chromedome

In my case, the beautiful moment is watching the penny drop after I've been searching for my mug for five minutes or longer...

In my house, the microwave is jokingly referred to as the "tea storage unit" because I'm prone to forgetting my mug in there.

Sharpen them.

Gotta figure a good chocolatier is welcome just about anywhere.

This site has a bit of an axe to grind, but the image at the top gives a good visual comparison of the two.

Isn't that always the way?

Yeah.

I have little doubt of your popularity among your co-workers.

A bit late on this, but I can assure you that a bit of funk when you open cryo'd meats is absolutely normal. Many's the time I've had a panic-stricken young line cook come to me all of a tizzy, believing that the day's entree would have to be scrapped. It's just how meats wet-age inside the cryo pack. After 10-15 minutes, the smell largely dissipates. If you blot any surface juices from the meat with clean paper towels, then sear or blanch it, you're good to go. Bear in mind, the bacteria that cause funky smells are not pathogens, which typically leave no evidence of their presence. Rustwood is right about bacterial populations, though. Each pathogen has what's called an "infective dose," the population required to make one ill. That might be millions or just a few hundred, depending on the pathogen (it can be frighteningly low with listeria, for example). The larger the original population, the more quickly you reach the infective dose. The same principle holds for spoilage bacteria, though the stakes are lower because most people wouldn't be able to choke down enough of the finished dish to make themselves really ill. (Apologies to those who already know this, but reiterated for the sake of those who don't.)

Sorrel doesn't grow wild in Florida? Admittedly the wild stuff is pretty small, but it doesn't take long to harvest a few cups if you're prepared to look for it. I've added it to salads and soups (an old friend's ribollita recipe springs to mind) for years. Also spanakopita.

Capelin caviar...cool. For those who don't know, capelin are a sardine-ish bait fish that shoals in huge quantities along the coast of Newfoundland. When I was a teen I fished for one autumn with my uncle and father, and capelin were one of the things we caught. We'd dip a seine and corral perhaps 7,000 or 8,000 pounds of them, then sit for the next 12-14 hours and separate them by gender. The males were worth just 1 cent/lb at the fish plant, while the females (because of the roe) were worth 26 cents/lb. To put that into context, salmon (you could still catch them commercially back then) also fetched 26 cents/lb. We separated the males from the females ourselves, because the fish plant hit you hard for the labor of separating them if you brought them in unsorted. And how does one tell the difference between males and females in a sardine-sized fish, you wonder? Simple...the females are the pretty ones*. The males went back into the water to fulfil their biological role with the (very slightly diminished number of) females. *Not at all facetious, believe it or not...the males have rough, grey-black skin and a ridge down their sides, while females have smooth skin with a delicate rainbow iridescence.

That's me. The ex joked that by the time I was done with a chicken carcass, any dogs in the vicinity would turn up their noses at it. I've been known to go to the extent of biting the ends off the thigh bones and sucking out the marrow.

...and that's all the reason anyone needs.

LOL Yeah, that's my late wife with Costco soft-serve cones. "Oh, they're too big. Let's just share one," she'd say. Then I'd get two, maybe three licks before it was gone. Eventually I put my foot down and ordered my own, and she grumbled all day about feeling bloated because she hadn't wanted to eat "all that ice cream." Do you remember the comic strip Cathy? There was one with Cathy and her mom sitting in front of a plate of doughnuts. They decided to split one with sprinkles, because "I couldn't eat a whole one." Then they spit a chocolate-dip, for the same reason. When sometime boyfriend Irving returned and had a meltdown because the doughnuts were all gone, Cathy guilelessly replied "It couldn't have been us...neither of us could eat a whole doughnut."

My father arrived at the same conclusion this year, and I picked up a lightly-used pressure canner for him from a local buy-sell site. It was a bit late in the year, so he probably won't give it much exercise until next summer.

Makes a nice stocking stuffer...

Police in nearby Prince Edward Island deterred drinking and driving this past holiday season with the announcement that anyone incarcerated for a DUI would be treated to a nonstop Nickleback playlist in the lockup. That should work, if you're up for the necessary abduction beforehand (it would logically be part of any torture scenario, anyway...).

LOL I had a similar experience once, making spice cookies. It turned out someone had repurposed a spice jar labeled "Ginger" and it now held garlic powder. I didn't notice until they were in the oven, and the smell started to circulate through the house. Mind you, if you're going to make that particular mistake, a punk house filled with heavily intoxicated skaters is the place to do it. They inhaled the entire batch, and demanded a second round.

My mom, second wife and current GF are all painfully slow eaters. My father -- who grew up in a hardscrabble fishing village with several brothers and sisters -- learned in childhood to eat in a hot rush, with his elbows well up to protect his food from older siblings. Watching my parents eat is definitely a study in contrasts. My dad sets out my mom's plate (he does the cooking) then goes back into the kitchen for beverages and to get dessert ready. Then he makes up his own plate, sits and eats, goes back (usually) for seconds, makes the post-dinner coffee for each of them, watches the news, patrols the garden for critters, harvests anything that's ripe, washes and packs it into the fridge, tops up my mom's water glass, reads half a book...and *then* rejoins my mother at the table for dessert. They don't eat out much.

I did half-portions on request and simply set aside the other half as a staff portion for me or one of my servers. It wasn't that big a deal in my instance, since my dining room was small: I had a maximum capacity of 28 to 30, and in practice learned never to seat more than 12-14 in any given one-hour stretch since that was the most I could deal with (it was a very limited kitchen, and I ran it single-handed most nights).

Winter is a good time to play with vinegar-making. As I've observed on another forum in the past, "Anyone who says 'You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar' has never tried the experiment."

I had a recent culinary grad working for me at one point, a youngster from mainland China (I don't remember where exactly, but he said it was just a bit north of where the Olympic rowing took place). I offered him a taste of pulled pork from my Big Green Egg one night, when he came in. He took it rather suspiciously, but when he tried it his face lit up immediately. "This is kind of like how we cook dog," he said, to the shock of my servers (dog lovers, all).

Yeah, I know...but you were the one who threw out the caution about reduced salt, so that's why I quoted you. It's all good.

You can compensate for that by reducing the yeast a titch, or fermenting the dough at a lower temperature, or shortening the time you let it rise. Just play it by ear, basically, and be prepared to throw a batch or two into the compost if necessary (flour is cheap).

Wages in the restaurant business are terribly low. So are margins. That's not a happy combination, no matter how you slice it. Here in Canada most jurisdictions don't allow a reduced minimum wage for tipped employees, so it's even tighter for restaurateurs. I've been seeing a lot of articles about top restaurants in Toronto and Vancouver -- the kind of place ambitious cooks should be fighting to work -- struggling to keep a kitchen staff, because wages and local cost of living are so far out of sync. Perhaps I'm selling my colleagues short, but I think in the longer term it will be a tempest-in-a-teapot situation. Remember when smoking bans were going to kill the restaurant (and bar) industry? That never happened, and the restaurant business showed itself to be resilient. I think it can survive paying a living wage, as well.