OliverB

fascinating read! Always love the behind the scenes stories, especially in gigantic operations like a casino. Way more interesting to me than what's visible to me as a visitor. Hope we get to read some more! And congrats on the new job, even if it steals our stories, that's really great!

haha, that party above reminds me of one we held some 20 or so years ago. Some friends of my wife over for chicken dinner. They arrived in the afternoon for beers and chips or what it was, eventually I put the chicken in the oven, set the timer and we continued with the above. 90 or so min later the timer goes off, it's close to 8pm, we're hungry for crunchy chicken. Alas, the oven was not on and the chicken was a pale cold carcass, LOL More chips and beer, for dinner around 9:30, but it was good! Oh, and that one time, the first time, I made a brisket. Did not know about the plateau, darn thing sat at the same temp for over two hours. Little kids got hungry, eventually I just had to take it out, was more medium rare and a bit chewy, but not too bad. Now I make it hours ahead of dinner and if it's done I wrap it in foil and put it in a small cooler to keep warm, works much better and the kids don't start to eat the furniture :-) Edit to add: Oh, one of the first times I used my outdoor wok burner the wok got red hot in the center. Turned the fire down a bit, thinking that's probably really hot while I poured in the oil. Which instantly ignited into a nice fire ball! Luckily I had the lid of my much smaller stove top wok handy to snuff it out! Luckily nobody saw this happen in the family, so it actually didn't happen, but it was still a bit scary, right there, under the big eucalyptus tree....... Nowadays the burner is further away from the trees and the lid is always at the ready :-)

alone, it's one of my zen moments :-) And I don't have to listen to "don't you have enough different salts already?" or "I think we have enough xyz" etc. I put my shopping blinders on (i.e. would walk past my mom not realizing it) and select and pick and cruise back and forth and look if there's a new hot sauce I don't have yet and what the meat looks like today and so on. Relaxing me only time. Same at the farmers market, sometimes the kids come along (and watch my cart) but mostly I go alone Sunday after coffee and newspaper. My wife doesn't cook (she's the working bee, I'm the stay at home dad) and wouldn't know what to get anyway ;-) Then I get home and get to wash/prep/chop all the new goodies, an other zen moment for me, even if I might blast Motorhead or the Grateful Dead in the kitchen, keeps the pests (family) out ;-)

who is Paula Deen? ;-p

I'm not aware of an official error log of the FL book, best bet would be to read the above mentioned blog and see what she came across. I do think she changed/substituted things some times though. If it's a really involved recipe, I'd probably just google that recipe to see if something was mentioned somewhere, before rising a ton of time and money. Sure would be nice to have at least an online error log for every book, just not practical. Errors slip in all the time, be it from translation, typing, human error. Even Modernist Cuisine has errors (to my utter surprise and dismay at that price...). At least they published them and fixed what they knew by then in the 2nd edition. With that hyper anal and super expensive book I really would have expected zero errors. But with any other mass produced book, there's only so much a publisher can do and stay cost effective. A cook book without any errors is quite rare I'd guess. Publishers generally love to hear about errors, if they do or do not offer anything in return then is anyone's guess. But at least they'll probably fix it in the next edition. As for testing, the more expensive (celebrity/famous restaurant etc) recipes go through multiple testing in home kitchens most of the time. I'd not expect that from the $12.99 Pasta Bible or 40 ways to fry a chicken kind of books though.

very tempting unit! I have a Demi and it works great, but sometimes two machines would be useful. With a unit like this, storage is a much smaller problem and the price is certainly great! it's still cook on fire time here for a couple months, but come "winter" I'll be looking at this closely :-)

