feedmec00kies

Ok, some more information: First off, I'm cheating. I forgot to mention I bought pre-made filo dough for this little project. I figure I'm not completely suicidal, and I also somewhat lack space in my apartment to set upon that kind of adventure. I'm leaving that for another time. Also why I figured that it wasn't quite so necessary to post in the pastry forum. I was looking for easy to pick up since this is an appetizer, so I bought these little metal tart things for about 30 cents each (actually, I got them 20% off, hehe) at Bed Bath and Beyond to use to form the shells. The bottom of them is a little less than 2 inches across. I have no ruler, so that bottle cap will have to suffice as reference. I'm not going to make the shell thing too perfectly - rustic is the new black, right? - and just cut the filo dough big enough to fit the metal shell things. Maybe trim off some of that excess dough. Good point about the parsnips, BTW. I would probably have forgotten that. I also failed to mention that I was thinking of also adding a little fresh fig as well, and that'll have to go in last minute, like when I warm these puppies up, or right before I take everything out of the oven when I cook them the first time. Heidih, good idea about the balsamic and the veggies juices. I'm just going to drizzle a little reduced balsamic on the finished product, so I can certainly mix in the veggie juices. Weinoo: cheese is not an option, unfortunately. A significant number of my boyfriend's family members are lactose intolerant, so I'm trying to accommodate that. There's also 2 vegetarians (one of whom is one of the lactose intolerant people) and a family friend who is severely allergic to nuts (he might or might not have an issue with my thing; I didn't examine the filo dough too vigorously for that yet). So yeah, part of my ambitiousness is trying to accommodate all that. Although, I am actually thinking of putting a tiny bit of prosciutto on the top of some of them, making it obvious for the vegetarians what's safe... Or I could just eat it all myself. Heeheehee. That information help? (edited to insert picture)

So, being crazy/adventurous/overachieving, I thought of something to make to bring to my boyfriend's mother's house for Thanksgiving that I haven't made before. She asked for an appetizer, so I thought up something that won't be too hard involving zucchini, yellow squash, parsnips, and phyllo/filo dough (plus seasonings and some balsamic vinegar reduction). The gist of it would be that the vegetables will be sliced thin, stacked together with salt, pepper, herbs, and oil, and roasted in the oven until soft. Since I haven't had time to buy the ingredients a few days ago and do a test run, I'm wondering if anyone can answer the following question for me, as I am inexperienced dealing with filo dough... If I wish/need to prepare the dish tonight (he and I are going to his mom's house first thing tomorrow morning to help her prepare, and it'll probably be good to let the veggies sit together cooked overnight), should I: A. Bake the filo dough and cook the vegetables seperately, and put it all together later (like a half hour before serving). B. Cook it together tonight, sogginess be damned. C. Something I haven't thought of yet. Sogginess is the main issue for me. I'm also wondering if the veggies could use a little salting before they get cooked to try and draw some of the liquid out beforehand... Any and all help will be greatly appreciated!

A list I came up with when I googled "baking apples": Excellent: Cameo, Cortland, Golden Delicious, Granny Smith, Jonagold, Jonathan, Rome Good: Braeburn, Empire, Fuji, Gala, Ginger Gold, HoneyCrisp, Newton Pippin, Pink Lady Those aren't all tart though; Golden Delicious is probably too sweet to use in a pie. I've used Granny Smiths and Jonagolds before. Someone correct me if I'm wrong (I don't really bake so much), but I don't know if there are varieties of apples that won't run liquid at least a little. All the recipes I've seen 1. call for some flour for thickening the juices that run, and 2. tell you to let it sit for a bit before serving. Might also help to bake the crust a bit before putting in some filling (covering the edges so they don't brown too quickly, and with some sort of weight in the middle) so the dough on the bottom doesn't cook to a kind of gooey consistency. Anyone with better knowledge? Please correct me if I'm wrong!

I put my money on people being trained not to like crust because of that horrible storebought pre-sliced bread crust. Plus, maybe economics for the producers, but I don't know if it actually benefits them significantly or not. Also, my mom would make a point of buying bakery breads with a little lighter crust, because she would want to heat it in the oven but not worry about burning it... maybe that's part of it for some bakeries? It's like buying produce at differing degrees of readiness depending on when you plan on using it, right? Fortunately for me, I can get good crusty bakery bread near me. Plus, it's not behind a counter, so I can make sure to get the ones that have the best crusts (sometimes, on the border of being burnt! Yum! )

I haven't tried the other places mentioned for Belgian stuff, but I think Spuyten Duyvil is a great bar (in general and for Belgian stuff) and certainly worth trying. It's in Williamsburg, though, so you'll have to take the L 2 stops out into Brooklyn, but they really get some really great stuff, both bottles and taps. Also, if you're interested in lambics, they'll have stuff on tap at times besides their bottles. Ratebeerians usually do a tasting/event there in the late spring when Spuyten Duyvil has some sort of lambic event.

