quiet1

I'd be interested to see the results of vacuum packing a pre-frozen piece of butter cake. I feel like it would compress even with being frozen, but if you have control over the strength of the vacuum you could probably manage it, at least within a range of final product that is acceptable. (I.e. Possibly slightly more dense than the original cake, but still edible.) Don't think I would bother with sponge cake - too much risk of losing the lightness inherent to a sponge cake. You could also skip the vacuum and just use the sealer to make sure the cake is well packaged, if your sealer gives that option. I might do that, if I had a sealer handy. Anything to reduce the risk of the cake and frosting picking up flavors.

For some reason making my own bacon never occurred to me, but it sounds doable. I'd be interested to hear if anyone has found a recipe they really like that doesn't include nitrates or nitrites. Most of the commercial products I've tried that leave those out have been less than exciting (either they leave out everything else that gives flavor too, or they get overly complicated with extra ingredients and you end up with a product that doesn't taste even remotely like bacon.) Annoyingly, nitrates and nitrites in foods make me wheeze so I would prefer to avoid or at least minimize the amounts used if I'm going to make my own. But I don't want to waste time and money on something that isn't tasty, either. (Since it isn't actually an allergic reaction, my current solution is just to limit cured products in my diet and when I have them, they have to be extra tasty to make up for the annoyance of wheezing and coughing after. So that remains an option, but it would be nice to have a bacon-like product I could have more often without sounding like a sick dog for an hour after eating.)

Without seeing the actual comments made to him, it does sound like his response was quite out of proportion and inappropriate, at least to start with. I don't even think it's a case of people being too PC - his hashtag "thinspiration" is quite well established in a community of people that I think everyone would agree is actively harmful (eating disorders) not just someone being offended. Even well known fitness folks (who don't buy into health at every size or fat acceptance movements) have spoken out fairly strongly about eating disorders and the kind of support for eating disorders that the pro-Ana community provides. It is reasonable for someone to not know about that connection, but upon someone explaining it the sensible thing would be to go "oh, I didn't know that was how the word is used" not curses and encouraging suicide and whatever else. I mean, it doesn't sound like anyone was giving him a hard time for having lost the weight or being proud of his accomplishment, at least initially. (I imagine all sorts of things were said once things got going. It is the internet.) At any rate, his supposed apology is pretty unimpressive. I hate it when pr apologies sound like they were written by a very very new pr intern. Do better, pr people.

When I lived alone and away from friends and family, I portioned cake and froze the slices fairly often so I could have a treat now and then without being tempted to eat the whole cake before it went bad. Success is mostly down to the type of cake and filling/frosting. Pastry cream and fresh fruits don't do so well. (I have a cake I make with whipped cream frosting, pastry cream filling, and slices of fresh strawberries between the layers. This is not a cake that will freeze happily.) Anything kind of simple or dense did fine, though - cake iced with a plain buttercream, chocolate cake with ganache, carrot cake with cream cheese frosting, etc. I will confess to never doing a side by side comparison - I would not be surprised if the frozen and thawed slice was not quite as perfect as the freshly made - but certainly good enough to enjoy a nice slice of cake as a treat. (Even with any freezer related quality issues, it was still much tastier than anything I could buy locally.) My method was to portion the whole cake then freeze the whole thing unwrapped for a couple of hours or so, until the outsides of each portion had frozen enough that they wouldn't be damaged by wrapping. Wrap each in plastic wrap, then depending on how robust the wrapped pieces felt, either freeze overnight wrapped individually (so they'd be more robust) or go right to packaging in an additional airtight container. (Bag, sealed box, whatever works for your freezer organization.) Then just leave in the freezer and pull an individual piece or two as needed. To thaw, unwrap portions immediately (before the icing defrosts and sticks to the plastic wrap) and thaw in the fridge or at room temp depending on preference and type of cake. (Denser cakes I tended to do in the fridge because they take longer. A regular American birthday cake type thing with buttercream, on the other hand, will often warm to a nice eating temperature if you just leave it at room temperature while eating the rest of the meal, at least with the normal room temperatures I had in the UK.) I never had much trouble with humidity and condensation, but that would be something to keep an eye on when choosing your defrosting methods. I've actually been pondering doing something similar lately even though I now have enough people around to finish a full cake, but with cupcakes or mini cupcakes. My housemates are trying to teach their kid moderation and good eating habits, but he does have a sweet tooth. A mini cupcake or two (depending on exactly how mini) seem like they might be less tempting for a kid re: portion control than a normal sized slice of cake. Plus it'll probably be easier to get him involved in making them because it's easier to have more than one person working on cupcakes than on a single cake, and I'm trying to make sure he thinks of cooking as a thing that he can do if he has the interest. (As opposed to cooking being a magic thing that happens. He doesn't have to actually love cooking like I do, that's fine, but he shouldn't be afraid to give it a try if at any point he has something he wants to make.)

