Fat Guy

They actually just knocked $20 off the price a few days ago to bring it down to $80. It was $100 for the longest time before that. Who knows how long it will stay at $80, so grab it if you want it. I confess part of the reason I chose this thing over some other contenders had nothing to do with the FlashXPress technology. What I like is that for a full-featured toaster oven it has a really narrow footprint. It only needs 13" of counter space (width). That's because all the controls and mechanisms and such are in a vertical arrangement. A standard Black & Decker toaster oven, by contrast, needs almost 19" (even though its interior appears to hold less than the Panasonic). That's a big difference in a New York City kitchen. Although, if you have an appropriate place for it (I don't) you can mount a Black & Decker under a cabinet, which is an excellent arrangement (my mother saves a nice parcel of counter space this way). Most other brands don't offer that kind of bracket.

I'm not going to win this one, but it's not about winning. It's about old cheese. But don't bother if you can't beat 3 years. That would just be undignified. I'll start: 4-year aged Gouda aka Boerenkaas.

Dude, I haven't had the Black & Decker since before we started this crazy thing, back when it was just me, you and Fat-Guy.com. For the past 3 or so years I've had a KitchenAid toaster (not a toaster oven) like this I have, however, recently catapulted myself several generations of technology into the future with the purchase of a Panasonic FlashXPress infrared digital toaster oven with kung-fu grip, like this except in stainless. I will report on this thing once I actually put it into service, but right now I'm reorganizing the kitchen so it will be a little while longer.

There's a piece in today's St. Petersburg Times that quotes, among others, Oakapple (from what he wrote here) and me (from an interview with the writer, Janet Keeler). Also some guy named Anthony Bourdain, who apparently posts here (also quoted from this topic, I think). A very thoughtful piece, I thought, that makes a few points you don't often see in mass media coverage of $350 meals, most importantly: Full story: http://www.sptimes.com/2005/01/04/news_pf/...eals_crit.shtml

Those both strike me as excellent examples of tried-and-true restaurants, and Gotham has the additional distinction of being neglected by the press. Some of the tried-and-true places manage to get on various informal media short lists and get plenty of coverage: Peter Luger, Katz's, Papaya King. Meanwhile, you have places like Gotham that have to fight hard against far inferior places for coverage. Picholine is another example of a restaurant in this category: excellent food year-in-year-out, but mostly relegated to lists of "top 10 cheese carts" and "top 10 places to eat before Lincoln Center."

I think Bryan Miller did a fun piece that presents a certain caricature. I can testify that, on New Year's Day afternoon, it was all the talk of the cocktail party (heavily populated by hardcore foodies) I was at, and at the level of standard cocktail party conversation it was well received. To dig a little deeper, as Busboy and Docsconz both intimate, I think you might find that the culinary equivalents of trainspotters are having the same sorts of empty experiences that the museum trainspotters, architecture trainspotters and opera trainspotters are. The phenomenon Miller describes is not about food. It's about a certain state of mind. There are, however, plenty of genuinely engaged people who emphasize one thing or another when they travel, sometimes to the exclusion of all else. I have certainly chosen food over museums many times when allocating my time. And I would defend the choice of a restaurant over a museum for several reasons: A restaurant is an interactive cultural experience tied to a time and place, whereas the art in a museum can be sent around on a road show and it's exactly the same. I live five minutes away from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and I haven't even seen everything in there yet; why should I spend my vacation time visiting other museums? And, call me a philistine, but I enjoy looking at pictures artwork in books. No, it's not 100% of the experience of seeing artwork live, but let's call it 80%. Now what percentage of the restaurant experience can you get from reading about it? Call it 1% at most. So the arithmetic just works out in favor of visiting the restaurants and looking at art books. That's the most extreme version of the argument. Of course I've been to plenty of museums in the cities I've visited. But not as many as I could have, because I've so often chosen dining over art, architecture and the like. Then again, in places where I feel the arts scene is more attractive than the food scene, like London, I have often chosen theater, opera and ballet over restaurant meals. The performing arts, however, are more interesting to me than museums when I'm on vacation -- they represent more of the inimitable type of experience that a restaurant does.

