FaustianBargain

i couldnt agree more strenously. NEVER EVER approach someone unless you are trained AND allowed to administer first aid. even if you have acquired a certificate in first aid or some such thing, these things have to mention that you are qualified to administer first aid. they expire..usually within a year, i think. good samaritans can get sued too. I'd avoid this like the fucking plague. Lawsuit, lawsuit, lawsuit, apart from actually being an illegal act in itself. You may, possibly, get away with handing the person the epi-pen and allowing them to medicate themselves, but under no circumstances are you allowed to administer either adrenaline in the UK or epinephrine in the US without proper training. I have seen someone lose a limb because an untrained person thought it would be a good idea to plunge the epipen into their ankle, the reason being that they were wearing a skirt and they didn't want to puncture it. Vasoconstriction led to necrosis, gangrene, and a below the knee amputation.

hi jgm. excel is far superior to word because its easy to figure out of the ingredients when you want to triple or halve the recipes. my project was inspired by http://www.cookingforengineers.com/ site, but i tweaked a little more for other details. the idea is that the methods and techniques are imbedded in the recipe itself so anyone can replicate it and adjust quantities. i am currently working on substitution of ingredients/flavour pairings so there are several combinations, each one spawning out a completely different recipe. so its like having five or six recipes, each one just a keystroke away from each other. i dont know how useful it will be in a real restaurant environment, tho. For awhile, I actually had a system in which I had all of my recipes in MS Word files; I then cut and pasted the ingredient lists (including quantities) into Excel files, which were downloaded onto a PDA. It was wonderful to be able to whip out my PDA in the grocery store and find out what I had to buy for a certain recipe. Obviously, I could just make out a list at home, but it's not unusual for me to find myself at the store, and find the store out of crucial ingredients for what I'd planned to make. Having a list of ingredients on my PDA allowed me to make last-minute menu changes without my getting home and having to turn around and go back for one or two more things. Sadly, the PDA was a cheap one, and awkward to use, and I just stopped carrying it. But oh, the possibilities... ←

how does one 'sizzle' hay?

wow..yet ANOTHER article involving french women, american women and food. what IS their obsession with french women, *I* want to know...really..what the fuck is wrong with these people? did trees die for printing stuff like this? women scare me. true. p.s. oh wait. she just wrote a book. French Women Don't Get Fat: The Secret of Eating for Pleasure. what a clever, subtle title! i CANNOT wait to get it. the throbbing, tearing suspense is killing me.

you are probably right, but it would be so cool, wouldnt it? make us all feel so 21st century!

I have designed a neat little template for recipes and method using excel. I can probably upload it onto my PDA. Paper is out, baby! Save the trees!

slightly off topic. how do restaurants deal with allergies unknown to the diner? maybe someone orders shellfish for the first time and it turns out that they are allergic. the foh team is equipped/trained to deal with situations like that? just curious.

That is absolutely ridiculous. Although...customers who call a chef 'arsehole' and chefs who call their diners 'miserable old cunt' are complete novelties to me...such things occur? for real?

I didnt say that. May I ask you read what I wrote?

From what I understand, the fault line occurs where the indian plate and the eurasian plate collides.(indonesia). like this ___----, the indian plate slipped underneth the eurasian plate causing the earthquake. the after shock of the earthquake, which occured on an island surrounded by water, radiated *outwards*(no barriers over the open waters) into the sea giving rise to the tsunami. can you explain how the 'vertical shift' is a good thing?

I have a rough draft of a business plan for a 'commerical mise-en-place' on a SCORE format that I started as a fun project about six months ago. Lack of imagination led me to call the gestating enterprise, 'mise-en-place'. I am not sure if I am pleased that I can watch it in action or annoyed that my 'creative ideas' are not really that original..however, I do wish them well..I will be watching closely!

I heard all this third-hand, narrated by my husband, many hours after the incident. I understand that the mothers took turns over the phone to give him bits and pieces of the event in fragmented sentences. I have never known my husband to exaggerate, but he did mention that they were all 'choked up'. Storms and cyclones dont faze these folks(and the madras residents, they are lucky..the southern most part of the state gets ravaged by the elements quite ruthlessly..again and again). I cannot imagine the mothers breaking down and they were only witnesses quite far removed by distance and impact. This one really hit them hard in the gut mostly because of the surprise factor and the magnitude of the tragedy, I imagine. The impact on those who were affected directly and severely is something that pains me even to contemplate.

