dividend

Touche. I'll be over in the hypocrite's corner of the forums, eating froot loops covered in lowfat margerine.

The wording of the ordinance is disgraceful. What? Someone explain how this ordinance protects any of those things? He's obviously not doing a good job supporting his own stance that it shouldn't be regulated by the government if his name is in the legislation itself! What kind of "education" did those polled receive about foie gras, you may ask? Looking at a breakdown of the poll, 48% of those polled had never eaten it, and 34% of those polled had never even heard of it. So what's the follow up question, the question that generated the "nearly 80 percent" statistic in the ordinance? There's an unbiased poll question for the ages. Especially when 82% of those polled had never eaten it, or never heard of it. The rest of the ordinance points are about production of foie gras being unethical, protecting fine dining in Chicago, and other states enacting bans. There is seriously not a single point in this ordinance that stands up to even the most casual of logical scrutiny. It's a shame. I was really looking forward to that burger at Sweets and Savories over labor day weekend. I'll have to console myself with chain smoking in a bar somewhere - oh wait. Can't do that either.

Yup, moderation is key. I've never understood the mud flung at the straw man who orders a Double Whopper value meal with a Diet Coke, in the same way that I don't understand criticizing someone for putting organic milk on froot loops. I mean, it's a start, right? The fast food consumer is saving themselves 300 calories. If you wanted to lose a pound a week, you'd only have to cut 500 calories a day. I have several college freinds who've dropped 10 - 15 pounds just by switching to diet soda. I veiw healthy eating as a complete, sustainable strategy. If I want fast food every once in a while, I'm not going to deny my craving. I'll be the one in front of you in the drive through ording the value meal with the diet soda. In the same way, which is better for you - fruit loops with organic milk, or fruit loops covered in chocolate flavored corn syrup? Especially since milk is on almost every list I've ever seen of "most important things to buy organic." Side note - does anyone else have the urge to start a conversation with someone in the grocery store buying a "healthy" substitute that isn't really so healthy? Like "low-carb" bread, or lowfat margerine? They think they're doing something good for themselves, and I have to restrain myself from commenting sometimes.

A few weeks ago, my boss's boss was in town, and they invited me out to dinner with them and few others at my boss's level. So I'm the extreme low (wo)man on the totem poll at dinner, in fact the only one who is still hourly rather than salaried. That didn't bother me, but it does highlight why what happened was so akward. As we're eating our appetizers, I waitress (not ours) tries to scoot behind me with a full tray of water glasses, and somehow trips and dumps 6+ glasses of water all over me! I looked like I had just gone swimming. She frantically apologizes and runs off to get towels, so that when our waitress comes back by, she finds me mopping my sodden self with the napkins of everyone at the table. I was mortified, not so much at what had happened, but because I was now the center of attention at a table of my bosses. I did get a free beer and a desert out of it though. And endless teasing about it at work.

Jack you should write a book in the style of your excellent EGCI courses and tutorials. I would buy it - I love the approachable, non-professional yet absolutely knowledgable approach to cooking. Like Dan Lepard's latest book. Actually, some of those courses exemplify what I want in a cookbook. I think the course on Mexican Table Salsas is a great example. We get: - some history - an explanation of tools without being fussy - a comfortable style that says, hey, I know the average home cook will takes shortcuts, here's where it works or doesn't, here's why you'll want specialty tools if you really get into it - a clear, nicely illustrated example of several different styles - the chart at the end, with examples of how to make the subject your own Those courses (and distillations of their accompanying Q&A's) ought be compiled into a book. I personally dislike both spiral bindings (makes the book feel cheap), and pretty dust jackets (it's just going to get tattered anyway). I love wide margins and non-glossy paper so I can make pencil notes. I think Rose Levy Berenbaum writes great recipes - some might find them overy convoluted, but she does a great job of conveying in words parts of baking that are intangible until you see them, particularly in The Bread Bible. EDIT - forgot to second the love for weights/measures, when appropriate. But sometimes it's not necassary, so I think you need to pick your audience. I don't like to be told 2 1/8 teaspoons minced garlic. Stuff like onions and garlic, people are mostly likely going to eyeball anyway. But for baking? Weights please. I agree with this! Marcella Hazen does a good job with this, I think, using phrases like "until you smell garlic" or "until the oil floats free from the sauce."

