John Rosevear

My sense is that Beefeater has really upped their game in recent years. My default standard at home is Plymouth, and I usually have Boodles (an old college favorite) around, but there's absolutely nothing wrong with Beefeater and I prefer it over many showier (and costlier) bottlings.

3 more ISI soda siphon tips: Use COLD water, shake the thing vigorously for a minute or more after charging, and refrigerate overnight before using. You can get reasonable (not super-excellent, but usable) fizz with just one cartridge if you do those things, and no I don't understand the physics behind why they seem to work.

Eat: More local meat. Specifically, more good pork, once I find a reliable source for it. Make: More grill-roasted foods. More foods cooked over wood coals. More and better gluten-free Chinese dishes. Find: A safe and reliable high-heat source for wok cooking that works with my small deck and clustered neighborhood. Learn: Bao technique and get a grip on this whole wok hei business once and for all. Read: The cookbooks I own but haven't read yet, as well as the small pile of new ones I suspect I'm going to get for Christmas.

The Wine and Cheese Cask in Somerville isn't bad -- they sporadically have the Lemon Hart Demerara rums and other useful things -- but I'd start with Charles St Liquors for in-the-city shopping. IME it's much better than the other place further up Charles, which over the years has been guilty of some weird sins (like keeping bottles of Lafite in the window) and has never quite seemed (to me at least) to really know what they were doing. Federal Wine & Spirits is a spectacular place to buy higher-end bottles of wine. I've repeatedly had the wonderful experience of telling Len what I'm looking for and watching him produce exactly the right thing from a dark corner of the shop. The two best bottles I've ever had at home -- a L'Evangile '85 and a '75 Haut-Brion -- were both bought there.

My outlook on chain restaurants changed earlier this year when I was diagnosed with celiac. I used to avoid them like the plague, but now... Uno's has gluten-free pizza (and beer), Boston Market and Outback have a number of reliably GF options, Chipotle is almost entirely GF if one avoids the tortillas, etc., etc. I still venture into non-chain-land more often than not, but when I'm traveling, hitting one of these places is (alas) easier and usually safer than checking out the local mom-and-pops.

East Coast Grill is actually a fantastic place for seafood, particularly if you don't mind a bit of heat in the seasoning. In recent years it seems to have become their primary focus, more so than BBQ. I don't get the hate on Legal. I've had plenty of boring meals there, but never a bad one that I can recall. I think of their chowder as the standard against which all other attempts at traditional New England chowder should be judged. Few come close.

When judged by an expert panel (my three budding-foodie children), Ore-Ida Shoestrings, taken straight from the freezer, dropped into 375F corn oil spiked with a bit of bacon grease, and fried until just starting to turn past golden brown, have handily defeated all of my (many) attempts at fresh-cut homemade fries to date. It hasn't been close, and honestly I agree with the judgment of the panel. I don't know what they do to those potatoes before they freeze them, but it works.

gfweb: True that. And when they do tackle something a little bit beyond basic -- boeuf a la mode, say, or pommes Anna -- it tends to be a dumbed-down cook-it-on-a-weeknight version. Paul: I bet they have data showing that featuring "Even Better Than Best Roast Chicken" and recipes of that ilk on their cover spikes newsstand sales. Like it or not, we home-cooking geeks are way outnumbered by people who can't manage to roast a chicken without drying it out and for whom techniques like brining are a major revelation.

It doesn't overlap with CI (by design, I assume, to encourage people to subscribe to both). It's... downhome, middle American fare, perfect country-fair fried chicken and big fancy decorated cupcakes rather than coq au vin and creme brulee. Just go here and browse, you'll get the idea.

Maybe I'm too much of an effete east coast snob, but I keep expecting Cook's Country to do an all-Jello-mold issue one of these days.

The lamb sounds pretty good, like an arty riff on Greek standards. The first one sounds... ridiculous, and the second one sounds like they got some sort of deal on a truckload of scallops and are kind of desperate to use them up.

I have an older Chef's Choice unit. It's not bad but the resulting edge doesn't compare with a good by-hand job. (Edited to add: My collection is a grab-bag of higher-end Henckels and Wusthof knives.) As a lower-priced alternative to the Edge Pro, some folks like this GATCO set, though I haven't used it personally.

I've used Lee Kum Kee's powdered chicken stock in Chinese dishes for ages, partly out of laziness, partly because my "normal" (French) chicken stock doesn't taste right, and partly because my kids like the resulting dishes (they taste more like restaurant food), but it's time for me to outgrow that. Do you make stock in quantity for Chinese cooking, and if so, how?

CooksIllustrated.com. Or maybe Epicurious. Seriously, if we're talking actual paper books, I dunno. I could narrow it down to five or six -- one or two French books, a Chinese book, an Indian book, a grill/bbq book, and a general book like Joy, maybe -- but I think my cooking is too eclectic these days to get much narrower than that. The most tattered book on my most-used-cookbooks shelf is Mastering the Art of French Cooking, for whatever that's worth.

Sounds like an excellent reason to avoid that magazine, as well.

The vinegar note was detectable but subtle, and the dish was superb. This is the recipe I used (I didn't do the baby veg, but did the rest as written), and I'll use it again.

2 cups, reduced 50% before adding the stock etc.

I'm braising short ribs right now, using a Barbara Lynch recipe from an old issue of Gourmet that calls for ribs on the bone, no marinating, a fairly conventional wine-stock-mirepoix braising liquid -- and 1/2 cup of red wine vinegar. When I first assembled the liquid -- nearly 2 quarts worth -- the vinegar flavor was overwhelming, and I was worried that I was heading for some sort of funky pseudo-French sauerbraten. But after 2 hrs in a 325 oven, the kitchen smells the way you'd expect beef braised in wine and stock to smell, with no vinegar note, and I'm wondering if it'll mostly cook off. We'll find out in 90 min or so.

Are only car designers' opinions on cars worth considering? Only novelists' opinions on novels?

Shalmanese, do you spatchcock them? FWIW, deep-frying a well-brined (and dried!) Cornish hen for 12-15 min at 375 produces quite respectable results.

For whatever it's worth (I leave that as an open question), Cook's Illustrated did a mandoline comparo last year and rated a Benriner just below the Oxo V-slicer and a little Kyocera ceramic model, and just above the straight-blade Oxo. All were "highly recommended". The Oxo won on safety and versatility, but the Benriner was lauded for its juliennes.

The Oxo handguard works fairly well once one gets the hang of it -- which might only make it the best of a bad lot, arguably -- but I agree that that glove looks like a good idea.

I own this Oxo V-blade model and have been entirely satisfied with it... and haven't cut myself once, which is a nontrivial thing, as I'm a major kitchen klutz.

Poultry? Gravy. Beef? Jus, unless it's braised. Other things? It depends, but probably gravy.

The gin gods have seen far, far worse than a drink made from the kinds of quality ingredients discussed in this thread. Heck, I've seen far worse things done with gin... within the last 48 hours, even, in a couple of Boston establishments that really should have known better.