First get out 2 six to eight quart pots. Fill the bigger one with water 2/3rds of the way up and put it on high heat to get to a boil. This is the pot that you will use for spaghetti cooking. Set the other pot aside for now.

If you have it chop up some fresh parsley. I don’t always have this.

In a medium sized saute pan, heat up some olive oil while you slice 4 cloves of garlic. Add the garlic to the pan and saute on low heat for five or six minutes. You want to toast but not burn the garlic.

While the garlic is toasting, you have time to cut up the bacon. Gather up six or seven thick slices of bacon. Cut them into thirds and then cut the thirds into thinner strips lengthwise. When the garlic is done, remove just the garlic from the pan and add the bacon to the oil. Cook on medium heat until crispy. Drain off some of the fat, put the bacon back in the pan. Now deglaze with a bit of white wine and reduce for five minutes.

Meanwhile, cook the spaghetti. You should cook around a half a pound to a pound of pasta, give or take.

While the pasta cooks, crack two eggs into a bowl and beat them. Add salt and pepper to taste. This will not take that long, so when you are done grate about a cup or a bit more of Parmesan cheese.

When the pasta is done drain it out and then immediately mix the cheese with the eggs. Dump everything into your second empty pot (the cold one) and mix it up until the “sauce” is all over the noodles. When that it done, toss in the bacon and parsely and mix some more. Now you can gorge yourself. Oh yeah, if you are nervous about raw eggs, be careful where you buy your eggs. Or you could always wuss out and get pasteurized eggs.

I love two things about this dish.

1. You never actually have to cook the sauce, per se. You just have to mix it together.

2. It’s really a bacon and eggs breakfast on top of pasta, with cheese. How brilliant is that?

Finally, if you are more efficient, you can probably do this with only one pot and the saute pan. But this flow is a bit easier.

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/10/four-star-vegetarian-dishes-from-eleven-madison-park/

Tell me I’m wrong. For the record, comment 25 was the one that put me over the edge. There is no more foul being in the world than a vegetarian who is also a picky eater.

Here we go. Start with 4 or 5 or 6 or however many pieces of flounder filet you have. Some will be thicker than others, so make sure at least someone who is eating the fish likes it a bit overdone. Put the fish on a sheet pan and drizzle with olive oil on both sides. Then salt and pepper the fish.

Now get a dozen or so of those medium sized grape tomatoes that are so popular now. The farmer’s market is overrun with them this time of year. You can’t go wrong. Slice the tomatoes in half and throw them on top of the fish.

Do the same with limes, or some fancy herb (dill, cilantro, I don’t know).

You can also put garlic in this, but cut it up and saute it a bit first because the flounder cooks too fast to get a good roast on it.

If you want to get super decadent, put 1/2 tablespoon of butter on each piece of fish.

Heat the oven to 400. Put the pan in the oven and cook for 8-10 minutes. Less if the fish is thin, more if the fish is thick. Put the fish and the roasted tomatoes on a plate. You are DONE.

In the following picture, I also had some corn, grilled zucchini and some other tomatoes lying around so I made a second salad on the side as well.

Really this is 20 minutes. At the most. Even counting the eating.

Salt of the Earth

This place opened recently to a huge amount of hype and buzz, and I avoided it for three reasons:

1. Hard to get in anyway. I have plenty of places to go that are easy to get in to.

2. An overbearingly self-concious twitter feed.

3. I had a friend of a friend who had a poor service experience there. ‘Nuff said.

So our foodie friends finally strong-armed us into going. While it’s not entirely fair to come to hasty conclusions based on only one visit, this is my web site and I’ll do whatever I want. I was not impressed. SALT (I refuse to call it NACL) is not so much a restaurant as a narrative food experience. The entire mission of the place seems to be to tell you an epic and engaging novel-length story about how they served you food and it was fantastic! This gets in the way of the actual food service.

The problem is that the place just isn’t that good. Every dish has at least one or maybe two too many ingredients on it. The otherwise excellent beef tartare comes buried under toasted garlic and chopped peanuts. Might have worked if there was less of it … but it definitely would have worked with no peanuts at all. The diver scallops come with 3 kinds of greens, 2 different soy sauce reductions and little pieces of banana. Banana? Why?

