Torrilin

Not sure. I have limited storage space, so I only have tallow on hand if we do slow roasted beef short ribs (rub with salt and mustard powder and perhaps some pepper, roast in the oven at 200F until falling off the bone tender). Have you tried consulting a suitably old edition of The Joy of Cooking? They're very good on food safety and flavor concerns with unusual to us ingredients. Generally fat can be reused, but some ingredients may add an off flavor to the fat, and the temperature where it goes "off" may vary. Emily

I don't have an "ethnic" cuisine. My parents are of Norse, Austrian, some kind of British, French Canadian, and probably some Native American descent. The most recent immigrants in the family are on the Norse side, and like many immigrant women, my great-grandmother refused to teach my mother any traditional Norwegian dishes. Like many proud granddaughters, my mom insisted on learning them from cookbooks. What I do have is a family cuisine, built on my Dad's sensibilities (Austrian food is good, it's what his mom made!), and my Mom's (French! Thai! Chinese! Norse!). So we eat lots of things that would not strike a Scandinavian family as odd. My friends from Norway and Sweden laugh at me at Christmas as I bemoan not having krumkake and the other traditional cookies *their* moms make. I no longer live at home, and don't have the necessary pans and presses and molds for proper Christmas cookies. Someday tho... There's also lots of things my Thai aunt would find very familiar, if not precisely as she'd have it at home. French and Austrian are what mom and dad default to (respectively). If they're not sure what else to do, they'll head that way. Emily

Fried potatoes. French fries. Yorkshire pudding. Anything you'd use duck fat for. Anything you'd use bacon fat for. You get the idea I'm sure . If it's creamy white you got it rendered right. It's fabulous stuff to have on hand. Emily

Hrm, didn't know that. Most of my more enviromentally aware chemistry and physics profs strongly recommended using conventional heat sources for reheating food on the ground that a conventional heat source is less of a power hog. They also were huge anti-fans of nuking water to make tea or coffee. *ponders* Never really thought deeply about it, so it wouldn't surprise me to be wrong. Emily

Do you have a tureen or some other suitable serving dish for soup on a buffet? Will you be serving the soup hot or cold? Will your guests have to walk more than ~10 ft or 3m with the soup? Pre-portioning the soup may also work. The soup strikes me as something meant for a plated meal tho, rather than a buffet. (that's not to say a soup can't work, but this sounds very much like it's *intended* to be presented as single servings, and much of the balance and effect may be lost if it's not). The main dish also sounds like it's meant for a plated meal. A lime/vanilla mash of what? How will you present the mash and the chicken strips so it's clear they go together? Most of the other items look lovely. It's a very impressive menu, and will take a lot of preparation in advance. Have you checked that you have enough space for seating, displaying the food, and storing the food? I know my apartment would not have enough space for a meal this ambitious even if I could seat 30 . Emily

*g* I've helped grill things on a firebrick grill, about 5 foot by 4 foot. Three sides lined with firebrick, top covered with about 3/4" thick narrow grillework (not straight grill pattern, a nicely engineered diamond mesh kind of deal). Wood fire. Will comfortably handle a party of 30-50 adults, plus kids. You could definitely get much fancier than just burgers on it if you've got any kind of skill at cooking with fire. Stick a couple dutch ovens loaded with peach cobbler in the coals, bake potatoes in the coals... I've noticed a lot of egulleters tend to use their charcoal grills for barbecue tho. That will serve a lot of people using a fairly small grill. If you tried to do steaks for 50 on a small grill, you'd go mad. Either that or you'd get devoured by your guests. Emily

I don't have any cookbooks I don't use. I do have one that I use primarily as an excuse to practice my critical reading of secondary history sources skills, but I still use it. I generally don't cook from it as the recipes are either dumbed down versions of things that really do take *time* to make, or are rather over fancy versions of peasant food. The tagines in it read a lot like Americanized versions of Paula Wolfert's recipes. The avgolemono is well... not so good. The cassoulet recipe is so shortcutted and speeded that I can't see how it would produce something worth the effort. The book almost has more history than recipes, but the author's history strongly resembles his recipes. Sloppy and careless. I keep it around because every so often rereading it will cause me to go haring off after primary sources in an attempt to get a better understanding of things the author glosses over or misrepresents. (not giving the title because I'd hate for the author to make money off it) Emily

