slkinsey

There are "a lot" of variables, though, including portion size. Most people don't drink 20-ounce servings of coffee, whereas that's pretty standard for iced tea. And how long you steep it, the type of tea, etc., all affect caffeine levels as well. Exactly. Looking at the numbers I just quoted, a 20 ounce iced tea could easily provide 400 mg of caffeine... perhaps more considering that tea for iced tea is often brewed longer and stronger than tea for hot tea.

This page says: Double espresso (2oz) 45-100 mg Brewed coffee (1 cup) 60-120 mg Instant coffee (1 cup) 70 mg Decaf coffee (1 cup) 1-5 mg Tea (1 cup) 40 mg Cola (12 oz can) 38-45 mg Chocolate milk (1 cup) 4 mg Dark chocolate (1 oz) 20 mg Milk chocolate (1 oz) 6 mg This other page says: NoDoz - 2 doses - 200 mg Coffee Drip - 5 oz - 110-150 mg Excedrin - 2 doses - 130 mg Jolt - 12 oz - 100.0 mg Anacin - 2 doses - 64 mg Coffee Perk - 5 oz - 60-125 mg Mountain Dew - 12 oz - 55.0 mg Tab - 12 oz - 46.8 mg Coca-Cola - 12 oz - 45.6 mg Coffee Instant - 5 oz - 40 - 105 mg Tea, 5 min. steep - 5 oz - 40-100 mg Dr. Pepper - 12 oz - 39.6 mg Pepsi Cola - 12 oz - 37.2 mg Espresso - 1 shot - 30-40 mg Tea, 3 min. steep - 5 oz - 20-50 mg Chocolate - 1 oz - 1-35 mg Decaf Coffee - 5 oz - 2-5 mg 7 Up - 12 oz - 0 mg

Do all teas contain caffeine? I thought herbals didn't. FG, I think I would agree that the non-tea-based Snapple drinks are probably caffeine free. KNorthrup, I think the Fat One was referring to infusions made from the leaves of the tea plant, rather than infusions made from other plants.

YES, that is the case at a university where you would want to be with your intellectual equals or superiors, but cooking school is skill and labour, brains and intellect have nothing to do with it. Huh? You sure you don't want to rethink that? Also, it's not necessarily only a question of "brains and intellect." There are also the elements of dedication, motivation, talent, experience, hard work, etc. Wouldn't you also want to be in a class where your colleagues were as dedicated, motivated, talented and hard working as you... if not moreso? Do you think it would be better to be in a class of cooking students who were all busting their asses 24/7, competing with and helping each other to attain higher and higher levels of proficiency and excellence... or in a class where 50% of the people weren't putting it all on the line? Which one do you think would be more condusive to acquiring the skills and expertise necessary for professional cooking? Do you think it would be better to attend a cooking school that was extremely rigorous and where students had to earn their diplomas by passing difficult examinations relevant to professional cooking, and which not all students are able to pass... or to attend a school where most any student who ponys up the money and slogs through class can say they are a "graduate?" Which diploma do you think is likely to be taken more seriously by the profession? I know which one I'd choose.

A lot of lefties put the knife in their left hand and the fork in their right. When eating with a knife and fork the elbow of the knife hand will naturally stick out somewhat when cutting, whereas the elbow of the fork hand tends to stay closer to the side. If you get a righty sitting to the left of a lefty, the inevitable result is a collision of elbows whenever they use their knives to cut at the same time. This can be mitigated, of course, by having both diners keep their elbows at their sides while cutting (which may be better table manners anyway), but in actual practice this rarely happens and some diners may find it unnecessarily restricting.

