spqr

Just to be precise, we should stipulate that we are referring to vegetables and not fruits. Tomatoes, eggplants, zucchini, and such like are fruits, not vegetables, and there can be no objections to them.

The proper role of veggies is to garnish a plate. I don't generally consider them to be "food", although there is at least one big exception to the rule (the potato). Which isn't to say I don't like veggies. Well, I don't really, but there are exceptions. I guess I am conflicted too.

Speaking of food snobbery, I just recently found the paperback edition of the Hess' A Taste of America under a pile of books on my "to read next" table. I pulled it out and began rereading. Now HERE is a lesson in food snobbery, albeit one that is learned, erudite and passionate. To wit: Granted, that was written in the early 1970s, and while I think much has improved since then, it still rings awfully true today to me.

Consume or Perish!

Leftovers go to my refrigerator to die. I prefer to be, tactically, more parsimonious in my purchasing so as to mitigate the problem of throwing away "food". But I throw away what needs to be disposed of and that's the way it is in my house.

Springfield, IL, west side of town, in The Gables.

Whatever contemporary European cuisine may be that duck salad would not be part of it, the only place you'd get stuff like that would be in an American restaurant, and I don't care what it calls its "cuisine" Sniff sniff. I wouldn't want to over generalize on this issue. I've had many dodgy meals in Europe too. I don't know who the cook is at this place, or what his/her training is, but whoever it is is stretching his/her competence way beyond its current limits. However, I'm sure that cooking in a small, midwestern U.S. city is equivalent to pitching in the minors (baseball reference, sorry), and there's no way but up from here.

Okay, so what is "proper" bacon? Is it from the loin, like Canadian bacon? How is it processed? Does it taste like "bacon" or what?

While we're on the subject... I've heard the Two Fat Ladies mention "proper" English bacon on one or two of their shows, and I always wondered what proper bacon is and what is improper bacon. Were they making a distinction between supermarket bacon and that which can be procured from the pig farmer? Different cuts from the hog? Or what?

I don't know. I find it hard - though not impossible - to believe that there is such a huge apparent disconnect between basic food safety and culinary dogma: fully cook your chickens but eat your duck bloody. And how trendy to eat fish raw or rare, even though they may be loaded with nasty parasites. I am still in search of a good explanation. I believe that there is one out there somewhere. I started this thread because yesterday a group of friends and I ate at a new place in Springfield (called "Soiree", contemporary European cuisine, whatever that is). I ordered the duck salad - small stack of mesclun with a port wine/vanilla vinaigrette, useless poached pear, seared infant duck breast and candied pecans, and the duck was cooked very rare. It was a touch too rare for my taste, but my bottom line is that the dish was very poorly designed and poorly executed (loads too sweet, not very flavorful, considering all the disparate elements, and the duck was stone cold when it arrived at table). After lunch, I was telling a colleague who wasn't able to attend about the meal, and when I described the duck salad he shuddered and said something to the effect that all poultry should be cooked through. I thought about that for a second, and I just didn't have an answer for why duck is different and not, somehow, considered to be "poultry" for the purposes of that particular culinary dictum. I came up blank, and that's where I still am I guess.

I'm with Wilfrid. So far the information posted here suggests that both chicken, ducks and geese are liable to be contaminated/contaminating and therefore pose a serious health risk if not fully cooked. One answer that has some potential is that there are differences in the ways that chicken are "processed" compared to ducks that leaves them much more apt to be contaminated with various microbe nasties. But I've seen no authoritative word on this yet [edit: except for g.johnson, who posted while I was composing]. And even this would not really account for the near universal dictum to cook chicken fully when at the same time to advocate for duck cooked rare (Asian habits notwithstanding). Where are the egullet food scientists when you need them?

I've given my recipe (which was lifted from an excellent wing joint in Buffalo) on another thread. What you have to deal with is that authentic Buffalo wings use bottled Louisiana hot sauce (Frank's was the essential brand before the brand was sold to some huge conglomerate who proceeded to dumb it down) as a base. It is then doctored in various clever and not so clever ways.

Quoting from of Dstone's links: and These quotes suggest to me that the risk of salmonella contamination is not essentially different between ducks and chickens (and geese, for that matter). So this begs the question: why are we paranoid about raw chicken cross-contamination and illness, and not about duck cross-contamination and illness?

