Mjx

You may have a point, but my own (equally subjective) take on this is that virtually all labels seem mindless and limiting, at least if you're older than 12, and not wacked out on grass. It's not a question of hypersensitivity, just that labels only seem appropriate for things you put in boxes: If you have a mind, you really don't need to stick a label on yourself to find like-minded individuals.

I'm with gfweb, with regard to the term 'foodie' being very likely a part of the problem (besides, who needs a name to state that one has an interest in/passion for food?). The more serious problems are the high-visibility celebrity figures whose behaviour is guaranteed to draw fire – regardless of whether they're sanctimonious, or arrogantly loutish – and are so beloved by the media for the very behaviour that makes them so aggravating, and the less visible, but equally aggravating private individuals who can't seem to control their urge to shove their views in other people's faces. But notwithstanding their visibility, these people are in the minority, when it comes to those who love food and cooking. It is hard to believe that any intelligent person would conclude that what they see in the media constitutes the greater part of the landscape it supposedly represents. It seems a bit odd that Myers has so easily gulped at the media pap that's churned out, then complains of its flavour: Does he honestly believe that the tip of the iceberg represents the whole? Looks like it: His entire article strongly suggests that he's never noticed the vast number of people who are focused on making something delicious, even with very limited means; good food is one of the few remaining affordable pleasures, if you care enough to take the time and effort. I believe that part of the increased interest in good food emerged because of a harsher economic landscape: You may no longer be able to afford the speed-boat, but you can still produce deeply flavoured braises from cheap cuts of meat and a handful of seasonings. And exploring modernist cuisine needn't be any more expensive or elitist than trying to restore a 1981 Yamaha in your garage at weekends; to suggest this is merely inverted snobbery, which I believe lies at the heart of this entire article. To mock 'the stomach-driven life' is to condemn 99% of the human race; Jerome K. Jerome had it right when he wrote: (Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog))When he speaks of Bourdain's writing, there is a strong suggestion that the concept of irony is lost on him. This effectively means that he may never be able to fully appreciate food as anything more than a source of nutrients, since even the most carefully and lovingly prepared item is destined to finish in the same place as a fistful of protein tablets. Can he honestly say that his considered opinion is that the majority of those who care deeply about food would find it amusing or acceptable to violate someone's religious restrictions, or revel in the protracted death throes of some animal? The relationship between these sorts of things, and the attitudes the majority of those who really appreciate food is analogous to the relationship between haute couture fashion shows or Vogue, and what most fashion-lovers choose to wear on a regular basis. One is fantasy, designed to generate attention, the other is reality. By focusing on the most garish and decontextualized figures and incidents in food culture in the media, he promulgates the very thing he condemns. His insistance on seeing 'foodies' as comprehensively and universally superficial is itself the essence of superficiality, and he betrays himself as possessing that 'littleness of soul' against which he rants. Edit: It might be interesting to invite Myers to debate this: If the decencies of debate were observed, I think it could be a fascinating discussion.

A glass of Madeira, Boal for preference. Edit: I realize it isn't a cocktail, but the only cocktails I've ever had have been G&Ts, and erm, well... Shirley Temples (when I was kid; not recently); neither is really is what I'd want when I'm about to be strapped to a post and shot at. Perhaps pounding a slug of overproofed rum would be the way to go, but I wouldn't really enjoy it.

This reminds me of the those truffle producers whose primary claim to fame seems to be their cost (on the laughable side, for anyone who's ever made truffles, even those involving pricey chocolate purchased at retail).

I thought I'd like that, but found it really strange. The cream didn't stir in as I expected; instead, it was like little pieces of butter in yogurt. Maybe I got a bad batch. The cream at the top is usually solid-ish, so to make it mix in smoothly, you have to first work it about at the surface, until it's fairly fluid, then it mixes in nicely.

I'd go with using the zest to give you the bouquet, and then, if you want a little of the acidity that you expect with citrus, a scant sprinkle of citric acid crystals over the ganache just before slicing and rolling it (or, mix it in just before pouring, if you're using moulds) gives tiny, subtle, discrete (citric acid is water soluable, so it doesn't dissolve in the chocolate) flecks of tartness, and doesn't conflict with the chocolate, the way juices sometimes do.

