jsolomon

Servers who describe a wine I ask about as "yummy" or "popular". The last time I tasted popular, I was dating a gymnast and accidentally got her hair in my mouth. The flavor of her hair spray is forever burned in my brain as the flavor of "popular". Blecch. People and places that treat wines like a social, political, economic, or classist statement. But my biggest problem? The double standard America has with drinking and drinks. It's like we're just asking for problems.

Hasenpfeffer!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Gads, that brings memories of Yosemite Sam!

Twinkies and beer. Special brownies. Cornbread and honeybutter. Berries, sugar, and cream. Rhubarb upside-down cake (or muffins).

Fill a sink with hot water. Add dishsoap. Mix to froth. Wet a dishcloth in the hot soapy water. Wipe down all counter surfaces, rinsing the dishcloth often. Drain water. Repeat. The soap will remove a significant amount of the trail marker chemicals the ants will leave behind, and soap does not taste good to ants, so they try not to walk where there is soap residue. Also, soaps munge up their spiracles where they breathe, so wet soapy water suffocates them.

Lessee... rabbits Slower than me. Check. Smaller than me. Check. Dumber than me. Check. Pass the salt. I would suggest a braise in red wine (burgundy or similar) with carrots, onions, garlic, and some herbes de Provence. Don't worry, Thumper. It'll only be uncomfortable for a bit. And, the wine will get you all twitterpated.

A small batch of blackberry jam. Delish.

I suffer from nixtamalaise. I simpy can't get excited about hominy.

God bless cash transactions. Err, I mean, yeah! Let the ice cream man go!

My memories of them are chasing them down by running pell-mell a block or two. I earned that ice cream, dammit! And I'll defend to the death any child's opportunity to blithely run around and through traffic to get theirs, too. But, when will people learn? Exercise is more of the answer than cutting calories.

I usually make mine with duck, but whatever I have at hand can be delightful. Chicken, torn or roughly cubed. Skin, dark meat, little bits that tried to stick to the bones, it all goes in. Chopped onion, grated carrot, some shredded cheddar if I have it. Dash of worcestershire, drizzle of olive oil, dollop of mustard, and enough mayo to make it creamy, but only after I've ground several grinds of cracked black pepper over it. If I'm really feeling magnanimous, I'll also add some sriracha or tabasco, too.

Also, if you're going the oven thermometer route, don't go cheap and get one of those piece-of-shit bimetal types. They rarely come anywhere close to calibrated, and never keep any calibration they had. Get a liquid in glass or thermocouple model.

What're those? Seriously. I've never seen a leftover baked potato.

Make deviled taters! Roast halved potatoes. Cool, remove part of the center, similar to removing the yolk from a halved egg. Use the removed potatoes to make a zingy potato salad that you will then load back into the potato skins.

I have generally had the best luck with par-cooked potatoes of one form or another. Lately, I have taken to using my vegetable steamer to steam 3 or 4 potatoes at a time and then grating them with the largest holed grater I own... after they have cooled! Also, a hot pan is very important. You want the outside starch to go through its gelatinous phase and then crisp as quickly as possible to keep from sticking.

Hmm... there have been a lot of questions about this lately. Is there an eGCI course on grilling in the works? There is a Virtual Weber site on the web, just type "virtual weber" in your favorite search engine, and that site should come up. That should be a reasonable first help.

And being closely related to roaches? I can see it now, scene International Criminal Court, The Hague, Netherlands. PETA Practitioner: Your honor, this innocent lobster is guilty of nothing, and look at how it is killed. This is certainly a war crime. Anthony Bourdain: Pass the salt. Alton Brown: That electric chair is a unitasker. Death to the electric chair! Thomas Edison: I certainly hope that chair uses alternating current. It is much more deadly than direct current. Sandra Lee: I think this can be used on Krab! Rachel Ray: I wish this thing came in a perkier color, like red. You know, how lobsters' shells look when they're cooked? *giggle* Me: Give me the boiling water. I'm tired of this nonsense. Edit: stoopid pre-caffeinated spelling

Actually, that is sort of the antithesis of Jim. His main point, always, is that points don't matter, that there are many great wines that are affordable, and that beauty is all in the eye of the beholder and a meal with friends and good wine. I actually find Jim's writing to be the opposite of most wine writing. But, to each their own. Certainly I will agree with you whole heartedly on one thing--Jim's knowledge and experience are formidable. ← I think you read my comment wrong. I was using FloridaJim's wine writing as an example of reasonable wine writing/blogging. It just is a painful academic exercise for me to read about wine. Jim's writing style is perfectly acceptable. I just can't get into the subject matter.

