David A. Goldfarb

I wouldn't want to make coffee at home with any kind of machine that used single-serve prepackaged coffee, but over the last month we've been visiting elementary schools for our son, and have encountered a few such machines in admissions lounges, where they seem like just the right technology. You've got a lot of visitors who come to these places once or twice or maybe three times and might want coffee, but don't have much time to learn how to use the machine. The Keurig machine produced okay coffee and was very easy to use, and everyone managed to get it to work reliably. There was another one where the coffee came in foil packets with a plastic cap, and this was much more difficult to operate. You had to slide the cap into a slot just so, so that the drawer would close properly and actuate a switch that caused a ready light to go on, and most people had to try it several times before getting it just right, sometimes removing the bag after the cap had been pierced, spilling grounds around the machine. The coffee was neither better nor worse than the Keurig machine's. I suppose that of any single-serve method, I'd rather have espresso pods, but not everyone prefers espresso. There was a pod machine in an administrative office at the university where I used to teach, and it made better espresso than I would have expected, and was easy to use, low maintenance, and clean enough to work in an office environment.

And when you have two, you can heat both of them and have a panini press with a pretty large surface. I've done panini for a party this way.

When I see ginger in Asian markets here, where there is a very high turnover, the freshest pieces seem not to have formed much of a skin. The skin appears thin and translucent, and I usually don't peel it when it is in this state. How fresh can you get it?

"Australian comfort food"? I don't know if Vegemite is going to be a big draw in Brooklyn. Foster's maybe.

I haven't been to the current place and never made it to the first one, but ate at the second place in the West Village a few times. All the wacky stories are true, but I gather that the first version where it was just a few tables set up in a corner grocery was the most interesting incarnation.

Nice photos/presentations, dcarch. Last night: Turned leftover beef shortribs braised in beer into ravioli, and turned the strained braising liquid into a sauce. I feel a major dumpling phase coming on. No photos this time.

Stumptown gives a free cup with purchase of beans, but not necessarily with the same beans as you purchased.

I don't particularly care for canned soups, but I suspect they did more to bring new things into the home kitchen as ingredients in other recipes than replace something that people previously made on their own at home. My own grandmothers didn't particularly make stock unless it was chicken stock to be used in chicken soup for a special occasion or a holiday. They made homemade soups, but they usually left the marrow bones in the soup and served it with the bones to someone who wanted the marrow. They made pan gravy or more likely served the meat juices as a sauce (bearing in mind that they kept kosher, so no cream sauces for meat or roux with butter). They weren't making foundation sauces and subsidiary sauces from those or making glazes from stock. But take a can of tomato soup and a can of beef stock, and you've practically got an espagnole, and if there was canned veal stock (which I doubt has ever been as common as beef or chicken stock or tomato soup or cream of mushroom soup), you would be halfway to demi glace. Ranhofer always mentions ingredients like "mushroom essence," which is an infusion made from mushroom stems, but you have to be using a lot of mushrooms to accumulate enough stems to make an appreciable quantity of mushroom essence. Stocks generally make more sense in restaurant kitchens, where there are meat scraps, bones, and vegetable trimmings to be used, and when there are pots of stock on the back burners, it's easy to be creative about sauces. Lacking a suitable method of preserving stock, I doubt my grandmothers' mothers and grandmothers made much in the way of stocks and sauces at home either. TV dinners and cake mix, though--that's another story.

If you are open to mail order, I'm a fan of the coffee from Moloka'i, which is often better than some of the 100% Kona varieties and certainly better than "Kona blends." I recommend the Malulani Estate or Hawai'ian Espresso roast from http://www.coffeesofhawaii.com/catalog/family/1 I've been to the plantation, and it's a fairly small operation, and they don't seem to have coffee sitting in storage between roasting and shipping. If you get on their mailing list, they often have discounts, so with shipping you can get it straight from the plantation at around $15-20/lb.

Regarding the rectangular braiser, I'd been keeping an eye out for a good deal on one and just managed to nab one. I think they've been discontinued, and it seems that there are people who have these and have never used them, and there are some dealers with overstock, so they can be found on eBay in new condition for half what Williams-Sonoma was selling them for or even less. It's still an extravagance, but I see these things as multi-generational investments. There are some restaurant-sized examples of rectangular braisers on display at DBGB, with their assemblage of copper cooking vessels collected from well-known chefs. You could braise two ducks in one, but the attraction is less conformity to the shape of the food being cooked than efficient use of oven space. I suppose that the original idea was that one of these could fit in the low temperature side-oven in a classic French stove, but in a modern American-style oven, it has the footprint of a quarter-sheet pan, and is fairly tall, so it holds 10 quarts. That leaves a nice clean quarter-sheet sized area for something else that can be baked at braising temperature. It is similarly efficient in terms of refrigerator space. The fitted lid is nice and heavy. Looks like it could also be handy for something like a potée normande where there are several meats tied up individually and vegetables in cheesecloth sacks all simmering in the same pot, each with a string tied to a pot handle for easy retrieval, but in the rectangular pot, they can be side-by-side instead of stacked on top of each other as they would be in a big stockpot.

