jerkhouse

I was visiting family recently (post bar exam travels) and found out that my cousin is married to Thomas Keller's sister. It's a huge family (I have something like 13 or 14 uncles and aunts) so these kind of things are able to go unnoticed, but I was blown away. My uncle and aunt are showing me pictures and they're like "there's Elizabeth with Jacques Pepin at a celebration for her uncle Thomas's Beard award." So I'm like "?????" - And she asks "Have you heard of Thomas Keller?" Haha, I don't think they have/had any idea how much of a wannabe foodie I am; my starstruckness seemed to take them completely by surprise. So my cousin gets to say stuff like "my brother in-law Thomas keller stayed with us this week" which I imagine is followed by "I've never eaten so well in my life."

the story made msnbc http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7613524/site/newsweek/

"I've got nipples Focker, can you milk me?" something about the title of the thread; I just pictured someone tugging on little potato teats. I would say this has something to do with watching too much Arrested Development; it encourages this kind of thinking.

I grew up in Tennessee, my mom fried chicken all the time, and I've never had chicken backs. I've got to admit, eating it wouldn't be my first instinct, but if other people eat it.. Catchy thread title though. I don't think I would have read just "fried chicken backs" but the promise of something "taboo" lured me in; haha.

I was always really hungry when I was in bootcamp because our meals were so small. The servers completely controlled your portions, which were always pretty miserly. We could get a maximum of two slices of bread with our meals, but there was no butter limit! So I would always make butter sandwiches; 8 cold pats of butter between two slices of white bread. Before that, I didn't like butter if it wasn't melted into something, but after bootcamp I was a changed man. My friend would pile a bunch of pats in a bowl with some salad dressing and eat it with a spoon.

I'm southern, and like southern food the best in general, but I think I've got to say lobster rolls from New England. Maybe it's an underexposure thing and I wouldn't be so hyped about them if I could eat them all the time, but I daydream about eating those things.

I get it, Kit. In fact, that is my point too. The small guy in a new restaurant is willing to please. The poor chef is probably congratulating himself on his brilliant move to interact with the customer. Nowhere in the incident narrated was it indicated that harsh words were uttered. I am tempted to bring to this discussion the Manresa story. It is somewhere in the California thread. I cannot seem to find the link. I think it is we who interpret reactions and label them. There is a thin line between 'gracious' and 'defensive'. ← I'm not sure that it should matter whether the chef interpreted his gesture as a brilliant act of customer diplomacy. The question everyone seems to be debating is whether this was an appropriate way to handle the situation, not whether the chef acted with malice. If the chef honestly thought that this was an appropriate way to handle the problem, I think many of the posters will agree with me that he has some pretty undeveloped people skills. You've met these people before, they think there's nothing wrong with telling you that your girlfriend has big boobs because it's a compliment; yeah, they honestly thought they were saying something nice, but the majority of people would still likely find it inapropriate. Like Grub said, regardless of the chef's personal characteristics, he demonstrated what has been commonly interpreted as "lack of grace and social skills -- and possibly a lack of business skills." Whether his behavior met the Webster's definition of defensive or not seems irrelevant in the face of all the posts by people who agree that, taking the whole restaurant's interests into consideration, this wasn't a good way to handle the problem. (and I'm going to weigh in with my two cents, I wouldn't be happy if this happened to me either, but I'm a wuss about complaining about food so it's a moot point)

In my friend's defense, he was high when he made this, but I was over at his house and he asked me if I wanted some seafood alfredo. I said, "sure." He started to look in his cabinets and stuff and he was like, "oh, I don't have all the ingredients, but I've got this bottle of alfredo sauce, it's not the best, but it will be alright. He then grabs an onion, dices it, and throws it in a skillet. I was thinking, "well, okay." So he starts cooking the pasta; after about 10 minutes of not stirring the onions on high heat they were half caramelized and half blackened. Trying to be tactful, I asked, "are those onions done "caramelizing" and he looked over and said, "Yeah, they're getting there" at which point he stirred them a little and left them until they were 100% black. He then deglazed the pan with the bottle of grocery store alfredo sauce, which when combined with the blackened onions somehow turned a bright orange. Then he added some white wine vinegar (because he didn't have any wine..... ??), and stirred in a stick of butter, because, apparently the jar from the store isn't rich enough. It was finished off with some imitation crab chunks. It really wasn't all that bad in the end, not disgusting like some of the abominations posted on the thread already, but it was definitely a strange interpretation of alfredo.

Could some more people post some experiences? I find these stories very interesting.

I assume your All-Clad SS soup pot has metal handles? If so, your soup pot will do just fine in the oven, as well as on the stove top, and you don't need to worry about going from one to the other. I used to do that all the time with my Revere stainless steel stock pot (aluminum disk bottom) with no ill effect. ← My pots and pans do have metal handles. Thanks for settling my nerves on this! ← You'll be fine. I put my all clad SS in the oven all the time. I think a few people even used them as test vessles in the recent EGCI thread on braising. Haha, for all that money they better go in the oven.

That's the same thing I thought about the now whole foods. I was thinking, "can they really afford to run this place on a day to day basis?" They seem to have way more prepared food than Central Market, but it may just be the layout; everything is spread out a little more. But the place was bumpin' and if any city can support a giant whole foods, it's Austin; people are fanatical about that place. Anyway, I hope it does well; it's in a far more convenient location for me than central market. I still like central market better though, mainly because they sell a lot of basic stuff at normal HEB prices; whole foods seems a bit more expensive, and I'm in school. But if I ever need to make a dish that calls for 75 different kinds of mushrooms, I'll be headed straight to whole foods.

