Chris Hennes

As we sit around starting at our post-Halloween leftovers (or, if you went Trick-or-Treating, your haul!), I find myself wondering what the best candy with peanut butter (or PB flavor) and chocolate is. At first I thought the clear winner was Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, but then I was reminded of the Butterfingers, which is a damned fine candy bar. And there must be dozens of others out there. What are you favorite PB&C candies?

I'm suspicious of olives in desserts ever since a Taiwanese friend of mine gave me a candied olive to try. Wow, that was the most vile thing I've ever encountered. Though nomnivorous I must admit to being intrigued by the notion of black olive caramel.

Yeah, but those McD's hash browns.... oh man. I think they lace them with crack to keep you coming back.

Well, canned anchovies are a great starting place simply because they are so versatile. I can't even count the number of sauces I make that have a couple mashed anchovies in them: Spaghetti Puttanesca, for example, benefits greatly by the application of a few anchovies. I've been pretty happy with all the brands I've tried, actually.

Absolutely there are times when lard is the best: but here I'm talking about fresh-rendered lard, not that deodorized flavorless shelf-stable stuff on the shelves at your local supermarket. For example, many, if not most, Mexican recipes call for frying in lard, and in those where there are not a whole lot of other flavors you would not want to sub it out.

Damn, you just reminded me I meant to make pizza dough yesterday for dinner tonight. That looks fantastic. Where did you get the recipes for the charcuterie?

Forums Upgrade: Notifications Notifications are the messages you get when a topic or forum you are subscribed to has a new post, or when you receive a new PM on the board. In the new version of the software, Invision has changed the way notifications are sent, and the way they are managed. You can go to your notifications settings screen here (or by clicking on your name in the Member Tools box on the right side of any page and selecting "Settings" and then "Notifications Options"). As you can see, there are many types of notifications and options for them. For example: by default, when you receive a new PM, the only notification you get is a small pink number appearing in the member tools area on the right side of your screen: You can elect to make this more visible by having the board pop up a window: just check the "Show popup when I receive a new inline notification" option. Below those options you can set exactly how you want to receive your notifications for each event.

I vote that airport food doesn't count: the extremely lame breakfast I had at the O'Hare Chili's yesterday should be stricken from memory, permanently. Today I don't think I have plans for anything so horrible, though the way things are going I may wind up with frozen pizza for dinner. And no, not of the homemade variety.

I've used a food processor and fine mesh sieve to good effect in the past. What sort of equipment do you have on hand?

I grabbed the frontispiece from "Bacon and Hams" by Nichols (1917) from Cooking Issues, vectorized it, tweaked the color palate a bit, and had it printed at Kinkos:

Definitely a good point, and I highly recommend picking up one of those cheap digital scales for charcuterie. For home charcuterie I find myself using tiny quantities of various things all the time since I'm sometimes scaling a recipe down 10x or more from the industrial-scale sources.

Bud, have you tried it in sausage? I've made some really great duck sausage with about 50% wild duck and 50% pork.

Yes, with nitrate/nitrite you can just scale it with the weight of your meat.

Of course, but there is a tremendous bias at work there: everyone knows that everyone uses Vita-mix, so everyone buys Vita-mix. So everyone know that everyone uses... It's pretty damned hard to crack into a new market.

Snickers is the greatest candy bar ever developed, with the possible exception of the Snickers ice cream bar. I can't have them in the house. Though I'm a big peanut butter cup fan as well. The funny thing is, I never even liked Snickers until I worked at a store where we sold them, and I got to try them "fresh". The were usually a bit warmer than room temp coming off the truck, maybe 80°F, so the caramel and nougat were soft. OMG. Keep me away from the box...

Perfect timing on eating the brains, I must say. BRAIIIINNNNNSSSSS!!! OK, now that we got that out of the way... you could give Fried Brain Sandwiches a go.

I go through lemon bitters at a pretty good rate because I add them to soda. I think both Pepsi and Coke are much improved by a few healthy dashes Of the Fee Bros. lemon. As for cocktails: a few drops of lemon or orange bitters are nice in martinis, depending on the gin. And I like lemon bitters in a Cosmopolitan.

I'm sitting here with a garnish-free martini. Mostly out of laziness, but also because I am out of olives and didn't feel like a twist tonight. I've had Hendricks martinis garnished with cucumber, and of course there is the Gibson. Which all got me to thinking, what other garnishes are there out there that people put on their (gin) martinis?

Chris, I think you would be surprised to find out how many contributors to both this thread and the sous vide thread have completed experimental research-based PhDs. I would not be surprised at all... but I hardly lump the SV-topic-contributors in with "most people" . My point is simply that sadistick is quite within his or her rights to question the backgrounds of the authors of the book: they are not "world-renowned experimentalists." And being a good scientist does not necessarily result in being a good experimentalist (I have read an awful lot of poor experimental results from otherwise-capable researchers). Sadistick seems unwilling to trust that Nathan and his team are competent experimentalists: I say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating; as Nathan and company have already demonstrated several of their new results, I personally am quite convinced they know what they are doing! Therefore, the question of price tag is not, for me, a question of whether I trust the correctness of the results, but simply, whether a collection of those results is worth $500. At $100 per volume it's not even close to the most expensive textbook most scientists own, so it doesn't seem unreasonable in the least.

It's a legitimate criticism: the team involved has no established reputation as experimentalists. I'm interested in the data and techniques in the book, not the recipes, so I couldn't care less about their reputation as chefs (and we certainly have seen many truly awful books from well-regarded chefs, so I'm not convinced it would matter anyway). It's a testament to Nathan's clearly demonstrated intelligence and drive that so many of us are willing to bet such a substantial sum of money on this book. Yes, he has a background in science, but experiments are HARD. REALLY HARD. I don't think most people appreciate how difficult it is to set up an experiment properly. I'm betting Nathan does. (As an aside, there is value in even just collecting all of this disparate data into a single compendium, even if we were to accept the dubious notion that it's all already available elsewhere)

Autumn weather has finally arrived here in Oklahoma, and I'm sitting in my office drinking an ice cold peach smoothie. Typing is difficult because I can barely feel my fingers (too stubborn to close the window). I'm thinking it might be time to rethink my smoothie strategy and shift to something hot. I suppose hot smoothies are really just soups, but I'm looking for things that can be made just in the blender, with perhaps some supplementary heating in the microwave. Any ideas?

Due to a "typo" on my grocery list a few weeks ago I wound up with an extra pound of sesame seeds. I've got a few bread recipes that call for a decent quantity, but I don't have much time for baking at the moment. What can I do with them in the savory kitchen that will use a lot up all at once?

I've been eating a lot of smoothies since I got my new blender, and people keep suggesting that I add flax seeds (for Omega-3s, I guess). I've tried adding them straight, and also pre-grinding them a bit first, but the texture is not my favorite. Any techniques you guys use to get the seeds in incorporate better?

I have a bunch of extra pecans leftover from another project that I need to use up in the next couple weeks. I was thinking of trying to do something savory with them: does anyone have any ideas?

Christina, you'll definitely want to use a controller on that dehumidifier, as discussed up-topic. Here's jmolinari's post: ETA: Yeah, what vice said...