chromedome

Despite my misadventure I still use them regularly. Sure, they can be dangerous but I've also cut myself with knives (and countertops and piping tips...what can I say, I'm talented) and have burnt myself on any number of things. Cooking customarily involves heat and sharp edges, so the odd bit of ancillary damage to the cook is all but inescapable.

LOL Yes, language is important. My former employer told me once he'd tried rice pudding several times and was unable to sell it. I put it on the menu as "dessert risotto" and sold a bunch. One of my favorite examples was non-culinary. Many years ago a neighbour making a purchase at Dad's bakery (okay, not totally non-culinary) during a rare dry summer asked him "I never see you watering your lawn, but it's the only one around that's still green. How do you do it?" My father, straight-faced, told him he'd "landscaped with native species that required little maintenance," since he was self-employed and had no time for yard work. That sounds so much more impressive than "It's all weeds, dude..."

In a similar vein, you might want to give Strawberry Spinach a shot. My father planted it once and never had to again. The leaves are edible young or mature, and the berries -- while not sweet -- add color and texture to salads. It's quite an interesting plant.

I've done some pretty shameless things with pizza in the line of duty (ie, in the interest of using up odd bits left over from other parts of the operation). They mostly tasted okay, if you were able to wall off that part of your brain from any ideal image of what pizza is supposed to be. I think my proudest moment was when I stumbled across a case of squid in the freezer. The Athens Olympics were underway at the time, so I braised the squid and put it on a pizza with fresh tomatoes, black olives, red onion and feta. I called it "The Olympian." About half the people who came through said "OMG...squid? On a pizza?" and shuddered and moved on. The other half said "OMG!...Squid!...On a pizza!" and ordered it. To me, that was a pretty big win. We eventually ordered in more squid (smaller quantity) and put it on again, because people kept asking.

From The Food Lover's Companion: "A simple cooked pudding made of milk, cornstarch, sugar and vanilla. Gelatin may be substituted for the cornstarch. The hot mixture is poured into a mold, chilled, unmolded and served with a sweet sauce or fresh fruit. The original blancmange used pulverized almonds in lieu of cornstarch." IIRC the ancestral almond-based version was often savory, but that goes back centuries.

It's just a pudding thickened with cornstarch, basically.

Yup. Five hours of prep with a chunk out of your finger is officially hardcore. I took a serious chunk out of a finger one night during service, when I was working alone and had nobody to cover for me. Fortunately one of the in-laws of the building's owner was an RN, and had me bandaged up in a trice (and I only needed to throw out about 1/2 cup of vegetables, because I had the foresight to injure myself on about the fifth stroke of the mando). The irony is that I *was* using the hand-guard...I was taking round slices from the end of something or other (I forget if it was a carrot or a zucchini, but that's immaterial) and the veg caught on the lip at the top of the mando because I'd pulled it too far back. The little finger of the hand holding the hand-guard slammed into the blade, and a slice almost 1/4" (1/2 cm) in diameter got left behind. It healed up well enough, but it was almost 2 years before I got back the feeling in that fingertip.

Yes, but steak is just...steak. Oxtail is different.

Yeah, that's a pretty old-school thing. I remember an exchange in one of Lillian Beckwith's books about life in the Hebrides, in which -- when she expressed revulsion at the notion of drinking soured milk -- the islander looked at her in astonishment and asked, "Well, you wouldn't dream of eating fruit until it was ripe, would you?" Just to be clear, if you were hashtagging this, it would not be under #protips. This is pure, old-fashioned frugality. The staff at my restaurants knew when I started speaking about my "East Coast Frugality Gene," it meant somebody was being wasteful and was about to get a dressing-down.

Treat it as a replacement for buttermilk in most recipes. You want to use it or freeze it before it gets to the chunky stage, though.

It's basically just like soured milk, only richer. Use it in biscuits or chocolate cake; basically anywhere you'd use past-its-prime milk.

