*Deborah*

Ditto!

Good thing I remembered to add the parsley, or I think this would end up in the Dinner II thread... Weird riff on tuna casserole: Linguine with a sauce of sautéed sweet onion, tarragon, tuna (yes, from a can! and it's not Italian even! don't hurt me!), deglazed with a splash of sherry, added capers and finished with cream I had leftover from other things. Must pay more attention to drips on the plate

Lumas, I really like your little ghosts! very cute!

Mmm, breakfast (chew, chew). French toast made with one of my odd little loaves of bread. Lots of Mexican vanilla, yay! but the crumb of the loaf is so dense that the egg didn't soak all the way in...oh, well. Nothing fried in butter and then finished with more butter and maple syrup could be all bad! and a nice big allongé espresso with milk.

Thursday night, not last night, I had a Ling moment, and had my latest experiment in baguette (nothing at all like a baguette, really, but it still tasted good. I am quite a novice at bread) with this really really dense chocolate pudding I had leftover smeared on top with a spoon (Mario Batali Babbo cookbook Chocolate and Valpolicella Crema made with Scharffen Berger and Callebaut--this stuff is like hard cream cheese in consistency). Bread and chocolate for dinner...the perks (or sad side, I suppose) of being a single girl The night before, I had some more of that bread, hot out of the oven, with Normandy-style butter and cave-aged Gruyère. I suppose that's a bit more acceptable One day my bread will be cute enough to show you, but for now, I'll keep it private

That is why we pump them full of antibiotics. I am also for irradiating the milk instead of pasteurizing. Pasteurizing doesn't get all of the bacteria, which is why milk spoils. Irradiate it and it kills EVERYTHING. ← Gah! that sounds appetizing!

My dear boy (I use this term in reference to your youth), I defy you to find anything resembling a personal attack on you in my posts. It's Ramsay I called a supercilious twit. I merely called you on your condescending attitude and backpedal on the "simpleton" wife comment.

I actually have seen a lot of women my age (& some baby boomers) who view my cooking skills, amateur though they may be, as a sort of sorcery. They are completely flabbergasted as to how food gets from shopping cart to serving platter, as if my hair should go white from my "life force" being drained out of me by the magic of cooking. I know that over a century ago, critics were lamenting that young women were getting their recipes from Fanny Farmer instead of their own mothers & grandmothers. So the disconnect from family tradition ain't exactly a new phenomenon. And it seems like with a lot of baby boomers, including my mother, there's a sort of defiance against time in the kitchen, like it's a form of slavery, or something they don't have time to "waste" on. And with my generation... a lot of us did not see our mothers cooking, and so for some, I can only guess that it appears to be a skill well beyond the scope of mere mortals! Because of this, I really can't be offended in the least by GR's accusation, it seems quite spot-on with what I see around me... namely, folks watching TV Food Network like it's the Discovery Channel: "Oooh, lookit that, how the hell did they do that?" as they just watched it BEING DONE for the past 20 minutes. ← Yay! Another rational and objective post I can appreciate. ← At the least, it is a learned skill. At the greatest, it is a talent more akin to creative genius, producing art. It is, nonetheless, not defined by gender or age. Whether or not it is considered a quotidian task, a fashionable skill, wizardry or a torturous chore has nothing to do with the fact that women are as capable of doing it (although judging from empirical evidence, perhaps less likely to toot their own horns about it) as men.

2004? Took them a while to make up their minds...

