I'm on holiday in New York City at the moment and would really like to make some Indonesian food. Do any of you Serious Eaters know where I can find Indonesian ingredients (kecap manis, sambal oelek, terasi, galanga, etc.)? I wouldn't mind ordering online, as long as it arrived promptly and didn't cost the earth.
Thanks for any ideas.
My birthday is next week (29), and I can't decide what to do for it, but I want to do something fun because my last birthday was really depressing. Do you have food-related birthday traditions? Do you go out to dinner? Do you make yourself a cake? Do you go on a pub crawl? Do your loved ones bring you breakfast in bed? Or do you lie in bed and eat chocolates and pretend the whole thing isn't happening?
Give me inspiration!
I'm sure there are foods whose enduring popularity leaves you baffled. In my case, it's fruit pies and blue cheese.
What about you?
It can be nice to experiment in the kitchen, but everyone has some beloved dishes which they feel can only be made in one way, and with which no one is allowed to tamper.
I don't want any wierd spices in my fish pie (a friend recently suggested the inclusion of ginger), and my boyfriend would rather poke out his own eyes than see a variation on the sacred combination of poached salmon, potato salad and sliced cucumbers.
What dishes turn you into a traditionalist?
Here in London it is cold and wet, and it's only going to get colder and wetter. In fact, I currently have the heating on, and am wearing woollen socks. I have exhausted all of my rainy day food ideas, and now I need some inspiration. What do you make on a cold, rainy day (that is, if all of you in the midst of a warm American summer can recall what such a thing feels like)?
Were you served lunch at school? Did you brown bag it? Did you go home for lunch?
I was served lunch at school, and it was vile. We ate 'family style,' there was no choice (although at some point they began providing jelly sandwiches for vegetarians - occasionally, when they ran out of the other kinds, with MINT jelly), there was no standard of nutrition, and lunch was viewed as a punishment by one and all. Thinking about it still makes me cringe.
What about you?
Or did you as a child? I'm thinking along the lines of 'Wednesday is Meatloaf Night!'
I particularly remember being fed Chinese takeaway beef with broccoli by my father, and also eating tinned fruit cocktail with maraschino cherries at preschool. In both of these memories, I must have been about two and a half years old (for timeframe, think late '70s).
What early food-related memories do you have?
Of course it depends on what I'm eating it with, but in general, I require piccallili, Swedish mustard (which is quite sweet) and mayonnaise.
Here's mine: I was a vegan at the time, and I had got into the habit of making 'pizza' with a toppinng of vegetables, covered with this 'cheese-like' combination of silken tofu and nutritional yeast wizzed together in the blender. It wasn't great - in fact, it was pretty revolting - but it broke up the tedium. (I will add here, as if it needed to be pointed out, that at the time I was cooking for one. Otherwise, I'd never have got away with it.)
Anyway, this tofu-nutritional yeast combo would have been merely a blip in my record of relatively sound food-related judgement, were it not for the fateful day that I went to the farmer's market and returned with a large celeriac. When I got it home, I was wracking my brain for something unusual to do with it, and I hit upon the misguided notion that it would be really delicious to make a kind of celeriac au gratin with the aforementioned tofu/yeast combo as the topping. I spent an hour lovingly slicing the celeriac, braising it (or something) and arranging it in a little pyrex dish. Then I spred the odious combo on top, sprinkled with breadcrumbs and popped it into the oven.
What emerged tasted like drinking rainwater out of a rusty bucket. It was so revolting that I've never been able to eat celeriac again - it's flavour is, for me, indistinguishable from the flavour of nutritional yeast.
Ok, that's mine. I'm not proud, but I feel a little better for having told you. What's yours?
My local in London used to do a lovely twist of orange, but singed with a flame until it was a bit caramelised. That was nice.
That corn with butter, mayo, parmesan and chili sounds fantastic to me. Why can't I have a corn man too?
I love sour bread, but I don't really love sourdough. The sour bread that I like is the northern European kind of rye bread (rugbrød, roggebrood, whatever you want to call it), which is sour but has an underlying sweetness to it as well, which goes very nicely with cheese, smoked fish, etc. In contrast, sourdough is often a bit harsh, I find. But then, I've never been to San Francisco, and it's possible that the sourdough I've tried hasn't been of a very high quality.
Yeah, the beans would make it. Plus, the egg should be fried. Fried bread is rather nice in this context as well.
I absolutely agree with HeartOfGlass! Fruit ice cream just does not do it for me at all. My favourite ice creams have chocolate in them, often in several different forms (also marzipan, but I don't think that's available in the States). I think it is partly because I am squeamish about the combination of fruit and dairy (don't like fruit yogurt either).
That said, there has been one single time that I tasted strawberry ice cream and really thought it was delicious. That was in Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen in June of 1997. My (then) boyfriend got it, along with pistachio and white chocolate. That is basically my ice cream nightmare troika, although as you can imagine, the colours were lovely. But actually all three were very intense and fresh and real tasting, the strawberry in particular. And I suppose it made an impression on me, as I still remember it eleven years later.
