Katherine

Not sure how this would work as there's not as much fat content (I think...) but we can try it! Jamie Buttermilk doesn't contain enough fat to make a yummy cheese, and it's already too ripened, so the cheese you make will come out oddly too sour, and rubbery in texture. If you want, you can use it as a starter, instead of purchasing starter.

I hate to say it, but perhaps part of that attitude is based on the fact that women in general aren't really that good at kitchen work. Kitchens are extremely high pressure and labor intensive environments, and oftentimes women just can't do it. I mean, can you blame cooks for having an attitude about women co-workers when they're constantly getting girls who come in to work for like a week before they quit, and then spend the whole time there asking people to help them lift heavy things or breaking down into tears when they get criticized? I'm not saying all women are like that, but it seems like the vast majority of women I encounter in kitchens are just plain not as tough as men. Personally, I hate it when I see a woman join the team and generally assume straight off that she's not going to last. She has to work extra hard to prove herself. It may be sexism, but it's sexism based on actual experience. It's just that women are so damned inferior. Get'em out of the kitchen fast!

Actually, judging by archeaological remains, our primordial ancestors ate an awful lot of fruit (you can tell a lot from the teeth). Also snails, clams, and the like, at least guessing from the huge midden heaps left behind. Clothing is a relatively recent invention, evolutionarily speaking. The survival of the species didn't really depend on it, but it did allow migration and settlement of otherwise inhospitable areas. Fruit is only available seasonally, meat is a year-round food, especially in the savannahs of Africa where our predecessors evolved. Protein, however, is a poor source of fuel. Actually, our ancestors ate as much fat as they could get ahold of. We know they cracked the bones to remove the brains and marrow, and probably obtained the carcasses by scavenging them partially eaten after the predators had their fill, but before the hyenas arrived. Certainly anyone living in a cold climate would have needed a lot of fat to get them through a long winter before storage became possible, and they'd probably need some skins to wrap themselves in, too. Europe was populated throughout the last ice age, and caves aren't warm inside. Paleontologically speaking, shell heaps are modern.

I'm not denying that - but kind of hoped it open up into a bigger discussion I'm game for a bigger discussion. I can't say what goes on in the kitchens. But I have always found it unusual that most high end restaurants don't have any female servers. You can't tell me that women aren't capable of being servers in high end restaurants. One of the biggest deal restaurants where I live (Florida) had to be hauled into court to get it to hire female servers. I can only assume that there is even more sexism in the kitchens. Robyn Of course there's sexism in kitchens. Restaurants are small businesses run by owners and chefs who consider themselves mavericks, not accountable to anyone. If a woman complains about sexism, what does she hear? Just as in this thread, that she deserves what she got for being uppity, that she's imagining the hazing, assaults, and verbal abuse are sexual in nature. You can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen. Hehe...slut. I think Bourdain's attitude in Kitchen Confidential is still prevalent in many kitchens: If a woman doesn't successfully defend herself in the kitchen, she doesn't deserve to be there, so there's no need to treat her with respect. Kitchen are...different than any other place of work, right? This stuff would never fly in an office, but it's necessary in a kitchen, to toughen up the girls. They'd better get used to it, cause it's not going to stop.

I had the same problem with my ex, but he never attributed it to an eating disorder. He just figured that, no matter how much food I prepared and put in the refrigerator, it was fine for him to eat it all, and everybody else, including the cook and the baby, were on their own. So if I made a pound of meat into a pot of chili, he'd eat the whole thing, leaving none for me when I got home from work. You see, he deserved to have all the meat in the house, and I, not as thin as a model, didn't need to eat at all. In other words, he was a greedy, self-centered, controlling jerk. The last straw was the time I picked out a quart of grapes, figuring that I should make extra so there'd be some left for the baby to eat. There weren't. Guess what? It was my fault! I forced him to eat all of them by not buying whatever else he was going to be in the mood for at that time. Don't get me started. You know how I get.

Thanks to the fact that I finally had time to come to the site and read this thread, I've been prompted to put red and green bell peppers in the cauldron of tripe I have simmering on the stove. Just what it needed.

Bring it to a boil to kill anything that may be starting to grow in it, then freeze.

I seem to recall that the method used by the ancient Egyptians was not the fermentation of stale bread, which would make an inferior beer indeed. What they did was to sprout the barley (malting, to form sugars), mash it, form it into cakes and dry these or roast them lightly. When you steep them, the sugar goes into the wort, and is now free to be fermented. I understand this method was still used in Colonial times. Alcoholic beverages in Egypt were considered food, and this was just their method of processing barley to get the greatest food value out of it. But they also fermented anything that was sweet, so your beer might have dates in it, though we probably wouldn't class that as "beer", according to our modern definition of the beverage.

Sam Adams Brewery is the master of marketing gimmicks. No chocolate! Just chocolate-roast malt, I guess. Which can be found in many dark microbrews that don't use it as a marketing ploy. Edit to add: OK, cocoa beer. But Sam Adams is always pandering to the whims of rare bottle collectors with its limited releases. The ones I have tasted are not worth the sky high prices.

