I have not tried Mitsuwa, though I have shopped there from time to time. Excellent idea. I'll report back.

Any great places to buy fresh fish for home prep in Culver City? I'm looking for a step above what's usually offered at TJ's. I typically drive down to El Segundo and visit the Bristol Farms or Whole Foods there; the Bristol Farms in particular has excellent fish, and I've been very happy with it, but I don't always feel like making the trip down there. If I'm feeding 4 or more, I'll usually buy it from Costco, but I'd love to hear of a local spot. Would love it if Surfas put in a fresh fish counter.

I haven't tried the seafood at Sprouts because, overall, I'm not impressed with the quality of their prepared foods (this doesn't necessarily mean they don't have good fresh fish, though). I'm willing to pay what good seafood costs, so it's not so much about cheap as it is really, really fresh and good.

As someone who used to work for FOX, Jon, I tell tell you there's a significant difference in the cost of licensing professional sports content and the cost of roasting 50 chickens to see which way is "best." I don't think anyone who's a fan of America's Test Kitchen has an issue with paying a premium - just paying several premiums at every single turn to engorge the coffers of ATK.

I know I've groused about Cook's Illustrated/America's Test Kitchen/Cook's Country price gouging on Chowhound before, but today, the company took it to a whole new level. I hope anyone who's a subscriber to their web sites takes note.

It's bad enough, as many people have mentioned here and other places online, that the company essentially makes you pay for access to their content on any and every single platform: print subscription, web subscription, iPad subscriptions are all separate - and not inexpensive - fees. The $29.95 annual price for cooksillustrated.com access - which you need to make use of their "free" iPhone app - doesn't even get you access to the full site's contents. For that, you pay an additional fee of $14.95 for the "Editors' Choice" Membership, which includes a select number of recipes for their published books (many of which I've purchased as well).

Together with the separate subscriptions for both pubs on iPad, I have a total of EIGHT subscriptions and associated fees for TWO publications.

For the most part, I've swallowed the fees and told myself that, given the number of good meals I've enjoyed from their work, it's worth it. Maybe not a bargain, given all the other sources of really very good recipes online, but manageable.

Today I received a notice from the company, however, letting me know my annual membership to cookscountry.com would expire this month, and it would be renewed at "the current regular membership price of $34.95."

Nowhere do they mention that this is a price increase of 175% year over year. That's right - last year, the annual membership to cookscountry.com was $19.95. Now, it's $34.95.

Worse yet, I went online to cancel my membership so they would not automatically charge my card on file this newly exorbitant price. Despite being paid up on my last annual membership through April 5, the site cancelled my access immediately. Talk about a huge middle finger to anyone who's had it with their price gouging. It took 15 minutes on the phone with a customer service representative to reinstate my online subscription for the remaining time I'd already paid for.

Although I love the content put forth by this company, their shading marketing practices and ham-fisted pricing strategies leave such a bad taste in my mouth, it's hard to remember how good their recipes are. I'm now thinking about cancelling all my subscriptions to the various and sundry products I've already paid for and just cooking from my enormous backlog of issues (or picking up the occasional "Best of" collection, which they seem to issue every other month).

I'm sure I'm in for another similarly insane price increase for online access to cooksillustrated.com when my annual membership for that expires soon. I'll have to let that one go as well.

Or, like their rip-off online cooking school, maybe enough subscribers will cry foul that they'll come to their senses and readjust their pricing. We'll see.

To say Westside Tavern's ambiance is "decidedly shitty" because it's connected to a mall is laughable. What are you doing, having your dinner in their lobby?

Big fan of Westside Tavern as well. Have never really had a bad meal there. A consistency that rivals the Hillstone chains (which are often anchored in malls as well - not really sure what that has to do with food quality).

Recently had their poke tuna appetizer - every bit as good as the one we got at Spago in Maui, which is saying something. Their flatbread pizzas never disappoint, either.

So, I'm interested in making the Pasta all'Amatriciana from the latest issue of Cook's Illustrated. Instead of guanciale, it calls for salt pork - which I don't recall seeing anywhere that I shop (of course, it may be there, and it's a case of me not looking for it). But do the knowledgeable folks here care to suggest a good place to pick this up? And has anyone tried the recipe?

Although I tend to find their recipes as advertised - tasty, well-thought-out, nearly foolproof - I have a real problem with how they nickel and dime fans for everything. At their subscription prices, online access should be a given, not another $25. Separate fees and memberships for ATK, Cook's Illustrated, and Cook's Country add up quickly, before you even figure in the cost of the books or special issues like "Cooking for Two."

I took a look at the intro lesson for the online cooking school on knife skills. Some handy tips, but nothing extraordinary. "Keep your knives sharp and curl your fingers under" is hardly the kind of teaching that will revolutionize your abilities in the kitchen. I imagine they feel the lesson casts the school in the best light; why offer it as the sample class if not?

To then browse the "course catalog" and see the kind of prices they're charging - um, wow. Seriously? In this economy? Major turn-off. Either their sweet-spot demo is a rich, bored housewife with a whole lot of time and money on her hands or they've seriously miscalibrated the market. I have a sneaking suspicion it has to do with Christopher Kimball. You can tell by the way the other cooks interact with him on the TV shows that they can barely stand him, and I have a feeling his attitude is essentially he knows everything and to hell with the rest of the world.

Oh, and if I have to read one more misty-eyed letter from the editor written by him, I'm gonna lose it. It's the exact same premise every month: essentially, cooking is a homey art that takes us back to simpler times, when kids rans through tall fields of grass under endless blue skies, grandmas left pies to cool on windowsills, and everything - even presumably women's lack of status or voice, abject abuses of civil rights, and the Cold War - was just peachy.

While I agree the perfect solution is not here yet, it would be remiss not to mention something exciting that hopefully isn't that far away:

http://flickr.com/photos/mydreamapp/s...

The My Dream App competition ended long enough ago that this is beginning to feel like vaporware, but I guess good software takes longer to design than crappy, overproduced albums take to produce. So, hopefully it'll be worth the wait.

Doesn't look like nutritional analysis is part of the mix, but when something is this darn pretty, do you really care what's going on upstairs?

Just to report that the Costco in Marina del Rey had it this weekend... vaguely remembered reading raves of it here so picked up a bottle. Wish I'd picked up more than one now, as everyone is right - this is great stuff. Only minor complaint is that the bottle is so tall -- not the easiest to store for those of us with normal-sized, already-stocked freezers but found a way to make it work. I'm a fan of Ketel One and Grey Goose, but for the price, this has got them beat hands down.

I am a bit of a soup fanatic; would probably eat it every day for lunch if I could find enough variety. Until the end of November, I worked in Fox Plaza in Century City (2121 Avenue of the Americas), and there's a Trimana in the basement. On the whole, Trimana's pretty uninspired from a culinary standpoint -- not nearly as good as the Lemon Moon outpost it replaced after Lemon Moon had been open only a few months -- but I will give them their due when it comes to soup -- I never had a soup I didn't like, and they always offered a minimum of six. Particularly good were the chicken tortilla, tomato bisque, corn chowder, and turkey chili. I can't vouch for the quality at each and every Trimana -- but once you've got a good soup recipe, it's pretty hard to mess up, right?