I'm not a real lawyer, but I play one in law school. It sounds completely preposterous, a customer's offhand response to a common question won't be given any binding effect by a court. I don't even think that restaurant claims based on the quality of the food are very common, and when something does happen, the legitimate or fraudulent plaintiff will make a scene at the restaurant as "evidence" that something actually happened. I don't think there are enough lawsuits where the customer leaves the restaurant in peace and later sues over glass in their food to justify such a widespread custom. real lawyers feel free to correct or agree with me

I went there today. It's like a carnival there or something; I think people may have been hanging out there just because they didn't have anything to do. Whoever posted about the mushrooms was right, they had so many. Anyway, it's a really cool place, but I'll have to go back there when I have about 2 hours to explore. I'm not even sure I made it into every section of the store; I got kind of disoriented. The "fishmonger" was amazing. The meat department looked a little more expensive than central market. I had my eye on a lambroast, and I think it was 20/lb compared to 18/lb at central market, but that might have been 18.99. What is it with these places and sausage? Every time I go to central market (and now whole foods) I think, "who the hell is eating all this sausae?" but it looks good. Maybe I'll pick some up next time.

Where is it? Did they redo a previous location, or is it brand new?

thanks for the replies. I like fish skin, so next time I get some brie, I'll try out the rind. I hope I like it because it would sure make eating it a lot easier; I usually leave about half the cheese attached to the rind because I would even avoid the cheese that was close to it - I have no idea why I was so spooked by it; I'm not generally a picky eater.

The guacamole story reminds me of something I did back in high school. We had some sort of "international day" where all the students who took foreign languages would make something relevant (all the kids who took french made crepes, etc). I took spanish so I was going to make gaucamole. I bought a bunch of avocados the night before and took them over to my friends house to make it; the only problem is that I hadn't taken account of the avocado's need to ripen; so I had a bunch of super hard avocados on my hands. Knowing at this point that the recipe was going to be crap no matter what I did, I decided to soften it up by throwing some extra ripe bananas in the mix, and for the hell of it, a bunch of Dave's insanity sauce. It was totally disgusting, but one of the janitors liked it so much that he asked my spanish teacher if he could take it home. ???

In responding to this, please remember the name of the thread - the questions are supposed to be stupid. Are you supposed to eat the rind on Brie?

they're not very gadgety, but I love bamboo utensils. I would be happy with a bunch of bamboo in my stocking any Christmas

Ok, believe it or not, I have found this works the best, 50% coca-cola , 40% high quality soy sauce & (about) 10% Coleman’s hot mustard. I use a cheap cut of meat, sirloin butt flap, cut on a sharp angle & marinated for 24 hours. It always comes out fork tender. Believe it or not! Also, for tougher cuts of meat I follow the same process, however I lightly stew them in a mixture of Asian flavored broth till just tender. I store the over run in freezer bags for quick meals, fajitas, paper steak, stroganoff ect. and use the reduced broth as part of my stir-fry mixture. ← I tried this with great results with $2.50/lb shoulder steak; it was easily as tender as more expensive cuts of meat. The only problem is that it was way too salty. I used kikkoman low sodium soy sauce because I expected the 24 hr marinade to add some significant sodium to the meat, but it was still just too salty. What kind of soy sauce do you typically use? I have a hard time picking stuff out at the asian market because there are about 10,000 varieties and I can't tell what's good and what's crap. Anyway, I've got a few more of the shoulder steaks left because they came in a four pack; next time I'm going to do 24 hours in coke, and add the soy sauce 30 minutes or an hour before I cook it; I will report back. Overall though, I am very impressed with the tenderizing effect; it turns out like flank steak but for a third the price.

fried goatcheese battered with breadcrumbs. I made it for my wife because she loves goat cheese; I also did an orange beef stir fry, but something was missing, so I've gotta go with the cheese.

I don't see why you couldn't make batches and freeze them. I would think that any flavor loss would be minimal, and would likely be impossible to detect after you add the fresh juice at the end when you make your last or second to last batch.

Lime juice (I see that LindaK abstained, but I won't) Vinegary hot sauce (Tobasco or Louisiana Hot Sauce I guess) Non-vinegary hot sauce (Melinda's, Yucatan Sunshine) I play by the rules, so that's it, but I would miss pickapeppa, worcester, sriracha, and hoisin, among others.

I think I got a cheap version of the lemon trumpet in a bag of sunkist lemons I got a few months ago. I took a picture of it but I can't figure out how to post it. Anyway, it's basically just a spout that screws into the lemon and you squeeze and it comes out of the spout. I thought it sucked because you can't really squeeze it that well because the screw in portion of the spout is all inside the lemon and gets in the way of the squeezing. The sunkist one also had a little flip top cap that ostensibly sealed it back up when you were done, but usually the lemon was so beat up where it met the spout that it didn't really matter.

Somebody likes Tony Chachere's Creole Seasoning!

Have you thought about using a lime/lemon press? I keep one around for making margaritas, but sometimes I use it on lemons; but not all lemons are small enough to fit in it. I have seen specific lemon presses at the store, though, that look like they're designed bigger to accomodate lemons. I think a press gets pretty much all the juice out of the fruit, I think it probably gets more out than a "reamer" style juicer. Anyway, it sounds like its going to be quite a bit of work no matter how you do it, but that's my suggestion.