Dave the Cook

I don't understand this oil thing. 'splain, please, or I'll have to post this on the "Things I Don't Get" thread.

You just have do do what we did and get the 27 sq ft model. It's huge - too big for our kitchen, but once we looked inside we refused to return it. Nothing succeeds like excess?

I'll tote a tub of the stuff on the plane when I meet up with all y'all folks at Varmint's. Pick your flavor. You're on. I start considering flavor. (You need to brush up on your Southern before you get to Varmint's, Lily. Your use of "tote" is perfectly colloquial. However, "Y'all folks" is redundant. )

All those questions -- and more -- will be covered in the sauce-making section. I would ask that you re-post those questions in that section when it gets started on Monday. Quickly, however, that "breaking" of a sauce is the butter going out of emulsion and can often happen by having too little or too much heat. The general fix is to add more liquid and bring them all to the same temperature. You mentioned it exactly, "letting the pan cool." It is a differentiation in temperature and as you become increasingly more aware of when a sauce DOES break versus when it does not, you will notice the heat at which you are working. Carolyn is right -- it is possible to learn the signs, and to gauge the temperature of your mixture; this is simply a matter of sufficient experience and careful observation. But to be specific, if you keep your emulsion between 100 F and 130 F, you'll be able to whisk in all the butter you want. Literally. edit: sorry if I stepped on any toes, Carolyn. I promise to sit in the back of the room and be quiet from now on.

Maggie, I'm not talking about grocery-store sheet cake frosting, which I'm pretty sure is made with shortening, since it seems to hold up better in a display case. Most of the buttercreams I've had (which were made by professionals) tasted as if they were made of Crisco, though I know for a fact they were made with butter. It's just too much room-temperature fat on my tongue (no Jamie Oliver jokes, please). How about you make one for me and try to change my mind?

AMEN! I can see that you are a person of outstanding perception and intelligence. Funny, I was going to say the same thing about you!

Buttercream frosting: You might as well nosh Crisco straight from the can. Side-by-side refrigerators: I can't see a single significant advantage to this design. Yes, you can get water and ice through the door, thus maintaining the interior temperature, but the result is that you have almost no usable freezer space. So what's the point?

Boston Market expanded too quickly and ran out of money. McDonalds bought them, and in an attempt to restore profitability, has closed some and converted others to Donato's, and a few to Fazoli's (an interesting fast food concept on its own: drive-through Italian; McD is a major franchisee of Fazoli's). You might also see some eventually converted to Pret A Manger -- a concept similar to the sandwich-to-go idea that's being tossed around here. Just for reference: Boston Market: 650 locations in 28 states Fazoli's: 400 locations in 32 states; McD has opened or has options on up to 30 Chipotle: 200 locations (they have an entertaining web site at www.chipotle.com, btw) Pret A Manger: 125 locations, most of which are in the UK; there are eight in NYC McDonalds: 30,000 locations in more than 100 countries

I love pie for breakfast. I learned the habit from my Mom.

I don't get cottage cheese, either. In fact, the only thing I liked about Richard Nixon was that he put ketchup on it, thereby treating it with the contempt it deserved. As long as we're in the dairy section, I don't get yogurt that's been dressed up so it tastes like pudding. Why not just buy, um...pudding?

Only if there's somebody who doesn't get it.

Dave: This would make a great After School Special. The whys and hows of sensitivity to asparagus pee. Times like these are when I yearn for The Return of the Poll. edit: emphasis

Yea, yea, yea... potato/potahto. Yes, it is asparagus pee. Broccoli is, um, also green! And... um... ..also stinks, if you overcook it! Yeah, that's the ticket!

Toliver (or anyone else who's joined eGullet since March): One of the best eG threads ever was on childhood food traditions and memories. It's well worth your time to read through it. And if you were to add a post, it would bump back to the top of Active Topics, and we would have the opportunity to capture the childhoods of a whole new group of eGulls. Click here.

I've wondered this, too, becasue I don't get the smell, either. And there are people who disdain cilantro because it "tastes like soap." But I thought it was "asparagus pee."

Mortadella I get. No problem.

I tried a bite of one when I was five. Baloney has never touched my lips since. Ever. Again, toast is the key. Plus, you have to fry the baloney. In butter. And spread on a good brown mustard. As we say down here, "it's a lot of sugar for a dime." Most processors use the same recipe for baloney as they do hot dogs. Just a different extruder.

With the tails still on? Absolutely.Interesting. They have to be doing the peeling/deveining by machine, right? I wonder how the tradition arose? I still think it is probably related to the Italian tradition of keeping the seafood as whole as possible to show that it is fresh (the same reason most vegetables in the markets still have flowers and vines and stems attached). What culinary tradition to you suppose originated this practice? I'd bet that most shrimp in the range from 26/30 to 16/20 are sold for shrimp cocktails, where the tail makes sense. Restauranteurs are by turns: lazy, ignorant or following the tradition you denote when they decline to de-tail. Certainly in high-end restaurants, where shrimp are brought in fresh, there's some reason other than lack of care. But everywhere else, if they leave the tail on as a promise of freshness, they're lying. Smaller shrimp are sold tailless, and larger shrimp are usually sold in the shell. I don't know if it's mechanical or not; I'd love to see the machine, if that's what's used. But most crab picking is still done by hand, so you never know. The shelling that really amazes me is done on these teeny-tiny, little-fingernail-sized shrimp they have in Scandinavia called Fjord Shrimp. I couldn't figure out any way to shell them economically.

It's just like the way the Italians leave the vongole, etc. in their shells in pasta dishes. It is a sign to the customers that they are fresh and don't come from a can. Correct! Peeled and deveined shrimp come from frozen five-pound bags, instead! With the tails still on? Absolutely. Edit: looky here.

It's just like the way the Italians leave the vongole, etc. in their shells in pasta dishes. It is a sign to the customers that they are fresh and don't come from a can. Correct! Peeled and deveined shrimp come from frozen five-pound bags, instead!

It's stupid and lazy, too, because the tail shells are easy to remove without losing the meat. All it takes is a little squeeze. Why go to the trouble of P&D and leave the tail on (except for a shrimp cocktail, where the tail is a handle)? I would add that puking and gagging is not the line in the sand here. It's just stuff that doesn't make sense to us. For sure, I've eaten lots of tuna salad with pickles in it (if nothing else, this thread has proven that if I'm served tuna salad, odds are I'm gonna have to contend with something pickled). I don't spit it out. I just don't think it's very good. And I don't get why one would want to make or consume something that doesn't taste as good as it could.

This one's easy. Bite off most of the meat and give the tails to Bux. He likes the shells.

As Sam alluded, there's a lot of superstition. The singer I know best, a rock and roll guy, was quite fond of a slug of beer between songs (or verses). When he realized he was an alcoholic, he quit drinking, and switched to tonic water. It was my opinion that he was still looking for the carbonation -- but also a little gin. Couldn't belt it out without at least the thought of an alcohol buzz. (Eventually, he quit the tonic, too, because of the sugar. Last time I saw him, he was on club soda.)

Sure there is.

If there's no pickle, it's not a Cubano. Unless you substitute roasted pimento, of course. No pickles in egg salad, either. Maybe it's just pickles I don't get.