chromedome

I dunno about Starbucks...I'm no fan, but they're not the worst. Just expensive and mediocre. Here in Canada, the dominant chain is not Starbucks but Tim Horton's...yeah, the doughnut shop named after the dead hockey player (I remember watching him play. Suddenly I feel old...). Heretical though it is for anyone from the East Coast to say, I truly detest the coffee at Tim's. If we opt to focus on fresh-brewed/not held too long/not overcooked/"yes ma'am this is how it's supposed to taste" awfulness, that's Tim's IMHO.

No shit. Have you seen the video segments of the "California Raisins" thingie on the CIA website? Compared to Keller, Keanu Reeves looks like Robin Williams. But really, folks, come on. He's been doing the French Laundry for how many years? Anybody with that much talent has to be looking for a new outlet. Or perhaps, a new order of magnitude.

If you have a fair quantity of whole berries left, you may want to add a few of them to the mix. Whiz 'em in your food processor, then add them to the juice before you reduce it. The seeds are high in pectin, and will thicken your reduction naturally and give it some nice body and mouthfeel. They'll also put some tartness back into it. Before finishing your sauce with the butter and port (I'm totally on board with MGLloyd's suggestion...very similar to things we do at my work) just strain out the seeds through some cheesecloth, or a chinois if you have one.

Bread is beyond food, and into the realm of the magical and the spiritual. Honestly. I left home for university at 15, and the thing I missed most was my mother's (perfectly ordinary, but always fresh) home-baked bread. Of course, at a distance of some hundreds of miles, I couldn't count on her for my supply any more; so I decided to bake my own. This was northern Newfoundland in 1979, so artisanal bakeries were not an option! I'd never baked bread, never really helped my mom, and was too stubborn to try and "get it" from a cookbook (and I'd been told that you can't really do that very successfully anyway) so I ran by memory. "What did she start with? What did she do next?" Even with these handicaps, I think in retrospect that I did fairly well. The only thing I had a real problem with was the shortening...I couldn't remember how much she put into her bread. So I decided that a quarter-pound should do nicely. That bread was well and truly shortened, let me tell you. It was edible, though, if dense, and the flavour was not bad. I was pretty pleased, and hooked, and I've been baking my own bread ever since (about 25 years, now). I think my fresh bread may have been one of the things that helped my now-wife decide that I was a "keeper."

The Digby scallops hold up well...don't know about the Black Tower wine, though...

With our first, my wife was so sick in the first trimester that she nearly died. Given my genetic heritage, I always thought I'd lose my hair before I got any gray (see username...) but I was wrong. I sprouted a bunch, at age 23. I don't remember any cravings specifically from the first pregnancy (and I won't wake up the missus to ask her...I'm a little loopy, but I'm not CRAZY). I do remember that during the second pregnancy, she ate a lot of garlic, and our daughter as a toddler showed a bizarre predilection for raw garlic. She also had to have a lot of nuts. Oh, yes...she had a big thing for really garlicky dill pickles. And although she'd always enjoyed ice cream in a desultory way, she really REALLY had to have it all the time. And then when she'd had the ice cream, she'd have a pickle. Or when she'd had a pickle, she'd almost immediately want ice cream. She was so mortified when she made the connection. We always thought it was just one of those silly made-up things... Pregnancy really does change the way your body deals with certain foods. My wife was never a milk drinker until the first pregnancy. And she was indifferent to chocolate until the second; at which point it became almost a physical necessity.

When I was in basic training (Canadian Armed Forces) back in '81, the food was pretty much standard-issue cafeteria food. Not bad, not good, notable primarily for quantity (hundreds of 17-year-olds, working harder than they'd ever done in their lives...you'd better keep it coming!). A lot of the guys complained about the food, but I didn't. I'd eaten cafeteria food at university...I'd seen the dark side. However improbable, some of my platoon insisted that it was better than they'd eaten at home.

Admittedly this is an area where my experience is limited...I've been baking for decades, but (not being fond of most icings) have tended to cover my cakes with nothing more elaborate than whipped cream. I have two kids and a wife with a sweet tooth, so keeping qualities have always been a low priority. Having said that, I currently favour a ganache of roughly 1:1 proportions of cream and dark chocolate; with a small amount of butter added for sheen. Still playing with the proportions, though. At work, we use something my boss calls "Vienna icing" on the sachertorte we make. That's made with unsweetened chocolate, lots of egg yolks, butter, and some other things which elude me at the moment (I have it written down somewhere). It makes a beautifully glossy finish, like ganache, and is resilient and dry to the touch. It can also be refrigerated and then softened for re-use, with only a slight loss of sheen.

YES! Unfortunately, the rest of my household comprises three unequivocal NO votes. Yet another thing I have to send the family away to enjoy.

Damn. Guess I'll have to work on my boss about that bottle of '85 Dom she got for Christmas...

