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JAZ

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Everything posted by JAZ

  1. In addition to what Dave mentioned (the TOH products for sale and a traveling cooking show), there's also the new Taste of Home Cooking Expo. I mentioned this in my original post, but didn't include expand on it. With 45 exhibitors from Campbell Soup and Kraft to Chef's Catalog, I imagine this expo generates major revenue. Also, keep in mind that these magazines are published with a very small staff -- seven full time employees, who also work on other publications. All of their photography is done in house as well, so they have incredibly low overhead.
  2. JAZ

    Crazy Drinks

    I like it. Can we have a contest?
  3. Now that wasn't so hard to figure out, was it? Well, no, it wasn't. What I should have asked is whether it was ONLY the entertainment value, which apparently it isn't, since several of you have bought these products. What happens if you get one of these and are dissatisfied -- are they guaranteed? Is it easy to return them?
  4. JAZ

    Crazy Drinks

    Okay, I can't believe that a) I know this and b) I'm admitting it here, but having dated a bartender is my excuse. A Slippery Nipple is equal parts Sambuca and Bailey's Irish Cream and is disgusting. A Buttery Nipple substitutes Butterscotch Schnappes for the Sambuca and is also disgusting. I believe that most requests for the former actually result in the latter. My impression from watching the sort of person who orders drinks like these is that the perceived "naughtiness" of the name is part of the appeal. Like a "Sloe Screw" or a "Sex on the Beach," they seem to the drinker to lend them a certain panache, when really all they do is point out the amateurs (sorry Dave; I know you had mitigating circumstances; these comments do not apply to you).
  5. Since we're talking poly boards, Sur La Table now sells one with a backing of rubber for about $15 (11x14) -- it does mean you can only use one side, but you don't have bother with the damp towel.
  6. JAZ

    weekend menu

    Although omelets are tough to do for a crowd, frittatas and tortillas (basically Italian and Spanish versions of oven baked omelets) are not too hard. But you do have to choose your additions a little differently than you would for rolled or folded omelets, as they are baked in the eggs rather than added after the eggs are cooked. And as for potatoes, I think they rank up there as one of the most adaptable foods ever. If you baked an oven full of them the first night, you could use the leftovers for: hash browns or home fries, corned beef or smoked chicken hash, potato salad, potato pancakes, twice baked potatoes, gratin or a potato casserole. (Damn, now I want potatoes and I don't have any...)
  7. JAZ

    weekend menu

    Having dealt with the situation of cooking for a part vegetarian crowd, I can offer a couple of suggestions on that point. If you make chili, it's not too much more trouble to make two batches, one with all meat, and another with only beans. This satisfies everyone from the no-beans-in-my-chili-dammit-I'm-from-Texas contingent to the moderates (who can mix the two) to the vegetarians. And enchiladas are another dish that's easy to make with and without meat -- make one pan of cheese only and one pan with chicken or beef. And finally, one last general suggestion: regardless of whether you usually use it, Bisquik is a wonderful thing for vacation kitchens.
  8. This probably isn't in the same league, but there was a time when my then boyfriend and I had just moved and were pretty broke until the next commission checks came in. We had money for food, and the then-boyfriend being a wine broker, we had wine, but what we really didn't have disposable income for was liquor, so the liquor cabinet was pretty bare, and of course we couldn't afford to go out. We had half of a big bottle of really cheap vodka that we'd bought for bloody marys, and that was about it. Problem was, neither of us was a real big vodka fan (even if it was good, which it wasn't). So we crushed a bunch of juniper berries and added them to the vodka, which at least gave us a cheap tasting facsimile of gin. I still can't believe we drank it, but we did.
  9. Okay, this is going to sound strange, and I really don't mean to make any moral pronouncements by it, but this thread is completely incomprehensible to me because I don't have a television. Haven't for quite a while, actually. (and just to forestall questions, it's not any big "value" statement; it's just that I've lived with TVs and without them, and when there's a TV there, I spend time watching it that I'd rather spend doing other things.) But, can I ask why you all watch this stuff? I mean, I can see it being like Saturday Night Live "commercials" (even though I guess this sort of thing is serious) -- is it the entertainment value?
  10. Here's what I'd do (sshhh, don't tell Fat Guy): Cut and chop on it to your heart's content. Knife marks are not a big deal. But if you need to mince several cups of parsley for tabbouli (sp?), or dice dozens of carrots, or peel beets for an army, throw one of those little flexible plastic cutting sheets over it. Otherwise you'll spend an hour with a scrub brush and some bleach water to get the stains out. You don't know me, I realize, but you can trust me on this one. I teach classes in a kitchen with a huge built in wooden chopping board, and before I taught there I assisted (read: washed dishes and cleaned up). This surface has been cut on for five years, and with a little oil, it looks pretty good. But cleaning up parsley or carrot stains is a BIG pain. Yes, you can get them out, but it sucks. (Oh, and try not to spill red wine on it either.) If you use the little flexible sheets, you can just toss them in the dishwasher after they becaome imbued with beet blood, and while not in use they're easy to store.
  11. John, I don't think that the "literary food writing corner" is such a bad place to be. It's one of my favorite corners to hang out on.
  12. Also keep in mind that some foods will tend to stain the maple -- parsley, blood oranges, beets, carrots. A little diluted bleach will usually take care of it, but it might be a consideration.
  13. JAZ

