NulloModo

I tried another batch last night, with red onions. My issue with the confit however is that it always comes out really sweet, the natural sugars of the onions seem to concentrate. Does anyone know of onions that are lower in natural sugars? I would love to make a more savory confit with a little more bite and less of the sweet onion flavor, where should I turn?

That Radical Chef website linked on page 1 is awesome. I am definately planning on cooking/adapting some Philipino recipes soon.

That's true, the steaks and higher priced entrees generally suck. All I would ever order were the burgers/sandwiches, which even they couldn't fuck up. Also, alcohol anywhere is expensive. Now, don't get me wrong, I like my local diners and ethnic joints as much as the next guy (and these are the only local non-chain restaurants), but sometimes you can get a meal worth the money in a chain, if you think basic, at least IMO.

You live in Manhattan and have only $700 a month rent? Damn, I am suddenly feeling really ripped off...

Weird, I just don't get it, but then again, I don't particularly like cereal... Coffee shops make since to me because they can often make a better product than one can make at home, having access to the best equipment, etc. Bagel shops are the same boat, I don't have huge bagels loaded with cool stuff, multiple flavors of cream cheese, and lox in my cabinets, but they do. This Cereality joint seems to have just boxes of retail cereal and a few things to toss on top... wouldn't take much time or money to get the same effect at home.

If I had money shooting out the wazoo, sure, I would eat there. Since I don't, I eat sushi at the local Hibachi place where it is $20 for all you can eat, or $25 for the deluxe sashimi platter, which is very good. Personally, I can't see how sushi could be worth $300, but I am not a sushi conniseur. I might drop the change to dine at Per Se or the French Laundry if ever given the opportunity, just to see what the supposeldy best prepared meals under the sun are like, but there is no way I could do it regularly. I am very much a value-minded person in general. I will spend money up to the point where spending loads more only gets a minimal increase in quality. This also relates a bit to all the chain-bashing around here I think. Sure, a meal at Friday's is not going to be anywhere near the quality of anything with a couple stars, but you are spending $10 for your experience instead of $20, $30, or $100. To me, that makes it pretty worthwhile.

I am not a big fan of superfluous adjectives, but I don't really mind them either. I very much appreciate when the menu lists if an item is sauced/glazed/breaded/etc when one might not normally expect such an item to come this way however. I also see nothing wrong with a basic name for a dish then a small paragraph underneat explaining what the dish is.

Redfox - Your greens recipe sounds pretty tasty. I haven't had bulgur, well, ever now that I think about it. I have used chickpeas a couple times while making an Indian style curried spinach dish. Personally, the extra carbs from the half a cup or so of chickpeas are well worth it in my opinion. My LC cooking lately has been focussed a lot on baking. My favorite LC bread mysteriously dissapeared from the market, and I have been trying (unsuccessfully so far) to recreate it. However, I am learning a good bit about how the different elements of a 'bread' recipe work together in baking. This is the thread Troubleshooting My Buns if anyone has any suggestions on other ideas to try.

There are a number of flavored Rums on the market, anything from Captain Morgan's, to Vanilla Cruzan, to tons of othre stuff. I am curious about how these flavorings are instilled into the liquor. Is it essential oils, is it sugar-syrups, is it a mixture of a little of both? Does it differ from brand to brand, and is there a way to tell from looking at the bottle, or a database resource out there? I would be interested in trying some of these (I am starting to like regular Rum more as well, I guess if one drinks enough of it, one will come around) but I recently found out that Captain Morgan's contains sugar, something I can't drink. I was under the impression that if something contained things other than just the basic alcohol it would have to be labled a liqueur, or something other than hard liquor, bot Captain Morgans appears to be labled as just basic rum. Are there standards in place for what can and can't be put into something known as 'rum' or 'whiskey'? And does anyone know of any flavored or blackstrap style rums that are definately sugar-free? Thanks a bunch.