Given that I've seen medical professionals who seem completely oblivious to best practices for gloves, I'm pretty skeptical about "MORE GLOVES!" as a solution for food prep cleanliness issues. I mean, if you put clean gloves on with dirty hands, how clean are your gloves anyway? (Plus based on observation, people seem to either think of gloves as part of the uniform that you put on and never change, or else as a thing to protect THEM from having to touch the icky whatever - not as a method for controlling cross contamination.)

Ikea has a metal notice board thing at the moment that has potential. (I haven't checked the measurements precisely yet.) but yes, a magnetic white board sounds like a good idea also. Depending on location it might be handy for notes or if it is big enough, you could have a staging area to pull out the spices you need for a recipe. I have a friend who messes around with all kinds of stuff so will be able to get me metal scrap pieces that are suitable, but if not I might steal the whiteboard idea. (Also remember that if you don't like the look of the metal or whiteboard, there is no reason why you couldn't cover it with fabric or paper as long as the layer is thin enough that the spice containers still stick. So maybe not thick fleece or velvet unless your magnets are quite strong. ) http://www.tubularspices.com/spiceracks/sohospiceboard.asp is the kind of set up you usually see, but I am buying solid lid containers instead and just spending a bit of time making nice looking labels for the lids. Maybe not as visually exciting, but I pay too much for spices to have them sit out in the light all day.

Depending on how modern your tastes are, you could use metal containers and magnets so they'd stick to a metal plate instead of sitting in a spice rack? I think that is what I am going to end up doing for my most used stuff, because I have no good place for a spice rack large enough for everything anyway. It is definitely what I am going to do for my collection of loose tea samples, so I can keep them handily near the kettle instead of tucked away in a cabinet where they sometimes get forgotten.

My aunt and my grandfather both hated onions, so my grandmother had several different stealth onion tricks depending on the dish. It was pretty funny. (I still do some of them because it changes the taste of the food if you don't do it the same way.)

Oh, yes, your pan size looks perfectly sensible for the amount. I was just trying to say that exactly what type of pan (brand, stick or non stick, etc) is often not that important, but pan size is worth paying attention to. You used a 10" pan so he should probably do likewise, or larger if he is cooking more. Using a smaller pan would result in the pan being crowded and things not cooking as desired. I suppose the thing to look for as a novice, when it comes to pan size and sautéing, is that you want to have room to move things around in the pan. If you're worried you won't be able to stir without knocking stuff out, you have too much for your pan size.

There is definitely a lot of personal preference in pots and pans in terms of what you prefer to handle and work with. The handy thing is that there is also a lot of cross over in terms of what nonstick vs stainless, etc. can do in the hands of most cooks, so you can go with what you feel most comfortable with or have to work with, rather than having to run out and buy a specific brand of pan just to try a recipe. (There are some recipes which do legitimately call for specialized cookware, of course, and certain cuisine types, but for this kind of thing, you really don't need x specific brand anything.) I think the most important thing would be size - you want room to move things around when sautéing. So you won't get the same results at all if you try to cram the same amount of ingredients into a smaller pan.

