cdh

Not a fan of plastic twisty. For most things I drink, the big chunks that come from these do the job quite well. I've got 2 and am lazy refilling them, and have never come close to running out. Couldn't do a party with a dozen of those chunks, but for day to day usage, they're great.

It also sounds like you need to immerse yourself in the philosophy of good food more than you need a shopping list for your next run to the store. Maybe building you a reading list of not-recipe-books about good food and the gustatory pleasures would be worthwhile, provided you're not of the school of thought that philosophy is claptrap and the humanities are a waste of time. To kick it off, I'd suggest getting your hands on MFK Fisher's The Art of Eating anthology.

Well, there are two ways you are going to broaden your taste buds' horizons- Going to restaurants/markets/etc where good food is prepared and presented, or taking cooking classes where you learn the techniques behind the preparation and presentation. Good food is more than good ingredients... it is good technique applied to good ingredients by means of highly effective tools for the needed purpose. At a restaurant you get the good food, and some partial insight into the ingredients, but no insight into the techniques or tools. That is something the Modernist Cuisine books attempt to tackle... but from a very lofty position, so maybe not of interest to somebody looking to build up from the foundations. Cooking lessons do that too, but in an interactive and hands on format. You sound as though you're a very analytical person, and I'd bet you have a quantitative bent. That suggests that baking lessons may be the place for you to start. Baking is very precise, and can employ lots of ingredients for you to learn about. French pastry demos I've been to have been quite interesting... If you find this uninteresting or your friend thinks that it is unmanly and weird, you might want to take up the art of BBQ, which is as much about engineering your cooking contraption's thermodynamics as it is about anything else... You're building a reactor to maximize the collagen to gelatine reaction... the byproduct is yummy muscle fibers drenched in the gelatine you made.

That tells me that perhaps coming at improving your enjoyment of food from the scientific perspective might be your best path. Luckily for you, the Modernist Cuisine books have been published... they're insanely expensive to purchase, but you fortunately have a fine public library system that will get you access to them for nothing. I'd check them out and get reading. They are all about technique more than they are about standard recipes... but technique is where the deliciousness comes from more often than not. The same old ingredients can be tweaked to new heights of tastiness with some of the methods described in there. Granted executing some of them will require fancy kitchen equipment like immersion circulators and/or access to fun stuff like liquid nitrogen, but some are within reach of ordinary folks who own a pressure cooker...

Ah, so you're quite local to me then, Princeton being half way between NYC and PHL... Had you eaten at Elements on Bayard St before it closed to move to Witherspoon St? Have you gone and explored the truly local delicacies of Trenton Tomato Pie at either of the Delorenzos? Are you as averse to Philadelphia as you are to NYC, or does NY carry some particular scary cachet for you? How close to urbanity are you comfortable going? Don't want to list a bunch of places for you to try that are all in no-go zones for you.

Do you live somewhere with gourmet shops or supermarkets that give classes? In Philadelphia, we have Tria, a set of temples to the fermented arts of beer, wine and cheese, which offer classes to introduce folks to the depths of deliciousness in those products. When I used to live in Austin, TX, the Central Market supermarket had lots of classes in many varieties of food. If you're in shooting distance of NYC, the De Gustibus classes at Macys are fun, as is the James Beard House. Tell us where you live beyond vague generalities, and somebody might have similar recommendations for where you are.

"Flush" generally means flush with cash --. money to spare, cost is not a primary consideration. We also really need to know your baseline of experience: Did you just graduate from medical school and subsist on ramen for the past dozen years? Are you accustomed to going to restaurants? Are you accustomed to a "meat and 2 veg" diet? Are you now or have you ever been a vegetarian? Do you cook for yourself? If so, what do you like/what are you good at making? etc. There are good preparations and bad preparations of most ingredients, e.g. squid, brisket, . You do need to get to know ingredients... pressed sweetbreads have enough texture to be OK, brains are just mush in all preparations I've had... rocky mountain oysters actually beat sweetbreads for textural and flavor appeal in my opinion. Maybe not yours. You need to be open enough to try stuff. But to guide you, we need to know where you're coming from...