Well yeah, different areas have different heresies . But when your culture says "You shall RESPECT the potato" and then proceeds to lay down dictates about how animal fat and salt are really the only things it should be aquainted with, it'll give a different result than a culture where they've got different rules. Believe it or not, I've never actually seen an Old Bay seasoned chip. I grew up near the Utz and Snyder's and Herr's factories, and that kind of stuff is for sale Elsewhere normally. Utz sells a bunch of different barbecue chips, so I'm not sure which particular one you mean. I can't remember if it's Martin's or Snyder's or Herr's or Utz that does the radioactively hot barbecue chip... There's a lot of variation in barbecue flavored chips. Some are just sweet. If I'm gonna have chips, I get Grandma Utz's, because they're fried in lard, and lard tastes *good*. It is perhaps telling that "California burgers" on a school lunch menu are the only ones with mayo in PA schools. McDonalds occasionally does burgers with mayo, Burger King always has done burgers with mayo, and getting a burger without mayo here in LA is like pulling teeth. Most midwestern burger places are in the no mayo school, and I don't know of any east coast origin burger chains. I suspect a CA native might have a very different reaction to mayo on a burger than I do. Scratch that, all the CA natives I know find it very odd that I ask burger places to hold the mayo. Emily

A more likely reason for microwave ovens being uncommon is that they have rather high power usage. So if you're not using them for something important they're a power hog and the electricity could be better used for something else. Emily

It's not Eastern. It's Western. If you go to a *civilized* place in PA, the only acceptable condiments for potatoes are butter and salt (baked potato), ketchup OR vinegar (french fries) or none (potato chips). Potato chips may come in salted, sour cream and onion, barbecue, or salt and vinegar flavors, all of which are vaguely heretical except plain salted. Other flavors you see made by a PA potato chip company are made for sale to non-natives. The only other culturally appropriate uses for ketchup would be things like hot dogs, burgers and possibly scrambled eggs. On the other hand, now that I live in LA I have to tell the local cheesesteak place to hold the mayo and mushrooms. Thankfully, their cheesesteaks are otherwise perfectly edible and traditional. I've also seen Angeleno restaurants put mayo on everything except potato chips, and just because I haven't seen them do it in a year doesn't mean there aren't any places that do. Emily

I've had a genuine seating issue at restaurants twice in my life: once at a busy TGI Friday's (not packed, just busy), and once at a local place that was empty aside from one other party. At Fridays, my (then) boyfriend and I were seated next to an 8 seater round table that was full of customers. Many of the other tables in the area were full as well. The 8 seater table was so loud that we could not hear each other talk without screaming. Many of the surrounding tables were near silent, or in the same positon of having to scream to be heard over the 8 seat table. We finally caught our server and asked if we could be moved since we couldn't talk. They had space in other areas, so they were able to accomodate us, and they gave us a free desert, which I thought was entirely unecessary. At the local place, my partner and I went in for dinner after he finished work. The staff immediately seated us right next to the bar, where a group of 5 was talking loudly. The restaurant was entirely empty except for these two parties. Again, we couldn't hear each other speak without shouting. Our waiter was the invisible man. He appeared to take our order, and was not seen again until we had get up to ask him for the bill. The server who actually got us our meals vanished almost instantly. We were not checked on at any point during the meal. We left no tip and will not go back to that restaurant. In the first case, the meal was not ruined. I was able to communicate the problem to the staff, and they really didn't need to do anything except move us. In the second case, the meal was edible, but it did not resemble having dinner with my partner as we were entirely unable to talk to each other. I wouldn't call it ruined, but it was unpleasant. Since their dining room was arranged in a very sensible fashion, they could have avoided the whole thing by seating us a bit further from the bar. An extra table's worth of distance would have reduced the effect of the noise, and would not have put unneeded strain on the waitstaff. On the other hand, I've had many very pleasant experiences, even at very busy restaurants. Far too many to count where they accomodated a large-ish party without a reservation, or went above and beyond the call of duty without being asked. A restaurant near my parents' home will regularly take reservations for their Mother's Day brunch a few hours in advance, and they have a lot of unusual or hard to get items for it . Emily

