Lilija

I think that, like granulated, has places. I never used it before, till a friend of mine gave me her recipe for arroz con pollo, and she insisted that I HAD to use the jarred stuff for it. I tried it with fresh, and for sure it didn't taste like hers (which is the best goddamned arroz con pollo I've ever had in my life). So, I keep it around, again, for certain things. It's not as sharp as fresh, and melds nicely with rice. I think, though, using it in EVERY instance where fresh garlic should be, you might be missing out on some of the hot sharpness that fresh offers.

I'm a fan. Like other's have said, it's got a whole other flavor profile, and simply goes where fresh garlic can't. I went through the same "middle" phase, where I banished it. I've come full circle, at this point. My chicken salad and barbecue rubs would be bland shadows of themselves without granulated garlic.

I cut it into thicker pieces, and quickly sear it on a hot pan. It gets a little more cooked, but with good timing, you should get it warm, a little brown on the outside, but the center stays rare. I use this technique for lamb, too, when I have leftover leg of lamb.

I've always turned to a peanut butter sandwich. Just a gob of PB on a slice of bread, folded. Usually with a glass of milk. A bowl of cereal is nice, too. Lately, in the interest of calories, I've been having my peanut butter on Wasa Light Rye crispbreads, and that's really good, I think I like it better than the actual bread. If I'm starving, I have a banana along with it, or in my cereal.

I've been thinking long and hard about this. I couldn't think of anything, initially. I have a few great desserts, but nothing really showstopping or in a heavy rotation. Then I remembered the Chicken and Dumplings. First, it's entirely mine. I learned chicken soup at my Polish grandmother's side, and have made it my own. The broth includes a whole chicken, a mess of chicken feet, extra wings, carrots, onions, celery, turnips and parsnips, all simmered till it falls apart, strained and the chicken picked over. The dumplings are a long-tweaked egg noodle recipe enriched with extra egg and butter, cut painstakingly into a thousand tiny pillows. They're dusted with a lot of extra flour, and they go into the pot with all that extra flour clinging to them, along with the best bits of the chicken, more carrots and celery, some fresh parsley, dill and a load of black pepper. It takes forever to cook. When I make it, I set aside an entire day. This goes without saying, but it also makes enough to feed a small third-world country. The results are a huge bowl of extremely rich, glossy, deep gold, heavy broth, that is so loaded with collagen it makes your lips stick together. The broth just fills in the space around chicken, toothsome yet light dumplings, and veggies. Not exactly soup. It's my gift to sick friends. This won't just make you feel better, it'll bring you back from the dead. It's textbook comfort food, presented at my personal best. It's a reputation maker. It once brought a friend of mine to tears. It's requested heavily by friends and family as soon as the weather gets cold. In fact, I think I know what I'm doing this Saturday. My best friend has been pestering me to make this since June. (I just wish someone would make it for ME when I'm sick!)

Welding equipment! Among all those lovely suggestions (now I'm thinking some cornish hens) welding stuff... we got welding gloves before the last trip, and they were amazing. I used them for everything, moving around hot pans, poking the fire and adjusting logs, even digging around in the ice filled cooler. If you plan to pit cook often, welding gloves would definitely come in handy. That, and loooong handled tongs, spoons, and spatulas.

This is fitting, we just got back from a short camping excursion. I do almost all my cooking on a firepit, when we camp. I have a small stove for heating things up real fast in the early mornings before we start the fire, but besides that, we do everything on the pit from bacon and biscuits to a dijon and rosemary rubbed roasted pork loin smothered with onions, to brownies. This trip I made fajitas with London Broil, and charred peppers and onions one evening, and a bolognese sauce (with all the leftover meats, bacon, and burgers), spaghetti, and garlic bread the next night. With a good controlled fire, and pots and pans that you don't care if they get black, you can do anything you do on your firepit. My suggestion is split a bunch of wood to small pieces, and use them to better control your heat. You have to tinker, and fiddle, and spin the pots to get the heat even, but to me, that's all part of the fun. This is a great thread, we're going camping again around Columbus Day, and I'm already making up a menu. We're gonna be out there for a week, this time, so I need a lot of good ideas. We're already talking Greek, something like souvlaki. Maybe a paella, or jambalaya. Also, I'm in the mood for gumbo. Rice gives me trouble, on the pit, though.

I'm a big fan of those Japanese purple sweet potatoes, and they definitely stay purply when you cook them. They would make delicious chips, for your cabbage combo. If you have access to an Asian market, you could probably find them there.

