jgarner53

French fries dipped in a chocolate shake (a malted is even better) are quite tasty.

Rosemary's probably my biggest pet-peeve. I like a little bit of it, but the flavor is so assertive that it easily overwhelms the rest of the dish. And it doesn't belong in everything!

From my childhood: Make a wish before eating a gingersnap pogen (the thin ones shaped like animals). Break it between your palms. If it breaks into three pieces, your wish will come true. I remember that this was even printed on the bag (I believe they were Mother's cookies). I told this one to my husband, who's just a year older than me, and he doesn't even remember the cookies! If you don't blow out candles on your birthday, you're not actually a year older. Cake eaten on your birthday has no calories (or fat or any negative health consequences)

I think that the salesman was full of shit. Either he didn't know what he was talking about, or else he had an agenda to try to sell you something else, like granite. I have three samples of soapstone in my kitchen. I've tested them all with lemon juice, red wine, bleach, what have you, and none of them did a thing to it. There's a reason that soapstone was used for years in chemistry labs.

Those last pics make me want to go out and get some bananas right now! Warm banana anything can make me swoon!

As a testament to how well linoleum lasts, my back stairs are still covered in their original 1923 linoleum. (The pattern matched what was under all that vinyl in the kitchen.) Beige with darker brown swirls. Was everything in that era beige and brown? We've found traces of beige (like café au lait colored) on the door trim, on the fireplace (grrr to people who painted over tile!)...

HD holds a special place in my heart. I worked at a scoop shop two summers (and one winter break) during college. It was back in the days when you could still get the t-shirts with the names of the flavors on them (coffee, vanilla swiss almond, chocolate, honey (remember honey?), peach, etc.) though we didn't wear them in our shop. Instead, we wore white button down shirts, black pants or shorts, and an HD apron. We did hand-dipped ice cream bars in the shop. For each other, we'd triple dip the bar: chocolate ice cream, dipped first in dark chocolate, then milk, then dark again and finally rolled in chocolate sprinkles. Talk about decadent! Ordering a "scoop" in a cup usually meant you'd get a pint packed into a cup. These days I don't eat much HD, having moved over to the Ben & Jerry's camp for all but vanilla. But oh, those memories!

Perfect timing! I felt a tickle in my throat last night at the movie and woke up in the middle of the night with a full-blown sore/inflamed throat. Maybe I can convince my husband to throw together some chicken noodle for me. I have leftover homemade egg noodles in the freezer, chicken (cooked, also in the freezer from making stock a couple of weeks ago), and plenty of stock (reduced, also where? yup. In the freezer. Barring that, pho sounds delightful, or hot & sour soup. I had cold-eeze, half a grapefruit, toast and orange juice (followed by tea) for breakfast, and tomato soup and toast and an orange for lunch. I think it's time for more tea and maybe another nap. What annoys me more is that the weather's absolutely gorgeous today! Why couldn't it be raining?

I will start out with a bite of the tastiest thing, then ration it out through the meal so that I can have it at the end. When it comes to sushi, I'll usually save the pieces that are my favorites until the end. Cake's not my favorite dessert (too sweet most of the time), but when I eat a piece of a tart or pie, I always eat from the point of the slice to the outer crust -- that's my favorite part. If it's a composed dessert (tart plus ice cream plus sauce, for example), I try to integrate everything into each bite, as I imagine that's how the pastry chef intended it to be eaten, each flavor enhancing and complementing the other.

