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jsolomon

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Everything posted by jsolomon

  1. jsolomon

    Optimal BBQ bun?

    I wholly agree. Either an egg-bread or a potato/squash bread, with plenty of buttermilk in the dough, are my favorites. They are soft, and not very crusty, but with enough flavor that they can simply be served on the side for purists.
  2. Just wanted to say, I completely agree with you. It's now required reading for lots of college freshmen, and I'll bet it's soon up there with The Jungle. ← But... The Jungle isn't about food... :puzzle: Also, Fast Food Nation only paints one picture about animals for food production. I know several other business and people who do it much differently than Iowa Beef Processors (now bought up by Tyson). Speaking of all of this, when your food purveyor says that an animal has been raised conscientiously, how do you know that they are telling you the truth?
  3. To assist his appetite if nausea is an issue, things like candied ginger or ginger tea are quite effective and suppressing the nausea without the side-effects of other anti-emetics. Suppressing nausea can sometimes be just as effective in assisting calorie intake. Best of luck!
  4. I'm a 3rd generation Nebraskan who never heard of it until I saw it in Rosies All Butter Fresh Cream Sugar Packed Dessert Baking Book. But, now I am a convert! However, I have never seen it on a menu in Nebraska. Plenty of apple pie, and plenty of a la mode (but the mode always seems to be vanilla ice cream) You would think that by definition a la mode would follow the hip and mod of the food world.
  5. As long as you are doing it in a P. J. O'Rourke proscribed fashion... The proscription.
  6. Personally, I do believe that it could be a very teachable subject in the public schools for each student to have to dispatch and prepare a meat-animal (and exempted from based on parental consent, etc). I think that we, as Americans, shield ourselves from death entirely too much, and this could be a good method to (in order of importance) 1: educate students about the business and necessities of food, and 1: educate students about death, and 1: educate students about the biologically supported theories that humans are omnivores and eat both autotrophs (plants) and heterotrophs (fungi and animals), and 1: allow students to wrangle personally with their decisions about what they feel about eating meat to allow them to be more informed consumers.
  7. I don't know what started me thinking along this line. But, I started today. I have two questions about press-pots that really cooked my noodle, and I think I have one of them answered (but not very satisfactorily). 1: Why do we press press-pots instead of lifting? 2: Why aren't there press-pots with finer filters? Here's the deal that makes me think it's worth my time to worry about. I really like press-pot coffee. The flavor is top-notch, but I don't have the scratch to spend on a grinder to do it justice. So I end up with more sludge than I can handle. Question 2 would address that. Also, in previous press-pots, I've noticed blow-outs from pressing too hard, etc. Lifting, depending on how speedily done, could take care of that. The ancillaries are that I work in an engineering college, and I think it would be really slick to take a couple independent study credits, and design, build, and possibly market/patent a different kind of press pot. So, I'm curious, why do we press pots of coffee the way we do? And, second, if you could change a press-pot, how would you change it and why?
  8. Fingernail polish remover also works. FNPR is also slightly less damaging on the physiological structures of the mouse... But not much.
  9. I agree with your first statement, but I think that the second one doesn't support it. Impersonally wrapping your fodder in styrofoam removes us from the actuality that our food sources come from animals (at least a significant amount for a significant population). From a physics/chemistry/Gibbs Free Energy (yes, I spend too much time thinking about those), it takes a lot of concentrated energy for life to exist. In both chemical descriptions, and visual descriptions, this leads to violence. My significantly skewed point of view describes morality and ethics as a chauvinism derived from real consciousness and ability to communicate. I.e. we think we're superior from things that do not do these things as well as we do, so we try to distance ourselves from animals to assist our feelings of superiority and dominion. But, we are still tied to these traditions based on things like animals being good sources of concentrated energy. Thusly, we balm ourselves by distancing our view of this violence with cute packaging, etc. And then many of us turn to the National Geographic channel and watch a lion take down a gnu and call it educational, but we would never go into a ranch, feedlot, or meat packing plant to see how our food is actually made. I think this is due to a distaste for seeing violence that actually affects us personally--(digress)and I personally find that somewhat unhealthy(/digress). But, this distaste makes us less effective at dictating where our food comes from because it makes us ignorant of some of the finer points. So, as long as we only accept in an ancillary manner our animal origins and try to ignore the violence that our society performs for our food supply, we will be at the mercy of those who are accepting of understanding these two areas (e.g. farmers, ranchers, ConAgra, Cargill, etc). Life isn't clean, and we're fooling ourselves if we try to believe it is.
  10. Link via slashdot from Agenzia Giornalistica Italia And I just thought it was a naval military tradition from post-dark ages. Well, I'll be jiggered! edit to fix quote tags
  11. I'm assuming that's because Mr. Varmint didn't want to get the fuzz on his premises for procuring for minors... Or he's simply being PC and not letting us know that anything illegal went on. Be either as they may, kudos to Varmint for showing athletes eGullet-styled hospitality. Testify about food, my friends, testify.
  12. My biased version of the top 2... The Coffee Roaster (Lincoln, Nebraska) Intelligentsia Small guys that don't ship far don't get much press.
  13. jsolomon

