Mjx

No. "Soft ball" definitely meant the temperature the cooking candy reached. Having made this and many other recipes for years before I ever bothered to buy a candy thermometer, I can tell you that what you did to determine what temperature the boiling candy had reached was to get a glass (in our case, a glass measuring cup) and fill it with ice water. You dropped a spoonful of the candy into that ice water and then plied it with your fingers. "Soft ball" was when it would just hold together and form an, um, "soft ball." It went up to "firm ball," "hard ball," "soft crack," and "hard crack." The "crack" referred to the sound it made when you hit the ball against the side of the glass. "Soft ball" is about 236-240 on your candy thermometer and is exactly what my mama's Date Nut Loaf called for. Reading through the all posts for this topic, it seems that the take on this recipe is at least somewhat generationally bound; my own understanding of 'date roll' is the same as Chris A's, both because of the sorts of date sweets I recollect eating when I was a kid, and the recipes I'm familiar with that refer to various 'ball' stages, all of which have the sugar syrup alone reach the desired stage, before any other ingredient is added.

There are some some suggestions for this, in the Egg and dairy substitutes topic. Faced with this challenge, I freely admit that I'd probably simply bail on anything that involved eggs or dairy in the first place, and go with some sort of agar/tapioca/konnyaku based dessert. And, just to make you crazy, I have to point out that tree nuts are a fairly common allergen.

RE: shrimp and squid I had always thought the same thing but then every dictionary I've looked in lists both shrimp and shrimps and both squid and squids as proper plural forms. I haven't checked the OED but I'm betting it's the same there. Edited: grammar The OED lists both options as acceptable (but the form with the terminal 's' always sounds so illiterate).

Aha. Thanks!

I don't get through onions of any sort very quickly, so if I have a whole bag, I often end up slicing/dicing and freezing most of them; it's actually pretty convenient.

I'm not getting the point of inverse puff pastry, either; what makes it light and flaky is the laminated construction, can't see that it would make any difference to texture which layer is on the outside. From the standpoint of avoiding a colossal mess + possibly lots of smoke, having a dough layer outermost would make a difference.

Danish cookware isn't particularly cheap here, either. Pots and pans at Inspiration, a major Danish housewares chain, start at DKK250 (described as a 'god pris' or 'good price') for a chintzy 3.9L enamelled pot by Raadvad, a popular Danish brand, and go up to DKK1000 for the not-exactly-robustly-constructed 15L Raadvad stock pot (as I mentioned, prices in DK, as elsewhere in the the EU, include sales tax: 25% in DK). At the moment, conversion is about DKK5.6/USD1. Scanpan (despite the name, I don't know whether it's actually a Scandinavian brand) runs about DKK500 for an 8" frying pan, so the base cost is DKK400. Æbleskive pans aren't specialty items here, so they're available at pretty much all price points, from merely 'Wow, that's a bit spendy for this piece of crap' to 'Well, I might need both kidneys some day.' I believe I've seen the Scanpan one for DKK450, and Inspiration has a Le Creuset one (yeh, I know, don't ask) for DKK800. However, since a lot of people just buy frozen æbleskiver by the bag, and heat them in the oven, the pans can be had for a song, secondhand ETA: I realize these links are going to be dead in no time, since that's the way retail goes, but the names should still make it fairly easy to find the items/prices (e.g. Raadvad, inspiration.dk), if you're curious.

Okay, I'm trying to feel embarrassed (not having much luck with that) about not knowing what the back of the spoon thing is, but... well, what is it? Someone, please explain (and what, if anything is it sopposed to convey?)! All I can conjure up is someone drawing the spoon backwards through something, or possibly patting it with the back of the spoon, both of which seem random/unremarkable actions. What am I not getting? Before you ask, nope, I don't really have access to a TV.

Overhead and prestige may be part of the equation, but I have a hunch the big determining factor is what the target market will bear. I no longer do conversions from kroner to dollars when I buy cookware in Denmark that I know can be had reasonably priced in the US, it's just too frustrating. For example, in Denmark you pay DKK230, or about USD41 for the Microplane gourmet series (prices include sales tax in DK; if you subtract the 25% sales tax, we're still talking just shy of USD33), while in the US, before tax, the identical grater is USD17. The base cost of Lodge cookware runs about 2.5 what it does in the US. On the other hand, in Denmark, minimum wage for adults is equivalent to about USD18, and most people make more than that, so there are simply a lot more people (percentage-wise) who can take the hit in the wallet. Not surprisingly, I mule a lot of stuff back from the US every time I go back.

With you on the misery. Except I can't even bring myself to throw them away, because when I was a kid, all the old people around me taught that waste is evil, so I'm stuck looking at my failures for days, until the last one has been ingested.

My cousin (who lives in the area) mentioned that there are buses that do rounds of the vineyards in the area, but I never did look into it. I imagine they're at a reasonable price point, and would also mean that you needn't worry about watching your wine intake super carefully, the way you would if you were driving.