It'd be interesting to see how they replicate the enzyme-substrate activity of the organism, and how (or whether) they control for temperature and pH effects. Looks like an interesting field, anyway (although you just know that it's the sort of thing that would also be insanely popular at a certain type of wedding )

I don't speak Swedish (and a Danish bar supplier would have probably have prices at least as high as the Swedish ones), but have you looked at UK sites? Even amazon probably carries some bar equipment, and if you do a search for "bar equipment" and .co.uk, you get a lot of hits, at all price and quality points. Edit: Have you checked out top collection? If you set your language preference for Swedish, and do a search for bar artiklar, there seems to be a quite a bit, now.

Since the compound (at least that used in edible items) is harvested from marine organisms, I wonder what sort of impact that's going to have on the ecosystem in question.

Don't leave the dose issue aside! We all have tiny amounts of all sorts of "poisons", "toxins" and "carcinogens" in our bodies all the time, but below certain dosage thresholds, they are "harmless." (OK, they have such a small impact, if any, that it is statistically undetectable.) Botulism toxin is the most deadly toxin known by weight. But doctors around the world inject it into millions of people every year - Botox. The dose is so tiny that it "kills" local nerve activity temporarily, but doesn't have any other negative health effect, except in very rare cases. Clearly, dose matters. The same holds true for things that would be beneficial above a certain dosage level. Something might be great for you, but unless there's enough of it in your system it doesn't have any detectable effect. (Yes, I am saying that so-called "homeopathy" is Woo - aka "gobledygook") Highly dilute solutions and/or tiny does of some chemical or other do no good, or harm, for that matter. The one potential positive effect from tiny, culinary amounts of herbs and such would be the placebo effect. If you're receiving (real) treatment for cancer, and you take the action of adding such-and-such to your diet because you believe it will help you, it just might. You may be so uncomfortable from chemo that you can't eat much, but you're eating a few blueberries because you hope that the anti-oxidants will help you heal. The actual dose of anti-oxidant chemicals might be "meaningless", but your choice and action to assist your healing can have some influence to stimulate your body's ability to heal itself. It may be "Dumbo's feather", but if you get better faster (or survive at all, for that matter), then great! As long as you don't eat anything that is actually harmful (which some "natural remedies" are, as are some foods with certain health conditions), and you aren't wasting money on some "homeopathic preparation" or "super-vitamin" or similar woo-junk, then if it helps to induce the placebo effect, then all the better! Wasn't saying dose doesn't matter, but that if the active compounds in something have deteriorated/been degraded, the dose would be beside the point (e.g. if you boil the hell out of orange juice, you can drink it by the a gallon, and you'd still get zero vitamin C). And I'm not clear as to whether you're talking about "poisons", "toxins", "carcinogens", and "homeopathy", or actual poisons, toxins, carcinogens, and homeopathy.

Photobacterium phosphoreum would probably grow nicely in a gel base (such as an aspic), but rather a lot of vibrio strains cause unpleasant diseases (e.g. cholera), and I have no idea of whether this one is a pathogen, too. The Bioluminescence Web Page may offer one or two usful starting points, and some oyster mushrooms are bioluminescent. I'm not certain that you'd be able to get substances extracted from living organisms to glow in food; I think a lot of them rely on cell activity for that.

There were a few places near the Art Student's League, where I was working as a model, which I really miss; there was an Irish pub around the corner, right next to the N/R station that was pretty good, and there was Petrossian (which is still there, but it seems to have both downgraded and become more expensive). I'd often bolt out on my long break in just a really long t-shirt and harness boots, scoot across to Petrossian to get coffee, and chocolates or a pastry. They knew me pretty well, and I can remember sometimes the staff was comprehensively boiled, usually from a wine tasting (according to them), and they'd just give me stuff to try, then grill me about whether or not I liked it, and why... it was brilliant.

