• It can go very, very hot so I can sear/grill nice steaks (like Steve of Let’s Meat serves up here in Del Ray) quickly and with that great combo of crispy outside and still-pink inside that I always found tough with my old gaser
• Something about ceramic (as opposed to metal) means everything stays much more moist.  So even when I overcook stuff I’m less salty about it because the meat is still very juicy and flavorful.
• It gave me an excuse to bust out the tools and build this cool table-home for the egg.  Got the plans from Naked Whiz, one of the many great Egg sites that have popped for the love of Green Egg Grilling (like, umm, you guessed it… www.greenegggrilling.com)

Next up, starting to use some of the cool accessories to venture beyond straight up red meat cookery.  Today I took my first shot at plank cooking some seafood on a piece of cedar.  Fun and adds a great flavor.  Next it’s on to using it as brick oven for some pizzas.  The apocalypse and inescapable middle age will be fully upon me when I start waxing poetic about the grilled Thanksgiving turkey… baby steps….

I got my Egg at Village Hardware (limited site but has address, etc.) down on Fort Hunt Rd.  Deserves a post all to itself.  But suffice it to say that in the era of awful big box places with tons of stuff but no help, this family hardware store is a revelation.  Still plenty of stuff, but with tons of help.  If you’re thinking of an Egg (or any other grill), make a trip to Village Hardware.  They have a whole showroom in the basement, really knowledgeable folks to point you in the right direction, and there’s no chance of the soul-killing, spend 45 minutes but still not find what you need Home Depot visit that’s ruined many a Saturday morn.

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We took a swing at these hassles by signing up for milk delivery from South Mountain Creamery when they first started delivering to Del Ray and we’re hooked.  Pretty simple.  Sign up online, they deliver yummy milk on Mondays in sturdy glass bottles and pick up your empties from the week before.  In the summer you leave a cooler outside on the morning of delivery to keep your new supply chilly until you can grab it.

It’s $3.25 a half gallon, compared to $3.89 a half gallon for organic – which is what we buy from the store.  We buy 4 a week, so the lower price almost covers the 3.75 delivery charge, but for me the extra dollar is a small price to pay for the convenience, the good product and the little throwback pleasure of delivery from the man in the truck painted like a cow. The farm isn’t certified organic, but they don’t do growth hormones and they don’t do antibiotics as a matter of course.  The milk tastes like real milk from real live cows and I love that we’re both supporting a local farm, and not throwing away 200 plus cardboard cartons a year.

Plus we get coffee, butter yogurt, cheese, bread, and locally raised meats occasionally.   They even offer prepared foods, though we haven’t ventured there yet.  So far their blog is a largely missed opportunity (some  interesting stuff, very sporadic…write more SMC!) but that’s a small gripe.

Combine milk delivery with our Soda water maker (I’ll write about that some day too… awesome) and we’ve pretty much eliminated lots of trips, bag lugging and disposable containers for the two beverages we drink most before 6pm.

Now if we could just figure out beer delivery or an instant wine machine.

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Windsor Avenue Nog

• 12 eggs – pasteurized if you want to remove the thrilling risk of Salmonella, though the sprits in these quantities will likely do that for you too.
• 6oz (3/4 cup) sugar
• 1 pint of Bourbon
• 4 oz. brandy
• 4 oz. rum
• 1pt. milk
• 8 oz. heavy/whipping cream
• Nutmeg for grating over finished product

Set up – Ideally Holiday Party or Christmas Eve.  Get yourself a nice open space cleared, ideally with seating for your co-conspirators.  Hand mixer at the ready.  3 big mixing bowls out, few wooden spoons, plus big punch bowl and ladle to receive your final creation.  Tasty beverage in hand.  Xmas music playing.  Some scrap of red in your outfit somewhere.  And a few guest/family helpers around to pitch in and gab during construction.

Steps –

1. Separate egg yolks and whites into two separate bowls  (yolks in the biggest one since everything goes back in there for mixing)…..
   1. Taking great care and attempting to adhere to family myth that even one molecule of egg yolk will prevent egg whites from whisking stiffly (however proceed even if terrible comingling occurs because somehow it still works).
2. Beat the yolks with sugar until light yellow
3. Pour all booze (trickled slowly) over the yellows to “cook” them
4. Whip heavy cream in separate bowl until you get peaks when you pull the mixer blades out
5. Wash mixing blades to within inch of life…..
   1. Taking great care and attempting to adhere to family myth that even one molecule of any foreign substance will prevent egg whites from whisking stiffly (however proceed even if terrible comingling occurs because somehow it still works)
6. Whip egg whites in a separate bowl until they too peak
7. Add milk and whipped cream to yolks, stir, smoothing out most cream lumps but all not necessary
8. Gently fold in fluffy egg whites and stir
9. Grate nutmeg and sprinkle over top
10. Set aside in fridge for a couple of hours to come into full bloom
11. Then prepare to be delighted (great thing about this nog in addition to the first taste?  Just stick it in fridge between sips and it will just get better over the holidays), and possibly sauced if you have more than a cup or two.

