lowonthehog

Following Seattle Food Geek's line, wine boxes are not incredible, but ingenious and very important, because they dispense wine without increasing air exposure. I cook with more wine (and get more layers of flavor) with no worries about how I'll use the rest of the bottle. Now we just need box wine purveyors to stop positioning themselves only at the low end of the market and start to deliver better wines in boxes.

It depends on what you're using the mirepoix for, including what size you want, how long you're going to cook the dish, and how much juice can come out in the prep. I'm assuming from the question that reasonable, but not fanatical uniformity is the goal. If you're making a soup or stew without caramelizing the mirepoix or if you're going to simmer the dish for a longer time, you have more flexibility in how the flavors can come to the party. At the other end of the spectrum, if I'm doing something like a stir fry, I'm much more careful in how I chop. Nathan (volume 2) has convinced me that smaller pieces release more flavor, so I'm cutting things much smaller these days. Most often I'm looking to practice knife skills, but otherwise I pulse each veggie separately, as a couple of folks have mentioned. The Cuisinart does more violence to onions (and shallots) in realeasing juice, which you typically don't want to happen early, so I generally do those by hand. In contrast, I've had good success with pulsing the Cuisinart to get a fine mince of garlic.

As highlighted in the OpEd piece, this is regretably more about marketing than about wine packaging technology and ecological goodness. The move by some winemakers to artificial corks is driven in part by cork becoming a scarce resource. Why do we think that vintners are going to be less short-term profit motivated in their packaging choices? And while restaurants might buy boxes for wine in the kitchen, how soon do you think it will be before you can order a box of wine from the menu?

The cookbook to recommend depends on your goal, so my main advice is to start from either someone's approach to food you like or a set of things you want to learn and then find a cookbook that you're willing to spend time with. After you' ve narrowed down the field, go to a physical bookstore and leaf through the cookbooks you're considering. The right one for you will speak to you. You'll like the way the author tells you about cooking. I cooked out of Mastering the Art of French Cooking for years because I wanted to learn French cooking. I loved the way she talked about what she was trying to do, which made me want to make time to cook from her book sooner. You're going to try things that don't turn out the way you expected, so it's a relationship: why are you going to cook another recipe from this cookbook raher than start on a different cookbook. Coobooks are quite cheap compared to the cost of all of your time that you're going to invest. I have several Keller cookbooks and the Complete Robuchon, and they are great choices. That said however, start from what you want to cook.

Appreciated your comments, but could you say more about the Sous Vide Mini being more flexible, please? Is that added functionality? Thanks.

I expected a book largely about recovering from cancer and was very pleasantly surprised to read a book about a chef living his passion, with cancer just one piece of a very compelling journey. Perhaps because I'm a recent culinary school graduate, Life, on the Line was a book I had a hard time putting down.

My absolute must-try is pain a l'ancienne. Fermenting overnight makes for the kind of complexity in the bread I thought that you needed a starter for. It takes about 20 minutes the night before and three more hours in the morning, but it's worth it. I'm a disciple of Reinhart's "slower fermentation is better" and am making less and less un-fermented bread.