on three sides, is outstanding. It was nice weather for the rooftop patio, but the menu is limited there and the view in the "dining saloon" is too special to pass up.

The New American food was fine: I had the artichoke soup special (lots of cream and salt but all right) and the pork chop, while my companion had the watermelon salad (which I sampled at it was excellent) and the risotto.

But I would return to spend some time at the bar and drink, eating only as necessary to keep tasting the voluminous assortment of whiskey. It is a very special place for whiskey lovers, and right here in DC!

Proof

Our first meal at this downtown wine restaurant was with some friends from out of town and we had a great time. We decided to share the chef's platter of house salumi and it turned out to be an inspired choice, because the cold cuts were plentiful and delicious. Plus, it's a fun thing to do.

The entrees were very good if not terribly original. I had a great lamb dish with lentils. My companions chose variously the pork chop, the salmon and a tofu "napoleon," and they all seemed very happy with them. One of the visitors ordered the cheesecake for dessert and we all ended up digging in. It was creamy -- the type you eat with a spoon -- and an excellent way to round out the meal.

The wine list was pricey and our two lower-price choices, while quite drinkable, were  not outstanding, with the Piedmont red a better choice than the Chinon. But the point is to share a bottle of wine, or two, have some great food and an enjoyable evening. The table we had was along the window and not too close to other tables, so -- a rarity these days -- it was not too noisy and we were able to have a good conversation.

In short, it's a great place to meet friends for dinner and I'm sure we'll be back for that purpose.

Roast beef

Perhaps the most distressing thing about shopping at the butcher counter at Whole Foods is when I ask the person behind the counter whether they have a top round roast and she looks at me like I'm a Martian with horns sprouting out of my head. I don't mind that English isn't her first language but I would like it if I could ask for a cut of meat and she has a clue what I'm talking about.

You can read anything you like in a cookbook about which cut of meat is ideal for a certain dish, but given the streamlined situation at supermarket butcher counters and the absence of any alternatives, you literally take pot luck when you go shopping for it. There have been a couple of sporadic attempts at setting up gourmet butcher shops in DC but their offering is even spottier than in the supermarket.

Long story short, I had to settle for what I could find on my own to follow Molly Stevens roasting technique for top round. In this case, it was a 2 lb. bottom round roast in a package. When I got home I found out of course that bottom round is much less desirable than top round. Stevens says if you attempt to use bottom round she can only recommend that you roast it very slowly and cut it very thin. In his River Cottage Meat Book, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall says bottom round is suitable only for a slow pot roast.

I counted on the WF grass-fed beef being good enough quality to try oven roasting anyway. So I salted and peppered it, seared it in a cast iron skillet as instructed by Stevens, and popped it in a 250-degree oven until it reached 125 degrees. I sliced it very thin and surprise, surprise, it was delicious.

To accompany, I used a Sarah Jenkins recipe I've been wanting to try for tahini roasted cauliflower. You just roast the cauliflower florettes at 400 degrees for 45 min. then toss them along with chopped parsley in a dressing of tahini paste, water, garlic, lemon juice. Very, very tasty. We'll do more tahini vegetables, I think.

Update: Great roast beef leftovers, too. Whipped up the horseradish sauce Stevens has in the recipe -- heavy cream, creme fraiche, prepared horseradish, dry mustard, squeeze of lemon juice, salt and pepper. Also got a nice tomato salad variation from Epicurious -- sliced tomato sprinkles with salt, pepper, capers and pieces of basil, drizzled with a shallot vinaigrette.

Roast duck with mustard-mint glaze

We stumbled upon a great little menu drawing once again on Bobby Flay and Deborah Madison. As always, I jump at the chance to use my rotisserie attachment and I love to cook duck anyway, so this was perfect. Flay recommends putting the duck uncovered in the fridge overnight to help the skin crisp up during roasting. Otherwise, just salt and pepper and onto the spit. The glaze is made of Dijon mustard, honey, prepared horseradish and some chopped up mint. You apply this the last 20 minutes of the roasting and then once more after you take the duck off the spit. Really tasty.

