Another variation of the "blue cheese and honey" theme is to drizzle honey onto baguette slices, sprinkle with blue cheese crumbles and toast under broiler. Very simple and always a hit!

This may help: https://www.google.com/search?q=ngò+ô...
I concur that íts most likely ngò ôm. Its most common use is probably as an herb in Vietnamese "sour fish soup" (canh chua cá)

Oh, and BTW, I fluff rice with a SINGLE chopstick, doing a "stirring" circular motion in the rice. The single chopstick has enough "presence" to move the rice around and "aerate" it, but not so much "presence" that it'd crush/smear the cooked rice. Also, the bamboo reduces scratching of the non-stick finish.

I do not have a recommendation for you since my Zo rice cooker is over twenty years old; I have no experience with newer Zo rice cookers!

I am also a bit mystified as to why you need to keep rice for "multiple days". Either your previous rice cooker is huge and holds a prodigious amount of cooked rice, or your family does not eat that much rice and therefore one rice cooker-worth of cooked rice would last multiple days. Can you cook a lesser amount? Also, I think a smaller amount of rice (and therefore lesser amount of water) will cook faster.

My wife and I eat about 4-5 Cs of cooked rice per meal, when we have rice. One meal's worth of rice cooks in about 20 minutes. When we do have left-over, it will keep on the cooker's "Keep Warm" setting for a full day or more before becoming too dried out, but will never spoil.

BTW, the Zo NSDAC10's user manual says:

"Do not use the Keep Warm mode for the following:
...
Keeping rice warm for more than 12 hours."
http://www.zojirushi.com/servicesuppo...

Another variation on the cheese/sweet theme is blue cheese and honey: drizzle honey on baguette slices, sprinkle crumbled blue cheese on top, then put under broiler or in toaster oven for a bit.

I wonder if crabs need air to breathe, like clams and oysters and mussels and such. I have read that, and in my experience, clams etc. would suffocate and die if kept in an airtight plastic bag... Open to air, they last longer.

I work in the building right behind Trento, and Trento's owner(?)/GM Donnie Damuth (ex-GM of NoRTH in The Domain) is a friend. I stopped by to say "Hi" and saw their gluten-free menu; it has about a handful of items in each.

Additional tidbits:

One of the chefs, Andreas Exarhos came from Austin's Zoot (which has re-opened at a new location on Bee Cave Rd.).

The other of Trento's chefs, Alex Kahn, is a 27-year old "kid" from nearby Westlake:
http://www.austinchronicle.com/food/2...

Finally: no, we have not eaten at Trento yet, but considering that we know both the GM's track record, and that Trento has a couple of (other) chefs from 2nd Bar/Bar Congress, we'll definitely try it soon.

I don't know what batonnets or a brunoise or tournes mean (without Google'ing). Is it still possible for me to have good knife skills? :)

OTOH, if two people can produce the same quality of cut/chopped stuff (size, accuracy, uniformity, etc.), but one does it 50% quicker, that person has better "knife skills", no?

To be fair, you also have to count the time needed to clean up the knife & chopping board versus to clean up the food processor.

For me, chopping/slicing/dicing for a meal for two means a knife wins, every time.

I only break out the food processor if I'm making, say, filling for 250 spring rolls.

If íts not a liquid, it's MOS DEF not fish sauce!!! :)

10 bucks a tray?! Wow, that's a great price!! (Well, I suppose when compared to a per-piece sushi price, *anything* is a great price!)

That's a different kind of "cream sauce"! Sounds delish!

Great idea! It'd be even more enjoyable if one like one's cab driver.

On a related note, when visiting a place we've never been to before, we usually take a half-day "city tour" of some sort to get a quick overview of the city, get our bearings, note the places we'd like to visit more later, etc. We usually ask the tour guide or driver "If *you* were taking your family out for a special lunch/dinner, where would you go?" We've found that yield much better eating places than merely asking "Where is a good place to eat around here?"

"Most of this thread is so clearly about traditional Edo-mae sushi, that in context, calling ceviche Japanese food is a tragedy."

Is calling such food "Japanese" the issue? Would "Japanese-inspired" work? Do you have a standard that qualifies food to be labeled "Japanese"? "Italian"? "French"? "Vietnamese"? Let me know so I won't piss you off again. Buddha knows, once is enough.

