carp

I’m starting to feel very stupid watching ICA because at this point I have no reason to doubt that it’s fixed and yet I still watch it and pretend I don’t know who’s going to win. I need to watch this with the mindset I had when I watched Hulk Hogan on WWF as a wee lad. If one guy had a nick name and the other guy didn’t, it wasn’t hard to see who would win. Of course, there were always the “upsets,” but the only kids who couldn’t see those coming went home on the short bus and no matter who won you always saw something cool that you couldn’t wait to try on your friends. Cora had to win, so she did. That doesn’t mean she beat Alex Lee. It just means Alex Lee wasn’t the new Iron Chef, so it wasn’t his turn to win. The contest is so obviously fixed that I feel more and more stupid the longer I go on about how fixed it is… It’s fixed. Get over it… at least they still throw around thou$and$ of dollar$ in truffle$, hack up live fish, and regularly display moves that separate the real professional bad ass mother fuckers from the mere industry mortals (think Sherry Yard spinning sugar bare-handed vs whatever the hell Cat Cora thought she was doing in there).

I’m a big fan of waring blenders (or blendors as they like to call them). I bought their 70th anniversary model after making margaritas using my grandmother’s 30+ year old blender. Grandma’s blender is still in top shape. Part of the lid has been missing for 20 years, but thanks to the permanent blade assembly, she hasn’t lost anything important. The motor still runs like a champ and I was very impressed with how it crushed through the ice to make our margaritas. It crushes ice much better than my old cuisnart smart-power blender, it’s a lot less noisy, it’s more than 20 times older and yet it looks a lot better(most of the white plastic parts on the cuisinart have permanent tomato and chili pepper stains). I think you have a good point about the shape of the canister. I think the Waring's slender shape feeds directly into the blade while the food in the slightly wider canisters seems to collect in the shoulder around the blade. The cuisinart I have, the smart power duet, is a terrible blender, for this and many other reasons. Not that you were thinking about buying one, but I just feel a need to say, at every opportunity, that cuisinart blenders are pure garbage that I wouldn’t sell to my enemies (the food processor attachment is not too bad… but the whole thing is of vastly inferior manufacture and design to their food processors). The 70th anniversary waring looks great, features 500w, and sells for about $150 at Williams-Sonoma. Grandma’s blender looked like it could easily pull another 30 years of duty and if my blender is still cranking out margaritas in 2035, I hope she’s also there to share them with me.

Since you only have one lemon you might want to just slice it up and eat it. I find they are usually mild and sweet enough to eat thinly sliced. I like to use them as a garnish in place of regular lemons when serving crab (Dungeness of course), oysters, and other seafood. I also like to use them for making lemonade and homemade sours, but since you only have one… you should get more! It makes a great vinaigrette. I love lemon vinaigrette and meyer lemons make the best. That soft smooth skin yields some fantastic zest. I make sure to include a bit of it no matter what I might be using the lemon for. I like meyer lemon crème anglaise and meyer lemon hollandaise… and one lemon might just be enough to make a batch.

This sounds like a solid dish. The tomato water is a good move. I might actually try this tonight...

Or you could do a hot tomato bisque and add the cold lettuce, shredded, like you would with pozole. The cold shredded lettuce added to the steaming pozole, has always been an important part of the dish for me.

Yeah, I second Cafe Rigio. They serve some solid Italian fare and the owner, John Rigio, a second or third generation restaurateur from Chicago, is a pretty nice guy.

QUOTE(Neal J. Brown @ Jan 5 2005, 08:51 AM) Well, where are the Mexicans beyond Emeril using a hal-i-pee-no pepper? Where are the blacks beyond Al Roker dressing up like a pilgrim? Where are the Asians beyond Rachel Ray exclaiming, "Oh wow! I wish you could smell this cilantro!"? The KKK comment is a bit much but it is lilly white and as boring as watching a boil grow. That Unwrapped is a hit is very disturbing to me. A show where the spotlight product is obviously paying to be featured and footage of how machines add a wrapper help explain American politics. ← Ok… the KKK think was over the top(way over), but I do feel that all the diversity is being washed out of the network. Of course, some of the food is still there…(Emeril isn’t going to stop running our recipes into the ground just because FTV’s focus groups don’t like to see Mexicans on TV)... it’s just that we don’t get to cook it. Considering the enormous popularity of ethnic food in America, it is interesting that with the Food Network the diversity stops when it comes to hiring the on-camera talent.

Hey, it’s not just the French they are getting rid of… they already got rid of the Mexicans (Sanchez), the black people(Aikens), and the Chinese (Tsai)… They are basically targeting the “mid-west” demographic by making the network as culturally diverse as a KKK meeting.

I hate the word veggies. I also absolutely hate the term foodie, but I can live with it as it seems I am the only one who finds this term about as grating as sharp nails on a blackboard. I do love an amuse bouche, though. It isn't the term I like, but rather getting an unexpected little morsel of something right about the time they take away the menu. Edited to express additional hatred for the term foodie.