Madison's India-inspired chickpea salad with tomato and cucumber garnish paired perfectly with the duck. The cooked chickpeas get stirred into a panful of oil, onion and ginger with some Indian spices -- coriander, cumin, turmeric and garam masala. The garnish is diced cucumber, diced plum tomato, a diced jalapeno pepper, chopped cilantro, Dijon mustard and lime juice, spooned over the mounded chickpeas.

The sharp and spicy mustard tied the two dishes together; it was balanced in the duck with the honey and in the salad with the chickpeas.

Proof to me once again that you just can't beat good cookbooks for finding recipes. There's no way I could have searched for this combination on Epicurious. When I say "stumbled" above, it's the serendipity of random access.

Bobby Flay, Deborah Madison

These two accomplished cookbook authors are helping us with our diet. Bobby Flay's Boy Gets Grill guided us through two great meals this weekend, while Deborah Madison's Local Flavors delivered a tasty side dish.

What appealed to me about the Tandoori Cornish hens recipe was the idea of these two little hens together on the rotisserie spit. The Tandoori marinade consisted of yogurt, ginger, and the usual curry spices, and the hens sat in that overnight. They were roasted to an internal temperature of 175 degrees and served on white onion slices chilled in ice water and cilantro sprigs. We had a tomato-avocado salad with them (summer is great!). Either you take the temperature differently for these little birds than you do for a chicken, or having them breast to breast on the spit kept the breast meat from getting done, so I had to put them back in the grill for a while -- but no harm done.

The other Flay recipe was for grilled chicken breasts with a delightful toasted chile sauce. I toasted the New Mexico chiles in a cast iron frying pan, removed the stem and seeds and chopped coarsely. The chile gets cooked in a concoction of canola oil, chopped red onion and garlic cloves, coconut milk and coconut cream, then mixed in a blender till smooth, with some honey and lime juice blended in at the end. The sauce, which has a lovely red color, gets strained and served over the grilled breasts topped with chopped cilantro. Neither too hot from the chiles nor too sweet from the coconut, the dish has a nice balanced flavor.

We paired it with waxed beans cooked in salt water and then mixed in with a peeled, seeded and chopped yellow tomato and shallots sauteed in butter and oil with chopped lemon thyme (so few recipes for this herb we grow in the garden). You are supposed to drizzle a little champagne vinegar over the vegetables, which I'm sure is nice, but which I forgot to do.

Pig roast

I generally refrain from writing about meals prepared by friends because an invitation to dinner is not really about the food -- it's a generous act of hospitality and "reviewing" the actual meal would be ungracious.

But this 60th birthday party thrown by friends in central New York state was more of a public feast than a private dinner and can be an exception to the rule. The idea of roasting a whole pig has something innately festive about it and our hosts' locavore approach to the whole party made it a celebration of a lifestyle in this area.

The pig, they wrote in the invitation, was growing in a field next door and was to be expertly cooked by a neighbor. A mushroom farmer just over the hill was to supply the vegetarian option in the form of mushroom burgers. A local cheesemaker, a native of the Netherlands, was providing a whole wheel of cheese. The beer was from a local craft brewery. The corn was picked the same day at a local farm and shucked just before cooking. Flowers were harvested at another local farm.

The pig was roasted in a large rusty smoker specially designed for the purpose over dried applewood logs and kept moist with a carefully tended drip pan full of water. It roasted from 5 in the morning till 2 in the afternoon, when it was removed and expertly carved by an enthusiastic crew. The buffet table had several salads along with the carved pork and corn and cheese, the beer was excellent, the weather was perfect, the music was great and it was a real feast! Who ever thought 60th birthday parties could be this much fun?

Thai X-ing

Now that Thai is considered the hottest cuisine among foodies, according to Bon Appetit, we decided to eat at the DC Thai restaurant that gets consistently rave reviews on Yelp. It is another example of how you can run a restaurant any number of ways -- their way is decidedly quirky.

