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Food Thread: Nice Buns, But Don't Try To Curry Favor Here!

I haven't cooked anything recently outside of my usuals, so that's just a nice picture of some tasty looking food. Aren't those buns nice looking? I usually order them when I see them, and I am usually disappointed. They are almost always served with not nearly enough of what tasty filling I wanted in the first place. They make me think of the crappy Char Siu Bao I used to get in SF Bay Area. Too much doughy bun and not enough pork.

Indian food can be incredibly good. I haven't eaten enough of it to proclaim that it is one of the great cuisines, but I have had some amazing meals in Indian restaurants. It's probably far too big a country to call its food "Indian." It has more than four times our population, and I just laugh when some idiot foreigner who writes a food blog talks about "American food."

I like the general technique of curries, and the flavors are wild and almost always pleasing. Plus, they know how to cook rice...definitely better than the Chinese!

What foreign food strikes your fancy?

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Anyone notice that eggs have gone up rapidly in price recently and are now even more than their pathetically ridiculous, economy-crushing price of a few years ago?

$7.29/18 eggs sounds suspiciously to me like inflation. Sure, there is a bird-flu epidemic that is a once in a 1,000 year 100 year 10 year several year event, but still, it is a huge increase of a staple that is hard to substitute. Maybe some of you lunatic vegans who read AoSHQ can pipe in with your wonderful replacement for eggs, but normal people can't stomach loquat puree or $12/lb melamine gel from China.

Those eggs were $4.99 just a few months ago! At this point I hope that the American people don't care about bird flu, and simply toss the bums in D.C. out on their well-fed ears.

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Pel-Freez

That's the sh*t I ate when I was a kid, and it always tasted freezer burned to my young palate. Unless you were a hunter, it was tough to get fresh rabbit in Michigan, so we were left to this crap. And to make matters worse, the company is actually not an Ag company first...it is a medical products company, and they grow millions of rabbits for various animal blood products and tissues and other stuff.

I am confident of course that they never mix the excess production that is sold as food and their biological product carcasses, because they are an American Pharmaceutical company and they would never lie to the American public.

Luckily we moved to a place with Italian butchers who carried fresh rabbit, which when grilled with a mustard sauce is pretty damned tasty!

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Our wonderful not-so-new-anymore neighbors from Texas made grilled pizza last night. I am a big fan of pizza, and the grill is a great way to duplicate (sort of) the high heat of a true pizza oven. But they grilled the dough directly on the grill, at low heat, and the results were excellent. Really fun, in spite of the rain that wasn't forecast. But really, I believe their long-range forecasts of Global Warming because they went to Ivy League schools and they are smart!

Anyway, after the dough got some color, toppings away! Lots of fresh mozzarella from a local Italian supermarket that I have never visited. But after tasting their mutz, I am now a fan! Fresh tomato, a garlic oil, and on the second pizza they added pepperoni and roasted jalapenos, which was a delicious touch!

I am officially impressed.

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[Hat Tip: Powerline blog]

No, it's not. It is axiomatic that all great breakfasts must include bacon or biscuits & gravy, and that's just American breakfasts. Those folks south of us may run a f*cked up country, but I have had some fine Mexican breakfasts.

Besides, isn't the highest expression of the breakfast steak a chicken-fried version? Doesn't anyone read the bible anymore?

That is not to say that I wouldn't eat the one up top if it were offered...it looks delicious, and topping food with a fried egg is rarely a bad idea. Maybe a slice of cake would be a bit weird. Gateau Garni D'un Oeuf au Plat?

No thanks.

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Cacio e Pepe is one of those insane Italian dishes that really shouldn't be that good. Three ingredients: pasta, cheese, and pepper, and it is one of the glories of Italian gastronomy. I have made it, with varying levels of success, but this guy seems to have a very interesting way around the fact that it is really, really hard to make!

Pasta Cacio e Pepe

Obviously he is making it in a restaurant kitchen, but still, I think his technique has real promise.

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[Hat Tip: Powerline blog]

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Good butter, and Flap Meat...whatever the hell that is...just send it, Broccolini that isn't $6/bunch, garlic...lots of garlic!, well-marbled hanger steaks and elk chops to: cbd dot aoshq at gmail dot com.

Who are those poor deluded souls who shake their Manhattans? These are the same people who drink fine bourbon with coke, and probably shake red wine with ice too.

My and the world's patience has run out. Shaken Manhattans henceforth will be banished to the land of Long Island Ice Teas and Frozen Strawberry Margaritas.

And yes, I used to demand fancy bourbon, but let's face it, $1,200 for a bottle of bourbon is just stupid, insulting, and a ghastly affront to most people's palates and wallets. I think the sweet spot is $40-$60 for excellent and interesting bottles, and bumping that to $100 gets you an incremental improvement in quality, but nothing mind-blowing. More than that and I think you are paying for hype and rarity, which may look good in your liquor cabinet, but doesn't translate to more quality in the bottle.