melkor

The folks over at Gawker seem to agree with the medical professionals on this thread. I really can't fathom how anyone would make the case that diabetes is a myth or that ignoring the health risks associated with obesity is wise. There are several studies that disprove the idea that overweight people require more health care - the general consensus seems to be that if you're morbidly obese you'll require more health care each year of your life but your life will be so much shorter that in the end the total costs are similar to that of someone who is a healthy weight. My family has a history of heart disease; my father had two heart attacks at age 57; his father died young of a heart attack - there's no doubt in my mind that if I don't take care of myself the same thing will happen to me. It seems to me to be completely irresponsible to advocate eating yourself to death. If you want to pretend to be a duck raised for foie gras, feel free to grab a funnel and shovel everything you can find into it - that's a personal choice. It isn't a good one, but everyone can make their own decisions.

Wouldn't Perlow be an example of an undiagnosed case of diabetes? Dude thinks he's healthy, starts feeling crummy, talks to a doctor who says "Surprise, your 400 pound self has diabetes!". How many people like that are walking around under the impression that everything is fine?

Obviously people are born with a tendency towards one body shape or another - all of us know someone who eats everything in sight and stays skinny. That doesn't give the rest of us an excuse to ignore a huge health problem. I fail to see how being born predisposed to being heavy is an excuse not to take care of yourself. The problem is that there aren't any easy answers. Pork belly and fried chicken isn't the key to longevity, though my grandmother, being one of those people who eats everything and stays skinny is under the impression that ice cream has kept her healthy all these years. It's a problem with a different solution for each of us. The only sustainable solution for me has been to get a lot of exercise and eat more intelligently. More veg and fish, sane portion sizes, etc. I eat whatever I want, but I pay attention to portion size and I spend 6-10 hours a week at the gym. For me, that yields a pound of weight loss every two weeks or so, but more importantly I don't need to give up eating the food I love. At this rate it'll take me about a year before I'm at my target weight.

The NY Times has an article about healthy eating for the food obsessed. It's interesting to see the arguments the people quoted in the article make - most of the food writers and critics suggest that there is a less than direct relationship between what you eat and your health. Is that something people who don't write about food for a living believe to be true? I wonder if the skinny food writers also believe this is the case. My experience when I've had back-to-back meals at Michelin starred restaurants that I feel less healthy than I do after a trip to the gym and a salad. The scale the next day confirms this hypothesis. Maybe that's the genetic lottery at work, but it seems pretty direct to me.

Wow, That sounds like a lot! Pix? I love the concept of the greenhouse. ← ImageGullet is too horrible to use, so no pics. The greenhouse is from Harbor Freight - they have them on sale from time to time, it's a good cheap solution as long as you don't live somewhere with a lot of wind.

I've got a 25' x 30' back yard in a city. We grow a lot of stuff in very little space. There are two large fruit trees (apple and plum), a couple of small trees (fig, orange, pomegranate), a small greenhouse, several small raised garden beds, some blackberry vines, and an herb garden. I'm building a chicken coop and getting a couple of chickens to turn my table scraps into eggs. It's not a lot of work once you get everything in place and you can grow things you otherwise can't easily find. I harvested some fresh green peppercorn spikes from the peppercorn vine in the greenhouse and made steak au poivre vert on Saturday. It's really nice to be able to grow things you otherwise can't buy. There's a small kaffir lime tree in the greenhouse, some pitaya (dragonfruit) cacti, passion fruit, papaya, a couple of mangosteen trees that will take forever to get big enough to produce fruit, a vanilla orchid, and some other random stuff.

At the Chicago Botanic Gardens last year they were doing a solar cooking demo, their oven was a simple box lined with foil with a clear lid. Left in the sun it was able to bake cookies in 20-30 minutes. I've considered building a solar oven at home a few times, but then I remember I live in San Francisco.

AB and Harold are both correct that washing mushrooms is perfectly fine. What you are seeing in your experiment isn't valid for anyone working with good quality ingredients. Foragers, restaurants, and countless home cooks wash mushrooms. Fresh mushrooms don't absorb significant amounts of water. Dried mushrooms need to be soaked before use, the semi-dried mushrooms grocery stores stock may absorb water to replace whatever water they have lost in storage.

Even that is an interesting result: it would basically mean that the additional water added by washing the mushrooms is in fact bringing them back to their "correct" weight, in some sense. Therefore, if a recipe calls for 100g of mushrooms, that would be 100g after washing, not before. ← Isn't that another topic entirely? That would be more applicable in a thread about reviving poor quality ingredients. I don't see how different people measuring the weight gain of different age/quality mushrooms will lead to any sort of statistically valid conclusion...

What will be obvious is the freshness of the mushrooms each person uses for this experiment. Mushrooms that have sat in cold storage for a month will double in weight when washed, fresh ones will gain an insignificant amount of weight.

Remove the legs and use the meat for a thai curry, two legs from a 3 pound bird will give you enough meat for two or three servings. Confit the wings and use the meat in a risotto - save the jelly from the confit for your stock. Take the bits of fat from under the skin around the breasts and render it, use the fat to pan roast the thighs, deglaze the pan and make a simple jus using some thyme and lemon zest to serve with the thighs. If you like the white meat, use it for something or other (stuff the breasts with something and bread them, use the meat for an chicken karahi, roast them and use them cold in salad or a sandwich), otherwise throw it in a stock pot along with the rest of the carcass and make stock with it.