Thanks for this course. I just finished my first ever session of meat smoking after many months of just reading along. I did 2 4 lb pork shoulders and 3 lbs of chicken thighs on my parents' Weber kettle. (Can't have a grill at my apartment, so I figured I'd put theirs to use. Worked like a charm, even with my poor sense of how to control the temperature.) I pulled the pork at 205 degrees, a little over 6 hours. Pulled the brined thighs after 2 hours. Thanks to you guys, I was able to produce some impressive smoked meat on my first attempt. Next time I'll do more thighs - they disappeared the fastest. Bonus - I smell strongly of hickory and mesquite, and my SO keeps sniffing me as he walks by. I can't wait to do some more next weekend.

Hellman's Light for me. I grew up on the stuff, and other mayo just doesn't taste right. Especially Miracle Whip. BLECH. I didn't taste it until I was in middle school, and I remember my reaction being, why would you want mayo to be sweet? I still feel that way. (Of course, I feel the exact same way about BBQ sauce too.) I've never made my own mayo, because I live by myself, and I don't think I could justify eating enough of it before even a small batch went bad. So Helman's Light it is. At least until they start putting HFCS in it, in which case I will cry. As for usage, I love mayo on hamburgers. Especially the thin steakburger kind. Nothing beats a smear of mayo and grilled onions. I grew up eating pressure cooked boneless skinless chicken breasts dipped in mayo, and canned peach halves, with a scoop of cottage cheese and a dollup of mayo on top. I also like mayo sitting on my plate next to an omelette as a sort of ghetto hollandaise.

The only word I can think of that gives me the skeevies when applied to food is "moist". Which is odd, because I enjoy, when appropriate and not abused, the use of sexual language to describe a dish or an eating experience. Because some foods, like fresh-from-the-ocean raw oysters, or very cold high quality cheesecake, or strong soft cheese, actually do provoke those kinds of physical reactions. The problem with alot of over the top language, like "unctuous", is overexposure. I do NOT want to sit down at Applebees and have the waiter describe the sauce on the steak as having "an unctuous mouthfeel, with a silky, velvety finish. Perfection on the palate." When I hear strong language like that describing something I'm about to eat, putting it in my mouth had better cause physical arousal.

What's a reasonable food budget for one person for a week in Zihuatanejo? I'm not concerned about fine restaurant dining, more like vendors on the streets or in the market during the day, cheap places for dinner. I'm thinking of a trip there on the cheap in mid-February, and am trying to work out my budget. Thanks!

Haha! I went to a movie last night with my little brother, and he said these things were awesome. In fact, he'd eaten two of them, for lunch and dinner. Of course, he's a 23-year-old, 6'5", 150 pound college soccer player with the metabolism of a race-horse, whose cooking skills consist of having recently learned to make a baked potato in the microwave, so I'll take his opinion with a grain of salt. That said, this totally seems like something I would order at the tail end of a night of heavy drinking.

Curied-sausage platter Apple PI Bread with infused dipping Eulers Hard-Boyled eggs Mobius strip steak Wild game theory steaks (perhaps wild Bohr steaks?) BBQueue (computer 'science' counts, right?) Cedar Planck salmon Roasted quadratic root vegetables Leonardo Da Vincissoise soup Serve these out of: Pandora's lunchbox Or on a Truth table cloth: And let's not forget the "chain rule", which around here seems to be - avoid them at all costs.

