patris

So is it possible to leave any food portion vertically oriented with the standard grill? My understanding is that horizontal placement messes with the convection effect. Did you get the $199 price? I tried to order the other evening and the DEMI199 promo code came up invalid. Somehow, for me, $199 is palatable, but $299 is not.

Neufatchel (sp?) cheese, or maybe soft tofu? HTH! There's also Laughing Cow (the low-fat variety). It's soft enough to spread, I think. And you can cream cottage cheese to make it smoother. And fromage frais. And Boursin Light. And soft goat cheese. (edited twice to add a few ideas) How about hummus? Or peanut or other nut butter, depending on the veggies (might be nice with a carrot/celery/raisin mixture)? Or a nice thick yogurt dressing like tzatziki?

Whoa. If Georgia O'Keeffe and Salvador Dali had a baby who became a cheesemaker, that is exactly what he or she would make. It's... umbilical. And no doubt delicious - what kind of cheese is it? This reaches back a couple of days, but thank you for reminding me that roasting is a good way to cook shrimp. I always boil it, and it always ends up overcooked no matter how vigilant I am. I roasted some today and it's beyond good.

Antipasto? Assuming you can get some sort of sausages/charcuterie, that might work.

I usually don't hang anywhere outside the pastry & baking board, but I'm particularly happy with today's lunch (even though, as usual, I am eating in my office). It's day 2 of no refined carbs: tuna salad with loads of lovely veggies for dipping/spreading. Given how much I enjoyed my morning snack of teeny sweet peppers stuffed with veggie cream cheese, I think this low carb thing might just be manageable! I really should invest in some paper plates.

Thank you for posting those pics - my iPhone camera really didn't do justice to any of that. The soup was pea and bread, with something called dinosaur kale which I am on a mission to find me some of (grammar be damned - it was good!). Turns out they fry the frites in duck fat. I'm kicking myself for turning down your offer to taste one!

I am lucky to have tasted these a few moments ago. I will cop to some trepidation, being not at all adventurous... but man, they are delicious! The salty brininess of the olives comes through more as fragrance than flavor, and the olive bits in the buttercream have just a hint of meatiness to them. Really wonderful!

What fun! And what lucky kids, to be learning such things from you at such a young age!

Totally agree about filling from the top - I use a little scoop or melon baller to take out a goodly divot. If you're looking for recipes/ideas, you can make a nice take on the Mounds bar by using any nice, dark chocolate cake recipe, filling with a mixture of equal parts sweetened condensed milk and flaked coconut, and frosting with a whipped dark ganache. Have fun!

Well I know I won't ever be able to erase the memory of it... (is that asparagus in pasta with some sort of cheese sauce? Because that sounds delicious.)

Perhaps too simple, but a true pleasure when done right: hot, crispy toast, thoroughly buttered. Never had perfect toast in a restaurant, regardless of the quality of the other meal components.

Just finished my first batch, using Kerry's honey recipe and layering in some chopped dark chocolate. I used my Kitchenaid mixer (no thermomix for me!), and beat until it was really thick - like if library paste and peanut butter had a baby. Seemed almost uncomfortably oily when I was putting it into the pan, so much so that I actually poured some oil off. It has sat for an hour or so now, and has magically transformed into a much nicer texture. A bit hard, but crumbly as opposed to the gumminess it had at the start. Also: delicious. Like "I will need bigger pants soon if I don't get it out of my house" delicious. Lior, I may be sharing your level of obsession with this stuff pretty soon!

Kerry, that looks crazy delicious. Well done! Do you think halvah could be dipped in chocolate, or is it so oily that it you risk seepage?

Oh, what fun this is! I stumbled upon huge bags of lemons and limes at BJ's yesterday, and thought I'd give 'cellos a shot. I used 6 oz. of grain alcohol in each bottle, and topped it up with some cheap stuff - Fleischman's. I am amazed how much color was extracted right away: Hoping it will be ready in two weeks, when I head off to the Adirondacks for an annual reunion weekend with a couple college friends... definitely a far cry from the Hawaiian Punch and grain alcohol we enjoyed back in the day!

Many thanks to all for your thoughtful feedback. Our chocolate vendor's question about selling our recipes does not appear to have been a serious inquiry. There have been a few other "my uncle (neighbor, neighbor's uncle, neighbor's uncle's dogsitter's third cousin twice removed) is going to call you"s as well, which is perhaps just what people do when a business they like shuts down. At this point, barring any unexpected earth-shattering offers, my sense is that we will probably just dismantle the business structure and hang on to the recipes and business name trademark. Who knows what the future will bring; if we end up doing something interesting, I will definitely let you know.