    Roasting a Chicken

    It works, even for a larger chicken. The drawback is that it can create a lot of smoke and a big mess in your oven. But you can minimize both by putting a layer or two of sliced potatoes in the bottom of your roasting pan. They absorb the fat so it doesn't burn and smoke, and they keep the splattering down as well. And then you can eat the potatoes too, if you like that sort of thing. With butter under the skin, you probably don't need the brining for moisture, but it does season the meat all the way through, which I think is an advantage. If you do brine, don't salt the bird before roasting, but you probably figured that out.
  14. It strikes me that we're all speaking of "food writing" as if it's a homogeneous category, when there are really many different species of food writing, all with different qualities. How can one compare On Food and Cooking with How to Cook a Wolf with Kitchen Confidential? It's like trying to talk about "non-fiction" as a cohesive genre -- what do you mean by that term? newspaper columns? personal memoir? "how-to" books? magazine articles? history books? It seems to me that "food writing" is almost as vague a category as "non-fiction," and trying to explain what makes "food writing" good, or trying to delineate necessary and sufficient conditions for successful food writing, is an exercise in futility. What makes a restaurant review good is different from what makes an essay good, which is different from what makes a cookbook well written. And that's not even scratching the surface of possibilities -- what about food science? or histories, or biographies? I find the Best Food Writing compilations amusing for that reason. Not that the writing in them isn't good; it's very good (and I'm not just saying that because Steven and John's writings appear there). But it's all very much the same type of writing - essays and articles. You'd never find a chapter from Vegetables from Amaranth to Zucchini in it, nor an excerpt from something like On Food and Cooking. Both are very well written, but they don't fit the profile of the book series, which really should be titled "Best Food Articles, Essays and Memoirs." And if those of us in the business (or those with a decided interest in it) succumb to conflating the various types of writing that comprise "food writing," the average person out there is even more confused. (I don't know about Steven and John, but here's my least favorite conversational exchange in the world: "So, Janet, what do you do?" "I write about food." "Oh, you review restaurants?" "Um, no. Actually I'm working on a book." "Oh, a cookbook?" End of dialog) If we recognize that food writing is not one cohesive category, then I think it's obvious that everyone here has expressed valid points about what constitutes "good food writing." But Steven's criteria are valid for one sub-category (restaurant and travel reviews), and John T's apply to another (essays and memoirs). And food science would require yet a third set of criteria. Expertise is crucial in some cases, extraneous in others. Personal experience is distracting in some cases, delightful in others. I'd bet that if we chose a topic at random and each of us here wrote about it, we'd all write something good, but there'd be nothing in common among our results except the general subject. And that's what's so wonderful about "food writing"; there's room for just about anything as long as it's well done.
  15. does it also serve the purpose of tenderizing tougher cuts of meat? I thought it was papaya that contained the tenderizing enzyme. Does mango also tenderize?
  16. JAZ

    braising question

    The nice thing about braising with a cover is that you don't have to pay as much attention to the dish as it's cooking. I prefer to braise without a cover, or to start with a cover and remove it part of the way, through, because the liquids evaporate and become more concentrated. If you do it right, you don't need to reduce at all at the end, because the liquid reduces slowly throughout the cooking process.
  17. That was always one of the major criticisms of Michael Bauer (at the Chronicle in San Francisco) -- that for years he was both editor of the food section and the primary reviewer. He isn't any longer, but the damage has been done. No one takes the Chron's food section seriously anymore, despite the fact that there are some decent writers on staff.
  18. JAZ

