Katherine

Unfortunately, I've had that orange jello "salad" with carrots....eek! My mother made that salad with lemon jello for thanksgiving every year. I'm rather fond of it, but it's better made from scratch with lemon juice and gelatin.

Everything you wanted to know about jamon iberico but didn't know who to ask...

Another reason to be concerned about Starbucks.

A good recipe can be found in Jane and Michael Stern's Square Meals. It's curryish rather than southwestern, and not at all thin.

Drop the lobsters one at a time into a kettle of boiling water, fish them out after exactly 1 minute, and quench in a bucket of ice water for 5-10 minutes. The meat will release, but still be raw. I've tried it both ways. Take my word for it.

Actually, around here it is impossible to collect any sort of workmen's comp if you are injured as an unofficial employee. Workman's comp insurance doesn't cover the employer for this type of employee. You have to get a lawyer and just plain sue them, and you don't have the money to do this if you're not working on the books, while (in many cases) a small business that does this is marginal, and doesn't have the deep pockets to cover the costs of your injury, let alone your legal expenses. Plus, the courts look down on somebody who is injured while working off the books, as though they got caught trying to get away with something and deserve what they got. So while theoretically, the business is open to unlimited liability, in practice, nothing ever happens. I used to work in a business that had no employees outside of adults in the family, and when the labor inspector came through, he wanted to make sure that all the unpaid employees were adult members of the family, ie, co-owners. Using any unpaid labor is exploitation by this definition, even if you have convinced the workers that in some way it's for their own good. So for a worker doing a genuine stage, not just under-the-table work, in case of an accident, the worker would end up paying for all his medical expenses (unless he tried to sue, which would pretty much end any chance of a career in the business), and the labor board would hit the establishment for a big fine for violating labor laws. The state usually doesn't find out about violations unless there's a problem that brings it to their attention, though. I think in many or most states, this is how the law is written, but enforcement may vary. Imagine working for free (ok, for goodwill) for an extended period of time. You have no money to pay any of your bills, and your employer benefits greatly from your free labor. Then you have an accident, get hit with huge medical expenses, and can't work. You can't even complain, because then you'll never work in the business again. This sounds exploitative to me.

I think all the suggestions about using different flours will give you greatly improved results, isn't Gold Medal bleached? Bleaching takes a lot of the wheaty goodness out of flour. To make sure mine doesn't stick to the peel, I shape the crust on the floured wooden peel, shake to make sure it's loose, top it, and shake again. Usually it takes a shake or two, but that's something you don't want to be fighting with in the oven. We just use whatever dough we have hanging around the house for our pizza, and it always comes out great, regardless of what my inspiration may be that day. Homemade pizza is so much better that pizza parlor pizzas. My daughter judges it the best she's ever had, every time she eats it, and she spent a summer working in an upscale pizza restaurant, so she's got some experience there.

Kiwis are attractive, and you can do all kinds of complicated things with them, but when it comes down to it, they're just a piece of fruit. Like most other pieces of fruit, you can just eat them. Cut them in half across their midsection and eat them with a spoon. Quickest way to do them in.

Gee, I'm glad I'm not going to visit NYC anytime soon. Sounds like they wouldn't like me atall, cause I'm from away. Indefensible.

I didn't see anything on that website about these eggs being free of the salmonella that can infect store-bought eggs. The antibodies they contain would likely be unable to interact with contamination in or on the egg. Another article of faith?

I searched and found the website: hyperimmune eggs Most of these are disease organisms we are not commonly exposed to. The claim is that these eggs develop immunological characteristics that transfer protection to the body to help it fight other conditions as well. There's some research here. I think you have to view it pretty critically. In "Effect of Immune Egg on Serum Cholesterol in Rabbits on Atherogenic Diets" (abstract only) they fed 35 rabbits with a diet designed to give them plaque buildup in their arteries. The diet was not described in the abstract. They then broke them into groups. The control group got water, while the test groups got hyperimmune egg, either unheated or heated. The researchers concluded that consuming the hyperimmune egg equivalent of one egg a day helped to control the cholesterol levels of the rabbits, and more worked better. An issue here is that they didn't have a control using non-hyperimmune eggs. So if the theory is that the miraculous egg properties get denatured by heating, and yet there is still an effect, the results could have been attributed to eggs themselves. But they didn't control for this. Another issue is the size of a rabbit. How much do you suppose that a lab rabbit weighs, 10 pounds? So a man who weighed 200 pounds would have to eat 20 of these eggs every day to get the minimum effect that they found. Sounds like a lot of issues. Hmm... There are some articles listed concerning human research, but it looks like they didn't use hyperimmune eggs per se, and most of them were using cow's milk antibodies or researching rotavirus.

