What are you eating?

Kim and I had a cooking lesson in Florence last year. Just the two of us and a local woman. She took us to the market to get all the ingredients, then we went back to her apartment and cooked all day. Of course we made fresh pasta the old fashioned way…mixed and kneaded by hand on her giant wood board, rolled out by hand, cut using a chitarra, the whole works. Of course it was wonderful, but when asked if she still made pasta this way, the lady so “oh hell no. No one does. We buy the dried pasta.” Apparently even everyone’s old Nonna has been buying dried pasta for 50 years. Not a bag at H‑E‑B, of course, it’s from a legitimate pasta factory made fresh, but hardly anyone futzes around with making it by hand anymore.

So today we’re making fresh pasta by hand.

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I find that the bronze-rolled pastas are pretty damn good, especially the shapes that I’m never going to make by hand. But there are some things that I simply can’t find in stores (spinach lasagna sheets, in particular), and those I make by hand (which is to say, I make the dough in the food processor and roll it out with the pasta attachment on the KitchenAid).

I’ve been reading Italian cookbooks to get hints on making fresh pasta, and one of the things all the cookbooks say is that neither one nor the other, fresh or dried, are exactly better, they’re just different. I’m not sure I completely agree, but it’s a point they keep making.

Since my exile in the woodlands is over ive been dining at a lot of the houston restaurants that end up on the best restaurants list. Elro and Tris both recently closed unexpectedly which caused a little reflection. Elro especially because i could walk to it and its linneage connection to the lost beloved Pass and Provisions.

I’m making a point to go to fewer new to me restaurants and patronizing the local ones i really love. So its taco laredo, brothers taco, and tio trompo for tacos. Cali sandwich (combo bahn mi and eggroll) for vietnamese. Home slice for pizza (and kick ass sandwiches). Riel for fine dining.

NOT arguing that these are the best…but all are in the loop and not too far from the ballpark. If you are visiting houston to catch a game (or driving in from the suburbs) you might check them out.

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It’s funny, but it seems that no restaurant will ever know because I never go there twice.

…not sure what you mean Neil. Some guesses:

  1. what does/can a “restaurant” know…?
  2. Heraclitus’ viewpoint…it is impossible to go to the same restaurant twice because both you and the restaurant have changed in minor/major ways that cause the “sameness” of the alleged reoccurrence to be a lazy mental illusion and empircally false.
  3. you don’t eat at restaurants (or rarely).
  4. you eat at an abundance of restaurants, just never need to repeat because you live in a city with incessamt opening and closing of restaurants and/or you travel.
  5. autocorrect gibberish?

I’ll stop and continue to digest tacos al pastor and un taco de barbacoa while enjoying my third and final café con leche.

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Reminds me of my aunt and uncle’s philosophy of dining out when their three kids were young. They were one of those families always on the verge of total collapse. The rules they lived by were:

  1. Eat fast
  2. Tip big, and
  3. Never go to the same place twice.
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You can’t get the “al dente” effect with fresh pasta.

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Yes…dining with young offspring is a different matter entirely. Used to take them to katz’s sometimes and followed your uncle’s tipping policy.

Now the youngest of my 4 is 16 and amazingly civilized.

One of my best dining with kids in public experiences was taking the 4 of them to the dining with disney princesses at disney world’s epcot Norwegian pavillion. My then 13 year-old-daughter is the oldest with 3 younger brothers and had a cynical and too old for this shit attitude about the whole disney world thing in general. All of the im a young woman now dad melted away when the princesses showed up.

Most of the time we ate fast food in the car or pizza pizza.

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Riel is fantastic. The head and shoulders best Ukrainian/Canadian fine dining establishment in the region. Their pierogies are the best I’ve had this side of the Danube.

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Jeff, have you not been to European Dumpling Cafe in San Antonio? Very very good.

We’ve gone through 2 of our 4 homemade “dumplings”

jamaican (meat pies)
asian, 4 kinds, (pot stickers, ish)
…now, need:
empanada (argentine)
polish

European Dumplings is about a block from my store. It’s pretty good. Nice people.

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Fatay Picante (Arabes) is my next try

I have not. Thanks for the recommendation!

I’m gonna wash my face, comb my hair and put a clean shirt on.

Then I destroy the sushi bar in about an hour.

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Isn’t that for Saturday night?

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Is this a euphemism?

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These songs know me. Finding out there are two albums of Tom Waits covers by women tells me how I’ll spend tomorrow.

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