Bloglines, Rojo, and others don't increase my reading speed. Nor do they increase my thinking speed, tolerance for abstruse prose, or limitations of liking run-on sentences and poor spelling. Also, I tend to find myself more likely to believe the wine taste of someone that I have experienced wine with. That just doesn't happen much because the wine bloggers' and wine writers' reviewed wines don't often make it here into the central hinterlands ("flyover" states for the painfully hip).

Epee, courtesy of Wikipedia I generally prefer the sabre. Here's my problem with most wine writing and blogging: there is a painfully high educational, chronological, and capital investment to keep up with either the blogs, or the actual consumption in the blogs. Take me, I like wine. I can marginally describe a particular wine. But, if I come across a reasonable wine description (take FloridaJim's on eG for example) I zone out. I can't finish it because it is mentally exhausting to actually recreate his tasting experience, or I don't have the knowledge to recreate his tasting experience, or the wine is totally out of my budget. I have rarely found much wine literature for me. Good wine salespeople can work with me well, and I well with them. But Wine Spectator, or wine blogs are completely inscrutible.

I think I just made the most disgusting coffee drink in existence. I wasn't paying attention, and had my melitta one-cup sitting on top of my breakfast/lunch mug (read: never-washed, oatmeal and ramen mug), and in my caffeine-reduced haze, I poured my hot water over my fresh grounds, and mixed my coffee into all of the detritus sitting in that dirty mug. I'm a little frightened to try my coffee. I have a second one, too. One morning, after a particularly rough night, I got some coffee from the store across the street from where the party ended, and as the coffee was bad, burnt, etc, I dumped about three spoonfuls of sugar in. But, the sugar was from the same bowl as the margarita salt. More undrinkable coffee. What sort of good-meaning problems have you had?

Hear, hear! As someone who works with true genetically engineered yeast, I am utterly convinced that there really isn't enough profit to be made at this point by using a genetically modified yeast to change your grape guts into wine. A typical yeast engineering contract we do is for a well-studied protein and runs well into the millions of dollars. All of these products are for medical purposes. I don't think you can legally get a basically unrefined product (it pains me to call wine unrefined, but I'm speaking in a chemical sense) created from genetically modified organisms into the US food supply. I have been wrong before, but I do not believe I am far from the truth here. Besides, making wine is close enough to magic for me, I don't want to start paying attention to the "man behind the curtain". However, a pure strain would be nice.

I tried that recipe and walked around all day with a Miracle Whip moustache. Honestly, I don't think the people I work with even notice me.

Ghee, a clarified butter, is really good to fry things in. You may even be able to find it in large amounts in a sufficiently well-stocked supermarket.

Umm for the first question, I moved in with a girl. Second question: no, but I did remove its sex organs, and I plan on cooking them and eating them. I'm a heartless bastard. I'll probably serve them with the mountain oysters I have in my freezer, and maybe some edible flowers, too. I'll just eat sex, sex, sex someday soon.

Since the "process" ultimately ends in us killing the animal, it's hard to argue with the statement? SB (so I try not to ) ← I think your statement is a non-sequitur. Like we, even though we dislike to admit it, everything that is alive will, eventually die. Many of these things will not only die, but be killed for their food. This is a simple fact that the food chain is a calorie funnel, and if you eat meat, you need a lot of pounds to make one pound of you. So, many wildebeests feed a lion, but a lion feeds few. Commericially grown animals, in the current paradigm of industrial food processing is a slightly different animal, but the truth is that were the animals raised in a more "natural" environment, they would still die. And, a killing floor's knock-gun is more humane (does that apply to animals that aren't human, really? And, even so, isn't it just a social construct?) than how a pack of wolves would bring down a bull or a cow? Recall that steers don't exist naturally. I think this protest is more a product of people thinking that you get food from the grocery store. They are completely divorced from the food production process. It's really sad. But, on a wonderful note, I found morels in my lawn last night! Yay!