The final insult was the “Pork Baguette.” Presumably an homage to the Vietnamese bahn mi sandwich, this dish came out with perfectly cooked pork combined with a fresh and lightly pickled mix of excellent vegetables. And then they stuffed it into a stale and chewy baguette. This is a bad move on any day. But it made me especially grumpy since I had just returned from Cupertino, CA where among other things you can get a better pork bahn mi for $3.50 instead of $15. Yes, Lucy’s sandwiches are also only $4 or $5. But her pork is not as good. Her bread isn’t stale though.

I can think of four places I’d rather go than SALT on any given night right off the top of my head, and I’ll list them here: Dinette, Legume, DISH, and Toast! So there.

A Thing to Do with Fish

Baking that filet of firm white fish in the oven? Don’t know what you want to do for sauce? Do this:

1. Cut 1 or 2 tablespoon side pats of butter.

2. 4 or 5 or 10 cloves of garlic.

3. A couple of handfuls of cherry tomatoes, cut in half.

Pile these on top of an near the fish in the half sheet pan. Bake at 400 for 10-15 or however long it takes for the fish to cook. Now you have baked fish and a roasted tomato sauce to put on it.

Short Blurbs on New and Not so New Food Places

Dinette bills itself as a pizza joint, but really you should go there for the salads and appetizers. The chef there makes the best salad dressings in the entire city. Her “green goddess” dressing in particular is something to go our of your way to eat.

Park Brugge is good. At least as good as Point Brugge and with much better wheelchair access, so it’s the new default place for that Point Brugge sort of food. They should teach Lidia’s how to make steak and eggs and Burgatory how to make fries. I like the thinner fries there better than the fatter ones at the Point.

We went to Elements once. I remember the smoked and cured meats being awesome. And I remember nothing else about the meal whatsoever. I hear the chef there left to open his own cured meats restaurant. That should be good.

Piccolo Forno has some really good risotto. Go get some.

Finally got back to Coca. I liked it a lot this time. I’d go more if it weren’t always impossible to get in.

Go get Thai food at Pusadee’s Garden in upper Lawrenceville.

Meat and Potatoes is a new place Downtown with a lot of dishes that have too much meat in them. You must go to any place that serves the marrow, liver and sweetbreads triumvirate. So go.

Smoke in Homestead has real BBQ that they serve in “tacos” that are really more like small burritos. No matter. It’s good.

New New How Lee

For as long as I’ve lived in Pittsburgh, HOW LEE (and later NEW HOW LEE) has sat at the corner of Forbes and Shady and been the sort of dive Chinese-American takeout joint that gives Chinese-American takeout joints a bad name. No more.

Sometime last year someone bought the place, rebuilt the inside and filled it with Chinese and other East-Asian people all gorging themselves on Szechuan food that is so spicy that it will melt the front of your face off. And, in something of a watershed, this place serves real Ma Po Tofu, not that bullshit vegetarian peas and carrots travesty that so many places put on the menu to appease the weirdos in the universe who don’t like pork. This Ma Po tofu is also infused with a generous amount of the Szechuan peppercorn. If you have not had this sort of peppercorn then you are in for a treat. It does something in your mouth that no other food can do. I don’t really know how to describe it. It’s like a flowery, peppery shot of Novocain. Other highlights include the Beef with Cumin, either one of the dry fried chicken dishes, the Dan-Dan noodles, and the sauteed green beans (with pork in them, dammit!).

By my count this gives Squirrel Hill its fourth or fifth genuine regional Chinese food restaurant (Rose Tea, How Lee, Ka Mei, China Star, and Sun Penang if you want to push the boundaries a bit).

Random Thought for the End of the Night

Pittsburgh still desperately needs a real ramen place. And a place with truly excellent breakfast. The other things are coming along OK though.

Anyway, with Dozen gone, you might be asking yourself, “where should I go for cake?” Four places.

First and foremost, you should go to Jean-Marc Chatellier’s French bakery in Millvale. In addition to the best croissant that I can remember having anywhere in the Eastern United States, the guy can also make a good basic cake.

Second, you should go to Vanilla Pastry Studio in East Liberty. Yes they make cupcakes. But they also make good cake and a few neat novelty items. Try their Whoopie Pies.

Third, you should go to La Gourmandine. I haven’t actually had cake here. But, the tarts and the brioche are fabulous. So you should go here anyway.

Fourth, you should get the various pound cakes they make at Mediterra. The lemon “traveling cake” is particularly excellent.

