The Doctor Said I'm Gonna Die. So...Who Wants a Beer?

[Jester]

I can't comment on that, as I've never drank with a dwarf. I DID once wait on (and do magic tricks for) Warwick Davis (aka Willow from the movie of the same name), but neither he nor I (nor his family) were drinking that night, and that's as close as I've ever come to drinking with a dwarf.

Well, other than when I drink with my notoriously short family (no woman tops 5'0", and I am the tall one at 5'8"), but I don't believe my sisters technically qualify as dwarves. (If they do, then yes, I can outdrink a dwarf....)

[Jester]

Latest update:

I bought over six pounds of bacon at the store the other day.

Now, before you go running to your nearest interventionist, I should point out two things....first, while I love bacon dearly, I don't eat nearly as much of it as people here seem to think. "But Jester, if that's the case, why did you buy SIX POUNDS of it?!?!?" And that brings up point number two, which is why I bought so much damn bacon. One of our three major grocery stores here is closing down. And they have the Best Damn Bacon in their butcher department. Stuff I use in my chili. And I'll be DAMNED if I am going to let a mere thing like a store closing get in the way of my chili being all that it can be. So, before they close (on this coming Saturday), I went in and got a metric shit ton of bacon. A metric shit ton equaling approximately 6.39 pounds, of course. Now, since I usually use about a half pound of bacon per batch of chili, I divided this bacon up into approximately ten equal portions (just over half a pound each), saran-wrapped them, put them into freezer bags, and put the freezer bags into larger zip-locs, and put those into my freezer, for future use. In essence, I have bacon for ten future batches of my semi-famous chili. I think this was a good idea.

In other news, more closely related to my actual diet, in my most recent purchase of fruit and cottage cheese (which I actually like, and was eating YEARS before this latest physical, thank you very much), I tried something different, and got 2% cottage cheese instead of my usual 4%.

Yuck. Stuff was soupy and gross. I'm sorry, but while I will make certain concessions, my cottage cheese WILL continue to be the full, whole 4%. I think the health benefits outweigh the potential cholesterol downfalls by a country mile.

[fireheart]

Mytical, there are plenty of people who can outdrink me. Of course, most of them are either very large or very Australian (or both)

Oi! Not all us Aussies are huge drinkers thank you!

Just those who don't drink beer (my boyfriend drinks Scotch. His "base" drink is Glenfiddich, although if there's nothing else, we'll both go for beer or cider)

[AccountingDrone]

<snip>pasta wasn't even discovered by Europeans until the 1300s.<snip> even fast food SALAD has carbs (don't ask me how.) .

Fast food salad dressing has high fructose corn syrup in it as a texturizer and general additive - it is pure nasty evil carb.

And pasta does pre-exist Marco Polo in Europe, the Romans had a variant of pasta called laganum and referred to in Cato's De Re Agricola, and the earliest pasta dish I have personally made cressee which is from a recipe dating to the mid 1200s, where you make 2 different color pasta doughs and sort of weave them into a potholder sized swatch of pasta fabric. [we made it of yellow colored with saffron and green colored using chlorophyll extracted from spinach, both done in that time period]

The way I remind myself to take daily meds is to have the bottle of pills sitting someplace other than the bathroom that I visit frequently. In my case, it's right next to the coffee pot in the kitchen. Most of the time, simply seeing them there is enough to trigger the 'Oh, yea, gotta take my pills', which NEVER happened when I kept them in the bathroom.

If you get used to wake up, get up, go to bathroom, hork down pills and stick with it you will always manage to take your pills.

There is one thing you should never use extra virgin olive oil for, and that's pan searing fish, as the EVOO will burn at the temps used for it.

Which is why professionals combine half butter half olive oil - it raises the smoke point of olive oil. And may I point out that the whole EVOO being different from regular olive oil is total marketing crap ... the only difference is it is the first thing out of the presses. The only difference is a lighter flavor than later runs of oil. Many people are baffled by our insistence in EVOO because one of the reasons for different 'single malt' olive oils is the difference in flavors between the different oils.

Alfredo and cheese sauces both start with a base of roux...which is flour and butter. The flour's not just for thickening, it's more for stabilizing. I honestly have no idea how you'd make either without roux.

Actually, proper Alfredo is simply mrFood's version below. The bechamel based alfredos are easier to shove in a bottle for restaurants to dump on pasta.

