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.

Tamituesday

Painting tractor
Originally uploaded by karavshin.

Ling dropped Shannon at the airport monday afternoon. Tuesday morning, driving to work, I realized Shannon was still in the air, flying. *ouch*

It was good having her over to visit though. At lunch today with friends I asked Luke, "where's Tua-Kah ?" He looked around and gave me his sign language gesture for "not here."

Little man is now walking, tentatively. The longest I've seen him walk so far is about ten feet. He is no longer so resistent to walking. He used to plop on his ass if you tried to carry him along under his arms or hold his hand.

He's also making all sorts of babbling conversation-sound noises to himself, so I suppose that he'll be talking soon too. Ling read somewhere that at his age he should be speaking fifty words. What a joke. He probably knows fifty words, but since he chooses to skip all the one syllable words and go for the two-syllables like 'bubble' and 'tractor' it seems to be slowing his pace a bit.

I'm freed up to tag along with Ling and Luke next week for ten days in Sydney. The only problem is that three nights in a row out having big dinners and drinking plus a bad saturday sunburn knocked my immune system around and I've managed to catch a flu of some sort.

Normally this will kill us -- I get sick, then Ling does, and then Luke does. Three or four weeks later everyone is recovered. I don't want to spoil our vacation, so I went to the doctor and got a course of Tamiflu, that anti-flu viral medication. I gave Ling some too, as apparently taking it reduces the chance of her catching it from my by 92%. Relatively expensive, but well worth the cost of saving a vacation. Ling is sleeping in the other room for the time being, I've been avoiding Luke, and when we drove around today I was wearing a surgical mask. I was amazed how few looks i actually got for it.

Anyway, the dinners were worth it. Particularly saturday night's italian dinner at Valentinos. Most noted item we had there was white truffle. All the girls had generous shavings of white truffles in their olio porcini pasta. I've never had truffle like that before. The smell is truly amazing. The taste, a comparative letdown. Definitely not worth the absurdly outrageous price.

The better ingredients were the mozarellae flown directly from Milan and sardines flown, that morning, from, of course, Sardinia. The mozarella was the best I've ever eaten.

What do you get when you cross a cocaine-tooting misogynist with an alcoholic pedophile?

...a Pat O'Brien -- Mark Foley mashup!

What goes around...

...comes around

Guidelines for cooking steak to proper doneness

I'm not a fan of Morton's of Chicago restaurant (ripoff prices) but today's newspaper had an interview with their chef who explains how to properly assess doneness of steak.

Rise

Ow

Went out last night to one of the best sushi restaurants in Singapore. The meal started off typically.

Luke and his John Deere Tractor