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Oct. 25th, 2003 12:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pantryslutOK, you know you're curious. Here's the cooking meme, snitched from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
wild_irises.
You will notice a pattern here: I am not very good at picking just one favorite anything.
Favorite Cookbook: Have you seen my shelves? You expect me to choose just one?
My favorite cookbook to read, at the moment, is Eric Ripert's A Return To Cooking, but that will change. My favorite cookbook to cook from is probably Claudia Roden's New Book of Middle Eastern Food, narrowly beating out Sonia Uvezian's Recipes and Remembrances from an Eastern Mediterranean Kitchen (Uvezian is a stronger reference work). I also use Vegetarian Cooking For Everyone a lot. And when I cook Asian food, I adore Hot Sour Salty Sweet -- everything I have tried from this book has been outstanding.
Kitchen tool you can't live without: my utility knife. I love it so much that I haven't replaced it even though the tip has been chipped for five years now.
Your speciality: My friend Heather B. (who's coming into town this afternoon) told me many years ago now, "you seem to have a Mediterranean palate." I thank her every day for her insight.
Steven says, "things you've never cooked before."
Fondest food memory: Our impromptu picnic of erdbeeren (strawberries), ham, cheese, and semmeln (bread rolls) during the 1999 solar eclipse in Augsburg. (Most painful food memory: piles and piles of gorgeous, cheap chantrelles at the Munich Viktualenmarkt on that same trip -- and I with no kitchen!)
Cheap frites the night we were unexpectedly held over in Belgium, bought with our very last pocket change.
The open-faced salami and butter sandwiches that the train staff fed us on the way to Budapest out of pity after the kitchen had closed.
Mussels and salsa verde at the Ferry Plaza Farmer's Market.
Fish tacos and Zankou Chicken in L.A. (not at the same time).
The last night Ya Halla From Nadia was in business, when the waitresses gave us an entire leftover container full of baklava to take home.
I used to mourn the fact that I never got the recipe for a certain ex's spaghetti sauce, but I suspect that my tastes have changed enough that I wouldn't like it as much as my memory tells me I would.
First meal you ever prepared: I can't remember. I would have been pretty young. By the time I was 12, I was making cookies and pies (I have the honor of having *forgotten* how to make apple pie by the time I was 21), and I'd certainly managed simple food before then -- grilled cheese sandwiches, hamburgers, that sort of thing.
Nor can I remember the first meal I made from scratch. Sorry.
Best meal you ever prepared: I don't know, but my best-reviewed meal was this year's Passover seder.
One food you couldn't live without: My current existence is predicated upon peanut butter, but I suspect I could live without it.
Vinegar might be hard.
Favorite food scene in a movie: apologizing to the pork in Tampopo. Second runner-up: passing the egg from mouth to mouth, also Tampopo.
Favorite guilty pleasure food: I tried very hard to answer this question, but I'm just not very guilt-ridden. "Secretly gleeful" might capture it better, in which case: hot dogs (and their kin).
Favorite restaurant: Ya Hallah (see above) was probably my favorite restaurant, but it's closed now, and I'm still looking for someplace I like even half as much.
There's that Italian place in Munich that we ended up going to three times in one week, but as it's on another continent, that doesn't seem fair.
I still have a hankering for Taiwan's pork and pickled mustard green soup with noodles, but not so bad that I've acted upon it lately.
I give up.
Favorite quick/easy recipe: Some recipes are quick, some recipes are easy: make up your mind!
I have a different idea of "easy" than many people, too, I've learned.
But perhaps the pork and green bean stir-fry from Hot Sour Salty Sweet would qualify.
I am also unduly fond of tomato-cheddar-mayo sandwiches on wheat bread, when tomatoes are in season of course. (One last one on the counter, waiting to be eaten.)
wild_irises.You will notice a pattern here: I am not very good at picking just one favorite anything.
Favorite Cookbook: Have you seen my shelves? You expect me to choose just one?
My favorite cookbook to read, at the moment, is Eric Ripert's A Return To Cooking, but that will change. My favorite cookbook to cook from is probably Claudia Roden's New Book of Middle Eastern Food, narrowly beating out Sonia Uvezian's Recipes and Remembrances from an Eastern Mediterranean Kitchen (Uvezian is a stronger reference work). I also use Vegetarian Cooking For Everyone a lot. And when I cook Asian food, I adore Hot Sour Salty Sweet -- everything I have tried from this book has been outstanding.
Kitchen tool you can't live without: my utility knife. I love it so much that I haven't replaced it even though the tip has been chipped for five years now.
Your speciality: My friend Heather B. (who's coming into town this afternoon) told me many years ago now, "you seem to have a Mediterranean palate." I thank her every day for her insight.
Steven says, "things you've never cooked before."
Fondest food memory: Our impromptu picnic of erdbeeren (strawberries), ham, cheese, and semmeln (bread rolls) during the 1999 solar eclipse in Augsburg. (Most painful food memory: piles and piles of gorgeous, cheap chantrelles at the Munich Viktualenmarkt on that same trip -- and I with no kitchen!)
Cheap frites the night we were unexpectedly held over in Belgium, bought with our very last pocket change.
The open-faced salami and butter sandwiches that the train staff fed us on the way to Budapest out of pity after the kitchen had closed.
Mussels and salsa verde at the Ferry Plaza Farmer's Market.
Fish tacos and Zankou Chicken in L.A. (not at the same time).
The last night Ya Halla From Nadia was in business, when the waitresses gave us an entire leftover container full of baklava to take home.
I used to mourn the fact that I never got the recipe for a certain ex's spaghetti sauce, but I suspect that my tastes have changed enough that I wouldn't like it as much as my memory tells me I would.
First meal you ever prepared: I can't remember. I would have been pretty young. By the time I was 12, I was making cookies and pies (I have the honor of having *forgotten* how to make apple pie by the time I was 21), and I'd certainly managed simple food before then -- grilled cheese sandwiches, hamburgers, that sort of thing.
Nor can I remember the first meal I made from scratch. Sorry.
Best meal you ever prepared: I don't know, but my best-reviewed meal was this year's Passover seder.
One food you couldn't live without: My current existence is predicated upon peanut butter, but I suspect I could live without it.
Vinegar might be hard.
Favorite food scene in a movie: apologizing to the pork in Tampopo. Second runner-up: passing the egg from mouth to mouth, also Tampopo.
Favorite guilty pleasure food: I tried very hard to answer this question, but I'm just not very guilt-ridden. "Secretly gleeful" might capture it better, in which case: hot dogs (and their kin).
Favorite restaurant: Ya Hallah (see above) was probably my favorite restaurant, but it's closed now, and I'm still looking for someplace I like even half as much.
There's that Italian place in Munich that we ended up going to three times in one week, but as it's on another continent, that doesn't seem fair.
I still have a hankering for Taiwan's pork and pickled mustard green soup with noodles, but not so bad that I've acted upon it lately.
I give up.
Favorite quick/easy recipe: Some recipes are quick, some recipes are easy: make up your mind!
I have a different idea of "easy" than many people, too, I've learned.
But perhaps the pork and green bean stir-fry from Hot Sour Salty Sweet would qualify.
I am also unduly fond of tomato-cheddar-mayo sandwiches on wheat bread, when tomatoes are in season of course. (One last one on the counter, waiting to be eaten.)
