MelissaH

I could see where a little water on the outside might make salt adhere, which would go a long way towards making the stuff edible. Then when you toast it, you'd get rid of the water and crisp it up.

Do you have a ready source for the bags (other than stealing a few extras from the produce department every time you shop)?

Point of clarification: are you talking hand mixer like the sort of thing you'd use to make a quick batter, or like an immersion blender aka blender-on-a-stick? I associate the Bamix brand with the latter, but to me "hand mixer" means something more like this: http://www.amazon.com/KitchenAid-KHM5APWH-5-Speed-Ultra-Power/dp/B000BVZ5X0/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1364316077&sr=8-5&keywords=kitchenaid+hand+mixer. We have a KitchenAid hand mixer, which I use when I don't need the oomph of a stand mixer but am too lazy to beat by hand, such as when I want to beat a few egg whites stiff. It's lasted through probably 15 years of intermittent use, so take that as you will.

I also like bits of them on pizza.

I work my way down the list of topics with unread content, going to the bottom of page 1, then clicking to page 2 and scrolling down that, and if that's still all new content I click to page 3, until I put a page where there's content I've seen. Then I work my way back up, right-clicking on the star or circle to open that topic in a new page. I do that on each topic I want to read, and when I get to the top of the page I hit the back button, which (in Firefox, anyway) takes me back to the bottom of the previous page. I then work my way up that page, again opening each topic in a new tab, and so on and so forth till I get back to the top of page 1.

I've never had much luck with bar cookies, because I can't cut them without losing a lot to crumbling, regardless of what temperature I cut them at. If I want something bar-ish, I make brownies. And if I want drop cookies, I make the dough ahead of time and scoop it into balls, which I refrigerate or freeze, and bake as needed. That said, I might have to give the concept another try.

The old KitchenAids are great. I read lots of reviews complaining about plastic parts failing on recent models, so I spent the extra money for a Viking. But who knows, they might have fixed their recent problems.http://www.amazon.co...duct/B0007WLJ3I Do you like it? I have Viking cookware and I love it. They make a solid product. I have both a KitchenAid (circa 1992) and a Viking. My KA is a tilt-head model with a smaller bowl (only 4.5 quarts), and it's just not big enough to handle a whole batch of many of the bread dough recipes I enjoy. After one too many hair-pulling-out disasters, I got a Viking with a 7 quart bowl, which has no problems making bread dough recipes that call for 1 kg of flour. However, I still use my KA for things like cake batter and cookie dough, as I think the smaller bowl is easier to handle for smaller amounts.

Yup - 250 ml. They were $7.50 each at Sur la Table and under $6 at the other place. I don't think Whole Foods in Canada carries it. Although their online list of places that sell it is clearly a bit skint. My bag will contain well padded and ziplocked bottles of all sorts - so indeed hope it makes it home safely. I've had a few leaks in trips past. There was the one of 21 bottles of single malt that leaked on the way back from Scotland - all carry on in those days. We smelled like classy rummies. I picked up a 375 ml bottle of St George's Absinthe and a regular sized bottle of Pierre Ferrand Dry Curacao to protect too. I long for the days of carry-on liquids, when buying a bottle of something wouldn't cost you an extra $35 for the checked bag it now needs to go in. Did you get the 40 °N or the 50 °N Red Boat?

I'm not awake enough to use my pressure cooker for anything in the morning.

Um, no. A favorite general chemistry practice problem is having students calculate the boiling point of salted pasta water, or calculating the amount of salt that you'd need to add to a pot of pasta water in order to make a noticeable difference in the boiling point. It's not for that.

As soon as Padma looked at the contestants and told them they had to make a breakfast on a stick, I looked at my husband and told him that I felt the shark circling. We've been watching on DVR, so I don't remember what episode that was, but I feel like this season we've been zipping through a lot of content that wasn't worth our time to watch.

I read that book. Probably the most interesting thing I learned from it was very close to the beginning of the book: Wherever she went to culinary school didn't pay close attention to details, as she apparently graduated without ever being taught how to properly hold a knife!

I seem to recall Jacques Pépin using strips of tenderloin to make quick beef stews, also.

Has anyone figured this out yet? Is there a brand of plastic wrap that has successfully been used to fry herbs without melting? MelissaH

I have it. I haven't cooked out of it yet, but it was a joy to read and look at. MelissaH

Those of you who have made the adobo: how essential is it that you use pork belly, rather than another part of the pig? We don't typically see belly in the town where I live, so I'd either have to special order some (and hope my butcher can get it), travel to a bigger city where pork belly is available, or find another cut of meat to use. MelissaH

I've had good luck with a slew of bite-size tartlet pans I got a while ago from Bridge Kitchenware. However, due to Sandy, Bridge is not going to be available to order for a while longer (website says at least the second week in November). MelissaH

You're not the only one. I often find that canola oil tastes almost fishy and smells almost fishy. I've even gotten this from a fresh bottle, so it's not a rancidity thing. My default oil is corn oil. MelissaH

Although I grew up eating New York pastrami sandwiches, I now have a strong preference for Montreal-style smoked meat. Mile End does a fine sandwich. MelissaH

It's probably not a huge help to you if I say that my only experience fermenting teff for injera was also a miserable failure. I don't remember whose recipe I was following (I know I was in grad school, living in my house rather than my apartment but before I started dating my now-husband, which puts it somewhere between 1995 and 1996) but mine also turned out to be inedibly sour. I obviously haven't gotten around to trying it again, but I think that if I do, I'd be inclined to maybe ferment a tiny portion of teff flour to get the flavor, but use some form of chemical leavining for lift. It's a shame, because Ethiopian is another on my list of "cuisines I love, but need to make myself if I want any". MelissaH

Breville's customer service has also been good for me. I had an oven, the larger of the two, and the convection fan all of a sudden got very loud and rattly. I phoned them, explained the problem, and within half an hour had an email containing a FedEx label to send the oven back. I dropped the old one off on Friday morning, and yesterday (Wednesday) had a new one waiting on my doorstep when I returned home in the afternoon. I suspect the turnaround would have been even quicker had the problem not occurred on a Thursday night, leading to a weekend delay. MelissaH

Just tell everyone that it's close to Halloween, and you're just making sure there aren't any vampires hanging around this morning. MelissaH

No rotovap pictures yet? (Just kidding.) In the synthetic organic chemistry labs I worked in, the original setup for a rotovap required two separate sources of water: one for the aspirator to provide suction, and another for the cooling coil. However, over time, it became less acceptable to stream raging torrents of water down the drain for many minutes at a time, especially if the solvents we were removing were low-boiling and therefore not adequately captured by a cold-water cooling system. There were two refinements to counter the water issues. One was a sort of pump that generated the suction. I don't know the exact details, but because I remember needing to add ice to the thing as we used it (and make sure that there was still liquid water in it, that the water hadn't all slid out the drain hose at the top of the box), I suspect it might have been a little pump that used an ice-water bath to stay cool. The other was an alternate coolant system: for most things, we could use a recirculating ice water bath, but when we did reactions in ether, we'd use a cold finger with acetone and dry ice inside or we wouldn't collect anything. I'll be interested to see what you rig up, because I don't know many people who would be willing to dedicate the gallons of water to a rotovap the way we did in lab, once upon a time. MelissaH

I'm not afraid of eggs, but I generally prefer ice creams made without them. Custard bases tend to be too heavy and mouth-coating for me. MelissaH

We've made it our new SOP that any citrus coming into the house gets sprayed with StarSan (my husband's homebrew sanitizer of choice) before it gets put into the citrus bowl. Since we started doing that, we've had exactly zero incidences of moldy citrus. MelissaH