As an aside, there used to be a bakery in Monroeville whose name escapes me that make a fabulous layer cake with some sort of berry jam as a filling. That was some good cake too.

As a second aside, if Legume ever reopens, their version of the usually crappy flourless chocolate cake is actually a stupendous taste sensation.

As a third aside, there is a certain restaurant on the South Side that I like whose name you might be able to guess. In the summer they will sometimes have a mango cream filled layer cake that is absolutely worth dying or killing for. But I’m not going to tell you all the details because I want my piece first.

That’s all I have for cake. And no, I don’t think that Burnt Almond Torte is all that great. So sue me.

Obtain some nice pieces of salmon filet. I like King because it has the most tasty fat. You can pick whatever you like, but it won’t be as good. It just so happens that the Alaskan King is starting to be in season as well. Win!. Cut the filet up into portion sizes and put them in a small pan together. Season with salt and pepper. Please excuse the ghetto cell phone photo here, I thought I did better:

Let that sit for a while. Meanwhile, snap the tough ends off the asparagus and lay the spears out on a sheet pan. Douse the asparagus with olive oil, salt and pepper. Be generous. The market this day also had green garlic, so I cut that up and put it on top. Let me say: that ruled.

Heat your oven to 400F. When the oven is ready, throw the veggies in the oven. You want to cook them 10 to 15 minutes depending on how big they are. When they are half done, start heating the pan for the salmon. Add olive oil to the pan and put the salmon pieces in. Brown them well on all sides. Remove the veggies from the oven and replace with the salmon. Cook the salmon about 5 minutes per side or until they are as done as you like. I have no insight on how to tell when this happens. I know when its right for me, but that won’t help you.

When the salmon is done take it out of the oven and throw the veggies back in to reheat them a bit. You can turn the oven off and just let the asparagus sit in there. It will be warm enough.

Let the salmon rest for a few minutes while this happens. Then take everything out and plate it:

You’re welcome.

To my mind there are three things you want in a burger place. I will list them here in order of importance:

1. Good meat.

2. Fries and other side dishes.

3. An appealing atmosphere and attitude.

Now, the next thing I’m going to say will cause many in the audience to huff and puff with a general sense of disdain, because their experience may have been different than mine. But I only know what I know. In my experience, if what you are after is a really good beef hamburger with really good meat and generally well-prepared and well-served, there is only one place to go and that place is Tessaro’s.

I know that people have issues with the service there. I know that people have had issues with the kitchen there. If you are one of those people, I can’t really help you. All I can say is they serve me well every time I go there and the meat and the burgers are really still the best in the city, even with the new fancy places opening up.

Now, we can all agree that their side dishes suck. The awful excuse for “potatoes” that they serve are just shameful. But the meat is the thing, and the meat is great. Still, sides, and especially fries, can’t be discounted.

And this is where the discussion gets more complicated because the side dishes and atmosphere are where the two new places: BRGR in East Side and Burgatory in Aspinwall shine. Both have a hip young bar vibe going. Both have cool boozy milk shakes (I’ve only had the BRGR version, so I can’t comment any further). Only BRGR has good fries. Both also serve respectable beef-based hamburger sandwiches. On the whole, I think that Burgatory has better meat and BRGR is better at everything else. But neither has as good a beefy beef patty as Tessaro’s.

My conclusion is this: the meat at T’s is still the best. But the overall sandwich experience you get at the new places might be better because of their wide range of interesting toppings and sides. The Filthy-a-delphia burger at BRGR is a particularly brilliant combination.

However, BRGR loses a few points for making sandwiches out of strange patty shaped ingredients and calling them a “burger.” I guess in theory there is nothing really wrong with this, but I’m personally not very interested in going to a burger joint to get salmon, or falafel, or turkey for that matter. Turkey is a particular sore spot for me. To me, poultry is entirely unsatisfactory as a basis for a ground meat sandwich. The texture is all wrong and the fat doesn’t have great that great rush of juice when you bite into the sandwich.

Even so, the strength of the fries at BRGR more than makes up for a few weak points on the meat axis. Good fries count for a lot.

So my final order of preference is T’s, then BRGR, then Burgatory. Feel free to make your own choices. Even if you’d be wrong.