Sugar is supposed to effectively remove onion smell from hands; I haven't tried it, but I mentioned it in a recent topic on that, and someone else tried it, and said it was effective.

I'm wondering whether this change has anything to do with the fact that in Scandinavia, you can get most of those things at every newspaper kiosk/supermarket.

Naaah... A little clever marketing ('hand-crafted!' 'exclusive, very limited edition!' 'heirloom style'), and jacking up the price to about 250% of the cost of the ones that came out right, would have these bad boys flying out the door. There's one born every minute...

When I hear 'coffee cake', I expect: no frosting (but possibly icing on the top); less sweetness than the cake used in frosted cakes; spiced to a greater extent than usual in layer cakes and such. Apart from that, anything goes.

Eating the last few of a nearly extinct species will ward off starvation until what, next week? Yes, I get it, you don't think that about that sort of thing when your kid is wasting away before your eyes, but when you are outside the situation, simply contemplating it, it's not a compelling sort of example. Frankly, I find ALL the extreme points of view on this (actually, any) topic remarkably tedious, shortsighted, and spectacularly ignorant. It's as though everyone is so over-invested in their stance, the option of discussing the topic objectively and rationally is just out of the question. The inverted snobbism of the 'just folks' crowd is at least as nauseatingly dishonest as the wilfully naive and preachy elitism of of the overprivileged, self-appointed finger-waggers. Yeh, I know: Moderation is boring, but does anyone actually believe that embracing some extreme fringe outlook is going to fix things? The whole concept of 'honest' food is even more laughable, when framed by the hypocrisy of those who produce it.

I'd model my approach on making trifle, since cake breaks down in moisture more easily than bread. What sort of flavours were you thinking?

This past weekend, I was listening to The Splendid Table and I heard Lynn Rossetto Kasper pronounce it "bru-SHET-ta." I always thought this was a mis-pronunciation but she's Italian and I'm not. Is this a regional thing, perhaps? Lynn Rossetto Kasper is American. However, she's spent plenty of time in Italy, so I have no idea why she would pronounce 'bruschetta' that way; 'che' is always pronounced 'keh' in Italian.

They can't hide behind the 'Oh, but we're not professionals' tree, if they set themselves up as critics with a wide audience. It isn't at all unreasonable to measure them against the standard for all restaurant critics. If you want to play with the big boys, even by implication, you need to expect and accept the big boy rules.

The Little Chihuahua has tasty and filling Cal-Mex food, and Miette has lovely sweets (not cheap, but if you're ever struck with a 'let's have dessert for breakfast/lunch/whatever', it's worth it).

Heck, I would have been fine with (in fact was trying to get her to tell me) the Vietnamese name. I'm guessing she felt embarrassed, which I can definitely relate to, so I didn't press it. In Denmark, the name wouldn't be likely to be regarded as offensive (major pork producer). I need to get the ingredients together, and start experimenting. If I can get my hands on some decent rose water, well, I've been a little obsessed with trying a cacao and rosewater version of this.

It seems a likely candidate (BonVivantNL mentions it, upthread), and I was hoping that if I just asked for the name of this sweet today, it would clear that up, but for some reasone, she declined to say. I toyed with the idea of trying to say 'banh da lon', but had doubts about getting some of the more forcible sounding vowels pronounced correctly, and had visions of the shopkeeper rolling about on the floor, convulsed with laughter. So I chickened out.

Don't know how long as it's been going on, but I can recall this going back at least as far as August of 1989, in NYC. It always made me giggle.

In theory, at least, the closer the food is produced to where it is sold, the less fuel is needed (and by extension the less pollution is produced) to transport it; at a cumulative level, this can make a difference. Also, you might argue that supporting local (or as local as possible) sustainable agriculture is simply good for the community. Clearly, if you want lemons and live in in Denmark, you're going to be importing. But importing them from Italy has advantages over importing them from China (also in terms of being better able to monitor the labour and hygiene standards in place at the point of origin). This is largely fallacious. As I said, 'In theory'. I'd want to see hard figures from very, very credible, firsthand sources, and lots of them, before reaching any firm conclusion. The issue of being able to have a better idea of the labour and hygiene practices involved in the production of food that comes from closer by is less theoretical; it's much easier to have an idea of what's going on in your neighbour's yard, than in the yard of someone you've never met, in the next city. But what is troubling me increasingly is the sense that 'honest' (with regard to food) is being used to imply 'better', in any or all ways. If someone wants to say, 'X and Y practices/ingredients/sources make for the best/my preferred food', I can accept that. When someone starts babbling about food being 'honest', I just want to beat them to death with my copy of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary.

Actually went back to the shop again to day, and asked the woman who keeps the shop what it was called; I was told 'coconut cake'. I asked for the Vietnamese name, and she just laughed and shook her head. I'll crack this one yet.