I must admit that I had never seen this before, until today that is. A couple of friends and I went to a new place for lunch ("contemporary European" cuisine - personally, I'd prefer ancient European, but that's another topic), and all of the wait staff had their leatherette check books stuck down the back of their pants. When I pointed out the gross inappropriateness of this, one of my companions quipped: "it gives new meaning to the phrase "check out that ass!"".

Okay, so how are ducks processed? Are they not defeathered, gutted and washed too? I've not seen them otherwise at my supermarket. (Off topic, but the tuna thing is, I agree, annoyingly ubiquitous on restaurant menus. But it is also the quintessential fad food. Not good to eat, basically, but because it's so trendy everyone thinks it's marvelous. And, BTW, that waiter at Picholine was rude and wrong. The customer is entitled to have his food cooked to his preference.)

Every TV cooking show host, and many cookbooks, specify that one should be fanatical about cleaning hands and all exposed surfaces when handling raw chicken. But there are never similar injunctions when it comes to duck and other foods. I speculate that it can't be simply differences in taste or texture of the foods that account for this difference. Raw duck is pretty gross too, after all. And don't get me started on lightly seared on the outside, raw on the inside tuna (has this despicable fad died yet?) Are our perceptions about health risks really so selective? Or are there good reasons underlying them? C'mon, who knows the answer? Give me facts, not opinion please.

I understand why chicken must be thoroughly cooked, but why is duck frequently cooked and served nearly raw? What is it about duck that makes it immune to salmonella (or other nasty pathogens)? I suppose one could ask the same for fish. Is there no health risk to eating raw fish? Just curious.

From some of the responses, it appears that there are many more episodes of Chef! than the measily 6 that are for sale on video. I'll have to double check the PBS listings for my area, but I can't remember ever seeing it run on either of the two PBS stations I can get. I've seen 6 and I'm hungry for more, alas.

While searching for things culinary on Amazon.com one day I stumbled upon Chef!. There are two videos, each containing three episodes. Can any of our British friends tell me whether there were more episodes of this series than just these six? Was this really a "smash hit". I thought there were some funny moments, but I also thought that Lenny Henry needs a lot of getting used to. Comments?

I hate it when 1) salads are overdressed 2) macaroni is overcooked 3) waiters want to be my best friend 4) drinks are mixed way under strength 5) the wait staff can't cope that I like to eat my salad last

I hate it when 1) salads are overdressed 2) macaroni is overcooked 3) waiters want to be my best friend 4) drinks are mixed way under strength 5) the wait staff can't cope that I like to eat my salad last

Yikes! What a nightmare story. Did it not occur to either of you to do a 180 out the door and go somewhere else as soon as you were told they were out of lobster?

This sounded good to me, so I went and purchased the article from The Times' archive service. Basically it is dry pasta cooked like a risotto. But Ducasse's version has no cream or sausage. Instead it has chopped tomatoes, fingerling potatoes, onions and fresh basil or arugula. I've never heard of cooking pasta this way, so I'm going to have to give it a try, maybe this weekend. Thanks for the tip!

Probably the one tip I read in Cooks Illustrated that I actually use and benefit from on a regular basis was the tip to use a sheet of parchment paper to bake your pizzas on. Place the parchment on the peel, lay on the rolled-out dough, top it and then slide the whole shebang onto the pizza stone. You get all the advantages of baking your pie on a pizza stone and you get the added advantages of 1) never having your pie stick to the peel and 2) leaving no mess on the stone. Eh voila!

As I reported in an earlier post, I have experimented quite a bit with flours for my pizza doughs and I have lately settled (for the time being at least) on about a 1:3 ratio of AP flour to bread flour. I haven't yet tried to use semolina in the mix. Regarding the stickiness of my dough...I tend to make medium-dry doughs, finding that very wet doughs are too hard to handle. I've read that one should try to make as wet a dough as possible when making bread but I've never been able to ferret out a sensible explanation from the book or magazine article as to why I should do this. I sometimes watch the two or three old Julia Child episodes on video where she demonstrates her French bread technique. She sort of plucks at the ball of dough to show how sticky the dough should be. I think my doughs start out that sticky but they quickly lose that after they get kneaded and rolled out on the bench flour.