JAZ

I haven't made this cake, so I don't have personal experience with it, but I did look up the recipe. The only thing I can see that might be an issue is the temperature of the ingredients. It says to have them all at 75F, which to me seems quite a bit warmer than usual for a cake. Maybe her ingredients were too cold?

I have to admit that I haven't seen this one in person, but I'm going to nominate The Great Alaskan Bachelor's Cookbook: OK for Girls to Read Too! From the back cover: "JUNK FOOD COOKING AT IT'S (sic) FINEST. Just throw a bunch of food together and cook it." You really have to follow the link and look inside. The first recipe involves two pork chops, four potatoes, American cheese slices, and three cups of milk, which is all layered and then baked for an hour an a half.

My range is a model with the controls at the back, and since it has no real exhaust system, the back part gets covered in gunk. Every once in a while, I get out the Goo Gone, which seems to be the only thing that takes it off. Then it's clean for a few hours, until I start cooking again.

I keep mine at 60F, which keeps my butter just spreadable and seems to be a good temp for citrus, tomatoes and avocados as well.

I've been making pizzas regularly for the past year or so, ever since I discovered Publix fresh pizza dough. In some ways mine are very similar to Steven's, but I stretch my dough out on parchment instead of using a sheet pan. The best discovery I made, though, was to ditch my pizza stone (actually a Hearthkit bread "oven" with three sides) and replace it with a square cast iron griddle. I was making pizza at a friend's who didn't have a pizza stone, so we used the bottom of a huge cast iron skillet instead and the crust was much better than on my stone. Granted, my friend's oven heats up hotter than mine, but still, the cast iron produces much better char and overall better pizza than my stone did. The oven also heats up much faster without the massive amount of stone in it. I also use Pomi strained tomatoes, but depending on what else I'm adding to the pizza I sometimes sprinkle it with crushed red pepper flakes and salt. I use a little olive oil to coat my hands as I'm stretching the dough, so the crust ends up with a barely perceptible coating of oil before the sauce goes on. Lately, I've taken to using Sargento's "Artisan" shredded whole milk mozzarella, which in addition to being way easy, also has decent flavor and the right amount of moisture. As an added bonus, one bag equals three individual pizzas for me, which is also what one bag of dough equals. This means that I sometimes end up having pizza three times within about 9 days (which is about the limit for the Publix dough in the fridge), but if I change the toppings, it's not a hardship. If I remember to start heating the oven beforehand, I can have a pizza in 20 to 30 minutes (depending on the toppings) from the time I start making it. Next time I'll try to remember to take pictures.

I'm with Shamanjoe. My DW and I vastly prefer thin asparagas - but it does need to be fresh. I'm curious: what do you like about it? To me it's just a mass of stringy fiber. It's like eating dental floss.

Don't buy thin asparagus. The thin stuff is the first and the last of the growth and much stringier and less flavorful than the thick spears.

Two things that don't take up much space that I've found indispensable in rental kitchens (in addition to what's already listed): a Microplane and a good pair of kitchen scissors. Do you need both a blender and food processor? I have both at home, but in rentals I can usually make do with just a blender.

I think Steven mentioned this in passing, but a stack of side towels, easily accessible.

I freeze raw bacon all the time, both store-bought and home-cured from a friend. I tend to get the home-cured in small vacuum packs, so I just freeze them as-is and pull them out as needed. When I buy pounds from the supermarket, I try to divide them up into quarter-pound chunks and freeze them that way, so I don't have to pull out a whole pound at a time.

If you plan to try this, you may want to skip flouring the meat. In fact, I never flour meat for a braise -- if you flour it before browning, you brown the flour, not the meat. I think the flavor is much deeper if the meat is browned plain.

I recently read an article on squash blossoms, which made me think that using zucchini blossoms would be an effective means of squash birth control. I sure wish my dad had known about that back when he had his giant garden.

I worked in cookware stores for more than 10 years (we sold a lot of Demeyere) and in that whole time we only had one pan and one lid returned because of handles breaking off like that. In fact, I think those were the only two pieces of Demeyere that were ever returned for any reason -- a better record than any other manufacturer.

