Katherine

To make plain bagels more flavorful, I'd use sourdough starter or retard them longer, but what I usually do is (if I'm just recycling bread dough I already have) use a topping. If making them from scratch, I use whole grain flour for flavor. I make a mean pumpernickel bagel using rye flour, dark buckwheat flour, and gluten flour (lots of seeds, sourdough if I have it). It's as dark as my cat, and a lot easier to get along with.

I nursed my daughter until she was ready to eat people food, I pumped, and so I had plenty of opportunity to taste the milk. It is maybe a little bit sweeter than cow's milk, but not noticeably so. In no way does it resemble condensed milk/corn syrup/water. Back then they used to think that children need lots of sugar to give them the calories they need to grow. You're lucky you're not diabetic.

It's diners who want the "restaurant kitchen as 'theme park' experience". They don't really want to be in a working kitchen. Most of the things that go on in a place like that would not enhance the enjoyment of their meal: heat, smoke&fumes, grease, people yelling at each other and dropping things, employees running around and pushing each other out of the way... What they want is the ultimate dining room pampering experience, located in but shielded from the kitchen, so they can have their hand held by a star chef.

I agree with Steven's post, and I would like to add that the technological purge of traditional cooking in America has been followed by a medical/nutritional/food police purge. For a generation we have been bombarded by the messages that all traditional cooking is bad for you, accompanied by fixations on 'good' foods and 'bad' foods. The message has been that we need to continually re-engineer our diets, or our lives will be in peril. Much of the data these messages are based on is preliminary and based on test tube studies, not controlled population studies. (Hey, guess what? Soy is only a food, not a miracle food, and eating it doesn't have most of the effects we told you it would.) Most people I know (both at work and at college) have become so confused by these ever-changing expectations that they have made a few minor changes in their diets and otherwise given up trying. So they eat less meat, while consuming uncontrolled quantities of ice cream, chips, crackers, and soda, and no fresh fruits or vegetables. Where I work I am the only one who brings in meals. People look enviously at them, but consider preparation of food on even an occasional basis to be unachievable. (Don't say these people are too busy from working, none of them works overtime, and they watch hours of TV every day.) The only things they eat that might resemble meals are delivered by pizza joints. You may have many friends who do not eat like this, but you and I are a minority. I think the pundits have to answer for this degradation of American eating.

I've been distressed to see that a host opens a wine I bought when I didn't know what was being served for dinner. But they mean well, so it's probably a better quality wine than they were expecting to serve, and it means they didn't match their wine to the food anyway. It would be more distressing if someone showed up to my house with a bottle of pink zinfandel and expected me to open and serve it. I guess I'd have to make some sort of lame excuse to keep it from happening. Even though I consider myself capable of doing adequate wine matching, I'd be glad if someone suggested (nicely!) that they wanted to shoulder the expense and responsibility of providing wine, as long as they made it clear to me that they were at least as capable as I. I think that in the case that the article opens with, there's something wrong with expecting to serve expensive, carefully thought out wine at a real cookout. As far as I'm concerned, table wine would be just fine and a great wine is overkill.

Snobbiness. Definitely. It's gotta go.

And how is 'za different from real pizza?

By the way, sea water is really, REALLY salty. I harvested some once for a salt-making project. It's like brine, not like broth. I personally add enough salt to make the water taste as salty as a broth.

I'd guess that a food processor would heat up the cream too much to make butter, but if you want to try it, let us know how it works out.

Those people are making $12 an hour. That's twice what coffeeshop employees make where I live. Somebody could decide to live on those wages, and pursue their craft, because in paying them that much, the owner is also paying respect to their talent and skill. But I still think that it's a reflection on management when the employees are untrained, not on the employees themselves. It shouldn't have to be up to minimum wage employees to figure out how to make a quality product when the owner can't tell the difference, or doesn't care, and think's it's a waste of time.

I open up a 16 ounce bottle of heavy cream, purchased from a local dairy (not ultrapasteurized and no additives - I'm lucky to have that). I dump it into the KitchenAid, turn it on and wait til the buttermilk starts splashing onto the counter, about 10 minutes. I form the butter into a lump and knead it in a bowl of cold water to wash out the milk, then add salt to taste (ground to a powder in a mortar and pestle).

Whenever I have guests for dinner, I make my own, from locally bottled cream. It blows them all away. I tried culturing it first, but it tasted the same.

It's not the barrista's fault. It's a management problem. If the owners can't tell quality espresso from instant coffee and think you can't, they won't care enough to train their employees and keep track of the quality of the product they sell. So why would some kid who's only doing it til he gets a job paying better than minimum wage care? Key are good beans, freshness, and time of draw.

I treat thighs and breasts the same way: Skin and bone them, pound to about 3/8" between two sheets of plastic wrap. Sprinkle with salt, freshly ground pepper, and red pepper (or your choice of dry rub. Saute in a blend of extra-virgin olive oil and butter (crushed garlic optional). Breasts will cook quickly and absorb more fat, making them as tasty and moist as the thighs. If you grill, brush with oil first.

Myself, I do not believe that "cuisine" and "cooking" are separate things, either, but Robert Brown started this discussion using "cuisine" to mean "the food that is served at multistarred/cutting edge restaurants, exclusive of the food that most people eat." This definition has often been used on these boards. I personally feel that a more valid comparison (if you believe in national stereotypes, which I do not) would be to compare the food most people eat with that "national character". I don't think that the number of high class restaurants can be significant enough to reliably reflect anything, other than the artistry and business acumen of their creators, the taste in food of the people who can afford to eat in them, and their desire for an occasional blowout no-holds-barred experience. Given the difficulty of getting a reservation at El Bulli, how many people eat there to say that that type of food is representative of what they usually eat? If Ferran Adria had gone into architecture instead of cooking, would we be describing the "cuisine" of Spain differently? His is the restaurant which is always cited as an example, yet it is atypical, at the end of the extreme. Even if you were able to come up with some sort of an "average" diet profile, it might be that few people actually fit that profile, due to individual differences. Think Americans. If data showed that 40% of Americans ate yogurt for breakfast, what would that say about the 60% that did not, and ate instead a variety of things? Probably nothing. When I read this this morning, I had biscuits in the oven. Now I've eaten them.