Steve, why? Why and how would that change a school for performing arts? Or the culinary school for that matter? It wouldn't change a public high school for the performing arts much, because they are not necessarily designed for students who are going to pursue a career in the performing arts so much as they are there to help the students develop their performing abilities as much as possible no matter to what end. Think of it this way... what if Julliard filled up with a bunch of amateur violinists who could play OK but didn't want to become professional musicians? What if one of those elite tennis programs filled up with players who were good but didn't plan on turning pro? You can't tell me that those schools wouldn't fundamentally change. I can't believe that an adult who does not aspire to be a professional violinist is going to spend 5 hours a day in a practice room hammering out his chops. No serious amateur tennis player is going to spend 5 hours a day on the courtsand sacrifice social and home life to train. Likewise, I can't see a non-career-track culinary student spending hour after blistering hour turning potatoes until it is just right. The point is that there are sacrifices an aspiring professional is willing to make, and there are lengths to which an aspiring professional is willing to go that 99% of "civilians" won't. To make a hypothetical example, I could see an aspiring professional cook at cooking school staying up at school until the wee hours of the morning turning potatoes and practicing because he has been told that he won't pass on to the next level unless he makes a certain grade turning potatoes. I could also see an amateur chef in the same class saying, "fuck this, I don't care if they give me the diploma or not... what use is turning potatoes to me?" Putting these two students together in a classsoom is going to make a difference. One thing my father, a life-long academic, told me once about college admissions standards is this: the reason Harvard and MIT (et al.) set their admissions standards so high is that a big part of the reason an elite student would want to go to these schools is to have the privilege of working alongside other students at a high level. It is not the case that an intro level English class at Yale is somehow "better" at teaching English than an intro level English class at Brooklyn College. It may be more rigorous and challenging at Yale, but that is completely determined by the composition of the student body.

I have always understood that, unless a soft drink lists "caffeine" on the ingredient list, it doesn't have added caffeine. Whether or not there may be some natural caffeine may be an issue, but I don't think it is a huge one. I'd stay away from coffee or tea-based drinks. Something like Fresca, for instance... I don't think they make a big deal out of the fact that it doesn't contain caffeine, but it doesn't. Similarly, I think that regular Barq's root beer contains caffeine while the diet version does not. As I recall, I only discovered this by comparing the ingredient lists. I know a number of serious Mormons (serious enough to have "temple recommends") who, as you may well imagine, do not take any caffeine. AFAIK, they don't worry about drinking sodas that do not list caffeine as an ingredient.

Oh, I don't disagree; nor with your premise. It just surprised me that the median was so low. And, believe me, I know that 99% of law firm lawyers completely hate their jobs.

Of course they do... unless the school decides they do not want to admit them. Then they don't. No one has the "right" to attend a private educational institution. But I think here we are discussing institutions that ARE allowing them. Obviously it would exclude the ones that don't admit them. Both of these things are up to the institution. Ultimately, that is how schools make their reputations... how selective is admission? how rigorous is the course of study/instruction? how hard is it to make the grade and stay in? what quality are they producing? If a cooking school is really interested in turning out top-level graduates who will be taken seriously, if they want their diploma to be accorded weight and significance, then they are well-advised to attend to the above described matters. If not... well, then that will be reflected in their reputation. If a cooking school is able to train prospective professional cooks to an exceptionally high level and also attract/retain paying amateurs to the same classes without compromising the focus of the curriculum and its rigor, then all the more power to them. This does not seem to be the case, and I gather that cooking school diplomas are not highly valued and respected in the business. That said, a professional cooking school ought to be able to administer some kind of test or evaluation that will determine whether those who have participated in its course of study are entitled to the diploma or to advance to the next higher course of study. Then the diploma might really mean something. Of course, such a practice would tend to turn off paying amateurs, so...

Is it really that low? I have an occasional day job (the arts market being what it is) at a mid-sized but certainly not top-shelf NYC law firm... and I happen to know that the first-years make over $100k/year. And I also know that this is not considered an extravagant salary in the biz. Of course, your figure may reflect the fact that there are way too many law schools turning out way too many lawyers and the business is so glutted that the median is being pulled down by the people who end up working for podunk practices in little midwestern towns.

Of course they do... unless the school decides they do not want to admit them. Then they don't. No one has the "right" to attend a private educational institution.

Oh, yes they do. See an example here from MIT's graduate program of economics. It's the same competitive environment for same basic end result. Um... that's why I said chemistry and not economics. The Econ Department at MIT specially offers a placement service. Not exactly quite the same thing I was talking about. The Law School at Harvard also may talk about the placement percentage and starting salaries for their graduates, but I very much doubt that the History Department there is doing so. Not that this in any affects my comparison of a pure academic setting and a vocational training program.

