I've been doing a bit of digging into the books-on-food portion of my bookshelves lately; like most bachelors I have around 10 feet of shelf space devoted to books of this sort. Lately that's meant reading more closely through Michael Ruhlman's book Ratios: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking
Rather than a typical cookbook, this one is more of a meta-recipe book. i.e. it's not focused on how you make, e.g., a double chocolate-chip cookie as it is on how you can make a generic cookie and how that cookie changes when you adjust particular types of ingredients.
One thing that I think taking cooking classes helped with is my sauce-making, and now I'm trying to both diversify and apply that a bit more. So far this sort of book seems to be helping. Chef at Home also isn't bad, although the semi-faux-realism of most of these shows gets a bit tedious after a while.
From one of the linked articles: "China’s Ministry of Education announced this week plans to phase out majors producing unemployable graduates, according to state-run media Xinhua. The government will soon start evaluating college majors by their employment rates, downsizing or cutting those studies in which less than 60% of graduates fail for two consecutive years to find work." - seems to be a double-negative in that last sentence, but I think you get the point.
Finally something to serve after a turducken. A few kinds of fruit, so obviously this much be healthy. Not too difficult to make either considering that the "another cake" seems to be just some (chocolate?) icing.
"The six-pack of Coca-Cola he drank each day? Gone. The hamburgers, chips and chocolate he relished? No more. Today, he drinks a protein shake mixed with ice water or soy milk for breakfast, nibbles cantaloupe and red grapes, and makes “sandwiches” with thinly sliced meat and cheese but no bread." Darren's already gotten started on the no bread side. I may need some photographic evidence of him chowing down on a nice green salad to really believe this though.
"Although it would be helpful if affluent households spent more, we shouldn’t be calling upon a struggling majority to do so. In the long run, the health of the economy depends on the financial stability of our households. What might we learn from societies that promote a more balanced approach to saving and spending? Few Americans appreciate that the prosperous economies of western and northern Europe are among the world’s greatest savers."
"By the mid-1970s more women were keeping their maiden names, so hyphenating the names of the children seemed like the next logical raspberry to blow at the patriarchy, a stand against the family’s historical swallowing up of women’s identity ... The problem, of course, is that this naming practice is unsustainable."
Seems like a cool idea to me. A few questions I'm interested in though: (1) how expensive are these? (2) how long to they take to dissolve? (3) Do they leave any soapy residue if you don't wash them long enough?
"Non-thermometer users are probably following cookbook directions like "when the juice runs clear," which Chapman and other food-safety experts say is a myth. So is using color change to gauge whether meat is cooked." - personally I dig out a thermometer when roasting large amounts of meat but otherwise don't bother. I've also heard a fair bit from cooks that temps are a bit overly-conservative...