First, it is BYOB, a rarity in DC. Second, it is prix fixe with a different formula each night -- all veggie, veggie with fish option, meat-fish-veggie nights, etc. Prices are higher on the weekend and higher again for parties of 5 or more. Third, it is housed in a small row house on Florida and dining rooms are on two separate floors with service managed by walkie-talkie (have no idea where the kitchen is, maybe basement). Fourth, there are no written menus.

The food is great -- very fresh and authentic and super-plentiful. For the amount and quality of food served, it is a bargain at $40 per person (Friday nights). One thing we learned is that you should not eat every dish that is served but have at least one packed up to take home.

Our three appetizers included a soup with a cucumber stuffed with sausage meat. The broth was tangy with scallions and cilantro (as were most dishes) and probably some chiles, too. A second starter was a type of slaw that we understood to be papaya, but it was crunchy and not sweet so maybe it was something else. The third was a cold marinated beef with greens. The main courses included chicken with green beans and pork spareribs with a vegetable. The piece de resistance, however, was the salmon with pumpkin curry, an incredibly tasty dish where the spicy curry, the tender braised salmon and the soft pumpkin all harmonized to make a perfectly delectable dish. All the sauces in fact were great.

I'm sure we will go back at some point because the food is so good, and it will be interesting to see how much the menu varies with the seasons. However, we will not rush back because some of the sturm and drang that accompanies the service does distract from the experience. The walkie-talkies -- even the busboy has one -- blare more or less incessantly and are unpleasant. The service itself was very amateurish -- the food runners and busboys acted as if it was the first time they had done this (maybe it was vacation replacements?). We got all our food in a timely fashion, but it seemed touch and go the whole time. Also, the service on two floors via a stairwell that gives on to the street was a bit intrusive. You bring your own wine or beer, but if you want a wine glass, you have to bring that, too -- otherwise you just get a second water glass. Finally, there's no reason really not to have a written menu, even if it is a prix fixe at the chef's discretion with no substitutions. It would be nice to know what you're eating.

Olives & Oranges

I've often praised this cookbook by Sara Jenkins and Mindy Fox and thought it would be a good resource for our effort to eat more healthily. It has not disappointed and I used three recipes from it when we had guests over for dinner.

The roast chicken zata'ar was straightforward -- just smear a mix of butter, garlic and zata'ar spice mix under the skin of chicken, stuff onion, thyme and lemon peel into the cavity and roast at 425 for 15 minutes and then another hour or so at 350. The recipe says to roast to 165 internal temperature, but I would probably prefer to leave it in a while longer.

We accompanies with the pan-roasted asparagus that entailed frying some bacon and then roasting the asparagus in the bacon grease and topping with a hard-boiled egg pressed through a sieve and the butter-enriched grease from the pan. The third dish was yellow and red tomatoes cut into sections and topped with cilantro (or fresh coriander seeds if available) and feta and drizzled with oil and sherry vinegar.

Very Mediterranean, very tasty and a great little menu.

Dieting

I've succumbed to the inevitable and embarked on a weight-loss program. We decided to jump-start it with the Cabbage Soup diet, a quirky 7-day program that promises a loss of up to 10 lbs. In our case, it was about 9-1/2 pounds each. It is a cleansing diet based on the eponymous cabbage soup and is essentially a low-cal, high-fiber diet.

Now we are embarking on a Salad Week to keep the weight-loss momentum going. The plan going forward is to reduce portion size and to severely reduce carbohydrate and particularly gluten consumption to change our eating habits in favor of foods with a lower glycemic index.

Roadfood

The final day of our trip restored some of my faith in Jane and Michael Sterns' guide to roadside eating. All three meals were at Roadfood sites and none of them involved hamburgers, barbecue or fried chicken.

We had breakfast in Ann Arbor at Zingerman's, a quaint little deli downtown that has become a major mail-order house for gourmet food. Granted you don't need the Sterns to tell you that Zingerman's is worth a visit, it was nonetheless among their listings for Ann Arbor. I had bacon and eggs and toast -- a decisive rebuke to the over-fussy efforts at B&Bs and proof that simple, high-quality ingredients with little adornment make for the best meals.

