David A. Goldfarb

Pizza. Who doesn't love a fresh home made pizza?

My father was having difficulty swallowing for a while due to a neuromuscular problem and was restricted to thickened liquids while he did exercises to strengthen his swallowing reflex, and I looked up the products they used as thickeners ("Thick and Easy" was one of them), and they were pretty much all modified cornstarch. Google "dysphagia" and "thickened liquids" and you'll turn up a number of these products.

You were caught up in the yogurt craze of the 70's too, I take it. I still have my yellow Salton Yogurt Maker, which I eventually discovered was entirely unnecessary, but it is still handy to have a thermostatically controlled thing for making yogurt. I never got around to getting one of those strainer cones, so whenever I've made yogurt cheese, I've used a cheesecloth. I agree with this. The flavor, texture and acidity of any given yogurt depends on the cultures involved, the milk, and the length of time of culture, and then straining time will affect the thickness. Some commercial (and even homemade) yogurts also add nonfat dry milk to the regular milk, which usually yields a firmer yogurt. I'd start by making a batch of fresh yogurt using a Greek yogurt you like, then straining, checking it periodically to see how long it takes to reach the desired thickness.

Exactly. Put your yogurt in a cheesecloth and hang it until it is about half the original volume, and you've got Greek yogurt. Let it hang until it is about a quarter of the original volume, and you can spread it like cream cheese.

There was a very amusing piece by Jon Wiener in The Nation some time in the late 1980s that listed some fifty or so popular misuses of "deconstruction" to mean everything from simply "analyze" in reference to an argument to "demolish" in reference to a building. (For those seeking citations, he published another article in The Nation called "Deconstruction Goes Pop" in 1997 that pursued this further). What's being "deconstructed" in any particular instance, for Derrida, is the idea that there is an essential, immutable, one-directional relationship between what the linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure, called the "signifier" and the "signified." Saussure used these terms to distinguish his theory of meaning from various classical theories that suggested that a word always corresponded to a thing or an essential idea, and to broaden the idea of "meaning" to include all kinds of relationships of signification--sounds, pictures, symbols, novels, gestures, etc.--and not just words. Saussure added the notion that the relationship between the signifier and signified was arbitrary rather than natural or God-given. Derrida goes a step further and challenges the idea that a signified always points back to an origin or a center, and proposes that our only hope for understanding is to find the rupture in the structure that links signifier to a fixed signified (hence "deconstruction"), and to engage in "play" with meaning, giving up our belief in the unitary origin, and preserving the contradiction in discourse that was always there. For instance deconstruction might mean that understanding a painting might mean thinking about the frame rather than the story told by the picture, or that something we thought was trivial or peripheral might in fact be much more important than we previously had considered, and by exploring it, we might reveal previously hidden components of meaning. If you want to sort this out for yourself, I would start with Derrida's essay, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" (1966). Some of Derrida's followers interpreted this mode of critique as a kind of radical skepticism about meaning--the idea that anything can mean anything, but Derrida is nothing if not a careful and close reader of texts. He is certainly willing to claim that some readings are more compelling than others, but not that there is one ultimate reading that closes off all other readings. So what does this have to do with fine dining? I would say that taking the elements of a dish and simply putting them in piles is more like analysis or perhaps even demolition than deconstruction. A deconstructive culinary method would be opposed to approaches like Josh Ozersky's search for the Platonic ideal of the hamburger. But what about Keller's "Oysters and Pearls"? This is a dish that seems to be as much about linguistic play as it is about being food, and that seems characteristic of Keller's dishes. Keller claims, famously, that he's never tasted it. The idea came from the linguistic coincidence that tapioca comes in pearls and pearls come from oysters. It's not such an arbitrary coincidence, since tapioca pearls are called that because they resemble the pearls that come from oysters, but of course they are completely different things, and it doesn't hurt that caviar is also pearl-like both in its appearance and its price. In The French Laundry Cookbook Keller says he tries to reinterpret traditional flavor combinations in ways that are surprising. If they reveal something unexpected about what is otherwise traditional and inspire further creativity, I would call that "deconstructive."

There's a lot more sugar and less water in dulce de leche than in stock. I don't think you would see any maillard reaction in a pressure cooked stock. My grandmother made soups in the pressure cooker all the time, and I wouldn't characterize them as having any maillard reaction from the pressure cooker.

I had some excellent homemade rosehip preserves some years ago in Poland, and have always wanted to try making them. Recently I was visiting my mother and she had enough large ripe rosehips to try, so what I did was cut off the ends and cut them into quarters. You may prefer them smaller, if you want a more spreadable preserve. They have a lot of little seeds, and removing them is a bit tedious. They're also quite hard, and take hours to cook. So what I did was just to keep them on a medium simmer until they were soft, adding more water as needed, and when they seemed soft, I added sugar to taste, continuing to cook them down until the liquid thickened. They have a lot of natural pectin, and shouldn't need more. I thought I went too far and added a little more water at the end, thinking they would set up more in the fridge. This was a mistake. I should have left them as is. They could have also used more sugar than I originally thought, so I have a starting point for the next round.

