culinary bear

ah yes, tournedos Rossini, that great Swiss-French fusion dish. rosti? are you pissed?

Similar, yes.

Jilly Goolden once commented that a particular wine smelled of 'boil-in-the-bag shepherd's pie'...

Oh dear god. Why not just add miracle whip? *shudder* If you need to pass something thick, a good tip is to have a large square of muslin, put it in a bowl, pour/dollop your sauce/ganache/whatever on to the muslin, gather up the corners, and squeeze - instantly, it passes through and all the lumps disappear.

Oh, and regarding the bothersome habit of the English having silly names whose pronunciation bear little resemblance to their spelling, we turn now to Monty Python : Specialist - Ah! Mr Luxury Yacht. Do sit down, please. Mr Luxury Yacht - Ah, no, no. My name is spelt 'Luxury Yacht' but it's pronounced 'Throatwobbler Mangrove'. Specialist - Well, do sit down then Mr Throatwobbler Mangrove. Mr Luxury Yacht - Thank you. Back on topic, how about 'aioli'? I've heard it pronounced about seven different ways. Trockenbeerenauslese is, my german colleague attests, pronounced Trockenbearenaushlayzuh.

I was once asked what these 'funny little canapes are'... can-apes. as in... Can apes climb trees?

"foxy"... I hate the word. I have smelled foxes, and it quite obviously can't be a literal thing... so why foxy? I had a great time around the Finger Lakes in 2000 and tasted many V. labrusca wines, some of which were truly excellent. They don't deserve this term of approbrium. :)

Oh god, I'm coming out. I was a vegetarian, for seven years. I stopped when I went into the army. *hangs head in shame*

I'm twenty-nine. I'm not sure I was alive in the day, though I do have an alarming memory when about nine of a hapless waiter setting fire to my father's necktie when flambeeing steak diane at the table on a gueridon. I am happy to have wine poured for me, as long as I know the front of house staff don't use it as a vehicle for flogging more wine. Along with many others, I work in the industry and I'm very much aware of how management can apply pressure to the balls of the waiting staff and demand that they sell more wine. I hate being the recipient of the sort of 'service' this results in. Jay is perfectly right in this case; He's paying the (not inconsiderable) bill, ergo his wishes should be respected. He has a valid reason for wanting to pour his own wine, but it shouldn't matter if he doesn't - he who pays the piper calls the tune, and as much as I hate that edict when it comes to the vapid food requests that filter through to the kitchen from the great masses via the long-suffering waiter, it's not too much to expect that the waiting staff will be able to communicate with each other. Andy, you're right too, in a way. Treating every place the same and applying standard tests shouldn't be the way of enjoying a good meal at a restaurant. It may, however, be an intrnisic part of reviewing. As far as requesting a low pour on the glass - if they're filling the reds up anywhere near halfway as standard then they know precisely f**k all about wine and should be marked down heavily - it's like serving tournedos rossini in a soup cup.

We should hit places in tandem... :)

VLS is obviously working undercover with me... he purports to be a German demi Chef de Partie called Gillian. :)

Something relatively honeyed, I should think... Dalwhinnie? For a laugh, use an Islay malt...

Absolutely, and I know which sort I'd rather read.

Should you be beating your butter in the first place? Most shortbread recipes I've seen have been all-in-one methods. Cooking from frozen, or at least chilled, does lessen the spread. You could do what a lot of people do, which is to bake the shortbread in a large fairly shallow pan, so that there's no spread whatsoever, marking into squares when still hot from the oven, and then breaking into squares when cool and set.

From a human neurological point of view, one can receive stimuli and respond to them without the brain being involved. If one steps barefoot on to a piece of glass and cuts one's foot, the signal passes only as far as one's spinal column before the reciprocal message to one's brain instructs one's muscles to take avoiding action. I don't know what evolutionary advantage this confers, except that the reaction time is bound to be reduced by not involving the centralised brain in the process. The question seems to be whether for that jump to be made between stimulus and pain a brain is required or not. I'm not a neurological expert, but I would lean towards thinking that some greater processing ability than invertebratres possess is necessary in order to feel what we as humans tend to have in mind when we use the word pain. All of us know what pain is, in one form; some having, or having had, a more involved exposure to pain than others. We are, I think, guilty of projecting on to animals and investing them with more ability to experience and interpret things than perhaps they possess. At the heart of it, to my mind, is that if you are worried about the possible cruelty to lobsters caused by boiling alive, don't do it, and don't have others do it in your name. If you're worried about cruelty to other creatures, don't ignore your own species first, either. Having said all this, in my first serious kitchen (michelin starred, indeed; you'd think they knew better) the chef poissonier would routinely wrench both claws off the live lobster before grasping the head on one hand and the tail in the other, twisting them to separate the lobster into two halves, and throwing the head in the bin before poaching the tail. Oh, and re: screaming - venting air, of course, though Alastair Little recommends planting a large lid on the pot and whistling the Marseillaise loudly to cover this up...

