Karri

Thanks a bunch, this is all new information to me. I have had some experience, but I have always been fascinated by the intricasies of a well kempt garden plot. I've been looking at the different herbs and such available and am starting to formulate an idea as to how to proceed. And yes, I've also been thinking about sinking plastic buckets in to the ground so I can keep control of where the roots can and can't go. But please tell me about bolting... Is it possible to somehow delay it, or once a herb plant wants to flower nothing can stop it?

Escherichia coli "Many strains of E. coli are harmless and are found naturally in the gut of humans and animals. Traditionally its presence in foods has been an indication of faecal contamination of food or water. However, particular strains are pathogenic and traveller’s diarrhoea and haemolytic uraemic syndrome (HUS) are caused by E. coli strains. Although pathogenic types are rare, in the last few years there have been several foodborne outbreaks from certain strains of E. coli both in Australia and overseas." This is completely new information to me, I agree and substract my ill-chosen words on this, sincere apologies: Staphylococcus aureus * Characteristics: Produces a heat-stable toxin. * Habitat: Nose and throat of 30 to 50 percent of healthy population, sometimes skin and superficial wounds. * Source: Meat and seafood salads, sandwich spreads and high salt foods. * Symptoms: Nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea within 4 to 6 hours of infection. No fever. * Cause: Poor personal hygiene and subsequent temperature abuse. * Temperature sensitivity: No growth below 40°F. Can be destroyed by normal cooking but toxin is heat-stable.

Did some enquiries and found out that the landscaping company is outsourced and the GM holds no sway over these warriors... But it seems very likely that I will get my own little plot of land that I may experiment on. PS. Placed order for the Baker Creek catalogue, can't wait for it to arrive.

Ah muy bien! Thank you very much HungryC and dcarch. This is very helpful, now I've got actual prices and I can make my figures more accurate, the General Manager hasn't a chance Thank you everyone, this has been a great help!

Hahahaha... Please read my posts properly, how many times have I pointed out that good hygiene is important? All I'm saying is that enough is enough. And your argument has a fallacy, you point at my statement and create a straw-doll by regarding to something completely different and over simplifying my argument.

Fun fact of the day: Salmonella in Eggs - Weighing up the risks "In 2001 (the most current collection data available at the CDC), only 11.3 cases were found per 100,000 people. That is a percentage risk of only 0.0113%. -- Moreover, 26% of the cases were from children under the age of 5. So if you're older than 5 years of age, then your risk of getting salmonellosis is only .00836% Just for reference, the odds of getting hit by lightning are 1 in 280,000 or 0.00036% (according to NOAA). - 31 more times likely to get salmonellosis than to be struck by lightning." I'm not trying to tell people not to wash their hands or stop being hygienic, far from it, especially in a professional setting it is even more important than ever. But... isn't all this hype a bit too much? In my opinion it is the shock value of the -perceived- threat that the media is just jumping on... Recently read a news article from my home country in Finland which made it look like some parasite that moles carry is making an attack through the neighbouring countries in to Finland, and that because foxes and eagles eat the moles they become carriers and their droppings will soon infest all the berries and mushrooms in ALL the forests of Finland. So the news article questioned that should people freeze berries from the forest or should they be boiled from now on... I mean please, all this panic, and it might not be common sense what I said about boiling the pacifiers and whatnot, but what about H1N1? Massive panic about a little fever and a headache IF you are not under, what five years of age or over 70, or immunocompomised... And they vaccinated people for it in my home country and I don't know where else, and now what happened? Th vaccine was a sham, causing epilepsy, that's great. I think enough is enough, sound practices are sound practices, and everything above that is just being a little bit silly...

HungryC, I was thinking of going to the local gardening supply store, and I'm afraid they do not hold such a variety, atleast based on their website and my passable spanish, dill is dill is dill... If only there were some specialist stores with selections.