For lunch, we made a short detour to the New Sandusky Fish Co. in Sandusky, Ohio. It also gave us the chance to check off a fourth Great Lake, Lake Erie, for our roadtrip. I had targeted this Stern recommendation for lunch on our trip out, but the timing was off. The timing this time was not great since it came after our ample breakfast at Zingerman's, but the yellow perch sandwich we shared was really worth the detour. The amazingly fresh lake water fish had a lovely sweetness. Fried in a light batter on a roll with tartar sauce, it made a simple and satisfying lunch.

Although Hancock, Maryland is getting very close to home, we opted for an early dinner at the Park-n-Dine diner recommended in Roadfood. As promised, the restaurant offered a variety of tempting home-cooked Sunday dinners. I opted for the pot roast, which, though not as good as the one my mother used to make, was quite tasty and satisfying. The pie, however, was a huge disappointment. As Andrea said, if the Sterns don't specifically recommend it in their description -- which they didn't -- it's probably not worth ordering.

I still think the Roadfood focus is too narrow, but it is certainly reliable within those parameters.

Vinology

This trendy restaurant in Ann Arbor has really good wine but the food was too fussy and complicated in a way too typical of wannabe gourmet temples.

The avowed philosophy at Vinology is to carry the best representative of each varietal -- surely an ambitious goal and open to discussion. But in fact they had some novel wines and everything we tasted was very good to excellent.

In particular, Andrea's flight of "The Whites Less Traveled" had some very crisp, flavorful wines, including one from Turkey -- who knew? My flight of reds, "When Dirt Tastes Good," was, well, a little muddier, but I got what I was looking for.

The white flight was 3 oz. each of Arneis, Riofava (Italy); Emir, Kavakledere 'Cankaya' (Turkey); and Gruner Veltliner, Turk (Austria, in spite of its name). The red flight was Pinot Noir, Arnoux (Burgundy); Cabernet Franc, Couly Dutheil ‘les Gravierres’ (Chinon); and Tinta de Toro, Familia Solana (Spain).

The food was not at all bad, just tricked out too much. The homemade burrata, for instance, was wrapped in some leathery casing and had too many herbs. A truly fresh, homemade burrata can stand on its own. I ordered the Radishes 3 Ways as a starter for the simple novelty of it, but the raw radishes were tough, not crunchy and juicy the way they should be, while the pickled radish was pretty good.

My main course, a Lombatello (hanger steak) alla caprese, was a tender enough piece of meat, but smothered in a balsamic demi-glace and some sort of pesto and surrounded by the tomato and mozzarella, while the crispy carbonnara pasta, baked into a crust, was heavy and probably superfluous. Too much stuff! Andrea's Alaska Sockeye Salmon was tasty but not exceedingly fresh. We were disappointed when our waiter said there was no ice wine for dessert, even though the online menu lists one and one of the Tripadvisor comments singled it out.

The restaurant had a warm cave (in the sense of wine cellar) like atmosphere, which was fine on a hot summer day and must be great in the winter. Service was prompt and efficient. It was full on a Saturday night and extremely noisy. All in all, especially for the novel wines, a good find.

Our first choice was Logan's, a New American just around the corner from Vinology, but when we called ahead the recorded message informed us they were on vacation just that week.

Fish boil

A terrifically simple yet oddly satisfying culinary experience, this practice of Wisconsin lumberjacks turned into tourist attraction is really a must-do for a foodie in Door County.

We went to the Old Post Office in Ephraim, one of a handful of places that do a real fish boil more or less daily. We sat on benches in a circle out back where a wood fire kept a big black kettle boiling. Earl, the "boilmaster," came out and tossed in the potatoes and onions. After a while he came back out with a big pan full of Lake Michigan whitefish, trimmed and cut into serving portions. After explaining that the fish are added about 20 minutes into the boil and that they must cook 8 to 11 minutes, he set the pan, which had holes like a steamer, into the kettle and amused us with corny puns while the fish cooked.