Melchi, who turns three in December likes to help me when I make his smoothies. He peels the banana sometimes and puts it into the blender, and he likes tossing in the ice cubes. Someone gave him this toy that consists of a wooden tray and a (fairly blunt) wooden knife and wooden fruits and vegetables divided in half and joined with velcro, so he can cut get some knife skills. Today he was sitting on his mother's lap and picked up her table knife in a safe way and cut one of her french fries, so there may be something to it.

Mushrooms acquire a strange texture when vacuum packed. Normally this would be undesirable, but I've been trying to think of a use for compressed mushrooms. It seems like it could be interesting in the right context. There is a species of pressed sandwich that isn't cooked after being pressed that is also kind of interesting, such as Escoffier's "Bookmaker's Sandwich" which is similar to the "Shooter's Sandwich" described by Elizabeth David. These could be pressed under weight or in a screw press, such as a letter press. I suspect the pressed cold sandwich was once more common than we realize. I made the Shooter's Sandwich once, and I think the bread was too resilient to compress in an interesting way--

You just need a translation for "We'll have what they're having."

Normally they come packed in salt and last indefinitely that way, so I'd try packing them in coarse salt. They need to be soaked and rinsed out before use.

That works for me as well--long sticks then dice across. If you've got a lot to do, you can stack the celery, trim the ends, cut to a more manageable length, slice lengthwise, and dice crosswise.

For the stovetop, try Easy Off Heavy Duty oven cleaner. Spray it on, leave it for about a half hour, and wipe it all off with a sponge. It's so satisfying to get all that baked on blackened grease that you thought would never come off, you'll want to do it all the time.

It's not so much a bad cooking habit, but somehow, whenever I'm baking, I always seem to be wearing a black shirt.

Always a good excuse to buy another knife-- http://korin.com/Styles/Noodle-Cutting-KnifeMenkiri

I have a can of oven cleaner that I use for grease that gets baked onto the rangetop and onto pans, but I don't think I've actually cleaned an oven in any place I've lived in maybe 20 years. I have a vague memory of possibly cleaning an oven some time in the '80s, but I can't be certain.

Yes, it's a long worm screw that presses the fruit through the strainer cone.

The Kitchen Aid gizmo has a long screw and conical metal strainer that fit the grinder attachment. It squeezes out the juice, while the skins, seeds and other things that don't fit through the strainer are extruded from the front, and there is a cover for the strainer portion with a pouring lip to direct all the juice or fruit puree into a bowl. This is what it looks like in action, making pureed pears--

Oy, did that recently and caught it before doing too much damage. I think I need a cup of coffee before I try to make a pot of tea in the morning.

Looks like it's aiming to compete with the Thermomix in the same price range. The Thermomix has a built-in scale, but the Kenwood looks like it may be a more powerful mixer.

Oh, it was definitely in the weird zone. The whole time I didn't know what was coming next. At the same time it was a glimpse into what must be a mostly lost world of English servant culture.

We can comfortably do six at our table, but we've been thinking it's time to get something expandable. Eight sounds about right. At an apartment we rented for a year that was partially furnished there was a very large expanding table, but we still tended to have six for dinner parties. More than that, I think one needs to have more time for everyone to get to talk to everyone else--like the kind of thing where people come over in the afternoon and stay for dinner, or a big family gathering where everyone pretty much knows everyone else.

The most memorable bathroom experience I've had has been after high tea at the Savoy in London. There was a tall attendant in uniform standing near the door who, when I was done using the urinal, discreetly pressed a button on the floor with his highly polished shoe to flush before I could think of reaching for the valve handle. He then started the water in the sink to be sure it was a comfortable temperature, allowed me to wash my own hands, and handed me a fresh, fluffy warm towel, and as I handed it back to him, he produced a brush and dusted off my jacket. I think I tipped him two pounds.

Sometimes whole, but usually I break them up into three pieces or so. I have a Waring Commercial BB900, which is a standard bar blender from their restaurant line with two speeds. I've tried to fathom the power ratings of blenders in a couple of posts earlier in this thread, and I think there's just no telling. I think the motor, for instance, is just as powerful in amps as my parents' feeble Osterizer, and the Osterizer takes at least five minutes to do what the BB900 does in one minute.

All those things--refrigeration, women working outside the home, supermarkets, etc.--killed off delivery, and yet we have delivery for just about anything in New York (where many people don't own cars), and online shopping is bringing new forms of delivery everywhere, not to mention CSAs, which sometimes involve delivery, sometimes pickup from a central location.