I've also seen mention of kurobuta here. From the Lobel marketing material, it sounds like they're using "kurobuta" to mean meat from Berkshire pigs of Japanese descent rather than American or native British stock. Since the Japanese market doesn't favor low fat meat the way the American and British markets can, these are probably "unimproved" Berkshires that are as fatty as the original stock was. So yes, it's hype, but it's probably at least a bit deserved. (when the OK State article talks about "common hogs" they mean the pigs everybody grows. usually "landrace" is used to mean "the kind of animal that everybody grows". The US is sometimes very resistant to this terminology tho, because the stuff that everybody here has has to be worse than the stuff someone *else* has.) Emily

I haven't found a butcher here in LA that does dry aged beef, but my parents local grocery store (!) does do dry aged beef. For $20/lb for less than ideal cuts like NY strip, and pushing $30/lb for better cuts. Un-aged beef is approximately equal for equal quality (middling to top end choice is the best I've found here or at my parents), so I'd expect about the same prices for dry-aged. I'd probably double or triple the price of unaged choice ($10-15/lb) for unaged prime, since it's something like 1% of US beef. Aged prime I'd double again. So... if you paid between $20 and $30/lb for your beef, you got some really nice steaks, and if you paid $60+/lb for dry aged prime, you got some utterly mindblowing steaks. My brain is still reeling from my only taste of dry aged beef ever, and that was a couple *years* ago... Good steak is Not Cheap. Emily

It's pretty much exactly what kitchenimage said. The precise leavener doesn't much matter, since the reactions all produce similar end results. Baking soda reacts with acid, and like most such reactions it happens quickly at high temperatures and slowly at low temperatures. So you put the soda in with the acid, bubbles began forming, and you promptly refridgerated it. You've now got batter with manymanymany tiny pockets of carbon dioxide, and a certain amount of unreacted baking soda and acid. The existing tiny bubbles will deflate slightly, since chilling the carbon dioxide will reduce its volume (this can be derived from the ideal gas law, PV=nRT). The baking soda and acid reaction continues, forming additional small bubbles. Because *these* bubbles formed at a low temperature, they're smaller than you'd expect at room temperature. Because you held the batter for a long time at low temperature, chances are the reaction proceeded to completion *before* you portioned the batter. This is not necessarily the case with batters at room temperature. Because of the length of time you held the batter, there was minimal risk of CO2 escaping in the fridge. The volume of leavener is small compared to the batter volume, so the total amount of CO2 in your batter is also comparatively small. This means any CO2 that tries to escape has to pass through a lot of comparatively solid material, and it's in a low energy state so this is *hard*. Because the vast majority of your CO2 bubbles were very small compared to any possible portioning device, and you were not portioning with a pressure device (like a pastry bag), there was minimal risk of breaking bubbles and forcing CO2 to escape. Once you've portioned the batter, you have many bubbles, all much smaller than the recipe anticipates. From the ideal gas law, we can derive an equation that will relate the volume of the bubbles to the change in temperature. With room temperature batter, the change in volume will be less, and much of the reaction may happen in the oven rather than at room temperature or a low temperature. (when the reaction happens mostly in the oven, you'd expect to see very large bubbles in the finished product) So rather than having a mix of very large and small to moderate sized air bubbles, your method results in many roughly evenly sized bubbles, all of which expand readily in the oven. This produces much more even leavening, and may produce the appearance of more rising ability, even tho there were no real changes in leavening power. Since you don't specify in your question which acid you used with baking soda, I'm not even going to attempt the exact calculations. The results will vary depending on the acid used. Wikipedia is very useful if you know the acid, since you can get the chemical formula of it, work out what the exact reaction involved is, determine the thermal properties of the equation (very important in this case), determine how much CO2 is produced etc. I'm not certain how you'd go about approximating the CO2 bubble distribution in the batter, that's a bit more chemical engineering than I've studied. The gluten may also be an issue, but I'm even more unsure how you'd model that. For normal baking results (ones not involving temperatures substantially below about 5C or above about 200C), it's probably not necessary to model the gluten behavior or CO2 bubble distribution. We can also mostly ignore the effects of steam as a leavener, since the effect in most batters will be minimal compared to that of CO2. (I regularly make use of these kinds of estimations in baking. You can *always* slow down or speed things up based on temperature, even if you're using yeast. Yeast is just a bit less temperature shock tolerant than most chemical leaveners . Very often a slower method will produce nicer results.) Emily

