g.johnson

I think it was more like $2000. Mario may be a whore but he's an expensive whore.

I’ve never made a turducken but I regularly bone and stuff single birds. It’s a good thing to do, I think. Extra flavor, the breast stays moist, carving is easy and it impresses the hell out of people. At Christmas I’m toying with the idea of boning a goose and laying strips of duck and chicken breast within the stuffing, which will achieve a kind of turducken effect without the hassle.

From the article

Does this explain Freud & Fleiss? As a matter of fact, yes.

My mother always made parkin, a thick oatmeal cake sweetened with treacle, on Guy Fawkes night. We'd eat it while setting off fireworks and burning the pope in effigy.

It's been a while, but my impression is that black treacle is rather thicker and darker than molasses.

There's erectile tissue in the human nose. Don't know about other noses.

Previous offal thread, including a discussion of the always fashionable pigs uterus.

I think you put it very well yourself.

There was a long thread recently on what several posters saw as a certain tiredness and lack of innovation in the current NYC restaurant scene. There just doesn’t seem to be a new Vongerichten or Bouley appearing, certainly no New York Adria. Do you sense the same lack of excitement? Do you think that the enormous cost of operating a restaurant in NYC discourages investors from backing radically innovative chefs?

What else is there to do. Work is for tourists.

There is considerable redundancy in language. If you delete every fourth word in a sentence, for example, the result is surprisingly comprehensible. Take this picked at random from the Times today Becomes It loses some of the meaning but not, I suggest, a quarter. The main loss is that you have to work harder to interpret it -- there’s more ‘noise’.

Eh? It's it's a a good good idea idea to to say say everything everything twice twice in in case case you you miss miss it it the the first first time time. Eidt: Or weren't you commenting on the typo?

Anyone find all this 'u r some1' stuff unreadable? Sorry baruch, not meant as a dig at you personally but punctuation, capitalization and the the redundancy of language are there to aid comprehension.

If you feel comfortbale doing so, send your email address to g.johnson@physics.org, and I'll send you an Excel spreadsheet that'll do the calculation. Fat Guy: Newton’s law applies equally to convection and radiation and the differences in heating efficiency in any given oven would be reflected in the constant k in my first equation. As long as the oven has a reasonably stable temperature then I think it should be OK from that point of view. I’m more concerned that my equations assume that propagation of heat through the food is much faster than transfer of heat from oven to food. In other words it should be pretty accurate for predicting heating in a bar of copper, I’m not so sure about meat.

If the conditions obey Newton’s law of cooling (which covers heating too) then it’s straightforward to show that cooking time is given by t = ln((T0 – Toven)/(Tfood – Toven)) / k where Tfood is the desired temperature of the food, T0 is the initial temperature of the food, Toven is the oven temperature and k is a constant that depends on the size and shape of the food. So if t1 is the cooking time at an oven temperature of T1 then the cooking time at oven temperature T2 will be given by t2 = t1 ln((T0 – T2)/Tfood – T2) / ln((T0 – T1)/(Tfood – T1) This will be rather inexact as it doesn’t take into account temperature gradients within the food but should give you some idea. I would buy a thermometer, though.

Nougatine is, if nothing else, a bargain. The tasting menu (5 courses, I recall) is only $65.

The best two meals I've had recently are at Gordon Ramsay and Manoir aux Quat' Saison, both of which I'd give a 9 (I know I'm in a minority on MaQS). I'm reserving 10 since I suspect I should leave room for Michelin 3 stars in France. But I have wierd tastes. I'm the only person in the known universe (excpet Yvonne -- lucky we met) who remains unmoved by the Danny Meyer experience.

It's difficult to compare BH with other restaurants because they're trying to be much more innovative. Even though I often don't like their food I do admire their ambition. But to humor you, I'd give BH on menu 3, BH chef's choice 5, Gramercy 4, LeB 7, Babbo 7.

A disappointing dinner at Jean-Georges on Saturday. Yvonne had the Jean-George tasting menu and I had the autumn menu that Suzanne described. I’m not enough of a writer to give a proper review so just a couple of comments. Two courses were poorly executed – the young garlic soup was over salted and had an unpleasant raw garlic flavor and the turbot (in a very nice Chateau Chalon sauce) was overcooked. I found the lemon poached lobster much too sweet and thought the dish was misconceived but Suzanne’s rave above suggests that this too may have been poorly prepared. Bay scallops with caper-raisin emulsion was also too sweet. The other dishes were fine but the only the only one in the entire 14 courses that was close to FMJD was the peekytoe crab salad. For $120 a head I had hoped for rather more. It was especially disappointing given that we had a great meal in the Nougatine room a few weeks ago. On another thread southern girl has suggested that J-G is inconsistent and the varied experiences here bear that out.

Just anecdotal, but our experience is similar to Plotnicki’s. Of our three meals at Blue Hill, the one where the chef chose for us was markedly better than the other two. Is this because the food is somewhat unusual* leaving your ability to predict what you’re likely to enjoy compromised?

It’s believed that hominids (the family of animals to which man belongs) were, like other primates, social well before the discovery of fire*. There are some fairly obvious evolutionary advantages to living in groups. A group can better protect itself from predators and rival groups. There is an advantage in hunting game in groups (hominids became hunters a million years before they tamed fire). There might also be advantages in communal child rearing – allowing nursing mothers to go off and feed, for example. Communal child rearing could be even more important in modern(ish) humans where maturation is such a slow process. However, the web site I referenced above suggests that the social structure of pre-fire hominids (homo habilis, for example) was similar to that of chimpanzees. More human-like social structures appeared with homo erectus who was also the first hominid to tame fire. This is suggestive but there were many other changes occurring around the same period – the planet became colder and the numbers of large game animals increased, for example. It’s also impossible to determine cause and effect. Did the use of fire cause social changes or did developing intelligence lead to both the use of fire and to social changes? I think the most we can say is that communal fire tending and cooking may have caused changes in existing social structures. In doing a little web research, I realized that fire was first controlled by homo erectus about 1m years ago and not by homo sapiens (anatomically modern humans) who only appeared 150,000 years ago. So F-A’s claim that there is something characteristically human about communal cooking can only be defended by taking a rather broad definition of ‘human’. *This timeline has interesting information on how humans evolved with specific reference to diet.

Any, ahem, 'special' ingredients added as a result?

Mario Batalli and Marco Pierre White. Mario worked for MPW and apparently hates him (though with admingled respect). Alton Brown and anyone British. He gets up our noses something rotten.