But how would such a school make this determination? And when would this happen? Wouldn't the applicants lie? At what point does it become painfully obvious that the student/applicant has no desire whatsoever to pursue a career in that trade? I knew after 2 years of graduate school that I didn't want to spend my live developing a humpback over a lab bench, but they let me stay in the program anyhow, and finally let me get my Ph.D. And they were even paying me to attend and get credits. I'm glad they didn't kick me out. I just wonder how this determination of students' ultimate goals would be made. Obviously part of that determination has to be done by admission standards of some kind. Second, in a cooking school one would, I suppose, have to rely on the students' stated career goals and reasons for attending the school. The third part is to set the bar high and weed out students who do not meet the standard which has been set for them. This third bit is exactly what I would expect a hypothetical "American College of Bricklaying" to do. The big difference between your academic experience and a cooking school is that traditional pure academia is not a vocational school. They were not training you to get a job as a scientist -- that is not the aim of academia. The aim of academia is the pursuit of knowledge. They were helping you to be a scientist. Schools like MIT and Stanford don't go around touting the placement percentage of the graduates from their chemistry graduate programs. That's not the point. Doing the work and getting the degree is the point. Not everyone can go on to be a professional pure scientist.

Hmm... I'm coming late to this discussion, but I would not say that is strictly true. Not strictly true, but it is both a trend in education and, I believe, specifically true of culinary schools. I'm sure we could make a simple factual determination, though, by looking at some educational sites and seeing how many people matriculate and graduate at the culinary schools. I'll check the CIA site. You look somewhere else. Oh, I don't disagree with the basic tenor of your remark. I do think that it is generally true of academic institutions, and probably none the less true of cooking schools. That said, an institution with a reputation and high standard to maintain will aggressively weed out students who are not capable of meeting that standard. As you rightly state, this process starts with admissions. I don't see why this should not be the case for cooking schools. More to the point, I do not see any reason why a vocational school devoted to a particular occupation -- cooking, in this case -- should not limit the student body to people who are interested in pursuing that occupation.

Hmm... I'm coming late to this discussion, but I would not say that is strictly true. Some schools (I am thinking of top music schools in particular) are structured so that people without the proper motivation and/or talent are encouraged to drop the program or switch to a related course of study. Of course, many conservatories are affiliated with colleges or universities and they would often like for such students to pursue their interests there, but that does not change the fact that some conservatories have a fairly low graduation rate. To make an example from my own experience, I went to my undergrduate school specifically so I could do a double degree program (went 5 years, graduated with a BM in voice performance and a BA in psychology). When I was a freshman, there were around 30 of us in the double degree program. When I graduated, there were 4 of us left who went double degree all the way to completion. I would estimate that the rate of graduation in the conservatory was around 30% to 40%, and the percentage of freshman performance majors who graduated with performance degrees was even less. I was given to understand that these percentages were not all that unusual. Since a music school is essentially a vocational school (as distinct from a liberal arts school) it seems fairly directly comparable to a professional cooking school. This is to say that the main thrust of these schools is to prepare students to make a living as professional musicians (insofar as this is possible in today's arts economy) or professional cooks. Music schools do not typically accept amateurs or people who are not interested in pursuing a professional life in music into their regular curriculum, and I don't see why cooking schools would either. Most music schools have a "continuing education" division for that kind of thing, and I don't see any reason why a cooking school wouldn't as well.

Looking at your list, you could almost make the one kind of "alternative" pizza I can stand: fig, gorgonzola and ruccola.

I have enjoyed iced tea brewed from rooibos, a South African herb.

(Reads detailed instructions.) This is easier than burying a pig in a firepit, forgetting about it and digging it up 12 hours later?

You are?! DAMN IT! There goes my weight loss strategy!

I'm not sure we are exactly on the same page, because I don't exactly understand what you mean. As i understand it the efficiency of turning these things into fat is always relevant, no matter if you take fat in or not. The amount of fat the body can store seems to be endless. So if you take in excess fat it will be turned into fat, and if you take in carbs and protein in excess of what your body can store/use in those forms then it should be converted to fat by this ineffecient process. OK... let me see if I can explain myself better here... Let's say that an adult male burns 2,000 calories/day but eats 2,400 calories a day. We both agree that he will gain weight. Now, let us further say that this guy's diet is such that he takes his calories from the following sources: 800 from fat, 800 from carbohydrates and 800 from protein. So, there are two different ways of looking at the "extra" 400 calories... We can think of it as 133 calories each from carbs, fat and protein, in which case the extra calories would be converted into around 297 calories (129 from fat at 95% efficiency, 102 from carbs at 77% efficiency, 66 from protein at 50% efficiency) of stored fat. But, is there reason to suppose that the body would go that route? If there is plentiful dietary fat around (which there almost always is), why wouldn't the body simply do the most efficient thing and convert 400 calories of dietary fat into 380 calories of stored fat? My reading of what you are saying is that the body has a separate requirement for fat, carbohydrates and protein respectively and that any calories beyond those requirement are converted into fat according to the efficiencies you quantified. Except, obviously we know that this doesn't happen in the case of a hypocaloric diet where the individual eats more than the required amount of protein, for example, so the "extra" protein calories would have to be turned into something else and used, right? That's where I get confused. Given that the body seems to be able to use excess protein (or carbs or whatever) for something other than fat storage, why wouldn't the body choose the most efficient thing in and use dietary fat as the main source of calories for stored fat? Thanks for offering your expertise on these things, by the way. Is this kind of thing part of your profession or field of academics? So this assumes approximately 87.5% efficiency in converting extra calories from a mixed diet into stored fat. It strikes me, however, that the amount of dietary fat would not have to be all that high for this efficiency to come up a few percentage points. In the real world, of course, there is not much difference between 4000 calories turning into 1 pound of fat and 3500 calories turning into one pound of fat. If one's diet is consistently 250 calories over equilibrium (not a hard thing to do) it will take only two days more to salt away a pound of fat.