    braising question

    Aside from the texture question, it also depends on where you want the flavor to end up. If you cook the vegetables in the braising liquid for a long time, most of their flavor will end up in the liquid; if you cook them for only a short while, they will retain much more of their flavor. I've sometimes done both, adding half the vegetables at the beginning, discarding those and adding a new batch toward the end (or roasting them separately and adding them at the very end).
  19. Hmmm. I don't have a TV, which is probably why I've never heard it. I do work in a cookware store, and have sat through numerous product demos given by reps from the various cookware manufacturers, and not one of them ever mentioned that. None of the books I have that talk about non-stick cookware mention it either. One of them (The New Cook's Catalogue) specifically mentions cooking with "little or no" oil in them. It's not that I never use oil in my non-stick skillets, but I certainly don't use it all the time. In fact, I ruined one non-stick skillet I had by trying to shallow fry some tortilla chips in it -- the oil bonded to the inside of the skillet and formed a sticky crud that I couldn't remove (that was quite a while ago, and is part of the reason that I'm much more careful with my non-sticks and oil now). Looks like it's time for more research.
  20. JAZ

    Brining

    The osmosis caused by a salt rub is opposite that in brining. Rubbing salt on the outside of a piece of meat or fish does draw out the moisture, unlike brining. So brining doesn't take the place of curing.
  21. JAZ

    Brining

    Yeah, this was very counterintuitive for me too, until I read Shirley Corriher's explanation. The mistake you're making (and the one I made too) is in thinking that the concentration of salt is higher in the brine than in the meat. But that's not the case. The "free liquid" in meat (i.e., the water that's not bound by the proteins and held inside the cells) is actually very concentrated with dissolved substances, including salts. So the brine flows into the meat. However, the salt does also work in another way: it actually "denatures" some of the protein in meats, which increases the ability of the proteins to absorb water and also makes it slightly more tender. I'm sorry I'm not more specific here, but I lost my copy of Fine Cooking magazine where she describes that aspect. Her book only talks about the osmosis.
  22. It's simply not true that you shouldn't heat up a nonstick pan without oil. I do it all the time. (That's what they're designed for.) Where did you hear this? The potential for trouble with non-stick coatings is actually much greater if you use oil than if you don't. Now, you may have problems if you heat up a non-stick pan on too high a heat, regardless of whether you use oil or not. Keep your flame to medium, and you should be fine. I don't care for the double sided non-stick grill/griddles myself, because to me it defeats the purpose of having a grill if you can't heat it up nice and hot (which you can't with non-stick). Non-stick griddles, though, are wonderful things for pancakes and grilled cheese sandwiches. If you have a choice, go for two pieces: a cast iron grill pan, and a non-stick griddle.
  23. JAZ

    Carryover

    What do you mean by that? lay a fish filet on the cutting board and salt it. come back 10 minutes later and it will have sweated. obviously, dunking pork in a brine overnight will have a different end result but the salt will still have an effect on how the meat cooks. i'm not saying so with a negative connotation either. But surface salt and brine solutions produce two different results. Brining increases the moisture content of meat.
  24. Can you discuss the differences in quality please. Is it the thinness of the crystal? Or just design? Thanks... Sommelier glasses are lead crystal and are hand blown. Vinum are lead crystal, machine made. Overture are glass, machine made.
  25. The magazine Taste of Home was mentioned in one of the recent magazine threads here, and since the IACP quarterly newsletter had a short article on the magazine, I thought I'd share some of the information it provided. Taste of Home, as previously noted, rarely shows up on lists of circulation because it carries no ads. But, according to this article, it has the amazing circulation of 4.6 million (more than Bon, F&W and Gourmet combined). It actually ranks 8th in circulation for all consumer magazines, right below Family Circle and Good Housekeeping. The demographics are interesting: the average age of subscribers is 60; only 30.5 percent work full time (13 percent of subscribers are male, which apparently is pretty high for a cooking magazine). North Dakota leads the pack in number of subscribers, followed by Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska, South Dakota, Iowa and Wisconsin, where the magazine is based. Recipes for the magazine are provided by an unpaid staff of "field editors" -- 1,000 home cooks from all 50 states and Canada (none from New York City). The in-house (paid) staff numbers seven, who also work on other publications. Taste of Home began publishing in 1993 as a spin-off of Country Magazine. It has subsequently spun off two other pubs -- Quick Cooking and Light & Tasty, (which have circulations of 3.2 million and 1.2 million, respectively). The company also sells Taste of Home products, sponsors a traveling cooking school, and this year held its first Cooking Expo (6,500 people pre-registered for the event). The parent company, Reiman Publications (with 12 publications total), was recently acquired by Reader's Digest Association for $760 million.
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