The dramatic moment of the fish boil is when they throw kerosene on the fire at the end, making it flame up, enveloping the kettle, and causing the contents to boil over, removing all the scum and detritus that may have floated to the top. They take the kettle contents -- boiled fish, potatoes and onions -- and serve it remarkably efficiently, with drawn butter, cole slaw and bread.

I thought the fish was great -- very fresh, with a delicate flavor more robust than from poaching. They come along and remove the center bone and the most obvious pin bones, so I encountered only one or two smaller bones. (Andrea took the fried chicken option because she doesn't like bones in fish.) The only drawback was that Ephraim turned out to be dry so there was no wine or beer unless you brought your own.

L'Etoile

L'Etoile is unquestionably a wonderful restaurant with great food, a lovely ambiance and excellent service. We had a great dinner there that was a real event for the eight family members who could attend. I would definitely go back. A special shoutout to the maitre-d, Nick, for taking my reservation well in advance of the normal time limit and thoughtfully seating us in a long booth partially shielded from other diners.

All that said, the restaurant is a bit caught up in itself. The food and service both are borderline pretentious. While my pork belly starter, a special, and the duck breast were both excellent, the menu choice was severely limited. For entrees, there was a whole branzino, a turbot fillet, the duck breast, a vegetable dish, and two steaks. Since none of us are vegetarians and my brother was grilling steak the next day, that left us with three choices for entrees. There was no pork entree, no lamb entree, no chicken entree. Why on earth not?

On top of that, the two fish entrees in this city less than a hundred miles from Lake Michigan were flown in from the Mediterranean and Chile respectively. Really?

None of this of course detracts from the actual dining experience, which was on a level equal to any place here in Washington. It's not for nothing that L'Etoile was named one of the country's top 50 restaurants by Food & Wine.

We tried all three of the entree choices available to us. I enjoyed the duck breast with creamy polenta, and my brother welcomed the chance to once again have a starter of the fresh sea scallops not available in Kansas. The turbot and branzino got a big thumbs up from those who ordered the fish. The chocolate cake and the creme brulee ordered at the table were both excellent, as well as the cheese platter, and some of us enjoyed a cognac.

The wine list, while not enormously imaginative, had a varied selection in all price ranges. Because it was Bastille Day and that was one of the reasons for us choosing a French restaurant, we stuck with the French wines and found a Muscadet and a Burgundy pinot noir moderately priced enough that we could enjoy several bottles over a leisurely dinner.

Grain-fed vs. grass-fed

During the power outage, we went with some family refugees for a nice dinner out at Ray's the Classics, where the waiter made a big point of telling us that some of the steaks on special were dry-aged and grass-fed, as opposed to the regular menu steaks, which were wet-aged and grain-fed.

So three of us ordered the "specials" -- two Delmonicos and one Porterhouse, all bone-in -- and one ordered the ordinary, a "cowboy" bone-in ribeye. It would be interesting, we decided, to compare.

So we sampled each other's steaks (I had a Delmonico). First of all, they were all delicious! The other three people all thought the ordinary wet-aged, grain-fed steak tasted better. I thought all of them tasted good, equally good, but were different. Philosophically, I think grass-fed is better. I suspect that the others -- all great steak eaters -- preferred the grain-fed because that's what we are more used to. Does it have more flavor, less flavor? Who knows? De gustibus non disputandum!

Dry-aging is generally considered superior because it concentrates flavor and creates a natural crust. Also, it usually involves superior cuts of meat. I think it may be an acquired taste in the sense you have to be willing to let go of your previous experiences.

This Silver Spring offshoot of the Virginia Ray's has never quite matched the original. The steaks are good, though in the meantime there are other places which have very good steaks at the same moderate prices. It was not a great atmosphere and the waiter, while not exactly surly, was terse and cold. The cap came when we ordered coffee and he came back to inform us they had no coffee, so sorry, their shipment didn't come in. There was the power outage and things in general were disrupted, but there were supermarkets within walking distance and there's no excuse for such a lame explanation. The desserts were also lackluster.