JAZ

I've never found soaking to make any difference at all. Am I missing something?

You can brown onions and get a fond on an enameled surface, but it does take much longer than in a clad pan. We've done side by side tests in our cooking classes and the Le Creuset group always finishes much later than the others.

For those prices, one would think they could get a better copy writer.

I brown the meat and remove, then cook the onions (and any other vegetables). If the fond is very dark by the time the meat is done, I go ahead and deglaze, then pour off any remaining liquid, then add more oil and cook the vegetables.

I'm not sure that I understand why your undercooked egg whites are due to the egg rings. I don't usually use egg rings, unless, if for presentation, I want a uniform, round egg. But I've never found that they have any effect on the egg whites. I also like runny yolks and completely cooked whites, but I do what several other posters suggested -- cover the egg for a minute or so to set the white. You can also baste the egg with warm butter to set the tops.

A while ago, I had a great soup at a restaurant here -- "short rib and caramelized onion soup." It tasted like a cross between French onion soup and braised short ribs. I decided to give it a try a few days ago; although I couldn't find a recipe online I figured I could come up with something close. I started by browning the short ribs (bone in) and a small onion, then deglazing with sherry. I added beef broth, some thyme and black pepper and cooked in my pressure cooker for about 75 minutes. Meanwhile I caramelized a couple of very large onions. When the beef was done, I took the ribs out and strained and defatted the sauce. I shredded the meat and added it with the caramelized onions back to the sauce. Mine was less like a soup and more like a stew than the restaurant version, but I was very pleased with the result. I'll do this again.

I heard a program on NPR today about a kitchen scrap pick-up service in Boston -- Have kitchen scraps, will travel. The proprietor travels around Boston on bike, collects scraps from people all over the city and takes the scraps to a local farm for composting. His customers can either trade in their scraps for compost after 15 weeks, or if they have no need for it, they can opt to donate theirs to a local community garden. It sounds interesting -- anyone in Boston heard of it?

I went to a cooking class a couple of days ago that was taught by Sandra Guiterrez, author of a book called The New Southern-Latino Table. One of the recipes she made was this carrot escabeche. I'm not usually a big fan of carrots, but this was really great. Pretty easy too. It's definitely going into rotation.

In my experience, students love it when you set something on fire, intentionally or not -- in fact, it's probably more exciting for them if it wasn't intended.

I haven't tried it, but this article from Food & Wine suggests that salting lamb shanks a day before braising results in a much better dish. Next time I find some lamb shanks, I'm going to give it a try.

When we teach, we call those unexpected occurrences "teachable moments" -- when the "low" setting on the induction range is so low that our students' rice is still almost raw after 15 minutes, or when the burner under the chicken stock goes off without our noticing it, so that the 10 minutes for chicken soup turns into 20. It's one of the most important things to learn to deal with, I think.

Two things come to mind: First, it seems to me that the technological advances that make it into most home kitchens do so because they either improve consistency and reliability (ovens and stove tops or scales) or they make the cooking process faster and more efficient (stand mixers, food processors); sometimes they probably do a little of each. While it might be true that some cooks can achieve great results without these advances, for the average cook, they improve the final dishes and make them easier to reproduce reliably. Second, any kitchen appliance or tool can only be as good as the person using it. Can bad food come out of a sous vide set-up? Of course, just as bad food can come out of a regular oven or a food processor. Anyone who tells you a piece of equipment can, by itself, magically transform a bad or mediocre cook into a good one is trying to sell you something.

If you're interested in a cookbook for one that's a little more modern, you might check out Serve Yourself by Joe Yonan (it's got the "look inside" feature on Amazon so you don't have to buy it sight unseen). Joe is the editor of the food section of the Washington Post, so you could probably find some of the recipes on the paper's website, as well.

There's the Chartreuse Swizzle, a drink created by SF bartender Marco Dionysos (his member name here is cocktailgeek). At first glance it seems as if it would be too sweet, but it's very well balanced. And since the Chartreuse is the base spirit, it's a good way to gauge your interest in the liqueur.

While I understand that the Maillard reaction is responsible for mostly of the browning in both cases, I always that there was some true caramelization in the long cooked onions. As you quoted Wolke in the topic linked to above: Is that not true?

I think I have. The quick browned onions have more of a charred, sometimes slightly bitter taste to them whereas with caramelized onions, it's mainly the sweetness I taste. Also, the texture is quite different. The long-cooked onions are very soft, kind of gelatinous. They're almost a paste. The quick brown ones, while not exactly crunchy, still have some body and the onion pieces remain separate.

I regularly make a salad of sliced celery and apple, dressed with a cider and walnut oil vinaigrette and topped with sweet/spicy walnuts and aged cheddar. Depending on what kind of greens I have on hand, I sometimes plate the salad over greens. Tonight when I was putting it together I realized that with an almost brand new bunch of celery I had all the leaves, so I used them as the base for the salad. It was great.

That sounds good. I can rarely get clams, though. Do you think the dish is worth making without them? I also wonder how some shaved fennel bulb would be added with the peas.

I learned, somewhere along the way (Jacques Pepin, maybe) that there's a difference between caramelizing onions, which is a slow process over low heat that involves the gradual browning of the sugars inside the onions after the liquid has evaporated away, and browning onions, which is down over higher heat and involves the Maillard reaction on the surface of the onions -- so the outsides are browned quickly, but the insides are still mostly white. Lately it seems that many cookbook authors don't make a distinction -- they'll say you can caramelize onions in 20 minutes, for instance. Or they'll show a photo of what clearly (to me, at least) is browned onions and call them caramelized. Am I wrong in the belief that there's a difference? Browned onions certainly have a different taste and texture from what I call caramelized, but now I'm wondering. What's the story?

I can't think of a single thing I've tried where the fake version is better.

It's interesting that four years after writing: Ruhlman has apparently changed his mind. Stock --any kind of stock -- doesn't even make it into the top twenty things to know in his new book. And although he includes a recipe for chicken stock, there isn't one for veal stock.

The fact is that people are often not very good about gauging their own health. They might feel fine and have serious health problems, or feel "unwell" with no underlying sickness, disease or condition. The placebo effect is well documented; how people "feel" is dependent on a lot of things, including whether they think a given treatment will work. It's why self-diagnosis is so scientifically unreliable. Please understand that I'm not saying or implying that celiac disease and gluten sensitivity don't exist. They do, and for those who suffer from the conditions of course a gluten-free diet will make them feel better and make them healthier. But I think what's happened may be that with all the heavy marketing of gluten-free products and diets, some people with no indications of gluten sensitivity go on a gluten-free diet on their own, without any tests or doctor's opinions. (And, people being what they are, some people will also give up dairy products and other foods at the same time.) If they feel "better," it might be because they've given up gluten or the other foods; it might be a coincidence; it might be the placebo effect. It's great that they feel better, but my concern would be they might have some other serious health condition that's going untreated because they've convinced themselves that gluten was the problem, when in fact it's irrelevant in their case.

I have one of these Cuisinart mini-prep machines. It does a great job chopping and pureeing small amounts and runs around $40. It's not really heavyweight but for small jobs it's fine.

You may find this discussion of bacon cured in Coca-cola (starting here and continuing on for several posts) interesting.

She wrote a book on healthy eating in college: The Dorm Room Diet.