Mjx

Just looked up what beignet are in the US, and I can see how the advice to not make them in advance makes sense (the ones I grew up with, in Italy, are iced profiteroles with pastry cream, rather than ice cream). Incidentally, if you really want to bring individual-portion sweets, Italian beignet really do lend themselves to being made in advance, and assembled at the last minute, and you could ice them in the colours of a King cake (or use green, purple, and yellow sugar over a white or chocolate sugar icing).

I haven't had any problems with Word copy/paste (I'm on a Mac, and using Firefox). I know, I know... typos are nothing, really, but I'm a copyeditor, so if I screw up on spelling or punctuaation, I feel like crawling into a hole

If we're talking about the same thing (and since you mention frying, I'm sort of wondering), you can make the shells, pastry cream, and glaze ahead of time, and assemble them at the last minute, which really simplifies transport.

Is the minimum capacity of 11 lbs carved in stone? Because I can really recommend (okay: I adore mine) the Jennings CJ-4000 scale, but it only weighs up to 4 kg, or about 8 lbs, but apart from that, it meets your criteria. It also has a great warantee (10 years, if I remember correctly). 'Fluid ounce' is misleading: it's a volume measurement, so you'd want a measuring cup/pitcher for that.

I never could figure that out myself, since the serving sizes usually seem small to me, and I'm not a large person (and I have a not-particularly large appetite). Maybe they're sized to be easily multipled, since many people seem to have a harder time with division than multiplication. Most likely, the quantities just strike the people who determine serving size as nice, tidy amounts, and they like that.

I've been writing my entries in a Word document (including any coding for links/brackets), then copy/pasting the text into the wiki, and definitely recommend it. The idea of doing hours of reseach and then having the result vanish into the ether makes my blood run cold (just for variety, the blood ran hotly to my face yesterday, as I realized that the one article I had written directly online had two typos I'd overlooked).

Maybe a cultural thing? The only time I ever noticed a man doing that, he was also eating a hamburger impaled on a fork, and acting as though it was a very ordinary thing to do; he was an exchange student at the Graduate Center at 34th Street.

Last time I had a gas stove, I decided to clean it after living in the place for a year, and found a wee, mummified mouse.

I have wormy spelt flour in the freezer. My boyfriend proudly bought up masses of it when it was deeply discounted (Huh. Wonder why...), but didn't notice that there were those webby-looking bits around the folds at the top and bottom of the bags. I didn't have the heart to mention it (it weighed a ton, and he did it as a special favour to me, because I don't tolerate wheat that well), and couldn't bring myself to toss it, either, since it's so expensive here, so I sifted a bag, and concluded that the worms were mostly on the outside, and shoved the lot into a plastic bin liner and put that in the freezer, where they've been sitting at -16C for a month or so. The kitchen floor sometimes gets embarrassing (feet make sticking noises when I walk across it, although not since the flat's been up for sale), and the inside of the oven is atrocious looking with the polymerized and blackened fat of dozens of roast chickens. I'm afraid that if I try the pyrolysis feature, I might burn down the building, so nothing changes, apart from my scraping the inside of the glass door with a razor blade, giving a fine view of the encrusted interior. I console myself by reflecting on the fact that since the oven is used regularly, usually at 200 C or higher, it's actually not germy. I also have a really nasty-looking copper-clad frying pan that I have tried to clean on several occasions, but I cannot get the brasso to do its thing for me.

Lipstick?

What with a lingering and severe cold, a dissertation to copyedit, congenital sloth, and my boyfriend's currently being away at a conference and having recently returned from Kiev with a stupendous array of chocolates (also vodka, and, I kid you not, Crimean chamapne), I've been living for the past couple of days on increasing numbers of chocolates, as the real food gave out, and I couldn't work up a head of steam to go out to shop. So, today I ploughed my way through a bunch of whiskey truffles, and feel... not entirely well. I'm not complaining, it just seemed worthy of this thread. The interesting thing is that if I eat only chocolate, I don't eat very much in total (the calorie count for the past few days has been going down, rather than up, to today's low of about 800).

Oh well, I guess it isn't any sillier than 'starve a fever, feed a cold'. I don't know if you'd consider things like advice to thrash chilblains with a holly branch until they bleed in the same category (or for that matter, recipes for corns/fading freckles/making children stop biting their nails), but I remember seeing that, and thinking that people in those days were way, way less whiny, if they actually thought that trying out that sort of advice was just another something to do on a quiet Tuesday (I know it's more painful than you'd even expect, because, even though I had no idea what chilblains were when I was a kid, I tried it. Scientific curiosity). I've seen veteranary advice in old cookbooks, too. Oh, and a recipe for hot chocolate with ambergris as an emergency restorative for the ravages of sexual excess by older gentlemen

Rubber mat? It sounds like she has some good restaurant supply connections.

Are you looking for a restaurant, a catering service, or suggestions for doing it yourselves at a hired hall?

Article in English, from Singapore News: http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp_singapore/view/1111182/1/.html The cause of death is apparently still unknown/undisclosed, although what I've seen in Spanish (not one of my strong lanaguages) articles seems to be suggesting a heart attack.

