Jeffery C

Keeping it it cool, <90F, will deter any hatching eggs, but flour kept for more than 2-3 mos should be stored airtight in a refrigerator to keep any vermin from hatching.

Make ganache. Chunk it and make chocolate chip cookies or double/triple chocolate brownies. Melt it and use it as fondue. Grate some over the top of pancakes with whipped cream and amarena cherries. make some strawberry marshmallows and some graham crackers and make the best s'mores ever! Savor it!

Hopefully it tastes much better than the diarrhea curative. Maybe adding brown butter to a dose will help the medicine go down!

besides a heart, the cook's next best set of tools are a pair of hands and some fingers. I too have always enjoyed her warmth and soul she brings to her cuisine and the screen. One of my favorite episodes has her preparing a picnic for her and her husband whom you can tell she adores and is an inspiration for her love of cooking. I have always believed to be a great cook, you must have someone great to cook for, and what better person to be great than someone you love. Thanks Ina!

I think it comes down to demand in this country's markets. If the general public is happy with what they have been cooking with and buying for the better part of half a century, I dont think that any of the major appliance makers are going to change their production line to teach us how to cook better. Unlike sports cars & luxury automobiles, the majority of the buying public is not looking for the latest technology or trending form of culinary preparation. At least not yet. One of the biggest jumps home cooks have made in the last 40 years has been the microwave oven. It was marketed as a convenience product by providing meals with quicker cooking times. However as we found out they were inefficient cookers but did provide a quick way to reheat a meal that was prepared "conventionally" and pop corn. It did not deliver, at least by itself. Now we have new "turbo" ovens and convection/microwave technologies that are finally delivering what the 70's microwave ovens promised. These new ovens provide us with crunchy crusted baked bread, beautifully browned roasts, and crispy chewie cookies in less time and with less heat wasted radiating into the kitchen and home. We are also experiencing a renaissance of sorts with the circulated bath type of cooking and the expanded use of CVAP technology originally invented for the Colonel to help keep his fried chicken hot. These methods of cooking provide fantastic results and are very effective at getting heat into the food. I think as costs of energy continue to rise and the need for a more efficient way of getting heat into food increases, we will see a boom in kitchen changes, a veritable metamorphosis! Gone will be the double ovens found in some homes replaced with a convection/micro on bottom, and a CVAP on top. The double sink will have one compartment that will also serve as an immersion circulation tank. People will have chamber vacuums built into their counter tops with the lid acting as a counter so as not to waste space. I know I might be dreaming my fantasy kitchen, but I think it is not to far fetched

Sounds like everyone is having fun! I'm not doing myself any favors reading this thread, though, as I am trying to patiently wait for my volumes to arrive

maybe Tyson needs to genetically engineer a chicken with twice the skin? I think as GMOs go that would be ok with me *sarcasm*

I take a recipe developed by Cook's Illustrated to the extreme. they take a traditional pie crust and use graham crumbs instead of flour when rolling out the dough. To make it more graham crackery, I cut portion of dough needed for one pie by almost half and roll as many crumbs as needed to get it to the proper size for the pie plate. It is definitely more fragile and needs a little chilling before transferring to the pie plate, but the results are great!

I personally have not played with any yet, but I look forward to testing some recipes! thanks for the tip.

Upon removing from the heat source do you shock the pot by setting it in a pan of water to remove some of the excess heat? this helps to keep the pan from to continuing to cook the sugar.

corn syrup is used in recipes that require an invert sugar because it is WIDELY available. most of the time it is added as a safe guard as invert sugar is very stable and does not crystalize easily. the addition of this type of sugar to a crystalized form helps to keep the crystalized sugar from restructuring once it has been liquified. most edible inverted sugars will do and usually can be omitted, depending on the recipe.

Maybe we should all put a little more thought into what it is we are eating. We might have lower levels of morbid obesity in this country. However, when it comes to the stuff that a chicken's feathers used to be anchored in, first plunge it in a bath of some briny buttermilk concoction for an extended period, then dust it with flour, and finally send it to a vat of oil heated to a blistering 150 C & keep it there until it is nicely browned and scrumptiously crisp. I love the stuff that Alex & Aki do at Ideas in Food. Here are their thoughts on the subject.

I am not around vending machines very often, but the last time I was I indulged in a Snickers.

from experience i typically cook the wellington from a chilled state to get maximum puffiness from the pastry. the beef is typically rare at that point so I merely temp it up if necessary.

The biggest issue with vacuum packing is the lack of oxygen in the package, an environment the bacterium Clostridium botulinum loves.