I'd agree that 10-30 minutes is irrelevant. But 60 seconds may not be long enough - it all depends how many mushrooms you're cleaning. I'd guess when I'm cleaning several pounds of small mushrooms like yellow foot or black trumpets that I end up leaving some in the water for two or three minutes.

Every winter we forage and cook somewhere around 100 pounds of wild mushrooms. I'm lazy, my wife isn't. For everything but porcini, I use the sink or a bowl of cold water to clean mushrooms - I often just rub off or cut away anything that has too much dirt caked in it to be easy to clean. She uses a toothpick and a moist paper towel to carefully clean each mushroom. Mushrooms tossed in a hot dry pan will give off a fair amount of liquid, the quantity depends mostly on the type of mushroom. Mushrooms that have been washed rather than wiped clean give off a little bit more liquid, but not substantially more.

The "fresh" shiitake mushrooms you get at a grocery store are at best half dried by the time you purchase them. Candy caps absorb a fair bit of water when they're soaked but that's because they're often quite dry by the time they are harvested. Hedge hogs, yellowfoot, morels, oysters, porcini, chanterelles, and black trumpets don't absorb any noticeable amount of moisture unless they start out partly dried.

It isn't correct to say that all edible mushrooms are safe to eat raw. Many wild mushrooms need to be cooked before they can be safely eaten. Chanterelles and morels are the most common that will leave you with an unhappy stomach if you eat them raw. Porcini and the various insipid grocery store agaricus mushrooms (white buttons, crimini, portobello) are safe to eat raw.

Who knew that the last 108 years of culinary history could be divided 20% Escoffier, 35% Nouvelle Cuisine, and 45% Brothers Adria... Fascinating.

Ha! Now I know what offals are. I was very tempted to say, give it all to me figuring I could share with my dogs and dispose of the bones and such in a much more respectful manner than I assume the processor will provide. ← Using the whole animal shouldn't be difficult. Grind the fat along with any scraps of meat and bits you otherwise don't know how to use and make merguez, if you put the fat in a less flavorful sausage you're more likely to notice how strongly flavored goat fat is... The necks are great braised. Tongues are good in salad, or toss them in the sausage (or pasta sauce). Are you getting the tripe, stomach, lungs, and spleens?

Nicely done Rob! It's important to know where your food comes from. Goat offal is delicious, glad to see you aren't letting it go to waste. You can make an incredibly flavorful pasta sauce with the ground livers and kidneys along with a bit of tomato, onion, and some fresh herbs. The hearts you can cook like any other muscle, just be careful not to overcook them since they're very lean.

Pull each wing away from the bird and trace around the base of the wing with the tip of your knife, you should be able to see the joint and remove the wing. With the bird on a cutting board with the legs facing up, one leg at a time take the thigh and push it down towards the board, slice the skin between the thigh and the carcass and then cut along the base of the thigh staying close to the carcass to remove the leg and thigh. You can remove half the backbone by cutting along the base of the breastbone towards the backbone on both sides of the breast then flipping the bird and folding the backbone over on itself. If you want to separate the two breasts from each other, you'll need to remove the backbone entirely (use kitchen sheers) and then split the breastbone.

OK, now I understand where you are coming from. I was not aware of this mandatory "Living Wage," I was just saying living wage as in a wage someone could live on without assistance. Here, at least, it's below $14/hour. Maybe it's higher elsewhere. I agree, it doesn't seem fair for a dishwasher to be paid the same as a degreed cook. I do think the bottom level should be raised, though. Yeah, it might raise prices but again, we are paying one way or another. The way it is now many of the costs are hidden. ← The living wage requirement in Memphis is $10 with health insurance, $12 without. I'm thinkin' even in Memphis, ten bucks an hour isn't buying a lot of champagne and caviar...

I'm not suggesting that servers should make less money. The reason for the service charges in SF has been to improve wages and benefits for the back of the house, something I suspect you support.

You're saying this ~70 seat restaurant with a $70/head check average can only afford 120k/yr in payroll?

No question there are more living wage ordinances that require people working on government contracts to be paid a living wage, but several cities require it for all workers. I find it inconceivable that anyone would think it acceptable to pay people so little for their time that they cant afford basic shelter, food, and to get help when they're sick. Rather than being proud of the dishwasher that lives in a group home because he can't afford his own place, I'd be ashamed of the business owner that doesn't feel their employees deserve better. Obviously as an employee is able to take on more responsibility, their compensation increases, nobody is arguing against that. These service charges are to cover the people at the bottom of the pay scale, the ones that need help the most. The situation you outlined earlier where retirees and teenagers do the jobs you don't feel are worth paying a living wage isn't viable. For people to do the best work they are capable of, they need to be healthy and interested in what they are doing. Having your workers self-medicated because they have no health insurance doesn't make them more reliable. Having them work three jobs to pay the rent certainly won't improve the quality of the work they do at any of their jobs. As an employer, aren't you taking advantage of someone if you hire them to do a job but don't pay them enough to live?

Yountville CA.

Several cities and counties around the country require employers to pay a living wage regardless of the job they are doing. How does your statement that by doing so 'we are creating a useless class of people' not suggest that you believe those cities and counties now contain a 'useless class of people' who are 'stuck in an over priced entry level position'?