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The good – just like when I ate there in person, the chow was just as tasty.  Simply better than most Chinese grub I’ve found in the smaller little outposts sprinkled around strip malls in the area.  Which means that we’ll add Chinese to our takeout regimen for a meal that the whole crew (including our 3 picky princesses) will eat and that holds up well on the leftover front. We ordered pretty straightforward stuff which meant a very ample Sunday night meal for 5 for about $40.  Good value, particularly given the leftover trail.  For when we’re feeling a little more extravagant, Peking Duck is a specialty which we had when we went for dinner the first time and lived up to billing.  I figured that was off the good-idea list for takeout but noticed a bunch of people taking it home in the take queue.  Will definitely try that next time.

The mixed – From Del Ray it’s a little bit of a hoof (bout 15-20 minutes) to get there.  And the place is very popular so was jammed when we got there, both in the dining rooms and at the take out counter operation.  Which looks like a pretty efficient machine but we still had to hang out for 10 minutes or so waiting for all the pieces of our order to be put together.

Conclusion…. given the distance probably not as frequent a regular in our takeout rotation as a close place like Taqueria Poblano (where I think they’ve started to deliver our mail we go there so often) .  But absolutely a strong new player for the occasional Sunday night when we’re up for a little drive and only really tasty Chinese with all the fun little kid elements (egg rolls, those crunchy things you drop into the Won ton soup, making your own little moo shoo pork burritos, fortune cookies, etc.) will do.

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Recently a rare craving for Chinese struck me hard. After some web searching to no avail and a false start to Old Town, we ended up at Peking Gourmet Inn near Seven Corners on the recommendation of a friend. What a surprise.  Place is terrific. Growing up in the country, the Chinese restaurant 15 minutes away was one of the few restaurant outings we undertook with any frequency. So I have all these happy, and likely heavily marked up, memories of family outings at the tiny China King restaurant in Leesburg. Contrast that with the mostly unremarkable experiences I’ve had in the few times I’ve eaten Chinese as an adult in Alexandria and my expectations for satisfying this rare craving in modern times were low.

Short story, PKI surprised in lots of nice ways. Behind a completely non-descript store front we found a big, bustling (stuffed on a Monday night) restaurant with all kinds of sights, sounds, smells I hadn’t encountered in a Chinese restaurant east of San Francisco. Old school decor, full and busy bar, tons of families at big tables, older, distinguished looking and jacketed waiters flying around, shirley temples for the kids, scrumptious Peking Duck carved right at the table, Moo shu pork with hand cooked pancakes, kids digging the food, etc.  Wasn’t cheap (north of a $100 for 5 including 3 kids) but a really nice and different family outing.  One that I could see us repeating every once in a medium while to build up our own little Chinese food ritual and associated kid memories.

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Not the Fontaine version but you get the idea

In my experience that’s not saying much generally.  Really yummy breakfast food is hard to find in these parts.  Probably because, beyond hotels who have to feed their guests, there’s not much scratch to be made in breakfast for others in the food trade.  In Del Ray there’s Mancini’s which is great to have, reasonably priced, if not consistently great.  Bagels and the community scene are always a good thing at St.Elmos.  And the Sunday brunch at Taqueria (my hands down favorite for tasty, inexpensive, not boilerplate, chow with a great community vibe) is a good diversion every so often.

Especially tasty breakfast grub is scarce.  That’s why I was so happily surprised to hit on a not just good, but truly lick-your-chops yummy breakfast recently at Fontaine in Old Town.  All five in my clan went one Sunday morn.  Yes, my wife’s quiche, the girls waffles and my youngest’s sugary crepe were all great and better than most places.  But my breakfast bruschetta was a flat out taste-bud stopper.  Just the right amount overall, great ingredients(pancetta, crispy but not too thick bread base, perfectly  cooked eggs over tomatoes with a pesto sauce type thing on the top) and light little salad side that balanced things out perfectly.  I’m no foody generally, nor wise in the ways of preparation… but even I could tell this was a dish unlike all the others.  Not cheap Fontaine, our breakfast for 5 (2 adults, 3 kids) with 3 lattes cost about $120.  But for the occasional morning out when really good food is just as important as being out of the house, this place is worth a trip across the tracks to the mean streets of Old Town.

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