Thanks for this thread! I was in Vegas this past weekend as part of a bachelorette party I planned, and I definately had to put Bouchon on the itinerary. There were eight of us, so I called ahead to make sure they would be able to accomodate a large group for breakfast. We had a wonderful experience. We're all in our early to mid twenties, mostly single working women, so the price point was perfect. (Plus, when our server found out we had a bride-to-be with us, her meal was on the house.) And the food was wonderful, with some fantastic little touches, like the delicious stalks of epi bread, and the vanilla bean butter that came with the sourdough waffles, which was so good I would have eaten it with a spoon. And I'll agree that even if you're there for breakfast, order the excellent pomme frites. We all ordered, and shared, so I tasted five or six dishes, and they were all outstanding. Between the food, the stellar service, the ambience (and being with some of my oldest and dearest freinds), it was pretty much a contextually perfect meal. Between this and the recommendation for Burger Bar that came up in several threads, you guys really helped us to eat well this weekend.

I'm reminded of the beginning of an old SciFi novel I read (I think it was a Phillip K. Dick novel, but I'm not 100%), that opened with a scene in a little diner, serving real bacon and buttered toast and eggs cooked in butter. The catch? All of those things were "bad for you" and had hence been declared illegal. The main character sits down to breakfast and practically moans with pleasure, remembering her childhood when such meals had been the norm. The younger members of society having been inculcated to the tasteless, nutritional, and legal foodstuffs of the time, had no idea of what they were missing. How can you miss something you've never experienced. I'm not going to agree entirely with alarmism about these bans, partially because I'm not sure I beleive in the idea of a slippery slope in general, as anything much more than a rallying point for those opposed to something. The idea reminds me a of a cheap high-school debate tactic of forcing your opponent to take an absolute stance, then holding them accountable for the extreme fringes of their veiws. Fun to do, but a kind of logical fallacy as well. This is not the first thing in modern eating culture that makes me thing of that novel. I know plenty of people around my age (25) who have never tasted real butter, having been raised on margerine and I-can't-beleive-it's-not. A statement like that around here is so un-shocking as to almost be a cliche - we all know people like that. My inclination in that situation is to show them what it is there missing, just as I guide my parents to tiny, imperfect looking local strawberries and away from the supermarket imitations. But I would never ban margerine, or importation of strawberries to force my viewpoints on someone. I'm choosing to eliminate trans fats from my diet, but shouldn't that be MY choice? I'm completely in favor of leaving the decision in the hands of the consumer, as long as they have access to the information they need to make an informed decision. The problem is that consumers act like they don't even have time to read the menu at the drive through, ordering blindly by number, paying in 3 seconds with a credit card, and finishing their value meals before they've driven 5 blocks. They can't be bothered to take the time to make informed decisions about what they eat beforehand, we are getting fatter and fatter as a society, our culture rewards and encourages blaming someone else for our own decisions, our governmental agencies evolve into nannies, and the evil corporations feeding them cheap trans fat-laden gunk have deep pockets. End result? Bans and lawsuits. Better idea? Let people make their own decisions and reap the consequences or the rewards. Don't tell ME that I can't eat foie gras because it violates YOUR moral standards, and I won't tell YOU that you can't have your trans-fat fried chicken because it violates MY personal standards. I may try to talk you out of it, but at least we'll know that conversation can take place over an extra large order of breaded foie gras nuggets deep fried in partially hydrogentated soy bean oil. Many ducks will "suffer", maybe we'll both gain 15 lbs, but it will be OUR choice. EDIT: I don't spell well whilst ranting.

