yslee

Thanks to everyone for the shopping and tasting tips! Does anyone know if either Nicastro's lets you taste?

Hello, I'm finally ready to splash out on a bottle of fine olive oil. Ideally, I'd like to be able to taste a few before making my selection. Any suggestions on where this might be possible in Toronto or Ottawa? Thanks.

Ah. Thanks, SethG. [Moderator's note: This topic continues here: "Baking With Julia" by Julia Child (2005 - )]

What I meant to ask was, what kind of non-fat yogurt did you use and was the thickening agent in it that made skim milk behave like yogurt? In my experience, non-fat yogurts made with gelatin are too creepily unctuous but the starch-thickened ones are... well, starchy. (I'm trying to figure out which would perform better in the tart recipe.) Sorry for any confusion.

My Silpat retains odours, too. At first, I thought it was defective but the store I bought it from had it tested at head office (don't know what that entailed) and they said it was perfectly fine. I now use something called "The Original Bake-O-Glide Multigrade", which is a lot thinner, slicker, not sticky/greasy feeling, can be used at slightly higher temperatures, and can be cut to size. It claims to have a 100% PTFE coating (not that I know what that is). But I still haven't worked out what to do with my silicone spatulas, apart from designating them savoury and sweet. Just like cutting boards, right?

SethG, I haven't been participating in this thread, but I've always wondered about Leslie Mackie's yogurt tart and whether the fat content of the yogurt affects its structure. Did you actually use non-fat (insert shiver of horror here) yogurt? If so, was it thickened with gelatin, agar, starch, or a combination of the above? I just can't help thinking that you have to use good-tasting ingredients to get a good-tasting result... but maybe this tart is the exception that proves the rule. Thanks!

As a survivor of a terrifying suburban upbringing, I'm not really against chain restaurants. It was at chain restaurants that I first tasted fresh spinach, pasta other than spaghetti with "meat sauce", lettuces other than iceberg and a lot of other stuff my parents hated and therefore never served. (I also remember being luridly fascinated by the ball of marge on Denny's pancakes, which never quite melts.) Now that I have developed a palate, cook from scratch and spend far too much time prowling egullet, I'm still glad I was exposed to chain restaurant food. I don't eat at chains now, but judging from the convenience foods available at supermarkets, they serve meals far superior to what most North Americans eat at home. It's easy to bemoan homogeneity, but it's one of the defining characteristics of our culture. Our friends and neighbours shop at big-box stores and go on all-inclusive holidays. Why is their culinary counterpart so reprehensible? I suppose feeling superior is one of the privileges of being snugly ensconced in an elite subculture.

JPW - you're not married to David Sedaris' sister, are you? Have you read the last essay in _Me Talk Pretty One Day_? I defy anyone to read that without weeping either from hilarity or nausea.

Today at the farmer's market I bought some cotton candy made with maple sugar. The woman who made it said she'd mixed in a little white sugar to keep it from gumming up her machine (an ex-fairground model) but that it was primarily maple sugar. It was pretty great - and I normally don't like cotton candy.

Thanks for the advice and encouragement, all. (Mkfradin, I hope to graduate to sourdough one day - just have to figure out how to incorporate a feeding schedule into my peripatetic life!)

I've enjoyed this thread so much, even down to the queasiness that came with reading some of the MIL posts. My own bad food experiences aren't so extreme, but they haunt me just the same. - "boiled dinner" at my childhood best friend's house: stringy chunk of beef, half a carrot, many potatoes, no salt or other seasonings; salad of iceberg lettuce and sliced bananas. It was the first time in my life that I thought to myself, "I'd rather be hungry". (My friend went to university and said of the residence cafeteria: "I've never eaten so well in my life.") - dinner at the house of the prof for whom I was a TA: she called us 15 minutes before we were due to arrive and asked us to bring a salad. No problem: we arrived with a green salad and bottle of wine. She had prepared enough ratatouille and rice for two delicate eaters and proceeded to serve most of it to one person, while the remaining five of us had a little spoonful of each. She stashed our nice bottle of wine away in a cupboard and offered us the dregs of a bottle of "El Toro" red that was sitting on top of her fridge. It was rancid and warm, but my partner drank it anyway, hoping that once it was gone she'd open up our bottle. She didn't. She also didn't serve our salad, and kept my salad bowl until the end of term, when after I got my final paycheque I finally asked for it back. - I didn't have to eat his food, but I knew a guy who got sick EVERY TIME he cooked. I finally understood when I saw him "marinate" chicken in plain vegetable oil, then lick his fingers ("mmm, magnifico!"). I also once saw him make "bolognese sauce" with some ground beef of dubious age, one button mushroom and a bottle of red table wine. That's it: no salt, no tomatoes, no onions or garlic. Mind you, he was the English boarding school type. - also, now that my mother has gone crazy, any recipe she picks up from her church lady friends: sweet-and-sour casseroles that start with a can of tomato soup (we're CHINESE, for chrissake, and she's a very competent Chinese cook), underbaked bread puddings made with hot dog buns and margarine, napa cabbage salads with canned mandarin oranges and broken ramen noodles on top... Am I the only one whose childhood memories can't be replicated because of an actual decline in the cooking, rather than the power of nostalgia?

Hello, I'm a frequent home baker but new to breadmaking. I've been baking my way through Reinhart's Bread Baker's Apprentice with results that range from fair to excellent. However, I find the yields too large. Since I don't like previously-frozen bread for anything but toast (and I have tons of croutons, bread crumbs, etc), can anyone recommend a reliable way of freezing the dough? After the first rise? Fully proofed? Part-baked, a la supermarket baguettes? Thanks.