Torrilin

The labor cost is not primarily time, it's training. If a restaurant makes a specialty of tableside dishes, they need to have a staff that can prepare them well every time. This is not usually in a waiter's job description, so they have to spend time training the waiter to do it. If it's guacamole, there might not be much of a premium. If it's steak Diane or another flamed dish, there probably is a premium (tho you might not notice it on the menu). Caesar salad? well, depends on how much trouble they have teaching staff to get the emulsion right I suspect. Skilled labor can *always* charge more, and at a place that does many tableside dishes, the staff is skilled. So when you're making up your business plan at the start, you have to plan on more staff training time, and you have to plan that new servers will take a little longer to train. It's also well to plan on some way of making sure the staff is well paid, because that reduces turnover. You have to budget for any special tools the staff will need. You can't squeeze the maximum number of tables into your restaurant, it wouldn't be safe. So each table needs to produce more revenue every night. You need a chef who likes teaching enough that he or she can handle staff training. For a restaurant where they expect the bill for 2 diners to come out around $150 or so, this extra trouble is no big deal. Most of it they'd do anyway. For a restaurant where they're happy when the bill makes it to $50, it's much more of a big deal. And well, there's a lot more of the latter in the world than there are of the former. Emily

Sandalwood is endangered, to the point where the EO is pushing $2000/lb. It may well be that stores that used to have sandalwood powder can't afford to stock it any longer. Emily

I like 'em with salt. Occasionally salt and vinegar. But they should be good enough that plain is fine. If they're not, you're eating the wrong damn french fries. Emily

I've had some traditionally prepped olives that were quite awful, and some that are just to die for delicious. They vary quite a bit. Unfortunately, traditionally cured olives must be high in the same chemical that's in sharp cheeses... If I eat too many, I get a headache just like with the cheese. Sadly, this means no feta for me, and I limit my olive consumption. Emily

It's probably much less common due to concerns about eggs and salmonella. Add in that it's a tableside showpiece dish and thus expensive to do even if the ingredients aren't, and it's no surprise that it's not commonly done. The one place I know that does this kind of thing has nearly the entire waitstaff trained to prepare the flambeed dishes at tableside. They keep specially set up carts with portable burners and space for their mise en place. It's clearly a phenomenal amount of work and expense. They won't do caesar salad tho, probably because of salmonella concerns. The restaurant's prices clearly reflect their staff's training. It's *not* an inexpensive meal. When I *do* go to a restaurant that offers tableside preparation of things like Caesar salad or steak Diane I tend to go overboard on 'em. I have a very childish fondness for having everything that possibly can be set on fire. Drama is good, especially if the food lives up to the drama. Emily

It's not difficult to roast a larger bird. Like all else to do with chicken, good results take practice and attention to detail. If you roast chicken often enough, you'll find there's a set of distinctive scents that tell you when it's time to take a step, or when it's time to not take a step. There are also clear visual cues that should be heeded. The size of the chicken doesn't matter anywhere *near* as much as paying attention to what you're doing does. The skin having the right level of crispness looks distinctive and smells distinctive. If you're turning the bird, you want the skin that's on the surface to start to have that roasted meat fat crisp smell before you turn. Visual inspection should show that the exposed skin is visibly crispy, and has the level of brownness that you want. If those signs aren't there, don't flip yet. Trust your eyes and nose, not the recipe. The recipe's author didn't have your chicken (or your oven). I've had 8lb birds be easy roasts, with juicy meat and enough pan juices to float a boat. I've had 3lb birds be the most finicky bird ever, and come out dry. And well, I have the most trouble with finicky birds when I'm not roasting much. Experience will tell you when a particular bird is doomed to being a golden roast and when you've got a deep brown one. I don't use color of the skin as an indicator, because some birds just refuse to go dark without help from a sugar glaze. I'd rather leave the bird plainer and just live with the level of browning the bird will naturally do. The *texture* of the skin being right is more important than the color. You can always help the color along if you really want to. You can't help the texture along. Emily

