Lisa Shock

I have to second sorbet, it's really very delicious. Juice them and mix 50-50 with simple syrup and spin. The sorbet will last 6mo to a year, so you can enjoy it later on when the weather is warmer.

black bean dip and yellow corn chips golden bell pepper crudite with black bean hummus dip made with black sesame paste, or black olive tapenade golden bell peppers cut into canape shapes, or rounds of small yellow squash, topped with black bean hummus/ black olive tapenade yellow cherry tomatoes sliced in half and hallowed out and filled with a black rice/black lentil salad black bell pepper crudite with yellow tomato and banana pepper salsa Dessert: mini fruit tarts garnished with black grapes, blackberries, yellow kiwi, bananas, santa claus melon, golden raspberries, pineapple, etc. banana flavored panna cotta topped with blackberries or black grapes

The idea of black has seemed very appealing over the past few days. Cruzan blackstrap rum is very close to being black in color, and, if served in blue tinted glassware would make a very cool black and blue drink. It also has a lightly bitter, almost burnt, flavor -which would be perfect. Some basic ideas: The Dead Date black rum & tonic with no citrus, place a dried date on the rim as a garnish The Corazón Libre black rum & cola (I prefer Jolt) float a kumquat on top For a large quantity drink, David Wondrich's Rum Punch is excellent, and if you use the black rum you will get a very black drink.

The pasta roller is useful in rolling out fondant for cake decorations.

A little whisper of cracked black pepper on the top of the shortbread before baking might be interesting. (same flavors as we see in pepper-crusted steak with a cherry/berry sauce) The chocolate drizzle is always welcome. Caramel complements the flavors, but, I'd be wary of adding too many additional flavors, and maybe it might be too much -the shortbread itself has a little caramel flavor going for it anyway. I'd say go with a dried cherry garnish and call it a day.

Port pairs well with dark chocolate. And, with plain pastries like shortbread and biscotti. I like to think of it as being similar to having a pot of jam in front of you; it provides fruit and sweet, you can pair it with a crusty-type item for a pie-like experience.

Does it have to be red? What about blue -which usually has the opposite connotations of red? That said, I cannot think of a decent blue drink. Pomegranate juice is sour and red, how about using it in a gin-based daisy, where you substitute fresh grapefruit juice for the lemon/lime to give it a bitter boost? Garnish with a 'twist' of the grapefruit rind, but, pith only -discarding the outer rind usually used for a twist.

I think a lot of supermarket meats are previously frozen. There are a few brands that state on the label that they have never been frozen. My employer has done well with RedBird chicken, which is available in supermarkets, at least out here in the west, and through our wholesale foods purveyor. They have systems in place to ensure that their product does not go below 32°F. The Federal Safety and Inspection Service allows meats to be labeled as 'fresh' as long as they have not gone below 26°F. So, you may encounter meats labeled 'fresh' which have, IMO, for all intents and purposes been frozen and will have ice damage to their cellular structure. I had hoped your temp procedure was correct, but, since you didn't explicitly state your temps, just thought I'd confirm that piece of the puzzle was not an issue. Is speed of cooking important to you? Why not try a braise, like coq au vin, or beef stew, etc?

I'd like to point out that at my PT catering job (I'm a vegetarian, so none of this stuff gets cooked at home.) we've noticed that frozen then thawed chicken releases a lot of water, whereas when we source fresh chicken that has never been frozen, the liquid release is minimal. This makes sense knowing about the damage ice crystals do to cells. I recommend buying and using never frozen meats. The one trick we use in cooking is to pull the protein off the heat a bit below the temperature required, because carryover cooking during resting will take the the temperature up to where it needs to be. For example, we bake chicken in a convection oven with a corded probe thermometer/alarm, like this one on Amazon, set for 158°. We pull it out to rest and within two minutes it's up to the 165° needed to ensure safety. Anyway, you didn't list actual temps, and, just guessing here, but, if you're pulling out, say, chicken at 165° then you are probably overcooking it, since it will go 7°-10° higher during resting, and the protein as it contracts is squeezing out liquid.

usually 100 grams per person

Mini pecan pies might be nice, they pair well with most dessert type wines especially the straw wine family and fortified wines. Mini fruit tarts, without any citrus, would probably work as well. Biscotti can be very good with red wines. Fruit compotes may also work, I'd go easy on the spices.

Just to clarify, the chart I linked to shows what various vegetables wind up cooking down to, in addition to how they trim down. So it lists one head of cabbage and the average yield as raw shredded, for a slaw recipe, and shredded then cooked, for, say, a sweet & sour cabbage. You can get a pretty good estimate of final volume for a recipe you've never cooked by using it -how it might taste would, of course, be debatable.

Off the top of my head, I can think of two ways to approach the problem. One would be to find standardized recipes in a professional cooking book, such as those used in culinary school and just make minor adjustments to them to customize to your style. The minor adjustments, like adding or removing a spice, shouldn't affect the yield much if you're careful. The other way is to find equivalency charts like THIS and research each of your recipe's items. Yes, your cabbage example is on that chart. The fact is, until you've actually made the dishes a few times in your employer's kitchen, you won't know a lot of the finer details about yield. There's usually something about a container or utensil or an annoying trait of the food itself that throws a monkey-wrench into the works. But, cost cards aren't set in stone, it's always a good idea to keep re-evaluating them.

