Katherine

I have my doubts about putting bacon fat in anything but a savory pie crust. Have you ever tried a lard crust? I grew up on it, so I like it, but it does taste distinctly porky.

Pork: the perfect food, a meat for all reasons and seasons, the other dark meat.

More important than whether they roast their own beans is how recently the beans were roasted. If they don't know, or if it's more than a week, the coffee is going to be fair at best. Some shops use pods that are ancient. On the other hand, I interviewed at a coffee roaster that delivered twice-weekly to its clients, and the coffee was always roasted the day before delivery. In my coffee-roasting mode, I tried numerous blends and roasts for variety in my regular and espresso-style drinks. In Venezuela, everybody drinks a very light roasted coffee that seems to be brewed like espresso. The ground coffee is really cheap there, but I couldn't find anything like it in this country, only upscale varietal imports. At that time I was not yet a coffee buff, nor was great coffee so easily available to seekers, so I never followed up.

Then it's settled. You'll have to pass this assignment on to someone with no reputation to lose. Like me.

I make my own yogurt with a blend of whole milk and half-and-half. To eat, I add nuts, splenda, and vanilla and/or almond extract. A few dried cherries. If I have a piece of fruit coming to me, I add that too. So in all, I use about 1/2 to 3/4 cup of the yogurt for a light meal. Considering that most of the marinade will remain in the bowl, I can't see any reason not to use a yogurt marinade, especially if the partakers are not on the induction phase. Theoretically, a person could make sour cream cultured with a yogurt starter. That would be entirely acceptable. Ripe tomatoes are good. Just not a pound at a time.

Wow, I must be even more of a tomato snob than you! "...should not be purchased in January..." While I might be tempted to say, "should not be purchased out of season" (ie. other than late summer), I still insist on saying, do NOT purchase supermarket tomatoes at all, EVER; you're only encouraging them. NO!!! Maybe you can get better tomatoes in your supermarket in season; I can't. Even the local farmer's market often has inferior tomato-shaped objects, in season, at a high price. Sorry, but if you don't grow them yourself, they're rarely REAL tomatoes, except in certain rare circumstances, at least for me. [snobbery to the maximum degree; sorry, but that's the way it is.] Get home-grown, farmer's market, or, if all else fails, canned; otherwise, don't even bother. I don't care if the supermarket tomato is organic, hydroponic, on-the-vine, and hand-harvested by virgins; it's still crap; again, don't encourage them. I hope someday you find your perfect tomato. I for one do not think I would be healthier or happier if I never ate another tomato, and I don't intend to sell my house so I can grow them myself in order to eat them three weeks out of the year. Grape tomatoes taste ripe even out of season, are available at a reasonable price, and can be diced for recipes. Perhaps the problem with truffle oil and vanillin is that often, food is made with an extreme excess of these artificial flavors, which seems to impress enough of the customers that it makes financial sense to target them. I can't even eat some of those gourmet cookies, because they leave the same nasty chemical aftertaste that flavored coffees do. I've heard of vanilla sauces on seafood. I was served one that tasted like they dumped the bottle in. Everybody loved it but me. I found it inedible. Of course, they were people who love those cookies...

If your goal is to cram ever more toppings on a pizza, I suppose.

When you've got to be out of the house at 7:00. and you make a complete breakfast every morning, there's not much point in cooking from scratch the few things that are as good from a mix. Pretty much it would come down to having time to serve meat and/or eggs with the pancakes, or pancakes only. (Be still, my pancreas!)

For the longest time, my "secret" was Krusteaz mix, bought in large bags at Sam's club. I started buying this after working at a restaurant where they used it. The patrons just loved the pancakes (they were great), but I had to go into the back room to mix it up if we ran out, so the patrons couldn't see the mix bag...

The key is that for any type of pizza crust, there is one correct maximum volume of toppings. You can make it all one type, or you can mix and match, but if you exceed that volume, the pizza will come out overloaded, soggy, and difficult to get off the peel and out of the oven again. This correct quantity is often smaller than you would think, especially for thin crust pizzas.

