rat

i'll admit i'm wayyyyyyyyy too lazy to read all those posts, however if i'm cooking at home for friends i have no problem using a good quality canned bean and giving 'em a rinse in cold water. but having said that.....if i'm going to a restaurant and paying good money, i want the chef to be cooking those beans from scratch. that's called integrity! as for the differences between the two, chalk it up (generally speaking) as neglegible.

rats can't read, silly...

i agree with that. i'd liken it to a petrolly sorta chemical smell. fake, not natural. strictly on a comparison issue, a fresh sliced white truffle and white truffle oil have nothing in common for me. if you're talking about the subjective quality of liking or disliking white truffle oil, that's different.

it seems to me that aging meat in a small refriegerator woudn't work, although i've never tried it. most home refrigerators don't have fans to circulate the air which actually dries the meat. secondly refrigerators are always humid. meat won't air dry in a humid environment, it rots. standard commercial aging is 14 - 21 days.

what i suspected is now confirmed to be true...... jason perlow is just a nom de plume for peter jackson! i knew it!! cool. hey i heard u were gonna be directing star wars III

where the heck do you live? three mile island!! put the radishes back in the ground, gather up the wife, kids and dog, and walk away.......never look back.

and an amateur i shall remain then cause i don't go near the stuff. i don't recall where i got that info, but perhaps could have been something ed behr wrote a while back in "art of eating" suzanne, flattery will get you nowhere.....well, errrrrrrrrr......hehe. nevermind

me no likey truffle oil. not coincidentally, truffles and truffle oil have nothing to do with eachother.

anyone check out craftsteak? what's the reaction?

money in vegas is the last thing a celebrity chef needs. what he needs is full confidence in his staff, the ablility to duplicate himself and a set of steel balls!

black and blue is different. rare should be warm to the touch, not cold.

if your going to cook meat to the temperature of rare, it's always a good idea to let it sit out on the counter for a bit. just until the chill has come off it. - your meat will be rare without being cold in the middle - it will cook more evenly. - going from extreme cold to extreme heat can make a piece of meat tough

this thread reminded me... in late october i was walking across central park (manhattan) and right in the middle of the great lawn i saw mousseroun growing. i stopped and looked around slowly and they were everywhere! that was very cool. i guess since they stopped letting dogs go on the lawn the mushrooms now stand a fighting chance. i've heard something about a guided mushroom tour in the park. anyone got any info on that? i can just imagine a bunch of egulleters on that trip, driving the tour guide nuts!!

jaymes, another option is just to put the whole live lobster in the boiling water. the reason for separating the tail and claw is that they both cook at different rates. tail meat is easy to extract when it's half raw, but the claws are much easier to remove from the shell intact when they are cooked through. thirdly, when making a lobster stock from the shells and bodies, you want the bodies raw. you won't have 'em like that if you cook the lobster whole. get in there, put on your favorite slayer album and rip up some lobsters!

it is my understanding that by definition a chowder must contain potato, pork product (usually smoked bacon) and a shellfish of some sort (usually calms). in other words a chowder with one of these three things missing isn't a chowder (technically). that's not to say it wouldn't be good however i was thinking that cream had to be in there, but that would rule out manhattan clam chowder...