What's nanotech orange juice? The eggs we used to work with in the lab were purchased, already inocculated with a material that caused them to develop antibodies to a common animal disease. The eggs were processed (long, complicated procedure I did many times) and the antibodies were harvested and manufactured into test kits for the disease. So it can and does work growing antibodies in eggs. The other questions are not answerable at this point, and I feel probably never will be.

I was hoping to find that information out on the hyperimmune site, but it doesn't work. They should be immune to whatever they innoculated them with, at least in theory, provided they have developed a successful production procedures and have quality control at the facility. Inoculating raw eggs is a standard procedure for growing antibodies. So one issue is what type(s) of antibodies they are trying to grow in these eggs, and whether they succeeded. Whether eating these eggs would transfer immunity to the eater is a different question. In the absence of solid data, it sounds like something of a faith issue to me.

I tried to follow the link in the article you wrote, but I got an error message saying that the account had been disabled by the security department. I am familiar with immunized eggs and antibodies, having worked in a biotech immunology lab. Provided these eggs are still available to you, you should concentrate on the type of foods that contain raw eggs. Stuffed eggs are always cooked, and frosting that contains egg whites is usually prepared with a hot sugar syrup. What is the food philosophy of this restaurant? Are they vegan, or all-raw, or do they serve organic animal products? What about sugar? Smoothies are a good place to hide whole raw eggs. Chocolate mousse can be lightened with whipped egg whites, and some people put raw egg yolks in desserts like these, but I find the taste unattractive. Steak tartare usually comes with an egg yolk on it. Aside from these, I can't think of any way I would serve completely raw whole eggs.

I had that same "you can't go home again" experience. I came home from college and my mother had gone low fat. She made the cream gravy for the turkey with skim milk. "It tastes the same, and it's lower in fat." No it doesn't, Mom, and so what? Why eat it at all now? Though that's high on my list of characterless things I have been served, it didn't quite make it into the "bad" category for me.

Having seen Dave's butt, I can see how beautiful it is. But I think you're going to have problems if you try to cook it any longer at that temperature, and it's going to get too dark, I'm not a grill or barbecue specialist in any way, but I made an oven-roasted boned pork shoulder recently that was just totally, meltingly tender. I roasted it at about 200 degrees for approximately 8 hours. So I think what you need to do is get your temperature down a bit, so you can roast it longer without blackening it.

I have been related to or otherwise known several people who found their health going downhill after drastic dietary modifications intended to improve their health. Do people in this situation modify their diet to make it more moderate? No, the response is generally to become more and more strict and restrictive.

It's sad, but you can't help someone that doesn't want and can't accept help, especially if they are obsessed with some weird non-standard sorts of diet modifications. The more you push, the more fixated she will be.

The first step toward recovery, for me, was divorce. Not for everybody, a last resort.

Aren't you a sister-in-law of mine?

What sort of buttercream are you looking for? The old-fashioned kind, with powdered sugar, or with meringue, or egg yolks?

If you want to make it really interesting, you could serve them with ketchup and mustard, and let the ketchup-lovers and ketchup-haters duke it out in your backyard as entertainment.

The worst table I ever had was in a small restaurant that had just gotten pretentious, and added a couple of tables to the dining room to seat a few more customers. The only open table was next to the restroom, and I'm not talking about near it. The other patrons actually had to push past one of us to get to it. Since it was a small restaurant, the unisex bathroom didn't have any enclosure in it, and as the door didn't have a closer on it, every time somebody left it, they left the door wide open, with our nearest diner about 3 feet from the toilet. Eeeuuww.

Actually, some producers trim them back rather severely, right down to between the bones. They only cost about $1 a lb that way, but there's hardly any meat on them. It's an uncommon item around here. I see it occasionally in a market in the poorer section of a poorer local town. We don't have any Asian butchers around here.

I've seen pictures in Korean cookbooks of short ribs that have meat on them. Ours are nekkid, scraped bare, only worth a caveman experience. You buy the whole pack of ribs or not at all. Pork is better.