food (condiments, fish, fruit soup)

[cellio]

Dani forwarded me this interesting article about mustard and ketchup. It's long, but I found it worth reading. Basic question: why are there entire sections in the grocery store for mustard, but there are still only a few players for ketchup? (I'm not much of a ketchup person myself; I generally find it boring. For french fries or burgers or hot dogs, my condiment of choice is brown mustard. I've also been known to dip fries in barbeque sauce.)

When I last went fish shopping the person at the counter informed me that they no longer carry grouper (a versatile fish that I like to cook with), but that what they label as "basa" (not bass) is the same fish. Google tells me that both names are used for the same fish, so I guess this means they've changed their source and the sources used different labelling. My basa fillets were a little thinner than the grouper fillets I used to get, but otherwise it seems to be indistinguishable.

This was good: take basa fillets, put in a lightly-oiled casserole (I used olive oil) and drizzle oil on top, coat with "Auntie Arwen's fish blend" (assorted herbs, garlic, onion, I think paprika), bake at 425 for about 10 minutes, then add thinly-sliced havarti cheese on top and bake just until melted.

I went surfing for a recipe for cold cherry soup (not being satisfied with the one I know) and found something that mostly worked. (Dani has previously described a cherry soup with sour cream; the key word seems to be "Hungarian".) Boil water, pitted cherries, and sugar for a while until the cherries soften; in a bowl beat cream (if the cherries are sweet) or sour cream (if not) with a little flour, stir in some of the hot mixture, and then pour everything into the pot and simmer (don't boil). Chill well before serving. The flour's job, I presume, is to thicken the broth, but even though I beat it with the cream for a while, I got little globs of flour in the resulting soup. Maybe I used too much flour? (I had non-sour cherries, so I used cream. The recipe didn't specify the type of cream; I used heavy and will probably try light next time.)

Tonight after Shabbat Dani wanted to go to Longhorn, a steak house at the waterfront (don't know if that's a chain or a local instance). They have two non-shellfish fish dishes, both salmon. The grilled salmon was very good, and the steamed broccoli was tasty and not overcooked. The seasoned fries were reasonable, though I failed to procure brown mustard for them and had to settle for yellow. I didn't see anything vegetarian on the menu, but I like salmon so I'd definitely go there again.

But next time we'll sit at a table, not a booth. This isn't the first restaurant I've been to lately where the seats in the booths are really far from the table. In some (like Gullifty's), if I sit all the way back my feet don't touch the floor. So I end up having to sit on the front of the seat, with no back support at all. I'm short, but I don't think I'm farther out than one standard deviation. Are restaurants now planning booth layouts around very large people? (Ironically, the very large people I've had occasion to observe seem to prefer tables with chairs.)

Comments

[starmessenger.livejournal.com]

The restaurant booth thing drives me crazy! I agree with Willie that it's probably a function of wall-size, but the problem seems to afflict newly-built chain restaurants much more frequently than old-timey diner booths. I think it's a function of cheap manufacturing processes.


And about the cherry soup: I was reading a kitchen science article recently about how flour works as a thickener. To make a velvety sauce with flour, you have to heat it with fat or water, to release the gluten. If it doesn't get hot enough, the flour molecules won't break down and you end up with clumps. I think the same process is at work in gelatin and cornstarch.

[cellio]

Thanks for the flour advice. Maybe the recipe I had would have worked better if I'd combined the flour with the cup of hot liquid before mixing with the cream. (I assume the point of the small amount of hot liquid is to avoid curdling the cream by dumping it straight into the hot pot.)