shaogo's New Writeups

Crab Louis (recipe)

2009-08-15T18:57:24Z

This sublime, rich assembled salad originated in the early 1900s on the West Coast of the United States. The originator of the salad is lost to history. San Francisco's St. Francis Hotel is mentioned by some sources, as is Solari's Restaurant in San Francisco. Another source says that Seattle's Olympia Club first offered this dish. A chef from the St. Francis included a recipe for it in a 1919 publication entitled "The St. Francis Hotel Cook Book."

The dish was designed to showcase the Northwest's famous Dungeness Crab. It soon became a ubiquitous appetizer/salad item on menus all over the country. The alternative spelling of the dish, "Crab Louie" is also how the name of the dish is pronounced.

The popularity of the dish lasted until the 1960s, when it slipped out of fashion on restaurant menus. One of famed chef James Beard's favorites, the salad is re-created by crab lovers to…

Chasen's (place)

2009-08-13T21:29:51Z

Chasen's demise was the result of aging clientele, perceived un-hipness and arterially incorrect food.

— Steven Smith in the Los Angeles Times

Bob Hope rode a horse through the front door one evening. Ronald Reagan proposed to Nancy in a booth there.

Orson Welles threw a flaming pot of Sterno at John Houseman when Welles fired Houseman as a partner. Elizabeth Taylor threw a plate of food at Richard Burton and stormed out of the restaurant in a huff. George Burns initiated a food fight there. The owners and personnel at Chasen's knew they had to put up with such antics from Hollywood's rich and famous if they were to stay popular with them.

One night, Humphrey Bogart and the diminutive Peter Lorre got so drunk they somehow managed to hijack the restaurant's huge safe (it had wheels) and roll it out into the middle of Beverly Boulevard, where they abandoned it.…

Assholes on the internet (personal)

2009-08-11T20:27:30Z

Revenge is Sweet

To this day it does not cease to amaze me just how abusive people on the 'net can be to one another. Being a troll is far more cowardly than road rage, because the violator can hide behind the anonymity inherent in most internet communications. Surely there are people who're savvy enough to find a person given an IP address, but I am certainly not one of them.

Quite some time ago I was invited to join a very exclusive members-only Yahoo Group (basically a fancy-schmantzy BBS). The subject of the group's discussion is The Great American Songbook and the singers that made the tunes famous. The reason this group is oh-so-exclusive is that a percentage of their membership are music producers, composers, and performers. It was a thrill to actually "converse" with people whose names I'd read many times on record jackets. Now, this genre is not the multi-million-dollar world of the…

franks and beans (recipe)

2009-08-04T13:52:43Z

Harriet Scherer's Frank and Bean Concoction

This dish has a decidedly Asian kinda flavor. The first time I made it for my wife (she's from Taiwan) she thought I'd gotten the recipe from a Taiwanese cook book. Apparently, franks and beans done this way are very, very popular there. This dish was first served to me by my mother. She had gotten the recipe from our neighbor (hence the name).

This is a "quick 'n dirty" dish made mostly with stuff folks have on hand. It does not involve complicated preparation techniques, a laundry-list of ingredients, nor a great deal of time.

A red bell pepper

A green bell pepper

A big fat sweet ("chef's") onion — Vidalias are great for this

4 cloves of garlic

Olive Oil for sauteeing the vegetables

A package of your favorite hot dogs (I like Hebrew National 'cause they're all-beef and very, very tasty. New York's

…

July 30, 2009 (personal)

2009-07-30T20:24:37Z

Are personal messages protected by copyright?

There's a cool thread going now regarding the above-captioned.

I got bitten by a similar issue here on E2. Now, I wasn't in any copyright violation, but it was the expectation of privacy that I was accused of violating.

I received a message via our /msg system that I thought was abusive. I then published that message in a daylog. I got fired as a CE. The reason cited was that the sender of the abusive /msg to me, although he did not request it in his /msg, expected that the contents of that message were confidential and only between us. My assumption was that if someone sends me something, particularly something I find inflammatory, it's mine to broadcast to the world, along with something from me saying "did y'all see what he/she said to me?!!"

You see, the /msg was from my then-boss at E2. The…

Savory Upscale Sliders (recipe)

2009-07-26T15:55:54Z

Savory "Upscale" Sliders

Once a bit of military jargon connoting greasy burgers, "sliders" have evolved into small, two-bite hamburgers that are now quite in vogue as "comfort food." Restaurant industry magazines are chock-full of fussy recipes for sliders which use the ground beef patty and the bun as a background for the various condiments, vegetables, cheese(s) and other additions. "Meat-serious" sliders come in the form of sirloin sliders, ground lamb, pork or venison sliders and even kobe beef sliders. What most authentic "sliders" have in common is that they're full of delicious meat fat, and there are often onions insinuated into the meat.

The White Castle hamburger chain originated the idea of very small fried hamburgers with onion in 1921. In my home town of Flushing, New York we called White Castle hamburgers "little soggies" because they were just that…