Mjx

Thanks, liuzhou! Is this at the stand, or on your kitchen counter? If the latter, please post pictures of whatever you make with these.

I'd second the Fibrox, mentioned above. We have the 8" chef's knife, and although my hands are quite small (a bit short of 6.5" from the base of the palm to the tip of the middle finger), I have no problem with either the size or weight. It was recommended in Cooks Illustrated, and although I had intial reservations about the plastic handle, the price was low enough that is seemed worth a go, just to satisfy my curiosity. The handle is actually very comfortable in the hand, the blade holds its edge well, and all in all, I'm really happy with it.

I'm left-handed, too, and I love the Messermister. The OXO has a nice and squishy handle, but the Messermeister seems like the blade is sharper, and is one of those tools that gives that 'extension of your hand' feel. I don't know how many years we've had our peeler, but it's never been sharpened, and still zips skin off like magic.

Add goat to the mix, and call it 'here's looking at you kid' stew [sorry. Just... had to.] Hey! Where's that eyeball stand picture?! I really want to see how big this stall is...

Give us a picture, please! This is a gallery (and the title is, I think, fair warning), so if you can stomach taking the picture, we can handle gazing upon it in all its glory. And, if you cook something that includes them and add a picture of that, that would be the icing on the cake. I'm curious as to how big the stall is, since meeting even a heavy demand for pig eyeballs wouldn't seem to take up that much space.

Any of the ones discussed here work for you? I really like Messermeister's swivel peeler, strikes me as pretty hard to improve on.

Water. Wine, occasionally, particularly if we're dining out. The milk with dinner (or any meal) really blew my mind when we family movd back to the US; when I was a kid in Italy, this was just not a thing (don't think it is now, either).

I've recently found that rolled millet flakes make a solid stand-in for bread crumbs, both in coatings, and in things like panades and meatballs (I'm aware that consuming substantial amounts of millet – e.g. a lot of millet bread daily – carries the risk of a potential suppressive effect on the thyroid gland, but unless you're eating crazy amounts of 'breaded' foods/meatballs/etc., you should be fine).

If there is an ipercoop near you, they may well have it; I remember regularly seeing lemongrass at one in Milano, which always surprised me, for some reason.

Any polymerized fat/muck is best scraped off with an oven/ice scraper (depending on the surface), if you can manage it without damaging the surface beneath.

Even seven years ago, there were a lot fewer companies that had an online presence. Hell, today, there are still plenty of companies that have no website.

If they do, you can do the Eddie Izzard in Italy thing to them - hop on your Vespa and say "ciao!" like you're the coolest person ever. You've got P. edulis flavicarpa - there's an additional level of ripeness indication with those. They'll turn purple entirely before they start wrinkling up like humiliated grapes. Well, after reading that, I ended up saying 'Ciao' to the lot (no Vespa, so I just had to settle for eating them in a devastatingly cool way), since I decided to hack one open and see how the flavour compared with the wrinkly-state ones. It was very good. So good that I gazed at the others, reflected a good two seconds on your earlier comment regarding the purgative effect of eating more than one, then decided to chalk up any distressing outcomes to 'science' (sounds way more respectable than 'greed'), and scarfed down the other two. The only thing that puzzles me is that the flavour for this particular kind doesn't seem to be significantly different before and after wrinkling.

Thanks! I've now got three purply-green guys sitting in the fruit bowl... I just hope they don't do that Eddie Izzard recalcitrant-ripening-fruit thing.

Can passion fruit be ripened, once it's been picked? The only ones locally available are unripe, so I've never bothered with them, but if ripening them is an option, I'd love to give that a go.

I always had a problem with 'best', when it comes to food [ingredients], since it suggests a weirdly subjective broad consensus, and because of this, it feels (to me) like your question can't work; swap in 'most appropriate' or 'favourite' for 'too good', and your question makes sense (but then become rhetorical).

The flavour sounds like dilute version of the passion fruit you see most often in shops, which only taste good when the outside looks like the fruit is too old, and has gone wrinkly. Does the fruit on these go to that stage?

