Fat Guy

This item, from Levitech, looks like it might perform that function. Says it can hold 500 pounds, and seems to accept a variety of tabletops.

Standard kitchen counter height is about 36 inches, and the standard height of a dining-room table is about 29 inches. Does anybody know if there's such a thing as a large kitchen table that can adjust between 29 and 36 inches in height, so as to act as a counter some of the time and a table other times?

We had some Pillsbury "Oven Baked" biscuits at a friend's house last night. This product had escaped my notice. I've never much liked the Pillsbury biscuits that come in the refrigerated can. The line of Pillsbury biscuits called "Oven Baked," however, comes from the freezer section. You just take some of the frozen biscuits and put them in the oven -- you don't have to thaw them or anything -- and you have biscuits a few minutes later. They're not bad. I mean, they're not competitive with good homemade biscuits, but they're better than bad homemade biscuits, and better than a lot of restaurant biscuits. They come in several formulations (Buttermilk, Southern Style, Butter Tastin', Flaky Layers, Cheddar Garlic). We had the "Flaky Layers." Anybody else have experience with this product? I haven't done a comparison with the ingredients in the refrigerated biscuits, but it seems to me that at least in theory you don't need all the preservatives if you're going to freeze something -- maybe that's part of why they taste better.

I can't say I use an immersion blender a whole lot, however when I do use it it's usually to: 1- froth a sauce in a saucepan, 2- puree or partially puree a soup, like lentil soup, 3- froth milk. That's all I can recall using one for in the past few years. Old Timer mentioned multiple speeds. What's the benefit of more speeds than on and off?

Here's the product page for the one I got: http://www.cuisinart.com/catalog/product.p...id=568&cat_id=8

Show me the emulsifiers in Applegate Farms American cheese. Here's the product description on the manufacturer's website -- http://www.applegatefarms.com/am_cheese.shtml -- and you can click from there to see the ingredients.

My old Braun immersion blender passed away in December, after many years of valiant service. I recently grabbed a Cuisinart CSB-76BC SmartStick 200-Watt Immersion Hand Blender (Brushed Chrome) for $29.95 but haven't yet opened the box and can still return it. Did I buy the right thing, or is there a superior product in that price range? Or, is it worth my while to go up in price to a different level of product?

Pretty much the same with Ducasse at opening, except that the reactions to Ducasse were an order of magnitude more hostile.

When you say a tartare, do you mean finely diced? I do think beets would be great in that format. You could finely dice the beets, bind with a little sour cream, maybe a little horseradish, maybe some pine nuts for crunch, maybe caraway or some herb, then shape it with a miniature ring mold and plate with thin round slices of beet. Another ingredient that might be interesting is pomegranate seeds. I'm too tired to think of what you could do with them, but they sure are red.

I answered that like a hundred posts ago.

Beets?

As a couple of folks have pointed out, it's not that all Laguiole-labeled products are now bad. It's just that caveat emptor now applies more than ever before. One warning sign with the Wine Enthusiast stuff is that they don't seem to say which manufacturer is actually making their stuff. Without that knowledge, there's no safe way to proceed. Once you know the manufacturer, it becomes possible to do a little research.

Shelly, it's hard to tell for sure from those photos, but the stainless Laguiole knives they're advertising here -- http://www.wineenthusiast.com/E/details.as...%2D1A81AFA6A88A -- look exactly (right down to the angle of the slots in the wooden box) like the set of knives I bought on sale at Macy's that gave rise to this topic. A few years ago, Ellen and I were in a small city in France waiting around for a couple of days for some culinary happening or another, and we noticed the town had an incredible number of shops selling Laguiole folding knives. This was nowhere near Laguiole -- we were in Besancon -- but they sure did have a lot of knives in that town (and also a lot of eyeglasses shops). So, after shopping around, we picked three specimens. These were (and still are) gorgeous, hand-made, very high quality knives. The mechanisms are so smooth. They have intricate guillochage (filework on the back side of the blade) and impressive heft. They were expensive too -- even at the absurdly advantageous 7:1 exchange rate at the time, they were about a hundred bucks a piece. To look at the stainless knives I got at Macy's and to compare them to the ones I got in France, well, it's just a joke. I like the stainless knives fine, but they're machine-made, mediocre-quality knives. I use them, they have utility, they even look pretty nice, but they're not objects of beauty. Not even close.