very definitely off - the proportions I use are 1:2:3 of sugar:butter:flour. In this case, the ratio of sugar to flour is reasonably right, so if you want to give it another go I'd suggest cutting the butter down to about 5 ounces. If you don't want to rejig the recipe, try this one : 3oz sugar 6oz butter 9oz flour then add your lemon and flavourings... I'd go for about 400F too...

My first thought is that it might be a case of too much butter for the flour - roughly how much does 2 cups of flour weigh? A good rule of thumb is half as much flour again to butter, by weight. How cold was the dough when it went into the oven? 300F seems like it's on the low side for shortbread, too. Did the cooked dough have any colour? You got the important bit right, of course, which is that it tasted superb.

Chefzadi - I'm a chef, and breakfast usually consists of however many espressos the waiting staff can deliver to the pass. Queues : I'm over 6'4 and 250lbs; I should cope. John - Thank you; I shall report back with positives and negatives both.

Where I work, all tips are pooled - waiting staff, runners, bar servers, chefs, porters all get their share, distributed through their paycheck. In other places I've worked, even if the kitchen is excluded from the tips and it's entirely front-of-house, it was almost always the case that he tips were pooled. In my experience, it's rare in the UK in any sort of quality establishment (well, above a cafe) for the tips to be pocketed by the person who happens to be handed the tip at the end of the meal.

Assuming that the depth of the mix in both pans is the same, then the surface area is the important variable: surface area of 8" pan = pi x r x r = 64 x pi surface area of 9' pan = 81 x pi differential = 81/64 x 100 = 126.56, which is as near as makes no difference to 125%. edited to add : I wonder if conversion tables are available for instances such as these? square to round pans, different sizes, depths, that sort of thing?

Lemon and salt. Or Lemon, salt and vinegar. ← I always used lemon, and sand. Or use the French method, which is to find the lowest-ranking commis you can find, and tell them to do it. We digress, ladies and gentlemen. Sleepy_Dragon - I'm about the most hardened socialist you'll find in a kitchen, but the system is so utterly riddled with the current prevailing attitude that it's going to be very hard to swing. Whether we like it or not, we have to operate within market forces. Market forces may well dictate that some people will pay more to eat at an establishment where they know the staff are treated scrupulously well, but it's still a market force. Malheureusement, most chefs and organisations are still very much of the 'just hold still so I can climb up your back' mentality.

Rather akin to the original Trois Freres Provenceaux, non? They at least had the distinction of neither being : a) brothers b) Provencal though that seemed to make little difference to their popularity. Bux - you may be the most widely eaten man on the face of the earth (I'm sure there's a better way of phrasing that but it momentarily escapes me). Given that fact that I have never in my life been to Paris, do I stand a cat in hell's chance of finding a decent dining experience without a lot of signposting from those in the know? Is Aux Lyonnaisse a far from typical experience? One reads in Elizabeth David's "French Provincial Food" about eating heartily and reasonably just about everywhere in France, but that was before I was born and times may change. I'm planning a trip over to Paris with my s/o and sugegstions would be appreciated - indeed, is Aux Lyonnaisse a good choice for me?

of course it's tipping... provided the service charge goes to the staff in the same way that an optional tip would. I think we've anecdotally established that the likelihood of the staff seeing the money at the end of the day is higher if it's an 'optional' tip rather than a service charge. When fairly distributed, service charges result in higher staff income compared to optional tips. My question is : Does the automatic imposition of tips in the form of a service charge restrict, in an unspoken way, the choice of someone to express their appreciation or otherwise at the lack of service? Legally, of course, you can refrain from paying the service charge in the same way as you can refrain from leaving a tip; the management are likely to get bolshy over it, though.

Tacky or not, it's also very tempting. Making an extra 15% gross on every table can easily double your profit margin.

In the UK it's common to see larger tables (sometimes 6+, sometimes 8+) having a service charge automatically added to their bill (usually 12.5%, sometimes, 10%, sometimes 15%). Quite a few restaurants (mine included) operate a service charge across the board, but in this case almost always 10%. In our case, this gets split equally between front of house and back of house, as do any cash tips.