chromedome

We use La Forme at my night job, in a variety of shapes and sizes. They are durable and work very well. Personally I have no preference between springform and slip-bottom pans, though as an occasionally clumsy person I have found that I'm more accident-prone with the unsecured removeable bottoms.

I don't really follow baseball (it interferes with the end of hockey season - when we have one - and conflicts with CFL football) but congrats to all the BoSox fans who kept the faith when things looked so dark. I have to say, Schilling impressed the hell out of me. His performance against the Yanks was right up there with Bob Baun playing an entire Stanley cup game on a broken ankle (and scoring the gamewinner, to boot!). I know every professional sport requires players to play through pain, but Schilling's performance was worthy of football or hockey, infinitely more physical sports. Good on him. As a transplanted Easterner (Canadian, but still...) I'm happy to have an excuse for a big pot of chowder.

I'd eyeballed those things for years, wondering idly how they worked, but never actually asked anybody (in East Vancouver, they're a common decorative element). Having read this thread, though, and armed with the knowledge contained therein, I treated myself to a battered aluminum moka at the local thrift store. For the princely sum of $2.99 (CDN) I got an ugly little lump of metal which makes absolutely gorgeous coffee. It proudly proclaims that it is "Made in Italy," but declines to furnish any other identification. I don't care. I wanted one, I've got one, and it works. Only thing I've noticed is that the seal is a bit lacking, and if I don't screw it to the exactly correct degree of tightness it'll leak. I can see that a new seal is in my immediate future.

It's all good. Your gnocchi will be hit-or-miss for a while, anyway, until you get a sense of what they're supposed to feel like on your fingers. If you've got lots of squash, try that. If you've got lots of potatoes, try that. And then make them every chance you get, until you're happy with them. Flour and potatoes are pretty cheap, after all, and so are squash in season (which they are, now). Go nuts!

We have a couple of old Kenwoods at my night job. I've never made bread in them (we buy in our bread) but they get used constantly. The resto's been open for 24 years, and they were bought used, so they were probably new around the time the ark landed on Ararat. I'd have no qualms about buying one. And their oddball two-arm dough hook has always struck me as being more logical for a small mixer than the one on the KA.

It makes a good textural accent, I guess...should we dub it the "green feuilletine"? Personally I'd just as soon shred up the ribs and hearts of my romaine for that purpose, but to each his own. Growing up I was never keen on lettuce, but at that time in Nova Scotia iceberg was the only variety known to man (or Mom). It was an amazing revelation to me that there were actually a great many kinds of lettuces, in various textures and colours and (most shocking of all) flavours. I'd always thought of the lettuce as sharing moisturizer duties with the mayo, nothing more.

Lubeck is a remarkably beautiful city, and is the world capitol of marzipan-making. They have a civic website with a breathtaking virtual walk-around, but I'm too tired at the moment to look it up for you (been to the Rocky Mountain Wine & Food Festival tonight, and I'm a bit worse for wear).

Ducasse ahead of Point? Dunno 'bout that. But then, lists of this sort are always rather an excercise in futility, aren't they?

I don't give a rat's ass if it's fashionable or not. It's a good salad, a hundred-odd years notwithstanding. I'll take it any day over some of the abominations I've seen called "caesar."

When I was a young 'un living in Vancouver (back in my punk days) I did a certain amount of dumpster diving. It was a pretty straightforward proposition: I had a very modest budget to live on, and food that I got for free meant that I could eat better. Now, there is dumpster food and there is dumpster food. I was never up for somone's half-eaten Kentucky Fried, for example; but there was a specific KFC that quite often threw out product at the end of their night; just the right time for a nocturnal kid like myself. And then there was the traditional weekend "run" to Granville Island Market, a longstanding if little-publicised Vancouver tradition. I don't know if this is still the case (I haven't been there for a long time); but on Sundays IIRC all and sundry would congregate at GIM for the weekly discarding of produce which would not make it through the market's off day. There's certainly little to say against grabbing (for example) a flat of papayas which are getting soft and brown on one side. Cut off the bad side, grab a spoon, and enjoy the good side! That's just old-fashioned frugality. I've also taken the racks of two or three fish, still in the bags of ice they'd inhabited previously, and made chowder. I never had the chutzpah to build any sort of ideology out of this. I had more appetite than money, and this helped me to make ends meet. End of story.

