Thanks for the Crepes

Thank @shain, I'm sure I can make your version for less than $1.00 US per oz. I even have all the ingredients. I just never thought to combine them in that particular way. Bookmarked! I did not care for the anise either, so that is good news to me, and brown butter is appealing too. I like the fact too that I might be able to make small amounts to be used at once in my mortar and pestle.

Trop belle comme d'habitude!

Baby sugar cane shoots?

Well I respect your opinions on nitrate/nitrite, @scubadoo97 and @dscheidt. I suppose the marketing "scam" as you all perceive it, is due to folks like me who are more comfortable eating celery juice or extract than I am with something the food chemists and bean counters have been turned loose on. I don't aspire to become a food chemist; I just want affordable, wholesome, safe food, made from plant and animal products I don't have to be afraid of. TJ's is a great help with that. For all I know, they may indeed be getting more concentrated and processed nitrates from celery, but as long as they don't explain it to me, I automatically don't trust it. I'm not alone, and that's why "uncured" products are appearing in even mainstream grocers. As far as I'm concerned, good, less processed, better food is becoming more popular and available because the more people that want to know what is in what they are eating, the cheaper it becomes. I just don't see how that could be a bad thing.

Cool, now I see how no one can pronounce "Worcestershire sauce" consistently. How do y'all locals say that one?

@shain, I like your breakfast a lot! I was unfamiliar with dukkah, so Googled. If this version is anywhere near the authentic thing, I might even be able to get it here, along with a lot of others in the USA. What do you think about their formulation? It also seems a bit pricey for what goes into it. Is that normal where you are? Perhaps you make your own and would share your ingredients and method? I would appreciate any thoughts you have on it.

@sartoric, Your seaside fish and chips lunch looks like such good time to me! @liuzhou, Yours does too. If it's the right place, "All restaurant prices include bread, butter, and one hot drink". Okay, now I really want fish and chips.

Hi teapot, Thanks for starting this very interesting discussion. I'm no scientist, but the answer to your question I quoted is absolutely not. If a warped flat bottomed pan is a problem, don't you think the tiny contact area of a round wok would? I know your question was born of wishful/magical thinking, but it sure would be nice, wouldn't it? I love a round wok too, but I have learned to work around it with a conventional electric stove and a very heavy KitchenAid stainless tri-ply bottom skillet that is oversized with high rounded sides. I bought it when I was younger, and the weight is beginning to be a challenge, but I still pull it out for stir fries. I also love the ideas that have been brought up about the portable wok burners that are available in my Pan Asian market. There are so many good ideas here, including the super output outdoor propane wok burners. When there is a will to cook, one will find a way.

We had fresh ground-at-the-store today chuck burgers. I usually go with the mayo, onion, lettuce, tomato kind like my husband had. Today, I was in the mood for a plainer one with just a little mustard and thin slivers of white onion. If I haven't had a good, fresh and freshly cooked burger in a while, sometimes I won't put anything but salt and pepper on it while cooking, deglaze the pan with a little water, and pour that over it on a bun with no toppings at all. It's all good! He had colby-jack melted on his burger with tater tots. I had melty white American (the good kind from the deli) and a big green leaf lettuce and tomato salad with lemon tahini dressing as my side.

I cooked up a Crock Pot of pinto beans all day with a pork blade steak, onion and jalapeno. Three or four hours before dinner, I added a little more onion and a couple more chopped jalapenos and adjusted the salt. By this time all it took was stirring in the additions to shred the meat off the bone. At dinner time, I made a pan of rosemary/olive oil cornbread. Man, this was a really good dinner!

Hi @Saturable! Glad to see you here, and I'm looking forward to hearing about what you get up to in the kitchen.

Part of the current trend of quality and service drop for the same or higher prices. I feel really sorry for kids today. At least I have my memories. They won't. I still hope things will start looking up, but who the hell am I kidding? Customer service, and pride in one's work seems to have been mostly replaced by contempt for the customer no matter how much they are paying. Great customer service still seems to be available when you grossly overpay, but how many of us can afford to do that?