I've never seen fish sauce at $10, or even $5 a liter. At the all of the Asian groceries around here it sells for at most $2.50 a liter, most are like $1.50. I am not sure what brand I have now, I can't remember the name, but the wrapper is yellow, and the logo is a red circle inside of a blue one I believe, I am happy with it, it is a lot better than the 'Ka-Me' brand crap I had bought at the regular grocery store before.

Ugh, no Wegman's love for DE yet? Oh well, it can only be a matter of time...

Thanks for the info again... I decided against another attempt this evening, had a pile of dishes to do instead, so I will most likely try my next version over the weekend, and report back how it goes. The baking powder rolls however proved interesting in a new fashion tonight: I made a big pot of chili, and really wanted something with it, so I took one, cut it in half, toasted it a couple times till browned, and put a little butter on it. While a little dry, it had a great english muffiny taste and texture... I will have to remember that the next time I am jonesing for eggs benedict.

When I was younger my father would occasionally stop by a convenience store to pick up a random assortment of pickled sausages, similar to the 'Atomic Firecracker' or 'Tiajuana Mamma' variety. Inevitably he would give me one, and I always absolutely loved those. As soon as I started driving I made it a point to pick one up often while filling up the tank, and they are still a staple of mine on road-trips.

I am another one who is prompted by things in the fridge that need to be used up. I also get on kicks where I will keep trying variations on a certain recipe, such as the week I cooked a different version of gumbo every night last summer. This week, the name of the game as been eating through Thanksgiving leftovers. Some of the meals have been straight reheat specials, keeping everything in its original form. Some have been just figuring out how to best use what I have combined with what I would like to do. I have been experimenting trying to bake the perfect flax roll, and while I haven't made it there yet, my failures when drowned in turket, collard greens, and gravey, have still been pretty tasty.

Hmm, thanks for the ideas. I have been using the meal yes, not that measurement of seeds. My bag of meal was just opened prior to this experiment, but it had been sitting on a shelf for who knows, up to a year perhaps, before that. So, although it was sealed, it is plausible that that could have happened. I have a bag of fresh seeds in my freezer, maybe I will try grinding the flax fresh for my next try. I have been using instant 'active dry rapid-rise' yeast, red-star brand (or red-dot, or something like that). I have used a full packet per attempt. Is the other yeast the kind in the jar? Maybe I will pick some up and see if that helps, I need to go by Wally-World today anyway. The reason I tried to switch to WPI from VWG is that the dough didn't seem gluteny enough to me, it was pasty instead of stretchy like I would explect gluten to make it. When I have tried to roll out pizza crusts from LC pizza crust kits (which have a lot of gluten) I am amazed and how stretchy the dough is, I guess perhaps I was expecting something similar. I will try to knead in my food processor the next time, and see if that helps, maybe by hand I'm not beating it enough. By proofing the yeast, am I not wasting any of it's rising properties? I would think by letting it bubble in the bowl that I am letting it expel gasses into the air that could be expelled into my bread instead...

I don't think anyone will argue that there is anything evil about sodas in moderation, but it seems to me that soda is one of the foods most easily consumed in much greater than moderate quantities for many people. If you had one soda a day, or a couple a week or something, I doubt it would be a problem. But if you (like most people do when consuming sodas) take down several at a time (what with huge bottles everywhere, free refills at most restaurants, and etc) you are easily consuming a full cup or more of sugar, as well as lots of the chemicals (which may or may not be all that bad). As per wine and grape juice (which BTW is increasingly being seen as not that healthy when overconsumed, fruit juices that is, at least most of what litter store shelves, which are maybe 1% juice and then 10% HFCS) neither of these are healthy when you drink an entire bottle in a day. The problem with soda is that as you are drinking it instead of eating it, it is really easy to not realize how much you are taking in. Personally I will down four or five glasses of something with dinner. If I stick with water (which is what I have been doing for the past year or so) it is no problem. If I make those beers or sodas, I could easily be drinking more calories/sugar/etc than I am eating.

