Fat Guy

At first blush it seems neat, but I'm actually having trouble finding a practical use for it.

I made a soft-boiled egg for breakfast. It was a jumbo egg. Our collection of egg cups, consisting of one egg cup, did not accommodate a jumbo egg -- it was clearly sized for a large egg. I tried a shot glass but that didn't work either. Are there egg cups for jumbo eggs, or is there another kind of dish that can do double duty as an egg cup, or should I just stick to large eggs for soft boiling?

Science Q&A piece in the New York Times today by C. Claiborne Ray debunking the "5-second rule." Turns out, almost all the bacteria get on the food the second it hits the floor, and extra time on the floor makes little difference. Yes, it has actually been studied.

I really enjoy the TJ's "blister peanuts."

I'm repeatedly amazed at the range of quality in roasted peanuts available in the marketplace. This is also true of other nuts, but peanuts seem to have the widest range. The crummy little peanuts sold in glass jars in the supermarket are such a far cry from a product like Aunt Ruby's Roasted Redskin Peanuts that it's hard to think of the as the same food.

Pomi tomatoes in a box are one of the great underrated ingredients of our era. I think people don't understand them because they don't have as much salt as canned, but once you adjust for that expectation their flavor is amazing. In general, when you go from canned to aseptic boxes I think you see improvements. Chicken stock in a box is much better than chicken stock in a can, for example. But those are both forms of shelf-stable packaging. I think the loss in quality comes when you go from refrigerated to shelf-stable.

If all goes according to plan we're soon to be the owners of a Sub-Zero refrigerator. Recently, a friend with one of these told us that the one complaint she has is that the doors are non-magnetic. For parents of a five-year-old, this can be an issue because the refrigerator door is the default home of school art projects. Is it so? Are Sub-Zero doors non-magnetic? Are there other brands like this? And surely there are workarounds, like suction cups or something, right?

Most any home in the Western world is wired for electricity by default. If you want to install an electric range it's just a question of plugging it in, or maybe having the electrician make you a 220 circuit -- standard in a lot of kitchens and laundry rooms anyway. If you live in an area with a municipal gas supply then home construction in that area will often include gas plumbing. In New York City, for example, most every building is connected to the gas utility and you rarely see a non-gas burner in a home kitchen. But if you live way out in rural Connecticut or North Carolina there is no municipal gas supply. There may not even be municipal water or sewage: you have a well and a septic system. And if you want your range to run on gas you need a large, usually unsightly propane tank out back of your home, you need the plumbing to run that to your kitchen (which is not so hard to do if you're doing it while building a new home but is a major pain in renovation), and you need to monitor and have the tank filled when necessary. My friends who've gone through it are evenly split on the decision. One friend really likes cooking with gas and is willing to endure the inconvenience of the propane tank. The other friend says that if he had known what an annoyance it would be to maintain the propane he'd have gone with a modern electric range. Also, it seems that people with propane-fueled ranges often have calibration problems because the installers often don't know what they're doing with the conversion kits.

I'm not sure the non-natives explanation cuts it. New York has long been a city where a lot of people come from somewhere else. Even when I was a kid in the 1970s it felt like so many people were from Texas, etc. This is nothing new. I also don't think it's necessarily accurate to say that only non-natives are eating at the fast-food chain places. It may also be that various shortcomings of local establishments have opened the door to the chains. Domino's is a great example. The quality of average slice-shop pizza has been declining my whole life and is now quite low. Delivery can be hit-or-miss. Domino's, by comparison, has stayed level or even improved slightly over the past however many years Domino's has done business here (15? 20?). Delivery times are excellent. And it's cheap.

On another topic, LPShanet observes that the New York City outposts of the national fast-food chains are often disappointing. I must agree. I've been on the road for about a week in Virginia and North Carolina. We've had about 1/3 of our meals at chains like Subway. In the towns where we've visited these places, they've been uniformly pleasant and clean, with upbeat service. Not so in New York City, where these places seem to thrive despite being depressing and, in many cases, not very fast. What's the deal?

Over the years we've had a few topic on electric cooktops, including: Is there such a thing as a great electric stove? cooking with electric Giving up on gas and going back to electric As a longtime user of gas ranges, I've never really had to embrace electric. I've known, in the abstract, that electric technology has been improving, but it hasn't affected me. In New York City, most everyone uses gas and in the two most rural houses where I cook often as a guest our friends have gone to great lengths to have propane tanks put in. This week, however, I've been staying in some friends' townhouse in Charlotte, NC, and they have electric. Nothing fancy, I think this is just the unit the condo builder put in all the kitchens. It's a Maytag with glass-surface radiant-heat elements, like this one. After cooking on this unit for a few days, I've really come to appreciate electric. I'm not saying it's better than gas for all purposes. It's just that I've been impressed. I think in terms of raw power this unit outclasses any non-restaurant electric range. The primary test for this is boiling water. The range is unusually efficient at turning a pot of cold water into a pot of boiling. The strength of the largest burner is described as "Large: 1-10 in. 2100/3200 watts." I'm not fully sure what that means, but the thing is strong. For high-temperature sauteeing the unit is equally effective. It gets a pan super-hot very quickly. The common complaints about electric are that it's slow and that you can't see the flame. This unit is fast: you turn the dial to a setting and within moments the burner is glowing red. Temperatures are held by cycling on and off, but with heavy cookware there isn't major temperature fluctuation -- still, this is something that's better with gas.