I don't know if I have more than what's typical. I did have to sort of audition for this position for about 6 weeks, before they narrowed it down to myself and two others. There were over 800 people staging initially, and it came down to three. It's possible that I do have more tastebuds, but I never stopped to count them I can taste something and identify most if not all of what's in it, to what degree of intensity, and mostly if it's "real" though. On eGullet, that's not so special, it's a sport to deconstruct stuff and remake it at home! I bet everyone here would make it on the team, so to speak. Smokers have dulled or reduced tastebuds, there are no smokers allowed on my panel, whatsoever. We also have a lot of rules about what we can and cannot eat or do surrounding the workday, and smoking is THE big one. Also, no coffee 3 hours before, no strong mouthwashes, tooth brushing, perfumes, strongly scented soaps or body products, no lipsticks or balms, the "don't" list goes on forever. I think everyone has different numbers of tastebuds, or flavor receptors, or levels of intensity. Even in my highly specialized place, there's a LOT of dissent and arguing, when we first tackle something. There's a whole lot of background both physiologically and psychologically that goes into taste, flavor recognition, and perceptions. Even though I'm sensitive, I love a lot of salt, sharp, tangy, bitter, and spicy flavors, the one thing I can't handle is an overload of one thing, like heavy garlic used exclusively. I don't think preferences are conclusive, really.

Lilija, can you say more about your work and its relationship to processed flavors? IIRC, Eric Schlosser argued that there's little difference between artificial and natural flavorings these days, given that "natural" simply means that the chemical was derived from an extremely complicated process starting with a grown ingredient instead of a synthesized one; as a result, there's little to no chemical difference in the two. Honestly, I wish I could tell you more. I'm on a taste panel, and we're deliberately kept in the dark about most of the process, due to the nature of what I do. Generally, we're start with an unlabeled, uncolored, plain looking food or beverage product, most basically white rice or plain water with the flavor compound introduced. When we do new stuff, and it's up to us to figure out wtf it is/tastes like. Then, once we hit on WHAT it is, then we have to analyze the intensities, off tastes, various nuances, and aftertastes. Then we compare it to a fresh item, say basil, for instance, and analyze that, too, differences, similarities, all that. Then, we analyze the flavor in the actual product, sauces, soups, broths, noodle or rice dishes. We're the "after", the how whatever flavoring works in the food it's contracted for. My friend is in the "before" phase, they develop the flavors, to match real as closely as possible. When they're trying to make a better beef, they have to taste and analyze beef in many forms, roasted, grilled, boiled, and many cuts, ground, cubed, diced, with many salt levels. Then they try to determine which works for the product, and which sums up "beef" the best, for whatever it is. Then, I suppose the data goes off to the lab for creation. We've done everything from orange drink, to sports drinks, yogurt, beef, chicken, roasted beef and chicken, plain umami, salted umami, the heat and biting compounds of ginger, ginger, various mint flavors, and the cooling and biting compounds of mint, fruit flavors, fruit in yogurt, the dairy (yes, that's a flavor profile) the dairy flavor of yogurt, fruity cereal, vegetal flavors for salty snacks, garlic, basil, parsley for broths, sauces, and salad dressings, heat and biting compounds of cinnamon for gum, mint for gum, sweeteners for gum, and we went for almost a year working on sugars, sugar alcohols, artificial sweeteners, and natural lower calorie sweeteners, for the big soft drink companies. We did a ton with Stevia, when it was approved. Everything we try is FDA approved, or GRAS. Once, they tried getting us to do a non approved pharmaceutical salt blocker type of blood pressure drug, but the whole panel mustered together, and declined. Now, when I say "fake" it might be naturally derived, and they certainly don't have to put on the label that it's fake, you don't really see that too much on say, chicken broth. But, it's pretty damn far from a boiled chicken. Umami is a naturally occurring flavor in many things, which is what I was getting at initially. I chuckle to myself when people freak out about MSG, and they eat it regularly and in vast quantities, when they munch on Doritos, rice cakes, or have a can of condensed soup. I don't see those same people freaking out about their cheese or tomatoes, or mushrooms, either... I don't know thing one about the process of creation. I only know that most "fake" will fool any typical consumer. It fools me, and I was trained for it, for years. It's a very cool, slightly high pressure job. A sinus infection can really screw up your week. The company contracts out to huge conglomerates, like Unilever, for scents and flavors. We do a lot of stuff for Knorr, Bertolli, Lipton. Pepsi and Coke are other companies that hire IFF for flavors. There's a whole scent side, too, that deals with soaps, shampoos, fine fragrance, air fresheners, cleaners. We don't make the stuff, we make what makes it smell and taste good. Sorry for rambling about my job so much, I hope it is at least a little enlightening.

