Fat Guy

The knife referenced is listed as boning knife by Forschner with a usable blade of 5". I would have to assume that the Microban treatment makes the knife attractive for commercial use but in reality the knife is too short to fillet and remove skin from all but the smallest fish. An 8" fillet is the shortest I use and sometimes even the 9" Wilson could be bigger depending on the fish size.-Dick Definitely, Dick. The 6" knife is only suitable for small fish. But man do these fishmarket guys do a lot of fish per hour with those cheap Forschner knives, stopping every few minutes to hone them on the steel and sharpening them daily on a grindstone. For larger fish they use larger knives, but the blue-handled Forschner seems to be very popular, along with the similar green-handled ones the brand-name of which I forget.

I've watched a number of professionals do this, and the ones who aren't sushi chefs have mostly used cheap Forschner/Victorinox knives. The blue-handled 6" Microban flexible fillet knife seems to be an industry favorite and is available for between US$15 and $20 depending on the merchant.

A standard 3/4 sheet pan is 15x21", which fits in many 30" residential range ovens and really utilizes the space efficiently. A standard full sheet is 18x26", which won't fit in a typical non-commercial oven. Here's an example: http://bakeryequipment.com/Bakery-Equipment/productDetail.asp?ProductID=15933 That price is for a dozen of them. Don't be alarmed.

I'm not good with metric. Is 530 x 325 mm right for a 3/4 sheet pan? If so I know there's an Exopat in that size. Exopats are functionally so similar to Silpats that a couple of professionals I know consider the brands interchangeable.

Cheap unfinished aluminum sheet pans are the way to go. There's little benefit to anything more expensive. Aluminum is an excellent conductor of heat, and for precision pastry work you're likely to be lining the pan with a Silpat anyway. I have four of these: http://bigtray.com/advance-tabco-sheet-pan-18-8a-13-sku-adv188a13-c-14810.html They are workhorses and it's hard to think of how they could be improved. I'll echo Dave's advice about having racks that fit the pans. I like his idea of having some quarter-sheet pans. If I'd thought of that maybe I'd have bought two and two, since I've never used more than two of my half-sheet pans at once. I also have Silpats (Exopats, actually) for my half-sheet pans. My oven can actually accommodate a three-quarter sheet pan. I think some day I may get a couple of those. There are the occasional times when I wish I had a little more surface area.

I took Mr. Hennes's meaning to be "chain restaurant" as opposed to a formal definition of fast food as in "QSR" or some other industry category. Also there has been a lot of line blurring over the past few years especially with the rise of the "fast-casual" category.

Catching up:

My son and I baked a loaf of bread today. It got me thinking: garlic bread! I took a couple of slices and spread them with a crushed-garlic compound butter. Also a little Parmesan. 10 minutes in the toaster oven on 320 F.

And then there's garlic bread with mozzarella cheese...

Red Robin is not terrible.

If you eat in Chinatown and utilize the five-for-a-dollar dumpling places, street vendors, bakeries and snack shops then the lower limit on a good meal is about $2. Then at the $5 price point you have many, many lunch specials at all kinds of restaurants all over the city especially Asian, and you have all the street vendors -- most every Halal food cart has a $5 meal of lamb over rice with salad that's more than most people eat. Making lunch the main meal of the day helps keep the cost way down. The thing you're not going to get in that price range is much in the way of service or ambiance. But good, cheap, filling food? No problem. There's also a whole world of hybrid options, like going to Fairway or Zabar's or one of the other good gourmet markets for a baguette and a small piece of good cheese.

It's incredibly gratifying to see so much spontaneous enthusiasm (and concern) for a project like this. The management team and I have been grappling with similar issues for years. We've long wanted to do a book, either a cookbook or a narrative book, but after all the discussions play out it generally doesn't turn out to be a workable idea. We haven't given up on the idea, and certainly the availability of a group of volunteers willing to take on the burden would make it more possible to do something. If you are such a volunteer, please do contact me or any other manager. We have so much we need to accomplish, I'm sure we'd welcome your participation if not in this project then in something else.