The explanation I am familiar with is that the word is derived from the Latin "Quatuor Tempora" (literally "four days"); sometimes referred to as the "Ember Days." These were times of fasting and abstinence set out in the Church calendar to mark the beginnings of the four seasons. During these days, red meat was forbidden, and therefore the Portuguese would have favoured fish dishes. See the Catholic Encyclopedia for more detail.

Re the Robyn/Pan exchange: I can't help thinking that the differences in individual palates tend to get lost in discussions such as this one. I recently spent five weeks in a class with twelve other people, studying "International Cuisine." Part of the process was that each day, everyone cooked representative dishes from a different culture: some assigned, some chosen. At the allotted time, each of us would present our dishes in turn to be tasted and critiqued by the others (and let me say, you'd be astonished how quickly you get full on one bite of each...). It quickly became evident that we had very different perceptions of each individual dish. In my case, for example, I am very sensitive to salt. Almost anything I've ever eaten in a restaurant has been too salty, by my lights. On the other hand, I love hot peppers and find them to stimulate, rather than deaden, my perception of the other flavours in a dish. I also tend to use fresh herbs and freshly-ground spices with a generous hand. Others in my class proved to have very different sensibilities. One, for example, was inordinately sensitive to cilantro and cinnamon. Either of these, in a quantity that the rest of us could barely detect, would have her making faces and looking for someplace to spit out her mouthful. "I don't mind cilantro," she would say, "but that's waaaayyy too much." Yet this same person was prone to using unusual quantities of garlic, which she perceived as quite mellow. In the same way that people decorate their homes in either pastels or bright colours; people tend to eat in either very big flavours, or very delicate flavours. I, as you'll have gathered, am a big-flavours person (and we decorate in bright colours, too). I can appreciate the subtleties of sushi as well as any of my sushi-loving friends...it just bores the hell out of me. Give me a nice spoonful of dhansak and a paratha, now, and I'm in heaven. I guess what I'm saying is, we're all different. To each his own, and vive la difference, and all that.

Many cultures have a tradition of placing foods in the communal oven, once the bread is finished, to cook all day as the oven slowly cools. In other areas, earthenware pots are buried in the coals of the day's fire to provide the following day's meal (or the coals of the morning's fire, for the evening meal). The crock pot is a modernized take on that concept. It consists of a heavy earthenware pot set into a thermostatically-controlled shell. Older models typically offered only "low" and "high" settings, but newer ones have additional features like a "keep warm" setting. Crock pots/slow cookers can be terribly convenient: load it up in the morning, and supper's ready when you get home. They are also suitable for braising tougher cuts, since most meats will be fork-tender after 3-4 hours. The longest I've ever had to let anything go to tenderize was 10 hours, in the case of some wild Canada Goose that I was given by an acquaintance. They are also quite energy-efficient, compared to stovetop cooking. Having said that, I don't use mine a whole lot...but I surely do appreciate having it in time of need.

When I got home from work tonight, my friend had already checked this thread and e-mailed me a response for you. The instructions on this link are for a 6hr-to-overnight version: Hamine recipe Have fun... ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- You're right, btw, about the eye-opening effects of a familiar dish done in an unfamiliar way. When I lived in Vancouver, I once stopped into a little Portugese "greasy spoon" for lunch. Seeing that their special of the day was salt cod and potatoes, that's what I ordered. I am from Atlantic Canada, the son of a Nova Scotian mother and a Newfoundland father. Back home, salt fish and potatoes is served typically with "scrunchins": salt pork diced small and rendered. The crunchy rendered pork is sprinkled over the fish and potatoes as a garnish, and then the melted fat is drizzled in greater or lesser degree (according to personal taste) over the whole dish. Raw onions are a frequent accompaniment, either fresh-sliced or macerated in vinegar for a while. At the Portugese restaurant, my salt fish came to me with a generous garnish of black olives, a substantial drizzling of olive oil, and several rings of fresh-sliced onion. My initial reaction was incredulity (Olives? with salt cod? ....In my own defence, let it be said that I was quite young at the time...). Upon reflection, though, I realized that it really was the same dish. The salty, pungent olives filling in for the crisp, salty pork...the olive oil making a (healthier) alternative to the rendered pork fat...and of course the onions were precisely the same. That was the time in my life when I began to take food seriously, and this meal was something of a turning point for me.

Bread. Hands down, no doubts, and I'll second everything Thom said (Atkins acolytes be-damned). That was easy...but now, second place? That's something like a 247,989-way tie... (edited once for fumble-fingers)

Okay...my archaeologist friend got back to me, and seconded the notion of Ful Medammas as a classic, archetypal Egyptian dish. Then he reminded me that he'd given me this, and several other Egyptian recipes, months ago. <blush> I'm blaming lack of sleep. So, Rod's starting point was boiled eggs. I quote: <He does, at that...'Dome> And, from a later missive: Now, finally, a recipe you won't cook but which your students may find interesting. This comes from an inscription he saw on one of his digs, which centred around the Greco/Roman period in Egyptian history. Don't ask me about the units of measure....

