Moopheus

But I'd have to drive to get to the nearest Costco. It's in the middle of some huge suburban mall. Double feh.

Feh. If I thought about that I'd never get to do anything. If you live every moment of your life according to rules of economics, you'll quickly find yourself not living your life.

Except that microwaves don't heat from the inside out. The microwaves interact with water--so with some foods, the outside might be drier, leading to the impression of cooking from the interior. Microwaves also interact with ice less efficiently than with liquid water, which could produce differential heating in something like butter if it was only partially frozen.

That does make a difference: I enjoy the process of baking. I like working with dough. I like making stuff. It's like a chemistry experiment you get to eat at the end. And whether it's "better"--well, that is relative--in most cases I could buy better, if I were willing to pay a lot for it. I'm usually not. Hummus is not just better than store-bought (even Sabra, which I agree is the best store brand) but cheap to make. I also like the control over what's in the food--I can leave out the crap that's in most processed foods, choose my ingredients, adjust the flavors to my own taste. Of course there are choices to make, and the choices are going to be different for each person.

Well, yes. But this is an Internet forum; if we had to stop every time it got a little silly there wouldn't be much left.

It also depends a lot on what you mean by "store bought"--I can easily make cake, bread, cookies, pesto, hummus, and so on, that are better than anything I could buy in an ordinary supermarket. In fact, I try to buy as little as possible in an ordinary supermarket. On the other hand, I know there are bakeries that can produce better than I can make. There's a local bakery that produces bread much better than mine, though of course it is expensive. On the other other hand, I've rarely encountered a pecan pie or cheesecake better than what I can make myself. But otherwise I agree with most of the things that have been mentioned already. Also add, pasta, at least basic pasta like fettucini.

Unless it's Sandra Lee. Then it should go in the rubbish. Though in general, it's true: a book you didn't find useful might be just the thing someone else is looking for.

I just had to weed a few books out to make room for some new stuff. I eliminated a few that I just wasn't getting any use out of. But it gets harder, because I'd done some major weeding a couple of years ago, so most of the really obvious culls had already been made. Fortunately, a friend of mine is the manager of the used book department at a local bookstore, so getting rid of books is fairly easy.

"Bread Baker's Apprentice" by Peter Reinhart

This is true--but I think the point stands that Chris's analogy still applies more to the first edition than the second. Possibly the second edition may be more influential in the long run, but if so, it's not just because of the additional (valuable) information, but because McGee's reputation precedes it, so the second edition will be very widely read, much more so than the first. And the movement in the culinary world that Chris refers to was already underway when the second edition appeared--again because the influence of the first edition was already at work.

Well, maybe we'll look back on the first edition that way. Don't forget that the new McGee is a revised edition of a book that had been out for 20 years previously. To the extent that McGee was influential in inspiring a generation of chefs (and even home cooks) to think more scientifically about cooking, to use the knowledge of the chemistry to their advantage, that influence had already begun. I'd also be willing to bet that the sales of the new edition have been substantial. A few years back, when I was working the desk at the FCI library, Kitchen Confidential was the most widely-circulated book in the library. I'm not sure what that means in terms of its influence, but clearly something. The French Laundry cookbook was probably #2.

My wife and I had a good laugh the first time we saw a cereal labeled "Crispy Hexagons."

The roblem is only partly too many people, at least in the short term. I mean, I take a fairly neo-Malthusian position--populations tend to increase to the limits of available resources, and then crash, though humans have been clever at leveraging our position with our farming technology. But increasing the food supply has generally meant increasing populations, not so much declining hunger. And agriculture can only stretch so far in a world were resources are intrisically finite. So in the long run I think we're in a bad spot. In the short run we're actually producing sufficient food, but our production and distribution system is horrifically inefficient--somewhere around 40 percent of the food produced in the US is never eaten. Other industrialized countries are almost as bad. We could, in fact, ease up on the industrial production if we didn't waste so much. Food waste photos

This is partly true--to produce the same quantity of free-range meat as industrial factory meat would be more land-use intensive. It would of course also be much more expensive, and so unlikely that the same quantity of meat would be demanded by the market, unless government subsidies were increased dramatically. As it is, in the US we're constantly losing farmland, as it gets "developed" into McMansions and strip malls. It's not necessarily a choice of food v. wildlife, but food v. car lots and Wal-marts. But we don't actually have to accept factory-farmed meat, because we don't really need that quantity of meat. It's a choice, and agribusiness and the government push the economics toward cheap, low-value food.

The only kitchen gift this year was a copy of Bread Baker's Apprentice, though that by itself should keep me occupied for a while. Everything else was bike tools.

Pongal on Lexington is good for vegetarian Indian. There's a couple of places in Chinatown that do decent mock-meat, but the best one I remember is actually in Brooklyn--probably going to be out of the way for you. I worked at Rockefeller Center for a year, and my memory is that midtown is not veg-friendly generally.

I had to go out for some Jell-O supplies, and was going to the Shaw's in Porter Square, and since brandy was on the list . . . for the Jell-O . . . I went into the Liquor World store there at the shopping plaza, and they had maraschino.

Yes, which is why many restaurants are as mediocre as the chains.

That is part of what I was trying to get at with the distinction between the local and national chains. Part of the problem for chains is that what people expect in a chain is uniformity: You can walk into any one and know what you're getting. How do you do that? With more and more locations over greater area, more top-down control is required, more centralized processing. There's almost no way to do this economically without compromise. One of the things I hate about chains is that I usually feel like I've just gotten a poor value for my money: it wasn't very good, and it wasn't necessarily cheaper than other options.

I am generally an avoider of chains. When I was still living in Brooklyn, though, and driving back and forth between Boston and NYC, sometimes we'd have to stop (well, I always make a rest stop when I'm on long drives) and if we were on 95 we got into the habit of stopping at Cracker Barrel, because the other options were generally even worse. If we were on 84, then the stop would be at Rein's Deli. I admit that all chains are not created equal, but on the other hand they generally don't offer me anything I want that I can't get elsewhere. Can we make a distinction between a local/regional chain and a national one? I remember when Boston Market was still Boston Chicken and there were only three of them--it was actually pretty good. Most chains start out small, from the kernel of what may have been something decent at the beginning. And yet, to grow, to reach a really wide market, it seems that there must be some dilution. Sometimes they give up the very thing that made them in the first place--to give a couple of local examples: Dunkin' Donuts no longer makes donuts in the individual shops, Bertucci's pizza no longer has wood-fired ovens (I remember when it was just the one in Somerville). And yet this allows them to expand even more!

And you would be wrong. There are a lot of Domino's in urban areas--even New York City and Boston. We have Pizza Hutts, Papa John's, California Pizza Kitchen, Sbarro, etc. also.

I sort of got into the habit when I was working at a culinary school. I was just in a support staff position, but eventually I started calling the chefs "chef" just because everyone else was doing it. Though it did seem weird at first. A the school, there was a big emphasis on instilling a sense of discipline and hierarchy into the students. But the chefs called each other chef, too.

No and no. When I was a freshman, the local Domino's had a deal where you could get a soda for 25 cents with a pizza. So we'd order a small pizza and sodas for everyone on the floor in the dorm. After a while, we could no longer get this deal, and stopped ordering from Domino's.

Fine with me!

It looks, sadly, like Art of the Cake has been remaindered. But it also looks like you can for the moment get copies at Jessica's Biscuit for $15. Which I highly recommend doing before it becomes scarce and expensive like their earlier Mastering the Art of French Pastry.