A visitor from Switzerland recently brought some exceptionally tasty chocolate truffles as a gift, and I find myself wondering how they were done. I have done a tiny amount of truffle making myself for holiday gifts, but I am nothing near expert with techniques or flavors of different types of chocolate. Given how much everyone in the house enjoyed them, though, I am wondering if I can produce something similar at home when we particularly feel like a treat. I know that different chocolates will give different flavors, which I am prepared to experiment with a bit. What is stumping me is that the dark chocolate ganache filling has a cooked or almost burnt taste to it to me - not strong, and not caramel. It is very much like the scent that you get when baking something like brownies. Is it possible that they intentionally overheated a small amount of chocolate to get that flavor, or is it something that some varieties of chocolate have naturally? (I am working my way through various chocolate threads on egullet ATM. I had no idea I'd been quite lucky with my previous ganache efforts as I've never had any major issues with behavior or texture. Though I imagine having done it just for the home in small amounts helps - I never made enough for gifts that long term shelf life would be an issue.)

Depending on how you like your snap peas, precook ing might be overkill. I've never encountered any that took much time at all, but I do like them pretty crisp and hate them at all soggy.

I agree about not trying to learn from a commercial, but one thing you can see there since you looked at it anyway - the onions looked to be much more finely chopped than the peppers. Also, he said the unit he was using has 100 heat settings and he was on 90+ every time the camera showed the display with a number, so that is probably not medium. I'm going to guess that in that finished dish the onions were fine enough to have somewhat softened and lost the raw taste, the shrimp heated, and the peppers still had some crunch. Plus the sauce was being held warmed. So you need to be sure your expectations fit what you can actually do. You aren't going to go from raw or near raw to softened and nicely browned vegetables with that lovely sweetness you get from slower cooking in 3 minutes. In my experience eating from pasta stations, a lot of the flavor is coming from the sauce they add, which has taken longer to prepare and had time to develop flavors.

Okay, the steamer canning jar trick is a good one, I'm stealing that.

Yup, that is exactly what happened with my mom. She is a nurse and so was determined to do it right and have no junk food, good nutrition all the time, etc. Then came the birthday parties and class parties and other assorted activities that kids get up to, and those had all sorts of things she couldn't control except by preventing me from going in the first place or making me that weird kid who isn't allowed to eat anything. She decided it was far better to accept that some of those foods were going to be available and I would probably want them (because food science spends a lot of time trying to make those things tasty.) Thus the plan of moderation and making a specific effort to introduce some of those foods in an environment she did control, so we could talk about them, and that sort of thing. (Plus, if you look at the history of nutrition as a field of science - I am not sure we know as much as we like to think we do about what things are actually properly good for you and what things are not. Stuff that pretty much lacks meaningful nutritional content at all, like a soft drink, okay, fine, likely not supplying any essential nutrients except calories. But the evils of sugar versus honey versus agave and refined grains versus whole grains, and all that other stuff? Eat a variety of foods in a sensible amount for your size and energy levels, and don't sweat the exact details, I figure.)

Because chances are your kids are going to encounter those items "in the wild" and invariably when I was a kid, the kids who made the worst food choices and pigged out on crummy foods like sweets when away from parental supervision (school trips, etc.) were the ones where those foods were banned substances in the home. If those items are not banned but not always available, and you talk about them (what is tasty, what is not, what food scientists do, etc. depending on age of child) then it takes away a lot of the lure of the forbidden. (For bonus points, introduce your kids to high end sweets young. My mother used to buy me really good quality chocolate - just a single truffle - as an occasional treat and in comparison normal candy never seemed particularly tasty to me. Too sweet, not interesting flavor, unpleasant mouthfeel, etc.) In general, going by my housemate's kiddo, encouraging the kid to try things but not making a big deal about actually having to finish it if it is on the plate seems to be working. He's had some weird phases (at one point apparently he would only eat round food) but in general he is very open to trying all kinds of new things, and even trying stuff again that he hasn't liked previously, in case the new way of preparation makes it tastier or he is misremembering how it tasted before. I think it helps that in the house we eat a wide variety of food, too. There is also always something he can make as a fall back meal if he really genuinely doesn't like something and can't eat it. (Not anything exciting, though - now that he is 9 the rule is that he has to make it himself if he really doesn't like what is on offer for dinner, which means something like a sandwich. Adequate so he isn't starving overnight, but not anything he'd choose immediately over other food offerings.) (He does have a sweet tooth, which they manage by limiting dessert to every other day and then primarily having healthier dessert options like frozen fruit bars. We occasionally make cookies or something for fun, but not as a regular thing.)