There are tendons and cartilage. I've boned enough of 'em to know. Also blood vessels. If the bird is healthy, there are fat deposits at certain points on the breast. There's also a thin layer of silverskin under the actual chicken skin. Anyway, as a child, I was easily grossed out by meat that had blood vessels. My sibs were the same way. It's not I didn't want to think about the animal, I found the texture disgusting and unpleasant. Instead of making every meal a battle, Mom bought chickens and boned the breasts for feeding to her obnoxious offspring. And well, boning enough chicken for a family of five is a lot of work, so we all learned to bone chicken. At the time, pre-boned chicken breast was only available from Perdue or the like, and was very very expensive. It was much cheaper to buy whole chickens or parts from local producers and debone them yourself. I'm glad she did that for us. It was very clear that there was a lot of meat on a bird that we were refusing to eat. Instead of throwing it away, she used the "inedible" stuff to make soup. And no sane child turns down homemade chicken soup. If we asked why she insisted on using the whole thing she pointed out that she'd paid good money for it, it was nutritious, and it was disrespectful to the animal to not make full use out of it. Now we're all grown and foodies, and we've gotten over the blood vessels thing. So for me, boneless, skinless chicken breast was my gateway drug into the world of enjoying meat. Also my gateway drug into trying new foods, even if they're scary. Emily

Alternate method: I mostly roast in pyrex. Typical roasts around here are chicken or beef tritip, since they're sized well for feeding 2 people and the leftovers aren't overwhelming. Instead of using a roasting rack (expensive, inedible) I roast meats on a bed of veggies. I end up with a nicely liquid, intensely flavorful pan juice. Often I don't bother thickening it because it's so good plain. This would not work well for all roasts. Having random carrots stuck to the bottom of your beautifully done prime rib is not a good plan. But when it works, it's very convenient and tasty. I do high heat roasting. Chicken needs a pretty high heat initially to get the skin to crisp, and it roasts better when I start it thighs up, so going at high heat the whole time is good. And for beef, high heat seems to be the best way to get a crispy fat cap and still have the interior as rare as I like it *and* have the veggies done when the meat is done. Emily

Stupid question: is it a *nut* allergy or a *peanut* allergy? Both are relatively common, but one means bean dishes are perfectly safe, and the other means bean dishes are potentially dangerous. And if it's just one and not the other, that makes some things safe that I'd been discounting. And if it's both, well, my condolences, because that makes life even more difficult. IIRC oats contain a small amount of gluten. I'm presuming the problem there is celiac disease, not an anaphylactic allergy. And well, a celiac person generally won't die if they eat a small amount of gluten, but it does affect their long term health in a cumulative way. It's a lot like a diabetic who doesn't monitor their blood sugar closely. Nothing obviously harmful happens, but there's lots of damage that you can't see until it builds up years later. On the upside, beef fat, duck fat and lard will all work well to give you fat for making treats with gluten free flours. I could see biscuits or popovers made with those fats and water rather than milk, if there's a safe way to give the gluten free flour some structure. And if you can make biscuits, scones aren't far behind . My chemistry background is just not giving me ideas on how to work around the gluten + casein + egg issues... Emily

Will this be regular cooking or just once in a while? For once in a while, I'd ask the person what they get served a lot of because it's "easy", and if there's anything that is safe that they don't get to eat often. I'd imagine fruit iced desserts (granitas, sherberts, anything milk free) would be a nice treat. Most sauces are probably seen as off limits, but reductions should be fine. Gluten problems can be a pretty big deal... in some cases they pretty much eliminate all grains from the diet. Be *very* careful in serving processed foods to this person. Gluten is hidden in many processed foods where you wouldn't expect it. Eggs, seafood and nuts are usually pretty identifiable. Casein is probably hiding in a lot of products one wouldn't expect it in either. I did find this recipe for gluten free pizza dough. It is *not* safe for the person you're cooking for. Searching for celiac pizza on google brings up a fair number of other results. My internet connection is being wonky and won't let me check most of them tho. Emily

