Chris Hennes

A brief trip report. First, the donuts: we skipped Voodoo entirely, I'm not that into gimmicky donuts, which it sounds like is their specialty. Instead we visited Annie's and Bernhard Bakery. Both produced excellent donuts. I'd give the Maple Bar edge to Annie's, but the overall edge to Bernhard due to their excellent Danishes. Not a bad donut in sight at either place, however, and we ate a lot of them. For lunch and dinner we just hit various food trucks. I'll say that in my limited experience the Portland food cart scene is really a lunch scene: by dinner many of the carts are out of food and closed, or the best stuff on the menu is no longer available. The carts are stationary, so they can't move to areas with more nightlife in the evening; they just close down. Of those that do stay open, most are the hyper-generic gyro carts or pseudo-Asian places. We managed to find a few good ones, though, thanks to the Eater link chezcherie provided uptopic. We were also limited by it being a holiday weekend: several of the most highly-recommended carts were closed the whole time we were in town. Here are the carts we managed to try: Noodle House (dinner, regular seafood noodles: very good) Aybla Grill (lunch, regular gyro: excellent) Viking Soul Food (lunch, smoked salmon lefse: OMG) Euro Trash (dinner, chips with chorizo and egg: very good) EuroDish (dinner, pierogies & polish sausage: excellent) I'd recommend all of these to someone visiting.

Fantastic lists, thanks. Anyone here have personal favorites? I'm in town for three or four days, so I can hit quite a few of them.

Is Portland into the food truck thing? Any of note?

Awesome, thanks, those are exactly the kind of places I am looking for.

I'm just emphasizing that this isn't a "foodies travel to Baltimore in search of culinary adventure" kind of trip. Price-to-performance ratio is key here, as is menu diversity.

Yeah, we'll probably do Faidley's for lunch one day, since I imagine that anyone not interested in crabcakes can find something else in the market. Alas, Korean is definitely not going to fly with this crowd. Anyplace with good pizza? Or a not-horrible low-end seafood place?

Yes, we'll have cars: staying at the airport, so bonus points for the south side of town, but time spent in the car is time I don't have to think up something else to do .

Anyone have Baltimore food suggestions for the unadventurous and budget-minded traveler? I'll be there with family in a few weeks and am of course tasked with finding a few places to eat. Various family members have various food preferences, so the broader the menu the better.

I don't think I'd go that far: many of the recipes are quite good, and the techniques and flavor profiles have been absorbed into my wok cooking repertoire.

I think it was just a mistake in the settings: give it another shot now.

After over three years on the staff, first as a host and later as a manager par excellence, Linda Kowalcky (LindaK) is retiring from her role with the Society. Linda has been a fantastic colleague and her work behind the scenes here at the eG Forums has been without peer. Thanks, Linda -- hopefully we'll get to see you around the forums!

I guess if I specifically ask for a check I expect it to be brought promptly, but I can't recall it ever not, so I guess I haven't really taken issue with it. That said, I am not—as Tomasky calls himself—a "utilitarian" diner: I definitely tend to linger, and am usually (especially at nicer places), happy to be sold dessert, after-dinner drinks, etc.

Considering that the charts are all by different people (who are rounding differently) that's no real surprise. I agree that any of the various charts out there that attempt to provide simple conversions from weight to volume are fundamentally flawed, but there are still some great charts in the list ChrisZ posted (I only noticed one of the fourteen that really focused on that aspect). I particularly liked the Five-second rule chart at the bottom, and the knife charts are also nice. The meat-cuts chart is nothing out of the ordinary, though it's a visually-attractive representation.

In my experience, all stuffer attachments to mixers are garbage, for exactly the reasons you describe. The only people I know who've had success with them ground directly into the casing, without the added mixing step. Obviously this results in a different (and in many cases inferior) texture. I had a go at using one a couple times (the price was right!) but in the end relented and bought a dedicated stuffer.

It's very cheesy, but not objectionably so. I posted a picture here.

What is it about toaster ovens that seems to bring out the worst in product designers? I've never owned a Cuisinart, but I have owned TWO different toaster ovens that suffered from similar lacking-or-garbage-timer issues. Seriously, how hard is this?! It's a toaster OVEN. OVEN!! Ok, I'm done ranting now...

Sam, I had good luck keeping the garlic for about a week by adding some silica gel packets to an airtight container.

I did not cook it, just sealed it up raw.

Click the lightswitch in the upper left corner of the toolbar.

Right, what Dignan said: it basically acts like a hinge.

As &roid points out above, there is a significant benefit in terms of speed (and reduced server load) to not forcing the browser to reload the page when you hit "back". That said, if I'm reading the tea leaves correctly I think that our software provider is moving in the direction of fewer and fewer complete page reloads in general. This may result in a system that is capable of ONLY reloading those markers someday, without having to reload the whole page, in which case we can have our cake and eat it too. There is no timeline for the next major release, however, so don't start holding your breath just yet, and I'm just guessing about the feature set.

Interesting, Toliver: almost exactly the opposite of Dan Souza's opinion over at Serious Eats.

If by "area to the left" you mean the little blue and gray icons (circles and stars) next to each topic title, then if you are returning to the active topics listing by using your browser's back button, the answer is no, your browser is caching those icons. If you are using the "View New Content" button, however, then it ought to be showing the correct icon, so let me know if that's wrong.

Thanks for the suggestion, huiray: it appears that some browsers are being particularly tenacious in their caching of our old Javascript (which was updated in this release). Joe Blowe, if clearing the cache and cookies did not do the trick, you could try toggling the formatting off and back on using the lightswitch icon in the upper left corner of any post editor, that has resolved the issue for some people. If not, send me a PM and I'll see if we can dig a little deeper.

Update for Chrome (and possibly other browser) users: I have received reports that some Chrome users are needing to clear both their cookies and their browser cache in order for posting to work. If you are experiencing difficulty, in particular with the software telling you there isn't anything in your post, please try clearing your browser's cache and see if that clears things up.