Chris Amirault

Mine has been as intense, yes. Perhaps a bit more so, in fact, so if you use that recipe you'll want to scale back the spices some.

NOOOOOO!!!!

For the city folk, how much cow is half?

A question, in fact, based on reading here and there and this quotation from kalypso:

Is one cultivated (and bigger) and the other wild (and smaller)?

In USA Today, "Alcohol companies' pink campaigns anger breast cancer survivors." My favorite part, in a "What Drinks Are Women Served in Hell?" sort of way:

I'm able to distinguish celery salt from fresh celery, as it turns out. My question concerns the difference between celery that has a slightly salty yet fresh taste and celery that is dominantly salty and somewhat bitter.

Why Pizza Hut?

So Scrappy's bitters aren't, um, "fully legal"? Says the guy with bottles both at home and at work....

Brand?

Scented food billboards. Tx to Josh Friedland of The Food Section.

Is there any way to tell whether or not celery has that weird salty taste?

Just the first 94 pages, I think -- unless I'm missing something. It's that chart at the back I want access to....

There are a few, but not too many -- and they do not have a volume that's adequate for four servings plus leftovers. The one I have at work for tea maxes out at 2L.

While I sort of understand what you're saying, I'm confused. I deeply enjoyed Alinea and adore sour cream 'n' onion potato chips; I have to decide between a bowl of pho or a Filet-o-Fish at one particular intersection in town. One can argue that these are different sorts of experiences, but I think that the combination throws the assumptions in the paragraph above into question. Unless, of course, you think folks like me are a walking contradiction, something I can live with.

Yes, that's it exactly.

No, it's something I'd never heard before.

Thanks, DanM. I was thinking about this this weekend while making several batches of sausage. The kitchen is now very well laid out, much better than any kitchen I've ever had and with most things in good spots. So upon reflection I realized that some of the time sinks were: 1. prepping items to be cooked a la minute 2. having sauce and dressing items on hand: roasted garlic (I'm out), fresh herbs, curry pastes, that sort of thing 3. boiling water for pasta The first two are just prep items, and I think I can figure out some of that on weekends. The third is trickier -- though I realized that I could use the Sous Vide Supreme to hold a ton of water at 95C and then use it when I get home. I'll keep thinking about these time sinks -- it's a great idea. A Sous Vide Supreme can do literally anything a crockpot can do, with greater precision. A water bath is also the fastest way to bring something up to temperature.

Has anyone done this at home? I admit terror at the prospect of building this contraption just to make liquid smoke, but I'm intrigued.

Turned a 20# Coleman pork shoulder into three different types of sausage this weekend: a saucisson sec based on this recipe but using Clear Creek Distillery's Eau de Vie Pomme instead of calvados; some hunter's sausage with rosemary bacon; and some classic Italian sausage. The saucisson sec is curing in this curing chamber, and the other two are drying in the fridge before I pack them up. Definitely making a more significant commitment to drying the fresh sausage this time around, and was fascistic about freezing the meat before the bind. However, with such a massive batch of meat to process, I was straining the limits of my KitchenAid. What do people use to mix their ground meat to get the bind set up?

Standard issue Amco enameled lime juicer.

I was skimming through an original version of Trader Vic's Bartender's Guide last night, and he listed a drink category that starts with "S" and that contains, iirc, base spirit, liqueur, and bitters. Anyone know what this is?

I think we all expect Chris Young and Society member Nathan Myhrvold's Modernist Cuisine to be that book. In the meanwhile, this topic on sous vide/LTLT cooking has a good list of resources.

Fiddled around a bit at 9p last night with three different lime juices: one from brunch (10 hours old), one from start of shift (4 hours), and one from a lime that was room temp that I squeezed just before tasting. I tasted all of them straight, and all were hand-squeezed. Apologies in advance for the poor descriptive language. The fresh lime juice was cleaner and tasted more tart, less sweet. It tasted more like "lime juice" to me than the other two batches. It wasn't bitter at all. The 4-hour juice was quite different but still very pleasant to me. It had a distinct tropical, even coconutty quality, less sharp and more, um, round. The flavor was similar to the taste of limes that are a bit older, starting to get slightly brown in spots and slightly hollow in the interior. It seemed somewhat more complex than the fresh lime juice, but in a way that, in my mouth, felt less like "lime juice." However, it was certainly tasty. The 9 hour old juice was distinctly unpleasant. It had all of the bitter aspects and none of the nuances of the other two juices. I tossed it. This all makes me think that the oxidation process goes through two stages: an initial stage (within the first 3-4 hours) that's significant but not unpleasant, and, 10-12 hours later, a secondary stage that continues the oxidation past the point of decent flavor. Of course, if you're a bartender, you rarely taste lime juice that's 10-12 hours old, and it's quite possible that the 3-4 hour juice is a more common reference point. I'll be interested to read more about what people find as they fiddle with this -- Dave Arnold in particular.

Parceled out many two-serving FoodSaver bags of chili yesterday, and am making 20# of sausages today. I think that having smaller servings are going to help out a lot.