This Aloo Palak recipe from Forkbastard Circa 2009?

http://www.forkbastard.com/node/74

Still works. Plus, I learned today that if you don't have heavy cream, you can substitute half-and-half. You just have to up the quantity by 150% and let it cook down a bit longer in the final stage.

THE MORE YOU KNOW.

I've noticed a bit of backlash around the Intenet regarding a Mark Bittman article in the New York Times entitled "Fake Chicken Worth Eating".

In it, he extolls, to a limited extent, the virtues of an extruded, soy-based chicken breast substitute from Savage River Farms. As an example, here's Tristero from Hullabaloo:

As a practical nerd, I have... a skepticism for high end equipment. Despite my love of geare, I tend to buy the minimum necessary to meet my needs. For a long time, that's meant spending $20-$25 on a few probe thermometers and stick thermometers that I've never been quite happy with, especially when trying to judge the doneness of tricky meats.

Recently, I decided to bite the bullet and see if the high end was all it was cracked up to be. And now I have a Thermapen. A proper, chefly Thermapen in fire engine red. Like this.

Right. It's been a slow winter when it comes to experimental cooking and restaurant exploration. Part of it is that most of my braising adventures got chronicled last winter, so there's no need to mention things like my scratch (OK, semi-scratch) version of my cheater banh mi chicken, which involved bone-in thighs, coconut milk, and store-bought red curry paste. Which came out insanely spicy, but good, by the way.

Good news! I finally found the goddamned SD card I use in my motherfucking Forkbastard camera that had the pictures from my ancient Peruvian experiment in it. It's a Leap Day miracle!

Hey, I've got an idea! Let's see if we can get Brasa to have sex with a taqueria, and then they can have a counter-service baby that can live in the Midtown Global Market, where it can compete for my infrequently-visited love with Manny's Tortas tortas, Los Ocampos huarachazos al pastor, and the fries from Andy's Garage.

Oh wait, fuck, someone beat me to it.

One of the founding premises of Forkbastard is that tacos are awesome. All tacos are awesome. But some tacos are more awesome than others.

Burgers! Ain't nothin' wrong with that.

I do love burgers. And the burger has gotten a lot of culinary attention over the past few years. Locally, we got Burger Jones, we got our first few Five Guys, we got some Smashburgers... even the fast food places are pretending to step up and offer better burgers.

And now we have MyBurger, down near the Whole Foods just west of Lake Calhoun, on Excelsior Boulevard. And if you've been anxiously awaiting a sort of middle ground between Five Guys and Smashburger, you are fucking well set.

Well, I'll be damned.

So Cathy's sister sent me this... thing around Christmastime. It is a roughly three inch square of, I shit you not, CHAIN MAIL. As a D&D nerd who's spent time around SCA as well, I'm very familiar with chain mail. So why did I get a square of it in the mail?

Apparently, to clean my cast-iron pans.

One of the things I like to do is pull inspiration from much better cooks than I am. If I have a fabulous dish at a restaurant, I'm tempted to try to rework it, and if I can get at least 60% of the way to a mindblowing dish, then the result is still going to be damn good.