Mjx

I think one of the most helpful things you can do is to ruthlessly purge your collection of kitchen items of those that you never really use (and find good homes for them), even if they seemed like great ideas when you got them. This makes it easier to manage, when storage and counter space are limited. You may also want to hang some things on the walls, so that only things that must be stored in cabinets or drawers occupy that real estate. I have to admit that I've taken to bunging a lot of things in the freezer, so they don't take up our currently very limited refrigerator space.

I also think the lasagna idea is a great one: I made this for my boyfriend when I was first seeing him (not for the first date, since we never actually had one, but that's another story), and he adored it. I used one of the recipes from The Splendid Table, and it worked hitch-free; it's one of my favourite cookbooks. One caveat: My boyfriend loved this lasagna, in fact he ate enough of it to be able to do little more than sit about after dinner, smiling dreamily, with a glassy look in his eyes (this was pure food coma, since there was no wine involved, because he'd just got done recovering from the hangover of the century). So, you may want to consider a lighter meal, if you have any after-dinner plans beyond disjointed conversation.

Well, if luck is with me, I'll be back in DK soon, and hunting about for this beer, simply because it is such a trivial matter, too trivial to be permitted to continue to pique my curiosity. Since I'm no judge of beer, if I find it, I'll be trying it on my boyfriend's father, without addressing the language back of the name. @Maureen B. Fant: Fika is still there. And, they're producing chocolate bars under the same name, saw them in the Union square Christmas market just yesterday. @Teonzo: No worries about seeming pedantic, it would be hard to top me on that score, unfortunately. ETA My boyfriend's father tried this beer, and loathed it. Described it as tasting like weak, beer-flavoured water mixed with orange juice from a carton; a sourish aftertaste like you find in your mouth when you wake up from sleeping with your mouth open. He'll finish most beers, but this went down the sink.

Guess it take all kinds... I can eat any licorice (meaning the real stuff, not the red things... licorice is a flavour, not a texture!) by the sackful, salted or otherwise (I was delighted to discover that there's a semi-continent-ful of salted licorice to explore, since it's big throughout northern Europe). Now, milk chocolate with licorice embedded in it in a variety of ways is a new low I recently encountered: I keep giving it a go, but I just don't take to it. The aftertaste is just indescribable. It could only be worse if peanut butter were involved, too (so I'm guessing I'll be seeing that soon).

I'm currently cooking in my boyfriend's parents kitchen (his parents were so sweet, and asked us to stay with them while we house-hunt), and while it's not the worst kitchen I've ever worked in (it's got lots of space and storage), it's be the most frustrating. The main problem is that it is the kitchen of people who don't really like to cook. The stove is from the 80s, so the burners are a bit wonky with regard to the relationship among the various heat levels, and the oven runs hot and cool, nowhere near the temperature optimistically suggested by the knob. The sink looks nice, but the smaller compartment is so narrow, it's hard to wash anything without water splashing all over; the large compartment is shallow, so gives a lot of splash too, unless you use the tiniest trickle of water. The tap is set back just far enough to make it impossible to wash anything under the stream without water flowing over the counter, in part because the water opens too forcefully. And something is going on with the pipes/water heater, so unless you run the water fully open for about ten minutes (and I'm not comfortable wasting that many litres of water every time I wash up), the water stays cold, and since it's also hard, washing up takes surreal lengths of time. And there are so many implements! Mostly plastic ones, the use of which is uncertain, and at which my boyfriend's mother hazards amused guesses (she can't quite recall where most of them came from, or why they're there). At the same time, things like cake pans that are not made of silicone, or a dutch oven aren't present. Pawing through a tangle of odds and ends while looking for, say, a metal ladle (there isn't one, I discovered), is really frustrating. I've unpacked a few things that I really need, but since I can't reasonably clutter up someone else's kitchen with our stuff, so I've kept a lid on things. I'm really, really looking forward to having our own kitchen again, to a large extent because I hate feeling irritated when I just want to feel grateful. On the up side, some of the arrangements have made me aware of certain things that I mightn't have thought about otherwise.

Aren't the component pieces cut out before baking? Or, would the shrinkage involved make the actual construction too problematic? This is something I've wanted to try for a long time, but haven't yet got around to doing.

I know, I grew up in Italy But from what I can make out from the website, Stronzo brewery is owned by Danes... so I'm not sure if they really do get it. Of course, this wouldn't make a difference to the quality of the beer.

'Fika', hm? Well, I'm in Manhattan at this very moment, so you can imagine that I'm going to check and see whether this place is still around (both Scandinavians and Scandinavian languages tend to lend themselves to linguistic oddities, however: 'Svedka', as in the vodka brand, conveys something along the lines of 'sweaty' in Danish wherein 'sved' means 'sweat', I've no idea what's going on with that, either). I can't help wondering whether that brewery grasps the full implications of 'stronzo', but now that I think of it, I haven't noticed it for sale. Given that I only buy beer when I'm using it in cooking or baking, this isn't surprising, but I really do need to see whether this stuff actually exists. If you do get your hands on some, please let me know whether the flavour lives up to its name

Depends on what kind of rolls do you want to make. Are you looking for an open and chewy structure, or one that's a bit more compact? If I'm making rolls, I'll often just make a slightly larger batch of dough, and use only a part of it to make rolls (the rest becomes a loaf), so there are enough for immediate use, but not so many that they'll sit about and become stale.