I really appreciate it when a restaurant offers filtered water at no additional charge. There are also some restaurants here and there that pour bottled water at no additional charge.

It's by units.

Your logic is unassailable. I should always travel with eggs.

McDonald's is the biggest and has the most name recognition, so people seem to attach all their fast-food antipathy to McDonald's. Yet, McDonald's has a much higher quality level than the fast-food baseline: better ingredients, nicer stores (and also it's more expensive).

I also felt this way in the UK, which is why I brought some eggs back to the US. Tasting them back home didn't support my perception. My wife and I were amazed at the lack of corroboration. This led me to think maybe there's another factor at play, such as the butter used for frying eggs. Right now, I'm in North Carolina having a similar perceptual issue. I think the eggs here taste so much better than in New York. I have to bring some back with me to see if I can confirm that.

The USDA says "Typically, eggs are packed within 1 to 7 days of being laid." Although, the one time I visited an egg processor (this was in Canada), the conveyer went straight from the egg-collection are to washing, candling, packing and refrigeration -- and trucks were coming for the eggs all the time.

I'm ambivalent about Subway. In many ways I dislike the place. Most notably the sandwich fillings are just bad. Yet, in desperate situations, Subway is my family's go-to place, because of the vegetables. And also because of the price. At Subway, for $5, you get a foot-long sandwich on acceptable, squishy, finish-baked bread topped with a significant quantity of fresh vegetables of your choice. You can also skip the sandwich altogether and have them make you a salad. In the past week on the road we've utilized Subway three times for a vegetable fix. If only they used decent-quality fillings for the sandwiches. Their meats and cheeses need a lot of improvement.

I was at Costco in Charlotte, NC, today and it occurred to me to check the packing date on the eggs. The carton on top of the pile was packed on Julian day 50, which I believe is February 19 (today is February 24). The carton didn't specify exact origin, just that it was produced by Cal-Maine, which has a large network of producers and distribution around the Southeast, as well as elsewhere.

When you have a situation where the anecdotal accounts conflict, the way to sort it all out is through blind testing. At least thus far I have not seen a rigorously conducted blind taste test supporting the notion that there is much difference in the taste of eggs. Although, I think we could come up with more rigorous methodologies. Here are some of the recent publications on the subject. This one from the Washington Post is somewhat convincing: "Backyard eggs vs. store-bought: They taste the same" This one from Serious Eats is the best-done piece I've seen on the subject: "The Food Lab: Do 'Better' Eggs Really Taste Better?"

I've got to go with Knopf Cooks American, the 18-book series edited by Judith Jones. I don't have all of them, but I have quite a few and they are where it's at when it comes to making a compelling presentation of American regional cuisine. Indeed, once you've read a bunch of the books in the series, it's hard to believe a lot of people still say there's no such thing as American regional cuisine.

Right. It would require more resources than I had. All I can truly conclude from what I did is that it's worth doing a more in-depth test.

Over the past decade or so I've been seeing more and more products that used to be sold only in the refrigerator or freezer section repackaged for shelf stability. Milk is probably the most obvious example, with chocolate milk in particular now being mostly out of the refrigerator. Shelf-stable milk does not taste as good to me as refrigerated milk, though I confess I haven't done a blind tasting. Today I tried some shelf-stable tortellini, which I thought were markedly inferior to the refrigerated and frozen kind -- so much so that no blind tasting is required. What else should go back to the fridge?

According to Robert Sietsema of the Village Voice, always out front on such things, the Chick-Fil-A at NYU (which is a "Chick-Fil-A Express," actually) is a disappointment, selling pre-made, soggy sandwiches. Also this recent New York Times "City Room" blog post comes up on Google re the NYU Chick-Fil-A: "Chick-fil-A Protests at N.Y.U. Are Muted." I guess I'll have to sneak in and check it out.

Pharmacies, mini marts and bad supermarkets both urban and rural. Those places are at the ends of long distribution chains, whereas the large supermarkets, Costco, et al., tend to move a ton of product and the economics don't work out for anything except fresh and fast.