I would like some hard evidence if someone could provide about the inherent e-coli strains? Yes AIDS, the only acquired auto-immune disease... Now ofcourse I am not some nut who out of principle doesn't wash their hands after going to the toilet, I am a chef-in-training so obviously I know how to keep it clean, change my chopping board after changing prep ingredients, but what I am telling you is after working for a year in a 4*-hotel restaurant, and the stuff I saw there, it turned my blood in to pancake batter. BUT no one got sick, during that one year, where I did everything by-the-book, and I mean literally I kept sanitized, I bleached my own board every night, etc. It didn't make a difference, if the produce is already contaminated, and you are going to use it for a fresh salad or whatever, there is no way for you to know. But please provide some hard evidence on our own e-coli causing illness... The only way I could think it possible is that it would be given time to feed on whatever ingredient you are talking about, and then it would have time to produce the toxins which would then hit your stomach and cause you to get ill quickly... But if those are the same toxins that are produced regardless in your own colon, could it make a difference? I realize my earlier post might have made some people angry, perharps I wrote it in a style that makes me sound naïve or juvenile. But I was merely venting out some frustration. It just can't be dumb luck, since sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn't. Or then again maybe that's just the case. I would still like to emphasise the point that if it is possible that your own e-choli can give you food poisoning, then this place where the money is handled with the same hands, there is no cold chain? I thought everyone knows the TDZ? As I have never been to America, and I'm assuming this is where the conversation began is it really that bad? That things are left on the table or are in a display that doesn't have a cooler in it? And yes ofcourse departmental health codes and enforcement is a very important thing, but sometimes too much is too much. C-Bot is a killer, if you manage to get that on to your food somehow, or if you like to buy bloated tin cans, then you're shit out of luck... edit: From the hygiene and safety course I did with the AH&LA I understood that what we carry in our GI-tract is quite area-specific, saying that my bacteria from Finland and Spain are completely different from an Americans, and if this change in bacterium will cause "food poisoning" then that is inevitable? But that is not what is being discussed here.

Thank you very much, and thus I am wiser.

Helenjp: Thanks for the advice, I was already thinking about planting somewhere near the hedgerows, not next to guests balconies, but thanks for the heads-up. And yes, the compost and everything is following my train of thought, but Spain is in quite bad shape right now economically, so it's baby steps, baby steps, baby steps...

Ahhh... Well my question is still valid? What IS the longer indent for?

Please google fish fork and knife: http://cookies.cookiesfromitaly.com/silverfromitaly.com/hazel-doc/cutlery_service/fish_service.jpg

Right, let's get this started: 1. "Certain strains of E. coli, such as O157:H7, O121 and O104:H21, produce potentially lethal toxins. Food poisoning caused by E. coli is usually caused by eating unwashed vegetables or undercooked meat" 2. Nowhere and I mean nowhere does it say that humans can carry bad strains that are tolerable, and yes, we all carry e-coli, but what I am talking about is the gutblasting E-Coli, aforementioned. 3. The bacteria in a childs or an elders stomach -naturally occuring- is not going to kill them, or is it? 4. "Transmission of pathogenic E. coli often occurs via faecal-oral transmission.[24][34][35] Common routes of transmission include: unhygienic food preparation,[34] farm contamination due to manure fertilization,[36] irrigation of crops with contaminated greywater or raw sewage,[37] feral pigs on cropland,[38] or direct consumption of sewage-contaminated water." 5. "Dairy and beef cattle are primary reservoirs of E. coli O157:H7,[40] and they can carry it asymptomatically and shed it in their faeces." - apple and dung theory 6. Can't be bothered to copy paste this whole thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escherichia_coli edit: Here's another one. http://www.cfsph.iastate.edu/FastFacts/pdfs/ecoli_F.pdf

Yes ready-to-eat items that are prepared on-site are risky, -but- the fact of the matter really is that unless the person handling his/her hair, the money, the ingredients, does not carry any bacteria that are harmful, there really is no danger. To catch E-Coli from someone else means that this person needs to first drink sewage, or by some other miracle find an apple that fell into a pile of horsecrap and eat it... This whole "food-poisoning" mania that has been going on for so long is truly irksome. It really isn't easy to catch one of these germs, and if you do, it sure as hell isn't from someone else, unless they are a part of that 0.0001% who are salmonella carriers with no symptoms. Germination periods and somesuch aside, you can also only catch E-Coli if the person who has it, 1. Came to work with explosive diarrhea. 2. Went to void, and wiped without paper (yes, you need some actual poo on your hands to carry the bacteria), 3. Did not wash their hands after AND did not dry them. Drying is as important as washing, because bacteria grow on wet hands exponentially faster. And number 2 applies to carriers also. It is much more likely to catch a stomach bug from unprocessed products straight, since the bacteria might be there to begin with, but then again that guy with the money in the other and your cheese in the other hand was just out of luck... P.S. I have eaten at some really shady places, I ate riverclams off a streetvendor in South Africa, they had been standing in the sun for an hour, but they smelled really delicious. Oh and they were raw... Never had a stomachbug. In a way I agree with what was said earlier, since autoimmune diseases are pretty much nonexistent in 3rd world countries, there when a baby drops their pacifier they don't boil it for 3 hours. Antibodies are natures way of keeping you healthy, if you never develop any, then the common flu will kill you...