It's very unusual to use lard. There's no need for it. Corn, water, lime should be it. ← You are right, of course. I thought about it after I posted and planned to verify when I got home. Thank you.

I look at the ingredients list. I pretty much want to see corn, lime, salt, lard, and water as the only ingredients. I also prefer yellow corn tortillas, which are not popular at the supermarkets in my area so I have to go to the Mexican stores.

After reading Steingarten's article(s) on olestra, I had similar ideas. I still would love to get a hold of some. My idea was similar, but involved just soaking the chips in water and skimming the oil off the top. I assumed it would still float like regular oil. I never actually tried it because I figured I would need a lot of chips, and because I am lazy. Anyway... Your entire post is pretty awesome. I am impressed by the lenghts you go to and I am particularly impressed with the goals you start off with("zero-calorie donut"). Amateur food science is definitely something I am interested in. I'm sure many others here agree and would be interested in similar pursuits. Please post more about your experiments!

Right before the end of the “exchange with new one” portion of my warranty expired, I set out to try to break mine (6qt pro). I was not successful. I tried mixing stiff dough at high speeds, tossing in frozen chunks of butter and creaming them, and overall just punishing the machine for no good reason. The frozen butter alone made the thing seize up and I could smell burning plastic and electrical parts. One particularly stiff batch of dough nearly had the mixer doing cartwheels off the counter. I eventually got bored and gave up. Although I had a new found respect for the machine. The thing didn’t break, but it’s not nearly what it used to be. There are some new squeaks and chirps and whenever I use the beater attachment at high speed it slaps against the side of the bowl. Yet it still mixes just as well as it ever did…

Just yesterday I paid a visit to the original Jamba Juice (fka Juice Club) in San Luis Obispo and had my personal favorite, the Citrus Squeeze. I've always loved these things. At one point I was slugging down 2-3 per day and I won't pretend that was healthy, but it sure was good.

For anyone in the SF Bay area, Tap Plastics, has acetate as well as a whole bunch of other types of plastic products useful in pastry/sugar work/etc. This is where I get my acetate, which they feature in various thicknesses. I also get all sorts of stuff that I find useful, like the plastic dowels I use as mini-rolling pins for fondant, gum paste, and etc... They sell scrap plastic by the pound in a bin and that's where I get most of my stuff.

Various? Not ALL?!? ← Yeah, I guess it's because if you put in all of the spices they wouldn't fit into a nifty little berry.

This is the kind of research and hard hitting journalism that I have come to expect from Food Network. This just in: French Canadians missed the boat on the Founding of New Orleans ← Say what????? I've cought FN on things like that before. Where one show says "this developed here", and the show immediately following it says, "Contrary to popular belief, this happed somewhere else." That and that one jackhole who claimed that the trinity was black, white, and red pepper. And he used a mire poix. For gumbo. What could I expect, he was in Baltimore, and on Best Of. Just maybe they would hire a fact checker for some of these shows? ← Ainsley Harriet once said that allspice was a mixture of various different spices...

I liked Ready, Set, Cook. I like just about any show where actual cooking takes place. I even like How to Boil Water in its many incarnations. And I saw just about only because I don't really like Rachel Ray or Sandra Lee... although it's arguable whether the later ever does any actual cooking...

My experience with in this field is also very limited so the usefulness of my info is probably limited as well. Once, when I was in a hurry, I laid out the puffs on a rack and poured the caramel over a few of them at a time, then I hauled ass puting them in place before the caramel cooled. It worked, but was kind of wasteful since a lot of the caramel dripped right onto the sheet pan I had under the rack. However, it was fast. Coverage was not 100%, but the ugly part faced in and I wrapped the whole thing is spun sugar anyway so I doubt anyone could tell.

I don't know about the Calphalon board, but I have a John Boos that I have enjoyed for years and if you asked me to pay an extra $15 for it, I would do it in a snap.

I've done some transfer work onto chocolate by first creating a pattern on acetate with chocolate or cocoa butter and then pressing it onto the chocolates. Is this sort of what you are thinking about?

...to each his own I guess... Well, truth be told... I don't mind the festivals so much... although I could do with a lot less of them. The Mark Summers shows are the ones that really bother me. I like cooking... not watching the same industrial process over and over again. I feel like Unwrapped is a single episode, shot on the same factory floor, and then endlessly re-narrated by OCD poster boy, Mark Summers, who can only stop to go check on his oven, wash and re-wash his hands, and flip light switches. Someone make him stop!! Does anyone know someone at Nickelodeon/Viacom? Maybe we can get this guy's old job back doing that stupid kid's show where they spewed slime on preteens and whatnot.

I like what Andiesenji and Auntdot said... overcook a portion separately for the poor confused souls. Anthony Bourdain mentioned the microwaving to well-done in Kitchen Confidential. However, I have strong moral objections to placing USDA Prime graded beef in the microwave (it was even difficult for me to type that).

I can usually find exopats at about half the price of the silpat. As far as I can tell, they work the same, but the silpat is just a little bit stiffer.

Amen.