And away Uy-ghur!

I had the great pleasure of meeting our chief cooking forum dishwasher in person for the first time! Since we met online at least 25 years ago, we had plenty to talk about as we dined at Küsan Uyghur, a cuisine that neither of us is especially familiar with.

We started with samsa (烤包子), aka samosas.

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These were made using artfully folded commercial flour tortillas filled with coarse and soft lamb pâté. Different from samosas that I've had at Indian restaurants, but very well done.

Black Fungus Salad (爽心木耳沙拉)

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Undersalted, but I liked the texture of the mushroom and the little pops of goji berry.

The "handcrafted dumplings – lamb with Chinese cabbage" (手工羊肉白菜水饺) were almost like xiao long bao (soup dumplings), a vibrant, gingery filling of finely ground lamb, surrounded by a bit of intense broth. We ordered a lot of food for two people, but I could have easily finished these by myself. Excellent with and without the chili/vinegar sauce.

The "golden crispy roasted lamb rib" (黄金脆片烤羊排) was interesting, not falling off the bone tender but not crispy as described. If you're sensing a lamb theme, even though Xinjiang / Uyghur Autonomous Region is under the control of China, the majority of the inhabitants (despite ongoing genocide) are Turkic peoples from the Asian steppes, with a Muslim religious background. So no pork, and due to geography, no seafood either. In fact, the restaurant could not serve us a side of rice to go with the ribs, so we got extra wide (and extra-wide) noodles. Jenise, I hope you got a shot of me trying to serve these, they were at least 2 feet long!

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We had to pass on the Polo (手抓饭 (配酸奶&维吾尔沙拉), aka pilau, aka pilaf, but I've had Uyghur pilaf at a different place and it was excellent, supposedly one of the classic Uyghur dishes.

I brought with me a couple recipes from the old, old days of the forum (OK, not the Compuserve days, but still pretty old).

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If you note the URL, it's from "My Speakers Corner", which was a lovely idea that Robin had to make a local social network that really emphasized the social aspects. Since it didn't make people angry enough at each other, it did not become a runaway success, unlike the far inferior, but more popular Twitter. I miss Francesco P., Jenise was saying he married a Nederlander. Hope he's doing well. I note with amusement that I converted the metric measurements of this recipe, the first risotto I ever made, back into customary units. Now, of course, I am the one converting in the opposite direction.

(continued in the next post due to attachment limits.)

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The other recipe was this beloved one from Jenise, dated October 2002. I loved (and still love) the dynamism of cutting into the parchment and having the richly scented steam curl up and into my nose.

What, we're in a restaurant? OK, one last dish, also apparently a classic of Uyghur cuisine, "big plate chicken" (大盘鸡). No pics, sorry, I was too busy chatting. Bone-in chunks of chicken, green pepper, scallions, little skinny red peppers, deep-fried hunks of potato, all served over a rich chili-oil gravy and a giant pile of those wide wheat flour noodles. I'm sure this is not a particularly healthful dish, and the potatoes were undercooked, but I could eat it all day. The chicken on the bone was perfect, and you could make a bite combining any or all of the components and have a winner.

So, this is a wine board, what did we drink? I knew some of the dishes would be spicy, so I stuck to lighter, low-tannin, high acidity wines. The red was a NV Ryme Chillable Light Red, no information I could find in the usual sources, and no further info on the label, so cépage and region unknown. Definitely way on the lighter end, transparent in color and flavor, dry, low in tannin. A very good match with the non-spicy dishes, less successful with the spicier ones. Would love to try this with roast chicken, probably a better pairing.

For a white we had 2015 Weingut Prinz Hallgartener Jungfer Riesling Kabinett Goldkapsel Auction. Truly one of those wines with a name where you are certain the Germans are snickering at you from behind the füder. Can you imagine a new wine drinker trying to order that in a restaurant. And yet you don't have to be a German wine aficionado to enjoy this charming honeysuckle-scented drink. While labeled Kabinett, this is Spätlese weight at a minimum, plenty of sugar and acidity swirling together with a bit of chalk in an intense, youthful package. I had a bottle a few years ago that was shut down hard, but now it's out to play and if I had to guess will be nigh-on immortal. A lovely pairing with the spicier dishes.

The atmosphere of the restaurant was fun, cute tableware, attentive service when needed, though the food came out way too fast (we're two people, we can't eat that many dishes in half an hour). They don't have wine glasses or a corkscrew, so bring your own, but if I do say so myself, this out-of-the-way spot in a light industrial area of San José was producing some fascinating food. Can't wait to enjoy the leftovers. Thanks so much to Jenise for the food and company.

Sounds like great fun!

It's really nice to hear that you two had a chance to get together - it sounds like a great meal. I've never had Uyghur food and know nothing about it other than what you just posted, Walt, but I'll be looking for it in the future.

