Moopheus

As fair as I know, Lelsie McEachern still owns Angelica Kitchen. Not sure who the chef is there now.

How Baking Works by Paula Figoni is also good, and available in paperback. It's more comprehensive on baking than McGee, but she is not nearly as good a writer, and is a bit sloppy with detail, and it's a little less technical.

Apparently the wholesale import price (the price paid by the importers to their suppliers in the originating countries) has started to drop, but this has only very slowly started to filter through to retail prices, depending on the quality of the beans.

Right now the new book getting the heaviest rotation in my kitchen is Suvir Saran's Indian Home Cooking. It's all good.

Which is another discussion in itself.

In the early years of the Baskin-Robbins ice cream chain, Irv Robbins was opening a shop in Southern California near the home of a friend of his who really liked ketchup, liked to put ketchup on everything. So Irv made a special ketchup-flavored ice cream for him. He didn't like it. No one liked it. It was never made again.

The wife is right now recovering from gallbladder removal on Thursday--my word of advice is avoid anything that gets, as another thread has it, the fanny furnace going. Post-operative gas will be extremely painful.

I saw Jacques Torres use one of these in a demo recently. I was instantly lusting to have one, but I figured it would be very expensive and I couldn't possibly justify the expense right now, not to mention I have nowhere to keep it. Looks like I was right.

Is that higher butterfat than heavy cream?

Ultra-pasteurized is heated to a much higher temp than cream labeled "pasteurized," though for a shorter time. This kills more bugs, so it has a longer shelf life, though it is a little less full-flavored, and some people notice more of a cooked or off flavor in ultra-pasteurized. Most supermarket brands are UP. Most supermarket brands also contain thickeners and stabilizers. Whether any of this makes any difference to you depends on taste and what you're going to do with it. For myself, when I want the cleanest cream flavor, like in ice cream, I'll go to the Whole Foods and get something particular, whereas if I'm just using a little to finish a soup, say, I'll use whatever the local market has.

The photo reproduction in the compilation is not as good the original editions--the illustrations are photo-reduced from printed copies of the original books.

This guy appears to have made an attempt to get chocolate companies to state policies and sources of their chocolate regarding this issue, though his website seems to not have been updated in some time. Some companies seem to brush off the issue, saying it is exaggerated. It does appear that the problem is largely in West Africa and Ivory Coast in particular. It's not a problem in South America.

Good luck. There are good books on meat/charcuterie, but good books on butchering itself are scarce. (I don't know anything about the one FB linked to.) We don't have any in our library, and the librarian has been looking for some time. In fact, if anyone has a suggestion, I'd like to know too.

The wife remembers the catering trucks would hang out in the parking lot behind Building 66. If HWOE ever goes back there, he MUST go see the thing they've replaced Building 20 with. When I was working at Harvard, there was a good falafel truck that usually stopped on Oxford St. behind the science center. If Necco has consolidated, that means the Lechemere factpory must be closed too. When that was still the Borden factory, and we were poor, we'd go to the factory store and buy 'cosmetically defective' chocolates for a dollar a pound.

We have it in our library, and a pastry chef who's been reading it told me the technical information is very good, but the English translations are not so good. I haven't had a chance to take more than a cursory look at it myself.

You might check out Peter Berley's books, Modern Vegetarian Kitchen, and Fresh Food Fast. Not strictly vegan, but mostly dairy-free. The Greens books (Greens, Fields of Greens, Everyday Greens) have a fair number of recipes with cheese and cream, but a lot without.

I have two Metro shelf units in my kitchen--very little cabinet space, no counter space, no real way to add more, so there it is. They don't have doors--open shelving is sort of the whole point. I keep all my baking stuff, my small appliances, and so on on them. I like them a lot, actually. I guess in practice they're more counter replacement rather than cabinet replacement, at least for me. I think even if I had a chance to redo a kitchen I'd keep them.

NY Cake & Baking sells kosher beef gelatin, I think in powder form. I don't use it, but I know I've seen it there.

You can trick a Flavia into making a stronger cup by using two packets of regular coffee on the 'espresso' setting, so that each makes a half-cup. It's still not good, but it's less weak. Don't use the 'espresso' packets for this. Just . . . don't.

If you search the coffee threads here you'll find quite a few people who agree with you about that, myself included.

Given the lack of protection copyright law gives to recipes, as discussed on other threads, that blah-blah about letting them adapt, publish, etc, is pretty meaningless. The fact that they'll use it without attribution is not good recipe etiquette, but hardly surprising in this case. Also, I note that they say they you will let them publish, not that you agree not to publish it yourself. You aren't necessarily granting them an exclusive right.

This has been going on for some time now, though personally I haven't noticed it too much in my own shopping. When I buy ice cream, it's usually by the pint (single-serving containers!), which is still usually a pint. I only buy a half-pound of coffee at a time. As for the Hershey bar, there's a wonderful little essay by Stephen Jay Gould, "Phyletic Size Decrease in Hershey Bars," in the book Junk Food: "As a paleontologist used to interpreting evelolutionary sequences, I spy two prevalent phenomena: a gradual phyletic size decrease within each price lineage; and occasional sudden mutation to larger size (and price) following previous decline to dangerous levels. I am mostly innocent of economics, the dismal science. But I think I finally understand what an evolutionist would call the 'adaptive significance' of inflation. Inflation is a necessary spin-off, or by-product, of a lineage's successful struggle for existence. For this radical explanation of inflation, you need grant me only one premis--that the manufactured products of culture, as fundamentally unnatural, tend to follow life's course in reverse. If organic lineages obey Cope's rule and increase in size, then manufactured lineages have an equally strong propensity for a decrease."

No ice cream should ever be made with stabilizers in my opinion, but that's a different topic. Ice cream formulas for "sugar free" ice creams usually call for gelatin and glycerin to provide the body usually supplied by the sugar, though glycerin would still add some sweetness. A little bit of alcohol would also provide some anti-freeze function.

Does it have to be made with the Pacojet? Perhaps making a savory mousse and freezing it might be better. A frozen mousse isn't quite like ice cream, but it might be better than using a lot of stabilizers.

Sixty bucks a week for groceries (just food) for two? That's a tight budget? That's probably more than I spend now, and I'm not especially frugal (though we don't buy meat or much processed/packaged food). There have certainly been times when my budget was very tight (spaghetti 4 nights, tuna sandwhiches the rest of the week) and $60 would have seemed a luxury. Locally grown? My CSA allotment over the summer, with eggs and fruit, was less than half that. And it was a lot of food.