jsolomon

Herbs, salt, butter wash, or bacon grease in the crust recipe always make for interesting crusts. Bacon in the pot pie is always welcome, too.

My mother and I also use hers for potato mashing, tomato juicing, sausage stuffing, meat grinding. They are not indispensable, but they are darned capable workhorses.

For those interested in the current crop of MRE menus, the Defense Logistics Agency has a list at this site.

You're right, you won't get fat on them. However, if you eat three in a day, you are in the realm of 2400-4500 Calories, which is a fairly substantial amount no matter who you are or what you are doing. Granted, 2400 is at the low end of the scale, and these numbers assume you're eating the WHOLE MRE, but you won't starve. Also, with Mayhaw Man's comment about there being no salt, if he looks at the nutrition information, those things have plenty of sodium already in there. Really, they do.

For all, REMF is not something I can post here, but POG (not poge, as I posted earlier) is, after consulting some of my old materials from my first enlistment, an acronym, contrary to what I just PM'ed Deborah--a thousand apologies! POG stands for Personnel Other than Grunt. Pog (pronounced poag) is a very insulting term. Just random military stuff. Move along.

Sadly, Tabasco is not included in every MRE. There are a couple out there (the hamburger, for instance) which could really be improved with some Tabasco. How someone "out in the field" or "down-range" would manage to put it together is a very complex task called rat-f**king. Rat being short for rations. None of the individual items is so large that it cannot fit in the cargo pocket of BDU's. In fact, you can keep two MRE's in a pair of BDU pants, one in each cargo pocket. As for putting it together, when out in the field, you usually eat in a catch-as-catch-can manner. The normal manner is as such: 1: Get the MRE issued 2: Open and inspect contents 3: Trade with unsuspecting REMFs and POGEs for the items you want/like and to get rid of the items you don't. 4: Place MRE items in rucksack, pockets, camelback, etc (if on foot) 5: When you have a few minutes where you're not required to do something, eat an item from the MRE. 6: Work 7: Repeat 5 and 6 until MRE is eaten or mission is done. As for what items you actually get in your MRE, each main entree has a specific group of sides that go with it. It's not random. And, in the last 10 years, there have been several changes to the MRE menus, as well as an increase in the number of menus. The main thing is, when you're hungry, they are good. You can also tell the people who've been working because they don't care if parts fall in the dirt. They'll pick 'em up and eat 'em anyway. And, each one is only intended as a replacement for one meal for a hard-working soldier. 800-1500 Calories is the range of the MRE menus. If you have to eat them, remember, they are high in protein and low in fiber.

If you're a bread baker, freeze them in one-cup portions and add to your bread dough. The yeast really go nuts over the starch in the potatoes. Potato bread is generally a more tender bread than many and goes particularly well with barbecue. Also, frozen you don't have to deal with them all immediately.

Sadly(?) I do look somewhat for the conservative flavors in my Cabernet and Bordeaux. I /like/ the flavors of leather, pencil lead, and steel in my deep reds. I drink those when I want a bedrock wine. Something solid and broad-shouldered. Kind of like Atlas in a glass. I also like a hint of unsweetened cocoa in mine. The flavor of daisy in the background is also somewhat nice. A little pine resin can please, too. The things that I don't really appreciate are red wines that roll over my tongue like an oak compound butter, or even a dark berry compound butter. I guess, if I were to really go for visual imagery, I would like my Cabernet or Bordeaux blends to taste more like Hercules if he had been turned to stone by a gorgon than the oak board of education at a boarding school after paddling a bunch of food fighters from breakfast.

I've heard rumors of people cooking lettuce. Is iceberg one that people have cooked successfully? If so, would you care to share some tips with a curious fellow?

Strange Brew is much older than Sideways...

I'm so special that my short bus has just 2 wheels.

If this were true, about the mesh getting jammed, a drip coffee maker would never work.

50% for me, 50% for eG?

Owen, You're right. Bodum does have the nifty nylon filter, but my experience, and likely yours, is that plastic, any plastic, really has a detrimental effect on the coffee's flavor. I know there are some really interesting filters out there, so I thought it might be a good experience to play with some of them, and see what I could see.

Could you give us a little more information on price range, and your general tastes or pairing for this red?