I really enjoyed seeing those recipes, back in the old format. I think I posted it here a while back but you can use the Internet Wayback Machine to pull up some of the pages from the old forum. I'll check one of those out every now and then just to recall those times and all of the people who were involved.

[David M. Bueker]

Excellent that you were able to meet up, and to try Uyghur food.

Sounds like great fun!

It was indeed!

It's really nice to hear that you two had a chance to get together - it sounds like a great meal. I've never had Uyghur food and know nothing about it other than what you just posted, Walt, but I'll be looking for it in the future.

I really enjoyed seeing those recipes, back in the old format. I think I posted it here a while back but you can use the Internet Wayback Machine to pull up some of the pages from the old forum. I'll check one of those out every now and then just to recall those times and all of the people who were involved.

Next time we'll have to get organized earlier and you and I can get together.

Never thought to try the Wayback Machine, but it does have some pretty great snapshots!

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I always preferred threaded commenting.

I would have loved to have been there and would have said something, but we were out of town for the weekend.

[Jenise]

Walt, thanks for posting. Fun to relive the evening thru your notes: my least favorite part of the meal was the lamb riblets and my most favorite part was your company!

Speaking of the riblets, which were chewy and gamey and reflecting on the fact that were wet not crisp and that they came out much sooner than the 15 minutes our waitress warned they would, my cook's instincts believe that we were served the other, braised riblets that were also on the menu. They reminded me less of lamb as I know it than the yak riblets we had once at a Tibetan restaurant in Beijing.

I loved the samsas, what an interesting thing to make a casing out of a flour tortilla. They had a density to them but they weren't like Mexican chimichangas (sp?)--baked, not fried. Great texture and flavor.

And awesome as those noodles were I'm sorry that we couldn't get the pilaf you had your heart set on. But oh, yesterday on my way home I stopped at an Asian market and inspired by our meal I bought fresh wood ear mushrooms to make my own version of their dish--with more salt, of course.

Loved both of your wines. I remember my very first tasting of German reislings, there were 10 of them, side by side in order of sugar content. And my favorites were what would have been, I think, the 3rd thru 6th wines which were the fruitier kabs and the drier spatleses. Your Prinz was right in that group. Outstanding! I liked the Ryme (yes, no vintage on labels but a 2024 dated cork), though I agree it didn't show as well with the food. You gave me my pick of the two to take back to my hotel with me and I chose the Ryme, mostly because I thought you deserved the Prinz.

And I was grateful to have it Sunday night to come home to after the game and the Santa Clara Death March that was the ridiculous 2.5 mile grind on foot from the Uber drop off to the stadium. I did not have the right footwear for a hike of that nature and of course the damaged doubled after the game getting back to that same area with thousands of others similarly stranded and a two hour wait for cars. (What in the h--- were they thinking building a stadium no one can get to??????) My feet are quite blistered. Anyway, the RYME, out of a paper cup with a cube or two of ice from the machine down the hall was an absolute life saver when I got back late that night. I needed it!

Mike, would have been great if you'd been able to join us. I know I've driven from Sac to the Bay area but I've lost my sense of relative distances in that area to the extent I ever had them. And in fact I thought Walt would have been coming up from Livermore, not down!

Walt, thank you again for meeting up with me. I love that we are now friends in the real.

It is a thing now to have stadiums that are not just outside downtown, but have no transit near them. In the Cleveland area, despite a downtown stadium that's only 30 years old, the football team appears to be set on plopping a new one into a tiny suburb of 18K people that doesn't even have its own high school. The taxpayers will be out hundreds of millions. Santa Clara is a bit better positioned for a giant stadium, but not much more.

All of the reasonable locations in the Santa Clara area probably got NIMBYed by the locals.

-Paul W.

[Jenise]

It is a thing now to have stadiums that are not just outside downtown, but have no transit near them. In the Cleveland area, despite a downtown stadium that's only 30 years old, the football team appears to be set on plopping a new one into a tiny suburb of 18K people that doesn't even have its own high school. The taxpayers will be out hundreds of millions. Santa Clara is a bit better positioned for a giant stadium, but not much more.

Best I can tell they didn't even have a handicapped option. On the Death March to the stadium, one of my fellow hikers was a bona fide chauffeur, in black suit with that particular black hat, pushing his rich old boss lady in a wheelchair.

Isn't there a Cal Train station a couple of blocks from the stadium? I saw Dead and Co. there, and I think we parked in Milpitas or somewhere like that and took the train down. Not that it would have been a great alternative. I remember seeing the Rolling Stones at the Oakland Colosseum and taking BART to the station that's right at the stadium. The crush of people trying to get to the trains after that concert was actually pretty scary, and it lasted for some time before we finally go on.