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keychris, Chocolot, thank you! I'll be giving these a bash, and report back. By the way, I picked up a packet of the caramels I'd mentioned previously, and as I suspected, gum arabic is in there, so structurally, they're an entirely different sweetl. Might be worth investigating, at some point.

What sort of functionality do you need from the app? If it is very minimal, you can use the Notes app that is native to the iPhone, simply adding the items you need as you think of them.

That is an excellent idea. Not sure how much of it it will use up, but it should make a decent dent. The rest I believe will become dulce de leche, or possibly caramels. I have no idea why, but this sort of stomach upset makes me feel combative, so I've been eating the exact opposite of 'mild': broth, heavily spiked with cayenne and vinegar, and coffee, heavily spiked with cayenne. Not enormously nourishing for the offending interlopers, and seems to make a difference. I admit to not being much of a porrdge person; I don't dislike it, I just cannot seem to work up the level of enthusiasm required to actually make it! I have dug up a bunch of recipes fot rice polenta and polenta gnocchi (although no 'rice polenta gnocchi', as such), and am really gunning for those. Yesterday involved no breakfast or lunch (although there were intermittent cups of coffee and broth, used as vehicles for cayenne pepper/vinegar). For dinner, braised 8 pork cutlets at 125C for three hours, and they were still dry, which didn't matter, once they were broken up and mixed with sauce, pretty good, in fact. And now, there is shredded braised duck and pork to see us through until Monday. Today will involve vegetable shopping, and if I can occupy the kitchen for long enough, I'll have a go at rice polenta gnocchi. I also need to make bread, since we're clean out.

Thank you! David Lebovitz's caramel recipe involves first cooking the syrup to 310ºF (155ºC), then adding a cream mixture, and heating this base to 260F (127C). If the temperature is increased by 10-15F, to which step would that temperature increase apply? Possibly both? Regarding maillard caramel, how does that differ from a caramelized sugar caramel? Do you have recommendation for a reliable online source for a maillard caramel recipe? I searched in the eG database, but didn't find anything. I know I can find plenty of recipes online, but my lack of experience with candy-making means I wouldn't necessarily spot the duds, so site suggestions would be tremendously appreciated. Thanks, and I now realize that I really should investigate the sweets my friend was thinking of. The ones she mentioned are a commercial product that I really should hunt up, so I can take a look at the ingredient list. Just because they're apparently caramels doesn't exclude the possiblity of the ingredients/production having much in common with traditional caramels or toffee.

@ Vlcatko: Thanks, it could be a lot worse And yes, the rice rava is semolina, and I'm getting kind of fired up by the idea of making gnocchi from it. Although there will be an awful lot of them. @ Beebs: If you're passsing through Denmark anytime soon (hey, people do..!), I would be overjoyed to make you a gift of the milk powder (N.B. it's whole, not skim, however). Because my stockpiling chromosome is clearly a dud, I have nothing to draw on, apart from the rava and milk powder, so I've been shopping all along, but differently. Yesterday, I found frozen duck legs and pork cutlets very impressively marked down, so I got both. The duck was braised and turned into a large batch of sauce, and the cutlets will also be braised; there's no fat on them, and my experience of these is they tend to be dry and flavourless when prepared most other ways. I figure we'll have two of the cutlets tonight, and the remaining half dozen will will be incorporated into various other things. Wish I could get some chestnuts, but haven't seen any, yet.

Thanks Kerry! What I'm looking for is not toffee (as I noted, it lacks toffee's brittleness), but a very hard, yet plastic caramel. Think 'consistency of a very hard rubber' (yeh, I know, way to make it sound super-appealing), and you'd about have it.

Thanks, pastrygirl! The recipe already demands 260F, and it probably went a bit over, since I forgot to pull the pot off the heat when the syrup hit the right stage. For this recipe, the result was my idea of perfect caramels, firm and chewy, but not hard. Would reducing the relative amount of dairy accomplish the desired result?

I'm looking for a recipe that yields caramels that are chewy, but quite hard. A couple of weeks ago I was visiting with friends, and one of them was in a candy-making mood, so we decided to make some caramels and marshmallows. I suggested David Lebovitz's salted butter caramel recipe, and from my perspective, the caramels were an unqualified success, but although my friend did like them, she said 'They're good, but too soft'; she had in mind a sort that is popular in Denmark, which approaches toffee for hardness, but is still unquestionably chewy. These may have a special name, although I don't know of one. I believe that reducing the amount of cream/butter mixture would do the trick, but would prefer to start from a reliable recipe, if anyone has one to recommend. Thanks!