You bring up an interesting point. My fiance and I had a discussion last night about recreational intellectualism (me pro, her con). Basically, my view of intellectualism is that in U.S. society, it is generally frowned upon outside of the classroom or the workplace (depending on job). That may be why some people aren't drawn to wine, or at least aren't drawn to nuanced wines. OTOH, she likes wines, and is certainly willing to follow my journey through wines to discover fun wines.

I'm not sure where you found the stuff about the cardiovascular system. But, without glucose to help, fructose is absorbed very poorly by the gut, but your flora in the downstream ends of the gut like it plenty well. So, sometimes sensitive people who have a low-glucose, high fructose diet can have "internal reports" on the palatability of fructose. And, to support your assumption in your first paragraph, fructose is fructose. It has a definite chemical structure, and fructose from fruit, corn, or raw materials of C, H, and O will be completely indistinguishable chemically.

Champagne goes with anything. I suggest trying: Piper Sonoma or Bellefon. I came across a very charming Spanish sparkling Brut a month ago that escapes my memory. Remember: drink champagne (or any reasonable bubbly) for no reason. Edit to add: Cava Brut! That was the Spanish sparkler.

You can up the nutrition ante of this even more if you sub kale for spinach.

I can only speak for the midwest women that I've dated, but it seems to be, at least here, partially a self-assurance issue. Until the women have formed an aesthetic about some area like wine, they don't want to make a decision. *HUGE CAVEAT* That is only the women I have dated who fit in the midwest WASP mold happily. The two that I've dated that don't, acted differently about wine.

No, not even when we begged. In reality, I do agree that we should leave slaughtering to the experienced or the professionals, given that they are likely to cause the least suffering. However, that doesn't mean we shouldn't pay attention to what happens in that moment and all of the other moments leading up to it. It's all part and parcel of respecting your sources of nourishment. ← I disagree. In Home Economics courses, students are still taught how to sew to some extent, something which there are literally millions of professionals doing, yet there are still enough educational aspects of it to make it instructionally worthwhile in a public school. I think the same thing about our food supply. I'm not saying that for a class of 26, one should procure 26 bison, or hogs, or even chickens. However, 26 catfish, and then allow the students to watch for several other types of animals (say, a mammal and a fowl). I think it would give a very good area to tie multiple areas of study together: ethics, science, economics, history, sociology, psychology, and animal husbandry. A month of intense study on this one area would give significant real-life education to students, and I think we give short shrift to this type of education.

It exposed the meatpacking industry. It is about food. Do you think that some purveyors wiggle around the truth, or out and out fib? Well, I never. If you want to be absolutely sure something is done the way you want it, do it yourself. If you can't do it yourself, do your homework before you commit. ← I do my homework. I have read The Jungle. I grew up farming and ranching, and have fabricated both meat and plant foods from their raw materials (cows, chickens, pigs, sheep, fish, corn, wheat, morels, etc). And, The Jungle was more about the wholesale exploitation and dereliction of undereducated, poor-English-speaking immigrants than about the food packing industry. The meat packing area was just an meme in the book. Since the aim of the book wasn't directly at the meatpacking industry, I look at its uncoverings as somewhat spurious (although, they did hit home with many readers, correctly, or not).

Okay, I did some googling on fructose and these people say, which makes some sense, that HFCS is not pure fructose and water. It is a mixture of fructose and glucose (which makes chemical sense to me given the nature of the reaction of glucose to fructose) in water. The fructose and glucose stabilize each other in the solution so it doesn't crystallize at the saturation point. So, dried HFCS would have glucose in it, and glucose is necessary to carry fructose into the bloodstream. So, you may have to switch suppliers for your fructosen needs. I abolutely know that you can get equally pure fructose as you could sucrose (table sugar). I have no idea on how comparable the prices are, though. Best of luck!

This is pinging on my crap detectors. Could you provide some links, please?

Remember, that the tendencies the particles have are also the tendencies that the liquid will have. Lifting with a filter at the bottom will let gravity force the coffee through the filter (like a drip filter holder) instead of force from your hand doing essentially the opposite That's part of what I'm going to aim to design out. What I'm also pondering is if I can design the plunger so that you set a timer when you set the top on, and then it plunges (or lifts) at the proscribed time without any user intervention. Like I said, I work in an engineering college with an affiliated food science department. Something can be figured out. I just hope I can get to a simple, robust design that will stand the test of time.