Lisa Shock

I'm a vegetarian, so, at home I make and use vegetable stock or water. I disagree with Ruhlman on a lot of issues, including food safety, but, I really like THIS blog post of his on water. I use water a lot, it gives a clean pure flavor. I also add herbs and vegetables to it. For example, if I make a packet of ramen, I don't use the flavor packet that comes with it. I'll slice a little bit of onion and a mushroom paper thin, and add them at the start of heating the water along with some salt and a dash of dark soy sauce. By the time the water is boiling, a nice broth has started forming. I usually also toss a small handful of frozen (or fresh) green beans and a little frozen spinach (plus random fresh veg) in at the end of cooking the noodles. I also make risotto with water. I save vegetable scraps in my freezer until I have a couple of pounds and then make stock. I freeze the stock in square or rectangular shaped containers, including ice cube trays, overnight then I pop them out and vacuum seal them in bags. I've usually got some ice cubes of stock (a couple tbs each) and maybe a block of a cup or two handy, in addition to quarts for soup making. I try to consistently make a mixed veg one, and also make single flavor ones with particular soups or dishes in mind -like carrot for carrot soup and celery for my 'green rice.' I do have carnivore friends who save meat scraps, chicken and turkey carcasses, necks and backbones, etc. in their freezer and then make stock when convenient. I know one person who makes it in the oven for about 4 hours on the lowest setting after baking something else and thereby mostly using energy that would be wasted; apparently the oven doesn't run much except a little bit at the end.

If it's not vacuum sealed, then small amounts of air do get in and dry it out. The rate depends on the seal and the local humidity from day to day. The bamboo may absorb a little, but, I think the air is your culprit.

I mix strained jam with a simple american buttercream to make a flavored filling that is colorful and can be seen better than jam alone. -By american buttercream, I mean the recipe that appears on the box of powdered sugar which uses real butter, a little milk and my homemade vanilla extract. I cut down on the milk amount a little when adding jam.

Gelato, mostly the fruit flavors and sorbettos. That said, the best pistachio paste I have ever tasted (and I go to pastry chef conventions and taste a lot of product) was one made in Sicily -it was a very dark brown color. I tasted two different gelatos made with it and they were amazing. Normally, I am not a huge fan of the nut flavors, this changed my mind. So, remember, use high quality ingredients, be open to odd colors, and shop around for the best taste.

Sounds good. I'd strip, heat, then apply the first thin coat. This website suggests 6 thin coats.

You can, but, be careful about your temperatures. If you melt the chocolate first it's easy to burn it when the cream is added. Depending on the manufacturer, white chocolate can burn at 108°F and above, milk chocolate at 115°F+, and, dark chocolate at 118°F+.

And, of course, a old-school, suzie-homemaker style recipe that gives you a volume based measurement for dry ingredients (like sugar, which chemically is more wet, but, I digress -you buy sugar by weight, you should use it by weight) won't be very accurate to begin with. You'll get plenty of variation in results just following the written instructions every time, since your measurements will vary every time you make the recipe. Once again, professional bakeries use weight-based formulas so that they can get consistent results (and consistent profits) every time.

Albert still owes me a copy of Natura. Used copies occasionally show up on Amazon, but they are never priced below $249.

It just takes a long time to bake. I'm lucky that a local Asian supermarket carries some already baked tofu in the cold case. I don't recall the brand name, I'm currently out, but it's from California and comes plain and soy-sauce marinated. I'll take a picture next I get some.

Also, take a look at your pot. Is it old? Does it have lots of micro-abrasions on the surface? A scratched up surface will cause more sticking than a new, smooth one.

I just found a knife skills demo video on Rachel Ray's 'Every Day with Rachel Ray' magazine website. Guess who isn't in it?

And since I use eggs infrequently, I sometimes forget that I have eggs stored in the fridge, especially if the carton works its way to the back of the shelf and other items are placed in front of it, and if I forget long enough, the quality of the eggs definitely suffers. BTW, old eggs don't make very good popovers, they don't rise as well as fresh eggs -you're more likely to get hockey pucks. Al Sicherman did a series of popover experiments for his newspaper column which eventually wound up in his very wonderful cookbook, Caramel Knowledge.

If you look at the studies of hand drying after washing, you'll see that paper towels win over other methods of hand drying in eliminating bacteria while the hand blower type dryer tests show they actually increase the amount of bacteria. This result may seem puzzling at first, since all of the hand washing in these tests was carefully regulated. What people tend to forget is that our skin isn't a sealed surface that can be cleaned and remain clean if nothing else is touched. Nope. We have pores, and these pores have oil, dead skin and bacteria in them -including E. Coli. When you wash then pat dry with a towel, you effectively clean the surface of the skin. But, over time, and with workday pressure being applied to the skin, the bacteria rises to the surface contaminating it again. Hand dryers, with their instructions to rub ones hands vigorously create a situation where the user is pushing bacteria to the skin's surface very quickly and then smearing it around. Anyway, glove use, when properly implemented, is designed to protect foods from being contaminated by the bacteria on our hands. IMO, this law fills in gaps in previous laws. It never made sense to me to let barroom staff dip bare hands into 'bar salad' after handling money, dirty dishes, etc. behind a bar while the kitchen crew wears gloves for anything cold.