Why does this matter? Maybe I'm missing something but it would seem like any money you got would be better than just shutting down. It most certainly matters to us. Based on our sales, I am 100 percent positive that no reasonable, appropriately derived valuation of the business would be sufficient for either of us to sell it and walk away. We have put an awful lot of work into this business, have a delicious and marketable product, and may well wish to pick it up again when we have more time (50+ hour/week day jobs and aging parents have us both fully subscribed). I have a rudimentary understanding of how to put a value on a business, but no idea how to value recipes; that is at the heart of my inquiry. Selling the recipes right now would have to be well worth it, and it may be that a licensing agreement (thanks, Holly!) is the best way to go . The business has no debt, money in the bank and a reasonable quantity of sellable equipment, so it's not like we will walk away penniless. Ultimately it's not about price; it's about the value of our intellectual property, if one can accurately assign that term to a set of recipes. I am simply looking for input from professionals who might have thought about, or actually done, this kind of thing before.

A friend and I co-own a little (really, really little) marshmallow business, which we have decided to shut down as of, like, now. We haven't completed any formal dissolution paperwork or anything, but we intend to do so over the next few months. Several people have asked if we were going to sell the business, and my gut response has been no - the valuation would definitely not be worth what we have put into it, and I doubt we would be able to structure something that would provide us with a share of any profits from future product sales. So today, we get a note from the vendor who does our enrobing for us, asking if we would consider selling our recipes (all of which I developed/refined myself - none came directly from any copyrighted source). I honestly have no idea if it was a serious inquiry, but it got me wondering... those of you with businesses, if someone offered to buy your recipes, would you sell? And how would you go about determining a value?

How to create different textures might be an interesting thing to play with - that balance of temperature and time that makes things work or not work. You could do crispy fried (arancini, french fries), fluffy (perfectly cooked rice, baked russets), silky (risotto, gratin), sticky, just plain wrong (overcooked rice, potatoes "mashed" in a food processor). I realize these ideas are rice-and-potatoes centric, but you could do some of those textures with couscous, pasta, etc. There are loads of people out there (like, for example, me) who have never cooked a pot of rice properly in their lives, nor made acceptably fried hash browns (also me).

Many, many thanks to all for your terrific feedback. Merlicky, this was particularly helpful. We hand rolled one coat, then let them set quite a while before we proceeded, rolling twice more. Out of about 125 pieces, only a small fraction - 5 or 6 - had any ooze by the end of the day. Reputation (and my sister's holiday gifts) saved!

Humbug? What is this, that sounds so intriguing and also descriptive of my general holiday demeanor? Humbugs are a great little hard candy - found in english grandmother's purses. They are a little minty and little caramelly - yummy little suckers. You bash those up and put them in dark chocolate and they make a lovely bark. It can be rather hard to find humbugs these days - stores with old fashioned candies will often have them. Oh yeah, I forgot - I've been making pop rock bark too. When I was down visiting you the last time I found the candy cane flavoured pop rocks at Wegmans and I've used those in the chocolate and topped with a bit of crushed candy cane for decoration. Interesting! There's an old time candy shop not far from here - we'll have to check it out next time you're here. And I forgot about those pop rocks!

Humbug? What is this, that sounds so intriguing and also descriptive of my general holiday demeanor?

The peanut butter you are using may have a fairly high oil content. If you are using "natural" peanut butters, they tend to separate vs. some of the larger brands which are generally blended to prevent that. It's also possible you are seeing some "fat migration". My suggestion would be to make the centers a little "drier" than normal by adding a bit more powdered sugar and to pre-coat the product with tempered chocolate before dipping. Good luck! Thanks, all! I am 100% certain she doesn't use natural peanut butter - Jif is her brand, I think. We did hand-roll before dipping; perhaps we'll do that twice, then dip. Meantime, I'll suggest a bit of extra powdered sugar and a few hours' drying time out of the container she keeps them in.

One of my sisters makes those ubiquitous peanut butter balls every year around the holidays (don't know the recipe, but it's basically PB, butter, powdered sugar, and whatever gets used to hold those things together other than powdered sugar). She used to dip them in melted chocolate chips and paraffin, but last year I persuaded her to let me temper some 'real' chocolate for them. We first hand-rolled them like truffles with a very thin coat, then dipped them. Most (probably 80 percent) ended up with little pinhole-type leaks of an oily substance. (how appetizing!) A careful blotting and another dip fixed some, but not nearly all. Any ideas as to what we did wrong and how I can adjust the process to ensure success? The chocolate was in perfect temper, the pieces were room temperature, room temperature was probably 70-ish. She never had this problem using the chips/paraffin combo, and my role as benevolent chocolate dispenser and advice giver is at stake here.

I'm making macarons for a baby shower this weekend and planning to fill them with black raspberry jam. I have very little experience with macarons, and I'm wondering what effect, if any, the water content of a jam filling has on the shells - do I need to do something to 'seal' the bottoms before I fill, or can I just let them go commando? The shower is Sunday, and I was planning to fill the macarons Saturday night and pop them in the fridge. Is this ok, or will they go mushy or something? Any help from those with more experience would be soooo appreciated.

Those pizzas look absolutely delicious. I use Zoe Francois' no knead dough for pizza on my baking stone all the time - I shape it on a piece of flour-dusted Reynolds Release, slide it onto the stone using a peel, then pull the foil out from under about 3 minutes into baking time. It always turns out terrific.