Victor, head on over to the ongoing discussion of compressors, Air compressor kit for spraying moulded chocolates.

Web pages in general I save as .pdf files, then sort them to folders (many of which have a lot of subfolders). Works pretty well.

Honestly, when I saw the title, I assumed this would be a discussion of ingredients like fresh intestinal tract for sausage-making that specified needing to rinse it clean of feces and parasites, or possibly lists with 'fat-free'/'sugar replacement' everything. Those are seriously offputting. I'm pretty sure people stipulate 'organic' and related qualifiers to demonstrate how aware, and therefore enlightened, they are, but I inevitably tune them out (and I'm 100% behind sustainable, ethical production). If I can get my hands on organic/grass-fed/whatever versions of something, I'm using them anyway, and if I can't find these alternatives, well, that happens sometimes. 'Nourishing' was what grabbed my eye. If traditional Thanksgiving foods were built around chalk, or wood chips, or grass, or other things humans cannot get nourishment from, it would make sense, but this is such bullshit. It makes no sense at all: a given food, whether laced with toxins (e.g. pesticides) and the product of unethical methods, or produced as cleanly, sustainably, and ethically as possible will, all other things being equal, also be equally nourishing.

YAY. I have food poisoning..? Something, anyway, which is making me less than wholeheartedly enthusiastic about food. Yesterday involved a restocking of cold meat for sandwiches (something it never seems a good idea to keep around for long, so it's generally a weekly purchse). We had dinner with my boyfriend's brother's family, so I didn't cook, and didn't prep. anything, either (not pure sloth, this time, but more deadlines). I also identified two ingredients that are sitting about unused, confounding my creativity: a bag of rice rava, and a bag of whole milk powder. I got the former because it offered intriguing options, and to use in place of cornmeal, and the latter when I had to rig up a substitute for evaporated milk (which you cannot find here), which I needed for a test recipe for a Wellesley chocolate cake. The kitchen situation makes me reluctant to have a crack at the really good ideas for the rava, but I've held on to it for the day that we have our own kitchen; using it as a cornmeal substitute hasn't happened because I never actually use cornmeal. Still, If I pull myself together, I should be able to come up with some sort of attractive idea; I'm thinking gnocchi, along the lines of polenta gnocchi. Has anyone successfully pulled off sometthing of this sort? The milk powder really confounds me. I doubt I'll be making that chocolate cake again, since I was never that in love with it, owing to its tendency to induce a prolonged coma after consumption (it would be the perfect birthday cake at party that included many small chidren with violent tendencies; the most violent thing they'd be able to do after eating a slice of this cake would be to snore while napping). Besides, it didn't use much of the milk powder. I'm not a huge fan of dairy, and have no use for it at all in savoury dishes, so I'm looking for sweet solutions. Is there is some way of making dulce de leche, or something similar, starting from whole powdered milk? Some sort of candy, possibly caramels? A caramel sauce?

That's what I'm doing (i.e. planning more), although the way I'm planning is to prep./cook large batches of central component(s), then build around this, since (often unexpectedly) circumscribed kitchen access reduces flexibility at a day-to-day level. Having a central element in place gives me room to improvise, should I have the inclination/option, and to accommodate an often-unpredictable schedule. Today I baked a raisin and rosemary bread, which used up the last of the sifted spelt flour (our default), but the loaf should last to the end of the week. Breakfast was coffee, and so was lunch, then I remembered the carrots in the refrigerator, and a had a couple of those. Almost had the edamame, but other things that needed to be taken care of kept popping up, so I didn't get arond to that. Dinner wil be more of the frikadeller (these came out remarkably tasty), rice, and baby carrots. I need to have a good stare at the cupboard, to see whether they hold the elements of complete, acceptable meals.

