Dining@Large

The most fabulous pumpkin pie in the universe

2009-11-22T12:12:41Z

I woke up this morning thinking about the pumpkin pie discussion, and whether there could be a fabulous pumpkin pie. I decided if anyone could make one, it would be James Beard. Which is why I was in the basement going through my old cookbooks at 5:30 a.m.

One of my favorite cookbooks of his is Menus for Entertaining, first published in 1965. I only have it in a small paperback, and the pages are quite yellow and brittle now. Each menu is more interesting to read than the last, and the recipes are excellent (although in this day and age useless for many people because of their fat content). ...

]]> This search also led me to Amazon just now to see if Menus for Entertaining is out of print, which indeed it is. There are, however, used copies available -- some of them staggeringly expensive. But I also found a hardcover edition "Like New" for $10, which I promptly bought.

The search for the quintessential pumpkin pie so far this morning has cost me $14. I need another cookbook like I need more leaves in my yard.

Anyway, I found a Rich Pumpkin Pie recipe under Beard's menu for Thanksgiving dinner. In fact, I better give you the whole menu. It's quite unconventional, because he thinks cranberries interfere with the taste of the wine. It's expensive to make and elegantly simple, with a first course to have with cocktails and champagne. With the turkey and cheese courses, he suggests a fine Bordeaux, a Lascombes or Chateau Haut Brion, and a sweet sauterne for dessert:

Caviar or smoked salmon

Buttered pumpernickel or rye

Turkey with tarragon crumb and spiced sausage stuffing

Pan sauce with giblets

Mashed yellow turnips with butter

Salad

Cheese

Rich pumpkin pie

Now for the pie itself. I don't know how a pumpkin pie with candied ginger and cognac would go over if any children were being served. This is obviously a most adult Thanksgiving.

2 9-inch rich pastry shells [I've always had good luck making a crust with half sweet butter, half shortening; but he gives a recipe with egg as well. EL]

2 cups mashed pumpkin (canned is "ideal")

6 eggs

2 cups heavy cream

1/4 teaspoon salt

2/3 cup sugar

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1/4 teaspoons ground cloves

1/2 cup finely cut preserved or candied ginger

1/2 cup cognac

1/4 teaspoon mace

Fill pie shells with foil and beans and bake at 425 degrees for 12 minutes. Remove foil and beans.

Place pumpkin in a bowl and make a well in center. Add lightly beaten eggs combined with the heavy cream, seasonings and ginger. Blend thoroughly. Correct the seasoning -- you may want a spicier pie. Pour into the partially baked pie shells and bake at 375 degrees till the custard is just set.

Beard serves it slightly warm with cognac-flavored, sweetened whipped cream.

(Los Angeles Times photo by Kirk McKoy)

Comment of the Week

2009-11-22T00:24:39Z

Under Just when you thought it was safe to bake your holiday pies again Bob shared this great quote:

Deep (and true, IMHO) thought from Garrison Keillor two weeks ago: "Pumpkin pie is the essence of mediocrity. The very best pumpkin pie you ever tasted is practically indistinguishable from the very worst pumpkin pie you ever tasted."

Posted by: Bob | November 19, 2009 5:08 PM

I happen to like pumpkin pie, but when I eat it I'm always conscious of the fact that I'm enjoying nostalgia, not food I love. Can you really say you've ever had a traditional pumpkin pie that knocked your socks off?

(I solve the problem by making a chiffon pumpkin pie with a gingersnap crust.)

T - 5: What are you doing today?

2009-11-21T13:06:12Z

If i were cooking Thanksgiving dinner and working this week, I'd be shopping for as much I could five days in advance, making the carrot souffle and freezing it (see earlier Thanksgiving menu), cooking the cranberry sauce and cutting the bread in cubes for the stuffing.

Instead I think I'll watch the episodes of "Flashforward," "The Good Wife" and "V" I've TiVoed.

A decade of oysters and beer

2009-11-21T10:34:26Z

Somehow I missed the first nine Oyster and Microbrew Tastings; but next Saturday, Nov. 28, the 10th Annual will be held at Kooper's Tavern in Fells Point from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.

Tickets are sold the day of the event. They cost $40 and there are 100 of them.

For the price of admission you get to sample 20 different kinds of East Coast oysters and three beers from local breweries, Clipper City, Flying Dog and Brewer's Art.

Call Kooper's for more information.

Looking ahead to next week

2009-11-20T19:05:40Z

I'm taking next week off to do something I haven't done in forever: Have a week off at home. There are chores to be done, and my daughter and I have a movie list a yard long; but I'll still have time to blog with the help of some virtual friends.

I'm going to try to make vegetarian meals while she's here next week, and I'm already fighting the urge to wake up one morning early and start making stuffing for a nonexistent turkey. ...

