Mjx

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.

I often do. Fresh clean towel, and you're good. Today, I asked a couple more people about the suds on the dishes thing. Got the sort of looks normally reserved for asking a question such as, 'Is the noise in my head bothering you?'. Also got replies to the effect that It's tradition, and Why not. All I could think of was Despair, Inc's poster for Tradition. and that I wanted to get some inkling of the reason behind the tradition.

This article mentions some of the foods in which trehalose is used: http://www.sugar.org/other-sweeteners/novel-sweeteners.html#trehalose And this article indicates that it runs about 3.6 kcal/gr: http://hddrugworks.org/articles/13.html

A high pH is alkaline, not acidic; that'd be 'soapy', most likely.

That's beautiful, it reminds me of amber: Would you mind elaborating on the recipe a bit? Was it served as an appetizer, or at the end of the meal?

I think the pectin level in quinces must vary from year to year: My boyfriend's mother makes this every autumn, and most of the time it is a no-brainer, but this year (and it's happened now and then, previously) it just would not set up. Normal procedure is to boil the stuff up, spread it and forget it, but this year she had to air dry it in the oven (very low convection setting). We tried making one batch by just steaming the quinces, so nothing was poured away, but it didn't make much difference. It did finally set up, though. On a side note, I don't get the use of vanilla, which seems standard: I think it muddies the scent of the quinces.

The ability to survive noxious substances isn't a compelling argument for ingesting them, but far be it from me to argue with people who want to do so. Getting back to the underlying reason for leaving soap suds on washed dishes, the two people I asked today said they had no idea, but 'people just do'. Research continues tomorrow. Makes me kind of wince though, I get such odd looks, when I ask.

I don't know... that peck of dirt surely didn't include lots of things, such as cyanide, mercury, and ground glass (yeh, the body can handle these things, but they're not exactly great for you), so I don't see why soap would figure in (did they even use soap much, when that saying was first minted?). I can actually deal better with people using just blazing hot water and no soap at all, then leaving soap suds on. I'm going to have to find a tactful way to ask some more people here about this... what I really want to know is WHY this done.

Could there have been too much fat, even in the 'lite' coconut milk for the gelatin to dissolve easily? It's been a while since I've used powdered gelatin, since the usual form here is the sheet, but my recollection is of sifting it as evenly as possible over cold water, juice, or some other liquid (that didn't have fat), then adding anything else only once the gelatin had gone into solution.

Well, there are other old sayings that warn you against me as demon-spawn, because I'm left-handed, and that assure you that when the moon is 'laying one her back', it's going to rain . Soap isn't dirt (making that entire argument irrelevant), but a chemical cocktail designed to be rinsed away, nothing in it is going to do a spot of good, in term of building resistance to disease. For the record, I find this practice more inexplicable than horrifying. Fortunately, most of the dishes end up in the dishwasher, but the outliers get the 'soap and lay out to dry' treatment.

I'm guessing the missing 3 T starch did make a difference, since it would be included in the recipe to make for a softer/finer crumb (contains no gluten).

The dishes are white, and the cutting boards wooden, so you don't see it so much, just some more matte-looking patches. I'm not the one doing this! But if you don't rinse, the type of soap/water temperature don't even enter the equation GRRRRR... My responses to the non-rinsers' points (not directed at you!): -- Lazy sods! -- Then why are you running the water the entire time you're soaping the dishes?! All the non-rinsers I know do just that! -- It may not be toxic, but I don't enjoy diarrhea, and I'm not the only one who reacts this way to ingested dish soap (I actually thought I was developing IBS!). -- Especially in drinking glasses, you can taste the soap, and you don't wash things just to make them look clean, but to actually make them so. I mean, why wash them at all, just wipe them with a damp cloth.

Absolutely, but I think that a lot of publications care much more about being 'different' than intelligible; I know from aggravating experience that most authors seem to.

Might be a silly/misguided/pretentious effort to make the term 'crisp' sound more interesting. It's also not impossible that the writer is unknowingly a synaesthete, and just thinks that experiencing flavours in this sort of way is common to everyone.

I'm surprised: aren't there all sorts of restrictions on the import of uncured/slightly cured meats in the US? I could swear that once it was difficult to get many of them.