It's very common in some areas, less so in others. Generally, the more upscale the supermarket the more fancy marketing you'll see in the meat department. I live in a relatively lower class area of LA, and even the cheapest mainstream supermarket sells 2-3 brands of beef. The grocery stores near my parents' home in Central PA typically sell around 5, tho the most upscale store sells only 2... because they have good butchers on staff and process much of their store branded meat themselves. That place also dry ages beef on site tho, so they're a little exceptional. Emily

None of those are grades of meat. They are marketing terms. The grades of beef in the US are USDA Prime, USDA Choice, USDA Select, USDA Standard, USDA Commercial, USDA Utility, USDA Cutter and USDA Canner. Graded means that the meat has passed a USDA inspection and met certain criteria for marbling. The USDA grade applies to the entire carcass, and the inspection costs the meat packer money, which they pass on to their customers in the form of higher prices. If you research the various companies providing the fancy marketed beef, you'll find that most (tho not all) of them are producing USDA graded Choice beef. Some of them will not have their beef graded by the USDA. Chances are, the regular beef in your supermarket is ungraded or USDA Select grade. If the companies providing the grass finished beef are getting the meat graded, chances are it's coming out as Select as well. The range of fancy marketed beef is quite common in upscale supermarkets. It's a way for them to cut down on having real butchers on staff, while still providing the illusion of having a good meat department. The reason you're not seeing all cuts from all producers is because most of these producers don't bother to market anything other than the most valuable cuts. So the "lesser" cuts of beef will end up getting sold without the pretty brand name. If you care about your beef, I strongly recommend finding an independant grocer with a good butcher on staff, or an independant butcher shop that cares about beef. Ideally such a place will have the facilities to handle whole cows, but as long as the butchers are passionate about their beef, they'll see to it that they're selling meat worth eating. Even if they work off of sub-primal cuts like my butcher, they'll be thrilled if you want to order something they don't ordinarily stock. Also, bone up on marbling and learn to eyeball beef so that you can determine what the correct USDA grade for it is yourself. The grading system really *is* a good way to tell if a particular hunk of meat is worth eating. I'd rather have the occasional treat of a really fine piece of beef than frequent meals of low quality beef. Emily

Treated properly, a boneless skinless chicken breast is a joy. The trick is to treat it properly. Chicken breasts have an awkward shape. Thick at one end, thin at the other. This means the thin end is prone to being dry and overcooked when the thick end is just done. This means that one should pound chicken breasts to produce meat of a more even thickness. It doesn't need to be perfectly even, just more even than it is right off the bird. A breast when done *should* have a crisp surface and a juicy interior. This requires high heat and careful monitoring. The breast is very prone to sticking when it's cooked at the right heat, which makes grilling it the easiest option. You can pan-fry them with no coating and get good results, but it takes practice. Using a coating makes it easier, but inhibits proper browning. Chicken breasts are also pretty flavorless if you're using a poor quality chicken. If you're stuck with crappy chicken, I strongly recommend treating chicken breasts to a tasty marinade. My parents' default marinade is soy sauce cut with water, possibly with ginger added. There are scads of others that will work. If you have good chicken, the breasts will be just as tasty as the rest of the chicken. There, a marinade is gilding the lily. That's ok, gilding is what cooking is all about . I think of the breast meat as the test of a chicken producer. If the breasts are good, the rest of the bird will be wonderful. If they're bad, the dark meat will be edible, but it won't be anywhere near what it could have been. Buying boneless chicken breasts is... an adventure. If the producer leaves the tenderloin in, you're probably in good hands. No tenderloin? Get dubious. The producer can sell the tenderloin for $10-14/lb, and the whole breasts for around $6-9/lb. If you have cheap labor doing your chicken butchering, the tenderloins come out almost automatically (I know this from screwing up butchering breasts more times than I can count). A skilled butcher has to take them out on purpose. So a producer who has nicely butchered breasts with intact tenderloins cares about what they're doing, and isn't out for maximal profit. Oh, and if you *do* buy boneless, skinless breasts of good quality... Take out the damn tenderloin. There's a tendon in that thing that needs to be removed for proper cooking of the meat, *and* it's damn near impossible to even the thickness of the breast with the tenderloin still attached. Emily

