Mjx

That is sweet Not in that category yet, but I hope to be, someday.

I didn't hear about this one until I was in my twenties, and then I just thought it was a humorous reference to an old-wives tale, since all it takes is a moment's contact to distribute bacteria from one agar slab to another; did it dozens of times in labs. This is going to make it sound like I've lived my entire life in a cave, but does anyone actually believe in the '5-second rule'?

Yep, that's a downer. Although I could swear I saw some of those white jars in the overpriced supermarket in the basement of the departament store downtown... I should check. I sometimes buy the Mackays marmalades annd ginger preserves, which are not oversweet.

Are the Aunt Ruby's nuts the very small ones (I can't tell from the image)? Those are my hands-down favourites, but I haven't been able to find them since I was a kid, and I miss them I have found (still very rarely) skin-on peanuts, but they're inevitably the larger ones, which have a softer, mealier texture and flatter flavour than the tiny ones.

Ah yes, I miss that too, dunking things in boiling water to skin them isn't quite so satisfactory, you don't get that slight surface drying, which I think concentrates the flavour just a bit.

Peposo: cubed beef (about a kilo), crushed tomatoes (enough to mostly cover the beef), a few cloves of garlic, couple of teaspoons (no, not a typo) of ground pepper, some water, and a glass of wine. Combine the first four ingredients in a pot, add enough water to cover whatever the tomato doesn't cover, simmer covered for a couple of hours, add the wine, cook another hour (last half hour or so with the lid off, so it reduces), and you're good. Great on its own, over gnocchi it's just incredible. Traditionally, you don't even brown the beef, but I like the extra layer of flavour you get from that, so I do.

Data on HIV/AIDS (an autoimmune disease) is available on the WHO site; the problem is a serious one in third world countries, as you can see. Facts on what? If you want data on parasitic/bacterial/viral morbidity/mortality, go to the WHO site, and take a look. No one said "e-choli is going to kill you if you don't wash your hands", [sic] but that failing to wash one's hands before handling food risks contaminating the food with an array of pathogens, which customers' immune systems may or may not fend off unassisted, but which they are certainly justified in wishing to avoid. The original post was about washing hands. It was about professionalism, and courtesy, about leaving the decision to take on pathogens to the individual, should they so choose. No one denies the misuse and misapplication of modern medical technology, or the intricacies of the relationships between humans and the life forms they may host; we take that as read. But when disagreement with your position is taken as an insult, impartial debate is an impossibility. At the risk of further offending, the discussion is becoming circular, and I don't see any point in pursuing the matter any further.

I think the Danish rivejern (Danish for a 'grater', and also, I've been told, an abrasive woman) sounds incredibly raspy and evocative of the tool.

Do you use salt? In sweets, a pinch of salt often makes the difference between insipid and incredible. I have nothing to offer on the texture front, but I'm sure someone can recommend a reliable recipe, and for whatever it's worth, they really do look lovely.

Mette, I saw some marble cleaner in either Bahaus or Silvan, but make certain that whatever you get is okay to use on surfaces that are used for food prep. Or, Flemming Rubak (Århus, don't know his phone number, Krak, maybe?) might be able to recommend something specific, as he used to deal in stone surfaces, although he's in gum boots and JP, now.

Wouldn't the presence of enough water to maintain this effect for the entire roasting time interfere with surface crisping? It seems like just putting a bunch of root vegetables in the bottom of the pan, to absorb the rendering fat, would work at least as well, and give you some tasty veg, to boot.