Ooooohhhhh, boy.... I don't know where to begin, especially since much of what I wanted to say has been covered. I'm doing what you're considering. I sometimes wonder whether I've finally found my metier, or whether this is just the latest of several bad career decisions over the years. So, in no particular order, here goes... Age is neither here nor there. Necessarily. I'm just out of cooking school at 40, and while I definitely have moments of "I'm too old for this crap" I'm also outworking most of my younger colleagues, both in productivity and in terms of the hours I put in. As far as that goes, a friend of mine on another forum just recently graduated from law school at 53. Age is less important than aptitude, and the sheer bloody-mindedness to stick with it and wrest what you want from the industry. Forget about your knives. I own a very basic set of Victorinox knives, and even those I wouldn't take to work unless I knew all of my co-workers very, very well indeed. I've seen too many knives go unaccountably missing. Forget creativity...for a while. You'll be encouraged to be creative while you're in school, but once you graduate and go to work you will, for the most part, be engaged in rote repetition of your chef's standardised recipes. Believe me, unless you are specifically instructed to do so, improvising on one of your chef's recipes will usually be an express route to unemployment. The reality of an entry-level position is that you will see a lot of drudgework. Handle it efficiently and with a good attitude, and good things may happen. The #2 dishwasher at my day job is on the verge of becoming my third baker on a part-time basis. He doesn't know it yet, but he's impressed us all with his work ethic and we don't plan to leave him scraping sheet pans and silverware. Oh, and what the others have said about the 80% pay cut? Believe it. Entry-level cooks make peanuts. In fact, most cooks make relatively little, regardless of the time they've spent paying dues. The exec of a decent hotel makes pretty good coin, and corporate chefs can be handsomely compensated, but these people are more or less junior executives. Your accounting training would serve you well in that sort of of a niche, but of course then you're back pretty much to your point of departure. It would be like me ending up in some form of cooking-related sales...a long way 'round to where I started. This is not to say that you can't do well, especially if you're coming in with a sound understanding of how to run a successful business. I know a gent in Halifax who's clearing an income very comparable to a hotel exec, except he's doing it in an office-tower lunch/coffee shop. His investment was not negligible, but it wasn't huge either; he assumed the lease after the previous proprietor went broke. His food is simple and not overly exciting from the foodie's perspective, but he understands clearly what his customers want to buy. There are many different career options open to you as a cook. A majority of them are nighttime gigs, so balancing cooking opportunities with your significant commitment to music may prove difficult. There certainly are day jobs available (I nabbed one) but they are fewer and farther between. Think seriously about what you want to get out of this career change. In my instance, it was the simple satisfaction of doing something that I enjoy (after 20 years in sales). I have voluntarily accepted the notion of earning only mediocre money for a few more years to come; and the concomitant necessity of a second job to pay down my student loans. If you are looking for a creative outlet, then you may want to go the entrepreneurial route like Abra or my Halifax acquaintance. If you are looking to build a stable and materially rewarding career, you might want to focus on a hotel or corporate situation where your current skillset and history will work in your favour. This is, of course, less than the tip of the iceberg. As for the notion that when you *have* to do it every day it's no fun, well, that's what kept me out of the professional kitchen for a couple of decades. Let me tell you, even when I get home so tired I want to puke, I'm still enjoying what I do. Not everybody would. What's it like, working in a professional kitchen? Well, it's roughly like this. You're tired as hell, your feet feel like they've been dragged behind a bus, you're trying to keep more things in your mind than you've ever had at one time before, you're trying to do them faster than you've ever moved before, you're trying to keep your eyes on more things than you've ever had to concentrate on at one time, there's somebody on your left bitching because you're slowing everything down, there's a server or an expediter about to spontaneously combust because they've been waiting on one plate out of four for....how long? That's a starting point, anyway. It does eventually sort itself out, and become old hat, but a lot of people fall by the wayside without ever getting there. That's why I mentioned sheer bloody-mindedness, up above. I'm sure there are lots of other things I'll think of after I post this, but that's all my tired brain can come up with at the moment (and all the time I can take away from re-writing bakery recipes for work). I'll post again tomorrow if I can come up with anything else meaningful. Please don't interpret any of the foregoing as an attempt to discourage you. I'm very happy with how my career change is going, and I like the way the next few years are shaping up. Just be aware that it requires a certain personality to be able to jump and run with this, and the sheer glee of cooking will only take you so far.

I'd learned how to skin a rabbit by the time I was eight. I expect I could figure out a nutria quickly enough, if the need should arise. I'd just have to make sure my daughter wasn't around, or before I could whet my knife the little bugger'd have a name and be living in her bedroom.

So, roughly what size are the pans they use to bake these things? In the picture they look to be about 3" across the top, is that right?

Works for me, I guess, as long as I can find some palatable weeds that haven't got several generations of someone's damned weedkiller built up in their tissues... I like dandelions well enough, but only pick them where I know for sure they haven't been sprayed. As for carp and nutria, well, if I ever spot 'em up here in the frozen North I'll be sure to eat them on your behalf.