There are big differences between US eggs sold in supermarkets and eggs sold elsewhere in the world. Eggs in the US have the protective coating, called bloom, washed off with chemicals. Without that barrier, those eggs are much more susceptible to becoming infected with bacteria especially if they get wet in any way. (like, say, the fine 2ft+ diameter spray of water and salmonella that washing a chicken in the sink creates) Eggs in other countries are still sealed by the bloom and need less care in handling.

I recall a culinary school instructor friend of mine pointing out, sometime around season 4 of '30 Minute Meals,' she started holding her knife properly. We speculated about which sponsor insisted that she learn basic knife skills so as to stop embarrassing them -clearly the network either had no clue or did not care.

The early seasons of TC usually had at least one, if not several, contestant/s who had no formal training. A few occasionally get through the early rounds and make it fairly far. I recall an interview with Tom where he mentioned a few contestants by name who were clearly in above their heads but got fairly far on the show because other people managed to fail more spectacularly for more than a few challenges in a row. Oh, and then there's Tyler Stone.

I use my Foodsaver vacuum sealer to seal larger quantities of things like salts and spices in canning jars. You can get jars as small as 4oz in size and store things almost indefinitely. Before I got the Foodsaver, I noticed that a baggie of salt that a friend of mine had brought from Afghanistan was taking on the flavors of my spice drawers/cabinet. I have small quantities in glass spice jars I got at BB&B for ease of use while most of my 'stash' is sealed and in my cupboard.

Scales have been used in kitchens, including American ones, since the invention of the scale, several thousand years ago. I own cookbooks dating back to the early 1700s that use weight based measurement. My mother owns a kitchen scale with date in the 1840s stamped on it. Farmers, tradesmen, professional cooks, and many others used scales in their homes and businesses on a daily basis to buy and sell commodities and wares. Sometime around 1900, US publishers decided to drop weight based measurement while publishers in the Britain, France, Spain, Germany, Russia, Italy, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Egypt, India, Pakistan, South Africa, Greece, Japan, China, Korea, The Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and many more countries continued to publish weight-based recipes for home and professional use. The recipes he wants to convert aren't really all that old, they are, however, poorly written by authors who did not take advantage of readily available technology. Would you sous vide meat to done-ness based upon just the feel of the meat compared to the feel of the base of your thumb, without the use of any thermometers? If you found a recipe written telling you to just use touch instead of a thermometer in sous vide would you trust it more than tips from a chef instructor with years of experience using thermometers who tells you to use a thermometer for more accurate results? Would you keep asking questions of the chef about your ongoing inaccurate results using the thumb method after ignoring his advice several times? That would be Dunning-Kruger in action.

True, but, they (weight based recipes) have a better chance of working than recipes based on volume measurement. We're all working with differences in humidity, altitude, wheat varieties, water hardness, yeast strains, friction factor of our mixer, etc. Experience teaches each of us to know exactly how to get the best possible result from our ingredients and kitchens. Recipes, for those who choose to write them, communicate our experience to others. Volumetric measure of dry ingredients in a recipe lets me know immediately that the author routinely accepts a level of random variation and inaccuracy in the final product which I myself, and most of the civilized world, consider unacceptable. And, Chef Hitz's books are designed as an introduction to bread baking for home cooks, not professional kitchens. -He does teach professional classes and offer formulas for professional use, just not in those books.

Unfortunately, just about all the bread recipes I have use cups, not weight, and I'd hate to toss them all out just because they don't use weight. These are recipes I've been collecting since 1967, when I got my very first recipe from a little café in Durango, Colorado. Classic example of the Dunning Kruger effect creating a 'blind leading the blind' situation. The books I referenced are from a bread baker who has won gold medals at recent world-level baking competitions in addition to many national-level competitions. Those competitions are incrementally more difficult to enter (nevermind winning) than they were 20 years ago, because the state of the art has undergone immense improvement.

Start with weight based formulas. That's what professional bakeries use. Anyone putting out volume-based formulas isn't serious about quality; GIGO. If you want to invest in a bread baking book, I strongly recommend Ciril Hitz's books. He also has some great youtube videos.

I'll be cooking a simple lunch for a group of low income senior citizens. I'm going Italian this year: turkey soup with fennel, green beans, and turkey meatballs (stock made from the bones of the Christmas turkey last week) semolina bread fennel, orange and olive salad (my neighbor has gifted me with pounds of lovely organic oranges) orange & Tahitian vanilla panna cotta (made with peels from said oranges)

I started out in an Italian place (mostly pizza) when I was a teenager. I did the AM prep for a couple of years. We'd cook spaghetti until it just became flexible, with a tough interior. Then it would be drained, rinsed with cold water, weighed and placed in sandwich baggies. We had a pasta station on the steam table. When an order came in, the pasta went into the hot water pot on the table for a couple of minutes, then was drained and sauced with sauce that was being held. I am wondering if you can get ahold of a slow cooker and a colander that fits inside it? Then you could prep the pasta in advance, heat up water in the slow cooker with the colander in it, dump in the pasta for 2-3 minutes and just pull up the colander when done. My other thought is that you should just make the dish in a ramekin, refrigerate, and reheat in a low oven.

I like sourdough, a good one will have a springy texture.

Got a Kill-a-Watt at Lowes and love it.