If it's done right, I don't think it's possible to top the diner-style, hot open roast-beef sandwich with gravy. It's one of my favourite things, and I've been hunting high and low for a place that can still pull this off. The bread has to be robust enough to stand up to the juices, without being too tough to cut through, and the roast beef has to be the best sort, not something that has been downgraded to 'okay on a sandwich if concealed by a tsunami of gravy'. And the gravy? I think jus is best, but a dark gravy that's not starchy or coloured with caramel can be pretty good, too. 'Beef on weck' seems to be beef on a special sort of roll called a kümmelweck.

Gin and tonic? Nothing there to clash with even a really strong cardamom/other spice note. Or, use it like grappa in coffee, by the spoonful (unless you dislike cardamom, it's great with coffee).

I hope it's okay posting from a different place, both location- and age-wise: in the 70s, I was a small child and lived in Florence; it was also the decade in which my family first returned to the US, and I saw actually NYC (my parents left when I was a baby). In Florence, I miss all the small shops in the centre, where my mother did her daily shopping round: the tiny butcher shop (until my parents went veg.), the greengrocer, latticini, salumeria, the small coffee shop filled with the delicious scent of roasting coffee issuing from an enormous, orange-enamelled open roaster near the door that seemed to be in constant use. All these shops are now gone, and have been replaced with gift-shops for tourists, about 85% of whom wish they were somewhere else with better shopping, but 'it's one of the places you must go' (I also miss museums being free on Sundays, and as empty and echoing as catherdrals). I miss Paoli still being good. I miss the chestnut man who always sat under this one archway, all winter long, and the chestnuts warming my hands on my home from school. In NYC, I miss the many small shops with the most amazing array of edibles (and other things) that my brother and I used to explore, especially on the Upper West Side (I remember a Chinese shop on 105th and Broadway that perpetually fascinated me). I miss yogurt in paper containers and odd flavours (prune whip, anybody?). I kind of miss Sloans. I miss older waitstaff, and diners that didn't seem like they were trying to recapture something, but just WERE. I also miss perfume smelling better; when you're eating, a harshly sweet, plasticky fragrance is particularly horrible. Perversely, I miss my older relatives smoking after dinner (someone is going to crucify me for this, but I don't mean I want it brought back--I've never smoked, and know it's unhealthy, and we're better off without smoke all over the place--but a whiff of cigarette or pipe smoke evokes a wave of nostalgia). And I could swear that potato knishes were different, then, and I don't think it's just my memory; was there a cooking-oil shift sometime in the 70s?

Unless I can't find them, I only get extra-large ones. Often, however, I'm stuck buying 'large' or 'large/extra large' eggs, which means two or three different size eggs in the carton (occasionally, I have no choice but the boxes marked 'M-L-XL'). I don't even know whether Danish size standards are vague, recommended guidelines, or what; I sometimes think that they just get a batch of eggs and call the largest 'extra large', regardless of size (I'm not kidding; I've used 'extra large's here that are about the size of a medium egg), and take it from there. This used to bother me incredibly, but eventually, after a few despairing bouts over probable outcomes, I forced myself to stop worrying about this, because oddly enough, it didn't seem to make much difference in the results, and the differences have not been consistently tied to whether or not I used the correct size (as per the box, that is). For egg-size-weights to be useful, they would have to be the shell-less weights, and when whole eggs are involved (rather than separate whites/yolks), the eggs would have to be throughly beaten before weighing for use, in order to preserve the original white:yolk ratio. The lack of an international standard, and the fact that I've got cookbooks from several different countries has contributed to my continuing, when confronted with an ingredient list that includes 'two and a half extra-large eggs' to essentially go 'la la la...', and just reach for the largest in the fridge. Edit: I see that what are called XL eggs in the EU are supposedly equivalent to jumbo eggs in the US. I had no idea, and this means that I've been using jumbo eggs in recipes that call for XLs, without any consistent difference in results. This article--www.pjbs.org/ijps/fin1033.pdf--describes a way of predicting shell weight from that of the entire egg (p. 2, column 2); if one were to subtract the shell weight from the total weight, that would give the yolk+albumen weight without having to crack open a bunch of eggs, then figure out what on earth to do with them. Caveats: It appears that quail eggs were involved (may have significantly different shell:contents ratio than chicken eggs), and the authors may have been careless in their research, as they didn't care enough about the MS to have it copyedited... but I couldn't access any other relevant articles online.