The intent is to do more planning, to be more aware of what I'm deciding to make, be less automatic, especially at the shopping phase. It will involve more prep. work, but an hour spent turning a kilo of vegetables/meat into match-sticks/strips takes care of an entire week. Scheduling considerations make food that is ready at very short notice extremely desirable, so dishes that come together quickly, or can be made in advance and held (e.g. sautéed, pan- or stir-fryied, braised) tend to be top choices. I doubt there will be an uptick in the amount of cooking involved. Dinner is the only cooked meal we have every day. We prefer light, cold breakfasts and lunches, and the items involved are more or less fixed, since I don't consume them (I often skip both; my boyfriend has a couple of Wasa with laks for breakfast, and packs his lunch, which consists of three slices of bread with cold meat). I bake the bread we use, but apart from that, we don't bake much; I'm a fiend for baked goods, and unfortunately, starches do lousy things to me, so I keep a lid on my intake of them. We cover most of the food groups (starches and dairy not so much), although the coverage fluctuates, depending on season and mood; that won't be changing much. I love beans, since I grew up in a region where they're really important, so they show up quite a bit. There is a been and kale soup that I love and have been thinking of making (the recipe yield 3 litres!), but I'm not so sure I could run that by my boyfriend repeatedly for several days without his becoming a bit gloomy. The stuff also packs quite a blast radius, as foods go. No grocery shopping today. Breakfast was coffee and one of those chicken skewer things you get at 7-11 (we were in the centre of town today, and my boyfriend noticed I was beginning to look vaguely homicidal and decided food would be a good idea), and I'm thinking about having the rest of the edamame for lunch, but mostly, I'm looking forward to seeing how my chicken frikadeller come out this evening.

Mostly, it seems like a good idea for us to stop splashing money around thoughtlessly. Pretty much everything I cook is from scratch, but the situation had reached the point that we were eating things like the most expensive steaks several times a week, since shopping for, and making them is a speedy no-brainer, and as I mentioned, we've been feeling stressed by our living situation, and inclined to baby ourselves. The thing is, when I managed to scrape time from my schedule to make more complicated things from less expensive ingredients, the results are always so good, and we realized we missed the variety of dishes we enjoyed previously. We were also spending 50 to 100% more on food than we used to. We don't have a stockpile of stuff (the 'special' bottles and things I listed we actually use rather a lot of, on a regular basis); with next to no storage space, we're fairly selective about what we buy, and I'm a bit uptight about getting stuff we don't need, anyway. If I see something we use a lot of on sale, I'll get plenty of that, if it's something that will keep. Today was... unimpressive. I restocked on Wasa and laks, which get a heavy workout around here (and would have bought before starting this, if I'd noticed how low we'd run), and also got a bag of (inexcusable, if cheap) frozen edamame, half of which I ate as dinner while staring at my computer and typing with my other hand (I'm hammering my way through a heavy workload, and my boyfriend is having dinner with some colleagues). And I drank a lot of coffee. And had a small apple, and a whole bag of gummi bears, because when I'm not making careful decisions about food, I eat like an unsupervised child.

Popular sadist Chili Klaus disagrees (klik/kik her)! So do I. And, prompted by this topic, I recently had this discussion with my boyfriend (incidentally, also Danish), and by way of demonstrating that chilies do have actual flavour (and that their heat often masks flavour nuances, which are difficult to discern when your head is in flames), halved one of the eleventy-zillion arbol chilies from our insanely prolific plants, stripped out all the seeds and white membranes, and snipped it into small pieces. Although still distinctly hot, eating this is an entirely different experience than that of eating pieces of the whole chili. I recommend giving this approach a go, since you'll very likely find a great new range of flavour, while tempering the heat. Worst case scenario, you hop around for a quarter of an hour with your eyes and nose streaming, cursing me and the chilies, and get to say 'I TOLD you so!'

Anyone else kind of itching to cut up a sandwich with a cleaver (honestly, my first throught was 'battle axe!')? It would probably be a mess, but equally probably, quite worth it.

I grew up aware that you're not supposed to break up the strands of spaghetti, but I break it in half anyway, because it does pick up more neatly and I have a morbid horror of doing something criminally sloppy while eating. Also, if I cook spaghetti, I'm 100% certain to be eating it with at least one other person, and for some reason, most of these people wrangle full-length strands in a way that puts me off my food. I prefer a soup plate for any pasta, just seems to work best. And, it's what I've always eaten pasta from... It's nice to have a bottle of talc at hand, too, to deal with the grease stains from when a fellow diner whips something off a high-speed spaghetti strand, and it hits your clothes As long as someone does not do that thing where they hang their face over their plate, and nip of and let the ends of their mouthful of spaghetti fall back into the platet, I can't think of any hard and fast rules for eating pasta. A good friend of mine hacks it up into little bits, and eats it with a spoon. The Italian in me winces, but really, no one dies as a consequence, so who cares.

