Brought to you by the letter D

Yes, alright I know that cocktail begins with a C but...

Damn the Weather

• 1 shot Plymouth Gin
• 1/2 shot Cointreau/Triple Sec
• 1 shot Sweet Vermouth
• 2 shots orange juice

Shake ingredients with ice and strain into a martini glass.

Dark Secret

• 1 shot Green Creme de Menthe
• 1 shot Creme de Banane
• 1 shot Peach Schnapps
• 2 shots cranberry juice

Shake ingredients with ice and strain into a martini glass. Garnish with a wedge of peach.

El Diablo

• 2 shots Gold Tequila
• 1 shot Creme de cassis
• 1 whole lime, cut into wedges
• 1/2 shot sugar syrup
• Ginger ale

In a collins glass, muddle lime wedges and add other ingredients. Top with ice and ginger ale, then stir.

Can you tell we're a little krazy for Korean kuisine here at Slashfood? Really, it has nothing to do with my personal agenda of making Korean food the haute cuisine of 2006 all over the world. Nothing, I swear. Can we really help it that so many Korean dishes start with the "D'" sound?

Dduk bok-kee (also "bok-ki" or "bokki") is a saute of the Korean rice dumplings called dduk. I've mentioned dduk here a few times before on Slashfood - the term refers to an entire class of foods in Korean cuisine made from rice flour, similar to noodles or dumplings. Sometimes dduk is sweet, but in dduk bok-kee, it's savory. It doesn't have to be, but it is often spicy, too.

Dduk bok-kee is a sort of homestyle Korean comfort food. Because it's more casual, it's served in Korean "cafes," similar to the way certain casual, comfort foods are served in American bars or diners. But still,nothing beats having it your way at home. Of if you use the following recipe, then I suppose it's my way.

What a silly thing to volunteer to write about but here we go...

• "An apple a day keeps the Doctor away " - meaning fruit is good for you  
• Doily - an ornamental mat made from linen or lace, later used undercakes etc, named after Doyly an 18th century London draper
• "Done to a turn" - meaning done to perfection from the days when meat was cooked on a rotating spit
• "Drum up" - from tramps' slang derived from the Romany drom (highway) where tramps would take their refreshment
• Dutch courage - from the days of the Anglo-Dutch wars, alluding to the Dutch fondness for gin and a lack of genuineness, but now fortifying the spirit or courage by having a final drink
• Three square meals a day - from the use of a square board instead of a round plate
• Trench mouth - for those who couldn't afford pewter plates a piece of wood with the middle scoped out like a bowl was used. They were often infested with worms; after eating off the "trencher," people would get trench mouth. Nothing to do with D but so interesting I included it anyway!
• Humble pie - as the master ate the better cuts of meat the servants (especially on a hunt) would be given humble pie made from the lesser cuts of deer.  

 

 

 

"Drupe" is the botanical term for a fruit with an exocarp and fleshy mesocarp surrounding a hardened endocarp that protects a seed inside. In other words, a drupe is a stone fruit. Peaches, nectarines, plums.

But be not mistaken, not all fruits that have a hard center and a fleshy outside are drupes, and fruits that you'd never guess were drupes, in fact, are. I thought I was brilliant when I thought an avocado was a drupe because technically, an avocado is a fruit, but it's not a drupe. An avocado is a berry. But there are berries that are really drupes. Blackberries and raspberries, also known as bramblefruits, are aggregates of little drupelets.

A mango is a drupe. Duh. Of course it is.

Dice a couple of mangoes, which is a drupe, a couple of avocadoes, which is a berry, a couple of tomatoes (also a berry) and toss it with cut grilled shrimp, a squeeze of lime juice, minced garlic, salt, and pepper. If you are so inclined, add a splash of tequila. Serve with tortilla chips, and I guess if you think about it, you're eating one hell of a fruit cocktail!

Last November, Australia-based company Unistraw rolled out the Sipahh, a plastic drinking straw filled with flavored "soluble beads" of tapioca. As milk passes through the straw it takes on one of four "natural" flavors: strawberry, chocolate, caramel or banana. Each serving contains two grams of sugar, which, according to Unistraw, is far less than most flavored milk products.

Unistraw recently filed a lawsuit against Nestlé, claiming that their yet-to-be-released Nesquik Magic Straw too closely resembles the Sipahh. Nestlé denies the allegations. FoodProductionDaily reports, saying that Unistraw accounts for 25 percent of the multi-million-dollar "milk modifier" market.

Australian television show The New Inventors has a page about the Sipahh, including video footage of the incredibly tranquil Peter Baron, the straw's developer.

While flavored milk seems to be Unistraw's main push at the moment, the company's website also suggests their straws could be useful as delivery systems for sports and energy products and pharmaceuticals.

If you're from LA, or know anything at all about this city, you know that downtown LA is a busy place during the workday crawling with accountants, bankers, and lawyers; but once the sun goes down, the place is a ghost town.

But in recent years, LA's downtown has been going through a bit of a revival with old high-rise buildings being converted into lofts and condos, businesses coming in, and of course, to feed the influx of people, new restaurants opening and old ones coming back to life.