A glass cooking surface is easier to clean, IF--and ONLY IF--you use a scraper (the kind with a razor blade in it); you have to be careful to not let the edges scratch the pretty surface, however. On the other hand, it gets dirty-looking far more easily than any other sort of stove, since every tiny bit of muck you get on it shows on its highly polished surface, including water drops, if you have hard water. I love our stovetop, but it spends a lot of its time looking filthy, since the amount of time between cleaning and using is seldom long (ours isn't an induction model, just a plain glass-ceramic one: the tepid 'Eh, they're probably okay, at least if you keep a foot/30cm between the edge of the burner and yourself' conclusions of the various scientific studies I read didn't inspire much confidence). If you have fantasies of being able to simply wipe down the surface, you may want to think twice about this.

I also do a hot chocolate mix, and if we're making pancakes the next morning, I'll premix all the dry ingredients, but that's all I can think of.

When I was a kid I lived in Florence, and I remember watching strangolapreti being made (by my best friend's family cook/maid, I believe, but it may have been someone else: this goes back to when I was about seven): She rolled out the pasta dough (which was slighly reddish, it may have had wine in it) a bit thicker than you would for pappardelle, then cut it into fairly rough strips somewhere between the width of tagliatelle and pappardelle, and the length of her hand from the tip of the middle finger to the base of the palm. Then she rolled them back and forth fairly casually between the palms of her hands, turning them into uneven wiggles over their entire length. The idea is to be able to quickly create a pasta form that is filling (the original reason perhaps being the the [possibly apocryphal] story behind the name), so precision isn't at all an issue, and it's definitely a fun shape to make if you're a really little kid, since the ones you make look every bit as good as the ones the grownup in charge is producing . I'd like to making more filled pastas, and play with the flavours of the dough and fillings, myself (ever since the carob thread, I've been wondering how plain carob flour would work in a rabbit-filled pasta).

Chateubizarre.com lists a quite a few shops that sell tiki items, including Royal Tiki, Aisle Tiki, and Cheeky Tiki.

Thanks! Just noted these on my travel list, since I should be back in March. I haven't been to Veselka in ages; somehow, the crowd changed and the menu shifted accordingly, so I stopped going, but I should give it another go. I really miss the Potbelly Stove, on Christopher Street. Sometimes it was sort of horrible, but when it was good, it was brilliant.

The Creme Yvette website lists several cocktail recipes, although all but three of them seem as though they'd be rather sweet.

I actually get more of a tannic than a bitter effect when I chew the seeds (even without chewing them hard enough to crush): the inside of my mouth goes a bit dry and crepe-y feeling, but I don't particularly mind it.

The bitterness may have been caused by the stems, but it may also be due to the pine nuts, if they came from pine species that are not normally used for human consumption. This article discusses a condition called 'pine mouth', which does not, however, affect all those who eat the rougue nuts, but they might still make the pesto taste bitter/metallic while it's being eaten: Metallic tasting pine nuts are from illegitimate Chinese sources. Or, as you suggest, you just might need a sweeter nut to offset the cilantro stems.

Where?! Please name one or two: I like the idea of diner food at a conceptual level, but every time I've eaten at one in the last dozen years or so, most of the food has been ghastly enough that the only upside of the experience is that it makes a hilarious story to tell others. EJ's wasn't bad, but the one near Jefferson Market closed long ago, don't know about the other one, on the Upper East Side (and I found it a bit... faux-diner-ish). I love hot, open roast-beef sandwiches with fries and gravy, and a wedge of dill pickle and some lettuce, and occasionally make that at home. Also, French toast. And (no, I'm not kidding, I love the stuff) jello, even when it's a completely cracked-out colour, and the flavour bears not the remotest resemblance to any known fruit.