JAZ

The factors that Chris listed do make a difference -- I'll wait a lot longer if I have a drink at a bar rather than getting jostled by the door as people come and go, for instance. Another crucial factor for me is getting a realistic wait time from the staff if it's a sit-down restaurant. If they tell me 10 minutes and 15 minutes have gone by I start to get edgy, but if they tell me 20 minutes and I get a table in 15, then I'm happy. The one circumstance where I really hate waiting is if I have reservations. If I don't get seated within five minutes of a reservation time, I expect an apology. If it's 15 minutes, I expect a complimentary drink.

I haven't heard of that diet. It seems too restrictive for me, even with the day to splurge. I'm the kind of person who automatically wants whatever food I'm not supposed to eat. What's the rationale for eating 4-5 times a day? I've been following the Weight Watchers plan for a few months and like the fact that I can eat anything I want -- just not unlimited portions. I've found that most of my recipes are surprisingly "point-friendly" or can be made so with a few tweaks. The ones that aren't I just don't eat as often. (Coincidentally, I'm having a similar "fajita" salad for dinner, but with tortilla strips on top.)

Dejah, I should have mentioned that the recipe did call for marinating in cornstarch, rice wine, egg white and salt before cooking, and I did understand that this was part of the velveting process. At least in this Tropp recipe, though, the marinade didn't call for oil -- is that typical? I'd also only seen veleveting done for shrimp and chicken -- I had no idea it was done for beef and pork too. Is it done all the time, or just for particular dishes? In any case, it's good to know I don't have to use a separate pan -- thanks for the information!

I'm familiar with the procedure of velveting shrimp and chicken, although I don't do it very often. But I recently made a recipe from one of Barbara Tropp's cookbooks for a shrimp dish where she velvets the shrimp in simmering water instead of oil. I'd never heard of that, so I gave it a try. It worked okay, but I'm not sure it really made that much difference. So, I have a few questions. First, is this common - velveting in water? Second, I'm confused about whether the velveting process is only supposed to partially cook the protein, which is what Tropp's recipe called for. It seems to me I've read other recipes where the protein is completely cooked when velveted, and then added to the dish at the last minute. Third, I guess my main question is whether veleveting makes that much of a difference.

I learned a technique for braised chicken with crisp skin from a cookbook I had years ago, which I've used in other recipes like one for chicken braised in sherry vinegar sauce (photo here -- scroll down a bit). You start out with a regular braising technique, but first, make sure the chicken is placed skin side up and not covered with the sauce, and second, halfway through the cooking, turn the heat up and take the cover off. The skin recrisps and the sauce reduces, and you end up with braised chicken with crisp skin. (Here is the full recipe for anyone who's interested.)

I'm not sure if I can even explain this, but I was in the kitchen barefoot (which we always tell our students is a bad thing, but which I do all the time anyway) and moved a couple of plates out of my way, not realizing there was a fork wedged in between them. It fell out and somehow landed so that it pierced the inside of my big toe. I couldn't figure out why my toe hurt so bad, because when I looked at the top of my foot I couldn't see anything. Then I saw the blood from the puncture wound, which was pretty deep for a damned fork. I also now have a giant bruise as well as the puncture. I should probably start wearing shoes in the kitchen.

I used to bring a big plate of cookies and candy at Christmas for my butcher when I lived in San Francisco. I did the same for the guy who ran the cheese shop I went to and a few other merchants. I didn't feel it was expected and I wasn't looking for favors; it just seemed like a nice thing to do. But tip? No.

I haven't been to a salad bar in ages, but when I used to work in San Francisco there was a pretty decent one across from my office. I'd try for mostly lettuce and other leafy (and light) items, with cherry tomatoes, shredded carrots and cucumber slices. I'm not a fan of raw cruciferous vegetables, so no raw broccoli for me. They also had a selection of things like pasta salad, raisin carrot salad and the like. Most of those were pretty awful, but oddly, they made really good chicken salad, so I'd usually get a small scoop of that.

Anyone who likes salads should head over the the WikiGullet project and help out with our topic of the week -- Salad!

Thanks to the hard work of Society members, notably -- Liuzhou FrogPrincesse PedroG Xxchef Iradubinsky Vice Mkayahara Emannths Gfweb Kouign Aman EatNopales Mjx -- the WikiGullet project is growing in depth and breadth. We've compiled nearly 600 articles on topics from cheese and butter to sous vide and nouvelle cuisine. That means we've only got a few hundred thousand left to do, so . . . This week we're announcing the first of our featured WikiGullet topics -- Salads! Any salad aficionados out there want to help? Check out the salad page and add to it, edit it (yes, you're allowed -- that's how a wiki grows and gets stronger), or add pages for your favorite salads, from Caesar to larb. If you're not sure how to get started, here's a suggestion: take a look at the red text on the Salad page -- those are called "redlinks" in wiki parlance, and they point to an entry that doesn't yet exist. Just click on one of them, and you'll get a fresh new page, already titled, ready for you type away. Every week or two we'll feature a different category to work on -- but of course you can add anything at any time. Just dive in wherever your interest and expertise lead you!

John Mariani's Esquire blog post, in which he trashes not only Modernist Cuisine, but all of modernist cooking, all modernist chefs and restaurants, and especially Grant Achatz. I can't even dignify it with the term "review" -- it's a bizarre, spite-filled rant (and not a particularly well-written one, even). The only people Mariani seems to respect are Thomas Keller, Harold McGee and the staff of Cook's Illustrated magazine. After likening Modernist cooking to Lucky Charms and Dan Ackroyd's SNL Bassomatic skit, he concludes: What cave does he live in? I hadn't really formed an opinion about Mariani before this, but he shows himself here to be childish, spiteful, and ignorant. It's unbelievable.

