JAZ

My first thought when I read the original post was to wonder if you objected up front to the 50-minute requirement, given that you had reservations. I once had to push back the time of a reservation for a fairly large group, and was told in advance that the restaurant could do it, but it would mean we'd have to turn over the table faster than usual. That's one thing (and I thought it was reasonable -- they said we could have up to an hour and a half), but if I showed up with reservations and was told out of the blue that I couldn't even have the table for an hour, I'd turn around and walk out. That's just not acceptable.

When I started making overnight stock, I found that vegetables -- aromatics, that is -- tend to get very bitter with long cooking. Leaving them out makes for a much cleaner tasting stock. If you really want their flavor, I'd add them only in the last couple of hours. Better yet, add whatever vegetables you want as you use your pure meat stock, instead of adding them to the stock itself. Also, as Chris mentioned, I think clear stock is somewhat overrated. Sometimes it matters, but often it doesn't. I leave my stock on low on the stove, and from what I can tell, it stays around 195 or 200F. It's fine for my needs -- I don't make consomme or aspics.

One thing to consider is that not all kosher salt measures the same. Does the recipe specify a brand? Morton's is significantly heavier than Diamond Crystal, for instance -- if you're using Morton's, you'd want to reduce the salt to 3/4 cup to equal the weight of one cup of Daimond. (I'm surprised that Keller doesn't provide a weight for the salt.)

I'm not a fan of raw broccoli, which is why I've never considered buying the broccoli slaw mix. But I can see blanching julienned broccoli stems and dressing them the way I do celery root remoulade, with a creamy mustard and dill vinaigrette.

I have to admit that I usually buy broccoli crowns -- they're more expensive, but easier to deal with if what you want is florets. But today at the store, all that was available was broccoli with long stems. Very long stems. My first course of action would have been to save them for broccoli soup, but then I started thinking about other ways to use them. I ended up trimming and peeling them, then cutting each stem in two, yielding pieces about two inches long and just over 1 inch in diameter. I steamed them for 7 minutes, just enough to soften them but not enough that they lost all crunch. After chilling them, I sliced them on my ceramic slicer along with some shallots and tossed in a dressing of olive oil and lemon, with some garlic and parsley. It made a great salad, and I felt virtuous for a) not wasting the stems and b) eating more broccoli. This, of course, has me wondering what else I can do with broccoli stems. Does anyone else use them? What more can I do with them?

She often includes a recipe, or at least some instructions on how to make the dish she's talking about. I'd be careful about following them, though -- they often seem to be off in major ways. For instance, for some reason she seems to think that anything with beef -- soup, stew or braised pot roast -- needs no salt. If you already know your way around the kitchen, you could figure out what needs to be done to make the recipes work, but those who don't should steer clear. Read her essays, skip the recipes.

I'll be making Butterfinger truffle candies and caramels flavored with cardamom and cinnamon. I'll also make butter toffee almond bark, or if I have time and energy, I'll use the nuts in some Christmas-themed chocolate molds I have. I'm not sure about cookies. I always used to make them, but I've done candy only the past few years. I'll have to see what kind of time I have.

I don't know about the second question, but I substitute browned butter for regular in all kinds of recipes. Just make sure the browned butter is at the same temperature as is called for in the recipe -- so if the butter is supposed to be refrigerated, I refrigerate the browned butter so it's hard. If the recipe calls for softened butter, I let the browned butter set up to the same stage. The only difference, as far as I know, is that you've cooked off the water in the browning stage, but that doesn't seem to make a difference in the recipes I've used.

So, this dissolves the membrane outside the fruit, but you still have to cut the sections out of the membranes between the segments, right? Doesn't seem like it saves much time or effort. You still have to peel the fruit -- it seems to me that you may as well just cut the peel and the pith off the outside. Or am I missing something?