I would like to point out that years ago I made some cheese and butter from milk/cream that I got fresh, directly from a Jersey cow. Both turned bright orange and I did nothing to color them. (I didn't even salt the butter.) So, natural beta-carotene in milk can do the trick, I guess levels of it just aren't extremely consistent. That said, annatto has a fairly mild flavor and I don't think that most people can taste it in the concentrations used in cheese. You can find it occasionally at large asian markets or spice stores if you wish to taste it for yourself. -It's certainly not like the flavor of the artificial red dyes, which I taste in all sorts of foods. (The Costco berry smoothie is really annoying in this regard.)

The bags that are inflating over time have something growing inside of them. Mold, bacteria, viruses, etc. are consuming the food and producing gases as byproducts. This is why they inflate like a balloon and why the contents smell so bad. Vacuum sealing doesn't sterilize the contents of the bags, you still need to have proper sanitation and follow safe food handling procedures.

AP flour varies in starch & gluten by region. In some parts of the U.S. (generally the NorthEast) it's very close to bread flour in terms of starch and gluten content. In other regions it's very close to cake flour(the South) and in others it's close to pastry flour. You need to get some numbers on your particular producer of AP flour for that answer. Ask for the protein content of the flour, and you'll have the answer. Generally, for a roux, you want more starch and less gluten, so, I'd avoid bread flour and go for AP or biscuit/cake flour, if available. It's hard to say about the other ratios because the darker a roux is cooked, the less it thickens and, if it's undercooked it doesn't thicken as well, either. So, how it is cooked affects it a great deal and small changes in procedure can have fairly major consequences. I'd start taking temperatures and timing everything.

Regular blender, and perhaps then run through a chinois for those perfectionists out there. Hand blender, aka immersion blender is a touchy subject. My 16-year-old Braun Multimix that has a main body similar to an old-fashioned hand mixer or egg-beater, not the newer one that is a stick-shaped immersion blender with changeable heads, is far more powerful than the waring 'professional' immersion blender I have at work. So, in general, I'd have to rate this option very low as modern equipment just doesn't seem to measure up.

It was sliced thinner, but also contained cellulose (aka wood) fiber.

I have given up on glass pans, search for 'exploding pyrex' for more info. I'm currently using vintage corningware but contemplating enameled cast iron.

Seems like it could be duplicated with the cooler trick if you could find a silicone colander that fits the dimensions of the cooler. Then you could peel off the bottom.

The understanding of the composition of a food and how various cooking techniques affect it have always been a goal of thoughtful cooks. We simply have better (and cheaper) measurement tools now. We also have better communication venues, like the Internet, which help us weed out misconceptions and inaccurate data. In the past, if a cook thought that doing something arcanely superstitious helped, say, hard-boiled eggs peel more easily, they could latch onto that activity as the only way to cook the eggs properly and perhaps even pass the misinformation on to future generations who might accept it as gospel without challenge. Nowadays, not only might I have access to better equipment to test my method at home, if I make such a claim online, others might test my method and give measurable results of the test to the public at large -adding the failure or success to the current knowledge base. Historically, we have seen similar improvements to the field, just in longer time frames. Cheap, mass publishing methods in the 1800's made cookbooks affordable to the masses and enabled cookbook authors to reach wider audiences. Magazine publishing expanded at the same time. These venues allowed good, bad, and pedestrian ideas in food science to rise and fall and sometimes re-rise as people read, tried and reviewed the authors' work. Remember that standardized measurement in the home kitchen was once a radical new idea! Of course, things haven't always worked out perfectly. Some people hold onto old myths and superstitions, like Rachel Ray continuing to write and say on television that searing meat seals in juices decades after McGee definitively debunked it. Hopefully, as communications methods become faster, we'll cycle through inaccurate garbage and dispose of it from the data stream more efficiently in the future. I can't wait to see how quaint and antiquated today's 'Modernist' cuisine will seem fifty years from now, when we will have far more accurate equipment in our kitchens!

I have seen recipes for chocolate apple cake, but have never tried it. Of course, there are the aforementioned gourmet apples on sticks dipped in chocolate and a variety of toppings.

Looks like it's related to an Italian pastry called Sfogliatelle, or sometimes lobster tails in the US. This is generally a sweet pastry, but the dough technique appears to be the same.

I'd look at reducing the water content by using grain alcohol instead of vodka, and shortening the infusion time. That said, mango has some odd starches in it which makes it difficult to use fresh in sorbets and such. Blanching cubes of it in simple syrup may help a bit.

For a veg option, I'd use the veggies to make a curry, if you have the seasoning. Puree a couple onions to use as the base of the sauce, you'll want a couple of cups of puree. I know it sounds like a lot, but, it isn't. Then saute some curry powder in oil, add the onion and any canned tomato product you may have to build the sauce. Then use the corn, carrots & broccoli, peppers and beans from your place. You can add a puree of cashew to make it 'creamy.' Serve with rice.