Mallet

That's it! I'm sending my (future) kids out to school with a packed steak tartare once a week. Maybe some of that evil homemade potato salad too...

wow indeed. What is the stuff in the tray? By water pan do you just mean a sort of aluminum foil drip tray underneath? I have just bought a gas grill and am hoping to use it to smoke various things this summer...

Deep fried fat always seemed a little too much for me, until I tried it...

When I want a no fail knock-'em out of the park dish, I turn to Bouchon . It has never failed me (maybe because whenever I cook from it I have this weird feeling that Thomas Keller is breathing down my neck behind me and will get angry if I screw it up )

M&C with fresh pasta is a terrific idea! I'd leave a bit of pasta overhang (sort of like lasagna) because the crusty bits after baking are sooo good.

a few fries short of a Happy Meal

Emeril's also has a line of meats, clogs, knives etc.. Here is a more or less complete list

Looking at the original Science article and also the PNAS one, it seems that Legname et al. are using a synthetic/recombinant prion as the infectious agent. I can't seem to find a sentence about the part of Patrick S' quote which I found the most interesting: Can anyone point me to the appropriate part of the paper?

Patrick, thanks for bringing this to the table. I had no idea that prions could be "made from scratch", without an abnormal protein to convert them.

I'm not really sure, but it might be easier to find salted fatback (I can easily find it in supermarkets). You could then desalt it by soaking in water or (faster) putting a chunk in cold water and bringing it to a boil, much like you would do with salt fish.

It isn't, and 9 times out of ten I will do one of the above. Like everyone else mentionned above, KD is just a taste I grew up with and sometimes I find myself wanting it (like about once every couple of months). Also, I find it amazing how the exact same box can end up making so many different things when put into the hands of different people, and that's not even counting all the additions! Adding green peppper and ground beef was mentionned upthread, this is widely known as "rocket fuel". Would anybody here confess to putting ketchup in their Kraft Dinner? I've only seen it done a couple of times and frankly I can't imagine it being very good...

Let's face it.... everyone has to resort to Kraft Dinner sometime, whether it be because you just don't feel like making anything or because you simply crave it. So: How do you make it? What are your favorite additions?

last time I checked, Toronto did not equal Canada

Has anyone ever seen " The Green Butchers" ?

I certainly had no idea that there was disagreement on the issue, and like docsconz I found the pro-prion argument on the NOVA website much more convincing. I can't say I fully understand the conceptual hangups about proteins not being able to self-replicate and/or not being able to "transmit information". Firstly, to the best of my knowledge no-one is claiming prions self-replicate; I have only seen the claim that they can convert other (pre-existing) proteins into prions. Secondly, we already know that proteins do almost all of the work in living cells, including literally thousands of known examples of one protein inducing a change in the shape of another. I fail to see a controversy at the conceptual level, although to be sure we are free to argue about the results.

Prions are not really alive in any common sense of the word (they have no DNA or anything like that, and aren't really self-replicating). Prions are single proteins with an unusual structure which causes them to induce other proteins to fold incorrectly (which is how the disease spreads). It's certainly feasible that some particles would end up in other tissues.

I have this Soehnle scale. It's cheaper than the triple but has many of the same features. It's accurate too (100 mL from a graduated cylinder weighs exactly 100 g). edited: to add that, should you drop it from a great height and break it, it's easily taken apart and fixed (not that I would know about something like that )

You can definitely use a water stone for both knives and cleavers. For a cleaver a coarser stone should probably be used (think: axe sharpening ). The eGCI course on Knife Sharpening and Maintenance is an excellent resource (right here).

NO beef gets cooked in my household without me tasting it raw first!

Maybe a big paté/terrine/galantine would work. It can be made days in advance and certainly has the wow factor.

Unfortunately adult fruit flies can live for weeks, so getting rid of a big infestation isn't always so simple.

The closest I can come is the time I ate a supersized double grand slam meal at Wendy's. The line ground to a halt to make this burger and lo, it was good. The burger was so high I couldn't actually take a bite from it, but had to scrape off hunks of greasy meat with my two front teeth...

We recently went out to Luigina's for a friend's birthday. Everyone had a truly excellent meal, highly recommended!

In my lab, we use fly traps baited with a piece of very ripe banana and a splash of cidder vinegar (a small pinch of yeast helps too). Make at least 2 of these, and cycle them in and out of the freezer every 2 days to keep flies from breeding inside the traps (you always have one trap out on the counter and another in the freezer).

This seems like an affordable (and expandable!) storage solution..