i want to take my hard-of-hearing dad out in brooklyn -- can you make some quiet and tasty recommendations? somewhere that serves full, sit-down meals, but any price range, any brooklyn location (i have a car), any kind of food except eastern european/german.

thanks a ton!

Barry, mike, david, thank you! I'm excited to try all three of those spots!

does it have spaghetti?

my g just woke up with a strong desire for fluffy meatballs. it's our 4th anniversary -- where in Brooklyn should I take her?

- we live in central brooklyn
- but we have a car
- the meatballs are all the romance we need -- the vibe of the place is not important
- she also loves clams

when I make yogurt I let it drain in the fridge and then drink the 12 oz or so of clear greenish yellow whey as a treat. when it's cold and there's enough to gulp down, instead of the cloudy little pools that spoil the texture of your yogurt, it's super refreshing and supposedly has a lot of riboflavin (tho I am boyfacting the nutritional part -- it just tastes bracingly good, with that kind of slippery texture that coconut water has, only sour instead of sweet).

ive been freezing the piles of spiky slop left over from whole fried porgies to make stock -- spines, tails, scraps of skin, and whatever mush and jaws are left of the heads after we are done with them. do you think it would work to make fish stock from this cooked material? or must the heads and bones be raw for good stock?
advice much appreciated.

thanks westminstress! i'll try these.

thanks jungmann -- i just did. i used too much water (4:1) but the split dal cooked quickly and i ended up pureeing it into a soup with coconut oil and some chicken fat, and ginger and garlic and a hot green pepper and tomatoes and lime... pretty good.

these are all good ideas! thank you! i was thinking too of that moist little mound of dried fish (or shrimp?) that is part of malaysian nasi lemak...

i ate some (pretty good but i think these are maybe for cooking) and tried rehydrating in cold water for a few minutes before draining and mixing into a pan of fried kale and tomatoes. they made the water bright yellow.

what recipes do you like? i want to cook some plain comforting toor dal too, but i don't have a pressure cooker. what are your favorite methods?

hey you guys, how do you use/prepare dried fish, the small anchovy-ish kind?

and can you just snack on them? i'm really hungry, so please say yes.

i have a big bag of sea king brand little guys from the desi supermarket (anchovies/ kiski / corica soborna), about an inch and a half long.

What else do you guys do with chicken fat ? I've only really used it to reheat cooked rice and to melt a bit on top of a bowl of chicken soup (delicious). Potatoes and liver sound amazing. But what else?

thimes, thanks! that's so interesting.

(and it's a plastic clamshell package, so it doesn't seem like the leaf has a handling or insulation or moisture-retention purpose, like with those little sticky rice snack bundles you can buy in chinatown)

does anyone know if the plantain leaf that came draped over the mexican farmer's cheese i just bought serves a function, or if it's just decoration?

the package says "with plantain leaf" on it, so it seems like a thing.

thanks!

i just made chicken stock, or maybe it's soup -- either way my g will be eating it with noodles tomorrow night -- using a 3-lb whole chicken, the usual vegetables browned in a little bacon fat, and a piece of kombu. i simmered it until it fell apart, more than an hour, then pulled the bird out and shredded the meat.

my question is: may i freeze the already boiled bones and/or skin for future stock, or throw them back into the strained liquid and cook them for a million more hours to release the jello, or have they already given me all they can? i've only read about using roasted or raw carcasses.

commence getting bossy about stock, soup, the distinctions between them, the insults i am committing against chicken, etc. i know i'm probably doing it wrong, and i love to be schooled about cooking. (for real.)

if dumplings may be interpreted to include pelmeni, pierogis, etc, the golden farm on church ave and e 4th st (off of the church ave F/G stop in kensington) has a good frozen and refrigerated selection -- pork, pork/beef combo, veal, sauerkraut, potato/cheese -- some of them made just down the block at church & e 5th. $3-5 for a sack of pelmeni or a dozen pierogies. the delis nearby on church do too, but golden farm is 24 hours.

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Golden Farm
329 Church Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11218

no rind, just dark red/brown meat. that sounds good, though!

thanks all. if anyone eats at these spots, report back!

thanks pbsf! i wiki'd basturma in my initial post-meaty strip research phase and it seemed like a possibility.

my g and i sometimes go to this really sweet uzbek (possibly merely russian and uzbek-themed) place in northeast philadelphia, where everything is super cheap and delicious.

one time, out of recklessness, contrariness, or lagman fatigue, we ordered their greek salad. it was not greek salad, but a pile of shredded lettuce, tomato wedges, and crumbled mild farmer's cheese. but it was really good. scattered all over it were these small, chewy, almost hard little cured meat strips. they were dark dark red, smooth, and funky/salty, more like a very dense prosciutto than like a flaky thready beef jerky. what are these things? does anyone know? i want to order them in bulk and put them on everything.

thank you !!

has anyone tried the kavkaze spots on ditmas near mcdonald ave? (one had a star of david, an american flag, and a flag i didn't recognize in the window.) what's kavkaz(i/e) cuisine like? where are some good places to sample it?

thanks!

oh man, i wish i knew which one you meant -- i live right off of church. i'll look for the sign you mentioned. there's one butcher on the strip -- might be the albanian one, but i don't want to talk smack because i'm not sure, since there's a bunch of them close together -- where i've seen the guys that work there pull carcasses with like soggy paper towels and bits of trash stuck to them off of the bare floor of a van (sometimes with pieces of cardboard box kinda unevenly covering the floor), put them in bare shopping carts and wheel them into the store. this one goat's head was jammed up against a parking meter while they pulled out the other carcasses. maybe afterward they somehow clean the carcasses (and the shopping carts, and the floor of the van). i'm sure most supermarket meat is processed just as haphazardly or worse, and maybe it doesn't really matter, since you're cooking it anyway. anyway. i'll look for that sign!

edited to add that i actually don't know how butchers usually handle whole carcasses -- i guess you gotta get a giant dead animal from wherever it's slaughtered to your store somehow.

thanks! i'm in kensington.

i haven't cooked much meat at home and i want to start. what are your favorite brooklyn butchers? i live in south brooklyn but have a car. i'd be especially grateful for suggestions about where to buy organic chicken (besides whole foods) -- but mainly i want to know your favorites.

todao, thanks. that sounds good.

i just got some & the instructions on the back are minimal -- what freekeh preparations do you like best? any tips are welcome. thanks!

thanks maria & firefly!

what's an airlock? i used a big wide-mouth jar. i weighted the cabbage down with a sterilized glass bottle filled with water -- it fit pretty snugly in the mouth of the jar, but there was a little space around it (like enough to slide a butterknife into). and the cabbage juice didn't come all the way up to the mouth of the jar, so there was some air in there. there was lots of foam from the bubbles that escaped the fermenting kraut, but i didn't see any green or red streaks.

my friend just uses a plate weighted with a rock on top of her cabbage, and her kraut smells nice. i'm so mad!

other people's homemade kraut is tart and delicious. why does my first batch smell like farts? i know the fermentation process is smelly, but the end product isn't supposed to be. maybe i should have let it ferment longer -- i couldn't wait more than a week. the only other things in there are kosher salt, nigella seeds and mustard seeds. it tastes good but smells so yucky. why why why why why?

joel, this is fantastic. thank you.