The first part of this is easy to explain when you understand that each pound of body mass burns off about 12 calories per day. So, for any given caloric intake there is an "equilibrium" weight where the calories consumed will equal the calories burned. I'll make an extremely simple example: Say you have a 200 pound male who burns off 2,400 calories a day (for the sake of simplicity we are going to assume that this person lies in bed all day long and does not burn off any calories from exercise). Further, suppose that this person normally consumes 2,520 calories a day -- 120 more than he burns. As we know, this person will gain weight. But once the person gets up to 210 pounds, he will stop gaining weight because he is consuming the same number of calories he burns. This is because the extra ten pounds of body weight burns 120 calories/day. The reason people tend to stabilise at a certain weight is because they tend to consume/burn right around the same number of calories on a daily basis. Whether or not people are genetically predisposed to put on "excess" weight... it seems fairly clear that some are. The mechanism by which this happens is not entirely clear, however, to me at least.

I learn something new every day. I've always used the terms interchangeably; I've never heard anybody make the distinction, which seems entirely obvious now that you've said it. What I have is all black/blue steel, but I've always referred to it as carbon steel, blue steel, French steel, black metal, whatever -- never made any distinctions. Yeah... according to "The Well-Tooled Kitchen" they're different. The blue/black kind are annealed. I don't know if that makes them harder or not. Your link to Gaspary's Kitchen & Home Products has different listings for black, blue and carbon steel pans. How different they are, I really don't know. What I can say about mine is that they were definitely not black or blue when I got them, so I have assumed they are regular old unannealed carbon steel. They are quite soft -- easily scratched with a Scotch Brite pad.

Ah! Very interesting. Thank you for making that explanation, as that clears up quite a bit. Just to be sure that we're on the same page, it would seem that the efficiency of turning these things into fat is only relevant to losing/gaining weight if the person consumes practically no fat. Otherwise, the body will simply store excess calories by converting dietary fat to fat storage, which is extremely efficient -- yes/no? So, basically what this information tells us is that, if you are going to consume excess calories, it is better from a weight maintenance standpoint if you eat zero fat and high protein so you make your body burn the maximum number of calories converting the protein to stored fat. Wouldn't this tend to suggest that the best diet for fat loss would be a zero fat, high protein, moderate carbohydrate diet?

I scour my cast-iron after each use. I'm sure you do. So do I. That's why I said "scour out and restart the seasoning" instead of just "scour." Look... if you think they season just like cast iron, then I guess we have a difference of opinion there. My carbon steel pans are soft enough that I can easily scour the seasoning pretty much completely off with a Scotch Brite pad. I do not find this to be the case with my cast iron pans, nor would I want it to be. Maybe my pans are softer than yours, or maybe you treat yours differently than I do mine, or maybe I treat my cast iron differently. Who knows? I know that carbon (aka "mild") steel is different from black (aka "blue") steel, which is annealed. Maybe we don't have quite the same kind of pan.

I did the "whole pig buried in a big hole in the back yard" thing when I catered a friend's wedding in Arizona. Lot of fun, not too hard, and delicious results. We stuffed ours with sage and rosemary for the roast. Served it with a balsamic reduction, fire-roasted fennel and soft polenta with stracchino. Two web sites that may be of interest to you are: The Team Mumu Pit Cooking Page and Pig Roast and BBQ Links