Black Coffee (Deprecated)

Black Coffee Retired

It's time to retire Black Coffee Blog. These articles will remain, but for new updates please follow "Silver Case" blog at http://karavshin.org or resubscribe your rss feed to http://karavshin.org/feed/.

The new blog will be based on Wordpress engine and should be better looking, easier to post to, and with better features and integration with other web services.

Bye

Host Rule #1 -- reinforced

I'll never forget those ghastly, ghostly jellyfish-looking gnocchi I was served at a dinner long ago, nor the twitching faces of all the guests pretending that this wasn't a horrible, horrible meal.

I'm getting ready for the deep-fried turkey on saturday. The dishes are reasonably straightforward. I am trying to figure out some clever way to to serve the balance of the crayfish I'd frozen up as leftover from the last party.

I took the day off, tested some recipes, and reminded myself the Host Rule #1 should never be violated.

Bayou Christmas Party

Whew! It's over!

Bayou Christmas Preparation

Just back from Tokyo late Saturday night. Only seven days till I hold my Bayou Christmas celebration for twenty guests. It will be a tight schedule for the week, if I procrastinate until Saturday (party Sunday noon) I'll be dead meat. Today I practiced some new recipes and refined some old ones.

What the hell just happened to me?

Thinking about dinner today, my initial plan was another round of pizza research. However, eating another pizza didn't sound that fun, so when someone mentioned crepes, I thought, "yeah! I haven't made those since we shifted house in April."

Made a mental list for the grocery store and then thought, "gee, I am not too enthusiastic about more chocolate/strawberry and ham/cheese crepes." Then Ling's mom said something about having nice seafood crepes in Paris my interest was piqued. Then I decided a nice carmelized apple would do for dessert. I ended up doing 4x more than I expected when I woke up today. Thanks Julia Child.....

In Search of Pizza

One of the cafes we enjoyed in Sydney was Bertoni Casalinga. They manage to do something that I have always found absolutely, inexcusably appalling: reheat pizza.

I detest how disgusting NYC 'pizzarias' oven-reheat their cold slices of shit. But the people at Bertoni do it different: they start out with fundamentally good pizza (thick , fluffy crust, beautiful rich sauce, and high quality meat toppings) which they heat up in a large electric sandwich grill. It really comes out nicely.

I came home (prematurely) early last week after being the first off my table at a poker game at the "Crows Nest Club." On the way home I saw a Domino's pizza. They're the closest it comes to the type of pizza I like, so it got me hungry and I ordered one. It was ok, not great, but alright.

All this got me thinking, "I know exactly how I want my pizza to taste, so why don't I just figure out the exact formula for that?"

So that's what I started research work on this weekend.

Off to Sydney Wednesday morning

Back on the 11th of November.

Really looking forward to nine hours in economy class with a sixteen-month old.