]]> In fact, I may have to cave and get one even though only two of us would eat it, because I already miss how the whole house smells when a turkey is roasting.

The photo shows the Thanksgiving feast shuttle astronauts ate in space displayed Thursday, Nov. 20, 2008 at Johnson Space Center in Houston. Clockwise from upper left: green beans and mushrooms, candied yams, cranapple dessert, cornbread stuffing and smoked turkey.

Just looking at it makes me feel better about not cooking this year.

(AP Photo/Pat Sullivan)

Commenting, how to, part whatever

2009-11-20T16:45:11Z

I just deleted a long comment about Bicycle and Ullswater. What thirstywoman said may or may not be true, but please remember I and the Sun can't publish unsubstantiated accusations like that. Let me refer you back to the Commenting Rules. Please use your common sense.

Robert goes Hawaiian

2009-11-20T15:52:54Z

Robert of Cross Keys eats better than I do, and I'm the restaurant critic. Here's RoCK with a Free Market Friday guest post that's making me hungry. EL

This week the wife had a business lunch in Harbor East. She decided to bring me along. I was already off for Veteran’s Day, and a downtown lunch beat my original plans for the day of watching reruns of The Golden Girls on Lifetime.

My normal weekday lunch routine is going to the American Legion in the burbs. (I should say that American Legions are great places to go for lunch. Where else can you get soup, sandwich and a beer for $4?) On this day, however, I went to Roy’s, where I got some Hawaiian with a touch of the Philippines and even a little bit of Baltimore.

One of the things I like about Roy’s is that there is some discretion over the menu that allows for the chef to add some unique items to be mixed in with the standard menu items. At Roy’s Baltimore, the chef is from the Philippines; and you can see some of the culture in the menu....

]]> Philippine food is something you don’t see a lot of in Baltimore, and I don’t think you really see a lot of it in the rest of the country either. It often seems that presence of different types of Asian cuisine is either feast or famine. Obviously Chinese food is everywhere, but it is also very common to see Japanese, Thai and to some extent Korean and Vietnamese.   Meanwhile, Indonesian, Malaysian, Cambodian and Philippine foods are seldom if ever seen.

I don’t know enough about it, but it seems to me that Philippine food could be very interesting. As a general rule, countries that have been invaded and occupied often have great food. With so many foreign boots standing on Philippine soil, that country is a prime candidate for tasty fusion fare.

One of the Philippine items on Roy’s lunch menu is lumpia, which is similar to a spring roll. The lumpia here is not entirely traditional. It is filled with Kobe beef, which produces a very succulent and meaty flavor. The richness from the Kobe works well with the crispy roll and the salty black bean sauce, but I think the meaty flavor may be a little much (who said that?).   Yes, I think that some vegetables, maybe sweet onion or hearts of palm, could have balanced out the flavors in the lumpia.

Not all the dishes unique to Roy’s Baltimore location are from the Philippines. All restaurants in Baltimore are seemingly required by law to offer a crab cake, and that means that the only Roy’s to offer a crab cake is the one in Baltimore.

The ubiquitousness of crab cakes in Baltimore is not a good thing, and it is not that I don’t like them. I just don’t see the need to have them on the menu at a Hawaiian restaurant. I’m not sure if their inclusion on the menu is due to the demands of locals or tourists, but either way it is pretty lame. If I lived in the Carolinas, I wouldn't want BBQ served everywhere. If I lived in Maine, I wouldn’t need to see lobster offered all the time.

The crab cake at Roy’s is labeled as classic Baltimore, but I’m not sure how. It's not the standard mixture of mayo, mustard and Old Bay; rather there is a heavy dose of fresh herbs and an accompanying sesame beurre blanc sauce. Not all crab cakes have to be traditional, but the herbs and sesame flavors overwhelmed the crab in this recipe. Another problem was that the mixture was overhandled and packed tightly, which diminished the sweet flavor and moist texture of the crab meat.

A bridge between the unique items at the Baltimore location and the standard Roy’s menu is the bento box.   A lot of the Roy’s have bento boxes, but their contents change from each location. The box I had was a nice sampling of shrimp and vegetable tempura, Ahi tuna poke, Dynamite Snow Crab Roll and salad. Outside of the poke, which is wonderful mixture of raw tuna, avocado, wasabi sour cream and soy sauce, I’m not sure how many of these items I would order a la carte, but they worked well together.

From the standard Roy’s menu, I tried the Sunrise at Haleakala, which is a tempura roll filled with tuna, hamachi, salmon, avocado and asparagus with togarashi butter. This roll is well constructed. What I liked best was that it was a tempura roll that managed a crispy outside but a raw inside. Normally the fish ends up getting cooked or kind of cooked along with everything else.