That's exactly the sort of thing I mean! I have a couple of friends who are well over six feet tall, and (I'm seeing this more and more, as they move deeper into their 30s/40s) often watched them sort of crouch over the stove or counter, then begin to straighten out, and have to pause to clutch the lower back, which went into spasm as they were chopping or stirring... not the sort of thing you want have happen as you're hoisting something heavy and blisteringly hot. Kitchen-surface heights seem inadequate for both ends of the height spectrum. When we installed out new stove, we decided to get a stovetop, and were able to install it at whatever height we wished (it's quite low, since I'm short, and my boyfriend isn't particularly tall). But that's the only bit of the kitchen that 'fits' me.

I don't know whether they're the best going, but I have a set of stainless steel measuring cups from Williams Sonoma, and really like them. The depth/width ratios are good, and they double as pounders/espresso tampers, etc. I'd link to them, but the WS website forbids me access, which is weird.

Apparently, EL stands for 'Esslöffel'(= 'tablespoon'), and is equal to about 15 ml (about a tablespoon measure, in fact): http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/EL, under the second grouping ('sowie eine Abkürzung für:'), second item down ('Esslöffel, in Kochrezepten als Maßeinheit angegeben, wobei 1 EL ca. 15 ml entspricht. Siehe auch: Essbesteck'). According to Lebensmittel-Lexikon, traditional seasonings for Jagdwurst are mace, cardamom, garlic, and mustard seed (left column, towards the bottom, p. 2072).

For whatever it's worth, I plugged a German recipe for Jagdwurst into babelfish: http://babelfish.yahoo.com/translate_url?doit=done&tt=url&intl=1&fr=bf-home&trurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.praxis-lexikon.de%2Fdiy%2Fdiy-bauplan%2Fj%2Fjagdwurst.php&lp=de_en&btnTrUrl=Translate Vogon poetry, more or less (fifth step: 'Everything into intestines rackings.'). If the link goes a bit odd, this is the original: http://www.praxis-lexikon.de/diy/diy-bauplan/j/jagdwurst.php. If nothing else, it does give an idea of general ingredient parameters. 'Spice blend' is a fairly opaque term, and other sources are more specific (and mention spices such as pepper, mace, and ginger), but things like 'Nitritpökelsalz' and 'Farbstabilisator' don't strike me as likely to have been used in the original iterations.

Hm... so, no one else is standing on phone books in order to ensure a decent range of elbow motion/be able to see past her hands when chopping and slicing? I'm not even that short (158 cm/5'2"), but average kitchen counters are just a bit too high (yet I've nicked my scalp by cracking my head on the corner of the exhaust hood).

I plugged both 'Jagdwurst' and 'Jägerwurst' into a German-restricted image search, and, as pretty much everyone says, these don't seem to be hard-and-fast designations, but the former appears to be a larger and more finely textured product than the latter. I had a run of German boyfriends, and I can recall getting one or the other (both?) for breakfast sometimes, which was seemed a needlessly harsh way to begin the day.

What, if anything, would you change about the geometry and layout of your kitchen, to improve its efficiency and safety? Reading the 'Kitchen injuries' thread left me thinking about home kitchen design. We routinely work with very hot, sharp, heavy, and delicate objects in our kitchens, but most seem designed with an eye to looks/industry tradition, rather than ergonomics and functionality. I'm not talking about kitchens that have been crammed in wherever they would fit, and are consequently poorly located/microscopic, I'm talking about kitchens in decent-sized spaces designated for this specific purpose. My biggest gripes are with surface heights and lighting. Cutting or lifting, or even grating, become more complicated when your elbows are raised halfway to your shoulders, or you're practically bent double over your task, as you compensate for a 'standard' surface that's too high or too low. Kitchens that have only overhead lighting are problematic (and seem fairly common), since they almost inevitably cause your upper body to cast a shadow on the task at hand: annoying at best, at worst, you're squinting about, wondering where the tip of your thumb ended up, as you try to not bleed all over dinner. In our kitchen, I'd love to rip away the blocks and panels that were used to raise the counter surface about half a foot/15 cm, and restore the original 1953 counter height (unfortunately not an option at the moment, since our flat is for sale). How about you?

If a recipe looks like it's difficult, it will probably attract, me, especially if I'm missing at least one important piece of the necessary equipment. Otherwise, I tend to have a clear idea of what I want to cook and just hunt up a recipe that looks like it will deliver.

I get nervous around pointy and hot objects, so I'm fairly careful, but at any given time I'm likely to have at least one minor, cooking-related wound somewhere on my hands/forearms. A lot are related to scale issues: I'm not remarkably small, but significantly smaller than the so-called 'average', so things are bigger and higher up than they ideally should be, which affects my leverage. The open wounds are usually from pushing against something too hard (compensating for decreased leverage), then having my hand lose purchase, and slam into the counter or wall, which usually opens a knuckle. Also, the angle of my arms relative to the tallish edges of the large frying pan we have is just right for me to burn my wrist when I'm flipping something. I try to remember to grab a potholder (I made a point of hanging then on the wall between the oven and stove), but they're encumbering, so I usually chance it. I got an impressive burn over the winter holidays, when I flaked, and grabbed the handle of the cast-iron pan I'd just removed from the oven and set on the stove, forgetting to use a pot-holder. Everything ended up on the floor, which was depressing end to my crepes Suzette. No crying out, but a lot of swearing in several languages.

I feel a bit of a dunce asking this, since the answer probably should be self-evident, but I'm not getting the reason a fryer would have a non-stick coating... wouldn't it be unnecessary?