Everyone interested in eating tasty animals should know about The University of Oklahoma's Breeds of Livestock project. The link will take you right to the pigs page, and they cover several other major species of livestock. The data is not always as detailed as you might like, but it usually does a decent job of covering the basics from an animal husbandry point of view. Preserving rare breeds of livestock is really important, not just because they often taste good, but because they help increase the genetic diversity of the species. That helps with things like disease resistance, drought resistance, finding animals who can live under less than ideal conditions... Emily

Today's risotto: Melt butter, heat minced garlic in it but don't brown it. Add rice, such that it's lightly coated by the fat and saute until it smells a bit like rice but hasn't browned or anything. Use water splashes to get the rice to form the sauce, since you are out of stock. Add about a teaspoon of salt as you're forming the sauce. When rice is just short of done, add an equal volume of frozen peas and let sit until the peas are just done. Optional: add parmesan and some of the chicken flavored poaching butter to enrich the risotto. While you're preparing the risotto, poach chicken thighs in butter. When both sides have a deep golden crust, they're done. You may pull the thighs apart and add them to the risotto, but I rather liked 'em whole. Serve risotto and chicken thigh together. Emily

(I'll note for the record that Harrisburg proper doesn't have a ton of restaurants compared to the rest of the area... There are many good places within a 10 minute drive of downtown HBG that aren't actually in the city. If you open the radius to 20 minutes there's even more places. If your friend does not object to a bit of a drive, there are a lot of good options.) Emily

Use good quality bacon as a garnish on risotto. It's *really* yummy with a pea risotto. It's also good with a plain cheese risotto. Or a garlicky one... Lentil soup often wants a bacon garnish. Same with pea soup. Fried potatoes want bacon to go with. In fact, if they don't have beef fat to cook in, they want bacon grease. You can make an incredibly non traditional but yummy stir fried noodle dish with bacon, rice sticks, eggs, spring onions, ginger, garlic, fish sauce, hot peppers etc. Make a stew of red peppers, onions, bacon and garlic. Just slowly cook the ingredients in a dry frying pan. The bacon fat becomes the grease the peppers and onions cook in. This works as the base for a lot of dishes, since depending on the seasonings it can make good tacos, a good topping for rice, a good add in for a salad... Crumble fried bacon on top of white rice that's been cooked with about 3-5 smashed cloves of garlic per serving. Add in a bunch of grated cheese and stir together. This is one of our default breakfast dishes, since it doesn't take much in the way of brains to cook. Egg custard based quiches often like to have bacon to go on the side. Take leftover mashed potatoes, reheat, mix in freshly fried crumbled bacon and a lot of cheese and turn into breakfast tacos or burritos. Emily

Great idea; you just wisk the egg (or yolk) in at the end. ← I find it works much better if you prepare the yolks as if making Hollandaise sauce, and add stock from the soup to thin it out. Once I get it to a near watery consistency, I pour it into the soup pot. It's a bit more work, but then the soup is much less likely to curdle when reheated. Emily