    Novozymes

    As long as I continue to pay as much, if not more, for servings of wine than I do for many of the vaccinations I have received, I won't be terribly surprised. Of course, I work with a pharmaceutical/molecular biology/genetic engineering research group, so the usage of characterized enzymes doesn't surprise me too much. I will be curious to find out when there are more genetically engineered yeasts going to produce the wines--e.g. inserting the sequence for this extraction enzyme into the yeast to reduce the cost of purchasing the enzyme, since it would be made in situ. But, from my point of view, it does follow from our scientific thrust in the industrial food production societies we are in. It saddens me, because I like more romance and less marketing in my wine, but that is probably a marketed group-think inserted into my brain by mind-controlling orbital lasers, too.
  14. Personally, so would I. However, I know a lot of 18-22 year-olds, and if they were raised in America, chances are that they would be more of a mind to like the potatoes than gussied up rice. Pasta would be on a par with simply prepared potatoes. Remember, the diet these boys are on is more akin to nitromethane than E-10 unleaded with ethanol. A salad isn't going to cut it. They, like I, need to pack away somewhere in the area of 1000+ Calories per meal just to maintain weight and ability. That is part of the burden of being a competitive, long-performance athlete. Any cyclist, swimmer, pumpkin pounder, or marathoner will tell you the same things.
  15. If you're really uninterested in pasta, I'd do a mixed potato/squash dish with acorn and butternut. Zucchini or carrots would go well in there, too. Just steamed and mashed together, or roasted and mashed together with some garlic and parsley for flavor (and butter and cream for lusciousness). Good cards, good nutrition. Also, something like that is really good for large pouch cooking. Fajitas or similar with chicken breasts would be good. The tortillas are good carbs. Best of luck! If they were older, I'd suggest sangria, but, alas, they aren't.
  16. I've defrosted a freezer with mine, too.
  17. I can just imagine a dorm room full of induction hobs, sous-vide machines and water baths. Dry Campus? Do such things exist? Can't imagine that in the UK! ← You forget that America was formed by people too uptight to live in England... We even completely prohibited alcohol in the US for several years by a constitutional amendment.
  18. YES! Ask your cleaning supplier if they can get you some phosphoric acid disinfectant Citrinox is one brand that comes directly to mind. You want to clean this as well as you can. Then do it again. Good luck!
  19. jsolomon

    Roasting Meats

    Well, either her black magic, or her grasp of universe bending physics to be able to have both medium rare on the outside and crispy on the outside are a sure sign that she is actually a dimenion-traveling alien who is bent on the subjugation and subsequent enslavement of the population of the Earth to satisfy the energy needs of her people. The fastest way I know to send these pan-dimensional overlords back to their base to regroup is to serve them a cheap freezer pizza topped with cubed silken tofu, always eaten in front of the TV while watching Rocky and Bullwinkle reruns. Aside from that, her human-enslaving culinary selections aren't deadly, they are just delectable honeypots to bring you willingly into her grasp. And actually, freezing like that has some tenderizing properties, amongst other things, so there should be no reason to worry about the food. But, beware when she pulls out her Space Vixen costume and enslaves you. You have been warned.
  20. When I was a Freshman, I used to brew beer in the closet in my dorm room. It was cheap, good, and I could bribe my Student Assistant with it whenever I wanted. At the point that most dorms are in right now with not allowing you to have anything useful in your dorm room to cook with, I would go to an outdoor outfitter and get some jetboil stuff and just cook outside the dorm on the lawn. Hopefully you're not on a dry campus so you can make some nice wine sauces. But, if I were going to recommend something, you ought to get a crock pot. Soups and stews are simply divine, and easy. You can also do pot roasts, ribs, bread (carefully), lasagne, and mulled wine--that one is the most important if you're studying something like 18th century lit. BTW, what are you studying, so we can make more appropriate suggestions?
  21. Here ya go, Granite is mostly 70-77% silica (SiO2) and 11-14% alumina (Al2O3) Where as soapstone is generally steatite (3MgO-4SiO2-H2O) Thermal conductivity of quartz (SiO2) is 2.2 Watts per (meter degree Kelvin) and I found steatite to be 2.9 For reference, silver is 429 and liquid water at 0 degree C is .561, aluminum is 237, and concrete is listed at .05-1.5 Thermal Conduction
  22. Something really doesn't seem right with that. It sounds like you were baking a 10-inch pie with 8-inch directions...
  23. They're still teaching that in grade school, right? Of course, it's not like it's Mountain Dew Pitch Black MCMMLXXXVII Yet, that is. This also says "limited edition". Probably using up a batch of cheap syrup.
  24. At the U today I saw Mountain Dew Pitch Black II "A blast of grape flavor with a SOUR BITE". It is definitely sour.
  25. Hmm... I wonder if my ersatz independent bookstore will have my copy today so I can peruse it whilst on my trip to Manitou Springs. Oh, yeah, check out my ISO Dining Companions in the West & Southwest forum. I don't want to be bored while I'm there.
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