I have never organized a chocolate space specifically, but I think FauxPas hit on a good point - you need to know what you are organizing before you can really come up with a good system for it. (And even then, what makes a good system can be quite personal, so be prepared to tweak things after you've worked in the space for a while. That isn't a sign of failure, it is part of the process of getting it perfect. ) So the way I would start is to sit down and make a list of the kinds of things I want to store, what sort of storage they need (large shelf, small bin, box that is easy to take out and move around the room, etc.) and any other key things that influence storage. (Is something best kept far away from something else in the room, for example, due to heat or flavor contamination or some such concern.) Then go through your list and note which things you use most often together, which things you don't use often at all, and so on. From three, you can usually come up with the start of a system. As you put things away then you might tweak it, and you will likely find things you'd forgotten, so make sure to leave room in your plan for some flexibility. (Plus you end up buying new toys and so on, and you want to have room for your system of organization to include new items, or it will start falling apart the first time you bring home a new mold or pot.)

With reference to grandmothers and so on and cooking - I think one way they got predictable results was likely also enforcing some consistency within their own kitchen. My grandmother, for example, had a very specific spoon that she used for her tablespoon measure. It was just a normal spoon, not a purpose made measuring spoon, but by golly if she needed to measure something for a recipe, she was using that spoon and that spoon only. (It was kept apart from the regular table utensils.) She had a cup that she treated the same way, for larger quantities. So a new recipe might require some trial and error because her spoon was not likely the same as that of the person who wrote the recipe, but once she worked out the kinks and made adjustments, she could then relatively reliably repeat the results by using her own measuring techniques. It seems likely that many other people did likewise when baking in the home, (Plus familiarity with a recipe means you develop an eye for what texture things should be at different stages and so on, so if you are off a bit on a day, you're more likely to notice and be able to correct it or do a different thing if it isn't recoverable, so you don't lose the ingredients entirely.) The thing is, I am much more likely to try a new recipe than my grandmother was, and I think part of that is because trying a new recipe was more of a production for her - more risk of things going wrong, more work to figure out if you needed to make adjustments, and of course in her day many of the ingredients were much more expensive so she didn't want to waste things trying something new when she had five mouths to feed. I don't like waste either, but no one in my household is going hungry if I mess up and have to throw away half a stick of butter and some flour and sugar and a couple of eggs, you know? As far as my own method - after living in England for a while, I got converted to using a scale for baking and some cooking recipes. It really is much easier. When I have a recipe with volume measurements that I want to try, usually the first time I do it the normal way with the measuring cups and spoons. (I use the spoon and sweep method for flour, spoon and pack for brown sugar unless it says otherwise, etc.) Assuming I'm happy enough with the results, the next time I weigh as I go and make notes. For a long time I used the rec.food.cooking FAQ also for reference for how much the average cup of whatever should weigh, to make sure that what I was getting myself was in the right ballpark. Then in the future I just use the weights I've noted down. If I have problems I might go back to volume to double check what I'm doing, or see if there is more information from the recipe source about amounts, but for the most part my method works decently for most things. (That said, for anything particularly delicate or sensitive, I usually don't even bother trying a recipe that uses volume measurements for everything. Something like a chocolate chip cookie can be forgiving if there is a little too much or too little flour in a batch - they might not come out perfect but chances are they will still be tasty. A light egg white based cake, on the other hand, can basically completely fail if the amounts are too far off, and the end result will be nothing like the goal. That is finicky enough I just look for more 'professional' sources in the first place, and those all use weights pretty much.)

