EdS

Really? You guys are so afraid of actually tasting the hot dog you put everything else on it. ← The worst hot dogs I've ever been served were in Santiago, Chile. A friend and I stepped into a hot dog and beer place. They seem to be common there perhaps due to a significant number of German immigrants. The house special was two hot dogs with mayonnaise and a beer. We both ordered that. In a few minutes, the waitress brought our food. The method of preparation was something like this: 1. Lay two supermarket untoasted hot dog buns, partly open in a V-shape, on a plate. 2. Set poached hot dogs in buns. 3. Cover hot dogs with mayonnaise until surface of mayonnaise is level with hot dog bun. I'd estimate there was a pint serving of mayonnaise for each of us. My friend finished one hot dog, mayo and all, and looked queasy like a Ren & Stimpy character. He didn't touch his beer. I blissfully ate all of mine and chugged down my beer. I guess I was hungry and stupid. Within about 15 minutes, we were both ready to lose it. A few days later we walked by another hot dog joint and I talked my friend into going inside to try another hot dog. Guess what? Same thing! Scrape, scrape, scrape that mayo off! Oh, if you walk into a cafe with a sign outside that says "cafe con piernas" and your high school Spanish tells you that you might get a coffee and a drumstick or some other local culinary offering, think again. We had no clue. My friend and I sat down and didn't realize until we ordered our coffee that Starbucks would have some competition in that country [Google for "cafe con piernas" and "santiago", pervs].

More like Patriotic Red China Red because those Lodge enameled items are imported from China.

I do find it amusing that Chez Panisse air freights crates of "locally-produced" vegetables from Chino Ranch way down in San Diego County. I don't think of San Diego as being local to me at all. Chez Panisse has sometimes been compared to restaurants in Provence or northern Italy. Imagine if Chez Panisse were in Nice, France. A comparable distance would be flying in vegetables from Brussels, Belgium (512 miles) or Algiers, Algeria (528 miles). Local? I say do the Alice Waters thing and put that Chilean produce on a plane inbound.

If I'm doing some sort of saute with butter and possibly leaning French, I'm more likely to use shallots than onions. I started my rice pilaf tonight with a shallot saute in butter before adding the rice and chicken stock.

He doesn't look healthy.

I don't care where my produce comes from as long as the quality is great and the price is right. Let the farmers compete on quality and price.

Spam

I've read advice to wrap cheese in parchment paper and then wrap in foil. Unfortunately, I've noticed my Parmagiano-Reggiano dries out more quickly than it did when I was "abusing" it with plastic wrap. My Gruyere and old Cheddar are fine. I'm wondering if it would be wise to use different wrapping techniques for different cheeses.

While not knowing the proportions, that recipe looks like it would give a sweeter version of puree of potato and leek. I'll repeat others' suggestions to use chicken stock and know that this kind of soup can take a bit of salt. Stirring in a swirl of creme fraiche would be nice. A bunch of boiled vegetables is going to taste like a bunch of boiled vegetables without adding some fat or getting some carmelization going. I've been playing with using basmati rice as an alternative to potato as a thickener in my puree soups and have been pleased. It gives a bit of a nut flavor.

The predominant form of DAG fat in Enova oil is metabolized differently by the body; instead of being stored as fat, the majority of DAG fat is immediately burned as energy. What happens if I chug a half-gallon of this stuff? Do I become a human space heater?

While I've never tried them in this application and I don't even know if they are food-safe, collapsable photo chemical storage bottles might work well for oils and maybe even wine. These bottles certainly help preserve darkroom chemicals which can oxidize quickly.

It took me a few moments of staring at your lemon cheese photos, searching desperately for cottage cheese or some other cheese, to realize that lemon cheese is lemon curd and there is no cheese. I had a jar of TJ's lemon curd in my hand yesterday and now I wish I had bought it to try! I like the Dundee's orange marmalade at TJ's and it seems like lemon curd would have the similar characteristics of being tart and not so sweet. I'm really trying to imagine how eggs work with that. I remember your last blog quite well partly due to your daughter's given moniker. Has she wisely continued to eat her oatmeal or has she fallen astray?

Apparently, it's just very finely-cut oatmeal. ← Actually, if I understood Alton Brown correctly, it's partially cooked by steaming, then pressed flat, and then cut. But they also add flavorings/sugar even to the plain flavor. ← That's what I get for searching Google and running across a recipe for homemade instant oatmeal ground in a blender!

I have a heaping bowl of oatmeal in front of me as I type this. Since I'm eating this out of a Japanese noodle bowl, let me first crank out a few disturbing thoughts... Have you tried adding corn? How about Kewpie? I can't say that I've had instant oatmeal but I probably did growing up. Apparently, it's just very finely-cut oatmeal. How about stirring it in with the other oatmeal that the kids like? I know you're fighting psychology. If my mom had bought some bulk cornflakes and tried adding sugar to it, there's no way I would have accepted it. Where's Tony the tiger? I think if I were to buy some instant oatmeal and didn't like it, I'd add it to my next smoothie.