When we used to drive down to FL every year, we'd buy those boiled peanuts and munch constantly. My favorite was a stand that had a sign "bouillt pnuts".

As opposed to brie, which is the ur-Velveeta.

rancho_gordo, I am just totally impressed with how you have your popup images open on mouseover and close on clickoff. What a great idea!

Actually, what I've found is that if the beans are old, and you soak them, some of them will not plump up, but will remain rock-hard, and the skins will wrinkle but remain firmly attached. If they are large beans, you can pick them out at this point, but you might just want to pitch them. My experience is that cooking time for small beans is the same with or without soaking, but kidney beans take longer if they're not soaked, and don't taste as good. YMMV.

I think another problem is that the lids on many of these are not tight, and bugs can get in. I found worms around the lid of my Spanish paprika, cleaned it off, put it in the freezer for a while, and stuffed it in a plastic bag for protection. It seems that worms like the good stuff.

I've seen labels on pork shoulder and butt, beef, chicken, frozen turkey and duck. I haven't seen it on small packages of repackaged meat, but I seriously doubt that this meat is any different from the pieces they have not cut up. I have no idea if iqf chicken breasts are brined. Does it come in a package with a label? If salt is listed, then it is. I haven't bought chicken breasts in I can hardly remember when, but that's because I don't like white meat. Yes, it's pre-brined. I know some people brine everything regardless of how they intend to use it, but I've never seen a need to brine meat for what I do with it, so it's just a matter of them ripping me off by preseasoning my meat and pumping it up with water. Why would I want to brine a pork shoulder I'm going to simmer? But afterwords, the broth can't be concentrated or it will be too salty.

Nowadays, this is the type of meat (beef, pork, chicken, even duck!) that supermarkets carry. If you buy your meat in a supermarket, this is what you're getting. If the supermarket only stocks this type of meat, they're not going to do anything for you. They know you have no place else to shop, and nobody else cares. When you buy a package of meat in the cryovac state, it's always labeled to this effect, but when they repackage it, they don't relabel the smaller retail packages. Glad you can get what you want, but it's not available here, and I can't afford to have it shipped.

When I think of Valentine's day, I think of heart-shaped raviolis, pasta colored with the juice from the bottom of a roasted beet wrapper. It's certainly in your budget, and with all those hands, the work could be done in a few minutes.

The "palate" is not only a reflection of the taste buds in the tongue. The late physicist Richard Feynman felt that men and women were born with identical senses of smell, but women used theirs often, so it was better developed than that of men. For example, a woman will spend more time holding a child, being in intimate contact with their smell. Thus, a woman can pick up a garment off the floor and sniff it, to see if it has been worn, and if so, who wore it. He proceded to develop his own sense of smell, to the point where he could smell a number of books and see which one had just been opened and leafed through.

Nowadays, supermarket meat is presalted-pumped up with a saline solution which is supposed to make dry, flavorless meat tender and juicy. They claim they're doing this because the customer is demanding it, insists on paying meat dollars for water? One effect is to make meat broth and stock already too salty to concentrate as I like. I wonder what people who are on a salt-restricted diet are expected to do, pay 4X as much to have boutique meat shipped to them?

Somewhere in my attic stacks I have a book on marijuana beer-making. ("The one beer to have when you're having only one.") On the theory that THC is alcohol-soluble, but nasty-tasting impurities are water-soluble, it gives a process that involves soaking the marijuana in multiple changes of water until the soaking water becomes clear, redrying, and steeping then in homebrew ready to be bottled. After whatever period of time, the brew is filtered, bottled, primed, and capped. If this is correct, the better plan of action for bottom-of-the-bag detritus would be to soak it in water, dry, and make an alcoholic tincture. For medicinal use only, of course.

Another book published in the seventies was the "Hashish Cookbook" by "Panama Rose." It had a delicious and thrifty recipe for the Moroccan majoun. Butter, kif stems and seeds were all simmered in a pot of water then chilled overnight. The butter was mixed with spices and dried fruits and turned into a paste. All you needed was 1 tablespoon to feel the effect. Honey, dope, and spices were the major ingredients of the madjoon recipe I, er, saw in a Moroccan (?) cookbook. Actually, the cookbook was a gift from me to someone else, so I don't have it to reference. It was cooked until pasty, then set up solid when cooled, so it could be broken into pieces. The recipe was tested.

I was just reading this after finishing a plate of eggs beaten with cream and scrambled with chopped roasted habaneros. My mouth sings!

It has to do with the space/time continuum thing... That's what happens when the site is temporally out of order.

My mother would dump leftover popcorn into cereal bowls, sprinkle over sugar, and pour on milk for our breakfasts. We always understood this to be the conjunction of impoverished upbringing and excessive thriftiness.

So it's not a happy meal with, like, porn inside...