1. Do you eat brown rice or regular rice, or do you have no rice? White rice only 2. Do you put the rice into a bowl or plate and then top it with your entree? Or do you alternate bites of rice and dish? Rice goes onto the plate, with all the other bits placed around it. Like most everyone here, I like to mix the sauce into the rice as I get to the end of the dishes. Leftovers, however, are different - dish goes on top of rice 3. Are you a chopstick user or a fork and spoon user? Chopsticks usually, with a fork or spoon on hand to get the last bits of rice 4. Do you eat everything, all the vegetables but not the ________, or only meat? I don't eat the peppers (not even the bell peppers -- green bell peppers are nasty!) 5. Are you one of these people who think that fried chicken wings covered in hot sauce on top of pork fried rice constitutes proper Chinese takeout? Is that even a dish? I've never seen it on a Chinese menu 6. When ordering takeout, do you always get the same thing or do you try out different things? There are standards that we have to get: fried won tons (unfilled, just the wrappers deep fried with the red-orange sweet and sour sauce for dipping), hot & sour soup, and usually a mu shu. The other favorites rotate depending on what we feel like: spicy beef with orange peel, spicy eggplant, dry sauteed string beans. We mark up our takeout menu with rankings of things we've tried so we don't order something bad twice. 7. What's your favorite place and your least favorite place, and could you please describe them? Our favorite place is Emmy's, which is almost always crowded with Chinese families. Their delivery is quick (well, they are about 3 blocks away), the food is always tasty, and they're pretty reasonably priced. Interestingly enough, another Chinese place, Excellent Joe's, opened up right next door to Emmy's, is hardly ever busy, and their food isn't nearly as good (not as excellent as the name might imply). 8. Do you have a best takeout experience? Let's hear it. I can't think of one that's outstandingly bad. 9. Do you have a worst takeout experience? Let's hear that as well. Same goes for this question as for #8.

Yesterday: probably the edge bits of raspberry crumb bars (at my first day of my pastry externship!) Today: the puff pastry cheese straws I baked this morning for husband to take to work

I absolutely hate my tile counters. Granted, they are 25 years old and the grout lines are relatively wide by modern standards, but I cannot stand cleaning them. (They are a matte finish, so it's not the shiny factor that bothers me but the damn grout - ever tried scrubbing flour out of grout?) Yes, they're heat resistant. We replaced the old vinyl flooring (pulling up two layers of vinyl and probably the house's original 1920's linoleum, asbestos risk or not, way down below that vinyl) with IKEA's version of Pergo (made in the same factory), which has been pretty good. It's easy on the feet and easy to clean. There are a couple of chips in the laminate where something was dropped on it, but overall it's worn well. When we remodel (in a couple of years we hope), I want soapstone counters and linoleum on the floor.

Chocolate crinkles! They're lovely little fudgey cookies doused with powdered sugar before baking. There are also other recipes on their site. If you have a Better Homes & Gardens cookbook, there's a recipe for the cookies in there (though I'm sure they probably call for Baker's chocolate -- the Scharffenberger will make it better!). I have a recipe (from Scharffenberger) somewhere that's almost identical.

Yesterday: fresh, hot crullers doused in cinnamon sugar Today: meyer lemon cream

Wow. I can't imaginen preparing food for 34, much less for 80. As others have said, this brings back college memories for me. The first two years, I lived in the dorm and ate the cafeteria food. The last two, I lived in my sorority house. We were a small house (8-10 residents) and our kitchen was no more than a standard (OK, quasi-pathetic) residential kitchen, and we did all our own cooking. We had designated shelves in the fridge and pantry, though many of us relied on frozen meals much of the time. Once a week, we did have our chapter meeting and volunteers would cook dinner, at the most for 35 to 40 of us, at the least, about 20. So to hear about your setup (and your girls' setup) sounds like living in the lap of luxury by comparison!

San Francisco abounds with walking/eating neighborhoods: Chinatown (and its cousin, Clement St), North Beach (Italian, mostly), Japantown/Fillmore, the Castro.

OK, based on your responses, this is what I will try this week. The loaf will be edible regardless, so it's an experiment I'm happy to make. I will refresh my starter at a warmer than room temp (this for me means in the oven with the pilot light on and door open) except for the final which will go into the reefer. I'm not sure I really need to autolyse at this point because my dough really is a happy thing. Fred (that's my starter's name) is a busy little yeast colony. But if the cool refresh doesn't make my dough more sour (I'm not really after mouth-puckeringly sour, just a noticeable twang), then I will go from there. Perhaps the angle of my slash is the problem. I tend to go at it closer to 90º. I know my bread is done (to address whoever thought it looked underdone) because if I insert an instant-read, it reads at least at 200ºF (the bottom also passes the thump test). This week's loaf is considerably less pale on top. (I have also been fiddling around with tile arrangements in my oven to try to optimize the thermal mass) I'm actually quite happy with the crumb. This photo is of this week's loaf, which has about 15% whole wheat flour in it (I ran short on AP) The shape is a bit funky because a small spot stuck to my peel where I hadn't put enough semolina. Though I may very well add more water to open the crumb out a bit. (This loaf is also, what, now, several days old?) Really, I see this as an ongoing experiment. I love the idea that the flavor of the bread can vary so much based on how the starter is treated, the temperature of the dough/fermentation, etc. Thanks for all the suggestions.

