Mjx

Well happy new year and congratulations on the house, and those are some lovely gifts! But the cubed egg thing... WOW. Poirot would squeal

Ombre Rosse (Parma) and Frascati (SF) are two that spring to mind. There are several others, too, but... I love their unknown-to-outsiders status

http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?/topic/120762-obscene-sandwich/page__p__1626759__hl__obscene__fromsearch__1#entry1626759

Wonderful sandwiches?

Heck, find a diplomatic but unambiguous way to tell everyone else to make their own food, and take a break. When I'm fried, my boyfriend fends for himself... he sometimes even makes fantastic pizza!

I take a look at what unfamiliar cultures do at the current time of year, especially in tropical and subtropical climates. I look at the colours, the combinations of ingredients that recur frequently/seem unique to the cuisine; I annoy people in the forums here with my questions about this sort of thing. I make a list of the ingredients that particularly stand out, for any reason. I make an agreement with myself to cook at least X number of things in a given timeframe, using my new ingredient/technique set, and go on a hunting and gathering mission. Where I am now, this tends to yield meagre results, so I tend to have long lists for when I go back to NYC. Or, live on almonds, grapefruit, and coffee for a bunch of weeks, until I start fantasizing about real food.

These would be books unavailable on amazon, apparently, and it's the sister who's going to do the the schlepping, so it's another story (I can testify to this, having recently done the mule thing, and brought two cast iron pans – no, I'm not kidding – from NYC to Denmark)

I was just there. You assume incorrectly. (Although I wouldn't know which designer brands use sweatshop labor. I assume the answer is probably "all of them.") nikkib's comment was intended as irony. We already did all this, elsewhere, and this has nothing to do with someone making a dumb choice; let's not turn this guy into a martyr for a cause.

I don't care for yeast breads that have a cakey texture, either, they always suggest that something went wrong; a more resilient texture is what seems right for brioche. It also shouldn't be too sweet: I've had some that had been really oversweetened.

Because his customers go to his shop, not his home, for meat? All he's doing is fulfilling a demand for a product which is perfectly legal, but is chosen as an easy target for animal rights terrorists. It's good to see someone standing up and being unrepentant. It's just a shame he'll probably lose his business over it. Great points nikkib, but we all know that foie gras is the most evil product on the market, and must be stopped at all costs. One could go into the whole foie gras thing again, or argue one way or the other, regarding Selfridges hypocrisy, but what this particular incident is really about is someone gambling, and losing. O' Shea's arrangement with Selfridge's was to not sell foie gras; he did that off his own bat, he took his chances. So he gambled, and lost. The only grownup way to handle this sort of thing is to be philosophical; boohooing, pouting, and going all defensive are just embarrassing and babyish.

Well, it's stupid, if nothing else. How did think he would not get caught? And if he could set up this sort of network, why not do it from his home, or something, rather than from a large shop that may not actually care about animal rights, but does like to make the profitable pretense of it?

I'd be interested in hearing about the final decision (I have some doubts as to whether most kids would greet poached pears with much enthusiasm)!

The problem is probably sorted by now, but the issue of Cook's Illustrated that reached me yesterday suggested using sugar, which purportedly 'act like porous sponges to absorb some of the odor molecules' (January & Februar 2012, p. 17). The procedure calls for wetting the hands with warm water, then rubbing them for a minute with a tablespoon of sugar.

I like chocolate with muscat, and don't think it's a mistake, although large amount of glutinous, gloppy chocolate (e.g. chocolate cream cake) wouldn't seem like a great match. My pick would be a selection of things that make for small, concentrated (flavour/texturally) bites, biscotti and panforte/some chocolates (recently, I've been going a bit amok with Peter Beyer's ale truffles, and also the ones with saffron and... rum? I think it's rum) or excellent quality dried/candied fruit in a thin layer of not-too-sweet dark chocolate would be good.

I'm thinking that a really heavy cream might push the dessert into the too-rich zone.

Not eating for most of the day was difficult at first, but it became fairly easy after about two weeks, and it's the only form of dieting I can pull off (I find life rough enough without treating food as units and penalties). I'll sometimes pop a dextrose tablet, or grab a slice of Wasa. I'm a bit leary about the daily weighing thing. Bizarrely, my own weight hasn't budged in months, although there's no question that the spare tire I had in the spring is now gone, and my abs are all visible, and very 'displayable' again.

