Dakki

Right. It's practically our sole purpose to discuss the acquisition of ever-increasingly rarified luxury goods. Though the fact that basically anything that's not a product of an inhumane industrial process is seen as a "luxury good" is an indication of just why our world is quickly going to hell in a fruitbasket. Right. I agree that it's a shame industrial everything is replacing traditional production, but since trying to feed and clothe the world's population with pre-industrial methods is utterly impractical I think the main thing is to keep in mind that people like to see the stuff they choose to spend their discretionary income on as a necessity or a just a little luxury. A goes to concerts every week, B has a giant plasma screen and a BluRay collection, C buys anything and everything Apple, D likes nice clothes, E needs a new "gaming rig" computer every year, E collects Beanie Babies, F hosts dinner parties and owns a lot of Le Creuset, G holds season tickets for the local sports team. Each one of them (if they think about it at all) thinks the others are fools for wasting their money like that. So while I don't really consume foie gras (not because I'm virtuous, I just never acquired a taste for the stuff), I think it's unfair to condemn it on the grounds that only elitist decadent bougie bastards who probably vote for whatever political party I hate eat that junk, because I probably spend as much on other things that look just as stupid to an impartial observer. I'd be perfectly willing to listen to arguments about the cruelty of gravage or the sanitation of battery-farm-produced foie gras, but I do expect the people making the arguments to be able to answer questions intelligently. Otherwise this just turns into an echo chamber where everyone just agrees dumbly and nobody learns anything and nobody's mind gets changed.

Wikipedia tells me that I think 440 years is plenty to establish a tradition. Or are you just confusing "traditional" with "natural"?

One man's ridiculous luxury good for the overprivileged is another man's invaluable culinary tradition. Do you feel the same about artisan bread? As for PETA, I don't even like foie gras (or veal) and I find this ridiculous.

I like the idea that you should avoid having a bunch of single-purpose items, if only to avoid clutter, but there's any number of specialized tools that make life much, much easier for the dedicated home cook. Funny thing is, Brown does use unitaskers. At least I've never seen him make soup in a coffeepot. I have a whole bunch of them but the one that sees the most use is probably a rack that used to belong to a small toaster oven that broke down. These days it roasts chiles over the gas burner on the stove. And how exactly are you supposed to make real salsa without a molcajete?

Nobody's going to vote for a pay cut, and I don't think anyone but the customer actually has much say in how much they tip. I'm more in favor of forcing restaurants to treat their employees the way the rest of us do - if you want, start them at minimum wage and let them earn the rest in tips, pay overtime? Something of that nature. Treat your employees like human beings! Here's a question for someone who knows a lot more about this than I do: Was American-style tipping ever the norm in Europe, and if so, did this change to the current European practice before or after European restaurants started paying their waitstaff like regular employees? Depends on your experience, training, location, union vs open shop and the actual work you're going to be doing. Starting out in an open shop in the American South babysitting a CNC machine will get you a little over minimum wage. 10 years experience in a more demanding job might get you around $30/hr base pay, and if you can do something really special and/or work on an offshore oil rig you can just write your own paychecks. This is salary, not comparable to your plumber who only makes money when he can actually bill the hours. (I was going to say "when he's actually working" but you know plumbers.) Which brings me to this: Okay, we don't get "dine and dash" ("grind and go"? "machine and move it"?), but we do get clients canceling orders after we've bought thousands of dollars worth of materials and put in tens or hundreds of hours of work, people changing specs in the middle of a project and the inevitable jerk who wants to renegotiate the price after you finished the job. Compact, valuable tools disappearing. Sales reps steering customers to the competition for a little cash on the side. Oh, and free grills for everyone (does that count as a "comp"?). That sort of thing is universal. That's not the risk I was talking about. What I was talking about is the risk that (as often happens) business unpredictably gets slow and the company has to pay a bunch of highly trained technicians to wipe down the machinery, sweep the floors and hold up the walls. Not crying here, just pointing out some facts about running a "regular" business, where the employees are paid a wage rather than depend on gratuities. Yet, somehow, we deal with all this. Many of us do all right, actually. Well, I'm glad we see eye to eye on this.

How do you figure? You raise your prices so the bill comes to $5 more, then pay your waiter $5. Or, I give the waiter $5 directly. Or, you add $5 as a "service charge" to my bill. It's still $5, my dining experience is still the same price, not a lot more expensive, not even a little more expensive. The same. If I hire an incompetent machinist, I fire him or retrain him, I don't let him loose on my clients' parts and then let them decide if he deserves 30% of my price, 5% or nothing at all, and I don't tack on 18% to my bill as a "service charge." His work is included in my price for the job, which I'll either deliver to a previously agreed standard or not at all, in which case I don't get paid, but the machinist still does. It's a risk that every business (except restaurants!) takes and we're so used to it we don't even think about it. Our industry has managed to survive like this since the start of Industrial Revolution, btw. I understand the tipping system is so ingrained in Western restaurants doing away with it one restaurant at a time is impractical, but replacing it with an included service charge is just absurd. The supposed benefit of ensuring properly obsequious service is removed without guaranteeing a living wage to the server, who basically becomes a commissionist. It's the worst of all possible systems.

