Yiannos

Not sure what the texture will be like afterwards, but can you wrap it well and then freeze it for a week? I just can't imagine that long in the fridge for most any freshly prepared pastry, but I am not an expert so hopefully someone with more experience will chime in.

I'm not an expert by any stretch but it sounds like it's possible you don't have a good seal? I remember running the initial test on mine but do not remember any distinct boiling sounds, I'm wondering if yours is not sealing right and so unable to build the pressure needed to tamp down the water action.

I live in one of those shopping center/auto mall sort of towns (Roseville, CA) and it is shocking what the saturation of chains has done to our favorite local restaurants in the past couple of years. Just around the corner from me was a great little Japanese place, Kenro's, that closed last July I think it was, because their lease skyrocketed when it went up for renewal and they couldn't afford to keep the restaurant open. Directly across on the opposite corner, our favorite Mexican place, La Familia Taqueria, closed not long after for the same exact reason. There is now a chain in the same center, Moe's Southwestern or something that "replaces" it. We have had dinner there once and it was not great. I am not very hard to please, will even enjoy fast food here and there with the kids but this was so disappointing, especially when we thought about what we had in the same spot not a few months before. I have heard that property owners can make much more money should a chain set up shop, and so are making it hard for the smaller businesses to stay in place. We still have a couple of good Chinese restaurants nearby, and something called Curry Paradise has replaced Kenro's which I am actually hopeful for, some good Indian food would be great as opposed to whatever the next fast/casual food thing is that comes along. I'd say a good 90% if not more of the restaurants around here are now chains of one sort or another. The area I describe above has a McDonald's, KFC/A&W (two in one building!), Subway, Jimboy's, Moe's Southwestern, Little Caeser's, Pizza Hut, Panda Express, L&L Hawaiian BBQ, and of course Starbucks spread through the four corners of the intersection, within walking distance of each other, with a Wienerschnitzel a street down just because. As busy as this area is, I do not see how they can keep all of these restaurants in the black on a daily basis, but somehow McDonald's saw the need to install a second lane in the drive through so there you go. I'm not some crazy old curmudgeon or anything (yet), but this is insane and depressing, every corner around here has that same generic sterility about it, and you can just feel that it would be very difficult if not impossible for most small places to compete with the huge companies opening up these shit shacks every other day.

Top Gear is one of my favorite shows of all time, I hope you will share any tidbits you have after the premiere date! I'm really excited to see what they came up with having the BBC leashes off coupled with an apparently gigantic budget. Wait, isn't this a cooking website?

Watching the Bake Off always inspires me to get into the kitchen and bake, something I don't do a lot of. For someone like me who is not anywhere near a pro, it is wonderful to see talented home bakers produce some truly remarkable food. Despite being not at all as capable as those nice people, the show has a way of stirring that "Hey! I can do that!" feeling which so often propels me towards my mixer and bowls. More often than not it's because I have never tried or even heard of some of the things they make, that discovery of something new through patient and diligent work is appealing to me. I am sad to see the group break up, that ensemble is a huge part of the draw, all that dry British wit and innuendo takes it from great baking show to great hour of entertainment. It feels like the same thing that happened to Top Gear, but at least that group was able to tent up at Amazon and continue their style of television albeit under a different name. I think the finale next week will be bittersweet...

Thanks @Anna N, I actually found a portable induction top at Costco the other day for I think $70 or so, might pick one up to play with it and get a feel.

@Anna N do you consider your induction cooktop an adequate substitute for the temp control you might have with gas? I am in the process of moving and one of my must-haves is a natural gas hookup after living with electric for much too long. We are having trouble finding a home with gas at all in the area and were considering induction but did not want to get stuck with something we couldn't change after committing to a house. I've never cooked on an inductive top and am curious how you feel it might compare to gas.

I have to confess, the main reason I bought this book is how can I not buy a cookbook with an entire chapter devoted to watermelon?