Here in Canada, we have a farcical system of "voluntary" labelling of GMO foods. Since polls have us sitting at about 80% "Hell, no!", there has been little or no use of this voluntary system. In practice, of course, since our government has been unwilling to take this on, we eat a whole lot of it without knowing...just like you do. Greenpeace markets a buyer's guide to GMO/non-GMO foods, the Canadian link is here. The short version is, if you're buying major brands you're buying GMO.

In the mid-80's I was the only Caucasian living in an otherwise all-Chinese street in East Vancouver. After a month or two, I came to notice that they all, without exception, used PRB. So that's what I started buying, and I liked it a lot (still do). I've used their light and dark, and their newer "gold" line, and liked them all; haven't tried their mushroom soy. Rooster brand is my fallback; for whatever reason it's easier to find here in Edmonton (or at least my part of Edmonton). Never could adjust to Kikkoman. I guess my palate's attuned to the more robust flavour of the Chinese-style sauce.

At the end of the day, I guess we could say that if your product is of the right consistency and doesn't taste starchy, it's all good.

Karen, this is the restaurant I'm working at. It's been a little bit different for my boss, since she's the chef/owner and hasn't had the situation of working her way up through the ranks. Instead, she's one of that equally rare breed who jumped in with both feet, and made her own rules. Her first restaurant experience (aside from dining) was running one. She's an interesting person to work with. Her degree is in mathematics, her experience in computers and industrial engineering; and let me tell you that this kitchen has good "flow." New menu items will occasionally need to be tweaked to fit our physical capabilities, but mostly not. As for the whole notion of a "fire in the belly," I guess she's got a significant degree of that. Or perhaps just a complete unwillingness to be turned from her course. At any rate, twenty-four years in, she still puts in a work week that would leave me gasping. At two jobs and 55-70 hours/week I'm pushing my limits; she's 15 years older and does more than I. In her spare time she's been re-learning to ride a bicycle, because her dream is to complete a triathlon.

It's very cool stuff, fun to cook with. I used to get paid in kind by my part-time employer in Halifax, which meant literally all the organic grains and produce we could eat. I really enjoyed the opportunity to play with quinoa and other less-common "grains." My kids really got a kick out of the little "snap" texture you get with quinoa, even when it's a little overcooked (easy to do, the first couple of times. Bake with it, if that happens). I found that I really liked it in combination with cornmeal. Soak some cornmeal overnight in milk, add an equal quantity of cooked quinoa, and make waffles. Mmmmmm..... Or use the same proportions in a yeasted bread (use your usual bread recipe, use 20-30% corn/quinoa to flour; add a little fat if you go with the higher number). Soaking the corn overnight keeps the bread from being dry, and the combination of cornmeal and quinoa gives a beautifully crisp crust.

I've got a pork loin roast with the ribs on. I'm thinking that I'll stuff it (dried fruit, most likely). I'm going to put the pot on for some spaetzle in a few minutes; dig up the remaining fingerling potatoes and carrots from my garden; and pull a few of my shallots. I'm thinking maybe a Riesling/mustard sauce of some sort, but I'm enjoying the opportunity to just freewheel in the kitchen for a while so I'm in no hurry to make up my mind. I've already got a challah-style dough started with some saffron in it, I'm going to make braided rolls with that. For dessert, I dunno...maybe a couple of pies, or if the neighbours are home I'll borrow his torch and make some creme brulees. There's a football game this afternoon, but I don't know if I want to watch. Our Eskimos have been pretty shakey all year, and the powerhouse Alouettes will be in a surly mood after losing just their second game of the season last week.

The cake sounds wonderful, Abra. There's a very distinct mid-east feel to it, with the rosewater and pistachios and all. At home a lot of my food has a Middle Eastern influence. And yes, of course I'd be interested in saffron ice cream!

I guess if I ever got my own show I'd irritate the heck out of you. Watching me do the "Snoopy dance" over the taste of a really good sauce is a frequent diversion for the girls across at our coffee bar. (I really, really love what I do...)

A pint is actually 16.7 oz by weight. That's close enough for small-medium batches of pretty much anything, but will cause problems in larger quantities. For those of us in the rest of the world, it's easier, since 1kg is actually defined as the weight of 1 litre of water. At school I was taught to use equal quantities by weight for roux, equal quantities by volume for beurre manie. Dunno why.

I'd been plotting a mushroom/saffron risotto, so I'm happy to learn that this is a well-established combination. One of my neighbours picked a bunch of porcini this fall, and allegedly has intentions of giving me some (I have great neighbours...the one on the other side has promised me all the "spare bits" of the two pigs he's slaughtering soon. When that day comes about, I'll be absolutely certain to try this dish.

Didn't he start at Tribute as a line cook? I know I've read that he put in several years on the "hot side" before re-inventing himself as pastry chef. In any case, I've no doubt that he'll acquit himself well in the competition.