I love this idea. For some reason it never occurred to me to use the inside of a door for knife storage. I hate having them sit out, so right now they are in a drawer, but the current kitchen has so few drawers that freeing that one up would not be a bad thing. Anyone have tips on making one of these puppies?

This is a large part of why I just jumped on the kickstarter for the Anova - my mother is immune compromised (she has cancer) and while there are plenty of things that I don't feel any urgency to try doing sv, it will be good to have the option of being very sure that something not served well-done and cooked to death is still safe for my mom to eat. (That isn't the only reason, but it is what motivated me to get something now rather than keep it on a list as a technique to play with for fun someday.)

I find it depends a lot on what you're looking for. Replacements.com tends to be horribly over-priced relative to the secondary market for my winter dishes pattern. (It's a relatively casual Pfaltzgraff pattern that's discontinued; so not super-cheap, but not $$$$ per place setting either, which probably makes it more common on secondary market websites. More people have it or have pieces who are willing to clear them out for cheap just for the space.) That said, last year my mom got me several pieces that are harder to come by (like a cookie jar that was available for all of one season before being replaced with a newer and ugly version) and they all arrived in good condition, well packaged, exactly what was expected. So I'd probably spend a small amount of time poking around elsewhere to see if what I was looking for turned up elsewhere, and if not, go to replacements.com and be done with it. (I just can't bring myself to pay their prices without SOME effort to find things elsewhere.) If I'm giving someone a gift of something where they may need replacements (glassware, dishes, etc.) then I do try to take into consideration the likely longevity of the design, too. Most people just aren't going to be able to afford all of the pieces they want right away, and it's really annoying to start collecting a pattern and then have it discontinued inside a year. Sometimes you can't know for sure, but it is worth asking about, particularly if you're shopping places like outlet shops to start with, where you're more likely to find discontinued items. (I mean, I love outlet shops, I just try to be realistic about what I'm likely to find/be able to buy there.)

You know I have never seen these hereabouts, there does seem to be quite specific local baked delicacies up here and they don't travel well! Our area is more butteries and some very weird looking things made mostly with marshmallow and icing - not for the squeemish! I will ask my Baker chum about the buns. Oh, perhaps you'll know - my late husband's family was from Aberdeen and they used to get these bread/pastry roll things that were supposedly a local thing to Aberdeen. (Certainly I never saw them in shops in England near London, where we lived.) I cannot for the life of me remember what they called them, though. I do remember thinking they were a bit similar to a croissant - similar layered flake-y interior, though perhaps denser than your typical croissant. (I even made the things once and I still can't remember what they were called, and it was long enough ago that I don't remember enough of the process to hunt for a recipe that way. I just remember there seemed to be a lot of folding and rolling out involved - as you do with other baked goods that have that many-layers texture.)

Okay, ~$8 is an acceptable price for a pan that'll have to be thrown out. Although I do hate the waste involved in that. (Can you recycle pots?) Funny you should mention that - I noticed this "People & Planet- The material in this product MAY BE recyclable. Please check the recycling rules in your community and if recycling facilities exist in your area." in the product information for this pot. It actually seems like a reasonable concern given that most nonstick does eventually need to be disposed of. It's just the nature of the material.

Something in the region of 1qt. Just enough for a serving or two of soup, that sort of thing. (I have at least one soup recipe where in order to make it freeze well, I freeze it in basically two parts, and it comes together better if you reheat in a pan so you can stir the parts together as they warm up. Technically I guess you could do it in a microwave and just stop and stir frequently, but I find that annoying. ) Reasonable price depends a lot on the expected lifespan - I'll pay All-Clad prices and up (although a sale is always nice!) for regular pans that I can expect will last a lifetime if they're worth the money (i.e. I'm not paying $$$ because it has a celeb chef name on the side but isn't any different otherwise) but not for something that'll last a year before the coating is toast.

Okay, ~$8 is an acceptable price for a pan that'll have to be thrown out. Although I do hate the waste involved in that. (Can you recycle pots?)