If you're feeling flush and experimental, find a restaurant in your neck of the woods that really knows what it is doing. If they offer a tasting menu, order it. On a Wednesday night. Go back the next week and do it again. Ask to talk to the chef when you're done and ask about the things you liked. Become known. You'll find yourself with a guide to good food who can take your known likes and dislikes and steer you towards likely new pleasures for you. You'll get a lot more out of that than buying expensive ingredients and trying to figure out how to use them by yourself. It's always fun to have somebody who knows what they're doing tell you that they found something new that is gonna knock your socks off.

For the first day of the year to break 90F around here, some Leipziger Gose was just the drink. The Bayrische Banhof version that is available around here is lovely... fruity, sparkly, wheaty. Perfect in the heat.

Agreed that the reasonable conclusion is that High Street is the name of a restaurant... but without further context, e.g. knowing Mottmott lives in Philadelphia, that is a bit of a leap given the shorthand and obfuscated style that message boards full of repeat players who know each other encourages. I'm not calling you or the British in general slow, but I am saying that absent extra-post context, what that post says is either unintelligible (for folks who don't have the UK association with the phrase High Street) or vague to the point of meaningless (for those who do)... Those of us who know the context understood the question... I guess the unstated premise here is that nobody who doesn't have that extra information would be in a position to answer the question.

Haven't been... and given your report, not excited to go try the place....

This must be a confusing topic for a speaker of British English... where "High Street" means any town's shopping district. I'd wager that this posting is about the particular restaurant called High Street in Philadelphia, and not about a random eatery in a shopping district somewhere in Pennsylvania. I have no clue what a gd is, however.

Try raspberry syrup rather than puree... or perhaps run your puree through several strainers of increasing fineness. You want it to be nothing but liquid. All the little bits of raspberry are giving the CO2 something to grab onto and leave the solution.

Can something like coconut oil be a butter replacement for pastry purposes? It seems worth experimenting with... The idea of a puff pastry made with coconut oil is not an offputting thought... better and healthier than Crisco, in all probability.

Deviled eggs with smoked trout or whitefish mashed in with the yolks. Garnish and accents as fit with the rest of your menu.

How's this: http://faculty.vetmed.ucdavis.edu/faculty/docliver/Research/cuttingboard.htm ?

My thought on that device is that it would make a much prettier temperature controller for a fridge/freezer, if you were wanting to keep an affinage space or a charcuiterie aging chamber... don't see the utility on the hot side any more. But Ranco and Johnson and heaps of cheapie Chinese PID controllers on Ebay are probably going to price undercut them.

These things bounce up and down in price... wait a bit and it will drop again.

Hmmm... since what you'd get out of a Newcastle is a bit of maltiness, you might just go to the source and grab some malt of the right variety from your local homebrew store and crush that and let it steep in some warm water and add that to your marinade. The recipes out there seem to call for Crystal 60L and Chocolate malts... I'd grab a half ounce of each, run them through a coffee grinder, put them in the bottom of a pint glass, and fill the glass up with water at 160F... stir it up, let it settle, and pour off the liquid into your marinade. That way you get the flavoring malts, but none of the booze. Maltas seem much too sweet for this purpose, as do malt syrups and powders... And I don't think you'll miss the hops in a marinade either...

Friendly with any bars with a Kold Draft machine? Hit them up and fill coolers with KD.

What is it that you recall disliking about gin? Is it bitterness? a particular flavor? American market gins aren't something to drink straight, so you need to pick your cocktail, and then figure out the gin to try in it. I'm a fan of the Pegu Club family of drinks... gin, something sweet fruity and syrupy, some bitters and some citrus juice. I find that something with as muted a flavor profile as Bombay Sapphire doesn't work there... but a really christmas-tree-flavored gin like Beefeater plays very well. Your mileage may vary, of course.

This strikes me as a recipe for disaster. Has the OP ever experienced these alternative ingredients at all? Given OP's level of circumlocution, I'm going to join mjx's speculation that this is some sort of project with a "free the cute farm animals and eat insect larvae instead, like our Polynesian forebearers did" kind of spin to it. Unless you've got detailed preparation instructions for wichetty grubs or sago worms that get rid of the unexpectedly crunchy bits, you're not going to fare well. "In theory, they should be delicious and nutritious" isn't an acceptable answer.

The reunion effect on this thread is nice... pity it took something like this to make it happen. Raising a glass to Steven this evening in honor of his community building prowess.

A fine man and a great companion when sampling the food court at Mitsuwa. RIP FG.

Damn. RIP, FG.