Mrs. Beeton's book gives very similar ingredient lists and processes for both Scotch and Welsh rarebit: TOASTED CHEESE, or SCOTCH RARE-BIT. 1651. INGREDIENTS.—A few slices of rich cheese, toast, mustard, and pepper. [illustration: HOT-WATER CHEESE-DISH.] Mode.—Cut some nice rich sound cheese into rather thin slices; melt it in a cheese-toaster on a hot plate, or over steam, and, when melted, add a small quantity of mixed mustard and a seasoning of pepper; stir the cheese until it is completely dissolved, then brown it before the fire, or with a salamander. Fill the bottom of the cheese-toaster with hot water, and serve with dry or buttered toasts, whichever may be preferred. Our engraving illustrates a cheese-toaster with hot-water reservoir: the cheese is melted in the upper tin, which is placed in another vessel of boiling water, so keeping the preparation beautifully hot. A small quantity of porter, or port wine, is sometimes mixed with the cheese; and, if it be not very rich, a few pieces of butter may be mixed with it to great advantage. Sometimes the melted cheese is spread on the toasts, and then laid in the cheese-dish at the top of the hot water. Whichever way it is served, it is highly necessary that the mixture be very hot, and very quickly sent to table, or it will be worthless. Time.—About 5 minutes to melt the cheese. Average cost, 1-1/2d. per slice. Sufficient.—Allow a slice to each person. Seasonable at any time. TOASTED CHEESE, or WELSH RARE-BIT. 1652. INGREDIENTS.—Slices of bread, butter, Cheshire or Gloucester cheese, mustard, and pepper. Mode.—Cut the bread into slices about 1/2 inch in thickness; pare off the crust, toast the bread slightly without hardening or burning it, and spread it with butter. Cut some slices, not quite so large as the bread, from a good rich fat cheese; lay them on the toasted bread in a cheese-toaster; be careful that the cheese does not burn, and let it be equally melted. Spread over the top a little made mustard and a seasoning of pepper, and serve very hot, with very hot plates. To facilitate the melting of the cheese, it may be cut into thin flakes or toasted on one side before it is laid on the bread. As it is so essential to send this dish hot to table, it is a good plan to melt the cheese in small round silver or metal pans, and to send these pans to table, allowing one for each guest. Slices of dry or buttered toast should always accompany them, with mustard, pepper, and salt. Time.—About 5 minutes to melt the cheese. Average cost, 1-1/2d. each slice. Sufficient.—Allow a slice to each person. Seasonable at any time. Note.—Should the cheese be dry, a little butter mixed with it will be an improvement. (Source, http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/10136/pg10136.html [this is in the public domain])

I'll be looking out for these to hit Denmark, but I don't really get the point: Cotton candy doesn't taste particularly good, it's one of those childhood disappointments that you tend to wilfully ignore, because it looks so cool, but the taste is just hyper-sweet with a faint backgroud bitterness from the food colouring. I can't imagine anyone who actually likes grapes liking these, but looking at that article, it seems pretty clear that there are actual grownups who want their fruit staright-up sweet with nary note of acidity, so I guess these will be a hit..?

I take your word for it, although I can't get the video to play. Cook's Illustrated has proved quite reliable, but the stuff on their site doesn't seem to be quite as carefully edited, and in this case, it's relatively hard to understand, given that they have the accurate information at their disposal.

The ATK people don't say that, although they do state (in a recipe calling for an 8 to 24-hour soak): 'During soaking, the sodium ions will only filter partway into the beans, so their greatest effect is on the cells in the outermost part of the beans.' (Cook's Illustrated, March & April 2008, p. 15). They also call for draining and throughly rinsing the beans after brining.

From what I've heard, the family element is the only outstanding, special element of a luau, and if that connection isn't there, there's really nothing. The foods that are served you can still sample in other settings, if you're really keen on that.

I think a lot of it has to do with what you grow up with. For example, I grew up in Tuscany, where 'ordinary bread' has an open, chewy structure, hard crust, and absolutely no salt or sugar. When my family moved back to the US, it was all Arnold's whole wheat bread, all the time: compact, soft, compressible, and SWEET. I found it jarring at every level, just horribly, horribly wrong, because it isn't unusual for kids to be conservative about food. I have to admit that I never took to US supermarket bread, or soft sandwich loaves in general.

But we're having such fun! Look at our little faces, glowing with delight! I'd have to add the Italian national dish, coffee (espresso), accompanied by an intense discussion of what defines [insert name of dish], and whether the addition/omission of any given ingredient effectively turns it into another dish. inevitably served on a base of campanilismo.

In the 1950s a compendium like this may still have had some reality, but globalization means that today, a lot of what are regarded as any given culture's 'national dishes' don't really exist as such: they've been modernized to accomodate contemporary tastes to the extent that the resemblance to the original dish may be restricted to name, outside their culture they may be understood so generically that they're charicatures of the reality, or they may simply be museum pieces. I can't think of any food that is exclusive to one country, whether in terms of origins or current availability.\ I'm curious about how you're selecting these recipes: where are you from, and what have you selected as the representative national dish for that country?

Do you calibrate your scales (if they have this feature)? If you don't, how do recipes calling for tiny amounts of ingredients (e.g. in Modernist Cuisine) come out? My boyfriend recently gave me a Jennings JZ115 scale, precise to 0.01g; it didn't come with its own calibration weight, so he also got me a set of weights to calibrate it. And, I can't. The calibration instructions call for using a 100g weight, and I've tried again and again, and the scale stubbornly keeps showing 99.99/8g. Since this is in calibration mode, I suspect the scale has a problem. After discussing this issue with my boyfriend, he contacted the company he ordered the scale from, and today another model of equal precision arrived. Before even bothering to calibrate it, I popped the various weights on the scale: they're nearly all off. The larger weights are a couple points under the stated weights, the smaller weights are a hair over. Looks like there's a problem with the weights, too (these are gifts, which makes the whole situation even more awkward). I've worked with lab equipment, and I do care a lot about accuracy, even more than I do about precision. How finicky do you get with your scales for measuring micro-amounts?