I think that in order to properly analyze this, you need to keep in mind that "cuisine" is normally what may be found in only the highest priced restaurants, and may be based only loosely on "cooking", which is what people make and eat when they're not blowing their budget. The two are anything but synonymous. Cuisine is cooking promoted to an art form. While it gains much from this promotion, also something is lost. If the cuisine represents some aspect of a culture, so also should the cooking represent one, though perhaps a different one, or from a different perspective. So you need to be clear which you are referring to at any time. Confusing the two may be an issue, especially with French food. Consider: What is the standard of quality for cooking in a country? In France, it is quite high. My impression about Italian food is that it represents a continuum of quality food, the major difference between the two extremes being only the price, and not the quality. So you don't really have a strong separation between the two. In the US, many people seem to have abandoned any notion of excellence for what they eat everyday. So if you average in people like me, who cook all their meals from scratch using fresh ingredients, with people who subsist on exclusively prepackaged snack food and chain fast food, the standard would be so low as to be nonexistent. How would you factor that in? What would that say about Americans in general, and how would it apply to individuals? I've spent some time in Spain, though I never made it to any multi-starred restaurants. It would be a huge stretch to say that there is any humor or playfulness in their cooking, even if they do have some of the best bar food in the world. I think that at its extreme, cuisine is mostly a function of the artists who create it, and the audience which seeks it out.

Beets are earthy. I peel and dice them, then simmer in fresh squeezed grapefruit juice until done. Uncover and reduce the liquid until it is absorbed. Salt and butter to taste.

If you want someplace a little more upscale for breakfast, go to Bintliff's on Portland St, across from the main post office. I don't eat breakfast in bars, and the only time I went to Becky's, it was, eh. The Bayou Kitchen at Woodford's Corner off Forest Avenue is a funky place that does a tasty breakfast, but it's so small, it's hard to get into on weekends.

I use netscape, too. I find a lot of websites are not fully functional with netscape. It doesn't make me want to open IE, though.

I tried all the buttons, nothing happened.

I tried to post this recipe in the archive, but it wouldn't let me enter more than one ingredient. Extra-chocolatey brownies 4 ounces unsweetened chocolate, chopped 4 ounces butter 1-1/2 cup sugar 2 eggs 1 tsp vanilla 1/2 tsp salt 1 cup all-purpose flour chopped or broken nuts (optional) chocolate chips (optional) Melt the butter and chocolate together in the microwave at 50%. Stir in the sugar, then the eggs, the vanilla, the salt and the flour. Add as much nuts and chocolate chips as you like. Scrape into an 8x8 to 9x13 (depending on how thin and crusty you want them) baking dish lined with a piece of parchment that overhangs. Bake in a preheated 350 degree oven until firm around the edges and beginning to congeal in the center, but still soft. (Begin checking at 25 minutes.) When completely cold, lift by the paper from the dish onto a cutting board, and cut with a French knife. Variation I have always been a person who favors the 'filet' over the crusty exterior pieces. I discovered when I had no working oven for an extended period of time that you can steam brownies (works best with no nuts or chips). When they are cold, they can be cut into small pieces (they are very rich, rivalling the best flourless chocolate cake) and plated with ice cream, whipped cream, chocolate sauce, raspberry coulis, etc.

The unfortunate truth is that two devices can read the same at the extremes of their range, yet be non-linear between.

My ex tried to show me he could be a more efficient cook than I, who not only wasted time putting together carefully planned meals, but ended up with loads more dishes that had to be washed than if I bought things ready to pop in the mouth. He made a dish of fried hamburger and mushrooms with macaroni. He saved time by not washing or trimming the mushrooms. It had an interesting texture to it. It did not prolong our marriage.

Extra-chocolatey brownies 4 oz unsweetened chocolate, chopped 4 oz butter 1-1/2 c sugar 2 eggs 1 tsp vanilla 1/2 tsp salt 1 c all-purpose flour chopped or broken nuts (optional) chocolate chips (optional) Melt the butter and chocolate together in the microwave at 50%. Stir in the sugar, then the eggs, the vanilla, the salt and the flour. Add as much nuts and chocolate chips as you like. Scrape into an 8x8 to 9x13 (depending on how thin and crusty you want them) baking dish lined with a piece of parchment that overhangs. Bake in a preheated 350 degree oven until firm around the edges and beginning to congeal in the center, but still soft. (Begin checking at 25 minutes.) When completely cold, lift by the paper from the dish onto a cutting board, and cut with a French knife. Variation I have always been a person who favors the 'filet' over the crusty exterior pieces. I discovered when I had no working oven for an extended period of time that you can steam brownies (works best with no nuts or chips). When they are cold, they can be cut into small pieces (they are very rich, rivalling the best flourless chocolate cake) and plated with ice cream, whipped cream, chocolate sauce, raspberry coulis, etc Keywords: Dessert, Brownies/Bars ( RG442 )

Where do you live? I understand white asparagus in the US is much different and not nearly as good as that you would find in Europe. I enjoyed it in Spain, where they served it as a salad (greens optional) with equal parts mayonnaise on the side. (Espárragos con mayonesa) Some people were able to finish the mayonnaise.