Yeah, I'm thinking that the minute amount of alcohol present in the wine for fondue shouldn't be an issue, even if it doesn't burn all the way off. After all, drinking wine straight by 11 isn't unheard of, or even uncommon, once you get away from our puritanical shores.

I used to have awful Gerd, which completely went away when I started doing the low-carb thing, and I think the culprit was sodas. I don't drink Diet sodas now, but I used to down a sixpack or more of coke per day, so suddenly eliminating that could have been the issue. Some people have a problem with the combination of alcohol and soda. My father can drink his rum, or his coke, but if he combines them he gets bad Gerd as well. In addition to the carbonation a soda has a fair bit of acid as well, so perhaps that is how it differs from the selzter water.

Acme brand Cola is great stuff. It has a bizarre nutmeggy flavor that just sits in the back of your mouth, and makes it almost tastier to drink at room temperature than cold, although it is very good cold too.

Last night I tried a different approach. I figured I might just try to use baking powder as opposed to yeast, and after reading a bit on baking911.com, thought I had a relatively good handle on how it worked. I simplified the recipe: 1/2 cup WPI, 1/2 cup oat fiber, 1 teaspoon Baking Powder, 1/4 Teaspoon Salt, 1 Cup water. This mixed into a thick almost corn-meal looking batter, which I plopped into tins and into a 425 degree oven. I got much more rise this time, and a fluffier biscuitier corn breadier texture (still not what I am looking for) but the flavor profile was not nearly as nice as with the yeast rolls, in fact, these just tasted sort of like uncooked flour, so back to the drawing board yet again... At least I am getting a better idea of how the different variables work in baking. I might attempt to do a yeast plus baking powder or soda roll, but I'm not sure if the leavening would boost each other, or if the time required for the yeast to rise would be too long for the soda to hold up and still leaven...

The best Pepperidge farm cookie is from their 'Big and Chunky (or whatever it is called)' line, and is the Chesapeake, with the Sausalito a close second.

I have had the anchor bar sauce, and personally, I don't think it deserves the rep of ultimate buffalo wing sauce (although I will give the Anchor Bar mad props for inventing the addictive little things). Personally, for mild hot wings my preference is a bottle of Texas Pete, some butter, and just a little bit of garlic and black pepper to taste. The garlic and black pepper are not traditional, but give it a nice full kick.

So results after attempt #3 - I let the dough proof in big muffin tins, to try to establish a more bun-like shape. This definately helped, but I am wondering if there are other issues at play here. The results are still much more dense than I would like, and have a more muffiny than breadlike texture. I am contemplating playing with baking powder/soda as addition leavening agents. I have no experience with what these actually do though, which would I use, would I still use yeast, and would I need some sort of acid to activate them? Also, would these be conducive towards a more breadlike texture, or am I barking up the wrong tree?

No. Wings were dredged in flour and spices, and then deep fried, and then sauced. Did I do something wrong there?? woodburner ← I think it depends on what you are going for. A traditional buffalo recipe doesn't include dredging the wings in flour, they just go into the deep fryer skin on and that becomes the crispy bits. However, if you are trying for something else...

There used to be a really nice Genaurdi's near where I live (in Bear, DE) that was by far my favorite grocery store until the safeway buyout. I understand that in PA they are still called Genaurdi's? Down here they renamed most of them Safeway, and while Safeway seems a bit better than Acme, the quality of produce, number of options, fresh cooked/baked goods, and etc all went way down hill. I haven't noticed your neighborhood class/supermarket connection though. If anything, in the poorer neighborhoods I see that the prices are better and less inflated than in ritzy shopping districts. Two I can think of off the top of my head down here are a Metro Food Market and a Murray's Grocer in a somewhat poorer area of Dover, DE. Both have better produce selections, better ethnic food choices, and overall lower prices than other markets (well, Murray's doesn't have produce, but it stands on the other points).