Katherine

Are you looking for a traditional recipe for "icebox cake" made from plain cookies layered with whipped cream, or just a cake you can keep in the refrigerator, as Comfort Me suggests? I've always made icebox cake by layering plain chocolate wafer cookies with real whipped cream, and coating the whole thing with whipped cream. You can use vanilla cookies, and even spread one side with a little raspberry jam. Let them sit for at least a day, for the cookies to soften and suck the excess moisture from the cream. That's it.

Just want to be sure I'm understanding this statement correctly. Are you stating or implying that "what goes in NYC" (by that I presume you mean something that is enjoyed, appreciated and widely accepted in NYC as a standard of excellence?) is or shuold be accepted as a defacto standard in the rest of the world? If that's the case.... we need to separate the NY Forum in a big hurry and have a distinct and unique discussion area for cetrtain parts of Manhattan and its residents alone! What I'm saying is that if someone posts that a certain thing (let's say foie gras) is now mainstream and common in the entire country, partaken of by just about everyone (or at least a broad cross-section of the population), and I post to the effect that I have looked for it and not found it available in my entire state, I will be/have been told... ...that I am wrong. ...that it is available in my area because it's available in NYC, and people around me are eating it, even if I see it's not true. ...and can be purchased in my neighborhood at the same price you would pay, instead of the 5-10x that I would have to pay to get it on the Internet. ...or if none of these are demonstrable, then that my area doesn't count, only the largest metropolitan areas on the coasts represent the mainstream. A lot of people who live in the city need to get out more.

Bravo! No! Nachos are not damn nachos, they are good food. Especially when made with generic supermarket mild cheddar or monterrey jack cheese. This is how a true grilled cheese sandwich is supposed to be made. Anything else needs to be labeled with the provenance of its ingredients. I've pointed out this before, but every time I've been told it is untrue, that what goes in NYC is absolute truth in the rest of the world.Accidentally hit <post> long before I was ready...

Gee, that's too bad. I'd've guessed they probably eat lamb stew there, and I doubt anyone could've challenged me on it.

The salter is rather unique. It looks like an old-fashioned meat grinder, and grinds like a mortar and pestle. Maybe I can sell it on ebay. For anybody who's considering hand crank, definitely, wall-mount is the way to go.

Way too many commercials, that's what the problem is.

Freshly ground black pepper and grated lemon rind make an exquisite pasta.

It's a double-sided coin. Thanks to technology, we have preservatives (BHA, BHT) in our grain products that keep them from going rancid. On the one hand, this means that our stores are full of products with preservatives in them. But on the other hand, these materials are not rancid, and you would not want to eat rancid cereal, or moldy bread. In the absense of refrigerated transport we would have not more high quality meat and fish, but products of dubious freshness and edibility, and very little of even supermarket quality. Before refrigeration, fresh meat was something that only happened when something was freshly slaughtered. After you slaughtered your pig, you ate what you could, and threw the rest in a barrel of brine to preserve it, so that you would have some sort of meat during the winter. If you didn't live near the coast, you didn't get fresh fish. I don't think they'd let me keep a pig in my yard here.

My understanding of the symptoms is that the two diseases are different enough not to be confused by a doctor.A couple of years back, I read on the BBC that it's possible that the reason that vCJD is only found in younger people is that its symptoms mimic those of a variety of other degenerative neurological diseases, which we expect to see in elderly people. They thought that if proper screening procedures were in place, the number of victims found would have been much higher, by a factor of two or three.

Sweetened crisco, with enough emulsifiers to allow it to get fluffy under factory conditions. The problem arises when well-meaning friends use the term "whipped cream" as a generic term that covers all manner of chemicl-laden abominations, so long as they are sweet and white. One woman brought her oft-talked about pistachio pudding to a potluck. Turns out the major ingredients were instant pistachio pudding mix and cool whip. Bleh. I could say other things about the menu at that potluck, but they're OT, as the other offenders were distinctly low-tech.

Use it to saute onions or home fries. I keep jars of leftover fat of various types in the refrigerator, so I'll always have the right one on hand. When I was in Spain, my Spanish dorm mates would pour the used frying oil back into a container for reuse, regardless of what it had been used for. I would draw the line somewhat before the fried luncheon meat, myself. Ick.

Aw, c'mon. Spray can whipped cream's not that bad, especially when you compare it to cool whip, which is that bad. The worst I would say about it is that it's not really there. Eye candy. Plenty of real abominations out there waiting to be served to us unawares.