It was definately a guy food kind of weekend for this girl. Trips with my family to our house at the Lake of the Ozarks normally are. I started the weekend off right spending a wad of money on booze at the grocery store at the intersection of the two Missouri highways closest to our lake house. I knew I was in trouble as I stood on the aisle of hard liquor and potato chips, deliberating between a fifth or a handle of Jack. (Jack and I are on a purely first-name basis.) I settled on a handle. Along with a jug of Jose Cuervo and some margarita mix (for my mom). Needed some Corona, noticed 24 packs of long necks were on sale. Got two of those. On to the cold beer aisle and snagged a 12 pack of Boulevard Pale Ale. Som actual food made it into my cart by the end of it, but I don't think the 8 limes, jar of cayenne pepper, and tortilla chips fooled anyone. I got in line, and noticed several guys in different lines, with prissy girlfriends, and carts full of wine coolers and real food, looking at me with serious envy. The weekend after that was a tribute to manly food that included grilled t-bone steaks, lazy BBQ'd chicken, dozens of hotdogs and sausages, monstrous hamburgers, pancakes the size of my head with seven or eight slices of bacon, all eaten on our finest Chin-ettes, with our hands, accompanied by a cold beer or six, potato chips, chips and (homemade salsa), store bought potato salad, roasted cashews, baked beans, and the iceberg bag salad Mom bought to feel a little less guilty about it all. I think I might be missing some female parts of my DNA. Today, before work, I found myself at Costco, hotdog in hand, looking for Jack Daniels Single Barrel and really dry Cabernet Sauvignon. So I guess you now know what I think of as "guy food."

Peaches like that just cry out to be made into a jam or a salsa. I like a basic pectin-added jam, with either some lemon juice/zest to cut the cloying sweetness, or a go the opposite directions and add a little bit of vanilla extract at the end, just before jarring. The former is great on toast, the latter on ice cream <swoon>. My new addiction is ginger peach habanero salsa. For each cup of peach flesh, toss with 1/8 cup sugar, then add 1-2 finely chopped roastedhabaneros, 1/4 cup white vinegar, some minced fresh ginger, and maybe a splash of lemon juice. Boil for 1 minute and jar. I need to make some more of this, as I don't think the 2 half pints I have are going to last much longer. With the strawberry, blueberry, and cherry overabundance threads lately, and now this, maybe we ought to pool our ideas for what to do with all that summer fruit (?)

My absolute favorite thing to make to go with grilled steaks is twice baked potatoes. But not just any twice baked potatoes. Six whole potatoes, rolled in olive oil and kosher salt, baked for an hour until the skin is crispy. Cut in half, scoop the flesh into a bowl, and add 1 stick of butter, 1 cup of full fat sour cream, 1 cup sharp cheddar, 1 cup white jack cheese. Mix. Sautee a pound of shelled shrimp in butter, in which you've already sauteed tons of chopped garlic. When the shrimp turn bright orange, add the entire contents of the skillet to the potato mixture. (At this point it is not optional to sop up the excess goodness in the skillet with chunks of bread.) Spoon the mixture back into the potato shells, top with more shredded cheddar. Bake at 350 degrees until hot and melty. No matter how many people you are serving, expect no leftovers. That's the most over-the top, lily-gilding recipe in my arsenal.