Another standard I had was the macadamia nut-crusted mahi mahi, which along with the butterfish is probably the best thing on the menu. A tender filet of mahi mahi cooked to medium with a buttery, salty, crunchy coating of macadamia nuts. I don’t know if it gets any better.

I stick with macadamia nuts for dessert with the macadamia nut tart with vanilla ice cream. I know the favorite dessert at Roy’s is a chocolate lava cake, but I can’t understand why people would opt for that overly sweet, goopy concoction when they could have a tart loaded with macadamia nuts instead.

On the beverage side I go with Kona coffee in two different ways.   I finished the meal with a few cups of Kona coffee, which were smooth and rich. I started, however, with a few bottles of Kona coffee in the form of Pipeline Porter, which is made with it. I don’t normally drink a lot of porters, as I find them heavy and bitter, but I enjoyed the coffee flavor and aroma of this brew.

I’m going to have to make a suggestion to the Legion to have a Hawaiian lunch special.   Unfortunately, I’m not sure they’d be able to offer macadamia nuts and Kona coffee for $4. Spam and Hawaiian Punch, however, would probably work at that price point.

(Photo courtesy of Roy's)

One more reasonably priced Thanksgiving dinner

2009-11-20T11:42:03Z

I've come up with one more Thanksgiving dinner that you can probably afford, even if you can't do the $40 fixed-price menus or the hotel buffets that I mentioned in my Top 10 Tuesday.

My daughter and I stopped by the Crossroads Restaurant in the Radisson Cross Keys when she was visiting one weekend recently and had a bite to eat. (The not-so-great art is a camera phone photo by me.)

I was curious about it because I had gotten a press release about its new farm-to-table menu. ...

]]> Crossroads is a nice little restaurant -- more than a hotel coffee shop but not fancy. It's been fairly recently renovated and is cheerful and bright.

Anyway, I see that it will be serving its regular menu on Thanksgiving Day from 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., plus a turkey and trimmings dinner, dessert included. The price for the Thanksgiving dinner is $19.95 for adults, $10.95 for children (4 to 10), and kids 3 and under eat free. (Well, I should hope so. Probably on the snacks Mom brings from home.)

After 2:30 p.m., the regular menu and turkey dinner will still be served, but in the bar and lounge area, which isn't a bad place to eat. It will be open until 11 p.m.

I can't speak about the turkey, obviously, but we had a soup I liked a lot, basically roasted red pepper, cream and crab meat; a good salad; and salmon that was fresh and well cooked, but with a sauce that was on the sweet (too sweet) side.

I'd definitely chance the turkey dinner, though.

Richard reviews Cazabe

2009-11-19T21:26:08Z

Don't miss Other Reviewer Richard's review today if you like interesting, small ethnic restaurants. It sounds like a real find.

The restaurant is Cazabe, a Dominican restaurant in Jessup. It must have been a good evening if Richard enjoyed it in spite of getting stuck in traffic for 2 1/2 hours getting there.

(Lloyd Fox/Sun photographer)

Just when you thought it was safe to bake your holiday pies...

2009-11-19T19:43:02Z

...Susan Reimer tells me there's a canned pumpkin shortage again.

In other news, the Sun has a readers' cookie exchange going.

And there's a new Taste Facebook page, not that it does me a lot of good because I can't FB.

Death of an inspiration

2009-11-19T16:52:19Z

Recently I got an e-mail from a reader:

I'm an aspiring bread baker trying to work up the courage to leave my office job and begin baking full time. The Sun article on [Dale] Dugan from a few months back is taped on my wall as motivation; I will definitely apply for the position if he is still there.

The article in question was an excellent column by Rob Kasper, which unfortunately doesn't seem to be online anymore, so I can't link to it.

[Update: Community Coordinator Carla has come up with a link to the story.]

Today I got the sad news that Dugan died this morning after a short battle with kidney cancer. He was 48. ...

]]> I'll link to the obituary when there is one.

Dugan was the baker for the Charleston Restaurant Group, the most prestigious baking job in the city.

As Rob wrote:

Dugan, 48, is by his own description an old-school bread baker. He and his assistant, Carrie Goltra, bake between 200 and 600 loaves a day at Pazo restaurant on Aliceanna Street. The loaves are then distributed to the other Charleston group sites. He bakes in an oven fueled both by gas and chunks of wood that he splits with an ax.

"I spend a lot of time with my head and arms in the oven," he said. He forms the loaves by hand.

"I don't knock the guys that use machines to shape their breads, but I don't think that is really artisanal. When the Sistine Chapel was painted, he [Michelangelo] wasn't using a blow gun."