Eating dinner only for quite a while has made not overeating at dinner much easier. It also means I fill up faster, so I just eat the things I actively want: I don't take a little of everything, just because it's there. This means I can easily take a normal helping of duck, or fruitcake, for example, because I'm skipping most of the side dishes and desserts. When it comes to the coffee-with-colossal-trays-of-sweets-to-ward-off-deep-winter-starvation, I mostly drink a lot of coffee, and help myself to a chocolate or two, then forget about the rest, because honestly, they're nothing that's unavailable most of the year. The thing that has made not overeating easiest, though, is only eating one (no holds barred) meal a day.

It doesn't seem like the mechanism of a food processor would do as good of a job with bread dough as dough hooks of one sort or another. I haven't tried a food processor or a stand mixer to knead, although I do use the dough hooks on a hand-held mixer when I have to make bread in a hurry. I work with very slack doughs, however, so hand-kneading them is like pawing about in a large tub of glue; I normally go the no-knead route, but the hand-held mixer dough hooks do a fine job when there isn't time to let the dough do its thing for 12 to 18 hours. I just run the mixer for about 2 to 3 minutes, until the dough start forming strands/sheets, and pulling away from the sides of the bowl.

If gelatine doesn't work out, can you get your hands on some konjak? Acidity doesn't seem to have any adverse effect on its gelling capacity: I often make a very concentrated lemon ginger gelatine, which sets up very firmly (no idea of the pH, but I haven't come across anyone else who will eat it, owing to its acidity). Minimal syneresis, too.

If I was making a single regular sized pie of this sort, I'd be inclined to fit two semicircular shells in the single pie pan, to get around the intermingling of the two fillings. You could also blind bake a single shell, prepare the fillings, the add them in, either starting with the less runny one, then adding the other, or pouring them in from either side at the same time. I'd love to hear what you do, and how it comes out.

In Denmark, scented dish soaps are at least as heavily fragranced as any in the US. However, there are at least two or three brands of fragrance- and dye-free detergents readily available, and most of the people I know use these (I almost wish they'd used the fragranced versions, since I doubt they'd tolerate the residual scent they leave behind, when you don't rinse thoroughly). The most recent responses I've got to my question, 'Why are soap suds left on the dishes' (about fifteen minutes ago) were, 'Well, I don't know..! I guess it's faster and saves water? I don't know, really.' And I think for non-rinsers in DK, anyway, that pretty much sums it up. I don't get it, since rinsing suds (as opposed to unlathered soap) doesn't take much time or water, and they tend to run the water, unused, the entire time the dishes are being soaped, but I'll just accept it as one of those 'It's what we do' sorts of things, and continue to discreetly rinse dishes before I use them.

Eat less crap when I travel... seriously, when I'm travelling, I eat things I'd feel embarrassed to even suggest to another person (this partly comes about because I'm trying to accomodate a couple of food sensitivities I have, but still). This happens mostly in transit, not when I'm at my destination, but after all, there's ostrich jerky and there's ostrich jerky (and thanks, Mitch, for drawing my attention to the former). And I need to experiment more. I feel stuck, and haven't a spectacular food-related disaster in longer than I can remember, so I'm clearly playing it way too safe.

I'd be thinking in terms of chestnuts, and maybe some brioche.

Sure, but what's the benefit of drying with a towel? It's more work. I only use a towel when something is too large to fit in the dish draining rack or where I'm really worried about appearance; most of the time, I air-dry stuff upside-down in the drying rack, and it looks fine. Mostly a space limitation/trying to keep good habits thing (although the water here is really hard, and the spots don't look great on the flatware). It hasn't been unusual for me to have more dirty dishes to wash than would fit in the rack at one go (no room for a larger rack, either), so I'd do as many as would fit, and dry them to make room for the remaining dishes. Besides, if I don't put the dishes away, because there aren't more to wash up at the moment, we tend to just let them sit on the rack and use them as we need them, leaving dirty dishes to accumulate in the sink, because... there wouldn't be any place to put them, if I did wash them. And a sinkful of dirty dishes is kind of gross and depressing, not mention peculiarly self-perpetuating.

I recently read about slow-roasting prime rib in Cook's Illustrated (November & December 2011), where they describe searing the exterior on the stovetop over high heat, then roasting in at 200F, until the interior reaches 110F (3 to 4 hours), at which point the oven is shut off, and roast is left in to finish in the residual heat until it reaches 120-125F, half an hour to an hour and a half longer. For roast beef I do something simliar, but less complex: Stovetop sear, roast at 250F for about 45 minutes to an hour, to an internal temperature of 110F, then finish for 10 to 15 minutes at 450F, until internal temperature is 130F. Very pink and juicy interior, just a tiny bit bloody.