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Don't store other cheese with bleu cheese.

I'm headed to Copenhagen on Friday for about a week. This is a work trip, but I'll have a couple of days to explore the city. I welcome any and all recommendations for dining, fine or otherwise.

...or, really, any recommendations at all.

So I was trolling through the opinion page of the WaPo while drinking my coffee and I stumbled on this:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/13/AR201008...

I guess my taste is, like in so many other things, decidedly middlebrow. I grew up on hippified whole wheat bread. I know I'm "supposed" to buy whole wheat but I really don't care how much better it is for me, I don't like it. On the other hand, I don't care for industrial white at all. So if one defines "white bread" as "industrial wonder" I agree that is vile, but give me a good French country loaf or sourdough---made of white flour, thankyouverymuch---and I'll be happy.

It's a Travel Channel show. I don't have cable so I have only seen some episodes on Netflix streaming. This show is amazing. The host, Andrew Zimmern, is enthusiastic and likes to go where the people live. He's not at all afraid of going nearly anywhere and has had shows in safe locales like Paris but also in Uganda, where he went fishing for lungfish in a swamp by sticking his hand in a ditch of water. My favorite was the trip to Sicily, where he goes to a fishing village and has lunch with a family. I'm not sure I'd eat most of what he does---he's a lot braver than me definitely, and most of us, I suspect---and I sure hope he keeps his shots current, but check the show out if you get the chance. It's really fun.

http://www.travelchannel.com/TV_Shows/Bizarre_Foods

Addendum: Real Ethiopian food, just for Stuart.

I don't have a waffle iron or sandwich press and don't really intend to get either anytime soon. I used to have a Foreman grill, which presses reasonably well, but I never liked it for anything else and lack the counter space. However I decided to make an approximate Cuban sandwich (with a bottle of beer) for dinner, which requires approximating a sandwich press. Here's my attempt. This might be totally obvious to others, I don't know, but it had never occurred to me.

Sliced country bread
Ham, sliced thin
Provolone Cheese, sliced thin
Dill Pickle slices
Yellow Mustard
Butter (or a bit of vegetable oil)
A few heavy cans of soup, beans, etc. (unopened)

Heat up a cast iron pan for the bottom and a pan that's a bit smaller than the bottom pan. (Easily done by putting the top pan in the bottom one.) Melt the butter in the pan and assemble the sandwich with cheese on the outside and the ham, mustard and pickle on the inside. Put the sandwich in the cast iron pan. Lightly grease the top of the sandwich and put the sauce pan, weighted by the heavy cans on top of the sandwich and wait until the cheese on the bottom of the sandwich has started to melt. Unlike with a sandwich press, you'll have to turn it because most of the heat is coming from the bottom pan, which is best done with tongs.

I think it would have been better with a softer bread like a hoagie roll and, of course, I lacked the roast pork. This method doesn't give the nice grill marks of a sandwich press, but if you happen to have a grill pan, I guess that'd do the trick. Alton Brown does it with six bricks heated to 500 degrees in an oven for an hour but that just seems like WAY, WAY overkill to me.

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/the-best-of/original-cuban-sandwich-r... has a regular recipe.

http://www.theatlantic.com/food/archive/2010/08/grilling-a-butchers-case...

The author argues that it's a good idea to cook a steak low and slow. I think what he really did was reinvent a roast, in this case a sirloin roast. Generally it is a good idea to cook a roast low and slow and then put the crust on separately, either before or after the long cook.

When Crimfan came by to visit a few weeks ago, I regretted not being able to expose him to some fun sous vide cookery. I'd been meaning to work out a means to employ the method at home with the equipment I have. Unfortunately, most of the sous vide preparations that I get excited about take a long time - so sitting by the stove with a thermometer wasn't going to do it. I needed something with some ability to maintain a constant temperature.

I do have something like that - my electric wok. The temperature control is measured in degrees. It goes from 220 to 420. There is actually a lot of room below 220, too, that isn't marked.

The problem is that it has a really big hot spot, right in the center. This made me rule it out for sous vide a while back. Not long ago, though, I had a breakthrough. I stuck a small yet thick ceramic plate over the bottom of the wok to insulate/diffuse the heat, then I filled the wok with water. I found that I could hold the temperature in the wok to within about 3 degrees.

The amount of control here isn't totally awesome, but it is more than adequate for most uses of the method. It certainly works for turning chuck roast into super-awesome steak.

So... definitely add this to the list of unexpected super-awesome uses for an electric wok.