(Jed Kirschbaum/Sun photographer)

Best restaurants in Catonsville

2009-11-19T16:28:43Z

I get so many e-mails like the following one, I need to come up with a Top 10 of every neighborhood and suburb.

Let's get started with Catonsville. My first choice is Catonsville Gourmet (seafood), followed by Jennings Cafe (pub), Pho #1 (Vietnamese), Wong Gai Bi (Korean) and Ships Cafe (seafood).

Any other nominations, specifically in the categories asked for below?

My father recently moved to Charlestown in Catonsville. I would like to take him out to a local restaurant but I am not familiar with the area. Could you please recommend a nice Italian, Fish, Am food, and Chinese restaurant in Catonsville. Thank you. ...

]]> Totally off-subject (well, it does deal with Top 10s and seafood), the e-mail below his from my daughter, Gailor, with the subject line "oyster photo" said in its entirety:

Whenever you do "Top Ten Most Disgusting Photos in the History of Time," you have your pièce de résistance. There's something about the way it's hovering in space, like it could jump out of the computer at me when I'm not looking, that really freaks me out.

I don't think the color helps, either. I've never seen a pink oyster before.

(Photo of Catonsville Gourmet sign by Monica Lopossay/Sun photographer)

Untraditional, inexpensive restaurants for Thanksgiving

2009-11-19T10:59:53Z

I'm finding out that fewer restaurants are open on Thanksgiving than I thought. If you want to eat out, you have my Top 10s to consider, or the traditional lavish buffet many hotels in the area are offering. But I freely admit these are expensive options.

NotableM, I hear you.

I also realized, reading the comments under my earlier post, that not everyone wants turkey on The Day. ...

]]> Anyway, I'm going to continue to tell you about not-expensive places that will be open as I hear about them. Linda already mentioned the Eastern House on Eastern Avenue under the earlier post.

The following may not be restaurants I'd normally give a lot of publicity to; but because it never occurred to me they would be open, you may not have realized it either. They seem to me a reasonable alternative if you don't have family, don't have a lot of money, and don't want to stay home to eat on Thanksgiving.

Yes, they are chains. And in malls, no less.

M & S Grill in Harborplace

Traditional American cuisine in a setting "reminiscent of legendary eateries of the early 20th century." (Not sure what that means, but it's OK. Kind of pubby.) M & S will be serving its regular menu and a turkey dinner. Open noon to 8 p.m. Reservations not required.

Uno Chicago Pizza in the Mall in Columbia

It doesn't just have pizza, but also steaks, salads and the like -- and, of course, cocktails. No mention of turkey, though. Open 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. Reservations not required.

Champps Americana in the Mall in Columbia

Champps will offer its regular menu (I never promised you haute cuisine) as well as a Thanksgiving dinner special. Open 11 a.m. to 2 a.m. Reservations not required.

T.G.I. Fridays in Towson Town Center

The regular menu, which is heavier on seafood than it used to be, will be on offer as well as some Thanksgiving specials. Open 5 p.m. to 12:45 a.m. Reservations not required.

When I got the press release about these, Tir Na Nog, the Irish pub with New American cuisine in Harborplace, was at the top of the list. I thought it might be the most promising (see photo), but yesterday they decided not to stay open on Thanksgiving.

I hope other places that plan to be open will post below -- or if any of you hear of any, please let us know. The big problem with making up a comprehensive list is that some restaurants decide last minute to either open or close on the big day, maybe depending on whether they get any reservations. (That's my guess as to why Tir Na Nog decided so late to close.)

And speaking of last-minute decisions, Other Reviewer Richard is planning to review a restaurant that will be open on Thanksgiving Day, so you can read what he thought next Thursday morning and then decide whether to go.

(Jed Kirschbaum/Sun photographer)

What he won't be saying on his hospital death bed

2009-11-18T20:29:13Z

Think RoCK's guest post on RA was controversial? How about this one from our Shallow Thought guru John Lindner? Here's John. EL

Note: there is no known connection between the Advanced Cat Yodeling video and the following Shallow Thought. My apologies to newcomers who haven’t learned to ignore the STW videos.

Food-related things I won’t say on my hospital death bed: ...

]]> 1. I wish I had spent more time watching Anthony Bourdain reruns.

2. Nurse, would you please bring me another plate of creamed corn.

3. My this hospital serves wonderful apple sauce.

4. No, thanks, I’ve had enough morphine.

5. Does this gown make me look fat?

6. My compliments to the chef.

7. More visitors!

8. I know it doesn’t look like gravy, but it’s good!

9. Hey, who’s paying for this?

10. Oh, no thanks, I don’t want to die with gin and garlic-stuffed olives on my breath.

Just saying...

2009-11-18T18:47:47Z

If you're waiting for me to review Gutmans, you're going to have to wait awhile longer.