from madras: My mother and mother-in-law had gone to the temple early in the morning and they were inside the temple when the waves hit the shores. They got caught in the crowds that was trying to 'flee'. They managed to reach home and to safety. Both mammas seemed a tad shellshocked. They took turns reporting their version of the 'tsunami'. They didnt see the waves. It lasted only somewhere between 15-30 minutes. My mother-in-law seemed particularly shaken by the fact that the boys playing cricket on marina beach were swept away. Playing cricket in the morning, probably shooed away by their mothers busy preparing sunday lunch, none of them would have imagined that they'd never return home. Cars were overturned. Even as the waves ebbed away and the residents left for the inner city to the safer homes of relatives/friends, the masses poured into the beach to 'watch' the rescue activities. Naturally, this led to traffic jams and made it a little difficult for the mammas to get home. As it was a Sunday, most fishermen were not at sea. Their wives however were setting up their little sunday market stalls. Many of them were washed away. They are most probably all without a home. Many who werent swept away into the ocean succumbed to cardiac arrests because of the shock. Even children. People there are not familiar with 'tsunamis'. There are 'rumours' about aftershocks and further incidents. There is also angry shushing and labelling the warnings as scare tactics. It is going to be a nightmare accounting for the dead/missing. The bodies need to be identified soon. The lowest temperature in Madras in late December will rarely go below 25/28 degrees. Celcius. And Madras is the northern most coastal city of the southeast India's peninsular curve. I cannot imagine how bad it must be in the southern parts of the state and in SriLanka. Even with the damage done, I hope it will all revert to status O.K. soon.

Lovely, culinarybear. I use dry marinade and thereby skipping the rinsing bit. As it is cheaper to buy the whole duck, the breasts are cooked a few days earlier while the legs are left in the marinade for confit. I think I left it in the dry marinade for...like 4 or 5 days. The fat goes for the confit and the remaining duck for the sauce...sauce Perigeux(madeira sauce + truffles) if you can get truffles, that is... I dry marinade for the confit with just aromatic herbs, garlic and salt. sugar too! thats it. looking at your version and if i still try to keep it a dry marinade, lemon zest will probably be a good addition. I confit duck legs over the stove top. I dont keep time tho'...just have to make sure that the duck fat doesnt 'boil' or bubble over. I keep the shape of the leg. Cooking it a little longer like yours will make it even more tender and i am afraid i have never done that. now, i will! It is the same as rillettes, no? And oh...the classical pairing of Pommes Sarladaises with the confit. Trim a potato like a barrel. Thinly slice it and blanch them first so its semi cooked. Infuse duck fat with crushed garlic. The sliced potatos are arranged tart style. Keep building the layers with generous splashes of garlic infused duck fat. Layers weighed down and cooked until the bottom is nicely coloured. et voila! duck leg confit with pommes sarladaises and perigeux sauce! remaining duck leg(if its still there, it can lay around in goose fat until eternity) passed on for the cassoulet for the next week or the next month or whenever. the politics of the cassoulet are too complicated. toulouse cassoulet is a simple assembly of lamb, duck and haricot beans. with garlic sausage if you can get it. i dont do the breadcrumb thingy nor do i break the crust. Accompaniments of polenta and creamed morels. p.s. Thanks for the pictures!

hello there. i am intrigued now. can you tell us how to make it? anything that takes 2 weeks to prepare cant be bad.

Surely, you must be joking. No kidding. We'll be sure to tell the cod fishers in Newfoundland that the fish stocks are in good hands. Ooops! Too late! A. ← My understanding was that with the cod situation some things had been done to reverse the trend of overfishing, that the industry was now regulating itself to let stocks grow back, is that false? ← In 1992, a total ban was imposed on cod fishing off Newfoundland Grand Bank shores to reverse the trend of overfishing. Well..mostly to save the depleted cod stocks. Unfortunately, it never happened. The cod didnt return or repopulate back to levels that would support any kind of fishing industry. The effects of the cod disaster caused the fishery sector of the region and rippled to every other sector of the economy that led to livelihoods being disrupted, jobs lost, property prices spiralled down etc. In Cod, they trusted. The Cod was unmoved. point to remember: recommended min cod stock at any given time = 150000 tonnes. (plaice stock in the north sea is facing similar shortages)Current cod stock in the North Sea = 40000 tonnes. The Europeons are trying to bring a partial/total ban in the North Sea too. Hopefully, the Newfoundland fiasco wont repeat itself. The North Sea situation is a little tragic or at least going that direction. It is an ugly, open secret that fishermen were dumping back dead cod back into the sea to maintain prices and to not oversaturate the market. When the eggs of cod hatch, the little ones feed on plankton. This plankton is available only where there is cold water. With warmer seas, the coldwater plankton may not be available when the cod breeds out of synch. It is a very delicate ecology and everything is intricately connected. Indiscriminate fishing of juveniles also affects the cycles. It is not merely overfishing. There are other factors involved too. Fishing should *revolve* around forces and laws of nature. The opposite does not occur. This is common sense. We have lost it amidst cheap food, quick profits and oversaturated markets. In conclusion, the attempt to reverse the cod situation off the shores of Canada FAILED. edited to add: random google Newfoundland Cod stock collapse link.