This thread brings to mind a meal cooked for me by an ex-boyfriend of mine (not technically "in my family", but he came close), after we had stopped dating and were trying to be freinds. He knew that I had gotten into food and cooking, and so he invited me over for dinner, I think as some kind of peace offering. First of all, the tiny apartment we had shared up until about seven months prior was filthy, empty soda cans and fast food wrappers littering the floor. The furniture was still arranged in exactly the same configuration, with gaping spaces where my couch and desk had been. A quick peek in the fridge revealed 6 12-packs of different kinds of diet soda, a tupperware container filled with what had once been leftovers but was now threatening to evolve into sentience, unidentifiable congealed liquid in the vegetable drawers, and a jar of my homemade salsa, unopened. The freezer was worse - crab legs I had bought at least a year before, half empty bags of freezer vegetables now sauced with ice crystals, and a dozen Hungry Man Chicken Dinners. His latest grocery haul from the Super Walmart was spread out across the living room floor, and was typical for someone who refuses to buy perishable items - mega sized packs of Ritz, Saltines, and Graham Crackers (a sleeve of any of these plus a diet soda was his typical breakfast), flats of Cup 'O Noodles, 8 loaves of wonder bread, a 2-pack of super-sized Jiffy (6 or 7 peanut butter sandwhiches being his normal dinner if he didn't feel like hitting a drive-through). You may be wondering, why didn't I turn around and leave? Well, he was always so damned cute, and he sounded so excited for me to try something he had "cooked", because he knew that good food and cooking was important to me. On the menu: Frozen chicken tenders, which he had tossed, still frozen, onto a cookie sheet, and apparantly forgotten about while he was playing some WoW. Vegetables in a cheese sauce. From a package of frozen mixed veggies with chips of frozen cheese included. The veggies were still partially frozen, the "cheese" was crispy from sticking to the bottom of the sauce pan. Baked potatoes. I figured out why they were edible later when I spotted the plastic wrappers with the instructions on how to cook them in the microwave. Of course, that was ruined by having only margerine to spread on them. This was all served on a table that had not actually been cleared off. He had just pushed the piles of paper and trash and dirty dishes off to the side to create a space for us to eat. The worst part is, we're still freinds, and he always points to that meal as proof that he "tried" to take an interest in things that were important to me. He's never really moved past that point. A few weeks ago, he set a potholder on fire on my stove, while cooking eggs and bacon in a non-stick saucepot. This was shortly after splattering himself with hot bacon grease when he dropped the eggs into the hot fat from a distance of about four feet. He was so proud of himself for learning how to cook bacon and eggs.

Is it rude to just ask for separate checks? More and more, I don't carry any cash, assuming I'll pay with a credit card. I normally just double the tax (7-8%) on my bill, then round up to the nearest dollar in the server's favor. If anything, I've found that splitting checks means higher tips for the servers - i.e., if there's five of us, and we each leave an extra dollar or two for our portions, the total tip is much higher. 20% seems a bit high for the expected norm, assuming we're talking about the kind of mid-priced places where one person might get away paying $20-30 before drinks. I have a group of friends who spent a summer working as servers at Applebees, and they said on a busy shift they were making upwards of $15-20 an hour, with tips averaging less than 15%. I normally aim for 15%, and my friends tend to do likewise.

All the recipes in the books I have for jams/jellies call for a precise amount of headspace and then a water bath. I've heard that simply lidding the jars, or even inverting them while hot is an old-fashioned method, and not considered safe. I didn't learn about preserving from anyone, so I have no sense of the history behind different methods. I've learned from the internet and from books. One of the things I've noticed is that Europeans seem much less uptight about things needing to be held at X temperature for exactly X minutes than Americans. Almost like Europeans treat it more as an art form. I've been warned time and time again on other forumns that I'll poison someone if I'm not water-bathing, and that I should never make up my own recipe because precise ratios are the only thing standing between me and botulism. It all makes a novice canner from Kansas a little nervous.

I don't have that much experience with preserving and jam making, so the tips here are great, especially The Old Foodie's list. Maybe someone with more experience can help me with a problem I encountered yesterday while doing blackberry preserves. The recipe from Ball Blue Book was for 2 lbs of berries to 4 cups of sugar - combine until juices flow, bring to a boil, and boil to just before the gelling point. Then into jars and a 10 minute water bath. I had a little under 1 lb (14.5 oz), so I used a little under 2 cups of sugar. I stopped the cooking when it was "sleeting" off the spoon, and got 1 8 oz jar into the water bath, with another half jar I stuck in the fridge. When I opened the jar in the fridge later, the preserves had turned the consistency of concrete! What did I do wrong / how do I do it better in future batches? Anyone doing interesting salsa? I've done tiny batches of raspberry chipotle, and peach ginger habanero, and I do large batches of a sweet tomato salsa that my dad loves, which is basically a slightly better version of like a mild Pace. I'd like to explore more of the fruity/hot/smoky combinations. Those are fun to take to a get-together.