If you've got a whole day free, here's how you can dine downtown from dawn 'til dusk ('til dawn again, if you're so inclined):

• Breakfast - You can't go wrong with the Original Pantry Cafe on Figueroa, that serves breakfast all day, every day. If you can't stomach textbook greasy spoon so early in the morning, there's Pentolino, one of the smaller, newer stars in the Patina universe. A breakfast sandwich and coffee from this little cafe is perfect if you're on the go in the morning.
• Lunch - Grand Central Market is a permanent structure that has been around forever. The Market is filled with the requisite produce vendors that sell fresh fruits and vegetables for dirt cheap, but there are plenty of booths that hawk food. There are Asian foods, but at this Market, stick with the Mexican since you have the rest of the day to explore either Chinatown or Little Tokyo. Mexican pastries, carne asada, carnitas, tortas and tacos, and though I'm not a fan of the stuff in general, flan. If you're really craving Asian for lunch, pop over to Chinatown to any of the enormous restaurants that serve dim sum every day: Empress Pavilion, Ocean Seafood, or CBS.
• Happy hour cocktails - I've already talked about Ciudad, the pan-Latin restaurant from the Too Hot Tamales. They have good deals on a few food items on their Happy Hour menu, but the best deal of all is their Mojito. If Ciudad is a little too trendy, head over to Senor Fish for big food, small money.
• Dinner - Nick and Stef's is a masculine steakhouse, or you can go a little more old-school American at two restaurants in the spirit of the trains that used to breeze through downtown LA: The Pacific Dining Car or Engine Co. 28. If you prefer something even more raw than than a rare steak, get sushi in Little Tokyo.
• Midnight munchies - The Diner at the Standard is on the ground floor. If you're lucky (and pretty), you might get upstairs to the bar, but there's always a cover charge, and that doesn't include the $9 grilled cheese sandwich. Of course, you can always go back to the Original Pantry, too. 

Today's Sacramento Bee featured a produce column about why seemingly good potatoes go bad quickly and begin to rot and, um, drip. According to "Produce Man" Michael Marks, lots of potatoes recently picked in the northwest might have been exposed to near freezing weather temperatures while they were being transported. The moisture in the spuds freezes and destroys the cellular structure inside the potato. This eventually leads to rapid decay, sometimes before the tubers hit the shelves, sometimes after you get them home. Marks' advice: chuck those drippy spuds and go get yourself a refund.

You haven't lived until you've let your arteries harden a bit by doing a Dutch food slideshow on flickr. Some highlights:

• uitsmijter (fried eggs on ham, cheese toast) and a kroket sandwich
• ham, tomato and cheese pankoek (pancake)
• Bread with cheese 
• Boerenkool (potatoes, kale and sausage, mushed) 

As much of America's heritage is Dutch, the photos look very much like a particularly pork- and deep-fried-focused trip into America's heartlead. All I know is, breakfast tomorrow is uitsmijter. I'll be sure to deliver a full report. 

I've always been puzzled by two restaurants next door to each other on Washington Blvd. in Culver City's new downtown. It's not unusual for restaurants to locate in the same area, and even next door to each other - look at mall food courts. But Double Dutch Dinette is right next door to another diner even though there are no other diners in the area, and the area is pretty large.

But my bewilderment only lasted until I actually ate at Double Dutch Dinette because it’s a dinette, not a diner. I always thought a dinette was a table and chairs for under $100 at Ikea, but a dinette is also “a small space usually off a kitchen used for informal dining.” That is a fairly accurate description of Double Dutch Dinette - a small informal little restaurant.

The interior is like a kitschy retro diner. The food, too, is homestyle diner-inspired, but a little more up-scale. Salads dominate the lunch menu – perfect for what I am guessing is an entertainment/studio-heavy clientele (Sony Pictures HQ and studios are all over Culver City). There is everything from simple mixed greens, to classic selections like chef’s and Caesar, to more creative or exotic choices like Beijing chicken and Thai steak. Niçoise, with albacore tuna, red potatoes, and olives chopped and tossed together is my favorite, and the Exotic chicken with apricots, feta cheese and walnuts isn't bad, though I've always wondered what was so exotic about it.

Double Dutch has sandwiches, a few hot entrees, and strictly vegetarian dishes as well, some of them dinette-y like a BLT and turkey meatloaf, and some of them not as dinette-y, like baked polenta and raspberry salmon, which is the most expensive thing on the menu at $13. The dinner menu is almost identical, only a few dollars more expensive for each item.

Double Dutch Dinette
9806 Washington Boulevard
Culver City, CA 90232
(310) 280-0991
www.jenniecooks.com/DDD/

The last time I was in my local up-scale, organic supermarket, I saw chocolate-dipped strawberries selling for $1.25 each. Sure, they were big, and they might have even had some white chocolate drizzled on there too, but a buck-twenty-five? That alone is enough inspiration for me to make them at home. Some would say that good fruit doesn't need any sort of help. I agree. The fruit I happened to have on hand, however, was a little less than spectacular, so I didn't feel the least bit bad about dipping it in some Valrhona Manjari (64%). I just put a handful of chocolate wafers into a double boiler (a bowl on top of a small pan of gently simmering water), let them melt, dipped my strawberries and orange sections and let them cool on some wax paper. I then slightly burned my fingers "cleaning" the warm leftover chocolate from the bowl.