My GF's mother has just gotten out of the hospital after a week (long story...turned out to be an internal bleed). So today I hauled out a whole chicken, a carcass, and one of the five or six packs of wingtips that I know is in there somewhere, and made her a big batch of soup. Loaded it up with plenty of the frozen garden vegetables, as well, because she's bad for not bothering to prep any vegetables. Eats them happily enough, just can't be bothered to spend any time on 'em. Our dinner tonight will be chicken pot pie casserole, made from basically all the same stuff. I have a cup or so of soured heavy cream I stashed away in the freezer for just such an occasion, so that's thawing as I type and I'll use it in biscuits for top of the casserole.

Me, too. My problem is I want it *all*...I want something the size of the Oster french-door countertop oven, with the CSO's steam function and perhaps some added programmability for the occasional time I feel like messing with it. ...Oh, and I want it to cost $100 Canadian.

Shank and neck pieces are the closest, to my mind, but not really the same. And neck is almost impossible to get in my neck of the woods, unless you know the meatcutter personally.

It's probably the only part of Amazon's empire that's actually susceptible to that kind of pressure at the moment. Amazon as a whole is too big to be deterred -- it'd be like trying to use a popsicle stick as a rudder to turn a supertanker -- but WF as a shiny-new outpost? Yeah, that's a place where some pressure and adverse publicity might get a toehold, and take some of the luster off the acquisition.

For those of you who don't know, my home province of Nova Scotia boasts a small but rapidly maturing wine scene. One of its leading lights is a winery called Benjamin Bridge, noted especially for the quality of its traditional-method sparkling wines. It was in the news this past week because the 2008 vintage of its flagship Brut Reserve has been added to the wine list at Ramsay's 3-Michelin star restaurant in London. This isn't the first Michelin-starred restaurant to list the wine but it's certainly the highest-profile, and should help further elevate the reputation of our local wine scene. http://atlantic.ctvnews.ca/we-re-just-amazed-gordon-ramsay-serving-n-s-wine-at-his-london-restaurant-1.3559050 http://www.benjaminbridge.com/acclaim

Oh, yeah. My late wife, bless her, believed that there was One Perfect Way to cook any dish, and that a cook's task was to find that One Perfect Way and then never, *ever* deviate from it henceforward. My feeling, on the other hand (at least, when not in a professional kitchen) is that freewheeling and improvising is the fun part; and that leaving room for serendipity to strike is just good sense. As you can imagine, this led to some heated confrontations between us during meal prep.

Back in the early 80s, oxtail and flank steak were my go-to cheap cuts. IIRC oxtail was then .79/lb and flank was .99/lb. Then, almost from one week to the next it seemed, they were "discovered" and the price rose tenfold. Now, of course, it's nearly twice that. The last time I checked (here in Atlantic Canada) my local supermarket was flogging oxtail at $14.99/lb and flank steak at $16.99. Needless to say, neither is a regular purchase any longer.

I cuss it frequently, if that counts.

I have a large number of the thin, inexpensive ones. Two or three times a year I'll go through them, pick the six most-worn ones, and replace them. I get mine from the dollar store, so my cost is pretty minimal.

My mom still has all four, as well. I've just helped her move, so I can vouch for that personally. She also still has several pieces of the Tupperware I remember from the 1970s, and even one or two that used to be my grandmother's. Goodness knows how old those are.

That smacks of Harry Potter, more than technology.

Oh, agreed. We have a couple pairs of the conventional ones, purchased from Walmart or Dollarama or some similarly downmarket retailer, which get used for things like opening bags and snipping fresh herbs from the backyard beds.

...'cause I do it all the time, and no harm done. So far the worst thing I've done to my ceramic is make kettle corn in my aluminum Wearever pot, which requires constant shaking and therefore leaves a molecule-thick (but surprisingly difficult to eradicate) aluminum sheen on the cooktop.

My dad was a big fan.