Sam, I'm not arguing that the egg yolk pasta wouldn't be great. My question was about how it handles; hence the question about fat content. I'm not sure you looked at the Keller recipe. It not only calls for 6 yolks and one whole egg, it also calls for 1-1/2 teaspoons of olive oil (that's for 8 oz of flour, or approx. 225 grams). So Keller's recipe contains 38.25 grams of fat for 225 grams of flour. I'm also not sure where your math came from. My recipe calls for 3.25 oz. (say 94 grams) of flour with 9 grams of fat (one egg yolk + 1 tsp oil). Multiply my recipe by 2.4, and you get 21.6 grams of fat for 225 grams of flour. So my question remains, how does such a rich dough handle? Does it require the resting and extra kneading time?

That seems like a lot of fat for pasta (6 yolks + 1 egg for 1-3/4 cups of flour), and it also seems very time consuming. How does it handle? I make pasta with one egg to 3-1/4 oz. (about 3/4 C) flour, plus a scant teaspoon of olive oil; I mix it in my food processor, knead it very briefly by hand and then run it through the pasta roller five or six times on the widest slot and it handles beautifully. No resting for 30 minutes, no kneading for 25 minutes. I'd say it's 20 minutes start to finish. Is the Keller recipe worth the time and effort (and egg yolks)?

When I was catching up on this topic on bad kitchen habits, it struck me that most of them (mine included) had to do not with cooking but with cleaning the kitchen (or not cleaning). In the midst of the bad habits were a few suggestions on how to keep the kitchen cleaner, and I thought it might be good to have a topic dedicated to cleaning tips. Everyone always says "clean as you go," but that to me is not very helpful; I need something more concrete. Two things have helped me work cleaner. The first is simply to pull the garbage can out from under the sink and over to my prep area when I'm prepping lots of vegetables. I don't have room for a garbage bowl close to my prep area so I tend to push all the scraps aside, and then I end up with a messy counter and little actual prep room. But I find if I just remember to get the can out before I start working, my area stays much cleaner (if I wait until I've started working I don't like to break my stride, so I rarely stop to go get it). The other thing I've started doing is to run the dishwasher every night (or first thing in the morning) and then to unload the clean dishes before I start dinner. This sounds really obvious, but I really hate to unload the dishwasher, so I tend to put it off. If there are clean dishes in there, I don't have anywhere but the sink to put dirty things. (Also, I have to keep going back to the dishwasher to get my tools, which is annoying.) These two things alone have vastly improved my cooking experience, and I'm sure there are other cleaning tips out there that I haven't thought about. So, what are yours?

I always cut the membranes off, or more precisely, cut the segments out of the membranes.

Take a sprig and orient it so the leaves are pointing up. Holding it by the top with one hand, slide the fingers of your other hand gently down along the stem to pull the leaves off. You won't get them all, but usually most of them come off.

For those who try to shop "local" -- whatever that means to you -- I'm interested to know what your motivation is. Supporting local farmers/local economy? Better quality? Or something else?

A couple of weeks ago on The Splendid Table, Lynne Rosetto Kasper did a segment on dumplings. In a typically enthusiastic but inaccurate introduction, she started with a list of dumplings around the world, including (according to her), kreplach, ravioli, potstickers, samosas, empanadas and dim sum (I swear I'm not making that last one up). She then continued that a dumpling is "some kind of dough wrapped around some kind of filling." To be blunt, I believe she's way off base. But when I tried to define what exactly a dumpling is, I admit I came up with more questions than answers. First, I think the idea that a dumpling is dough around a filling is both too narrow on the one hand and too broad on the other. What about the dumplings from Eastern Europe that are boiled dough, with no filling at all? I'd say that's the original meaning of dumpling, and the dough-around-a-filling meaning came later. But I really don't know. I'd also say that boiling, or perhaps steaming, is crucial to dumplings. I don't think empanadas and samosas qualify at all -- they're much more like savory pies than like dumplings. If it's baked or fried, it's not a dumpling. So my working definition is that a dumpling is some kind of dough (filled or not) boiled in water or sauce, or steamed. That's more or less what Food Lover's Companion says: "Savory dumplings are small or large mounds of dough that are usually dropped into a liquid mixture (such as soup or stew) and cooked until done. Some are stuffed with meat or cheese mixtures." How does that coincide with what others think about a definition for dumplings? Does it cover Asian dumplings? Is it too narrow, or too broad?