Is this a false dichotomy? Why must it be either/or? The foodservice industry could certainly be seen as a prime application of Sturgeon's Law ("90% of anything is crap"); given that the majority of restaurant food is pretty low-end. Of the remaining 10%, the majority is well-crafted food; created by craftsmen (/persons) of varying degrees of ability, but a comparable basic skillset. But then, once in a while, you run across someone with the same basic skillset; the same basic ingredients; and yet what they put on a plate is somehow light-years above the run-of-the-mill. That's artistry. And for the record, towering showpiece plates are not food-as-art to me. They're self-centred masturbation; the kitchen equivalent of a 20-minute guitar solo.

I read an article recently (can't find the damn' thing now, of course, but I will...) on the influence of funding on the results of medical (and other scientific) studies. Aspartame was used, in this article, as a classic example of the thesis. The authors of the piece surveyed the (extensive) literature available on PubMed and other resources. They sorted the studies that had been done according to whether or not they found potential health issues; resulting in a nearly 50/50 split. Then they sorted the two groups of studies by source of funding. The correlation was almost perfect: studies funded by companies with a stake in Aspartame found no health issues; studies funded from other sources found a "significant likelihood" of health issues. They also had some things to say about Atkins, but this thread is already contentious enough... I find aspartame to give me "cotton mouth," nothing more. My daughter gets migraines. My wife finds that her tongue and throat get swollen and puffy, and that she has trouble swallowing. This holds true regardless of whether she ingests the stuff in a beverage, candy, or cough syrup. My son has no sensitivity to it at all. We don't have a whole lot of processed foods in my house, though, so this typically takes place when we're visiting somewhere...and my wife drinks only milk or bottled water when we're at a potluck.

The whole intellectual property issue is taking some unpleasant turns, with extensions of copyrights being granted wholesale by US courts in particular. It's not far from the point at which any attempt to write prose or music (to pick just two) may lay one open to litigation. Science fiction writer Spider Robinson wrote a wonderful short story several years ago exploring this, but I can't remember the title. Something about elephants and memory.

I dunno... Bring over a couple of bottles, and I'll work on it, okay?

They are absolute world-champion generators of gas. Think beans squared. Think "beer and saurkraut festival" for a week. Think "Hindenburg." Oh, the humanity! (PS I love 'em, but avoid them to spare my loved ones the consequences)

I have an archaeologist friend who spent 30 years in Egypt. If you are still gathering material, I can touch base with him and see if he's interested in relaying some ideas.

This has been a very interesting discussion for me to read, both as a newbie to the forum and as a culinary student. I am a career changer - 40 years old - and will be graduating from a well-respected school in Canada at the end of April. Will I consider myself a chef? No way. The woman I work for has operated one of the most respected restaurants in Western Canada for 23 years and counting. She has a degree in mathematics, and before turning to foodservice had been an industrial engineer, a government IT person, and a computer consultant. She hadn't previously worked in the industry, or gone to cooking school. Do I consider her a chef? Hell, yes! As for the corporate guys, well, they usually need to have some serious chops to get that position. Like, say, that former "corporate hack" named Metz, who runs the CIA. Admittedly, the general public ("great unwashed," laypersons, civilians, whatever term you prefer) has a pretty unfocussed notion of the term. I cringe whenever I'm introduced as a "gourmet chef" by some well-meaning acquaintance.

Wow...lots of great titles to add to my "gotta get" list. I've usually got several on the go at any given time...right now "Lord Krisna's Cuisine" by Yamuna Devi; one or another herb book by Jekka McVicar; "The Professional Pastry Chef" by Bo Friberg; "Food that Really Schmecks" by Edna Staebler (Ontario Mennonite cooking...guarantee to be the antithesis of *any* diet). Recently finished: "Bone in the Throat" by Bourdain; "The Bread Baker's Apprentice" by P Reinhart; "A Passion For Chocolate", R L Berenbaum's translation of the book by the Bernachons; several books by Madhur Jaffrey and Najmieh Batmanglij (Indian and Persian food respectively); "Hot Sour Salty Sweet" by Duguid and Alford; and "Savouring the Spice Coast of India" by Laila Kaimal (sp?). This is mostly above and beyond the various textbooks and online readings required for school; and exclusive of the non-food-related books that I go through. I have, on occasion, been called a bookworm... PS: My local library averages about $300/yr in overdue fees, primarily because of my ghastly schedule..

<sigh> I remember when beef shank was cheaper than dirt...and flank, too. Oxtails? Holy crap, they're selling oxtails here in Alberta for $6 a pound (CDN dollars, but still...). About the only thing that's still cheap here is my dearly beloved organ meats, and none of my family will eat those. <double sigh> I saw an interesting presentation recently from a representative of the province's pork growers. They're beginning to promote a cut called the "capicolla" (the same one they make the Italian cured meat from, apparently) which is the portion of the loin muscle that extends into the shoulder butt. Their angle with restaurant people is to buy the butt and break out the capicolla, then use the remainder for specials (pulled pork, souvlaki, whatever). The capicolla gives you a "loin-quality" cut for butt price, essentially, as long as you have a way to use up the rest of the butt.