Moopheus

Chocolate cake--not just for breakfast anymore!

You have to be careful for places that serve those meat Snickers bars. "healthy" to describe food is legit. A secondary meaning of the word is "conducive to good health."

I think that sounds like more work to use than just washing a Zeroll by hand. I've never had much of a problem with ice cream sticking to a Zeroll, so I don't see why you'd need a coated one. The other kind of disher with the release that sweeps through the bowl is useful for many tasks since it comes in a variety of sizes and can be scooped into almost anything, but for ice cream, it's hard to top the Zeroll. In the 30s the Zeroll was adopted by many ice cream parlors because you could make basically a hollow ball of ice cream with it, rather than a full, solid scoop. It was deliberately designed to be able to do that.

Hmm, that sounds just like the publishing business, plus ice cream. Sounds good to me.

I just hope they don't do a rush job on the production to make up for the book being late, to get it out in time for the holiday. What am I saying? Of course they will.

Sure, but the origin of grappa is basically a form of moonshine, a peasant drink. Now you buy it as expensive, artisinal moonshine. But it doesn't matter, the cake was good and now mostly gone. In fact, I'll have to make another one, 'cause I don't know what else to do with the rest of the bottle.

For x-day I decided to make the grappa, currant, and pine nut torte (sans currants). This recipe should come with a warning. I'd never actually tasted grappa before making this recipe. The wife complains when I make a recipe with an unfamiliar ingredient. But in this case it's okay. If I'd known beforehand, I might have decided not to make it. Grappa is pretty nasty stuff. It assaults you as soon as you open the bottle. I would never have thought to put this in a cake. I was just trusting that the recipe would work, and it did. The torte turned out pretty yummy, though you have to check IDs before serving.

No kitchen goodies for me this year (poo!), though I did a Good Deed for my mother, and sharpened all of her knives. I suspect that she has been cutting on her granite countertops.

I had a pretty disapponting pizza from there shortly after they opened--I called in for take-out (perhaps a mistake), they said it would be ready in 15 minutes, and it was already waiting when I arrived in 10 minutes. When I got home it was cold, overstuffed with toppings, and very soggy. Not inspired to try again.

My wife saw something similar in San Francisco's chinatown once--guy breaking up frozen meat by throwing it down on the cobblestones in the alley behind the shop. No reason to believe these are completely isolated incidents. I only shop for vegetables in Chinatown. I work on Grand St., and see the delivery trucks unloading the crates of produce every morning. At least I don't think they're throwing the bok choy on the sidewalk, but I guess I could be wrong.

A little sugar will cut the acidity of the tomatoes. It's not that uncommon a practice. But a lot of commercial sauces, especially the low-grade industrial stuff that comes in big cans, use way too much, so that the sauce is in fact noticeably sweet, which I think is just wrong. I have an insatiable sweet tooth--I like to say I am a committed dessertatarian--but even I don't want sugar in everything. If everything is sweet, dessert is less of a treat.

Hobart sold off the KA mixer factory in the mid-80s, though KA products continued to be made in the same factory, with mainly the same staff, until Whirlpool built a new factory in 1994. Most of the complaints seem to be about some of the newer models (like the 6-qt 'professional') made in the new factory, sometimes with cheaper plastic parts, that don't have the power or reliability of the older machines. My own has never given me a lick of trouble in 14 years, though I rarely make anything heavier than maybe a thick cookie dough in it.

Also good is The Viennese Pastry Cookbook by Lilly Joss Reich. Very traditional, with a section on "small pastries" that might suit the occasion.

The wife once got to make liquid nitrogen ice cream for a demo in a chemistry lecture at MIT. I didn't get to have any but she said it came out great. I recall also seeing it demo'd on the Leno show once.

There's at least one or two previous threads about cannoli filling.

Have you ever made cheesecake with thickener-free cream cheese? Wondering if you knew how much difference it makes. I've always used Philly, but always up to trying something different if it works.

As I recall (I haven't been there in some years, but it was always one of my favorites when I lived around there) Giacomo's (and some of the other North End places) was cash only. It is worth going to (I remember one cold, rainy, January night having dinner there, a long line of people waiting to get in, with empty restaurants next door!) but best to be prepared. If the pumpkin ravioli in cream sauce is on the menu, it is to die from.

I use one at home. I like it. It seems to be relatively easy on knives, but at the price that it does get cut up and needs to be sanded down once in a while. It's not particularly stain or odor resistant, but it hasn't been a problem (I didn't buy this board for its looks, that's for sure!). Sanding helps with that too. Other than that it's pretty low maintenance. Also, they might not be perfectly flat when you buy them (or at least mine wasn't). But sanding . . . Also, It's very heavy. I use it two-sided--a 'dinner' side and a 'dessert' side--so I don't chop chocolate on the side that's been used for garlic and onions. It costs about half of what the Boos board costs.

No, obviously at the other Charbucks 10 ft away at the B&N. Freedom of choice at its best. Though I can see how it would be annoying to have a truck spoiling the otherwise sweet, clean New York City air. Especially in August.

The Moghul rule of India certainly had a pretty substantial effect on the cuisine of that region.

I've got an orange ice cream recipe that suggests infusing the zest into the cream, then reducing the juice (no need to add excess water) and mixing it into the base after the custard has cooked and cooled. Do not add acidic lemon juice to a cooking custard base, it'll curdle and be nasty.

The chlorination actually changes the way the flour absorbs water and binds to fat, so that cakes made with cake flour rise more evenly. You do pay a small price in terms of taste for this, though. But I don't see this as a big problem; most of the time in cakes you don't want a floury taste. In bread, where the wheat itself is the primary flavor, it's a different story.

In my mother's family (from East Boston) it's always called gravy (my grandfather was Sicilian). It sounds like this must have been common usage in Italian families all up and down the East Coast. Weirdly, I was just reminded of this by something else earlier this morning.

Because "with with gravy" wouldn't sound very sophisticated, now would it? Over time, I think, these usages will change as some of these words become completely absorbed into English. Pizza is a good example of a word that has its own English language meaning and usage. People sometimes still say pizza pie but it already has kind of an old-fashioned ring to it.

I'll see your tautology, and raise you a "chai tea". ← Shrimp scampi. ← Maki rolls, anyone? This seems to be a fairly common type of occurrence (probably not unrelated to the reason people find it necessary to say "ATM machine"). There's probably a natural language reason for it, though I can't think what it is. In my daily work, we have to mix French culinary terms with English instructions constantly, and while we try to get tenses, plurals, genders, etc. correct, even with the help of native French speakers it doesn't always work. There will always be places where the language rules conflict and it will be awkward. But that doesn't, to my mind, necessarily excuse errors of laziness and ignorance.