Mike Nolan
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According to the web, one of the varieties of blood oranges is available through May but the other variety (which I think is the more common one) only goes through March.
Aside from tasting them in the grocery store a few times, we've never bought them. I have no idea what difference they would make in an icing aside possibly from color.
My wife is a big fan of the cara cara orange, which also has a short season.
Chopped is about the only thing I still watch on the Guy Fieri AKA Food Network these days. I watch it in part for the strange ingredients they keep coming up with (which SNL nailed!) and to see what the chefs do with things that are every day ingredients for many home cooks but which many of them wouldn't normally touch on a bet.
How many of us would know what a durian was without Chopped? (BTW, there was a story recently about a college library in Australia that was evacuated because someone left a durian in a trash bin.)
I agree with the lament that I'd like to see a bit more of the actual cooking, like how they make their sauces. (Having read several books on stocks and sauces, I think I can connect the dots a bit, though.)
I seldom watch SNL any more, most of the time it just isn't funny, this was one of the best skits I've seen in years, though.
The water in a dishwasher is hot enough that it helps melt grease and dissolve food. The studies referred to by the quiz answer didn't deal with removing dirt or grease, just bacteria.
I've had my doubts about just how good the 'sanitizing' cycle is in a dishwasher.
According to various reviewing organizations, any home dishwasher made in roughly the last 5 years is going to be less efficient at cleaning dishes, in large part because of governmental restrictions placed on the amount of water that a dishwasher is allowed to use. The cycles are longer, too, probably in the hopes of compensating for the water restrictions.
I'm glad I haven't had to replace a dishwasher lately. As I understand it, commercial dish washers have not been affected by these regulations, because there are requirements placed on them as to how well they have to clean, so they're allowed to use more and hotter water.
Newsweek used to have a regular column called 'Conventional Wisdom' in which a recurring theme was that the CW was wrong more often than it was right.
If you're trying to clean things with grooves in them, hot water will usually make the material expand, making the grooves smaller and harder to clean.
I've got a number of silicone brushes, the one I like best is a small one I got at a Le Creuset shop. I use them mostly for applying butter to pans and breads and the bigger ones hold too much butter and/or release it too quickly, so things get too much butter on them.
As opposed to air dryers, paper towels are much healthier. (Whether they're better for the environment is another matter.)
I agree with you on the comfort factor. My wife thinks grease comes off easier in warm water, but that really depends on the type of grease, because some of them have pretty high melting points. I keep a dispenser of Lava liquid soap by the kitchen sink, because it works better on greasy hands than anything else I've found. A friend of ours works as a diesel mechanic, I bought him a case of Lava dispensers as a Christmas present a few years back.
If it's a light glaze, you can probably do it before you freeze it. My concern about doing it afterwards is whether it would stick properly.
Many car batteries only have a 3 year warranty and even then it's pro-rated. And when they fail, they're usually goners. My wife's Honda Fit, purchased in 2014, had the battery fail over the winter.
My car is a Toyota Avalon Hybrid, so it's got multiple batteries.
I think people use more of the mother sauces than they realize.
Thickening a roux with milk (béchamel) is a pretty common practice, to make macaroni and cheese, potatoes au gratin, creamed tuna, etc.
Most of us use tomato sauce frequently, though we may not make it from scratch. It wouldn't be out of line to suggest that ketchup is similar to a tomato sauce these days, though ketchup has an interesting lineage--it actually started out as a fish sauce, tomatoes weren't included until around 1800.
And as I wrote some months ago, using a roux to thicken a stock (velouté) is basically the same process as making gravy.
Hollandaise and mayonnaise are similar, both are an egg and oil suspension (and both can be easily broken.)
Brown sauce (espagnole) is probably the least commonly used mother sauce at home, and not all that common in commercial kitchens, though demi-glace concentrate shows up in many high end restaurants. Demi-glace is a secondary sauce that starts with Espagnole. I've made Sauce Robert a couple of times (demi-glace, mustard, onions and white wine), it's excellent with pork dishes.
We had popovers, Veal Zurich (veal in a white wine cream sauce) and a trifle.
And there are other sources that include several other ingredients. But 3 of them appear to be constants.
I'm not sure why having oil on the rolling pin would make a difference. Dough that is high in glutenin has high elasticity so it stretches well, but that also means it snaps back, so you have to give the dough time to relax before stretching it a second time.
I buy the 33 ounce jar at Sams for under $7, you want ones that haven't been marinated in oil (too greasy) or spices (you don't want the artichoke flavor drowned out.) Our Costco only carries ones marinated in oil.
DO NOT BUY THEM IN CANS, they'll taste tinny! You can find small jars of them, but the cost of the big jar at Sams is a MUCH better buy, even if you throw half of it out!
The jar only lasts 2-3 weeks after it has been opened, so once we open a jar we have to find things to do with them. We put them on salads and use them in recipes. Artichokes stimulate your taste buds, so they make everything taste more flavorful.
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