jumanggy

Wow! Thanks! I'd probably cut before baking... I don't have an electric knife and I have incredibly bad luck with cutting delicate food, so to cut after baking would be shatteriffic for me

Why do most recipes require that the puff pastry be cut after the whole sheet is baked? I've never worked with puff pastry before so I thought that cutting it to the desired end-shape (individual rectangles/ squares) would work, wouldn't it? Or is there an undesirable effect, like not much/ uneven rising?

Sorry GTO... it's at least less gross than an exploding pig (I hope.) Anybody doing a bake sale at all this weekend, I wonder. No particular theme here, but mixes of fresh/ sweet/ fruity/ tart/ bitter so my friends' taste buds won't get frazzled out. Oh, and lots and lots of potato chips. Cause that what desserts do to ya... (Thank heavens we're all twentysomethings...)

I think that's what they call "Manggy Nectar," lol. And yuck. Who knew I could be so corny? Thanks for the vote of confit-dence. (Thanks, I'll be here all week) Before I joined the boards, the first thing I ever saw on the eGullet forums was Wendy deBord's food blog. My jaw dropped, and she'd say it's all in a day's work, etc, etc. Each picture, which consisted of hundreds of uniformly beautiful minis, plated desserts, and wedding cakes, was so inspired. It brought out the kid in this ogre who spent 5 years working in a dungeon (yikes, how poetic). This quasimodo had only ever baked COOKIES (and only chocolate chip cookies!) before joining the boards! I realize she's a pastry chef and I'm an amoeba, but still it's like I'm paying tribute to that first rush of inspiration. Maybe we can make the kid/ lurker/ new member think, "I gotta get in on that!" eskay, that's the spirit!

I'm so sorry for your loss, Margaret... I hope soon you'll be feeling better, and not just about cooking.

Tri2Cook, I'll be looking forward to any desserts you can make (they always look great), even if it's just a couple! Besides, you need those carbs for energy... I'm not sure what my theme is. Obviously it'll be stuff I've never made before, and as always I'll try to make everything visually appealing. I might throw an all dessert party this weekend and give out boxes to my friends so I won't have to do road cycling...

Steve, Kerry, is the joint rigid (holds its place) or loose? I'm sure this is a false memory, but those tongs look like something we may have used in the chemistry laboratory in college. I would use it to tong over (yuck... is that even a verb?) hot, dirty things, like pieces of coal or the entire grill. (Now that I think about it, that sounds less like a Chem lab and more like a barbecue) I certainly wouldn't say any wooden spoon is useless! (Or maybe we just don't have fancy plastic spoons in my neck of the woods..) I don't even have a well-made one and I still think it's unbeatable for choux pastry and working with caramel.

They even remembered little things like Pinchy (took me a while to remember him) and Moe's birthday fries! (Edna Krabappel "HA!") This sounds like a lot of fun.

I don't know if that's the one I see just outside Greenbelt, on the streets surrounding it. I haven't entered there. Almon Marina is a deli...

That's freaky! I just saw this rerun of Sweet Dreams with Gale Gand. Banana Brulee Spoonfuls: http://www.foodnetwork.com/food/recipes/re...6_16324,00.html

(Key-)Lime Squares? (there's always condensed milk here at home) But yeah, there's nothing quite as readily available as ingredients for Blondies.

I've been thinking of something that is truly useless, but it looks like the best I could come up with is "hindrance/ annoying." Agreed on the shaker tops and slicing guides. I've always thought multiple fancy whisk designs made little sense, but then again I've never used a non-balloon whisk. I just hate clutter (I have enough problems as it is keeping all my pans in order). From the pastry side: pie weights. They're uneven, heavy, and leave pockmarks on pie crusts. For me at least, egg timers or even regular tick-tock timers. Digital timers are a step up, but I'm always with my cellphone, so I always use it to time my baking, set alarms, etc. The bonus is that it also is my calculator.

Oh, I just realized something weird. The people in those calorie-counting forums were suggesting adding diet sprite to angel food cake mix (actually it's a very old suggestion), but isn't angel food cake mix made of powdered sugar, albumin, and cake flour? (give or take chemical leavening agents..) It would originally only need water to reconstitute. So... for the added extra sweetness, they're dumping diet soda into something with all its potential calories already built in. I'm not sure if the carbonated water is going to give it any additional oomph, would it? How much flavor do apples contribute in apple pie anyway? Could you just get away with using round buttery crackers? Pennylane, did you take a picture? I'd love to see it! Paulraphael, I'm guessing very few want the stress of making 8 different fillings, ha ha! I suppose wanting them all to finish baking at the same time shouldn't be too hard if the fillings are similar...

From a Reader's Digest Holiday insert (December 1980), an advertisement for Cut-rite wax paper (I wish I could scan it but I'm not sure if it's still covered by copyright): Eat your heart out, Martha Stewart!