Well, for gosh sakes, they should have known! I mean, what kind of friend gives a friend a DEAD lobster? Friends don't give friends dead lobsters.

I recall a first date I had years ago with a guy who imagined himself quite a wine sophisticate. In a modestly priced restaurant with a dozen supermarket wines on one side of one sheet, he must have taken twenty minutes trying to find the perfect match for our food, before I stopped him so we could actually order and eat. Just pick one, they're all ok! It was very instructive.

I wouldn't say steamer baskets are overrated, since I use mine all the time, but... I have one that came with my $20 stainless spaghetti pot, and two smaller universal ones that I got at an off-price salvage store for a few bucks. They're worth every penny.

What size funnel did you get, and did you buy a flask and adapter for it yet? We used to use all different sizes at work, both some small ceramic ones and large plastic ones. The receiving flasks I used were up to 4 liters, but for what I was filtering (you don't want to know) I had to change the papers repeatedly as they clogged, which was messy. I recommend getting coarse (fast) filter paper discs to start, and plenty of them. Also, you might want to put whatever it is through a fine sieve to get the lumps out first.

Cultivated blueberries strikes me as what NJ is famous for.

Cake flour makes crumbly dough and tasteless pasta. Don't use it.

I don't see it at all. ...and i, in the past, have eaten raw ramen noodles out of the bag. does that make me the "anti food-snob"? or just a slob... Try them toasted.

I was in Vegas for a conference, and since I don't gamble, I had to fixate on what was available. Two things in my hotel: Since I decided not to reset my body clock to local time, I was up and ready to eat at 5:30, when everybody else seemed to be going to bed. The only things on the menu at the coffeeshop were: 1. bicuits and gravy-the waitress said these were pasty and horrible 2. pancakes and sausage-the waitress said these were awful 3. roast beef sandwich, which I had: a 16 oz steak on a 2x3" piece of bread. With fries. Wow. $5.25. The other thing that was great was the sparkling wine ("champagne") on tap at the evening buffet. There should be more sparkling wine on tap.

To really evaluate a technique, you need to test it against the alternative, and at the same time. The most effective way is to test three ways at the same time. So to see what the proper amount of liquid is, you could add 50% more than you usually do to one batch, fix in the normal way, and make a batch with 50% less than usual. Taste them all and see how it worked out. Compare. Do they taste as you expected? I find that most people claim to have extremely strong egg preferences, but have never actually compared alternatives. So they're only guessing when they say that X does this or that. If you read that eggs should be made with water, and you like milk or cream, compare water vs milk vs heavy cream in the volume that you determined was correct in the previous test. How do you like them cooked? How much butter? All of these things can be compared objectively. When I did these tests myself, I found that I had not been making eggs the way the tests showed I preferred them, and so I changed. I like them much better this way.

Everything's better with bacon. mmmm

What's Silver Shred?

You're wrong, she was separated from my mother at birth. That "goulash" was a dead giveaway. She used to make it every week, though we really did like it. After she went back to work, she trained me to make it. It was a typical dish of the times, and after I moved away from home, I adapted it to my changing tastes, cutting back on the tomato, and adding garlic, red pepper, paprika, fennel, and other spices, which improved it a lot. Although she never baked it in the oven. I found that packing the leftovers in an oven dish, then covering them with bechamel and grated cheese, and baking made an incredible casserole.

I scramble my eggs in a nonstick pan set on top of a pot of simmering water. It's the best thing to do if you're likely to forget, because they can't overcook.

Quite possibly it would be acceptable to claim you had put in onion powder and dried parsley, where scallions were too threatening.

How we like our eggs scrambled is mostly a reflection of personal preference, not a matter of the "right" way or the "wrong" way to make them. I like fried eggs and scrambled eggs (scrambled my way), but this is something I couldn't even eat. There are so many different ways to scramble an egg.