I've thought about picking up that King Arthur spray before, but was sort of put off by it being made up of partially hydrogenated oils which include trans fats and are terrible for you. I wonder if using oil processed this way is why it works so well?

Wonderful wonderful post, thank you for the unique insight.

That cooking spray has been overheated and has now become polymerized. When it has happened to my cast iron before, the remedy is to put it in a very hot oven to burn it all off and re-season. I'm not positive what you would do for aluminum, my sheet pans get it here and there and I just leave it, it should not affect your cooking. You can maybe try something agressive/abrasive on it (ala Bar Keepers friend or maybe some aluminum polish) but I've had bad luck with aluminum oxidizing occasionally on some of those deep cleanings, which is much worse to me (black residue that rubs off everywhere). I'm sure someone will chime in with some better suggestions but I'm not positive there is much to be done once the oil has reached the point of being polymerized.

Is this for prime, choice, select, or other? Because if it is one of the first two that is pretty cheap.

These sort of remind me of those century eggs, but I am thrown off by the shape.

Thank you all for the enthusiastic comments on this book, some of these recipes sound wonderful and unique. Like a lot of you I don't need another cookbook on the shelf but this one sounds great, I appreciate discovering it here through all of you.

Because now I can't stop thinking about these, black bean noodles? I was thinking maybe squid ink but seemed to obvious, so my second guess is black beans.

Bun rice noodles? I've found some black ones digging around online, they look similar but the way yours are laid out makes it a little hard to compare length, etc. I should add I think they are Vietnamese...

I know the book is satire, and pardon my French, but I believe that a real man eats whatever the fuck he wants. A vote for quiche from me, also a good meal to make in a pinch, using leftovers and other randoms from around the fridge.

I have a bottle of Coquerel Calvados sitting around that I have used for both French Apple Cakes as well as things like applesauce etc. I don't think it is the best, it was just the best our grocery store had when I bought it, but for both of those applications it fit the bill perfectly. I'm not sure I'd use it to sip like a fine brandy, there are probably other much better Calvados out there for that, but the Coquerel I think is readily available, not too expensive, and is fine for cooking.

Yesssssss you said the G word, welcome!

Beethoven, my man!

When I make pastitsio (a Greek lasagna-type casserole), I use these long thick cylindrical noodles which you keep as intact as possible while cooking and then lay down lengthwise inside the dish as you layer the other ingredients on top. Think lengths of uncut macaroni. These that you've found are really interesting to me, instead of the tunnels inside the regular stuff soaking up the sauce, making it with these I would think the sauce would settle into the spirals instead, which would be an interesting play on the taste of the dish, not to mention the different texture from the heartier pasta.

The one thing holding me back from getting a Nespresso machine is Nestlé's apparent lack of a moral compass when it comes to drinking water. The machine is supposed to be great, is very cheap at the local Costco, but I somehow feel one of the few ways to really send a message anymore is with your wallet. Especially living in California with the drought, I just can't bring myself to send $ Nestlé's way.

While on vacation this summer, my family and I had lunch at San Juan Island Cheese and our dessert included a pair of chocolate and cheese truffles, one a blue and the other goat cheese. I was skeptical, almost passing on them in favor of something else, but I said screw it why not, and they were both amazing. The cheese was not the star of the show, but each type added it's own character to the chocolate taking it from great to spectacular. The blue was so so creamy and a touch salty, while the goat added salt and a slight funkiness that married perfectly to the sweetness of the chocolate. Some of the best chocolates I have ever had, even thinking about them now I want to get in the kitchen and experiment with the cheese/chocolate thing.

Here's an NPR article about them, sound really interesting!

If it is already the norm to store apples for a long time before selling, which I totally understand, and we already have ways of storing prepared apple with little to no oxidation using inert gas as Lisa Shock mentioned, then why is this genetic modification being done at all? I'm not trying to start an argument here or anything, but is there any other reason to do this outside of removing visual clues the consumer might use to second guess the quality of a product on a shelf?