I have three herb plants on my deck (basil, parsley and rosemary). Other than that, probably close to 0%, unless it's just by chance. I used to belong to a CSA which dropped off where I worked. Now that I don't work there anymore, it's not worth the time -- a half hour each way on the bus, lugging back a bunch of produce. Some of the produce was great; some was not measurably better than grocery store produce; some was spoiled by the time it arrived or shortly thereafter. I could get meat too, which was usually very good, but often oddly butchered so the cuts were not at all what I was expecting. Besides, I like citrus fruit, and coffee and spices. I like olive oil and sherry vinegar. I like liquor. I like all kinds of things that won't ever be produced within 50 or 100 or 500 miles of where I live.

I take my Le Creuset pots directly from the fridge to the stove or oven all the time with no problems.

Excellent idea. I had some skin left over from roasted chicken thighs, so I put it back on the rack and crisped it in a medium oven. Then I chopped it up and sprinkled it over an Asian chicken salad. It was a great addition.

When I was growing up, we ate a lot of tossed green salads. My mother had a standard "salad" bowl and "salad servers" -- the wooden long-handled spoon and the long-handled thing that wasn't really a spoon but wasn't really a fork either. Pretty much any set of salad servers that I see today are the same kind of thing, so apparently it's still the standard in serving salads. But a few years ago, it became the in thing to toss your salads with your hands -- less damaging to the lettuces or something. I tried that for a few months, but here's the thing: it's really messy. I'm not crazy about having my hands covered in salad dressing, regardless of how it makes the lettuce feel. In any case, if I'm serving family style, I still need something to serve the salad with, right? I can't really have my guests plunging their hands into the salad bowl to serve themselves, can I? So now, I mostly use tongs. It's not perfect, but it works. Am I missing any options? Am I damaging my salad greens with harsh metal implements? What does everyone else use for salad tossing and serving?

I haven't tried the old Chun King ones, but I love these: La Choy rice noodles -- are they similar? They're much better than the regular "chow mein" noodles; ever since I tried them I've never used anything else in my Asian cole slaw.

Am I the only one who prefers gin in my Bloody Marys?

I eat a lot of green salads -- side salads and main dish salads. It occurred to me recently that as much as I like the crunch of vegetables, I really like salads when there's an additional crunch factor -- toasted nuts or croutons, for instance. What I add, of course, depends on the kind of salad I'm making. If it's an Asian style salad, I'll add crispy chow mein noodles, or toasted almonds or peanuts, or both. Caesar salad requires croutons, naturally. A southwestern or Mexican style salad gets crispy fried tortilla strips on top. With the abundance of packaged salad toppings in my grocery store's produce section, I have to believe I'm not alone in this. So what do you add to your salads for that ultimate crunch factor? Store-bought or homemade? Nuts or croutons or something else?

I had shrimp in the freezer and broccoli in the fridge, and I remembered these posts so I gave the recipe a try. While the flavors were great and the dish was very easy, I had some problems with the recipe as written. First, I found the cooking time to be way too short for the broccoli. Fortunately, I tried a piece after 10 minutes (when the shrimp is supposed to be added) and realized there was no way it would be done when the shrimp was. Then, when the dish was done, it was quite dry -- not the shrimp, which were moist and done nicely -- but the whole dish. I served it over pasta, so I added a couple ounces of pasta water and a splash of olive oil and that helped. I probably will make it again, but will try blanching or steaming the broccoli for a few minutes before roasting. I think that will keep some moisture in the broccoli while allowing it to become tender in the oven.

I'd bet you could do a ragu with pork necks over pasta for $1 per person.