Keep in mind that even if you confine yourself to traditional Italian dishes, it will have a "fusion" feel. Italian cuisine has a broad base of traditional dishes ranging from very simple to very complex, and they use a lot of flavors that you wouldn't expect given what most Italian restaurants serve. Try one of the (many) traditional Tuscan bean dishes? They're Italian, many of them will hold well for a buffet, beans *like*being prepared in advance... Depending on how far in advance you're planning and your preferred style, a selection of Italian sausages would be really nice. They'd also work into a wide range of dishes. IIRC there are traditional Italian fish soups. I'm not sure how well or poorly they'd hold, but it would be worth looking at since most fish soups I've had have held very well indeed. Risotto can be par-cooked in advance, but it doesn't hold well and is ill-suited to a buffet. Risotto cakes would probably be a better choice if you're really fond of risotto. Italians are supposed to make Really Great Ham, and ham is a buffet classic because it's yummy and holds well. Ham also finds a way into a lot of traditional dishes. Many pasta dishes hold very well, others don't hold well at all. Lasagne, manicotti and things like that tend to hold better. Tortellini and ravioli can also hold well. I'm not sure where you're located, but green salads hold well for buffets and depending on the preparation, work well with an Italian meal. When you serve a buffet, people tend to eat very differently from a sit down meal. If you want the people eating to not load up on appetizers, you need to not bring them all out at once. If you don't mind them loading up on appetizers, it's better to focus on lighter ones like crudite platters and trays of crostini. If you don't have seating for 30, it's good to dodge tomato heavy dishes, soups and very juicy dishes. Spills can be a real problem. Expect that people will go very light on the "main" course if the buffet is laid out in the order you expect people to eat the meal in. If the appetizer dishes are mixed in with the main dishes, you probably won't have anyone devouring a plateful of appetizers *g*. Emily

First off, Ben and Jerry's does not source most of their chocolate from Hershey's. I'm not sure who they *do* source from, but Special Dark is not the right chocolate to use. They don't use particularly amazing chocolate, so they're probably buying bulk from one of the smaller American producers. Since they're based in the NE, I suspect they use Wilbur's semisweet or something similar as the base. Second thing that springs to mind is a lot of B&J flavors that have a vanilla base use their French Vanilla as a jumping off point. It's a very eggy, very rich, very intense french vanilla. Third, B&J's tends to be very heavy on the add-ins. I would probably start with cherry syrup and about 2x as many fresh cherries that have soaked in the syrup for about 8-24 hours. (I hate B&J's default vanilla, so take this with a grain of salt and use your best judgement about the base.) Emily

Avgolemono soup. Chicken, lemons (lots!), rice, good chicken stock, thickened with a hollandaise-ish sauce. You can add fresh grated ginger for a very unauthentic but slightly richer lemon flavor, and fresh lemon zest added at the end helps round out the flavor nicely. Emily

Mom is a self taught cook. She rarely uses recipes as more than a reminder of how a particular technique works these days, tho she was a lot more careful about following them as written when I was very young. Dad is a self taught cook and a trained chocolatier/food scientist. He and mom specialize in doing slightly different things in the kitchen. If they're doing chocolate or candy, he's in charge. He handles most of the bread baking and some of the cookie making. He's also very good with cream soups. Mom specializes in other soups, roasts and most other main dishes. They've got a longstanding disagreement about how one makes potato salad. So they ended up producing 3 children who all think recipes get followed once. Maybe. Then we understand the techniques involved and can proceed to change things around as we see fit. Emily

Ok, what you need is a cookbook that gives you diagrams of the animal and walks you through what cuts are good for what. This is a basic reference that every cook should have, as the names of cuts are not always standard. Parts of the animal that get lots of excersise are usually best braised. A pork chop is roughly equivilent to a steak in a cow. Think Tbone or porterhouse. If you compare the marbling in the steak to the marbling in your pork chop, you'll see that the steak has a lot more fat proportionally compared to the pork. Most pork would not qualify for anything but the worst possible USDA grades for beef, so it's very tricky to cook and get a good end result. If you want to do braised dishes, use cuts from the shoulder or other heavily excersised muscles. There's lots of fat and connective tissue, so braising will give good results. Ribs also tend to be very good braised. It doesn't matter whether it's beef or pork or lamb or goat, the techniques are pretty similar. Emily

Boiled ham feeds a crowd (assuming that keeping kosher is not an issue) and holds well. Jazzing it up is also easy. It's traditional big holiday food for a reason *g*. Braised dishes also work very well. There, the sky's the limit IMO. If keeping kosher *is* an issue, Moroccan tagines, saurbraten, and many many many other braised dishes will be kosher safe or can be made kosher safe. The only thing I'd worry about with a menu focusing on braised dishes is that early September has lots of yummy fresh produce that cries out to be used . It's the tail end of peak tomatoes, most of the hard root veggies are just coming into season, you'll have loads of lovely squashes, a lot of lettuces will be just lovely, cabbage is coming into season, broccoli is good, brussel sprouts are coming into season... The easy solution is to include a couple vegetarian dishes, braised or not . Emily