First off, there's bulk "instant food" ingredients: carnitas, carmelized onions, chicken stock, stuff like that. Prep in large quantity, freeze the excess, and you have instant meals available next time you can't bear to actually cook. Then there's bulk food that doesn't freeze well. Rice! Plain rice, rice pilaf, risotto, rice and lentils... we eat a *lot* of rice, in a variety of ways. The day after leftovers will get turned into dirty rice or fried rice. A pot of beans is in the same boat. Beans will take turns as tuscan white bean soup (for white beans only), bread topping, plain beans, a quesadilla filling, chilli, a salad topping... Lots you can do with beans. Texas style chilli comes under this heading as well, with a similar variety of ways to use it. (And really, texas style chilli ought to freeze well, it just gets devoured that fast) Then there's the soups that I make in quantity and really ought to freeze. Chicken soup is delicious, but my default full dress version makes enough to feed a small army. 3-4 gallons of soup is a bit much for 2 people. Leek and potato soup freezes well if you hold the cream/milk for at the table, and again I can't seem to make it in less than army size quantities. Split pea soup is a bit more downsizable if you don't start with "take a ham bone...". Thankfully, the method I grew up with is the much smaller "take a ham hock" one. Beef stew would likely freeze well too. Emily

The Cook's Illustrated article is (as usual for them) scientifically based and incomplete enough to be misleading. Cooking for Engineers is better, since the article only looks at one element of what's going on, but it does so thoroughly. So look there for an explanation of the solution mechanics. Cook's Illustrated *does* bring up a key point with the texture change Busboy is noticing. The salt in the brine works to denature the meat proteins. A normal protein is a very long molecule folded up into a complicated knot. A denatured protein is unfolded at least partially from the normal configuration. Since proteins are one of the key structural components to an animal cell, this could change the texture of the meat. With pre-salting, I see many of you are advising similar time lengths to those advocating brining. I'd hypothesize that since presalting is a surface treatment, the salt will have a portion dissolved by water contained in the cells on the surface of the meat, which will produce a thin layer of strong surface brine. From there, one would expect the solution mechanics to proceed normally. So presalted meat will still have denatured proteins, but since there is less available water, the salt will not penetrate the meat as easily and not every cell in the meat will have denatured proteins. I'm not sure if there's any publically available research on this topic, since it's fairly complex and would mostly be of interest to fast food chains rather than academia. Further, a thin coat of salt (or sugar) on a food's outside will often taste saltier (or sweeter) than a food with an even concentration of salt throughout. So a piece of meat presalted appropriately will give the impression of being saltier with less actual salt being used. That would also result in slower protein denaturization, since the thin layer of brine from presalting would have less available salt than a comparable brine bath. This would also explain why I've never noticed a textural difference. I don't brine large pieces of meat, I brine small ones. I don't brine for long periods, I brine for short ones. So I'm largely ending up with surface salted meat. Since I mostly use brining for grilled meats, the excess surface water is a minor issue. A grill is much better at producing dry heat than an oven or a frying pan, so a watery meat surface isn't a big deal. The surface water would turn to steam and get blown away. In an oven or frying pan, it would be easy for meat to steam slightly when the cook didn't intend it to, and steamed meat has a *very* different texture from pan-fried or roasted meat. (See? this is why I mentioned that the denaturization bit was a hypothesis) Emily