Just singling out one example here: the latest information I've seen indicates that the increase in joint problems among baby boomers is on account of exercise. As reported in the New York Times, in a story last April titled "Baby Boomers Stay Active, and So Do Their Doctors": I mention this not because the question of the cause of joint problems is particularly important in this conversation, but rather because I'm seeing factual assumptions made repeatedly here that are not good assumptions in light of the reporting in the same newspaper that published Pollan's essay. If you follow the health reporting in the whole paper, what you'll find in the past few years is revelation after revelation that the conventional wisdom about diet, nutrition, fitness, obesity, etc. is turning out to be wrong time and again. Pollan actually seems more aware of that than most of the people posting here in defense of his conclusions. The problem is that Pollan only presents the illusion of rejecting "nutritionism." He ultimately winds up supporting all the same old theories, just at -- as I said before -- a higher altitude. Fundamentally, what Pollan relies upon is the -- yes -- quasi-religious belief that what's old is good and what's new is bad. However, that thesis flies in the face of many things we know to be true about how bad the old days were and how good we have it today. Before concluding that the foods we ate when life expectancy was 40 are better than the foods we eat when life expectancy keeps pushing towards 80, I'd have to be convinced that there's some reason why processed/refined/whatever foods are bad. After all, all these drugs that people here claim are keeping us alive for so long are artificial, man-made products. Why is it so hard to believe that man-made foods can be as good or better than natural ones? What's so great about natural foods, other than that people really, really want to believe they're great? Why do we apply a standard of "food your great grandmother would recognize"? It's like a bizarre belief of some cult that seeks to live frozen in a randomly selected moment in history. What? It was okay that mankind was making wine, cheese, bread, smoked foods, cured foods and all other manner of technology-driven foods, but it's not okay that we're extracting sweeteners from corn? What possible basis could there be for drawing that line, other than nostalgia?

Doesn't the whole brasserie (literally "brewery") concept come from Alsace?

I'd modify that to say we expect a bell curve, with most restaurants getting better for a year or two (because very few restaurants open well), then leveling off for awhile, then going into a decline. That's not the case with absolutely every restaurant -- some of them (Jean Georges) stay good and others (Gramercy Tavern is a recent example) have sine wave graphs. But most peak after the ramp-up, then slip both in absolute terms and relative to the newer restaurants around them.

Geoff, having gone from a basic Maytag range to a DCS pro-style range, it feels like an order of magnitude difference to me. The DCS broiler is scary-powerful. You really have to be careful with it or it could easily swallow you whole and nobody would ever find out what happened. I don't really understand the principles involved, but it appears to be an entirely different technology, not just a stronger version of the same thing. The broiler I have produces a uniform sheet of blue flame that emanates from a mesh-like surface -- there are no identifiable individual jets involved. They call it an "infrared" broiler, for what it's worth.

I vaguely remember a time when butter around here (New York) was packed 1x4 sticks in a flat box. But today it's always packed 2x2 sticks, assuming a pound of butter in sticks. In Manhattan supermarkets a lot of what you see is 1x2 boxes with half a pound. Land O' Lakes also now sells a, well, I don't know how to describe it in x language, but it's a half-pound box of four half-sticks, "for smaller households."

If you go to a basic hotel, very often what you'll see on the room service menu is the same as what's on the restaurant's menu. Outside of the restaurant's normal service hours, there will be some sort of abbreviated menu. But during service you have all the food for the restaurant and for room service, as they say in the restaurant business, coming off the same line. Such an operation is also highly likely to be catering mostly to hotel guests, and the employees working there tend to think of themselves as employees of the hotel, not of the restaurant. To me, once you go to separate lines for the dining-room food and the room-service food, and if only a couple of your tables each night are occupied by hotel guests, and if your labor situation is segregated from the hotel's labor, you're no longer dealing with a true hotel restaurant. You're dealing with a restaurant in a hotel.