@czken, I'm glad that my description of Max's vile offerings amused you! It did occur to me that Max wouldn't be nearly as impressed were he to stumble across this site and read my comments (in fact, he'd be even less impressed to realise that I've made disparaging comments about his culinary technique in other serious eats posts over the years as well). Oh well, I suppose you reap what you sew - he once gave me a filled cookie, where the 'surprise' filling was a slimy lump of pickled herring!
My best friend always makes it up as he goes along, but it always involves the same ingredients: several kinds of frozen fish (prawns, cod, eel, squid, cuttlefish - all strait from the freezer and usually with a crust of snow), a packet of pre-cut, 'Asian-style' vegetables (bean sprouts, julienned red peppers, shredded cabbage - usually past expiry date), and some recently-acquired condiment in a jar that he/we have never tried before, often involving MSG and some gross secret ingredient like fermented fish guts or still beating prawn hearts. His cooking makes me sad.
There are lots of traditional Norwegian dishes, but probably not all of them you're going to want to run out and try. There are many different preparations of lamb, some of which (like får i kål, 'lamb in cabbage') are hearty and easy to love, and some of which (pinnekjøtt - dried lambs ribs steamed with birch twigs) are a bit odder. Fish in Norway is plentiful and can be wonderful, but a lot of it is farmed. Trout (ørret) is ubiquitous. The variety that you get in Norway is a bit like salmon, but more delicate. Cod is also everywhere, as is a fish called 'sei,' which I think is called 'coley' in English. Fishballs ('fiskekarbonader') are basic, good fare, made with potato flour so that they have a slightly rubbery texture. The salmon that you get in Norway will probably not be of as high a quality as you expect - at least, that has been my experience. It's still delicious, though. In the summer it's often served cold.
There are some odd foods that you might like to try, just to say you've tried them. Gammelost is 'old cheese'. I've never tried it, but it's about as Norwegian as it gets. Rakfisk is fisk (often trout) that has been fermented for several months. I've never tried that either. Tørfisk is dried fish, eaten as a snack. I have tried that, and it's oddly moreish, although it leaves an odd taste in your mouth. Whale meat is available in the supermarket, and also in lots of restaurants. My boyfriend says it's good, but he grew up with it and has a typically Norwegian indifference to its environmental implications.
Definitely make sure to try cloudberries. If you can find them fresh, great. If not, frozen also work (actually, Norwegians eat plenty of frozen cloudberries). As far as things you'd find in a supermarket (do go to a supermarket, by the way, and marvel and all of the quite basic things that it doesn't have): flatbrød - a kind of flat, crispy bread. Soured cream - Norwegian dairy products in general are very clean-tasting, but Norwegians are especially passionate about soured cream and there are several different varieties. Mustard - Norwegian mustard is very sweet. Idunn is a good brand. Mackerel in tomato is yummy and healthy. Leverpostej is worth a try also, if you like that sort of thing.
Now, Norwegian chocolate! Freia milk chocolate is really good, especially Firkløver, which has nuts in it. There are also lots of great candy bars. Troika bars have three layers: chocolate, jelly and marzipan. Yum. Mandelstang bars have chocolate, chopped almonds, and a sweet, minty sort of filling. Smørbukk are soft caramels, very good. Anthon Berg is Danish marzipan and cannot be recommended highly enough. There is also plenty of liquorice, most of it quite salty. If you like liquorice, buy some Turkisk Peppar, Swedish hard candies which are used to make an absolutely lethal flavoured vodka. Basically, you get a bottle of vodka and funnel the crushed candies into it, then run it through the dishwasher so that the candies melt and presto: salty liquorice vodka.
Oh my, just realised how long this is. If you have any specific questions then please post them. I moved to Norway in December, but I also lived in Denmark when I was a teenager, and could say a lot about that cuisine as well.
Hmmm. For milk chocolate, I like Freia firkløver and Milka (the kind with chopped nuts, although in my youth I liked the kind with the biscuit in it). For dark, I like Green and Black's Maya Gold, Cote d'Or with hazelnuts and Scharffen Berger 70%. I also like Anthon Berg marzipans, especially the kind with madeira, which takes me back to my teens.
I don't like Cadbury's anything (I find it greasy and bland), and I also don't like Toblerone, and Hershey's strikes me as quite pointless. I'm not especially fond of Lindt either, except for the kind with the orange peal and almond slivers in. That one is quite nice. My partner maintains that Rittersport is gross, but I like the one with marzipan.
@lemons: lompe is the one that you eat with a hotdog, lefse is eaten with butter and sugar. Both are thin, griddle-cooked, and made with potatoes, but lefse is the one that has all the little holes in it, whereas lompe is more tortilla-like. And yes, they're sold at newsagents, petrol stations, street stands, everywhere!
I like fresh mint! I even like fresh mint in my tea, whether it is iced or hot
majqa1966@yahoo.com.
Cherry and orange slice, on my pina colada.
I'm with the majority here... It's gotta be the lime! Thanks.
Ok, it's a toss up between olives, and a graham cracker crust.
k_cook30@yahoo.com
You're making me thirsty! I love limes as a garnish.
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