Quesadillas. Takes tortillas and cheese. The onion, salsa, tomatoes, tomatillos, red peppers, asada, chicken and other possible trimmings are all optional. Assuming you have a hungry person (or four), you need 1-3 tortillas per person, about 8 oz grated cheese, and any trimmings desired. If I'm doing it out of on hand staples, the trimmings will probably be sliced chicken thighs, onion and a bit of salsa. Get in, toss the chicken thighs into a skillet to cook. Figure 1 per person being fed. While they're cooking, slice an onion or two, and toss that in to cook with the chicken. Hitting the chicken with chili powder, salt, pepper, cumin or other seasonings is not a bad plan. Just salt is fine too. When the chicken is done, let it cool a bit and slice. Or you can shred it with 2 forks while it's hot. Now toss a tortilla in the skillet. You want a flour tortilla, not a corn one. Let it warm, flip to the other side and check that it puffs. Once it starts puffing, start throwing fillings at it, fold it in half over the fillings and let it go til the cheese is melting. You may need to flip the folded quesadilla once before serving. Once the cheese is melting, eat. Try not to burn your fingers. I usually make anyone else eating quesadillas with me be in charge of flipping their own. If you are using handmade tortillas, they'll be thick enough that you don't have to fuss with the warming and flipping. Regular supermarket tortillas need it tho, or they have a weird raw flour taste and the interior doesn't end up properly cooked. Don't ask me to explain *why* the thinner tortilla is more work, it just is. Oh, and you want taco sized tortillas, not burrito sized ones. You'll generally end up on your second quesadilla around the 45 minute mark after starting to cook, maybe a bit longer depending on how many people you're feeding and how much prep the fillings take. Emily

I find brining works very well for chicken pieces and pork pieces. The brine of my childhood is soy sauce diluted with water (generally about a 50/50 mixture), with slices of ginger added. No sugar. When the pieces have brined enough, pat them dry and toss them on a grill, pan fry or do whatever you had in mind. Enough generally meant no *more* than 4 hours. A plain salt and water brine would probably work for a more generic brine. Until I hit e-gullet, I'd never heard of the idea of putting sugar in a brine. Large pieces of meat get presalted. Finding space in the fridge for a large container of brine is challenging. Finding space for a salted hunk of meat is not so challenging. Longer is better, but even an hour before cooking helps produce good results. I will note that salting the inner cavity of a whole bird still results in seasoned meat, even if you don't salt the outside. Emily

bit late but... method for cobbler: Take fresh, ripe, freestone peaches. I use about 8 for a 9*13 pyrex cake pan. You may peel them (as previously instructed in this thread), or you can cut them into slices and leave them. I usually just cut them into slices. Put the slices into the pan (you can butter it first if you're feeling ambitious), and sprinkle them with sugar. I usually go with about 1/2 cup to 3/4 cup of sugar. Now sprinkle the peaches with lemon juice. I use the juice of 1/2 lemon. If you don't keep lemons as a pantry staple, it's fine without lemon juice too. If I feel ambitious, I'll zest the lemon and add it in with the peaches. If you like cinnamon, ginger (fresh or dried), nutmeg, allspice or whatever, you can add that now too. Stick your pan of peaches in the fridge, and let 'em sit. They can sit quite happily uncovered for up to 8 hours or so, I haven't tried it for longer. You can add a teaspoon or so of salt to the peaches too, I usually don't bother. For the cobbler top, I'm of the school that says cobblers are properly made with drop biscuits as the topping. So I use my standard drop biscuit recipe and add a bit of sugar to it, and call it good. If you don't have a standard drop biscuit recipe, mine is: 1 3/4 c flour 1 tbsp baking powder 1 tsp salt 4-6 tbsp butter, chilled use a pastry blender or two knives to blend the dry ingredients with the butter. You want the texture to range between about thumbnail sized lumps to fine powder, with the medium sized lumps being about pea size. It's ok if they're mostly thumb size too, mixing it too much is a graver sin than not mixing it enough. optional: you can freeze the mixture at this point for up to about 1 hr, to get a more delicate texture add 1 cup of milk and stir briskly until all the dry ingredients are incorporated. Now grab the baking dish of peaches and drop lumps of dough over the surface. Don't fuss about it. If there's a nice mix of peaches and dough showing, it's fine. Stick in the oven and bake at 450F until the biscuit topping is done and the peaches are done. The biscuit topping is done when they're golden brown and a tester inserted in 'em doesn't come out covered with wet dough. The peaches are done when the scent of peaches is thick enough to cut. Usually this happens at about the same time. If it doesn't, I'd consider blackened biscuits a graver fault than undercooked peaches. Use your judgement tho, your peaches may be less ripe than mine . You *can* add thickener, you can use electrical equipment to make prep faster. But really, this is an old fashioned fast dessert from a farm kitchen. 150 years ago, there were no electronic conveniences to make this faster. And really, the electronic convenieces don't make this faster if you know what you're doing. Emily