Stumptown at the Ace Hotel, 29th and Broadway. Oren's in various locations around the city.

I have a Thermowhip, and its particular attraction is that it has a double-walled stainless-steel vacuum bottle, so it will hold the temperature of whatever is in it, hot or cold. I haven't checked recently, but they also made one with a regular single-walled stainless bottle that could be used hot or cold, but you can keep the contents warm by putting the whipper in a bain marie (or put it in an ice bucket to stay cold). There are advantages to both kinds. If you're going to make a warm foam and you want to use part of the contents, chill it for storage overnight, and warm it up again later, that's easier to do with the one with the regular bottle. If you are making a cold foam (where you might chill it between uses, but it wouldn't matter), or a warm foam where you will use the entire contents, and you want to be able to make it and have it hold the temperature for several hours, then the Thermowhip is better.

Oven cleaner is usually a foaming lye spray. It won't damage stainless steel, glass, or glazed ceramics like your plates, and it's fine on enameled cast iron. It will oxidize copper quite heavily. Lye turns fat into soap, so it's great for polymerized grease, but you don't want to get it on your skin or in your eyes. Gloves are a necessity, and eye protection is a good idea.

I've had the Microplane box grater for around a year now, and I haven't had any problems with it. I like that it has one side that slides out, making it easier to clean. I'd recommend it.

I've seen these sold at tables on the street in Latino neighborhoods in New York. It seems like some kind of home business or multi-level marketing scheme. They are advertised as health products, but just seem like ordinary cheap stainless cookware.

I just bought an Espro Calibrated Espresso Tamper. It does help me make more consistent espresso, but it feels obsessive and fetishistic.

If you can find it in your area, there's 190 or maybe it's 192 proof Spirytus from Poland. I see it in Polish neighborhoods around NYC. Haven't tried it myself.

Much better. You might experiment with some asymmetric compositions. The bowl doesn't have to be in the middle of the frame, though that's certainly one option.

An interesting attachment, if you can find one and would rather not devote counter space to a food processor, is the DVSA, which is a disk slicer/shredder that uses food processor disks (and has similar safety interlocks to a food processor). They made it briefly, and then discontinued it, perhaps because it competed with their food processors that used the same disks. It cuts more precisely than the cylindrical rotary shredder/slicer, though the rotary attachment works better for some things like shredding cheese. I bought mine as a clearance item on the KitchenAid site, but that was a few years ago.

Instead of using gaussian blur on the background, I'd just try to find an uncluttered space, or create an uncluttered space within the view of the camera. Photo studios are often very cluttered visually with wiring, stands, lighting equipment, and such, but the clutter is all outside the frame. Occasionally you want a little kitchen clutter to convey the idea that the photo is taking place in a working kitchen, like for a photo that is part of a cooking demo, but I don't think you need that here. You could put a cutting board on the dish rack, and set the bowl on the cutting board, or temporarily move the dish rack and use the counter for the photo, if that's the spot where you have the best light. To clean up the presentation, prepare the food separately and transfer it to a clean bowl for the photo. Then with this particular dish, you might put a few fresh capers in the center of the pasta to contrast with the red sauce and to create more of a visual focus--something for the eye to latch on to.

I think the main problem with using an oven for heat is that running the oven with the door open can throw off the thermostat, as andiesenji mentions above, if you're keeping the door open, that is. On the other hand, a cold day is always a good excuse to cook, and that warms up the kitchen too. You could be braising meat, making Boston baked beans, roasting a pork shoulder or a turkey, or any number of things that involve running the oven at a low temperature for a long time, but that don't require a lot of prep.

Me too.

It's a current fashion, but isn't the only way to do it.

Thanks, I missed the link up there in Dakki's post. That is way smaller, but I still think of anything smaller than 35mm full frame (which itself small, thinking historically), as "small sensor" by today's standards. So that's going to make short DOF even harder to do, but not impossible. If you can control the aperture, select a wide aperture, and get as close as you can to the subject. It's hard to do, if you can't focus manually, or at least select the focus point. As far as a tripod goes, I always use a tripod for food shots, unless I'm just getting a casual snapshot in a restaurant while I'm eating. I even have a tripod mount for my iPhone.

That bramble & custard tart is a beauty, food & image both. Thanks. The hardest thing with those is to get the edges of the shortbread crust to stand up so it looks good in the photograph, without cutting back on the butter or using a higher protein flour, so it still tastes like a good shortbread crust.