I'm very happy with the 20 quart stockpot I have from A. Best Kitchen. You can see about a million photos of it in the eGCI stockmaking class. It's on this page: http://www.abestkitchen.com/store/pots.html Described thus: Stainless Stockpot 20 Qt. 10-3/4"H x 12-1/4"W CST-SSPOT20 $59.00 Comes with a well machined lid, has an aluminum clad bottom, is made of heavy gauge stainless, and at only 10-3/4" high it actually fits on the bottom rack of my dishwasher -- pretty remarkable for a 20 quart stockpot. This is a nice piece of restaurant-caliber equipment. The other stockpot I use is Le Creuset. The Le Creuset stockpots are not cast-iron. They are enameled stainless steel and don't weigh all that much. They retail for $140 and are $80 on a typical day at Amazon, but sometimes they make it to the clearance places like Marshall's and TJ Maxx for 30 or 40 bucks, in which case it's worth that much for a 16-quart pot, especially since they come in such nifty colors. Mine is red, and like all Le Creuset products it looks better and better with age as the colors start to vary from the bottom up. My small stockpot (8-quart) is Calphalon Professional Nonstick II. It's something like ten years old and still going strong. Nothing special, but it sure is easy to clean. And I like that it has a glass lid. It was a gift. I have no idea how much it would cost. Probably too much. I don't recommend cookware of this weight in larger stockpot sizes, though -- it's just too much to lift.

Since there are 89,300 hits on Google for the word "gastronaut," I hardly think the term is newly coined. But the Times will no doubt claim to have invented or been instrumental in its development, as it has with other inherited and already established ideas like low-carb diets.

Washing a Zeroll by hand is almost as easy as opening the dishwasher, putting it in the basket, and closing the dishwasher. And it's even easier when you have the non-stick version, which is really just rinse-and-wipe. The other two reasons I like the non-stick better are that it makes actual scooping even easier -- it cuts through the ice cream like the proverbial hot knife through butter -- and that it releases even more readily than the regular edition. No, it's not a dramatic, night-and-day, praise-the-lord difference, but I find that with the regular scoop you're sometimes hanging it over the dish waiting for the ice cream to release, and occasionally you have to shake or otherwise nudge it. Not so with the non-stick. This is one of the better culinary applications for Teflon that I've come across.

This sounds like the same technology used in the $15 Zeroll, although in the case of the Zeroll it's a liquid antifreeze solution.

Most non-stick coatings do eventually degrade, but if you handle the item properly -- no dishwasher, no scouring pads, not stored in a drawer getting scratched up by your forks and knives -- you should get many years of good service out of it.

I was sorely tempted to make lentil soup today, especially since I just made a really lame bean stew (I committed the cardinal sin of overpowering the beans with too many other flavors) the other day and I really wanted to redeem myself, but I'm in the middle of reorganizing the kitchen cabinets and had to use the stovetop as counter space today. Maybe tomorrow or the day after.

jsolomon, that was my old Zeroll scoop, but instead of the 1050, I now have the 1050-ZT, which is the same item in a "Zerolon" version (anodized teflon) so it's nonstick. It is in my opinion a major improvement.

Most often, I've seen costilla de res used to describe short ribs, but I've also seen it used to describe prime rib and spare ribs. In your case, it's probably short ribs. My suggestion would be that you remove the costilla de res from the stockpot after approximately 2.5 hours, let them cool enough so that you can handle them, cut off and refrigerate the best clean chunks of usable meat, and then put all the bones and trimmings back into the stock. Use the meat later on for hash, soup or a sandwich.

A newspaper (emphasis on "news") and a guidebook serve different functions. It makes sense for newspaper restaurant reviews to emphasize recently opened major or otherwise interesting or unusual restaurants. Such restaurants are always newsworthy if they're good, and sometimes newsworthy if or because they're not particularly good. If Michelin, for example, were to publish a weekly restaurant newsletter (emphasis on "news"), it would make most sense, I think, to include in that newsletter all major openings with some kind of commentary.