Hit your local farmer's markets. Sweet corn, eggplant, tomatoes, onions, basil, zuchini, leeks, and peppers should be in season. You should also find lots of greens like chinese broccoli, green beans, bok choi etc. Beets are in season. Potatoes are starting to come in. Basically, it's veggie time. You should have no trouble preparing a veggie heavy meal for 20 on your budget at this time of year. Your biggest issue will be meat prices. If you know what animals are raised locally for meat, that will help. When you're dealing with cooking for 20, things like a leg of lamb, a whole ham, a whole turkey or a whole goose are your friend. It's worth doing some research on this, because locally grown animals tend to be very tasty *and* less expensive than grocery store meat. Once you know how many dishes you want and what protein you can get reasonably, poke us again. There are just too many good things you can do with food at this time of year , even on a small budget. Emily

Does whole wheat bread smell icky to you as well? If it does, you probably just don't like the smell of bran. If it doesn't, you may have brown rice that's gone off. Brown rice is not as shelf stable as plain white rice, since it contains more fats and protein than white rice, and those are what go bad first. Emily

Ooh, interesting reading . I did fried chicken for what is probably the first time in my life. Mom is type II diabetic, so usually chicken skin went into the back of soup stock fixings in the freezer, and we ate boneless skinless chicken meat because the bones went into the stock fixings bag as well. I could debone chicken by age 12 . Now Dad *did* explain to me how to make fried chicken just we never actually *did* it. Brine the chicken for ~24 hours, dry thoroughly, dip in seasoned flour (he voted for plain salt and pepper), fry immediately with a deep fryer. When my boyfriend got a craving for fried chicken like his parents used to make, we combined Dad's directions with how the boyfriend's parents did it. His parents would not brine the chicken, and dredged it in seasoned flour of the same school as Dad's. Instead of deep frying it, they pan fried in butter. So... we combined methods somewhat. From experience, butter is a bit awkward to fry in unless you clarify it or blend it with oil. We were lazy and blended with olive oil (said trick learned from my Dad). We pan fried it, because we both felt dubious that our thin walled stock pot could handle deep frying, and we know damn well that the cast iron fry pan holds heat well. We didn't brine the chicken (last minute idea, no time to brine properly), but did dry it thorougly before dredging in flour. Bill handled melting the butter (right temperature appeared to be when the butter foams) and we added a slug of oil. Then we added the floured chicken and let it cook until thoroughly browned. I did fuss with the heat some, since we crowded the pan a trifle with 2 thighs and 2 drumsticks. We have a very old gas stove and while the heat control is good, our cast iron is new and on the thin side. Two pieces at a time would probably work better with our equipment. End result was juicy, properly cooked chicken with a wonderful crust. Yum! The meat was slightly undersalted, so I think next time we do fried chicken we will brine it. Emily