Nor I. As the need to bake something tasty and time-consuming was becoming overwhelming, I told my co-workers (the ones that I breakfasted with at the beginning of the work day) that the next day I was bringing in a tray of homemade danish and other pastries, and not to buy the crappy dried-out/burnt cafeteria muffins or stale doughnuts that they serve in the cafeteria. There were cheese and raspberry danish, cinnamon buns, little chocolate and peanut loaves. I forget what else. I got up at 4 to have them baked in time. I brought them directly to the cafeteria, and when I got them there, everybody had already bought their crappy muffins and was eating them. Homemade stuff couldn't possibly be worth waiting two minutes for, when you'd have to pass up the culinary delights of the cafeteria, could it? They were all, like, didn't bother, doesn't matter. Learned my lesson. Philistines.

I have a Salter mill mounted on my kitchen wall. It ground some damn fine coffee. They don't make them like that anymore.

Wow

No matter what the nominal nationality of any of the states that formerly comprised Yugoslavia, within each are many enclaves of all the other ethnic groups. My grandfather came from the coast of Dalmatia, but had a Turkish family name. My grandmother said she was from "Austria". We can only guess where she actually was born, probably somewhere in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. They were both Serbs, and only spoke Serbian when they arrived in this country.

Of course, this argument can be turned around and still make as much sense. When a customer secures a dinner reservation with a credit card, she risks paying a fee if some unforeseen event (emergency surgery, alien invasion, change of plans) occurs and she can't make it to a phone. Yes, indeed. One afternoon my car broke down in Savannah, and although I called immediately, I paid for the room we had reserved for that night in Orlando. And for the room I had to take in Savannah. It really cut into the travel budget (Travelling on a shoestring, I was not expecting expensive repairs, either.). Sorry, my fault, I should've informed them the day before that I was going to break down.

If you use too much coffee, you can always add hot water to your cup. But if you don't add enough, there is nothing you can do to save it. So better strong than weak.

I thought of a lot of weird and substandard things my mother has done since she started to take shortcuts or modify recipes to make them "healthier", but finally something came to mind that I hadn't thought of in years. I've said before that she was a health food fanatic, back when organic or natural were kooky. She used to buy some sort of (supposedly) natural margarine, which she thought was better for us than butter, and she used it for cooking. (Hey, Mom, it comes out of a chemical factory, how natural can it be?) But to "butter" bread, she would take a pound of butter, some water, some oil, and some gelatin, somehow mix it all up, set it in an old-fashioned ice cube tray. After it set, she would cut it into slabs and freeze it. It was stored and served frozen. I still recall what it looked like on the knife as we cut it to put it on the bread...

For many years, I made coffee every day in an automatic drip coffeemaker. I always thought press coffee was, eh, though I used a small press to make coffee at work. I didn't much like the sludge or the flavor. Then I started roasting my own beans, and as I was home in the morning, I started brewing it one cup at a time in a small Melitta unit. The method I ended up going with was to put the coffee in a Pyrex measuring cup, pour on the hot water, and stir. After 3 minutes, I would pour it into the filter, it would rush through, and my coffee was done. Rather like steeping tea. Then I found that the automatic drip coffeemaker was no longer acceptable to my taste. The coffee tasted awful, though I'm sure there wasn't any change in the machine. So I gave the machine away and went strictly Melitta. I don't drink coffee anymore, but if I did, that's how I'd do it. I never thought Kona was all that flavorful a brew, though, YMMV. My favorite was a blend of Yirgacheffe and monsooned Malabar. Sigh.

Where do you live? Somewhere that you've been unable to observe the process of pristine white snow becoming mixed with dirt, sand and salt? Newfallen snow only, please. I live in North Carolina - "in the boonies" is what my relatives from Detroit would say. There are no factories or nuclear power stations nearby. We live on a dead end street with no close neighbors and almost no traffic. And I do only use newfallen snow, but that's hardly avoidable because it only snows here about once per year. We're all so excited to see the snow, so as soon as there's enough out there, we're gathering it to make snow cream. Is the snow never clean in the city? I don't live in the "city", but the more snow you get, the more dirt, sand, and salt they have to throw on the roads to make them safe, and the sooner the snow gets gray and brown. Deep snow is less enchanting when you have to move it on a regular basis.

I think the problem is partly due to researchers who believe that their work proves beyond any doubt something that it clearly doesn't, and media journalists who know little or nothing about what they're writing about and are looking for a good sound bite. By the time anybody's actually read the research, the brouhaha has died down, and there's no incentive to retract any exaggerations or misinformation. If anybody does point out the shortcomings in the research, the reply they get is yeah, well, even if this study/every study yet is badly done/inconclusive/proves just the opposite, the conclusion has been repeated in the press so many time that this makes it true. I'm trying to figure out what you're saying here. You are already free to buy wild salmon. Are you trying to stop people who don't have access to wild salmon (or can't afford to eat it) from eating salmon ever?

I can't afford most of the stuff they fight over, so I just ignore their histrionics.

Where do you live? Somewhere that you've been unable to observe the process of pristine white snow becoming mixed with dirt, sand and salt? Newfallen snow only, please.