Au maigre = without meat

Here's the advice I offered in the original course materials: and This nets pretty close to Sleepy_Dragon's recommendations above, though with a little more veg. But what you've got to bear in mind is that the amount of water you start with is not the relevant measure of water. The relevant measure is the amount of water you end with. The stock you make will go through at least one and possibly two or three reductions: definitely while you're making it in the first place, often after you've strained and defatted it, and sometimes when you use it in a recipe (especially in sauce making). The other issue is that you are dealing with natural and therefore variable products. Seven pounds of bones with one pound of meat clinging to them altogether is going to produce a stock that's very different from three pounds of bones plus five pounds of meat. The bone-heavy stock will have more thickening power; the meat-heavy stock will have more flavor. And no two batches are alike. Some carrots, for example, seem to have very little flavoring power -- you could fill a whole pot with them and they'd contribute little but color. Other carrots manage to impart a ton of carrot flavor, sometimes too much. Ditto for onions. And the bones and meat are variable as well, depending on all sorts of factors like the age of the animal and the amount of water weight involved. Given the three potential stages of reduction listed above, I don't think it's a particularly big deal to add a lot of water to the stockpot at the beginning. Indeed, I think having a lot of water can probably aid in extracting flavors -- there's some law that supports this notion, diffusion gradients and osmosis or whatever. Plenty of the liquid will go away over the course of several hours of simmering. More importantly, while it's always good to start with guidelines, you simply must learn how to taste and evaluate stock. There's no way around it. The cooking magazines and books and shows will promise you that following their recipes will yield predictable results. It's simply not true. The only way to get consistent results is to taste the stock and reduce it to the desired strength. Don't bother trying to resist this notion. Just start tasting every batch of stock and in no time you'll be a whiz at evaluation. Unsalted or barely salted stock can be an unfamiliar flavor. It can be disappointingly "thin" tasting no matter how heavily reduced it is. I remember when I spent a week in the kitchen at Lespinasse restaurant here in New York a few years ago, and one of the sauciers asked me to taste a stock and tell him if it was the right strength or needed to be reduced more. I was absolutely unable to make the determination -- I had no frame of reference. I tasted a lot of stock that week, though, and it wasn't hard to catch on. If you focus on the aromatics and the feel of the stuff in your mouth, you'll be able to tell if you're dealing with a weaker or stronger sample. Don't rely as much on visual cues -- they can be misleading. One trick you can use is to remove a few tablespoons full of stock into a small dish and add a pinch of salt, so you have essentially made yourself a little bowl of soup. This will bring out the flavor of the stock and make it easier to tell exactly what you're dealing with, though after awhile you won't need to do this.

Absolutely. Lamb and lentils have an amazing affinity. In some parts of the country, a good selection of lamb is hard to come by, but in others you can get braising cuts cheap. I'm of the school -- a minority school, I gather -- that believes the bacon/ham/smoke flavor is not necessarily the way to go with lentils. To me that flavor works better with split peas, whereas the flavors of beef and lamb (and also veal and dark meat poultry) work most beautifully with lentils. This is especially the case if you can build up from a base of beef/veal stock or a braising liquid from beef or lamb. Then again I wouldn't say no to lentils with bacon. A couple of points about soup and interest: 1) Making a soup a week shouldn't necessarily mean you have to eat that one soup all week. With clearly labeled containers in the freezer, you can start to accumulate a rotation, so that in a couple of months you always have your choice of 6 or 7 different soups on any given night. 2) It's very easy to make variations on soups just before service. So, for example, you can make a relatively plain bean soup and then, when it's time to serve it one night, you can add some sauteed slices of sausage, whereas on another night you can throw in a few mini meatballs. A variety of fresh herbs added to soup while reheating can also create interest. And you can create interesting soup concoctions as well: chicken soup plus lentil soup equals chicken lentil soup, etc.