Tacking a mandatory service fee on my bill is one way to assure I won't be back to your restaurant. Restauranteurs, if you want your waiters to be able to make a living without depending on the doubtful generosity of the harridans in table six who had to wait A WHOLE TWENTY MINUTES for their shared green salad with raspberry balsamic vinaigrette, please just pay the poor bastards a wage, the way every other industry does it. That said I wouldn't refuse to pay it if it came to that.

My first stone was a Chinese made silicon carbide combination that was about $3, to go with an undersized "chef's knife" that wasn't much more. Far from ideal but I learned on it, and I wouldn't cry if it was all I had to sharpen typical soft stainless. These days I use Japanese waterstones and a Sharpmaker with the ultrafine rods in place of a steel.

I use it when making beef jerky. Just enough to suggest a bit of smoke. I think any more would give the jerky a "chemical" flavor.

I'm sure to get flamed for this but I'd rather have a $5 knife and a $3 sharpening stone than a $100 knife and no stone.

Because they own the factory. They also make KA-BAR knives there, which are also junk IMHO but are at least made of carbon steel.

Link to "Goodbye to the Average American Eater" tl;dr -Ethnic and cultural composition in America has changed and fragmented to the point where restaurant owners can no longer cater to a mass market and must narrow their focus. -"Average american" cuisine is disappearing ("average american" cuisine is, apparently, "roast beef and twice-baked potatoes and lobsters served with melted butter and a nutcracker"). This is bad. -Alongside (or due to or maybe a totally unconnected phenomenon - the author is not really clear) this, there's a clear-cut dichotomy between people who eat offal and entrees arranged with tweezers on the one hand and people eating $1 cheeseburgers at the fast food chains on the other. I have all kinds of problems with this article but I'll have to think about what I want to say before posting. Just putting this up for now so interested people can discuss it.

Jaymes, is field corn the same as white corn? If so I also prefer it.

High-pressure sales tactics by the sales reps, who are directed to target friends and family. Also, most people wouldn't know a good kitchen knife if it fell on their foot and cut off their toes. I'm serious.

Sounds like a bunch of Food Nazis (Food Brownshirts?) playing off the whole traditional = unprocessed/natural = healthy/safe set of myths and prejudices. Come the Revolution you bourgeois running dog chefs will be first against the kitchen wall.

Non-practicing here. I like my pork and shellfish. Sometimes I'll even make a cream-based sauce to go with the meat, just because I can. You mean like somehow... reforming Judaism? About dietary laws, it's my understanding we borrowed most if not all that stuff from the ancient Egyptians. We should find out what their views on sciatic nerves were.

What's a world peace cookie? Can you point me to a recipe?

The dishwasher in my house is named "Dakki."

I got a nice new hardwood spoon at a handcrafts stall today. No idea what kind of wood it is, I didn't think to ask. I brought it home, washed it, let it dry completely and gave it a good coat of mineral oil. I figure it should absorb the oil by tomorrow and I'll be more or less good to go. When it starts looking or feeling dry, I'll give it another coat of mineral oil. That's about all I know to do to wood. Anyway, it got me thinking that for all the back and forth about the right way to clean enameled pots, the right way to season cast iron and so on, I haven't seen anything here on caring for wooden kitchen tools. So, how do you do it? (Sorry if this is covered in another topic, a search didn't bring up any pertinent results).

Ray: Does the warning against toxicity in walnut extend to other nut woods? After reading this thread I was thinking of getting a local carpenter to make one up with pecan which is in relatively ample supply here.

I think it's interesting the article draws a line between the people buying this stuff and "real" poor people. Pierogi, I think what you said about access to good quality ingredients in poor areas is true but I also think there's a large educational problem. Most people (not talking about eGulleters obviously) aren't aware you can make a very decent meal for less than the price of a burger in a box with a clown on it, and a good proportion of people literally can't cook at all. Maybe some of the resentment talked about in the article comes from people who live on crap and pay through the nose for it?

Folk wisdom around here has it that the "heat" in chiles varies according to the wetness of the ground it was grown in. Maybe WF is buying from irrigation farms?

I use 'em in beans.

If the container is rigid enough to be used as a cup it might be too rigid to squeeze easily. Also, it seems to me the peel-back "dipping" part of the packet might come undone when squeezing, getting ketchup all over your hand in the best case.

I learned at my mother's (or rather, the maid's) knee, but Diana Kennedy has an excellent reputation even here in Mexico.