McDuff

Try this on for size 6.4 oz brown sugar 1 cup 7.4 oz white sugar or Florida crystals 1 cup 4 tb water 1 tb honey bring to a boil stirring constantly till sugar is dissolved. add 10.5 oz unsalted butter cook stirring most of the time to 270 and pour over matzoh crackers which have been laid into a sprayed paperlined half sheet pan. Bake at 325 for 10 minor until bubbly all over. Sprinkle on 12 oz chocolate chips, allow to soften, then skate it all around with an offset. This came out nice and shiny and clear and the chocolate didn't pull off like it usually does.

That's the one. Somebody make it, and tell me if the brown sugar doesn't get grainy. I'll try it tomorrow in a smaller batch than the 8.8 lb of brown sugar the one I'm supposed to use calls for. Speaking of Msss. Goldman..I use her Moist and Majestic New Year's Honey Cake and complained to her website link that it was perhaps too overleavened, as it collapses. I snuck the baking powder out of it and it worked better. I got a fairly snippy reply from her personally, but you know what I think is a riot? Look at the cover of her book, and there is a collapsed honey cake in the picture.

Yeah that about sums up what I think about recipes that say boil for three minutes and not boil to xxx degrees. Huh? So what do we think? 240 or 300?

All the recipes seem to be just that, but I don't know why the brown sugar gets grainy. I would like for it to stay nice and smooth, but it doesn't. That's what I want to fix.

I have to make mass quantities of matzoh crunch at work and have never like the stuff. It always seems to crystallize. Can't put corn syrup into it, though someone mentioned brown rice syrup. It's basically just butter and brown sugar boiled for three minutes, poured over matzoh, then baked for 12 minutes after which chocolate is glided on to it. Marcie Goldman claims to have invented it, but I doubt it. And her web site is now for hire only.

I've never met the guy, as I'm sure most of us have never met the folks we're writing about here. If he's that much of a doofus, then why bother with him? In the best of all possible worlds, our guests would be on their best behavior and wouldn't need to be bitch slapped between the entremet and the releve. You just never know about these celebrities..the one time I met Faye Runaway she was so plastered she nearly slid under Table 10.

Buy it and use it, a lot. My neighbor who cooks outside 300 days a year has a weber with a rotisserie and he does everything on it..chickens, pork roasts, all kinds of things. This is a guy who is seriously considering a caja China and who just joined a club called the Mangia Mangia Club, for serious cooks and eaters. I wondered if there is a way to retrofit my alan scott brick oven with a rotisserie. Brick Oven Rotiserie woodburner That article was right on the money..so to speak. I built mine from The Bread Builder's book and it cost about $1000 and weighs closer to 10,000lbs with all the foundation. I got a couple of picture perfect loafs out of it, and pretty much lost interest. Only have used it a dozen times, maybe. I don't know. We need to do some landscaping around it anyway and then maybe I'll be motivated to spend time out there. Takes all day to fire it, tend it, and make a pizza, a roast chicken, and some roasted vegetables. I think it might be perfect for Herme's 20 hour apples, as 80 hours after the fire is raked out, it's still 110 degrees in there.

Buy it and use it, a lot. My neighbor who cooks outside 300 days a year has a weber with a rotisserie and he does everything on it..chickens, pork roasts, all kinds of things. This is a guy who is seriously considering a caja China and who just joined a club called the Mangia Mangia Club, for serious cooks and eaters. I wondered if there is a way to retrofit my alan scott brick oven with a rotisserie.

I was personal cheffing for a high-powered real estate attorney and her family in a very upscale suburb of Boston, complete with the vintage Mercedes in the garage and the original Chagalls on the walls. She had a habit of running on a treadmill to, she told me, John Philips Sousa, then going upstairs and showering and then whatever. But two Mondays in a row she would shower, then come hang around the kitchen wrapped in a towel. What's that line from Goldfinger, "Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, the third time is enemy action." On the second Monday she lounged in the towel, flipping through a Victoria's Secrets catalog. That did it for me...maybe in another life, but not now, no way. I got so freaked out my back froze up and I could barely walk and do my fulltime job. I never went back, and endured several snotty phone calls from her and the husband before I was able to convince them, NO.

Or how about people in books? Ignatius J. Reilly Holden Caulfield Gandalf Scuppers the Sailor Dog

Dancing Deer baking co. in Boston makes and sells natural food coloring. (or at least they sell it.) There's also an outfit called The Plant Group.