Mr. Food's version of alfredo is just a tablespoon or 2 of melted butter, tablespoon of half & half, and grated cheese. It's very light and still very tasty. It's the only alfredo sauce I really like, the stuff that comes in jars is like glue.

And as to the basic only able to swim enough to not drown bit, if Rob and I manage to move down, we will take you snorkeling for sea urchins ... there is no season or bag limit, and the females have 5 roe sacs All we would need to do is buy a few quail to pop out eggs

[Jester]

Which is why professionals combine half butter half olive oil - it raises the smoke point of olive oil.

Or you could just use light olive oil, which is what was suggested in the instructions I found online for pan-searing fish. Works just great, no mixing needed, and no worries about calories or cholesterol from the butter. Just saying.

And may I point out that the whole EVOO being different from regular olive oil is total marketing crap ... the only difference is it is the first thing out of the presses. The only difference is a lighter flavor than later runs of oil.

The only comment I can make here is that I see a difference in color between EVOO and light olive oil, and notice a definite difference in taste, with the EVOO being richer and more flavorful than the light stuff.

[AccountingDrone]

Or you could just use light olive oil, which is what was suggested in the instructions I found online for pan-searing fish. Works just great, no mixing needed, and no worries about calories or cholesterol from the butter. Just saying.



The only comment I can make here is that I see a difference in color between EVOO and light olive oil, and notice a definite difference in taste, with the EVOO being richer and more flavorful than the light stuff.

You should do an olive oil tasting sometime. We obviously have different definitions of what olive oils taste like =) Fresno's extension university for agriculture has nifty stuff happening all the time, this time was an olive oil tasting. I was hoping to be there for the cheesemakers discussion panel but we couldn't stay long enough

[Jester]

I have never done a blind tasting, but I have tasted the ones in my kitchen, and there is a marked difference between the light and the EVOO. To be fair, I am pretty sure they are different brands, so that could be the difference as well. I don't know...not exactly an expert on such things.

On a semi-related note, I don't know if you saw it while you were here, but there is a relatively new store (about a year or so old) on Duval Street here in Key West called Key West Olive Oil Company, and they have all kinds of different infused olive oils and vinegars. Some really tasty and innovative stuff. I have a bottle of their chili oil for use when I make my extra spicy Devil's Ass chili.

[AccountingDrone]

I have never done a blind tasting, but I have tasted the ones in my kitchen, and there is a marked difference between the light and the EVOO. To be fair, I am pretty sure they are different brands, so that could be the difference as well. I don't know...not exactly an expert on such things.

On a semi-related note, I don't know if you saw it while you were here, but there is a relatively new store (about a year or so old) on Duval Street here in Key West called Key West Olive Oil Company, and they have all kinds of different infused olive oils and vinegars. Some really tasty and innovative stuff. I have a bottle of their chili oil for use when I make my extra spicy Devil's Ass chili.

Hm missed it, but we flew through there pretty fast. If it hadn't been for the whole job hunting bit I would have liked to stay for a bit longer. And it figures, the guy Rob was to interview with here in CT when we got home was sent home sick and had to reschedule so we could have stayed a couple days longer if we had known. *sigh* I figure we will try to get down again next year and stay at the same place, and stay for 4 or 5 days.

We have 4 or 5 different olive oils - a generic sort for bulk cooking we pick up at BJs and single family stuff, a nice spanish, a french, a sicilian and an italian for sort of general uses [dipping recipes mainly] and a california one that is great made into ice cream, or for beurre manie but olive oil instead of butter for sauces.

[Dips]

Usually light olive oil is usually olive oil mixed with other vegetable oils which have a less pronounced flavor. It's called "light" because it is lighter in color and taste but not calories. It has the same number of calories as any other fat: about 110 to 120 per tablespoon. Butter and EVOO have about the same number of calories (101 and 119 respectively per tablespoon). Butter, being an animal fat, has cholesterol, which some people may need to avoid for health reasons. But you don't save calories substituting other fats for butter.

The reason to use light olive oil instead of EVOO or butter is the flavor profile. If you're cooking something with a delicate flavor you want to use fats that will enhance the dish, not overwhelm it. I don't buy light olive oil myself since it's more expensive than simply buying both ingredients and deciding the proportion I need for the dish I'm cooking. I generally use regular olive oil for cooking since heating EVOO changes the flavor enough that I wouldn't notice the difference. I save the EVOO for salad dressing or to finish a dish after cooking.