I think that when it comes to marketing, all bets are off. In a "Culture and Consumerism" class in college, we looked at mail-order catalogs and how they try and sell things. It pretty much comes down to one or more of the following tactics, as outlined by some anthropologist that I don't remember: 1. establishing a product's "history" and "origins" in order to vouch for its quality 2. depicting the people who work at the company as individuals with a concern and interest for/in you 3. framing things within "gift"-giving, such as how they purportedly give a product to those they care about because of any number of concerns for their happiness and wellbeing The heritage/authentic/original/heirloom/give-me-a-break-this-is-BS thing really fits in with tactic #1 in particular. Maybe the term meant something when it was first introduced, but now it's hard to distill the honest use of the term from all the hot air surrounding it.

Did a quick web search and appears there are 3... I don't drink coffee so it doesn't do me much good, but if someone has input on any possible differences between locations that would probably help someone out there. their locations (edited to fix link)

Are there two locations for that place? I could swear I pass a "Porto Rico Imports" that sells coffee on St. Marks near 2nd Ave when I walk to the subway from my apt...

Sounds good. Thanks for the help everyone.

I was actually just there 2 weeks ago or so! Although honestly, my boyfriend and I didn't have the patience to read through all the historical information at the time... we kinda just skipped to the modern day chocolate making and the demonstration

The mayonaise isn't an issue. I heard of Pommes Frites and knew we could find it there, but it was really that gravy-like sauce based on stoofvlees that we're (ok, he's) looking for. Thanks for the links. Unfortunately, I'm not seeing the sauce on the Markt menu, but I'll examine it later in case I missed it. (edited to make "Pomme Frites" a proper noun)

Awesome! I was always surprised I didn't know anyone who had scurvy at school, but the fact that my university forces students (starting with my year.. bah) to buy into meal plans means that only students older than me would have had an issue. Doesn't mean that people ate much better though.

If it means anything, Frank's RedHot is supposed to be the "secret" ingredient in the original buffalo wings sauce. As someone who went to school in Rochester, NY (which is near Buffalo, for those not familiar with NY State), I was confronted with this fact many times as I saw many Frank's bottles throughout school. I went to their website and found the recipes section. They have a "buffalo wings sauce" that they sell, and so the chicken wings recipe on their site uses just that premade sauce. However, it also says the following: Don't know if that helps at all.

At one point in a trip through several European cities, we had pommes frites in Brugge, Belgium with "stoofvlees saus" (maybe it was written in one word.. as "stoofvleessaus"... wow, that looks like a dinosaur name.. anyway...) Besides having an abnormal love of the words "stoofvlees saus", causing him to repeat it constantly, he also very much enjoyed it. Point being, he wants to know if anywhere in NY has it (he's not interested in stoofvlees, just the frites sauce derived from it). Thanks in advance for any help that might be provided.

oh dear. there's certainly worse, especially for pancakes, where there are refrigerated precooked pancakes that seem completely unappealing to me. i think the true test is how they taste. as for the commercial, i would have liked for the modern mom to be wearing something a little less modern-version-of-the-50s-housewife thing, with the giant pearl necklace. or for the kid to make her own godamned pancakes. what use is modern technology like this if you can't just pass on the task to the brats that demand the results!

I was thinking of that, too! I think Minute Rice is one of the reasons many North Americans think they don't like rice (kind of like me and my KD hatred). The first time I had Minute Rice, I think I might have been in my early 20s. Having grown up eating jasmine rice, I was really horrified. If you don't have a rice cooker, is boiling a pot of water to make rice really much harder than minute rice? Even the cheap long-grain rice is better that Minute Rice! ← Amen to that!

That sounds like something one could buy from the White Castle brand of frozen products.. Well, maybe not with bacon, but they sold 2-packs of frozen White Castle cheeseburgers in the "corner store" at school. Disgusting. Speaking of food sold to college students with either no self-control, tastebuds, or drug-induced super-hunger... I just thought of something to add to the list: [insert drumroll] Warm Delights by Betty Crocker (I knew a girl who tried to act like she knew how to eat and cook but swore by this *&%$ last year when they appeared! )