Joe mentioned this already on the steak-broiling topic today, however I felt it worthy of its own. Mark Bittman did an interesting "Minimalist" piece in the New York Times today singing the praises of the broiler. His contention is that the in-oven broiler that comes with most every range is an underused and unappreciated appliance-within-an-appliance. He gives a number of tips for effective broiling, and suggests some items to broil. I agree with the major premise of the piece: the broiler is an amazing tool, and most people never use it. At the same time, I think it's very hard to deliver instructions for broiler use, because every broiler is so different. Bittman recognizes the range of differences and gives advice like "After a little experimenting, you’ll find the ideal distance for your broiler," but I think he underestimates the extent of the variations in what's out there. For example, he recommends, "Start by heating your oven to its maximum temperature, typically 550 degrees; then turn on the broiler," that's not necessarily the best advice if you have my oven and my broiler. If you try that in my apartment, when you open the oven door a big ball of blue flame flies up out of the oven. So, I would certainly suggest disregarding this advice if you have an infrared broiler on a DCS or other pro-style range. Then again, if you have such a broiler, you don't need to preheat the oven anyway -- you'll have plenty of BTUs to incinerate just about anything. In addition to the various uses Bittman suggests, broilers are great for finishing dishes that need to be crisped, and of course for melting cheese.

It's close to impossible to overcome strongly negative opening buzz. Ducasse was never able to do it, even though he operated one of the handful of best restaurants in America for something like six years at the Essex House. So, I maintain that in the New York restaurant culture, you have to be a risk-taker at opening. In addition, most critics won't grasp the nuances of your technical failures, or they'll forgive small missteps when the food is sufficiently exciting. There's a difference, as well, between a "hotel restaurant" and a restaurant in a hotel. Locating restaurants in hotels is just good real estate planning, because hotels tend to have whole buildings with plenty of ground-floor space. But is Gordon Ramsay providing catering for the hotel out of his luxury outlet, or is that happening from a separate line? Most likely the latter, which in my mind makes it not a hotel restaurant, but a restaurant in a hotel.

What I'm saying is that I see no good reason to assume that organic corn chips are better than processed potato crisps. What, it's true just because one has fewer ingredients? Is it so impossible to imagine that, when the day comes when they can actually tell with certainty that one food is better for us than another, it will turn out that the corn was worse than the potatoes -- even including all the other ingredients? Given that there's no compelling evidence either way, where do we look for answers? To Pollan's personal opinions? To Mark's? To the fact that we're living longer even though we're eating this stuff? Why assume we'd live longer without it, when we can just as easily assume we're living longer because of it? Until those questions are answered, I'm just not sure there's any advice to give. Moderation and diversity? I guess they sound like safe choices. But I'm not sure one should preach diversity while calling for as few ingredients as possible, and diversity is all well and good if you eat 23 foods instead of 22, unless the 23rd is the one that kills you.

Some percentage of French chefs in New York have always been Alsatian (Jean-Georges Vongerichten, anyone?), some have been Breton, some from Toulouse, etc., however I don't think there was ever a marked trend like the one we're seeing now. The old Lutece menus I've seen haven't been particularly Alsatian. There were always two Alsatian items available -- an onion tart and an Alsatian torte -- but the rest seems to have been general haute French. I also would be more likely than not to separate the Mitteleuropean and Alsatian strands of New York's restaurant history and present. While Alsatian cuisine certainly reflects Germanic influences, it doesn't follow to say that Kreuther is part of the Danube-Wallse trend (nor is it clear that trend has has much success compared to, I don't know, Asian fusion).

When we opened up the ceiling we found a mummified cat.

You think it but do you know it? Have control-group double-blind studies been conducted to determine it? The ingredients in Pringles are: It's entirely possible that deep-fried Pringles made from dehydrated potatoes are no worse for you than deep-friend corn chips made from dehydrated organic corn. Indeed, it's possible that neither is bad for you at all when consumed in moderation. Probably not, but my agreement with you is no more scientifically valid than your quasi-religious belief in the first place!