Yeah, that substitution was weird. Which household sooner has corn syrup than granulated sugar? "Gee, I know what this cake needs to be... Flatter, denser, and chewier!" Something's also surfacing in my consciousness... Oh yeah, Angel Food Cake Mix made with room-temperature 7-up instead of water, or maybe Chocolate Cake Mix made with Diet Coke. (I hope my link lasts forever.) Apparently it turned out okay for some people. I'm not going to knock it before I've tried it, but I will probably never try it.

I haven't been seriously baking for very long (just a few months), so I've no idea if something that sounds crazy may actually be common knowledge to professionals. I was looking for local recipes as I was getting guilty over making "international" fare all the time, when I came across this in a promotional cookbook (42 pages) for White King flour and wheat products, circa... 1980, I think. Near the end was a page titled "Professional Secrets." Does that sound like it could work or could be a spectacular disaster? (Apparently they did not trust homemakers of yesteryear in the Philippines to successfully tort a whole cake.) It kind of makes me feel sad to think a cake might not be finished in a matter of hours and that it would not even be stored properly, ha ha. I've heard of this tip a lot. Do people do this? I don't know what this means. I hope they're not suggesting that the downside to adding milk that has been sitting out for too long is an inferior "flavor."From the "Substitutes for Common Ingredients" page: Okay, that is clearly wrong for most baking applications. However, they didn't add any disclaimer saying that anything that results from this substitution will have no crumb (or at least a weird crumb). I'm hoping nobody followed this...Oh, there's also an introduction (unrelated): Gee, THANKS! Yes, I know it was the late 70's. Wasn't born then.So, have you ever heard of a baking tip that sounded weird but ended up surprising you? Or was it widely debunked?

I use this fancy contraption... http://www.notcot.com/archives/2007/07/toda_oxo_corn_s.php Just kidding.

Bruce: I LOVE Tilapia. That curry looks amazing. I prepared a Roasted Pork Loin for my mom's party (where I had to be nowhere in sight). She only gave me 24 hours of preparation and cooking time (I was doing other entrees and a dessert too), so the crust was pretty flavorful but the middle was pretty (er) purely porky (the roast was 8.25lbs/3.75kg). I would show some pictures of the slices but my mom did not do a good job carving it (thus magnifying the porkiness of the center). Maybe I should have stuck around to carve the monster around her guests.

Hong-Kong style Mango Puddiiiiiiiiing! [/oprah] p.s. I forgot to say: thanks, Panda!

Oh, that's the worst!! I had to sift through dozens of prepackaged cherries only to find 2- 500g packages that didn't have a moldy cherry tucked in the bottom!

Becca: I have a cup of rice krispies, so I might do a single serve of your treats, thanks for the recipe I bought the rice krispies for a modified version of Pierre Hermé's Plaisir Sucré but I discarded the dacquoise because I didn't like it... (way to sweet for my taste, hard as that is to believe) On the blog, when "Pom tea" was mentioned, I had to do a double take 'cause I read it wrong... Doddie: if you do happen to come home, you're more than welcome to have one! Though you can probably do a great version with the peaches. I've never seen a white peach before: it looks so precious, and so does the pie. Emily, thanks!

When you mentioned "roach-coach" an image from a snippet of "How Clean is Your House?" came back to haunt me: dead, splintered roaches encrusted in a thick layer of grease inside a microwave oven. I hope it's not that way there; ambience doesn't matter otherwise. (p.s. they boiled lemon slices in a big bowl of water in the microwave for a few minutes to loosen the grease and clean it up. But I still wouldn't eat from the microwave unless it went through a few cycles of Lysol...) I'm inclined to agree with Dr. Sconzo's good rule-of-thumb.

re: debit cards Oh, I see.. Although it's not as fast/faster here. I don't know if it's the networks, but it always seems like it takes forever with the swiping, waiting for the response, the printout, feeding the printout through the register, getting a signature, the cashier staples some papers together... But yeah, some people can take forever getting cash out too. Like they're surprised to see their total or something Maybe they're checking you out. You can bet those kiddie carts are funded by the cereal/ candy companies... (I really don't know, by the way.)

My second attempt at bread: Foccacia from Dan Lepard's "Exceptional Breads." Damn this lack of experience. I still can't tell if a dough is too wet or dry. I'm guessing my dough might have been dry because the crumb is so dense (not as hole-y as Dan's photos). I might have underkneaded* too, but the instruction said that if the finger's indentation springs back slowly, it's enough. The bread was way too chewy (maybe a problem with the flour too, but I don't have any choices in my neck of the woods...) Next time I'll definitely control myself when it comes to adding flour during kneading. * I don't have a heavy-duty mixer..

Wow. For everyone's sake, I hope it really is a hoax. (I wouldn't put it past any government to cover up stuff... oh, the complexity) But, yeah, it does sound hoax-y. I mean, wouldn't cardboard soaked in caustic soda taste bitter? And wouldn't it be less of an effort to just get cheap meat? I'm recalling those obviously fake stories of earthworms in hamburgers. http://edition.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/asiapcf/...alth.fake.reut/ This guy is in for a WORLD of hurtin'.