Things I cannot say no to: Fresh salsa and salty chips. Fudge, good rich dark chocolaty plain fudge. (Or a fudgy plain brownie, but it has to be an amazing brownie.) Crusty good bread. I don't even need butter, but if crunchy, crispy, crackly bread happens my way, then it totally owns me. NJ peaches, too. I ate half a bushel of local peaches last week. Whiskey I have conquered all my demons but these.

As a diabetic, I wouldn't be offended by a gift of vanilla sugar. There's room in our lifestyle for sugar, in fact it's quite necessary, in moderation. There's tons of great ideas here, but in case you come up blank, it would probably be ok. Especially if you tucked it in with some nice (non infused) coffee or something.

Ok, my first post since all the newness... I learned to make the best tuna melt I've ever had, from this little local sandwich shop. They took it off the menu, but I still make it, it's rather addictive. Purists, avert your eyes. We're gonna do weird stuff to tuna. Take a Portuguese roll, split it lengthwise, and toast it. Top with your favorite tuna salad (theirs is made with lemon, ground hot peppers, and diced carrots, sounds weird, but the textural appeal wins). On top of your tuna, some slices of plum tomato, avocado, crispy bacon, and some sort of mixed shredded cheese blend...a LOT. I'm fond of mozzarella/cheddar mixed. You want the cheese to be like, mountained on top of it. Broil it till the cheese melts and gets brown. They used to serve chips and housemade salsa on the side, I would skip the chips and dump the fresh salsa over the top. I think it's key, I still do it at home. The whole thing is a tuna melt adventure, and one is enough to feed a family of four.

Now, is it a smoothie without fruit? Because one of my favorite breakfast blender concoctions involves frozen coffee cubes, soy or regular milk, and chocolate whey powder... It's this lovely creamy mocha protein bomb.

Here's something I learned at work. We can synthesize *any* flavor. In typical jarred pasta sauces, you taste basil, and parsley and garlic, right? Fake, fake, fake. Not all brands, but last summer, we spent months working on those three flavors for a big sauce company (they wouldn't tell us which), and it got to the point that I couldn't tell the difference between artificial and natural basil. That's just one small example. I've also had fake chicken and beef flavors, for a type of packaged gravy, and innumerable (and impressively realistic) fake fruit flavors. Thursday I had a fake popcorn flavor, not popcorn butter, but popcorn itself, flavor sprayed on little rice puff things. It was startlingly similar. Also, MSG is in way more stuff than you would think. Any packaged food that is salty, meaty, savory has a form of MSG in it, even though it might not be labeled as such. MSG is derived from all sorts of stuff, so one thing you might see on a label is "yeast extractive" or something, and that's just fancy terms for MSG. Chips, dressings, soup, just...any thing. MSG also occurs naturally in a lot of foods, like tomatoes, seaweed, mushrooms, cheese, but at way smaller concentrations. My job has made me quit processed food.

And I once sat in on a Chinese-style cooking demonstration where one dish was, basically, green beans deep-fried in a wok till they were wrinkly and slightly browned. They were removed from the oil and drained. Most of the oil was poured out of the wok at that point, and a spicy sauce with a bit of ground pork was constructed in that same wok. The beans were tossed back in at the last moment. It was tasty! MelissaH ← That's one of my all time favorite Chinese (style?) dishes. Not sure if it's authentic, but our local place does it so well. It's old news, I know, but a deep fried Oreo rocked my world once. Once was enough, but it was kind of a revelation. The deep fried dill pickle was pretty badass, too. If I have one deep fried weakness (besides those devil string beans, I guess) it's tempura sweet potatoes.

Thanks again! I edited out fermented, because upon reading the Tea 101 thread, I noticed that many teas are fermented. I was thinking of one that I really like from the Asian market, called Yunnan Bo-Nay that's funky, salty and twangy. Again, thanks for pointing me in the right direction.