Be careful about screwball suggestions (sorry, folks) to use anything other than a proper oyster knife if you don't have any experience opening oysters. I was once using the little knife on a corkscrew, plunged it into the ball of my thumb and spent the afternoon in the er at Mass General having a med student stuff about 100 yards of absorbent tape into the gaping hole. Still have the scar and that happened in 1973. hillvalley's suggestion about the sweetspot is spot on. Once you find it, the oyster literally will pop open.

My daughter (14) got a whacking big box of Godiva chocolates from her boyfriend the other day, and I was reading the ingredients and found vanillin. We can't have that around at the earthy crunchy groceria, as it is an artificial flavor. And now this...I had a tub of pate a glacer at the country club and didn't use it much. I'll bet anything the ingredients lists partially hydrogenated oils, another no-no. I had been using Guittard white chocolate chips that someone else brought into the bakery, read the box one day recently..partially hydrogenated oils. Out they went. I think the glaze we learned in school was 2 to 1 chocolate to butter.

Seems to me all those reasons are valid, with the possible caveat that butter which is at about 55 degrees will roll more easily that butter at 34 degrees.

Whole Foods does in fact have a sampling policy that specifically applies to team members, who are encouraged to sample the foods so they know what they';re talking about but not make a meal out of it, and in general to the public. It's a stipulated 1 oz portion that fits into certain sized little containers. Most of the live demos have it on the sign, one portion per customer please. But we see it all the time with the passive demos, people just helping themselves to whatever. My feeling is, so what? Just about everything one buys in there is 50 to 75 cents a mouthful anyway. Sometimes companies pick up the tab on what's being sampled, today it was Coleman beef hot dogs, yesterday it was Bali spices and Bell and Evans chicken. In my department if we have stuff that's going to go out of code, we break it open and sample it to try and move the rest of the product. If a product gets damaged, it gets sampled, for instance a coffee cake that gets munched putting it in the bag. And if I'm working on a new product, I make extra to tease people, but strictly speaking, if we don't have it to sell, we shouldn't be sampling it.

I always blanched sweetbreads before skinning them, and then pressed them. You're supposed to do that with brains, the blanching, but I once worked with this fool who took calf brains, sliced them raw, breaded them and fried them, and sent them up to the bar for unsuspecting customers to snack on. They were grossly bloody to begin with. Should have been soaked for a while. I like my sweetbreads with shallots, olives, mushrooms, demiglace and madeira.

I've been using a Cocoa Barry couverture and I really like it. Melts down as thin as vegetable oil. I've always found Callebaut to be too thick. My experience has also been with 811 and 835 mostly.

Drizzle-drazzle...actually an ancient Babylonian term. I prefer the glaze brushed on, but my boss wants me to spray it and I don't think it covers well. I actually like the taste of what we use..reminds me of an apricot sour.

He related to Cyril Hitz?

If you mix a little corn syrup with the butter and brown sugar, I think there will be less of a tendency for the topping to crystallize and get crunchy.

Baking it in layers on a sheet pan at a fairly brisk temp works, because I did it in school too. I'd have to look it up to get the details. It was a little like marquetry to assemble the cake, which had an orange yogurt filling, but it was amazing looking when done.

Emma would kill him, and rightfully so. He resembles nothing so much as a human fungus, or the offspring of the Elephant Man, or a reptile with pink skin. I can't believe for an instant she would enjoy a dinner with him. Unless she were being paid as an actress to pretend to find him fascinating. I won't believe otherwise unless I see it in her own hand. She's just too gorgeous and cool. I strongly urge you to track down and watch The Tall Guy, with Emma Thompson, Jeff Goldblum and Rowan Atkinson. Emma like you've never seen her!

Yes, he most definitely is. His whacko politics aside, it doesn't appear that anybody who has responded to this has read any of his books about sailing. Racing Through Paradise is one that springs to mind. I think another was Atlantic High. He would charter a big sailboat and invite his pallies to go for a spin. They would bring a chef and a cellar and just have a lot of fun.

I lost count somewhere between 350 and 400, and that only includes what's out on bookshelves and not in the boxes under the stairs.

Maurice Ravel, Mark Twain, William F. Buckley Jr. and Emma Thompson. The idea of shooting shotguns in the garden of the French Laundry with Bourdain is absolutely irresistible. Saw him a little while ago on a journey back to France where he spent part of his childhood. Quite wistful.