Dakki

The Red Cross has a handy guide to storing food and water for emergencies. The upshot is, replace water every six months if you stored it yourself. I don't think the pamphlet includes instructions for sanitizing suspect water with household bleach so here they are. As dcarch said, you can drink water from the toilet tank (but not the bowl, for obvious reasons). Given warning of an impending storm etc. you can also store drinking water in foodsafe buckets, stockpots, bathtubs etc. for short-term use.

Blether, glad to see you're okay. I don't live in earthquake country. However, my understanding is that in any natural disaster situation an ample supply of drinking water is going to be more critical than food. I have a whole bunch of water-filled 2 liter soda bottles from last hurricane season in the laundry room and sanitizing drops in case tap water is available but contaminated. (Household bleach also works in an emergency). Also keep a lot of candles, kitchen matches/cigarette lighters, canned goods and a first-aid kit around, not necessarily for disasters.

According to futurist Ray Kurzweill: "With 30 linear steps, you get to 30. With 30 steps exponentially, you get to one billion. The price-performance of computers has improved one billion times since I was a student. In 25 years, a computer as powerful as today’s smartphones will be the size of a blood cell.” Except, of course, AI isn't a problem of making smartphones the size of bloodcells or even of making building-sized computers with gigantic amounts of processing power - it's about programming the computer, of whatever size, to be recognizably intelligent, and right now we can't even program one to beat a reasonably bright child at Go.

And yet, flying cars, cancer cures and cheap fusion energy and yeah, AI have been around the corner for the better part of a century. Some problems are just more stubborn than they look, and I wouldn't lay money on us solving them in my lifetime.

I love this idea. Cheap truffles, truly cruelty-free meats and all the faux wild-caught fish you'd care to consume with no environmental conscience pangs. And the step after that: foodstuffs with original, engineered tastes rather than imitations of the ones found in nature. Unfortunately I suspect the actual devices would be more like the ones on Hitchhiker's Guide than Star Trek. You know, claiming to make food specifically satisfy your particular nutritional needs and taste preferences while serving up some inedible slop. (The Apple version will make marginally better food but force you to choose from their iRecipes service at 1.99 a pop.)

"El Gauchito," a local (for me) brand of Argentine and Spanish chorizos, chistorra, longaniza, etc. Decent and inexpensive. Probably not available to most of you guys but hey, it's what's in my supermarket.

The wrinkling is attractive, IMHO. Did you do the butter-under-the-skin thing?

Frijoles charros. Get some complete protein in there with bacon ends and trimmings, pork skin and bulk chorizo. Make some white rice to go on the side and you can live for a week for under $5, as I had ample opportunity to prove in my starving student days. This also happens to be my most-requested dish.

Happy anniversary! I'm curious to see the recipe you're using, and how you're serving. Around here we serve with a purple onion and habanero quick pickle (escabeche) that's probably illegal under international agreements on chemical weapons.

I was also under the impression it was inexpensive, and that it was used in so many packaged products for that reason. Maybe the price difference is due to healthy/gourmet branding markups? One possibility would be to look in ethnic-type food stores, as opposed to the locally grown organic granola purveyors.

dcarch, your photos are fantastic. That's just cheating.

It was indeed a Washington Post article, but the link now appears to be broken. I actually found the article via another publication(link here) but linked what was quoted as the source article in the spirit of... whatever. Allegations of links to NewsCorp were not made by myself but by another poster, whom I believe mistook the Washington Post (which is not listed as a NewsCorp publication) for the New York Post, which is.

Ann_T, your version looks a lot better than mine. Also count me in your rhubarb pie's fan club.

Fish fry @ Dakki's this afternoon.

I think there might be something to this, or a related effect: I have an idea that people who are knowledgeable on a given topic tend to go on and on about inherent uncertainties and special cases while the guy who thinks he heard something in a bar once will state that bald "fact" as absolute truth. No opinion on Yelp. Never used it.

Chicken and mushroom tacos. I didn't really notice how often I make tacos until I started posting here. Rico, deep-fried canned oysters are considered toxic waste and must be disposed of by qualified personnel in an approved facility. Send me that sandwich and I'll get rid of it for you.

We keep a big jar of this stuff at the shop. Does what it says on the tin.

I'd be really interested to see if any party can justify pro- or anti- meat eating stances through Kant's moral imperative. AFAIAC any other definition of "morals" is synonymous with "prejudices." I'm prejudiced like that.

Pork chops, artichoke, mustard vinaigrette.

Why exclude members of this board? I find the "endemic pretentiousness" of which you speak just as prevalent here as anywhere else. It's a joke. I guess it's not a very good one. I agree with the rest of your post, except I think it's inevitable that any group sharing an interest is going to be labeled. I try to use "food enthusiasts" on this board when referring to people who are enthusiastic about food, but "foodie" means the same thing, as does, say, "food nerd." "Food nerd" I think is a good one because to me the word "nerd" implies interest and expertise in an esoteric matter, but I realize that to other people it has implications of social awkwardness etc. so I'm not proposing it as an alternative for general use. Words have different implications to different people and I don't think we should get too hung up on how something is said as opposed to what is actually said.

To the people using a 3:1 ratio, doesn't that make the dressing too vinegary? Is there something else in your ingredients that helps tame the acidity?

Back to the article itself, the most annoying thing (besides the explicitly stated all-"foodies"-are-the-same bit) to me was the ranting about the supposed elitism of foodies on the one hand and the author's attempting to show off his education and familiarity with what he calls the "real" arts on the other. Reminds me of those pundits who whine incessantly about academics and intellectuals when they themselves are academics and what passes for an intellectual these days.

5:1 ratio. Spanish EVOO - anything more exotic is pretty much unavailable here. I'm embarrassed to admit I like plain old cider vinegar best, but I'll use red or white wine vinegar if the rabbit food demands it. Mustard (usually but not necessarily Dijon), black pepper, salt and sometimes Worcester sauce.

Agreed on all counts. I think I've mentioned in previous posts that a backlash against food culture was more or less inevitable given the amount of BS that goes on in the community as a whole. I just have to re-iterate that we can't make distinctions among ourselves when all of us, from foie gras gorgers to cruelty-free locavores, are tarred with the same brush.

I don't think the general public distinguishes between the food enthusiast and wine enthusiast communities. Heck, the expert on North Korea (still having trouble wrapping my head around that one) who wrote the article in question doesn't distinguish between the ethical foods movement and extreme eaters.