I often use this method: season steak with only salt, heat cast iron pan to very very hot, sear steak on one side, flip and move into the oven which is set at the lowest temp it can have, somewhere around 200F I insert a bbq thermometer (wired) and close the door, then I make salad or what ever else is supposed to go along, potatoes in the pressure cooker (10 min) etc. Once the meat gets to the internal temp I want (about 130 degree usually) I take it out and let it rest, also that's when I add the pepper which would have burned to ashes in the hot pan at the beginning. Same reason I'd NOT add butter before searing, you'll just burn the butter. Add it while the meat is resting, maybe even a nice compound butter with some herbs, garlic? I used this method many years ago for the first high quality steak I ever bought and made, was for valentine's day and from the newspaper. Worked great then, works great now. Steak slowly comes up to temp and is perfect every time, the high heat sear does not penetrate much into the cold meat and since it's off the heat after the flip, it gets evenly heated through. I love steak sous vide as well, but that takes more planning, with this method you can have a wonderful steak dinner in 30 min :-)

if you have a good grater, you should be able to just grate it frozen too, or as suggested, leave it out a bit, like when you put the pasta in the water or start the water.

for book titles, I'm currently reading Food Photography and Lightning, so far I like it quite a bit. Author is a pro and has one of the largest food photography studios (that I want to move into). Geared towards pro work for advertising etc. Others I like are: Plate to Pixel Digital Food Photography Food Photography, from snapshot to great shots (I think) The Food Stylists Handbook, which as the title says is more about the tricks on how to make things look good under studio conditions. There are other books too, best if you go and look at them first. Some don't appeal to me at all for the displayed photos and they target a bit of different levels of knowledge. Some of them might have look inside on amazon or maybe their own website.

the sony 100 is a great camera, I think the new model is just called 100 II though, not 200. It will probably replace my G12 soon. My father in law, who has tons of canon gear (which is why I went canon, free rental store) uses it, he's very anal about picture quality and loves it, the new one is even better in low light, costs 100 more or so. Great little thing to have handy. Picture uploading here is a bit of a pain, I first have to save it as a small enough jpg etc, more than I want to do to just quickly upload a photo. Might look at tapatalk, but most my pix are in LR and out of my DSLRs or my G12, i.e. RAW format. Wish there'd be a LR plugin. I'm going to work on a couple thousand pix from this summer soon, maybe I'll upload some here anyway, aside of working with models in the studio, food photography is one of my top favorites :-)

"real" food photography is a whole different animal than taking photos of what we made or ordered in a restaurant, involves chefs, food stylists, lights, assistants, etc etc. And often the food is not real or edible, i.e. mashed potatoes used for ice cream, acrylic ice cubes, glycerin spray instead of condensation on glass, etc. The photos in MC are a top of the line example and certainly cross over into the art segment of photography as well. But putting a little effort into snapping pictures of our food is really quick and easy, and yes, works just as well with an iphone. Camera is just a tool, one needs to know what it's capable of and use it well. It's a lot of fun, I often snap a quick iphone picture of food I made or am making, I don't like having my real cameras in the kitchen, I use them when I set up a little studio setting e.g. after a good harvest at the farmers market. I use my phone or a waterproof P&S in the kitchen. To me it sounds like Meredith likes to set a nice table and just be able to sit down with her fiance after a long day of work, and I think that's great. It's more chaotic in my house, most of time I serve the kids first, then my wife and then myself. They start eating before I even have a crumb on my plate. I tried the serve all and sit down many times before, but the "can I start, I'm soooo hungry" whining got more on my nerves than sitting down when they're already half done, LOL So sometimes I spend a couple extra seconds on my plate and snap a couple photos, doesn't disrupt and the kids watch what I'm doing (trying to feed them some love of photography with dinner I guess). I don't have room in a closet to have a mini setup ready all the time, great idea though! Those photos are mostly for me to document what I did and trigger ideas down the road. I rarely cook exactly the same thing twice, and even if it's the same dish I play with stuff and change quantities all the time. Fun to see something I made two years ago. There are a handful of great (and some not so great) books on this topic, of course geared to the professional or "real" food photography, used in advertisements, magazines, etc. I also have a fun book on food styling that I use for ideas when I set up my mini studio. It really depends on what the purpose of a foto is too, a quick shot to memorize something great in a restaurant or at home, a shot for a blog (where one might spend a bit longer with light/composing), something arty to print and hang up in the kitchen, etc. For mini studio setup I use one or two flashes off camera with small softboxes, both either on stands or placed elsewhere to throw the light I want. Or I might work outside in the shade or close to a window. Sometimes I also use a small light table used for drawing to illuminate food from behind or underneath, fun to experiment. You need decent light and a somewhat capable camera, but you also need to know a bit about composition, play with angles, turn the food this or that way. Can be done very quick and once you get the hang of it and find your couple different approaches you like it gets even faster. Since we're not on a photography forum here, I don't think it makes sense to get too technical and certainly makes no sense to diss phone or P&S cameras, great food photography has been done with anything from pinhole cameras to $40k rigs in million dollar studios. Not sure why things need to get personal here, what's the point of that? People will just leave the thread and it'll die.