If you pro-treatment people are correct, there is but one peer-reviewed study, which is seemingly not available on the internet. I have a hockey game to watch, but I will continue my research tomorrow. I am in the middle of the FDA's report atm, in which they think that the Canadian researchers came to the wrong conclusion. It may take me a while to digest it. So far what I've gathered is that you need to take 4 times as much milk from a treated cow (something like 6 litres per day per 10 kg of body weight) as a heavily milk-drinking child would drink in order to approach the levels of...[item] (sorry, can't remember and don't want to say the wrong thing) that could potentially be dangerous. But as I was walking home, I thought I remembered that saccharine had to be ingested in amounts in the thousands times what a human would likely ingest in order to cause cancer, yet saccharine was banned, was it not? (was it? or is Tab still out there, somewhere?) All this stuff accomplishes is to increase milk production by 10%. Which is another reason Canada said no: our cows are doing just fine, thanks. I would say that the admitted fact that there are 25% more incidences of mastitis among rBGH treated cows (this is not disputed by anyone as far as I have seen--only the importance of it) leads to the fact that there are 25% greater amounts of pus and bacteria, as pus and bacteria are the results of mastitis in dairy cows. As far as I can tell. That and swollen udders. So, OK, pasteurize away, and commercial dairies aren't particularly fun places to begin with it seems, but I'll take the lesser amount of pus if it's all the same to you.

How about the fact that organic milk's levels of pus and bacteria from rBGH-induced mastitis are measurably lower?

Burrowing Owl ...not sure if the Sonora Room is still open for lunch? Black Hills

Hear, hear.

I got a bunch of shiny pots (KitchenAid's answer to All-Clad; I prefer the handle angles although I deplore the rivets, ah well) and a big ol' Le Creuset Dutch Oven (and matching trivet!! woo!) for housewarming gifts four years ago. They're still pretty shiny despite a fair amount of use. I love them almost as much as my pets. Now I covet one of those tall-ish sloped-side saucier pots. Hmm. Must make my Christmas wishes known.

That sounds like my KitchenAid pan! I love that pan! You can keep 8 duck legs in it Most of the time I use it to do a pasta sauce and then finish the pasta.

Sorry, I am no curry aficionada (although I happen to be eating one right now), but I laughed when I read your thread title...at first I thought you had dumped curry in your VCR by mistake.

Not complaining...just relating a fun moment. ← eGullet has had a similar effect on my eyebrows, from time to time.

From the study (conclusions linked here), you are correct, they have noted no health danger to humans. Whether, of course, one cares to associate with a product that lessens "condition", increases lameness (by 50%, mostly affecting the joints of the cows), shortens lifespan (by 2 years), increases reproductive problems, and increases mastitis (which is that lovely infection of the udders and teats, mmmm! yes! that's what I want in my milk! and which then requires antibiotics be given to the cow, if I understand correctly)...and then feel perfectly confident that something that can cause these problems in cows will have no effect, long-term, on humans consuming the cows' products...? Yeah, go ahead and drink up. I wish you well, but I pity the poor beasts. And I will limit my use of non-organic dairy products to the greatest extent I can afford to. And keep my eye on the organic labelling issues, while I'm at it. Edited to close that pesky parenthesis.

I think that's a debatable conclusion. If they think it's safe, why is it banned for dairy cows? (link to meeting minutes which mention the ban.) If I am understanding what I am culling, Health Canada have concluded that rBGH affects the cows badly (increases in illness, noticeably shortened lifespan), which I suppose we look at as inhumane, rather than necessarily dangerous to humans. I will have more to say about this later.

It may interest you to know that this use of quotation marks seems to have caused my left eyebrow to shoot right off the top of my head. ← I am not a scientist, and I am at work, looking surreptitiously for good data...I don't want to vouch for the science of something I have not had a chance to look at.

If there are no valid concerns, why have other countries (including my own, which isn't quite as green as it could be) banned rBGH?

Organic Consumers have links to a lot of stuff...some of it seems a bit "sensational" but some of it seems "scientific." I have to say that having watched The Corporation recently, the part about the Monsanto milk additives is the only thing that spurred me to an immediate change: organic milk for me now, never mind that it costs twice as much. If I can find some more good data, I will add it here.

Irishgirl...were you able to restrain yourself from smacking the supercilious twit? If so, I applaud you! Well, I applaud you regardless!

Cheers.

Oh, come on, he has a real talent for condescension!