chromedome

I see what you did, there...

My step-daughter's a hotel housekeeper. I'll see what she has to say about it.

A lot of places here use tip pooling to even things out between FOH and BOH. At the restaurant where I worked my way through culinary school, cooks got extra/hr above and beyond the base wage that was paid for by the pool. Occasional shortfalls were made up by the restaurant, but typically there was enough in the pool to compensate for any down weeks. It meant there was a reliable premium on each paycheque, which was very helpful. I understand that's illegal in some parts of the US, but it's a pragmatic alternative. The problem with pricing food fairly so that everyone gets a living wage? Well, everybody has to do it. Otherwise you're "the overpriced place" that everyone avoids, and you go bust. In my own restaurant I didn't tip pool most nights, because I was the only one in the kitchen most of the time. When I did have an apprentice on hand, the servers tipped him out a percentage. On slow nights (it was a small place) I wouldn't bring in a server, but would cover the tables myself and pocket the tips.

There's a hilariously graphic moment in one of James Herriott's books where he's administering the same form of relief to a distressed cow. Unfortunately, he'd neglected to consider the relative positions of his face and the incision before inserting the knife.

Here in Canada, cooking is a regulated trade like roofing or carpentry. In most trades, even an apprentice straight out of trade school will earn something on the order of $20/hour at a minimum (wages are low here in this province, it can be a lot more for in-demand trades in other provinces). I have my journeyman papers ("Red Seal"), and after folding my restaurants took a look at what places in the city were paying for journeymen. At the Delta, which is a union shop, I'd have been looking at $12.50/hr (that was a few years ago, minimum wage is about $1 higher now so other wages have crept up a bit in consequence). When a freelance writer can say that "it pays a lot better than what I was doing before," that's a pretty sad commentary on the previous gig.

Here's the underlying study, to save a couple of click-throughs for nutrition geeks: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0127128.s002&type=supplementary

A little while ago I read the Business Insider article that's cited here, and that article (and everyone interviewed in it) is very clear that the problem started before the Amazon acquisition. I guess it doesn't much matter, empty shelves are a bad thing no matter what.

LOL In my neck of the woods, it's the May long weekend.

Intriguing.

Apparently today's the last day of that flyer, but the IP was a special buy so maybe they'll be on until they sell 'em all.

Canadian Tire has the IP Mini on for $89.99, if that should be of interest to any of my fellow Canucks.

Okay...the point of adding your thickener to a cold liquid is simply to keep it from gelling prematurely and forming lumps. You don't necessarily have to make up your entire sauce in advance, complete with thickener, and then bring it up to temperature. If you want to reduce it, as I said upthread, that's counterproductive. Instead reduce the main portion of your sauce until the flavors reach a degree of intensity you're comfortable with, then make a slurry with the cornstarch or Wondra and a cold liquid (either water, or a retained portion of the un-reduced sauce base). You can whisk the slurry into the sauce directly (simpler, greater risk of clumping) or whisk some of the hot mixture into the slurry to temper and dilute it and then stir the mixture back in (an extra step, but a more reliable result). Cornstarch will "bloom" and thicken almost immediately in a sauce that's at even a low simmer. Wondra also thickens almost immediately, because as IAETRIO said it's pre-cooked and doesn't need to cook out as raw flour does. Given the sauce you're describing, the clarity of cornstarch is probably preferable to the opacity of flour.

Just to be clear, what you're proposing is to mix up a sauce base cold, add the chosen thickener, and then heat and reduce the sauce later to finish it? It's somewhat counter-intuitive, but I'm sure you have a reason for wanting to do it this way specifically (and I'd be curious to hear it). The two issues I see here are that 1) it's hard to know how much additional thickening (if any) you'll need until the sauce is reduced; and 2) the heating/reduction stage is going to screw with the thickeners. Adding extra gelatin basically is a cheat to compensate for a stock that lacks body. If you don't have enough gelatin your sauce can reduce almost to nothing before it thickens enough naturally. The problem with adding extra gelatin is that you may overdo it, and end up with that unpleasantly sticky mouthfeel. It can also leave your sauce unpleasantly gelatinous (duh) and rubbery after it has a couple of minutes to cool on the plate. Adding cornstarch means your plan to reduce further is at odds with how your thickener works. The cornstarch will set very rapidly when you bring the sauce up to temperature, so in order to reduce the already-thickened sauce you'll cook the cornstarch until it breaks down and loses its thickening ability. Depending how much starch you add, the sauce might be thick enough to stick and scorch when you try to heat and reduce it. Most of those same criticisms apply to Wondra, though it won't break down as quickly during the reheating process as cornstarch will. As a rule it's more practical to reduce your intended sauce until the flavors reach the right degree of concentration, then consider your options. You can bloom and add enough gelatin to give it the mouth feel you want, or add quick-thickening cornstarch (for a translucent sauce) or Wondra (for an opaque sauce) for their immediate and easily observed thickening effect (add a little at a time until it's right). Given a bit more information on your sauce and your thought process, we could probably give better-targeted advice.

LOL Gee, that was unintentional. It's not at all like me to miss a potential pun.

Kerry wins. That's not just another level, that's another order of magnitude.

When I looked at that post a couple of hours ago, for some reason my eyes saw "ketchup cornbread." This makes a lot more sense. (Didn't sleep much last night because of strep throat, so I'm a bit loopy)

At least all the tech support scripts are on their computers now, so we no longer have to listen to the discouraging sound of them frantically flipping binder pages. It always irritates me to *have* to have two low-level staffers walk me through all the troubleshooting steps I'd already done before kicking me upstairs to a third-level tech who actually knows stuff. It still makes me fume, but the lack of binder-flipping is progress of a sort.

Ah, okay. I know that as a "supreme." (Pronounced the French way, not the Diana Ross way)

Due to storage limitations, I have at least a bit of kitchen in most of my rooms. On the ground floor and basement, anyway.

Ours are all on the upper half of the fridge, out of the toddler granddaughter's reach (for now).

I drink it fairly regularly, especially in summer, because I find it refreshing and water is my only other non-hot beverage on a daily basis. Does it *really* taste like beer? No. Is it beer-like? Yeah, sure. Beats the heck out of sweet, sticky pop, and as a rule I'm not a fan of flavored soda waters either. The brand I drink is the "Red Brew" from Superstore, one of Canada's two major supermarket chains (supermarkets in Canada don't sell the real thing, as a rule, under provincial liquor laws). I haven't essayed a broad taste-test of what's available; I stopped when I found one I considered passable.

...and you can always point out that you ran the risk of the reverse happening, too.

Here in Atlantic Canada it's not uncommon even for non-Catholics to settle on a symbolic renunciation during Lent, though my family never did. My GF was raised Catholic, but she's currently keto-ing so A) going meatless would be a severe challenge, and B) she feels she's given up quite enough at present, thank you. I cracked her up the other day by quoting Tom Lehrer at her: "You're the girl my money's spent for, you're the girl I gave up Lent for..."

The commercially frozen ones (Welch's in the US, and President's Choice in Canada) are typically treated with citric and/or ascorbic acid to inhibit browning. That's about all the special preparation involved. Your plastic wrap seems to have done the trick on that front, though. I'd suspect if you have a FoodSaver or similar, just vac-packing would probably keep them from browning too much as well.

In the end we were able to track it down ourselves. It was an unexceptional Reinhold Merkelbach of no particularly great value.