"And so is claiming that "right on cue" you`re going to link your pet theory about the history of how sushi relates to America with your pet favorite restaurant in Austin."

I offered no such theory. I reported something I heard ("sushi is street food"). I named my source; it'd be up to the reader to decide whether that source are credible and therefore whether to believe that they read without further research or verification.

If anybody cares, they can see from the fact that the overwhelming majority of posts on your most recent ten pages of posts are on "Japan" or "ramen" or "sushi" or "Tokyo" that you might be the more reliable source of theories and observations relating to Japanese cuisine than, say, a sushi chef whose remark is being reported firsthand.

I do, indeed, have a pet favorite restaurant here in the non-Japanese culinary backwater :-/ that is Austin. Why that would be irksome to you is quite beyond me.

"Falling back on the typical concerns about stifling creativity or the authenticity argument is fine, except if you really hang around Chowhound long enough and read around, I think you'll find that many people here are genuinely interested in what and how food is eaten in Japan, Italy, and Vietnam."

And indeed that is a great thing.

"And they want to educate themselves on that on a cultural and culinary level ..."

And *that* is great, too.

"without having it diffused through the lens of some "artist" taking creative liberties- no matter how clever they may be...not that there isn't a place in the world for such experimentation."

OK, let me know when it's safe to talk about "artists" and "such experimentation".

"...you're not going to find any of this tangerine infused oil ceviche crap like you see in that video."

I can see how watching that video one might get the impression that it's just another nouveau cuisine con-FUSION preparation, heavy on wow factor and low on actual performance. Instead of seeing the chef as an "artist", one might get the impression that he's a "con artist" trying to talk up a weird combination that does not actually work very well. There are lots of examples of that type.

OTOH, while one will probably never see any traditional Japanese-like fish preparation that includes a fruit (even tomato), I would claim that one is missing out on a lot if one regards such a preparation as "crap". It's like dismissing out of hand the possibility of putting fish sauce in spaghetti sauce, or mustard in "shaking beef". Sure, that's not "authentic" Italian or "authentic" Vietnamese. That wouldn't necessarily make it any less clever a combination or less tasty of a dish.

Recognizing authenticity is a good thing. Dismissing something out of hand for being "unauthentic" would be a bit of a tragedy.

Using your hand is not bad manner. To eat nigiri sushi pieces, that is. :) But, again, I'm not concerned about manners and etiquette as much as I am about doing things bass ackwards.

Re. "not super fancy": during a drinking/hanging out session, a sushi chef told me that indeed, sushi is "street food" in Japan, that it's only here in America that more is made of it. He was very matter-of-fact and even with his remark, not being condescending towards Americans elevating a lowly "cuisine" to new height. (This is is Tyson Cole's "sushi sensei".)

And, right on cue, here is a video (in five parts) of Uchi/Uchiko's owner/chef Tyson Cole making a suzuki ceviche. I learned a couple of new things from these videos. For instance: the tail end of a fish is the least "valuable" part because there is more muscle back there (fish swim with their tail). Also: there are several layers between the skin and the flesh of a fish; those layers carry some of the fish's body fat, and a lot of flavor.

I hope you'll find these interesting and educational as well:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tebNp7r1qw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3o1XhylO9U
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1G98JbAc8Fc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdSFBIpcQy4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cp2EbB...

At the end of the day, it's your money, and you are free to do as you wish. This thread should be regarded as not about "etiquette", but about "The Correct And Logical Thing To Do".

I don't suppose you would pay multi-hundred dollars for a hunk of truffle and then red-cook it in a vat of fish sauce and sugar? If you love fish caramel, by all means, but you might as well save yourself a lot of money and not bother with the truffle. Same idea here. Some people love soy and wasabi; I know I do. In my early sushi years, when I was much more culinarily naive, I routinely did the soy-wasabi mud bath thing. But I eventually learned, after having spent a small fortune on sushi, that I was wasting money. These days, I buy supermarket "sushi" when I want to indulge in my soy-wasabi fetish.

I used dried pasilla peppers in a chili once. I liked the flavor but next time I'd scrape & discard the seeds 'cause they remained quite tough even after having been braised FOREVER in the chili.

Cranberry-orange relish sounds like a great idea!!!