I thought everyone loved cake but me. I guess I'm not such a freak. I think it's mostly a texture thing. Or lack of texture. I mean, it's a sponge. They're usually way too sweet for me too. I do like ice cream. Go figure. So, on my birthdays growing up, inevitably there would be a cake and ice cream. Well, I don't like cake yet parents or whomever would feel compelled to pleasure me with a birthday cake. Yuck. My solution was simple. I'd take a couple scoops of ice cream and the smallest piece of cake I could get away with. Then, when no one was looking, I'd quickly mix the cake with the ice cream. No more nasty sponge! If you can't see the cake anymore, it's not there, is it?

I have the same cooker, as well as the "neuro fuzzy" one. I use the brown rice setting. On the "neuro" I use the "mixed porridge" setting. If I happen to use one of the others I have, (if these are in use for something else), I just add twice the amount of water (or other liquid) as is called for in regular rice. For the savory version I learned a "trick" - I put frozen butter in the bottom of the cooker, add the rice or grains, then add room temp liquids. The result is a buttery "crust" on the bottom something like that which forms when cooking rice in the Lebanese manner (AKA "Armenian style"). It isn't really crusty, but I like the effect when the mass is turned out of the cooker pan in one mound. ← I wish I could try your butter trick tonight but I filled my cooker pan right before reading your post. I just checked and I see that my cooker also has a Porridge setting and I can set a timer so the cycle completes when I want. I'll use this tonight. There's a chart in my rice cooker manual that indicates that the cycle for porridge is an hour and a half. By porridge, I believe this setting is designed for okayu, rice gruel, and the similar Chinese congee. I've never had either. A common proportion of rice to water for this is 1:7, according to one of my Japanese cooking books. When the gruel is done cooking, you can add things like raw egg yolk, powdered green tea, dried bonito, sliced shiitake simmered in dashi, etc. I bet you could dump some Carnaroli or Arborio in the cooker and create a breakfast risotto if you used the right additions.

Something burned. It may have been the bones. It may have been the vegetables. I'll add a third possibility. The juices on the bottom of the pan may have burned and when you deglazed, those burned juices ended up in your stock, making it bitter. If your pan is much larger than needed to fit the ingredients, the juices can spread enough to burn rather easily. If my stock ingredients roasted fine but I found burned juices on the bottom of my pan, I'd continue with my stock but skip the deglazing.

I don't think you have a problem. The light color is, well, concentrated. You could take some of that concentrated stock and dilute it back to plain stock and check the color to be sure.

Synthetic vanillin tastes the same as naturally-derived vanillin but imitation vanilla doesn't taste the same as real vanilla because there are missing components. Vanilla isn't just vanillin. The same goes for comparing synthetic salt (sodium chloride) to sea salt which has added minerals. But I agree with your point. Everything in nature is just a set of chemicals. If you can recreate them completely, with nothing missing or extra, then the synthetic is the same as the natural. It's the differences we need to be concerned about, for both flavor and, more importantly, health. Thus, I'm not against synthetic ingredients but I am against nearly all the ones I know about. ← I don't know anything about olestra because it doesn't fill a personal need so I can't comment on it. My concern about avocado oil is that highly unsaturated fats go rancid very easily and consuming rancid (oxidized) fats is not good. I'd say this problem outweighs any health benefit to consuming unsaturated versus saturated fats. I've read some of Dr. Weil's work and he advises that in the case of flaxseed oil, a very unsaturated oil, that it be purchased in small quantities and kept in the fridge to keep it from going rancid. I wonder how avocado oil compares. I don't find grapeseed to pose a special rancidity concern. What are you doing that requires a high smokepoint? Ever see anyone cooking in one of those 100,000 BTU+ woks in a Chinese restaurant kitchen? You'll see flames here and there. I'm pretty sure they are going way past the smokepoint and hitting the flashpoint. I'm thinking that's not such a good thing for our health. Oh, and the smoke!

I'd like to see some people resolve in 2005 to stop whining about colloquialisms. They have their time and place.

If you do this sort of thing often, a fine-mesh chinois would be very handy.

More oil. Higher heat.

I flirted with going veggie as a New Years' resolution. I even read Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone from cover to cover. It didn't work. Hamburger, cooked medium rare, made with ground chuck (20% fat) crap supermarket sesame seed hamburger bun, good to 2006? (sorry Judy, it ain't a burger if it's on focaccia) Straus 85% butterfat butter, by the fistful, to toast bun and cook meat Fleur de Sel (plain sea salt isn't good enough for this return to reality) cracked Tellicherry black pepper Edmond Fallot Seed Style Dijon Mustard (Just Like French Laundry) I was mildly amused with using this stuff on a burger. The mustard counts as a veggie, yes? REPEAT Yes, I had two of them. I finished nearly a whole pound of beef. Each washed down with a beer...straight out of a can. I want to see some more broken New Years' resolutions here. It's already January 4. You must be dropping like flies by now. Confess.

By the way, a santoku is more of a homemakers' knife in Japan than a professional knife. A professional is most likely to have a deba (generally for boning fish and chicken), a yanagi-ba (sashimi slicer), and the usuba (vegetable knife). These have cousins that may be used instead. The santoku appears to me to be an attempt to replace these three purpose-built knives in the home with a single do-everything knife.

I'd rather have a chef's knife and an usuba than a santoku. And I do. The usuba is the optimal vegetable knife, in my opinion. I use it more often than my 10" wide chef's knife.