This a great thread, thanks! I love RLB's Bread Bible as a book to start with. I pretty much learned to bake out of it, and there are breads in it I turn to time and time again. What I love about it (and what I think makes it great for a beginning baker) is how warm and un-pretentious it is. The whole "I discovered wheat germ bread" idea aside, she doesn't assume that you know everything already, she breaks down each step with an explanation that makes sense to a novice, and her breads aren't technically tricky. It's not meant to be a master's thesis about bread, just a solid introductory education to the science and art of it. When I was starting out, I like the fact that her measurements were very precise, and she gave you some idea of what to expect the dough to feel and look like as you went along. This is without a doubt the book I would give to a freind who wanted to step up from bread machines. All that said, my primary text now has been The Handmade Loaf. Wow! What a fantastic home baking book for taking it to the next level.

After spending a long time reading this thread, I somehow found myself standing in line at Borders with a copy of Charcuterie in my hand. I'm not sure what happened - I'm pretty sure I went in looking for a Father's Day card. After leafing through it, it appears I may have bought myself some kind of lifestyle overhaul. I've already told my parents I'm using their grill for smoking bacon sometime this month. What have a I gotten myself into?

You can get fried pickles at the Blue Moose in Prairie Village. They're sliced into rounds first. Jazz at 39th and State Line also has fried pickles. They're quarted lengthwise first. Both are very good, in their own way. I love the ambience at Jazz - very dive-ish in the best sense, and the food is great. Spicy gumbo, Étouffée, or jumbalaya, wash it down with a strong bloody mary. Blue Moose is more of a generic upscale suburban bar and grill, with a menu full of pretentious sounding pizzas and sandwiches, most of which or good but not oustanding. I was afraid this thread was going to degenerate into a virtual fistfight of some kind. I heard a radio commentater one time explain that the source of all this city's problems was the state line running through the center, which he then equated to the Berlin Wall. I suppose that would actually make Jazz a good neutral place for a meeting, seeing as how it's actually on State Line road.

I almost spit coffee on my monitor when I read these replies. Hanging out here could become a technical hazard as well as putting a dent in my productivity. The stereotypes held by people from various parts of this city about other parts of the city never cease to amaze me. Ditto for the amazing diversity of food (and food related) offerings. I've found gems in places my JoCo friends are afraid to go, but had equally great food adventures in the middle of strip mall hell. (None so far in Zona Rosa though ) Thanks for the welcome guys. I'm happy to have found a group of like-minded, food-obsessed people - particularly ones who can appreciate the everyday absurdities that make me laugh.

I work right up I-29 from Zona Rosa. In my opinion, Tomfooleries is an ok place to go for a drink after work with my co-workers, if I can't drag them down to one of my favorite bars in Westport. Nothing much sets it apart from the generic bar 'n' grills that dot the landscape up here. As for Zona Rosa itself, the first time I drove into there, I was immediately struck by how much it felt like Disney World - some bizarre combination of Main Street, USA, and that fake movie set backdrop that looks like a city street. Creepy. I feel the same kind of anxiety there as I get walking through Oak Park Mall. I think it must appeal to people who are attracted to new places they are already familiar with. My best friend's mother moved up to Tiffany Greens recently from the middle of Johnson county, and she loves Zona Rosa. She thinks that people from down south will flock to it because it's "like the Plaza, only in much safer part of town." And yeah, dining options up here are pretty limited. I mostly hit up Chipotle or Panera on those rare occasions when I forget my lunch and can't stomach a burger from our Aramark cafeteria. I may have to give In A Tub a try - it's hard to tell which of the quirky strip mall restaurants are worth trying, and which are a waste of time, and that's not one I would have picked based on it's name. And there are alot of crappy places to spend your restaurant dollar up here.