don't forget that you're not creating a real vacuum, you're pulling air out so that the water can have contact with as much of the food as possible. It's not a vacuum and there's still air/oxygen in there and that's totally fine. which is why the water displacement method is just fine. Personally I'd still get a food saver or similar, since it's so useful for other things (freezer storage, buying cold cuts in bulk and splitting them, freezing parts, etc) but if you really don't have the room for one you'll be totally find with the dunk in water method. I'm not sure I'd trust the ziplock bags to hold a "vacuum" for extended times anyway, but for SV you'll be plenty fine. Actually, a sandwich bag dunked and then twisted, folded over and tied shut with a rubber band or similar does work as well if in a bind. You just want to be sure your meat etc has full (or as full as possible) contact with the water at all times.

they made good sandwiches at my work (when i still worked) or we went out, I don't think I brought something in once. Never felt like getting in the microwave line and don't eat much for lunch anyway, if anything at all. Of course, had we not had the three lunch ladies making things more or less fresh and acceptably good (and at low cost, company paid half) I'd probably bring sandwiches with me, the microwave line still would not appeal to me. But we also had lots of good ethnic restaurants with good lunch deals very close by, and it's always nice to get away completely IMO

if garlic breaks your knife sue the maker. Not gonna happen unless you hammer it like you're trying to make horseshoes out of it. I never use my garlic press anymore, too much waste. Smash lightly, remove skin, smash again, cut. Takes what, 30 sec? Been doing that for a good 20 years with my old knives, they sure did not bend or break or crumble, nor would I expect them to do so. go for it!

as far as I know a recipe can't be copyrighted. You'd have a really hard time to figure out if nobody ever before printed the same recipe also, thus making your recipe potential infringement. Special instructions and the text of your book are of course copyrighted, which is probably part of the reason we see many books with little stories with recipes etc. But you can't copyright "saute the onions until translucent" etc. I'm sure you also can't go and rewrite modernist cuisine, as with a lot of copyright, there's a lot of grey between the black and white. But a simple recipe can't be copyrighted, a million books would be infringing on each other with pasta or cake or bbq etc recipes. Back to topic, I think the idea is neat, but it's not new, has been done before, and to pull it off successfully would require a lot of work and money IMO. Nobody I know would subscribe or pay for such a site, unless it's a small one time pay like for an app. Not to say it's impossible, but a lot of research needs to be done before even starting such a site I think. Maybe they did it, I don't know. But beating all the ones Lisa posted and all the recipes google etc finds you is going to be very hard. I haven't even used eat your books in a long time, too many books I own were not indexed and sometimes the results were not useful to me. And I entered a lot of books. You'd also need a lot of advertising to get the word out and even more advertising on the site to make it feasible as a business. We haven't even touched the ask your friends on Facebook option etc yet either. Just my thoughts on it, would be interesting to hear what the OP has to bring in now? Edit to add a bit from the government: http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl122.html

I'm not sure I'd ever use this, I either google, use the flavor bible if really stuck, or open one of the many books I have. I might even remember that I entered some in eatyourbooks a long time ago, but I never use that site either. as a side note, I'm pretty sure you can not copyright recipes, images etc are of course a whole other story. There's one way I could see something like this work, I scan everything I put in the fridge into an app AT the fridge, also enter what I might have in spices, cans, etc and maybe at initial setup add what cooking options I have (stove, oven, SV, grill, etc). Then I scan my what ever when I want to make it and suggestions show up. But even then, I'm pretty sure I'd already be washing dishes by the time I found a recipe I never made, found all the things I need, etc. It is a neat idea, but maybe instead of trying to have tens of thousands of recipes, have flavor suggestions or combination suggestions for people to run with. I can't see how you could possibly compete with google here?

ha, never thought of using my Dizzy Pig collection, thanks for the idea!