Okay, so I tried to make almond butter in my Blendtec blender, and was horribly disappointed in my effort. I used the technique for nut butters in the booklet that came with the blender -- toasted the nuts, blended with a little oil, and kept blending until I had a fairly smooth puree. I did get a decent puree, but the texture was kind of a weird combination of pasty and dry, and the flavor was bland. I added a little sugar and salt, which did help the flavor a bit, but I couldn't get anything that I wanted to eat. Granted, I had no idea what I was doing, and granted, I'm used to commercial peanut butter. But I'm hoping that I can get a decent product on my own. So I need lots of help, I guess. Anyone have advice?

I also eat a lot of salads for dinner. Unfortunately, I almost never think to take photos of them. Some recent salads: Southwest/Mexican style with romaine, pico de gallo, tortilla strips and skirt steak; shrimp or crab remoulade on greens with tomatoes, celery, hard cooked egg and avocado; "Greek" salad with cucumber, tomato, parsley, mint, olives and feta cheese. One of my favorite first course salads is apples and celery, sliced thin and dressed in an apple cider and walnut oil vinaigrette, topped with candied walnuts and aged cheddar cheese.

Chris, if this is something you plan to do again, sit down the day after and make notes about everything that didn't work with ideas for changing it. If you don't do it right away, you probably won't remember all those great ideas you had. That's something we learned the hard way. Djyee, I worked with Ruta years ago, and I agree that she was an excellent instructor and very well prepared. A couple more points: Have sets of all the recipes for the students to take home, and also have copies at the stove so that they don't have to use their own copies while they're cooking. What we do is put the recipe copies on the sheet pans with the ingredients and equipment. We always give our students the opportunity to ask any questions they have along the way. The students learn more that way, but if you do that, make sure you don't get off track and too far behind your schedule. If our students ask something not quite on topic, we answer those questions at the end of the class or during break, and if they ask something we're going to cover later, we tell them that and move on. We love to answer questions and if we're not careful we can get way off schedule. Buy tons of paper towels. You'll need them not only for all the hand washing that will go on, but also for anchoring cutting boards (depending on what kinds you use).

The best range I've used is a smooth top with one large burner, and three that have two sizes each. You can turn those on as "single" or "double" depending on the size of your pots. Similar to this one.

Because people (myself included) are used to the taste of Diet Coke. Objectively, I can say that Coke Zero is a better product, but it tastes too sweet to me because I'm used to that bitter aftertaste of Diet Coke. (And if you think that's weird, there are people out there who still prefer Tab, because that's what they're used to.)

Josh Ozersky's thoughts on the book from Time.com. He mentions Ruhlman's review and Nahan's reply here and makes the interesting point that in the media, The "latter" being, of course, Modernist Cuisine. It's a shame that has happened, says Ozersky:

In these kinds of cases I think the best approach is to give as much information as possible, with the most general information first, then regional/country variations. So I would go with your second example for the porterhouse. As we get more articles with this kind of thing, we can see if that works well, or if there's a better option.

In general, we'd prefer American English terms and spelling in article titles (so, "Eggplant" rather than "Aubergine") with redirect pages for the alternate terms/spellings. Not to disparage regional/ethnic variations, but just for the sake of consistency.

I took a pizza class from Peter Reinhart years ago, when his pizza book American Pie came out. He said then that he was working with the company on their frozen pizzas, so I imagine they're very good.

I apologize for not being clear in my previous post. I didn't intend to deprecate those who have a real gluten sensitivity or Celiac disease. My point, which I guess I didn't make very well, was that when something like gluten sensitivity comes into the public eye, it's inevitable that lots of people will read a little bit about it and leap to conclusions that aren't warranted. My experience has been with a co-worker who swore that eating gluten caused arthritis in her shoulder; my ex-boyfriend's mother, whose dentist told her that her gum disease was a result of eating gluten; and an acquaintance whose brother was convinced that his Asperger's Syndrome was caused by gluten. It seems to me that such a wide variety of problems are probably not caused by gluten sensitivity.

It seems to me that gluten is the new MSG. The main difference is that there is a small percentage of the population with Celiac disease who really can't tolerate gluten, whereas MSG "sensitivity" has been shown to be imaginary. But aside from those who actually suffer from Celiac disease, there's a pretty large group that claim some kind of gluten "sensitivity" which, to my knowledge, is mostly self-diagnosed and anecdotal. People have always been willing to jump on the latest health food fad, and it's no surprise that marketing takes advantage of that gullibility. Let's just hope that gluten doesn't get the treatment that sodium is now getting.

Here's something interesting -- on the bag of frozen french fries I bought recently, a "serving" is defined as "3 oz. (85 g) -- about 17 pieces." Seventeen fries seemed like a pretty generous serving size given the calorie count, so I measured out three ounces. It turns out that three ounces is more like nine fries. I suppose if one picked out all the smallest fries, one could come closer to 17 in three ounces, but that's almost 50 percent off. Who comes up with those equivalencies?

Mitch, when you turn the flame off under a pot on a gas range, what makes you think the burner cools down immediately? Isn't there a hot burner grate under your pot that still radiates and conducts heat? The only burners I've used that actually stop the cooking process when turned off are induction.

That's certainly a part of what we're looking for, but it doesn't cover everything that's appropriate for the WikiGullet Project. For instance, it says nothing about entries on restaurants, books, authors and chefs, all of which we're interested in getting. However, it's a good suggestion to give more detailed information on our home page -- balancing brevity and detail is always a challenge, but we'll give it a try.