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What about curry and pregnancy?

Clearly, Trader Joe's is the Wal-Mart of small to mid-sized German-owned specialty grocery store chains.

Whatever you do, do not combine the Iron Chef drinking game with the Rachael Ray drinking game, unless you have a liver donor. We're talking critical mass.

From here: click. Sounds to me like I.P.A. was embraced by Indians because it goes so bloody well with curry.

Ha! Ambrose Bierce! Say, I wonder what ever happened to that guy...

How would they cut their meat?

Nonsense. Macaroni and Cheese was invented by Pavel Noodlov, the Russian epicurian and part-time inventor.

Who is this Bourdain fellow everyone keeps mentioning?

I hear the Two-Buck Chuck will sell for $9.99.

This is true. Code for beer in my Reserve Army unit is "pork chop in a can". ← Guinness is often called "liquid bread". "Pork chop in a can" sounds even better.

After three or four Black Velvets, I don't need to eat.

Marcus Gavius Apicius and Keith Floyd.

Then they can, you know, get some football guys on there and call it Gridiron Chef. Which would be doubly ironic because a gridiron is a cooking grate. Or they can have disabled chefs in wheelchairs and call it Ironsides Chef. Or a bunch of heavy metal guys and call it Iron Maiden Chef. Don't think they haven't thought of all this.

If this ep gets the best ratings ever, it'll be more like Ironic Chef.

This will be the first Iron Chef America worth watching since Iron Chef America: Shatner.

So am I.

In the heady rush of early success, I sent the word out that I need empty wine bottles. Inside a year, I had over 300 donated by friends and relatives. One day, I realized how much work it would take take to de-label, clean and sterilize all those bottles. All I really need, I decided, is 3 barrels and a pitcher.

You may live to regret the offer. Here is an old thread on the subject, or close to it, that I started and never finished a few years ago: Click. To follow up: the mead went off, and I have no idea why. Since then, life has conspired against my wine/beer/mead-making ambitions. But I'm still passionate about the whole natural fermentation thing.

Our own efforts at a home-produced wine yielded surprisingly good results. We even risked a few batches using natural fermentation -- those were quite good, in fact. Not world-class-vintner-good, but certainly drinkable. I've had worse $10 bottles. We used grapes, not a kit. You can expect and achieve good and even very good results with time, effort, proper equipment, knowledge, and most importantly, as TongoRad pointed out, the best possible raw ingredients. Serious wine makers learn how to select their grapes to achieve their desired results. Previously, we used food-grade plastic bins and carboys to ferment and rack the wine. The largest batch we ever attempted began with around 600 pounds of Zinfandel grapes, and required substantial (for a working man like me) time, effort and expense. The final yield was a decent wine that cost roughly $4-$5 dollars per bottle to make -- not counting the initial investement in equipment like carboys, bins, airlocks, etc. Although it's true that I've paid more for worse wines, I've also paid around as much for better ones. So it kind of depends on why you're doing this. My original goal was to produce our daily table wine, which means every harvest season I would have to buy a whole bunch of grapes and spend many hours laboring over something that I could simply buy at Trader Joe's for about the same price. But the pride I would take in drinking and serving my own table wine is immesurable. So I still plan to do that -- as soon as I can allocate the funds for around 1500 lbs of grapes and two or three 50-gallon oak barrels, and as soon as I have the time and energy to do a proper job of it. Maybe in time for next year's harvest -- but probably not. However, if your goal is to simply try your hand at it, and enjoy the feeling of serving wine made by the sweat of your brow, then I wholeheartedly encourage any approach compatible with your financial and physical conditions. If 200 lbs of grapes, a 30-gallon food-grade bin and half-a-dozen 6-gallon glass car boys are not a feasible approach, then I say a kit is better than nothing. Wine is, after all, a miracle no matter what method is used to make it.

I WANT ONE!! A silver tassie, I mean. The bonie lassie I already have.

A sandwich made for me with bread from the Japanese baker, mayonnaise and leftover carbonnade. Mercy!

They had to go through the five stages of grief first. Or wait for the hangover to end.

Since Scotch Whisky was first produced as early as the 4th century AD, a truly traditional glass would probably be something like a leather mug.

Lemon Cheesecake Pocky has the same relationship to actual lemon cheesecake as, say, a McDonald's cheeseburger has to an actual cheeseburger. It's called "Lemon Cheesecake", but it's really something uniquely its own. I know, because I have eaten Lemon Cheesecake Pocky, despite the fact that I would not consider eating an actual lemon cheesecake other than, maybe, in a life-or-death situation. And I liked it. My own philosophy with regards to Pocky is that if you do not try each variety at least once, you have robbed yourself of something that can be regained neither in this life nor in the hereafter. A good strategy regarding the more challenging flavors is to find someone who is willing to spring for a fresh pack (for what challenges one inevitably entices another), ask for just one, and gingerly nibble on the very tip. Even if you swiftly spit the morsel out, you will have legitimately tried it, and your Pocky Karma will be complete.

Well, if vegans are worried about miniscule bits of animal byproducts in beer, the solution to that is easy: brew your own. It's easy, safe, the results are quite satisfying and the ingredients are entirely under one's control. But other ingestants are more troublesome: what would a careful analysis of, say, metropolitan drinking water reveal? Or what about airborne particles? I know for a fact that I have unwittingly ingested several pounds of cat hair and dander in the last year or two -- I shudder to think what other far more gross-sounding animal proteins have sifted onto my food in public eating places. Where does one draw the line? Even the Jain, who gently sweep the path before them as they walk to avoid brining harm to insects, must eat and drink -- although they do eschew some root vegetables because the measures required to harvest them seem unnecessarily injurious to the plant. Now that's what I call integrity. Worrying whether your Heineken was filtered through charcoal that may have once been a horse's femur is to close one's eyes to the far greater problem of vegetable torture.