I've used an air popper recently, not sure I will continue, lots of unpopped kernels, but it was an older batch, we'll see what happens with a new one. Otherwise big pot with a bit of oil. I add melted butter and salt and nutritional yeast to mine. Smoked paprika sometimes too. Like the idea of cheese, will do that next time. I don't make it too often, mostly a watching a movie with the kids thing when the weather isn't all that nice.

definitely. This was in for a long time, is like a nice prosciutto in consistency. Also aged a tenderloin (but only for something like a week I think) and you could definitely tell. Worth giving a try. Very thin plastic of some sort, adheres to the meat and lets moisture out, no air in. I think they sell trial packages, I got an assortment of different bags when I ordered earlier this year.

Finally unpacked my first pancetta made with the Umai drybags. I bagged a pork shoulder May 12th, so it's been in there for a good 3 months. I think I cured it for some 10 days before that with pink salt, spices and garlic. It came out pretty good, nice and still soft inside, great red color. The meat was deboned, some areas had air pockets despite me tying it up very well. Kind of darker brownish there, I'll cut those parts out I think. Still a bit nervous about feeding it to my family, I tasted some first, see if I'm still around tomorrow ;-) But since the curing was done just in a regular freezer bag and then washed off very well, I'm pretty sure there's nothing mean growing. I think I'll cut off the fat cap and some of the dark outer layer, though pieces of it are funky yet good. Kind of funny I am hesitant, if this came from the basement of a small farmhouse in the Austrian alps, I'd be all over it with no 2nd thought, LOL. Next I'll try some salami, they have some recipes where you just hang it in the kitchen/house to dry, I prefer that over a big chunk of meat taking up half a rack in my tiny fridge for 3 months. I cut it in quarters and will freeze 3 in vac bags. So, if it tastes good and doesn't smell like rotten meat, I should be fine, right? Any input from others that did this before would be great, especially regarding checking for possible food safety issues. Thanks!

I'm starting to think that FN actually stands for F... No! There's not a single good show left on that channel, at least none I can seem to find. The trend of being icky or having people yell at each other is getting so old...

I've had it before and also never was impressed enough to justify the price. Prime from CostCo is easy as good and a lot cheaper. Got some frame worthy cuts there many times. I bet a big portion of the price is based on the name, as with so many things. I doubt the fact they listen to music matters much, though the beer might help fatten them up (and make them happier) I doubt I'd ever buy it, unless I came across a recipe that really makes this shine all by itself - and I'd think I'd have the skills to pull it off.

I never tip for take out, as I tip for good service during my time spent at dinner, not just the fact of being handed food to me. I leave it up to the establishment to have internal tip sharing rules or something like that. But tips are reserved for service quality above just giving me what I ordered. And I'm happy to tip more for great service, just as I'm happy to tip less for bad service, though that's thankfully very rare nowadays. I see take out more like a fast food thing, I order and I get handed a bag with my order a while later. I don't tip at fast food places either.

I have a bbq thermometer with two probes, one for meat, one for the bbq. That would definitely work and the oven one goes up to very high temp. Has a wireless receiver too (that I have somewhere in the house....) I use it in my big green egg all the time, definitely would work for an oven. Brand is Redi Check. Cost around $40 I believe. A meat thermometer would work too, but usually they don't go up high enough (only concern if you plan to use high temps in the oven)

I make bean salad with them quite often. Steam the beans so they're still crisp and have some crunch. slice a red onion or some shallots, in a bowl with vinegar (red wine, sherry, orange flavored, etc) and sugar, some salt and pepper, all to taste. Let those pickle a bit. beans on top, cooled under cold running water, toss. Never lasts long in our house. Easy to create variations, a clove of garlic instead (or with) the onion, cherry tomatoes, herbs you like, etc. I don't like them cooked (to dull green death) but I'll try the just slice and salt approach mentioned above!