melkor

It's usually vinegar, chopped chilies, and some fish sauce.

It's impossible to beat free. I'm a ham fisted right hander, the most important thing is how the knife feels in your hand. You can put an incredibly sharp edge on a $7 Chicago cutlery knife from target, but it'll need to be sharpened before every use. The real difference between knives is feel and edge durability. As long as you know how to care for your knives and they fit your hand, you're all set.

I'm with ya, the KO knives are the knife equivalent of monster cables - sure they work, but no better than a lot of other things that cost half as much.

Sure, the teflon worm works better than any other I've used - it also has a small grove along the side of it which seems to help it slide through the cork more easily.

This article in todays Chronicle: This is the sort of food writing I can support, macho or not. I've had my fill of the Michael Bauer 'fantastic beet and goat cheese salad' bullshit already. Food writing needs to move beyond the sycophantic nonsense that serves no purpose...

The teflon does eventually wear out but how quickly depends what you are opening with it. If you avoid the dumpy plastic/synthetic corks it should last quite a bit longer. Mine is still mostly intact after opening several hundred bottles.

Obviously that depends on the snake.

Excellent.

So, was whatever you ended up with better than foster farms?

Food handling in this country is a fucking disaster. You can buy socks at walmart and they say who inspected them but if you want to know where the meat at the grocery store came from - good luck. It's nearly impossible to find country of origin info for grocery store produce, nevermind who the producer is. This all comes back to the theory that if you want food not to cost anything, you're going to end up with disgusting ingredients. Salmonella tomatoes, hepatitis onions, and e.coli spinach...

Cool. Let us know what you think of them if you try them.

We've been home roasting for years, as have lots of other eGullet members. There are a bunch of topics about it in the coffee forum.

A handful of places in Sacramento apparently carry Mary's chickens. They're a huge step up from the grocery store junk.

That's a pretty broad brush. I don't have any problem finding minimally processed chicken at my supermarket. And though I'm not sure what the percentages are, it seems to me that after a few years of tumbling and soaking, the major processors are either backing away (at least for their fresh product), or are offering new lines of untampered-with poultry. Besides, I don't think there's anything wrong with brining in principle; I usually brine supermarket breasts. The problems with factory brining are that 1) someone else determines the salt (and whatever else) concentration; 2) you pay chicken prices for salt water. And of course, there's the texture issue that Jensen also pointed out, which usually goes hand in hand with either too much salt or too much time in the brine. ← Hey, buy whatever works for you. I want nothing to do with factory farmed poultry, brined or not.

Grocery store poultry is nasty - nearly all of it says something like 'may contain up to x% salt water by weight'. Frozen is worse.

Call suruki in San Mateo, they've got fresh yuzu in season and can get you nearly anything if you call in advance. I buy all my fish there. I much prefer it to Nijiya and Mitsuwa.

So you think that a small farmer is going to be putting their kids through college and paying their mortgage selling organic milk for less than $4.50 a gallon? I hate to break it to you, but everywhere I've shopped the cost of responsibly produced ingredients is higher than the factory farmed alternatives.

Am I misreading your report or are you saying that any reasonable shopper who makes an effort to buy tomatoes at the greenmarket has a very good chance of bringing good quality heirloom tomatoes home with them?

That doesn't sound to me like the good tomatoes have gone into hiding as Steven has suggested. Perhaps the title of this thread should be "NEWSFLASH: lazy shopper buys flavorless tomato, titanic hits iceberg!".

If you're referring to liquid smoke, it's usually used as a shortcut to make meat cooked in an oven taste like it was cooked over a heap of burning car tires. If you're talking about something called smoke liquid, I've got no idea what that is.

Lightweight copper is useless, you're better off buying something that she can actually use to cook something.

Just out of curiously, when was this meal?

Haven't we been done with the carb restricted thing for a few years now?

That's an interesting thought. Have you had that dish?

Exactly, not only does my favorite restaurant in Detroit serve a cheese plate, but they make their own cheese. ← OK. I'm obviously wrong. These restaurants actually do have cheese plates but keep them from me. Must be a plot. ← No, we learned in another thread that his favorite restaurant in Detroit is a truck stop. They apparently make their own cheese to go with their onion rings and fish sticks.