You're allowed to disagree . I'm going based on my experience with ripe stone fruit, and yours is different. I wouldn't mail order stone fruit because IME, anything that's going to respond well to cushioned packing materials isn't ripe yet. I define ripe as the point where anything more than the gentlest squeeze with even pressure from your whole hand will bruise the fruit. If you aren't as gentle as possible, you'll bruise the fruit. Generally, once it reaches that point, you've got at most 2 days before the fruit goes off. If you intend to eat the fruit out of hand right away, buy fruit at this stage of ripeness. The stuff that cushioned packing materials will protect adaquately is typically 2-3 days from the point I class as ripe (some varieties will be more like 5 days from actual ripe). They're still pretty tasty then, but the flesh of the fruit still has enough firmness that it can take more than the gentlest handling. Stone fruit picked at this stage *will* soften off of the tree, but it's rare for it to reach the same level of sublime as the fruit that was truly ripe. If you want to not have to go to the orchard every day this week for fresh fruit, buy fruits in this stage of ripeness. With practice, you can pick out fruit so you've got some ripe today, some ripe tomorrow, some ripe the day after. If you try to go much beyond that, you end up with screwy fruit that's not very sweet and has a strange texture. Nectarines and peaches behave about the same, IMO. Most nectarines are clingstone varieties, and clingstone varieties tend to be sturdier. A freestone nectarine will behave about like a freestone peach. A clingstone peach will be more like a clingstone nectarine than a freestone peach. If you want the fruit for eating out of hand, the clingstone vs freestone thing doesn't really matter. If you want the fruit for baking, it's a lot easier to get pretty fruit slices with a freestone variety. All of this varies based on variety, what kind of growing season the area is having, where you keep your fruit at home, etc. And it's with respect to the best possible flavor for that variety. Some varieties *are* good even if they're picked at not quite ripe and overhandled. Just well... those varieties are the first to suffer if the growing season is going badly. At least stone fruits aren't cucumbers . I never ever want to have a drought grown cucumber again. Emily

If you'd eat the herb in a salad (like sorrel or basil) don't dry it. If you primarily use it cooked (like sage and thyme) drying is great. I bought several bunches of fresh herbs for $1 each in early spring, dried them and now have wonderful dried herbs to cook with. Much cheaper than buying predried herbs, and much better tasting too. I wouldn't bother with freezing or any other fancy preservation methods, since the salad herbs that they're good for are so much better fresh. Keeping a cutting in water until it grows roots is a common way of getting new plants. Many plants will do this if the conditions are right. Consult a gardening book if you want to figure out how to get the cutting to grow happily in soil. Generally, soil is better than trying to do hydroponic gardening. Emily

The difference between a "fresh" Hershey bar and an "aged" one is not particularly noticable. You'll notice the difference between a fresh Reese's Peanut Butter Cup and an aged one much more easily. For the curious, Kit Kat is a Nestle developed candy bar, produced by Hershey Foods under license in the US (since it's a Nestle product, I no longer buy it. I find their business practices reprehensible). Cadbury chocolates are licensed by Hershey Foods in the US. Figuring out what is licensed and what isn't is pretty easy if you read the label. Emily

This year's CA peaches are not up to snuff (which is not to say I haven't had wonderful ones this year, but I have to *search* and last year I didn't). The farmers are all horribly apologetic about it. Last year I could reliably get much better peaches at the local farmer's markets. On the other hand, the plums! The scent will knock you over. As far as mail order fruit, I've never bothered. I grew up in Central PA, which is excellent stone fruit country. CA peaches at their absolute best are almost as good as what I grew up with. If good stone fruit really matters to you, shop at local farmer's markets and look for farmers who *care*. You may pay a premium over other local fruit, but the quality will be far better than anything you can get shipped in. Good stone fruit just doesn't ship well. The stuff that's actually ripe will bruise easily just going from the tree to the main barn. Emily