Kajikit

$500 is hardly pocket change or a counting error, and it disappeared from the room while you were in the presence of the auditor who had verified it was there... I would have thought that it would be a police matter and your mistake was not insisting that they be called immediately.

I'm sorry... if the food is bad enough that I have to send it back to the kitchen uneaten, there is no way in Hades I'm going to pay for it! I'll pay for everything else we ate and drank at that meal (and if I'm hungry enough to order a substitute dish, I'll happily pay for that), but I'm not paying for food that was inedible. The few times we've returned food it's been taken off the bill without our having to say anything more about it.

Serving up Thanksgiving Dinner this week... turkey breast, check... made-from-scratch green bean casserole, check... fresh herb bread., check... cranberry sauce, check... roasted root vegetable medley, check... leg ham that I bought specially for DH because he doesn't like turkey - still sitting in the refrigerator in its package. Good thing that it'll keep till Christmas! Also, a good thing that he decided he liked the turkey breast after all! I always forget something when I'm doing a fancy dinner...

'Mr Delicious' is a good name all by itself... it could cover anything. You could put 'Cheesecakes' etc on the sign to help pull people in.

If it's not broken, don't fix it... people know your name and know of the restaurant, and if you keep it the same but move to the larger (and presumably better) premises they'll understand... if you move and change the name, people will think it's some entirely new restaurant and you'll lose the following. Putting the pronunciation on your sign is a cute idea...

I got a very bad vibe from the beginning of the show - all those choppy cuts between the different parties griping about each other, wasting so much airtime that it took almost fifteen minutes for Gordon Ramsay to even get into the restaurant! And I wasn't any more impressed by the rest of the show - it looks to me like Fox took a great reality show and cut out everything that made it worth watching in favour of a bit of flash (overnight kitchen fairies anyone?!) and a lot of foul language If they wanted to show that Peter was a (BLEEP) they could have done that in two minutes and got on with the show.

Cake every single time! Pies are okay, but I don't really like pastry - the fat in it tends to upset my stomach.

When I was a kid it always seemed very strange that a lot of my friend's families at dinner at five... the earliest we ever ate was 6-6.30, and in the summertime it crept backwards to 7.30-8 (especially when it was very hot - the longer and hotter the day, the later it was before anyone was hungry...) Nowadays, my husband's work hours are erratic, so our dinner time depends entirely on when he gets home for the day. Our ideal dinner time (if we've eaten lunch that day) is anywhere between 6 and 7. But if I know he'll be home about 4pm, I cook our dinner in the afternoon and we eat as soon as he gets home, then we have a snack for supper at nine. When we're going out for a meal, in possible we go in the afternoon between regular lunch and dinner times - that way the restaurant is nice and quiet and not so busy and we don't have to wait for a table - we HATE waiting around! We like to arrange our dining around our schedule, not our schedule around our dining...

At least 50% of restaurants in South Florida seem to be too cold for me. I've never been in a restaurant here that was too hot for me, but I usually freeze to death by the time we've finished our meal!

Anyone else think that last night's episode was pure filler? Nothing really happened!

I'm sorry, the last two episodes have been LAME! I didn't bother to watch the 'reunion' at all, and I expected good things from the frozen food challenge, but it was pathetic! Even I know that if you want to successfully freeze meals they have to be lightly cooked so they don't overcook when you reheat them, something solid like a lasagne (which can't be reheated in a skillet, so that was out) and frozen either in very flat sheets or preferably with the liquids seperate from the solids so that they don't go mushy when you try to reheat them.

I think your restaurant (and food) look absolutely beautiful! I'd think that the 'weeknights=empty' situation is a simple matter of logistics - you say your restaurant is out in the country (so presumably it takes people an hour or so to get there) and they simply have more time for the trek on Saturdays!

I don't know what the experts are saying, but as a consumer, I've found that US restaurants never ever serve enough vegetables with their meals. Unless you specifically request a side-order (which generally comes drenched in fatty, salty SOMETHING) or a salad (generally a 'bowl-o-lettuce' laden in dressing of some sort) you can expect to get meat and potatoes/starch and that's it. It's one of the things that puts me off going out to eat - I LIKE the taste of vegetables darnit, and I really really wish that that practice would change so I could get a BALANCED meal for my money!

Dirty cutlery - I'd ask for a new set, but it wouldn't stop me from eating once I got them. A hair. Not a problem - I have long hair and it sometimes seems to me like everything I cook is going to get a hair in it SOMEWHERE (no, I'm not a chef, I'm talking about home-cooking...) Nobody ever died from finding a hair in their food... Bit of eggshell - not a problem. It happens. About the only thing that would force me to quit eating and make a fuss would be a bug (live or dead) larger than a fruitfly in my food... I can't stand 'em! (actually that's not quite true either - one time my salad came complete with a cute little itty bitty garden spider in it. I rescued the poor thing and set it free...)

I noticed that too. Thought maybe I'd lost a bit of concentration because I'd seen it before. I guess they take advantage and just throw a few more commercials in the repeats. After reading further, yep the first epi was 75 minutes. Can't blame the sponsors there. Morgan_Weber. Exactly! Not a brisket in sight. That would have been my choice. There are many ways a brisket could be ramped up to feed a distinctive crowd and be real barbeque. ← Yep. They had to cut the first episode for rerunning because it was 15 minutes too long for the regular timeslot. The stuff they cut out was just chaff anyway...

Mmmm... cherries! DH bought me a treat the other day - cherries, peaches (which were nice but not as nice as they could be...) and fresh blackberries... so I made a compote for dessert tonight.