When I saw this, I realized I should get on board with this, although my boyfriend and I are coming from a different place than the one described by the OP: Our refrigerator and freezer are not overflowing with anything other than condiments and things like paint rollers. The refrigerator looks like it could belong to most of the single men I know, sparsely populated with things that have obscure reasons for their presence (e.g. the empty bottle of gomme syrup persists, to remind me we're out). Our living situation has been a little odd these past two years, and we've slipped into the habit of compensating for lack of privacy and space, and having most of ours stuff in storage, by being a little extravagant when it comes to food. This is aided and abetted by the fact that most of the time, I have to shop on foot, and the only supermarket that is less than a 40-minute walk away is a highish-end one. Although a combination of workload and sloth mean I don't shop every day, it certainly takes place several times a week, and there are no specially designated days; it just happens when we decide we want X for dinner, and need ingredients a, b, and c, but don't have them. So, my boyfriend and I decided to experiment with an economically leaner approach to shopping and eating. This began last week, when I bought a clump of meat, and a bag of root vegetables, cut it all into into little strips, and wracked my brains to come up with something truly tasty every day. This week I'm continuing, and since there were two eggs languishing in the refrigerator, I decided to make fars (the mixture for frikadeller), and take things from there. A quick look at the refirgerator reveals a very typical(for us) array of items that are kind of useless on their own: Partial bag of washed baby rucola Large packet of smoked salmon containing exactly one teeny piece Some pasteurized egg whites in their cup-packages 2 eggs Nearly empty bottle of fish sauce Empty bottle of gomme syrup Bottle of champagne Squeeze bottle of mayonnaise Half a brick of butter Bottle of toasted sesame oil Sambal olek Baking powder Oyster sauce 2 packets of sandwich meat 2 bags of baby carrots (actual, complete small carrots, not those weird stumpy things) 800g chopped chicken Bottle of lemon juice Half litre bottle of tonic water Litre of chicken broth 4 scallions 2 bell peppers The freezer holds coffee beans, some lemon grass, some ginger, two slightly mummified-looking limes (last three items chucked in here before we went on holiday, and just kind of stayed there.) (The last eight items on the refriegerator list were bought yesterday or today, and yesterday also saw me buying rice, a packet of sour gummi sweets (= breakfast and lunch: I had a deadline...), and tin of water chestnuts (used in last night's stir-fry); today I also picked up some baking soda. Breakfast was coffee, lunch was leftover strir-fry from last night. Dinner will be frikadeller, with the carrots (raw; they're really sweet), and rice or pasta (there are penne and tagliatelle in the cupboard). ETA Although the fars is now made, it looks like the frikadeller are not going to happen until Saturday night, owing to work-related chaos. Form and freeze, I guess(?). I'm a bit leery of having an egg-and-chopped-chicken-meat mixture just sitting in the refrigerator for over two days.

Dan, speaking of Douglas Baldwin, if you have not already done so, you'll want to get your hands on his Sous Vide for the Home Cook, an excellent resource.

I find the whole 'it's healthy' being placed before all else really, really depressing. I try to keep a lid on things that may be detrimental to my health, but I won't eat anything exclusively because it's healthy. Partly, this has to do with the fact that a bunch of things I love are measurably bad for me (e.g. most starches mess with my joints/mucosae within minutes), so I have to avoid them, and partly to do with my having spent a goodish chunk of time as a student so broke that food every day wasn't even always a given. Eating things I dislike, added to the necessary aggravation of avoiding favourite foods, is just not a place I'm willing to go, there's plenty of stuff out there that is healthy for me that I like.

I've also used it in tiramisù, but as a replacement for the coffee+booze mixture you dip the lady fingers in. It also makes a dandy addition to hot chocolate (and pretty much any empty glass, but you've probably discovered this), and brushed or drizzled over layer cakes, a bit before icing them.

Tossup between LU Pim's and Bahlsen Lebkuchen. Actually, I am so full of lies: I will impartially eat virtually any brand of Jaffa-type Cakes or Lebkuchen in horrible quantities.

If the water is being filtered because it tastes bad (e.g. I had one of these in NYC, since the chlorine was pretty heavy), if the filter is working, the water will taste better, and the flavour will deteriorate when it isn't working any longer. If you're filtering for hard water, the filter is working if you notice that appliances like electric kettles are not showing any deposit (even when you regularly fill the kettle by topping up); water flow seems to start falling off when these sorts of flters become full of whatever they're removing. The better brands will give you an idea of the minimum/maximum volume of water that one filter will effectively clean.

'. . .objectively more flavorful, juicy, or otherwise preferable' pretty much nails the reason that you should just go with what you like; none of those things is objective, they're subjective. No one else has your mouth. Some people want beef that practically moos, others prefer something that is a few drops of water shy of beef jerky. Your tastes may change, too: In 2000, I casually devoured a 0.75kg bistecca alla fiorentina (yes: the entire staff slowly gathered to watch this); that's damn close to raw meat, and lots of it. Today, if meat is more than pink, or if there is a lot of it on my plate, I tend to start feeling queasy.