As a closing thought, I do have to give a shout out to Five Guys. Five Guys is not really in the same category as the other places we’ve discussed. It’s cheap food prepared as fast as they can do it. On its own it doesn’t really have that much character. Still, it was almost the best food that you could get near the Apple Store in Bethesda Row in Bethesda Maryland. The only place in that pathetic excuse for a gentrified outdoor mall was the great Indian restaurant my friend took me to. So, good job there.

As a second closing thought I also have to give a shout out to Little Big Burger in Portland, Oregon. They do little burgers. They do them really well. And they don’t coast on the foofiness of their toppings either. Highly recommended. Beware of the hipsters though. But if you are in Portland you already know that.

1. Not being able to follow simple directions from Mark Bittman about how to make a simple stir fry.

2. Drastically overestimating the cost of the endeavor, being unfamiliar with the notion of “amortization”.

In retrospect perhaps I was a bit unfair to the poor woman. It became clear to me that Bittman had left out a lot of important details that experienced cooks tend to take for granted. Since I am a software engineer, dealing with apparently insignificant details is my professional business, so I thought maybe I could help clear things up. So here is a simple stir fry recipe with every single possible detail included, so you can get it right the first time and then repeat it later to amortize your efforts.

You will need the following non-food items:

1. A kitchen stove with one working burner.

2. A good chef’s knife. You can get a decent one fairly cheaply at a restaurant supply store.

3. While you are there, get a 12 inch non-stick skillet as well, with a lid. Wearever makes a good one that will last you a long time.

4. One mixing bowl, medium sized.

5. A good cutting board. I like wood, but those new ones made out of recycled skateboards are OK too.

6. If you want rice, get a rice cooker.

7. A large serving platter.

You will need the following food items:

1. 3/4lb flank steak. This comes in a nice slab that is easy to slice.

2. 2 tablespoons of soy sauce.

3. 2 tablespoons of sherry, or white wine, or red wine. If you have no wine, I’m not sure what to do for you. I wonder if other booze would work. Maybe beer. Or whiskey.

4. 1 or 2 teaspoons of corn starch. You might have to buy a whole box.

5. Some napa cabbage. The best thing is to get about four of the mini-cabbages at the Chinese stores. These are the best because they are the easiest to cut up. One of the worst things, in retrospect, about the Bittman recipe was that he told you to use broccoli, which is the single worst sort of vegetable to prep for stir fry. If you can’t find those, get a normal sized napa cabbage. one will probably be big enough. If you feel like being adventurous you can also use any of the following: baby bok choy, baby chinese broccoli, broccolini, bean sprouts, or almost anything else that can be cut up small and cook relatively quickly.

6. 2 cups of rice for the rice cooker.

7. Some water.

8. Salt and pepper, a large pinch of each.

9. Optional: garlic and ginger diced really small.

10. Some cooking oil. It doesn’t really matter what kind.

First, start the rice. Follow the directions in the manual for how much water to add. Turn on the cooker.

Next, prep the steak. Usually you want to take your knife and first cut the thing in half lengthwise with the grain of the meat. The grain of the meat is easy to see. It’s made up of long vertical strips. Now take each half and carefully slice it across the grain into pieces as thin as you can make them. Put the meat in the bowl. For more tips, check out this youtube video on how to cut the beef.

Now add the soy sauce and the wine to the bowl. Mix. If you have the ginger, mix that in too.

Let that bowl sit in the kitchen while the rice cooks. If the rice has already cooked before you are done cutting, don’t worry, it will keep. Move on to the cabbage.

The cabbage is really easy. If it’s a small one, lay it down on the cutting board on its side and pretend that it’s a gigantic sausage. Now chop the sausage into rounds about an inch thick. Then cut each one in half. Presto, small pieces of cabbage perfect for stir frying.

If it’s a larger one, then peel the leaves one by one and cut each one up into little pieces. Then, when the cabbage has shrunk enough you can do the sausage thing. When you are done you should have a big pile of cabbage pieces.

OK. Now wait for the rice to cook. Go play Halo.

When the rice cooker is done, put your skillet on the stove and turn the heat on medium high to high to get it hot. While the pan heats up, add a teaspoon or two of corn starch to the meat and mix it up. When the pan is hot, add the oil and then the meat. If you are using the garlic, add it to the meat now. Turn the heat to medium high and stir the meat around. You want a constant level of smooth motion to get the pieces of meat to cook on all sides. But you can stop once in a while for a short rest. You’ll be able to tell the meat is done when it loses its red color. Around the time this happens it will also start to eject some liquid into the pan resulting in a nice sauce. At this point pick up the pan and toss the meat back into the mixing bowl.