Man, I'm so behind in this thread. I'm currently on a trip through some of Europe (pretty much all for beer) and I've been on-and-off with internet this whole time. I find (and am backed up by what people have been saying previously) that quite a few seemingly ill-advised food purchases have to do with nostalgia or some other associations, like the Kraft dinner and American "cheese" versus homemade mac-and-cheese and sliced cheddar. I like to think of the "bad" versions as existing as a separate entity from the real thing -- something incomparable by virtue of the meaning that people place into/onto them, whether they can describe it or not. --- Silk soy milk is the worst soy milk I've encountered so far, and it's unfortunate that so many people seem to think I'm crazy for complaining about its watery consistency and taste. I haven't drank as much fresh soy milk as I would have liked, but I grew up drinking Vitasoy (lots of juice-box sized malt-flavored ones, which is the only "malt-flavored" thing of that sort). They used to sell Vitasoy in the refrigerated dairy section, but they seem to have lost out to Silk and that made my family pretty unhappy... especially my sister, who somehow manages to drink 1/2 gallon cartons of chocolate-flavored in like... a day. I did recently find some cocount Vitasoy "juicebox" containers, and I want to find more. They taste like that coconut jelly "dofu" stuff you can get at dim sum. (This is where I have to ask... why is it called dofu?? It's not freakin' soy! It's agar! I never understood that...) ---- I once tried buying canned peas, and I almost died when I tasted them. I will only corn (off the cob) and peas frozen, and blanch them. They always instruct you to heat them to death. I like my veggies to still have some bite and flavor. ---- For light beer.. I know some of it's probably calories, but a lot of that garbage is only marginally worse than their "full calorie" counterparts, IMO. It's also a lot easier to become accustomed to drinking some crappy light beer that tastes like bad tap water than it is to appreciate an imperial stout like 3 Floyds Dark Lord. People don't like to look like idiots because they can't understand something. ---- And for my own contribution to this list of questions... Well, I can't think of anything but bottled faro right now (the boyfriend insists on trying to drink as many as he can find in shops so he can be one of the top faro raters on RateBeer... the latest one smells like rotting oranges ). Give me a little time and I'll certainly come up with something no one has mentioned.

Spreading anything on anything else. No one knows how to do it "right". And no one spreads butter/pb/jam/et al. right to all the edges, and evenly. Don't get me started on tomato sauce on pizza. Then again, I've also fixed thicknesses on things while cooking with friends, or fought the temptation to say "nevermind, I'll cut it myself..."

I have to agree too. I think the texture and flavor are perfect and creamy at the barely ripe stage. As soon as they get ripe with any brown on them, I feel I can taste the gas that ripens them for whatever reason. It's not like I've been trained to eat them barely ripe either, because my mom hates the way I need my bananas. Ripe is just too sweet, with that gas's fragrance filling my nose and mouth. Eghhh... If they get brown spots, they automatically go into bananas or baked goods. I actually don't buy too many bananas though, because of the ripeness issue.

Talking to my SO - picky eater (of meat) extraordinaire - he said, "you have to admit that white meat is the perfect texture for people who are picky about their food." This kind of points to what mizducky said - it probably reminds people the least that they're eating animal flesh or something. I've known quite a few picky eaters, having cooked with enough people to know that there are people who hate tomatoes and cucumbers because they are "slimy." Then there's my boyfriend, who I've had countless conversations about the foods that bother him. Texture really seems to be the determining factor for many people. BTW, thanks for the book suggestion Peter the eater! I'll have to check that out... (edited to fix word order)

Thanks for the recommendation, paulraphael. Do they have other kinds of glasses, like tumblers and such, out of curiousity? (I can stop there when I check out the beer store that the Bowery Whole Foods now has but I haven't been to yet!) Mambwe... I never looked for restaurant supply stores on LI, so I don't know where they are, but you might want to specify region, since LI is pretty big...

This brings to mind that chapter (or section?) in Fast Food Nation entitled "Mr McDonald's Breasts" or something. Apparently, the chickens that they use to make McDonald's all-white meat nuggets have been bred to have the largest breasts possible. Well, at least in my experience, white meat is heralded as "healthy" (at least compared to other meats) here in the US. Maybe the price might be related to that fact? Because everywhere I turn, I feel like places try to make a big deal of the fact that they use breast meat, but don't say "all dark meat, all the time! Wooooooo!!!!!" Especially places trying to push chicken as a healthy option (like McDonalds and his huge breasts... ) Doesn't matter to me; I've never liked white meat, especially when not from a whole chicken.

Heh, I was thinking of posting this very kind of topic. I decided to just go anyway. Fortunately for me, I've moved into the East Village in NY, so restaurant supply stores are only a few subway stops away on Bowery. They start at Houston St. and occupy probably 50% of the storefronts until you hit Chinatown... many of the other stores are restaurant table/chair stores and lighting stores. I actually don't care that things don't look "pretty," because quality and value are more important to me when it comes to kitchen supplies. I also didn't buy a set because I know that there's only so many things I need. (I also stopped using nonstick because Teflon freaks me out, and my boyfriend already owns a cast iron pan which, seasoned well, is nonstick enough to scramble eggs in.) I'm very happy with the things I found at the store I went to; I chose to stop at one which was listed in an NYT article about those Sanituff cutting boards. I bought a 12x18x1 board for 30-35 dollars or so, which is quite a bit less than it usually seems to sell for. I also got a decent pan and a big pot (couldn't find a small one at that store, unfortunately. I'm not in the market for a 16 gallon cauldron!) that had a steamer and one of those pasta strainey-things (NYC apartment = things need to fit together and take as little space as possible! No room for a separate colander!) and a very good serrated knife and some other various things. The staff there was also really helpful, and would take things from me and put them down near the register while I was shopping so I didn't lug everything around the whole time. I kind of think they were probably nicer than if I did go to one of those fancy boutiques, even if the presentation wasn't as nice.

Mmmm, laziness + refined sugar = oh god, what have we come to??????