update

It is not sustainable. Volume can support the market only upto a certain point because our resources are limited and renewable resources need time to..well..renew. [ Surely, you must be joking. From AccidentalHedonist'sfoodblog link to EnvironmentalDefence.org p.s. i find it interesting that sablefish/black cod from alaska is mentioned as 'good'. from what i heard just a couple of days ago, it is quite tedious sourcing sablefish in the united states. the person who had just finished enjoying his sablefish said that this was despite the fact that sablefish isnt endangered. and then i found the website comments: The Alaskan sablefish fishery is operated under an Individual Fishing Quota system, which allows fishermen to work under safer conditions and get better prices for their catch while conserving stocks. Sablefish populations are healthy, and the fishing method (bottom longlines) produces little bycatch or harm to bottom habitat. also, note that imported shrimp/prawns are not recommended by the website.

I think the issue is whether all this is sustainable trade terms and how it really translates for the american public in the short/long run even if we ignore the vietnamese et al. But that is just it. If Vietnam wants to get into the shrimp game with us they need to play by whatever rules we give them. If they want to sell us shrimp, they will sell them at the price we are willing to pay, same with domestic shrimpers. Getting into any business, especially agricultural commodities, is no surefire path to riches and steady paychecks, and anyone getting into it should know that. If the prices the market is willing to carry rule out domestic shrimpers, then the domestic shrimpers need to find new career paths or re-organize their operation so that they can run it on lower profit margins. If the Vietnamese don't think we are paying them enough for their shrimp, then there will be other nations lining up to sell them to us at the price we are willing to pay. ←

I wanted to stay out of this, but I have to note a couple of details here. Even though the US does not have a domestic banana industry, American companies like Dole, Chiquita etc in S.America have complete control over the banana trade. They dont own land down there, but distribution of banana to the rest of the world(1/3 of banana trade goes to the US, 1/3 to the EU and the remaining to the rest of the world ..Japan etc and ALL banana exports from the South America is controlled by American companies) is a full fledged American enterprise. South American 'banana' economies are propped up by the strength of the USD and the foremost reason why the majority of the S.American population simply cannot cope with the cost of living down there. So much is the hold over these weak economies that when the EU gave preferential treatement to banana import from former colonies of Britain and France and slapped tariffs on South American bananas, the US threatened and finally did slap a 100% export duty on goods from the other side of the pond.(There is a Bush.Sr angle to this, but then this would become a naked political discussion). This is why Roses lime cordial and lemon marmalade costs so much at the local Safeway. robyn, maybe you can see these as economic discussions instead of political discussions(as i do)? we can expand the scope of these discussions if we can agree among ourselves that it is all going to be purely objective. my humble opinion.

I just got around to reading the Manresa thread. The issue is clearer now. Re 'Haute Cuisine', in the present context, I think that it simply means 'highest cuisine' for the current times. I still think that it implies(or at least imo, it should imply) first class dishes made with first class(may i also add *seasonal*..for me, at least) ingredients that involves some creativity, flawless technique and precise translation of intended flavours/textures. My 2c.

Re candy bars, a google search reveals the 'Hershey Bar Index"

In my version of stollen(fannie farmer recipe, iirc), i let the dried fruits and nuts soak in rum(or whiskey) for *at least two days*. yes. it is awesome.

For whatever it is worth, wikipedia defines Haute Cuisine: Haute cuisine (literally "high cooking" in French) is a cookery style that originated in Napoleonic France under the influence of the great chef Antoine Carême and was elaborated by Auguste Escoffier. It was a refinement of traditional French cookery techniques and also included a radical reorganization of the way kitchens were run. Chefs were organized in a series of brigades, with under-chefs, in charge of sauces, fish, and so forth. [...] The style was characterized by complex dishes requiring elaborate preparation. Sauces were used extensively. Portions were often small to allow for multiple courses. Characteristically, the food was quite rich, incorporating a generous amount of butter and heavy cream. Desserts were particularly elaborate and rich.

Maybe people are eating way too much shrimp comforted by the fact that it is cheap? Food is not cheap. It comes with a price and sometimes at a price that is not always visible. I sometimes fear for the American economy. Usually it lasts for no more than a few seconds. This is a perfect example of "what goes around comes around". Welcome to the globalized world. Almost everyone has been through it. And survived. p.s. robyn: cotton is *the* most heavily subsidised crop in the US. Europeon underwear isnt expensive. American underwear is cheap. When I first moved to London, I was appalled by how everything was almost double the price of American goods. Eventually, I stopped converting pounds into dollars. Also, underwear is over-rated. unrelatedly: Growth in GDP Third Quarter 2004 United States 3.9% Eurozone 0.3% Japan 0.1% That happened because of everything that is despised..outsourcing, tax breaks to the top 1% etc. Meanwhile, those in the 'eurozone' probably claim a better 'standard of living'. There ya go. Please drive through and proceed to tear your hair out. Thank you very much.