Lisa Shock

Telling me that small plates are for sharing. When has it ever made sense to give someone less food, and then tell them to give almost all of it away??? Big platters are for sharing. That two bite appetizer is mine, and I'll have no trouble finishing it, thank you very much!

Booze!

Either of those products should work well enough, I think. They may not extract flavor quite as well from whatever you decide to infuse with, but, they should flame very well. -And, they are both better than regular vodka.

This is good to know, I like the idea of serving desserts flambeed and having the flames actually doing something meaningful for the dish.

You could make this recipe and amp up the spices: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/14/dining/steamed-turkey-the-jacques-pepin-way.html

Thanks for the link! Glad I could help!

Crud, I saw this demoed about a year ago by a big corporate entity from Europe. The sugar crystals are brown and a bit crunchy before being flamed. It's a kit, including the custard, from a big European purveyor. I recall asking if I could just buy the sugar and being told that that the kit couldn't be broken up. Sorry, I don't recall more details. IIRC the company was Swiss....maybe...

I really enjoyed Shapiro's books. One book that keeps haunting my thoughts lately is The Last Days of Haute Cuisine by Patrick Kuh. Parts of it are written oddly, and it's oddly assembled, but, for someone who dined in some of these places at the end of their glory, it captures the status quo of a previous generation of restaurateurs. Maybe I am just old and nostalgic for places that served the full-on Escoffier menus of the early part of the last century.

You can buy pasteurized shell eggs. I've worked places where we make a lot of macaron, so, we used cartons of whites. I do not recall the cost, but, we priced accordingly. And, we had no need for yolks. Maybe a half gallon a day, it varied.

I'd be thinking about Laird's Applejack as a base, or maybe calvados.

Recently, I decided to cool down a glass of Mountain Dew, in a 17oz Duralex Picardie, with 2oz of liquid nitrogen -just for fun. The glass held up just fine. The drink developed a raft of frozen Dew floating on the top.

It definitely helps to know what the split is in formulating a product.

Just thought I'd mention that some Duralex has shown up at my local Tuesday Morning. Tumblers range from $9.99 (5oz) to $15.99 (17 oz)for 6. They also had ramekins, $5.99 for 4, dishes, and two other types of glass: straight sided and flared.

You aren't cooking it long enough. The pectin takes time to develop. Also make sure that you're using enough sugar, if you decide to reduce the amount of sugar in a cranberry sauce recipe you'll be decreasing the power of the pectin which needs sugar and acid to gell. Here's a video: http://dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/18/why-wont-my-cranberry-sauce-gel/

You don't say that you added fat before the eggs. I tend to find that eggs need a layer of fat, except with teflon, and, even then, benefit greatly from one. I grew up before teflon, and learned to make an omlette in stainless steel. Even now I cook eggs in a small carbon steel wok, but, I always add a pat of butter and swirl it around, first. Also, eggs shouldn't be cooked at super-hot temps, either.

Yeah, they have a range of products designed for different uses. You need either the exact name or the number of drops to know for certain.

It's still very close to harvest time.

I'd use 4sp to be safe.

In a restaurant situation, you'd have warmers with precise temperature controls. There are some basic warmers, and more advanced, humidity controlled ones like Alto Shaam.

Preety much, yes. There are variables with different types of potato, but, too much acid and the potatoes will seem to never finish cooking.

Acidity keeps the potato firm, too much acid and the potato will never get very soft. I put a tsp of vinegar in the pot of water when I boil potatoes for potato salad so they keep their shape. Much more than that and you won't get an appealing texture.

I'm guessing that there could be an entire buffet of bad things here, mirroring the series of bad procedures and incorrect equipment decisions. Jar lids are not designed to be re-used. Canned foods need to boiled for precise times based upon the altitude. Jars and lids need to be sterilized and used immediately. Sterile equipment (ladles, jar lifters, tongs, etc.) needs to be used with the sterile jars. Gloves are recommended. Low acid foods must be canned in a pressure canner. http://www.pickyourown.org/canningqa_pressure.htm Also, remember that modern tomatoes aren't very acidic. The canning guidelines put out by the FDA were changed because tomato types developed in the past 15 years or so are significantly different from those of the past. In other words, the canning guidelines someone may have learned in the past are no longer accepted. And, mixing other veg with the tomatoes probably raised the pH, possibly to a dangerous level. There's also the issue of degraded quality if the seal isn't true. The food is probably decayed to some degree from exposure to air, even if it isn't contaminated, and simply not all that nutritious. Next time, encourage her to freeze the food. Overall, I am sensing a generally cavalier attitude towards a process which has well documented procedures which if not followed precisely are known to have fatal results on a consistent basis. Maybe she's been lucky all these years with just doing as she pleases. I only hope that she has enough sense to just consume these items herself and not feed them to others.

I have a hard time believing that a laceration to the "bone" healed in less than 24 hours no matter how sharp the blade was. It is easy to misperceive anatomy and fingers are quite complex. My instinct is that you cut to the lowest level of your skin which is very thick in the area of the hands and one's fingers in particular. I cut the top side of the intermediate phalanx of my left middle finger straight down the middle, from knuckle to knuckle. There isn't much there and the skin is fairly thin.

Re-boiling won't get rid of toxins that have been created by bacteria, like, say, botulism. These toxins can be colorless, odorless, and fatal in very small amounts. There are several categories of foodborne illness. You've got pathogens which infect the body and make you ill, like e. coli, parasites, like worm eggs in fish, and, toxins created by bacteria and other organisms. I'd toss them all. It's not just the foodstuffs and how they were handled, I'd also be suspicious about the 'clean' jars. Canning requires sterilized jars. Based on just the handling of the jars, I'd toss the lot.

I use ceramic almost exclusively at home. They do need sharpening after a couple of years, save the manufacturer info and your receipt for a free sharpening. I found that my Kyocera knives were sharper to start with and overall better than some Swiss ones I got at Home Goods. I like the lack of heft, it means that I can move more quickly and don't get tired, no sore wrists, with big, time consuming projects. The only time I use my steel knives is to cut really hard large items like raw butternut squash. Ceramics move through potatoes, fennel and most other veg just fine. The blade is thinner, meaning that you get more accurate cuts. The knife moves very swiftly and you can cut much, much thinner slices without breaking the food. Yes, at first it feels like a plastic toy. But, it's as sharp as a razor and does most of the work for you. I'd also like to point out that once I was being very foolish and cutting a few florets off a cauliflower while holding it in my hand and the knife slipped and I cut my finger, badly. (I saw bone.) I had things to do, and just wrapped the finger and kept going. The next day, I went to change the dressing and the cut was gone, healed without a scar, as if nothing had happened.