Dakki

Yellow mustard + rub sounds pretty standard to me. As far as I can tell the mustard is just to help the rub stick. Good luck with your search!

Dammit SobaAddict you're making me look incompetent. I particularly like the restaurant pic. I can't believe you got that without arranging lights and reflecting surfaces and so on. Thanks for the critique Blether. I actually picked a dark background on purpose, thinking the pale shrimp might be lost against a white background. I'll try a light but contrasting background such as the yellow you suggested next time.

I think almost everyone can agree with that sentiment but the thread has become a discussion of IP in the food industry in general, not just the article linked in the OP.

Leaving aside the questions of whether or not copyright protection for recipes would actually encourage creativity and what mechanisms would have to be in place to ensure that I could post my bean soup recipe without getting sued by General Mills or whatever, I'd like to point out that maybe there just isn't that big a market for really creative cuisine.

Steam to your preferred doneness and serve with a vinaigrette or lemon butter? I am the least imaginative person here.

Thanks. Smoker was kept below 300 F at all times and below 250 F for the (much) greater part of the time, going as low as 200 for extended periods.

~1.25"

After a weekend-long smoking session involving what I can only describe as a comically large brisket, I am in the possession of a huge pan full of water and beef drippings. I haven't measured it yet but I think there's probably over a liter of beef fat there and it seems a huge shame to throw it out. I have some questions for the collective wisdom and experience here: 1-Is it worth saving? 2-Will it keep? I put it in the fridge as soon as it was cool enough to easily handle and I could easily freeze the stuff. 3-What is it good for? Could I sub it for pork lard in recipes that call for it as an ingredient or is it only good for frying? 4-Will the smoke flavor and aroma carry over to the dishes I use it in? Currently it smells like smoked beef and fat, oddly enough.

I agree with Rancho Gordo. As I understand it both mole and chiles are "from Puebla" and one is not an ingredient in the other. Making mole from scratch is pretty intricate and time-consuming even for the people on eGullet I think. Those Dutch bloggers must be quite the "foodies."

Hahahahahahahaha! Sample recipe?

My feeling precisely. She's an actress, not a Michelin three-star chef. I'm not saying it's impossible for some actor/musician/whatever to become an authority on something else, but celebrities have to earn credibility before they become, well, credible.

I've kind of lost track now. Are we arguing whether recipes or techniques should be patentable, copyrightable or what, exactly? If it's patents, we get patent trolls, submarine patents, patents granted on obvious innovations and/or things that have plenty of prior art and all the rest of the stuff that plagues tech companies, particularly software. I can show you some neat examples of each if you care. If it's copyright, we're talking about author's life + 70, or 120 in the case of corporate authors, with all the arguments about fair use and so on. An illustration of the sort of thing that happens when you let the copyright lawyers in the door. (I picked this article because it allows you to compare the supposedly infringing work with the original; the final judgment is covered here). I don't think it's going to happen, but if recipes themselves were to get IP protection I imagine a future where cooks and bartenders are only allowed by their employers to prepare from recipes that are in the public domain or specifically licensed by them, on the chance that their off-the-cuff creation infringes on someone's patent/copyright and lands them in court.

A photo from the top would have been even more dramatic. What will 'I' do with it? Nada. DH, Ed, says he'll fry it and freeze it. But this morning it is still sitting there. Is it still there? Can you weight it?

What a lovely bunch of people those makers of glorified peanut butter are.

Ugh, last post I forgot to write what I meant to say in the first place. Anyway, the point of all this folding and welding was to wrap a soft but very tough layer of steel around a core of fragile but very hard steel, so you'd get the benefits of both. This is why fancy Japanese knives list two kinds of steel in the specs. Of course, these days you can get a homogeneous chunk of steel that's as tough and hard as you could want it for kitchen use anyway.

Thanks for the vote of confidence. You're right about folded-steel and twist-steel techs being developed to deal with less-than-optimum metallurgy, independently in several places (Classical Rome, for one); IMHO there's no real reason to use them anymore except for looks. Somewhere on my office hard drive is an early Enlightenment translated French cutlery-making book that describes the process of making (and faking) just such a blade; I could sent it to you if you're interested. The legendary "Damascus" blades (actually from India) were made by a different process however, using iron ores that had certain impurities which forced a precipitation of microcarbides in bands, which resulted in blades similar in appearance to the folded-steel and twist-steel ones. This particular tech was lost until a couple of decades ago, when some eggheads ("boffins" to you)at Iowa State managed to reverse-engineer it. These days we call folded-steel and twist-steel blades "welded Damascus" and precipitated microcarbide steel "wootz Damascus." I still prize my welded Damascus kitchen knives, proudly made by unskilled factory workers in Seki City, Japan. Chicks dig them because they're pretty.

Are you talking about Anime? I agree with your assessment of its usefulness but it sure is a pretty piece of steel.

LOL chilling effects. That reminds me of this: "The Official eGullet Cookbook infringes 235 of my patents. I'm not going to tell you what they are so you can take them out; I'm just going to reserve the right to sue any user who doesn't pay me a royalty."

"As shown by the US Patent and Trademark Office's recent history, who make it their business, it is very hard to distinguish a real innovation from a cleverly worded claim on an existing technology or trivial innovation, even when the claim is in a relatively concrete realm such as technology; any attempt to make that distinction in the arts is thus utterly futile. This argument refutes the previous poster's argument that protection should be extended to innovations in the culinary arts. Innovations in technology that could be applied to the culinary arts are already adequately protected."

The patent was issued and my argument on the USPTO not knowing their (body part) from (other body part) stands.

Such as this.

How do you distinguish one from the other? The US Patent Office notoriously has a lot of trouble distinguishing obvious from non-obvious claims (not to mention, claims with plenty of prior art) in straightforward tech; I don't even want to think about what would happen if the copyright office had to get into it on behalf of a bunch of cooks and/or bartenders.

Minor quibble: I think "trademark" protects the owner from cases where there is a likelihood of confusion. So no Dark and Stormies or Dark & Stormies, at least if they're similar enough to the original product to cause confusion in the mind of a patron. EDIT: Written in reply to slkinsey's post.

That's what I got (from the quoted bits) as well. I don't see any possible benefit to extending copyright to cover recipes in general and the whole "chopless brand ambassador stealing my cocktail recipes off the internet and claiming them as their own" is, well, irrelevant. If some spokesmodel with a pill problem wants to take my recipes, tweak them and "claim them as her own," well, that's pretty much what I did. Making a paloma with melon soda instead of grapefruit or whatever isn't exactly the height of innovation.

I'm under the impression "intellectual property" in the form of copyright and patents is a legal monopoly over the use of information, to encourage innovation, not to guarantee residual income. I don't see how enhanced IP protection for cocktails is going to encourage anything except me writing a script to publish and copyright every possible variation on the well drink.