Chris, it's been working great. I never did replace the top rack -- just took out the lower one so my fruit bowl fits underneath. The one housekeeping item is that since a wine fridge has no moisture control, I have to mop up water from the bottom of the fridge every few days. Not a big deal for me, but it is something to think about.

Thanks, Jane. I'll keep that in mind with future books.

Jane, just to clarify: if I import a book that's not indexed into my Bookshelf, do I have to click on the "RI" icon if I would like to see the book indexed? Simply importing it isn't enough? The reason I ask is that the RI interface is a little clunky. If I don't have to go through it, I'd rather skip it.

How about coming home from a week-long vacation to find that your fridge/freezer died at some point during the week, with spoiled shrimp and shells (for stock), duck breasts, duck fat, several quail, and pork chops? And that's only the freezer.

With some dishes, I don't add any vinegar to the dish itself, but serve it with a side dish with plenty of vinegar. For instance, I almost always serve broccoli in a sharp vinaigrette alongside macaroni and cheese. I don't want to add extra acid to the mac and cheese, but it benefits from an acidic salad on the side.

Do either the various Vita-Mixes or the BlendTec do small amounts well? By "small" I mean, say, half a cup of pureed tomatoes or vinaigrette.

It seems to me that there are two lines of criticism going here. If Bluecoat has production/quality control problems that result in some batches being definitely off -- burnt tires, "synthetic moldy ick" etc. -- and people comment on that, how does this make them pretentious, or blowhards? It's unfortunate that Paul Pacult got a bad bottle, but it's not his fault. Should he have tried again, with an untainted bottle? Maybe, but I can't blame him for not wanting to if the original bottle was that bad. As for the other line of criticism, there are lots of gins out there that don't carry much juniper punch (as Sam points out). Bluecoat (a good batch), Bombay Sapphire and Tanq 10 are the three that I've tried most often. They're fine -- good in some drinks, not so great in others. If I were going to pick one gin to drink, though, none of those would be it: I want my gin to have a big dose of juniper. Does any of this mean you should pour out your bottle? Of course not. To take a similar example, I'm on the record here describing Smith & Cross rum as tasting like dust balls and old sweat socks, but none of its adherents called me a blowhard (at least not to my face), and I certainly didn't imply -- nor did they infer -- that I thought they all had bad taste. I'm sure none of them are pouring their bottles down the sink.

My best luck with double crust pies is when the filling is cooked before adding. Chicken pot pies, for instance. When I've made double crust apple pies, the only time I've been successful with the crust is to cook the apples about halfway before sealing up in the durs.

A recent article from the Wall Street Journal reminded me of this topic: Couples' Food Fights. Rereading this topic, I realize I've been pretty lucky. I mean, my first live-in boyfriend (whom I now cheerfully refer to as "my dickhead ex-fiance) and I had problems over cooking, but we had problems over everything. I guess it's fitting that my one and only published piece of fiction was about cooking and eating dinner with him. So maybe it was worth it.

In our cooking classes, we regularly do side-by-side comparison of roasted v. steamed vegetables -- usually asparagus and carrots. You're right that the browning makes a difference, but I'd say the loss of water in the roasted vegetables accounts for the biggest difference. The flavors are more intense: for the carrots, it means they're noticeably sweeter. Generally, the students prefer the roasted versions, although I think that the steamed versions give a purer flavor -- no Maillard flavors masking the vegetables.

When I moved, I somehow lost/misplaced/threw away my only paring knife. I thought I'd miss it, but I lived without it for at least 6 months. Then I got one for free, so it's back in my block. I use it occasionally, but could live without it again, I'm sure. My utility knife gets easily ten times the use my paring knife gets.

I've been cooking a lot of Mexican and Mexican-influenced dinners, but haven't been taking pictures. A few days ago it was pork chile verde based on a recipe from Rick Bayliss' Mexico One Plate at a Time, with rice and refritos. Tonight I had a quesadilla and a "shrimp ceviche cocktail," also from Bayliss. One of these times I'll take pictures.