Thanks, but... no. Wikipedia just isn't reliable enough to trust on its own. As far as I can see (if I've overlooked something, please point it out, and my apologies) you haven't cited any specific facts or studies to generalize; a hypothesis is no more than an educated guess that is formulated with the idea of testing it. The Wikipedia article does have some good sources, including the WHO site (I'm sure that by now, you've read the handwashing document I linked to; they have plenty of other information, too), and some that are distictly iffy, for example, the study of the pregnant Ugandan women treated with albendazole, whose infants displayed an increased incidence of eczema (which doesn't seem to seriously address the possibilty of the eczema being a direct response to the drug itself, rather than the absence of worms; one way to control for that that would be to look into the incidence of eczema among Ugandan infants whose mothers did not have worms to begin with). I'm not entirely clear on your stance, but the gist of what you've written seems to be that people worry too much, oversanitize, that parasites, bacteria, and viruses are not exclusively harmful, that autoimmune diseases and allergies are the outcome of excessive health measures. My position is that what you say is not entirely inaccurate, but neither is it complete. And (to keep this on-topic) I certainly do believe that everyone has the right to decide for him or herself the extent of the pathogen/parasite load to which he or she wishes to be exposed: The decision should not rest with a deli guy who doesn't wash his hands. Again: People who handle food should wash their hands before so doing, and the research and debate surrounding pathogen ubiquity and overmedication/sanitation in no way conflict with this.

Well, I'm supposed to be working, but reading about pathogens is my idea of a fun 10-minute break. Mycobacteria include the causative organism for tuberculosis and leprosy, as well as forms that cause less serious infections, or do nothing noticeable. None of these things is known for bringing much in the way of health benefits. Lactobacilli are fine, we still enjoy them. Helminths are intestinal parasites, and include hook worms, pin worms, and filaria. Some are actually being used to treat automimmune and allergic conditions, but you don't want to get them because your deli guy has poor hygiene. The allergic-to-everything people I've known haven't had parents who were any more hypochondriacal than any others, nor are they themselves particularly uptight about it: the bring along a roll of paper towel, and do whatever the normally do. The presence of parasites and pathogens is more likely to have contributed to the much shorter life-spans people used to have, than to have created strapping heroes. By the early 1900s, people probably did have what might be described as elite immune systems (no way to know for sure), simply because of millenia of the weaker being culled out before they had a chance to reproduce, but the cost was high: parents assumed than at least one child would die before making it to adulthood. And immunity in one place might mean nothing if you moved to another location, with a fresh array of pathogens to which your forefathers had never been exposed. This is by the way, and... because it's past 1.00 a.m. here, and I'm geeking out. But it comes down to this: Thanks to science, we know that plenty of things that are just fine in our noses or lower GI tracts play merry hell elsewhere, such as in the upper GI tract. A great way to control what gets into your upper GI tract (unless you think 'all that science stuff' is a sort of fairy story) is to observe basic sanitary practices. We also know that hand-washing is a simple, cheap, and effective sanitary practice for avoiding the trasmission of food-borne disease. There have been a few who have suggeted that if you don't like the idea of feces or other contaminants in your food, you should bugger off. My view (and I run my own business, so I've thought about customer service a lot) is that if you run a shop, you should deliver service that doesn't risk compromising customer health. I think a brief note to a shop keeper who's being sort of gross might not be a bad idea.

I was thinking spice cookies, but if it smells so good fresh, I'm thinking that incorporating it into a dish right before serving it would really show it off. I also add it to ginger tea, even when I don't have a cold.

My parents just used tape to attach things to the refrigerator door when I was a kid. I don't know if the refrigerator door wasn't magnetic, but for some reason, the only magnets we did have were on the front of the oven. To keep the tape from showing, they made the tape into loops, and stuck them to the back of the paper; this also means that you don't do any damage by removing the tape, because you can just trim away the portion that was stuck to the fridge, leaving the remainder attached to the back of the paper.

Someone is probably going shoot me down for this, BUT: I was deeply impressed by the skill so many of them showed, yet I wondered why so many of them seemed to be working with an aesthetic that was clearly alien to them, and some of the finished pieces, although beautifully done, were sort of ... tacky. Sort of like Canova channeling Brancusi. Is it sort of a given, these days, that to stand a chance of winning something like M.O.F., you have to go with the more abstract aesthetics of some of the contemporary art movements? One of the competitors did some small pieces, lollipops of some sort, I believe, that were little Pierrot heads, and when I saw those, I remember thinking that they worked because they really seemed to come from the guy's aesthetic comfort zone; same with some teddy bears that were part of (if I remember correctly... it's been a while since I saw this) a larger composition. I'm still hoping Pfeiffer wins this someday.