I'd have waited for an hour, and made an effort to track you down to see if you were en route... and THEN I'd have left if you weren't. Thirty minutes isn't very considerate...

I watched it... It's too soon to make any judgement on the contestants except that as we were reminded they're not looking for someone who can actually run a kitchen and COOK - they want a 'personality'. I'm reserving judgement for a later stage... but for now none of them look like a standout. Oh, and when Patrick was eliminated I was like 'who's he?' - he didn't seem to make any impression on me at all, which took some effort And that wedding cake that 'won' was absolutely and utterly boring. All those cake decorating ingredients available and all it took to win the challenge was a piping bag?! And that blonde who was supposed to be running the wedding reception and didn't even buy enough food for fifty? What a ditz!

I've just discovered this thread and waded through all 24 pages of delicious uckiness (and just plain uck!) Bravo... if I was going to share my food photos this is where they'd have to end up!

Idiot savant?

I had mahi-mahi to cook tonight, so this thread gave me the idea to try it. It was easy to make the parcels out of parchment paper but the results were very disappointing - the parcels never puffed up so I had to guess when the fish was done and it ended up overcooked, watery and flavourless. It definitely looked better than it tasted!

I'd love to try this no-touch bread... I'm allergic to raw yeast so I can't make my own bread because I can't knead it without destroying my hands! But I have to buy a pot to cook it in - I don't have anything suitable. But I do have an Amazon gift voucher waiting to be spent... Is a Lodge 5qt dutch oven big enough/suitable?

I honestly don't understand just what is so hard about making a cake from scratch... my mother taught me a basic cake recipe that you can do ANYTHING you like to, and when we got a microwave I modified it to make it even easier (I hate creaming butter, and I have NEVER sifted flour in my life) It takes one bowl and about ten minutes to mix. You can have the cake in the pan by the time the oven's heated up... Mama's version that she taught me: BASIC SANDWICH CAKE INGREDIENTS: 1½ cups flour ¼ teaspoon salt 2 teaspoons baking powder 3 oz. butter ½ cup sugar 1 larg egg ½ cup milk Vanilla essence METHOD Sift together flour, baking powder and salt. Cream butter and sugar thoroughly. Add unbeaten egg and beat all together very well. Add vanilla essence. Add dry ingredients to egg mixture alternately with the milk. Bake at 375° to 400° F. in two eight-inch tins for about fifteen to twenty minutes. VARIATIONS To make slice in lamington tin, use 2 cups flour and 2 eggs. COCONUT CAKE: Use coconut essence instead of vanilla essence, add two tablespoons of coconut to mixture and bake in square or rectangular tin. Ice with butter icing and sprinkle with toasted coconut. SULTANA CAKE: Add one cup sultanas and bake in loaf tin. ORANGE CAKE: Add grated rind of one orange, 1 tablespoon orange juice instead of 1 tablespoon of the milk. Ice with orange icing. SPICE CAKE: Add ½ teaspoon mixed spice and ¼ teaspoon cinnamon. APPLE CAKE: Add 3/4 cup cooked apple puree instead of milk and ½ teaspoon cinnamon instead of vanilla. *** MY VERSION BASIC SANDWICH CAKE 1 stick unsalted butter (2 if you like it more buttery) 1 cup sugar 3 or 4 eggs 3 cups SR flour (or plain flour and raising agent) 1 cup milk or juice Flavouring (vanilla, cinnamon, spice, raisins etc.) Dump butter and sugar in a large microwave-proof bowl and nuke until the butter is very soft/melted. Beat in the eggs. Add desired flavouring/s and raising agent. Add one cup of flour and mix well. Add some liquid if it's getting stiff. Add another cup of flour (ditto). Add the last cup of flour and liquid if it's too hard to mix. Dump the cake into a large greased pan and bake at 370F for 30 minutes or until it's set in the center. DONE. Also works great as muffins/cupcakes/loaf cakes etc.

I was just wondering, do you (and LindseyAnn/and others) also get headaches/etc when eating products with high glutamic acid values? See list @ http://www.umamiinfo.com/umami-rich_food/ ← Thank you for your thoughtful question. I can only speak about my own migraine food triggers as they vary from person to person. To answer your question, yes some of these foods will trigger a migraine headache, but only if eaten in excess, or if I'm eating several servings of these foods in one meal or over the course of the day. I've got other food migraine triggers that aren't umami foods. Some always give me a headache no matter what (chocolate )and others I can eat a bite or two of every now and then. So if I'm having some miso soup (made with dashi) for lunch I don't have avocado (one of my other triggers) in a salad for dinner that night. But you know - added MSG whether it's processed into the food or added in the form of Ajinomoto or Accent always gives me a migraine. ← I'm absolutely sure it's related to VOLUME. Glutamates are a natural substance and they're found in lots of foods, but in minute quantities. One small tomato has approximately 120mg of glutamate in it according to that chart linked to... how much glutamate is in one teaspoon of MSG? (the closest I could come to finding an answer was for salt - one level teaspoon of salt is 2400mg and I assume MSG is similar in volume...) And how many commercial foods do they put MSG in? I can eat tomato all day long and not have a problem but I'm obviously consuming much less glutamate with my meal than if I opened a can of soup and a bag of flavoured chips. Chocolate has a definite affect on my migraines too - I can normally eat as much of it as I like with no ill-effect, but if I'm migrainish I can't have ANY or it makes it much worse

I've only seen two eps of it so far, but on the last one they were talking about it being the intern's job to scrub the used cake pans... so somebody's got to be baking something The finished cakes are glorious!