Reminds me of the time I stopped at a self-declared wine bar one evening with my then girlfriend and decided I wanted a port. Mind you this was a reasonably well regarded establishment in the Old Town section of Alexandria, Virginia, so not really backwoods or anything rural. I asked whether they had any vintage…

I was iffy about parchment paper (I used to use silpat) until I discovered pre-cut parchment (I esp. like King Arthur's) sized for half sheet pans and pre-cut sheets for my 8" and 9" cake rounds. Now I use them even for roasting veggies and stuff just to avoid washing crusty stuff off pans. I also cut them in half…

You need a butter boat. See http://www.amazon.com/Trudeau-096070…

I'm totally in agreement that is the wrong tool for an avocado. On the other hand, it's a bread knife, so do you really care if it is optimally balanced? You are never going to wield a bread knife with the speed you would use a chef's knife, bread is a fairly forgiving medium to cut, and the shape does give you some…

In the way of onions, we've all presumably seen that trick where you dice onions by taking a half onion, make a bunch of horizontal cuts towards, but not all the way to, the root end, make a series of vertical cuts almost to the root end, and then make horizontal cuts to get a dice. I find it slows me down to make…

I'm gonna go with crack the egg into your hands and let the whites slip through your fingers.

What? I've got one shaped like that which is great for cutting bread. Which is what it is designed for.

I actually find the rolling method takes longer and is a bit more of a PITA than simply making four (or maybe five, depending on the squareness of your bell pepper) straight vertical cuts, each taking off one of the sides. I can do this a lot faster than trying to manage one long cut. But it does mean that when I'm…

If I have to take a plane and my luggage is restricted, I'll pretty much just count on eating out. But if I'm doing a drive-to-house-for-beach-week or long weekend in the mountains kind of stay, I'm bringing pretty much everything from my kitchen I care about. In addition to carrying a large ice chest, a long time…

This has to be the dumbest internet argument ever. I'm the only cook in my household with a work week worse than yours (and probably subject to more variability in arrival time). I put a home cooked meal on the table 6 nights of the week, often using a slow cooker, and never eating the same thing two nights in a…

Sure, sure. And it would be totally ridiculous to do something like cook that "fresh" meal on, say, the weekend when you both aren't at your 11.5 hr/day jobs.

Gotcha. You're need this because—as you said—"it's not as fresh" if you "cook it the night before and put it in the fridge and reheat for dinner," but you're OK refrigerating it and eating it for the next 4-5 days.

I remember tiling a bathroom in our house with my slightly-anal-retentive dad where he ended up cheating the grout lines a tiny bit on each row to compensate for a marginally trapezoidal walls. Although it was a lot of work at the time, it seemed like a good idea—we ended up with perfectly straight tile on both sides…

I love my microplanes—I think my ribbon grater is shorter and wider, but I've got a fine grater with the same form factor as the one shown. I've started grating garlic because it is easier than dicing, frankly.

Read the link—you will learn that cheese is an emulsification of dairy fat and water, and that heating tends to break down the emulsion, which is why it can become grainy. When you create a Bechamel (roux + milk), you are creating a new emulsifier, but it is actually not a particularly effective emulsifier. Besides,…

Just because you re-use them misses the point—I can and do re-seal my bags too. The point is that there is an incremental cost for each bag and your bags aren't free unless you are dumpster diving. There are also differences in how good the packaging is—having used your technique in the past, I can tell you that the…

Sure, sure. So a useful feature for people who work 11 hours a day and who have a family of 8 requiring a large pork roast for dinner (I'm guessing my pulled pork serves about 8). Who also care about a pork roast, which will be falling apart, being "overcooked" by an extra hour in a crock pot (your "keep warm" will…

This seems odd to me because the typical creamy mac-and-cheese sauce is milk + flour with cheese slowly added in to avoid having the sauce become grainy or break. Not sure how that works with the rice cooker to avoid what I would consider nasty results. I actually like the Modernist method for MnC—use a small…

Actually, your zip lock bags cost a lot more than my vacuum sealer bags, so saying it doesn't cost anything isn't really factual. My Amazon search for "ziplock" comes back with a 1 gal. ziplock bags for $0.16 ea. in bulk. My commercial grade bags are about a quarter of that. And they don't leak after being vacuum…

Look here: http://www.crock-pot.com/service-and-su…, which shows some cook times on high and low for a variety of food loads. The BIGGEST time difference between high and low is about 2 hours. So you're going to engage in heavy math to split the difference somehow to—worst case—change the timing by an hour? Why…