I'm with you on some of the language pronunciation, but this one's fairly easy... leaving aside the ä in the middle (which really is a nuance thing), we're just talkng about a sh instead of an s at the beginning, and a schwa (like that you have at the end of 'Porsche') added to the end, after the l. But I guess it's only a problem if you can't figure out what someone is talking about (I've had people encourage me to try their 'lovely prosqueeto and canaloop', and could still decipher what they were talking about).

We have a glass stove-top (they're the standard in Denmark, with induction versions becoming increasingly popular, but we decided to wait on that one, until the research is more conclusive), and I really like it, but would love to have gas burners for a wok and for the moka: I cannot seem to get the hang of getting the moka to behave consistently on an electric stove-top. Unfortunately, gas burners are luxury items here, and between their cost, the costs of the permit (many cities no longer even have gas lines, you need to get tanks), and of the gas itself, we've held off. On the Vermont Country Store site, I came across a warning to not use at least certain enamelled cookware on glass stove-tops, but I'm not clear as to the reason for this, and discussions of this online seem to differ on this point.

Absolutely. Well, if anyone wants anything cleaned up citation-wise, point me at it, I'm game. I like writing, and I like research, but when I do both, my output tends to drop, so it would be nice to do something that makes my obsessive tendencies pay off. Incidentally, while I understand that the wiki articles are intended for anyone interested in food and its preparation, what is the baseline of knowledge/intelligence that is presumed for the average reader? With an idea of that, it's possible to better determine the point at which details and citations only deliver an increasingly diminishing return, and contribute clutter, rather than clarity.

You Canadian? No... is this a Canadian comfort food? Potatoes and gravy are two things I love, and when I was in my most broke student days, this was a still-affordable treat.

Speak to a doctor or a nurse: washing your hands properly before handling food is one of the simplest and most effective ways of controlling the spread of disease. When it comes to produce, which you can wash at home, or things that are cooked before serving, you may have point, but the discussion here is about ready-to-eat items; with those things, hygiene matters. I have friends who have a relaxed attitude towards this sort of thing, and sometimes, I get really fed up with having to listen to upadates of their symptoms, when they go through yet another bout of food-borne disease contracted at the same dump that infected them last time... I mean, I'm sympathetic and all, and as happy as the next person to interrupt my lunch to field a call detailing projectile vomiting, dry heaves, and 'I think there's blood in my diarrhoaea, now', or tremulous requests for 'more toilet paper', but I'm irked by the stupidity involved in their continuing to patronize places that staffed by people who clearly have no concept of hygiene, particularly given the fact that there are plenty of places that have different people to wrap the food and take your cash. In major cities, at least, 'casual germs' now tend to include some really fun stuff, like cholera (check out the CDC site). Washing hands or putting on a clean pair of gloves before handling food is a good idea. It may not be incredibly macho, but who cares? Neither is being curled up in the foetal position, while your friend yells at you to shut up already, and go to the doctor.

I cook down soups to reconstitute, but I freeze them, instead of canning.

I leave. This is something I actually notice: Money is incredibly filthy, and I can't afford the luxury of an E. coli or other infection. I have a really low tolerance for people who don't wash their hands. A single instance of hand-to-food-contact may transfer realtively few pathogens (although they do reproduce), but this sort of food item gets handled repeatedly, and a failure to wash hands suggests a general indifference to hygiene. I know some people who consider the casual attitude towards hygiene more 'real' (a single round with E. coli is generally enough to rid people of that picturesque view).

I found on youtube, and was really intrigued. I had no idea that the colour was syringed into the gelatin in that manner (I assumed something pretty much like an aspic, in terms of production), it actually strikes me as at least bordering on MC territory.

If I could go back to Bolzano and have the chestnut-pasta ravioli with venison, I'd be one happy person. Had that at 'Al Duomo', which always delivers, but hasn't repeated this particular dish since the one time I had it.