Yes, I love the floral and/or vegetal notes of some peppers, and I enjoy the heat up to a limit. I do not have anything to prove either, and can't imagine intentionally subjecting myself to unpleasantness or pain. I can get Habaneros and Scotch Bonnets sometimes, and some of your descriptions about stuffed ones have intrigued me. I would have dismissed them as too hot earlier. I will not be calling them by @Tri2Cook's colorful sobriquet. I will have to taste it first to see if it's appropriate to my husband's heat tolerance, and I strongly suspect it won't be. The OP is very sad. I wish people (mostly men) would quit doing "food challenges". A ruptured esophagus is a danger bulimics face, along with severe alcoholics and is often fatal. I hope the fellow is able to recover well.

I have to be thrifty, and so I will refrigerate a cut half of a large tomato. I agree with those who say that I will compromise flavor for the sake of not wasting it altogether. Now to persuade my Asian market to put their tomatoes over with the onions, potatoes, several varieties of sweet potato, ginger, etc, which is not in their fridge case. They don't even fridge their Napa or regular cabbages, but all tomatoes are in the cold case. I don't buy tomatoes there if I can possibly get out of it. I have picked up a few refrigerated Romas for green pepper steak, because they have all the other ingredients if I can't get to the regular grocery or one of the other ethnic markets that do not refrigerate tomatoes. I cannot think of another grocer that does this, in fact. But yeah, @Wayne has a very good point about tomato seeds surviving freezes over the winter just fine. Who hasn't had volunteers come up in spring from the compost pile? I can't explain or intelligently debate the science, but for my tastes, maters need to stay out of cold storage.

I made stuffed butternut squash out of the halved bulbous end where the seed cavity is. The stuffing was pork sausage, celery and white onion sauteed in some butter, and then combined with toasted bread slices cut into cubes and further dried in the oven. The stuffing was seasoned with ground sage and parsley, and moistened with chicken stock from the freezer. I had too much stuffing, so heated some alongside in individual casseroles as the stuffed squash baked. The squash was nuked to softness before stuffing and baking, and everything was put together hot, so I just heated everything for 20 minutes at 350 F/177 C. We also had a Greek salad with the last of the Romaine and feta. The salad and squash were great to me, but the stuffing was too meat heavy for my tastes. I'm making pancakes with warm maple syrup for tomorrow's dinner. I don't see how I can mess that up, but lately, I have been finding ways to mess up foolproof stuff, so we shall see. P.S. - I had to throw out the first batch of bread cubes after not really burning them, but when I tasted them they were bitter. See what I mean about messing stuff up?

@Wayne, I would be interested to hear your impressions. I will say this, I had not heard of Jonathan Gold either, but now I'm very interested to read his writings. I think that may be where he shines.

I just watched this, thanks to your heads up. Mr. Gold comes off as a not very likeable character. To start with, he has a face (and body) perfect for radio or writing. Then we see him in his home talking about what a procrastinator he is. This is filmed with him filling up his double-wide arm chair. His sister/manager says how frustrating it is to work with him. In Jonathan's own words, he tells his sister he needs a "cattle prod" to finish the piece. His brother (an environmentalist) is frustrated that M. Gold by his own words, "eats everything, I'm trying to save". Although, to Jonathan's credit, he did come down on the side that "finning" sharks for soup was a bad idea. It helps draw the viewer in that the protagonist is an appreciator of art, music and books, and takes his research seriously. Apparently, he's a talented cello player, in both classical and punk rock. There is WAY too much hip hop dancing for my taste. There are too many segments of Mr. Gold driving in LA, In his own words, "the single most polluting vehicle" according to Consumer Reports. Some of these segments are teasers for food lovers, as he drives by with a shot of the restaurant facade only, without a stop in for any food footage. Not endearing. Some of the actual food footage is bereft of descriptions of any kind. There is footage of a Oaxacan restaurant with something that looks a little like a pizza made on what I think? might me a really giant flour tortilla, but we won't know from this video. I also did not like the fact that so much time was devoted to the 1996 LA riots over Rodney King, but in the closing segment, where Jonathan Gold reads an essay he wrote you can see what the big deal over his writing is. His fawning fans eat this up. It's more a movie about a Pulitzer Prize winner than it is about food, but devoted fans of Jonathan Gold will love it. There are a few good food segments as well. YMMV

@Dejah, I'm sorry about your dinner, but it is so nice that you help out your family.