Not to bring you down even further, but there is a distinct possibility that the former is what a lot of pizza places actually do; in fact, a friend of mine had a connection who assured him that a single syndicate had the nearly the entire pizza-dough distribution in the Metro area sewn up, and that many of their buyers even denied buying, rather than making their dough (nope, never looked into it, under the circumstances, it sounded as though that might be... unwise).

Was approximate cost discussed? I'm really hoping that by tinkering with my budget a bit, I can make it.

I know; still, if he's keen on smoking venison, it's worth being aware of various options.

Depends on how you smoke it: I've had cold-smoked venison, and one taste makes it clear that it's worth the trouble; it has a very supple, silky texture. Should be properly inspected and approved, to ensure that it's clear of parasites.

Definitely more like duck than turkey, and very, very good: I roasted one a couple of years back (I used The Perfect Recipe's roast goose recipe, and it went without a single hitch, and the goose was not at all tough), and my boyfriend and his brother – both fairly picky and often conservative eaters – had to be practically restrained, so that the rest of us could have a go at it. During the early phase of roasting it does have an odd odour, but that's gone by the time it's done. Another nice thing about it is that it is quite tolerant of overcooking (at least domestic goose is), so you're unlikely to dry it out if your oven runs hot. To put it another way: Hell, yeah!

You'd have to check: It varies and most of the studies describe a range (the links to the articles are in some of the posts upthread).

This is pretty much what I've heard from quite a few people; since the holidays are approaching, maybe add one or both Chartreuses to your wish list?

Well... to be fair, if it's a first-time experience (which is my impression, based on the mention of 'sheer volume'), and his only idea about it is that created by Bourdain, who evidently went out of his way to create the impression that tasting menus approximate the sorts of banquets that supposedly preceded Roman orgies, he's going in without having any idea of how much food is going to be involved, and I can understand not wanting to find himself rolled off to the sidelines, halfway through. By now everyone has pretty much set the record straight on the amount of food actually likely to be involved (didn't someone post their images of a dinner at Alinea? All I found was this review without images, but I know it isn't likely to exceed, say, the amount that Steven and co. had, at elBulli, and that was manageable).

Aren't these sometimes treated with protective coatings/chemicals (marble is actually a rather vulnerable material, and can even burn) that may make them unsuitable for using with food?

If it's being sold to a US market, they may have been concerned that metric measurements would be intimidating. I haven't seen the book, but frankly, if they're giving weight measurements (of any sort) for dry ingredients, it would still put the book leagues ahead of a lot of other cook books out there.

Agreed, tasting menus are never that overwhelming to the stomach (and I fill up fast). I do find a glass of wine with each course kind of unmanageable (read: I get drunk so fast it's ludicrous), however, but many places offer you various options for the wine/beverage selection (e.g. options of 3, 5, or 8 wines, or a juice menu instead); Alinea may be one.

Got my boyfriend a Mahlkönig Vario model for his birthday last spring, and it works like a dream, and is also remarkably quiet (it makes less noise than the Silvia I got him at the same time): I definitely recommend it (it was one of the models that was most frequently recommended, when I was researching burr grinders).

Soot was used loosely to mean the grounds the seep through the mesh screen. Your Polish article kind of supports my point... in Warsaw they drink Espresso which has very little grounds and little to no correlation in increased cancer risk, in Sweden they boil the grounds & drink unfiltered and have high correlation. I did not cherry pick an article... I merely found one that pertained to an article I read a year ago. When launching a would-be scientific discussion, precision is important, and 'soot' is finely powdered carbon. My comment about not cherry-picking the article referred to what I hadn't done, not to whether or not you had Regardless, the connection between drinking moderate amounts of coffee and cancer don't seem supported; there's no discussion of Swedish coffee preparation in that article, either.

It might be easier to find a recipe for roasting whole ostrich. I could swear that I came across one at least once, along with a discussion of it's popularity, owing to a passion for exotica during the late 1800s. I'll take a look and see whther I can dig it up again. Wouldn't the general principals for roasting any whole animal apply?

Not reliably enough to deal with the concentration and array of pathogens in this setting. This may sound harsh, but... more fools they. I mean, these are things you're taught to not do when you're still a small child (smacking away of hands much involved, as I recollect)! Not by much. I say give them a running start, and offer to fire at them while they're moving fast. Grrrr.... One of the things that is most infuriating is that people never seem to take it seriously when I comment on this. They ignore me, start yelling at me about their right, or, bizarrely, even ruffle my hair. Does everybody get this sort of reaction, or have some of you actually managed to make some sort of impression on the people you speak to about this/get them to even listen? Lucky you... I seem to catch every damn thing going around, anytime I eat in public.

Any chance the thermometer needs calibration? Could be the humidity, too, but I'm sure you've thought of that.