After my pastry teacher split up her starter (from Nancy Silverton's Breads from the La Brea Bakery) and gave some to each of us, I've been baking at least one loaf of sourdough every week. The starter is wonderfully active and happy, and every loaf tastes great. Before I use the starter, I refresh it three times (morning/evening/morning, usually), with 5 oz. of AP flour and 3 oz. of water. I knead that into a loose dough and then mix in the starter and let it sit until the next feeding. After the dough has bulk fermented, I pull off a quarter of it and put it in the fridge until next week's baking. My recipe is as follows: 300 g. starter 300 g. bread flour 200 g. AP flour 300 ml. water 10 g. salt Mix into a dough. Knead. Bulk ferment until doubled (usually 2-4 hours, depending on the temp). Punch down, portion out dough, loosely shape into balls (I do one 750g boule usually). Bench rest 15-20 min. Finish shaping. Place in couche (for loaves) or banneton. Refrigerate overnight. Proof until nearly doubled (I do this on a baking sheet, under a bus tub with a glass of hot water changed every half hour, set into a warmish place), usually 2-3 hours. Bake at 425ºF. I preheat my oven one hour to 500ºF before baking (with quarry tiles on the bottom and a pizza stone on the lowest shelf. Baking directly on the quarry tiles gives me a burned bottom). I spritz the top of my loaf and slash (with a lame) and then spritz the oven when I put the bread in, and twice more at about 1 minute intervals, then reduce the heat to 425ºF. Here are my questions/challenges to getting the best bread out of this. Like I said, it tastes great. But only once has it been a truly sour bread like I could get from Acme. My other problem is that the slashes tend to sort of heal over to leave a smoothish surface. You can tell where the slashes were, but there are no fantastic ridges like you'd get on a commercial artisan loaf. You can see it in the photo here: Can someone offer me some suggestions?

damn it all, now I'm craving a scone!

I would be inclined to think of cream cheese icing with brown sugar in it maybe? Did the Sara Lee icing taste like banana? I can't remember.

And the traditional, original Caesar does not have anchovies in it, btw. (Just saw Julia and Jacques talking about the origins, and according to her, (and Rosa Cardini, Caesar's daughter) there were no anchovies. She wouldn't even let Jacques put them into the salad. )

I'm with offal. I ate at McDonald's a couple of weeks ago and paid mightily for my sin. The food (a cheeseburger big kids' meal) was damn near inedible. Spongy, sweet (and squished) bun, salty, otherwise flavorless, overcooked, underthick meat patty, plasticky cheese, and even the fries were disappointing. I hid the evidence in my neighbor's trash can (it was trash day and the bins were out on the street) so my husband wouldn't find out.

spinach dip, definitely. It's one of those things that always gets devoured if I serve it at a party or bring to a pot luck. fondue and quiche both hot dogs sliced down the middle and stuffed with cheddar cheese, then rolled in a Pillsbury crescent roll and baked. (I always thought that the term "pigs in a blanket" referred to sausage rolled in pancakes.) dutch baby pancakes port wine cheese spread (either in a tub or formed into a ball and rolled in almonds). Anyone remember cheese spread coming in ceramic crocks?

Most supermarkets carry Knox gelatine (it will be in the baking aisle with the other Jello products). It's unflavored. I believe that all packets are either 2 1/2 or 2 1/4 tsp. by volume, and you usually get about 4 packets to a box.

I don't know if this qualifies as a pet peeve or more just one of those things I don't get. He can eat the same thing day in and day out almost indefinitely. Every day he takes the same thing for lunch: half a sandwich (supermarket lunch meat and cheese with mayo & mustard on whole grain bread) piece of fruit (whatever's in season) yogurt (must be nonfat, fruit-flavored) cookies (whatever's in the cookie tupperware) How on EARTH does he not get tired of this?