Maybe something like this. When celery or leaf lettuce ages in the fridge, deprived of light, it tends to curve upward seeking light. I think asparagus will do this too. Celery keeps a long time compared to more fragile veggies, it's even used as a preservative in "uncured" meats because of the naturally occurring nitrates. As someone without a car, who can't just pop out to the grocery for something on a whim, I have some aged celery in the fridge right now. I will use it cooked in a dressing/stuffing tomorrow for dinner. I have a romaine heart going Chernobyl too. It will also get used, and it's time to press my reluctant driver into grocery shuttle service. What a nightmare, though to have to put in so much extra prep time on substandard produce, which is time-consuming enough in the best case scenario, for a huge dinner prep on the scale @Porthosis dealing with! I admire his restraint and reason.

Yes, we have a destination restaurant at the Umstead Hotel and Spa called Herons here in little old Cary. It's too pricey for me, so I have no personal experience with either the hotel or restaurant. I bet this is the sort of place the culinary students who prompted this discussion aspire to though. There are other exceptions all over the globe, but they are for the moneyed few. In the larger reality, after paying 3 times what one would normally pay for a better meal for a pretty terrible burger and fries in a Holiday Inn we were staying at, we vowed to not eat at a hotel restaurant again. There was no question at all about why we were the only guests in the restaurant at prime lunch hour. This place was not making money that day, with more staff than guests. So, yes, hotel restaurants can vary all over the spectrum, but for us 99 percenters, the ones we can afford are pretty bad, and I can't imagine anyone attaching their dreams to working at the majority of them.

I haven't used beef neckbones and I don't have an Instant Pot, but I have made many a pot of beans cooked up with pork neckbones. I would not go the trouble to remove the meat first, but add them whole to the stew. When cooked, the meat just slides off and shreds easily. The cartilage in the discs make for a rich, gelatinous broth too. There's a recipe for stewed beef neck tacos on Serious Eats.

@Shelby, Do you like jalapeno poppers? You could make some and freeze for handy apps.

Fascinating! I kept watching the linked videos on YouTube long enough to see that the fine threads are hand pulled sugar syrup done like Chinese hand pulled noodles, the process/recipe is at least 2,000 years old and is also popular in Japan. I never, in my wildest imagination, have ever conceived that you could make a cotton candy-like product without the machine. Very cool! If you are interested, wait for about the third auto-load video where the sugar puller describes in English what he's doing, and the exponential math that makes it work. He makes it look so easy, but I'm sure from reading the I Will Never Again ... thread, that any attempt by me would probably result in a trip to the emergency room before I ever got to the pulling step.

Since the meat eater had leftover rib eye steak to keep him happy, I was able to make a rare venture into vegetarian land to make something I wanted. I had been thinking about a butternut squash I had, and how it might make a tasty pasta dish. I knew I did not want chicken broth in the mix because I don't care for it in soup. When I found nothing I wanted to make in my cookbooks, I went hunting on the web, and decided to do this one. I had no fresh sage leaves, which would have been nice, so I used the ground dried sage I did have. I has worried that it would muddy the color too much, but the bright squash was not easily dimmed, and the color was fine. I thought I might not like the garlic element, but did it anyway, so as to keep to the recipe. I won't use garlic again with butternut, but that's just me. I knew enough not to use whole wheat pasta, and subbed in regular Barilla thin spaghetti. Overall, it was interesting and worth trying. But you know what? I found myself wishing for plain butternut nuked and mashed in the skin, with butter and salt like I usually do it, with a side of thin spaghetti with butter, parm and crushed red pepper. I have simple tastes.