For me it's mostly either non-food items or combinations of foods. For example, dental fillings and iodine both can trigger a metallic taste sensation. Likewise, I get it if I drink red wine and shellfish together.

Calcium is a metal but not a very metallic one.

I was just thinking about what I was going to label as taste number six, but reading your summary I guess I'm proposing taste number eight: metallic. The metallic taste doesn't seem to fit into any of the existing categories, or does it?

I haven't seen the episode and don't know much about it, but it seems at least one blogger either caught a preview or had a line on a good deal of information. She lays out a synopsis here.

On the Travel Channel website there's a 4-minute video clip of me and Bourdain chatting awkwardly on a bench. As far as I know this is not what's going to be on the TV episode -- it's just something extra they taped for the web.

That's mozzarella cheese. Also a hard-cooked egg in a bunny mold, pita chips, slices of red and orange bell pepper, and a slice of my wife's carrot cake with cream cheese frosting.

For this year's mishloach manot the entire apartment was turned into a crazy Yiddish assembly line.

The class pets are three hermit crabs. PJ is very attached to them. He wanted to name one of them Stripey but was outvoted by his classmates who wanted to call it Rainbow. PJ has doggedly insisted on calling it Stripey, so much so that other kids and the teachers have started doing the same. At this point nobody can keep the thing's name straight. In any event, we were at a Japanese restaurant the other night and all the plates were garnished with kale. The hermit crabs, we learned when PJ was given the honor of keeping the class pets over February break, thoroughly enjoy a good piece of kale. So PJ suggested we keep the kale and pack it for the hermit crabs for lunch the next day. Other recent lunches: By the way I think we have chosen an educational path that means I will be making PJ's lunches for the next several years.

Next week's show, "Obsessed," is described in the episode guide as: "Anthony talks to chefs and bloggers whose obsessive love for food drives them to noteworthy feats." Though I have precious few noteworthy feats on my record, I'm one of a bunch of people he spoke to. The interview was taped last spring.

One of the great perks of teaching at the International Culinary Center (of which the French Culinary Institute is part) is the bread. Whenever I go in, I come out with amazing loaves baked by the students under the watchful eye of Johnson Yu, Bread Genius. The other day I was in to judge a culinary final exam and I took home these two beauties (I had to break the baguette in half in order to fit it in the microwave, which we use as a bread box when needed): The next morning I asked PJ which bread he wanted in his lunch and he said both. So I made him a cheese sandwich on the big one and I buttered four little slices of the baguette. Also carrot cake with cream-cheese frosting, and a hard-cooked egg. The rest of the bread went into bags for freezing.

A while back my son was over for a play date with some friends and their mother declared snack time. We went into the kitchen and she had one of the more impressive snack-food inventories I've seen. Mostly organic, fancy stuff -- still junk food but at the extreme good end of the junk-food spectrum. She proceeded to take out bowls and ask each boy what he wanted. My son wanted everything. So she arranged a little bit of everything -- there must have been a dozen items -- in the bowl. So enticing was his bowl that I asked for a mixed-snack bowl for myself. Since then we have whole-heartedly embraced the mixed-snack bowl in our home. A single snack item now feels monotonous, and I've never liked snack mixes -- the mixed-snack bowl just tastes better. Today I had an abbondanza of snacks in a mixed-snack bowl prepared by my wife. I basically had it in lieu of lunch. The overwhelming majority of the snacks were from Trader Joe's, which makes the best snacks overall I think: honey pretzel rods, potato-lentil crisps, oyster crackers, potato chips, cheese puffs. There were also some Snyder's Snaps, a nice pretzel option. Is anybody else a fan of, or opinionated about, the mixed-snack bowl?

I haven't heard anything about Delmonico's lately. It could be tired and lame, as one would guess it is, but with places like that it's always possible they recently got some great new chef or GM and are trying to do something ambitious. I don't know.

Today's lunch. Things are really getting repetitive, but that's what kids seem to go for.