Now put the pan back on the stove and let it get hot again. Add a bit more oil and then throw in the cabbage. Don’t overfill the pan. You need to leave room to move the veggies around. If you don’t use all of it, don’t worry, save the rest for later. Throw the pinch of salt and pepper over the cabbage and then pour in a tablespoon or two of water. You should get a nice bubbly steaming action going, and at that point cover the pan. Count to 30 seconds. Take the lid off and stir the veggies around again. Now put the lid back on again. Count to another 30 seconds and repeat. Keep doing this until the cabbage has wilted and the white parts are soft. Make sure the liquid does not burn off.

When the cabbage is done, add the meat back on top of it. Mix this around in the pan. Then turn the heat off. Put the food on the platter. Serve with rice.

Hopefully this clears up some of the details involved in making a basic stir fry dish that might have been missing from existing recipes on the Interweb. If this helps you out, let me know.

10. Chili and Cheese Beef Dog at the O. With onions.

Not much more to say about this. I think this is the best hot dog of its type anywhere.

9. General Tso’s Chicken at Zaw’s

Zaw’s is the only restaurant where I will order this dish. Their sauce is perfect. The pieces of chicken are fresh and breaded/fried to order instead of being little frozen chunks of rubber.

8. Taiwanese Chunk Chicken, Rose Tea Cafe

I have been ridiculed for saying that this is the best “Thai Food” in Pittsburgh. I don’t care. I see no reason to go to any number of mediocre Thai places in the city rather than just getting this.

7. Veal Cheeks plus Chocolate Cake for Dessert, Legume

I have mentioned this already. The best slow cooked meat I’ve ever had in Pittsburgh. Also, the only flourless chocolate cake I will eat. Simply excellent.

6. Bacon and Egg Pizza, Dinette

Dinette changes its pizzas around a lot, but anytime there is one with lardons and eggs, you have to get it. In my view, best evidence yet that there is a god is the fact that the egg and the pizza crust both take the same amount of time to become perfectly cooked.

5. Cortado or Hand Pour Coffee, 21st street coffee

The Cortado is the most perfectly balanced espresso drink that I’ve yet had. In addition, the hand drip coffee that 21st street has been doing is consistently better than any other brewed coffee anywhere. In fact it will make you question why you buy drip coffee anywhere else.

4. Lasagna, Piccolo Forno

Hand made noodles, awesome bechamel sauce, and the portion is enough to feed a small football team. Pete still thinks this is wrong but I don’t care.

3. Grilled Sardines, Dish

I’ll say it again: grilled sardines at Dish. The braised onions on the side make this dish. Their mango cake is also to die for.

2. Grilled Cheese Sandiwch, Kelly’s Bar

The canonically perfect grilled cheese. Absolutely balanced. Perfectly prepared.

1. Soup and Sushi, Penn Avenue Fish Market

This is especially yummy as a late breakfast. I suggest the Ronnie Roll as your sushi. Also particularly excellent when they have good oysters.

Honorable mentions

Bacon and eggs appetizer at spoon, the cheeseburgers at Tessaro’s, the French pastry at Chatellier’s in Millvale, the “Filthy-a-delphia” burger at BRGR (along with a Dude Abides shake), the Mexican hot chocolate at Mon Aimee, Uncle Sam’s ultra cheesesteak, and the ma po tofu at the New How Lee.

Sadly, not everyone on the Internet is that smart.

Just to prove it, the worst cook on the entire Internet “reviewed” one of the recipes, a simple chicken stir fry. The result sort of speaks for itself, but I will interject two points.

1. I thought that I no longer had the capacity to underestimate the general incompetence of others, but I see I was wrong. Two hours to cut up meat and vegetables?

2. Note how she also doesn’t understand “amortization.”

Here are my hints to aspiring cooks who are just as incompetent as the above writer:

1. Jesus, practice a little. If you can’t chop an onion in (say) a minute and a half, just give up. Go out to eat, what do I care?

2. Learn some basic life skills, like time and cost management.

3. Stop writing on the Internet. If you don’t know what a god damned button mushroom is, you should really go back to school and grow up a little before trying to be gainfully employed in the real world.

Ok I’m done.