I meant high quality tea, with a little extra added caffeine. Two cups sounds like it might be a better answer, haha. After posting this, I poked around and did some more research on my own, and I'm starting to believe that sort of tea is akin to processed food. Thanks very much for the links, teas are something I've been meaning to learn about for a long time now. I love all manner of brewed teas, especially strong black tea and smoked teas... but I'm uneducated

Are there any decent quality loose (or a good quality bagged) tea with added caffeine? I'm a fan of (should I admit this here? I'm new to this section of eGullet...) Celestial Seasons Fast Lane and Morning Thunder black teas. I like tea better than coffee, and I like the more subtle energy boost. I like the Fast Lane, but I'd like something better quality, something I can get loose, or just other options in general. Are there any good ones? What would you recommend?

...look over my shoulder, chatting, while rapidly slicing carrots on a mandolin (do I even need to add this? Without the hand guard, of course). I have a quarter inch thick slice missing from the side and pad of my thumb. I also had to throw the carrots out.

I find looking at them quite pleasing, the pictures here are really attractive. That's as far as it goes... A pox on eggs in general, though. I can barely stomach the smell of them cooking. Not too long ago, I had a dreadful experience with 6 failed attempts at soft-boiled eggs. Dreadful.

This is something I have to think about very hard, right now. I found out I was diabetic a few weeks ago, and my doc put me on an 1800 calorie diet. I thought it would be torture, but I have to say, it's shockingly easy. I think that's important, the easy part, because if I had to really change things, and deny myself, I wouldn't be able to do it. I once told my doctor I would rather eat well, and be fat and happy, than be skinny, denying, and depressed. Finding the balance wasn't too hard. I'll eat anything, but I'm learning the art of the trade off. Like, do I really want that 300 calorie hot dog, when I can have 3 pieces of barbecued chicken instead? Sometimes, I'll eat that hot dog, and have it with a salad, or something. Whatever I'm in the mood for. Yesterday, we had a barbecue, I had the barbecued chicken, watermelon sorbet, a lemon bar, baked beans, coleslaw, potato salad...some pretzels, a few Jack and diet Cokes, on top of a good breakfast, and I still came in under 1800 calories. It's been easy because my family loves vegetables and isn't picky, and easy because I use food and activity journaling software. It really is as simple as calories in, calories out. I burn more than I eat, and I can eat anything I damn well please. The worst thing about it is the tedium of sitting down and entering everything I eat into the program. The biggest thing I've learned is that I used to eat about three times more, portion wise, than I needed to. I've also upped my activity level. I got a pedometer, and fixed up my bike. I aim for a minimum of 5000 steps and a half hour of riding a day, or 10000 steps. I already did yoga, and tai chi, so I sub those in on days I don't feel like walking or biking anywhere. My doc gave me the 1800 calorie diet thinking I was totally sedentary, and I'm not, but it works, and I think I burn more. I read this thread a few weeks ago, when I had to change things, and it helped me. I'm using a few of your philosophies, now, regularly. I don't eat bad food, ever. If it's not awesome, I won't eat it. That alone has cut out about 3 fast food meals a week, and incalculable refrigerator raids. I'm stuffed, I eat good food, I've have good energy, my blood sugar has been doing well, and that's what I care about. I happen to be losing weight, too, but it's almost like some kind of side effect. My weight never bothered me, and I would never go on a diet simply for cosmetic reasons. I think health, not looks has been the huge motivator.

I worked at Shop-Rite, in high school, as a cashier. I had to go to "Shop Rite School" for a week, before they let me behind a register. Five days of classes, 6 hours a day...one of the days was just about bagging. I learned how to set up two rectangular boxes, then put a specified amount of cans or jars in between, then a few light items on top...I learned that one of the most common things that breaks is yogurt cups. Yogurt gets sat on top of the egg carton, and a loaf of bread laid in sideways. Very specific stuff here, and I was a cashier, not a bagger. I was chatting with a cashier at that same Shop Rite a few months ago, asking if they still went to "Shop Rite School" and she gave me a blank stare. Turns out, not only do they not go to school, the week of in store training has been cut to 3 days. That pretty much answered all my questions. I bag all my own stuff, all the time. Saves time on unpacking. I sort it by where the stuff gets put away. It's nice, when you bring your own bags, you save yourself a conflict. Baggers (unless you're at TJs, but they're good anyway) leave me alone with mine. Some of those reusable bags are enormous. I can fit 4 plastic bags worth of stuff in a Whole Foods reusable.

And by somethingawful, I meant rathergood. I'm getting my one word websites mixed up.

My favorite thing about that whole post was the baby's permanent "WTF" face. I feel ya, baby. I love somethingawful. Not so much on the meatini.