No, I have not tried that. I've only had uni at sushi places (Uchi and Uchiko here in Austin), but in many guises: on a sushi piece (by itself, with ikura (salmon roe), with shiso (Japanese herb), with quail egg yolk, on top of a piece of saba (mackerel) with vinegared shallots), in a risotto (uni risotto!), as uni powder on a corn sorbet (a dessert!), uni with marinated strawberries (an amazing combination!).

Anyway, I'd love to hear a report from you on these uni 'cause they look a bit, um..., suspect, in that tin.

Did you get it from latienda.com? Is it this one: http://www.tienda.com/food/products/s... ?

Door-style bottom freezer is not all that bizarre; we had one (one big door on top, one big door on the bottom). I find a door for the bottom freezer results in more efficient use of space than a sliding drawer. A drawer wastes room with slides, baskets, gap between basket & interior wall, etc.

That said, our current fridge/freezer is a "wide by side": <a href=http://www.epinions.com/review/Maytag... by side, but the fridge part is wider on top and the freezer part is wider on the bottom</a>. It's my favorite combination, over the traditional side-by-side and freezer-bottom styles.

We often do the same "sausages with onions and peppers" quick-dinner thing. We use balsamic vinegar.

I read through the "sushi etiquette" and while I agree that some of it belongs in the "opinion" category and not the "fact" category, one can't go very far wrong believing what's on there.

I also watched the CHOW video on "How to (Properly) Eat Sushi" and it's useful and correct information as well. I would like expand on the video's recommendation of sitting at the bar, not at a table: fish is cold, sushi rice is warm, that's why you don't want to sit at a table if you want mainly nigiri zuzhi, because by the time the pieces get made and brought to you, the fish would be kinda room temperature, or worse, warm; not good.

This is in Tyson Cole's recent book: "Uchi: The Cookbook". The book has other "tips" on eating sushi which echoes the info above: don't make a paste with soy sauce and wasabi; don't dip a sushi piece in soy sauce rice-first; don't put pickled ginger on your food; etc.

Here are a couple more:

Don't order all your sushi at once. See "cold fish, warm rice", above. A bigger order takes longer to make, and longer to eat. By the time you get to the last piece, the fish is guaranteed to be no longer cold or cool. Sit at the bar and order as you go and eat it right away.

Avoid the spicy tuna roll (unless it's a REALLY GREAT one and you REALLY LOVE it): that's how restaurants get rid of their older tuna.

Escolar is a natural laxative! :)

Tuna is actually better a few days after it was caught. It has to go through "a process of rigor mortis and loosening up", like beef aging.

It's a Friday during Lent, so it's non-meat for us. Wife suggested scallops.

I went with big scallops from Whole Foods, seared in SS pan w/ olive oil. (Next time I *HAVE* to resist the temptation to move the scallops too soon: they stick a bit; in my defense, over-cooked scallops is something even Jesus won't forgive . :) ) Served that with a salsa: equal parts diced Roma tomatoes and diced red onions and diced navel orange (Fine Cooking's "How to segment an orange": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQr9QQ...), chopped jalapeno, chopped cilantro, 1/4 tsp of zest from the orange. Add the "run off" juice from the orange (reduced to 1 teaspoon), salt, lime juice.

Next time, I'd try adding a sprinkle of fish sauce to the salsa.

I might try a strainer stock pot for reheating the pasta.

I forgot to mention that my pre-ferment lives in the fridge, so it's quite rare that it develops alcohol, but it does do that sometimes when I leave it out too long before putting it in the fridge.

I don't buy the "redistribute air bubbles" theory. I find it difficult to believe that folding the dough a couple of time will redistribute its internals. I have also found that no matter how rough or casual I am in handling the dough, it always rises sufficiently (the proverbial "double in volume") in the last rise, so "defalting the dough" has not been a concern of mine.

I subscribe more to the "redistribute yeast/food supply" theory of "punching down dough". I "punch down" my 48-hour pre-ferment two or three times by kneading it a couple of times each time. I kinda suspect that, since yeast don't have legs :) , after they have "digested" the starch in their immediate vicinity, "punching down" shift the dough around just enough so yeast cells come into contact with more starch.

I made a bunch of this fruitcake as holiday gifts:

Spiced Rum Fruitcake
http://www.finecooking.com/recipes/sp...

I substituted dried Mission figs for the dried apple.