Please help me understand, in the original picture the top fork is a fish fork, identified by the middle space being a bit longer than the others. Now I have always wondered why is it that fish forks have the extra space in the center? I wondered if it has to do with the bones or whatnot, but that makes no sense.

Saw these in the window of a SMEG - kitchen store. From them you can get a hotbox, integrated deepfryers, you name it, they got it. For the home I mean. And their fridges are amazing. The price is amazing too... I don't know which country you are from Chris, but hope this helps, they have outlets on every continent. http://www.smegusa.com/Catalogue/Hobs.aspx

First of all, thank you very much everyone, I am afluster with the amount of attention this post has received... Yes, seeding was never a plan, since I can just aswell walk up the mountain and find rosemary and thyme growing everywhere, so I will just help myself to those when I have the time. But for the other ones you mentioned thock, the coriander and dill, I heard they were notoriously hard to grow, and attracted insects? This has been a great help thank you all, I will start perusing the websites aforementioned and crunching the numbers for the General Manager.

I am on a mission to try and have the GM greenlight a project for me to set up a little herb garden on the hotel premises, and my question is this. Does anyone know what the average yield of a rosemary or parsley bush is? Obviously depending on the size, etc. But for frame of reference I am on the Canary Islands with a constant +26 sunny weather, which should be optimal to most herbs? Please if anyone has any knowledge on the matter it would help me immensely, as I have to talk to her in a language only she understands, i.e. the bottom line and all that... Thank you in advance to all who help. P.S. Dreadfully sorry if this was posted in the wrong category...

If you're looking for a bit of a crisp - roll them in cornflour and brown in lard, this way even after braising, etc. you will still have a bit of a difference in texture.

My former boss used to own a beerhouse and he said the reason why people started using this mechanism is because when you machine-wash a beer glass it causes a static charge to build up in the glass, and in addition the glass would be polished afterwards - thus increasing the static charge even more. The water that goes in to the glass first "discharges" the pent up electricity and therefore the beer has a free run. Now I do not know if this is actually 100% accurate, it never is with these fields of glassware where no actual scientific data exists. I remember reading an article in a champagne magazine about always polishing champagne flutes with a cloth that would leave little fibers in the glass, so that the pearls would form properly, and never to polish the glasses too "perfect", otherwise the aforementioned static charge would interfere with the champagne.

Finnish recipes sometimes call for oats or other "whole"wheat. This absorbs all liquids released quite nicely and they make a nice addition to the filling.

One more question, is the whole thing the same color, or is it merely a coating?

I retract my comments, just checked some images and indeed a transfer would leave ridges and a bit of a raised image. But also wouldn't a spray leave it a bit uneven? The different colors look to be exactly on the same level, unless the shine causes it to look even.

Unmolded and then used the sheets. Some are very flexible, and I remember one instance where the chocolatier even used a burner to melt the transfer sheet on top of a truffle and it turned soft and coated the truffle. I'm sorry but I can't remember the name or the brand of the agent. It was a mixture that we added to a hand pressure-pump system, one of those hardware models used to apply lacquer on wood surfaces. Completely foodsafe I assure you. PS. Theoretically shouldn't the shine be possible with a simple hard-knack syrup? Never tested it myself, shelf-life would be an issue ofcourse...

It might also be done with a transfer: http://www.fancyflours.com/site/chocolate-transfer-sheets.html We used to do similar looking stripes and just finish it off with a polishing agent.