Tea Leaves

You have to give the Japanese credit for two things. They know about knives, and they know about rice. After spending more time than is actually healthy for an responsible adult lurking in the insane asylum we call the knife forums, I finally gave in and picked up the relatively pedestrian Shun Chef’s Knife. You can already tell that I am suffering from forum brain damage because I feel the need to call this knife pedestrian.
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Back in the distant past before Tony Bourdain was a TV personality jetting all over the world eating the more questionable parts of animals, I heard an NPR interview with him discussing Kitchen Confidential, the book that turned him into a TV personality who gets to jet all over the world and eat the more questionable parts of animals. He pontificated about kitchen knives, what pans you need, when to order fish and so on. Then he gave a radio recipe for something that is easy to do and makes people think you are brilliant: demi-glace.
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Here’s a dirty little secret: I am kind of a sucker for Bailey’s Irish Cream.

Yes, yes, I know. It’s too sweet. It’s a girly drink. It’s like an alcohol milkshake. It’s sort of gross. I know all these things, and I agree with them, but I still kinda like it. What can I say: i have my guilty pleasures.

But, truth to tell, I never drink Bailey’s anymore, because I am embarassed to be seen buying it. So my overactive superego has thwarted my own pleasure principle. Until now. (more…)

From time to time I try to get ribs around Pittsburgh, or anywhere in the Northeast for that matter. I am usually disappointed. Now, I like ribs in many different styles. There are the Chinese ones my mom made. There are the slow cooked barbeque ribs in the South. There are the braised ribs at fancier restaurants of various types.

Tonight I got the ribs at Tessaro’s. Normally I would only get the burgers there, but you have to change up once in a while. They were tasty and satisfying, but one thing was wrong, which is the thing that always brings me disappointment. They weren’t cooked long enough.
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Legume is a new bistro-style restaurant in that increasingly glorious food corridor of Braddock avenue between the Regent Square theaters and the entrance to the Parkway East. I was suspicious of the place because the name conjures up images of a prison run by terminally smug pot-smoking NPR-listening hippy types whose mission in life is to convince me that quinoa (it’s pronounced “keen-waaah”, apparently) is a reasonable substitute for Japanese short-grain white rice. Happily this is not the case. Despite the name, the thing to get at Legume is the meat. The vegetables are OK too, but the thing is the meat.
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