What a wonderful project, Maggie. I hope you will report in on each week's soup. And, lucky you, your friends here on the eG Forums will no doubt nag you if you fail to complete any given week's assignment. Let me cast my vote, during the cold months, for lentil soup. No need for fancy lentils with French names; the Goya lentils from the supermarket are entirely sufficient (and, to me, sometimes preferable) for delicious soup. Working from a base of lentils and basic aromatics (a little onion, garlic, carrots, maybe celery), you can take the soup in many directions, depending on what you have at hand. My favorite is to make lentil soup from the leftovers of a braised meat dish, like brisket, short ribs or pot roast. Save a small percentage of the meat, especially the bits that don't make for neat serving slices. Strain the cooking liquid from the braising project (or half or a quarter of it, if you're making a sauce from the rest) and refrigerate overnight. Defat it and use it as the liquid base for cooking the lentils (along with the aforementioned aromatics). You may need to supplement with some water or some stock from inventory. Depending on how "loose" you like your soup, you can either leave the lentils in a mostly liquid broth or you can remove about half the lentils, puree them in a blender and use them as a thickener. Season with salt and pepper, and maybe some paprika. Towards the end of cooking, mix the leftover bits of meat in with the soup, add fresh herbs and maybe a little acid (like a very small amount of Sherry vinegar).

I think the Winter solstice was on December 21, but I doubt they intended the technical meaning. I'm not a MOMA member so I haven't yet visited the casual part of the restaurant (the fine dining part, to be clear, will not be open for awhile longer), but I know a MOMA member who has been about 5 times and has delivered positive reports. I'm very much looking forward to going, to both restaurants.

The comparison I'd make is between Chefmate's $20 saucepan, lid included, and a Bourgeat stainless saucepan that costs around $60 for the pan and $30 for the lid, street price. I think almost everybody would say Bourgeat stainless represents a top-quality pan. Many of the top restaurants and culinary schools use Bourgeat stainless with aluminum sandwich bottoms and what would be considered relatively thin stainless walls when compared to aluminum, which is a substantially lighter metal. Comparing anodized aluminum and aluminum-core clad cookware like Calphalon and All-Clad to sandwich-bottom pieces like Chefmate and Bourgeat is mostly going to reveal the general properties of the two types of construction. Comparing within species is going to give a more focused indication of value and quality. I would probably take a Bourgeat stainless saucepan over a Chefmate one, but I'd have to think about it for a minute, primarily because I prefer a riveted handle to a welded one.

Yes, of course, plenty of people read the reviews in the New York Times. But even the most diligent readers such as the extreme food geeks here on eG are prone to remember the stars much more vividly than the actual reviews. And I don't think that's just a question of the stars being easier to remember. I think they overshadow content. I am much more likely to remember the specifics of a Gourmet review, whereas I'm much more likely to remember the stars from a review that has stars. I don't think a single indication, like a check mark or asterisk, for a "critic's pick," is tantamount to a star rating system, especially when it is only presented in the context of aggregated archived information on a web site. Admin: 2005 "Bruni and Beyond" discussion may be found here.

I agree that rating systems such as stars and numbers have tremendous appeal to the consumer, and that there's a type of social Darwinism that occurs as between the influence of publications that have ratings and those that don't -- the numbers, being such a ready source of easily consumed nourishment, push the harder-to-digest words out of the ecosystem just as junk food dominates over good food. That, however, describes the influence of the publications themselves. I think, internally, there's another type of cannibalization that occurs because the stars and numbers virtually consume or subsume the words of the reviews: they create a situation where nobody cares or remembers what the reviewer says, if the reviewer's words are even read at all. So in that regard the joke is on the reviewers at the publications that use ratings -- they may as well just give some stars and save themselves the trouble of writing the reviews. Those who read the reviews in New York, Gourmet or the IHT, on the other hand, are really reading those reviews -- they have no other option. I don't know what the local circulation figures are for those publications, or their demographics, or how one would equate daily, weekly and monthly figures, but I imagine that if you were to adjust for all that in a reasonably scientific manner you might find that, on account of their lack of stars, those publications have less direct influence but their reviews have more relevance.

At various times and depending on the potency of the critic, the reviews in Gourmet, New York Magazine and the International Herald Tribune have probably come the closest. There may be others, not in English, that also qualify.

Bux, can you be more specific?