That's why I drink very little wine in restaurants. I'm more of a cocktail kind of a gal. Better value.
Not "food," I suppose (although it is to me), but keep your lemon and orange slices away from my Hefeweizen. Barbarians. On that theme, "frosty mugs" are suitable only for root beer. In this day and age, there is simply no excuse for shitty bread at a restaurant of decent grocery store. Re: balsamic vinegar, it's wonderful stuff. Decent, cheap balsamic (like Whole Foods 365 brand) is fine for everyday use. But this stuff: is just astonishing. Pricey, as hell, and not to be used like you'd use the WF stuff. Thick (like olive oil), sweet, delicious. Just drizzle it over, say, tomatoes, strawberries. Amazing. Re: salt and caramel, my only experiences is with ice cream; salty caramel is fan********ingtastic.
If I'm somewhere that serves Guiness, I always ask for the two-pour method. If they don't know what I am asking, I ask for another type of beer.
I am not sure wether it was Bourdain or Zimmerman, love watching both their shows. Sorry about the mushrooms, I love all kinds of mushrooms (except of course the poisonous ones!).
Are you saying bars over there try pouring it all in one go? It does grate with me when they top-up and pull the tap back, rather than push forwards.
Sweet macaroni or potato salad. Why bother? And any german-style potato salad is, in my humble opinion, inedible.
let me see if i've got this right: they take caramel and put sea salt on it? if such is the case it is indeed moronic sheeple foodiness of the most grievous kind. i will elaborate. a specialty confection in brittany is caramel made with salted butter, and the best salted butters of course have sea salt. now butter in the states is almost always salted (unsalted butter is the specialty item, the reverse of what's done in the real world). but if a little is good, more must be better. right? it reminds me of the pains au chocolat they served in a (generally very good) pastry shop near the california st. caltrain station in palo alto. the article was, at bottom, the real mccoy. but instead of leaving well enough alone, they dipped half of it into melted chocolate to make it... extra good. vade retro satanas! oh. my. god. let us make one thing clear once and for all. the powder in those green cans is not parmesan cheese. it is not even cheese. proof? i found some in my mom's cupboard once (you don't even need to refrigerate it! what a giveaway!) that was FIFTEEN YEARS beyond the "best by" date. and it was still, for all intents and purposes, what it had been the day it was bought. real hard italian cheese, once grated, will go roqueforty in a couple of days. the prosecution rests its case. in holland too. and they even have snoep that is dobbel zout. you gotta be pretty hard core to like that. cottage cheese is ricotta cheese. kind of. in the way white pudding is boudin blanc. the name has nothing to do with any cottage, it is a corruption of the italian, just as pudding is a corruption of the french. but don't trust me. check this out. i can only imagine this degenerate practice started with the already misguided use of lemon with tecate mexican beer. it is hard to trace the origins of this any further, i can only offer a theory: in the rough and ready cantinas of the wilds of darkest mexico, there are usually bowls of cut lemons on the tables, because the mezcal served there is often so harsh and vile that even the locals need to mask the taste. perhaps some gringo tourists needed the same treatment to make the beer which in these places is not often chilled palatable to them. if you need to ask, you need to go to another bar.
This weekend at a rehearsal dinner, my wife was coerced into taking a shot of some caramel-chocolatey concoction - with a pinch of salt, like you do with tequila. She was not a fan.
This isn't true. Salted and unsalted butters are in every grocery store I shop in. I only ever buy unsalted. Never have any problem finding several to choose from.
Same here, and we travel quite a lot in the US and it is pretty much the same everywhere as most grocery stores has various unsalted butter options.
It's a crapshoot. I usually get Guiness when I see it on tap. I remember one place in Maryland (a local chain) where the person who took the order just went at it in one go. I argued with her on how to pour a Guiness and she looked at me like I sprouted wings. Of course, she also resembled a Hooters waitress and wasn't hired for her brains.
perhaps i was misundertood. i think all dairy companies offer unsalted butter. but observe: in france it would be the salted butter that would need specific labelling.
Got it. I think butters are sometimes labeled "salted" but I don't think there's any sort of strict labeling requirement here. I had a "difficult" conversation with my mother over Christmas about butter. Recipes from any decent cookbook are nearly always clear about "unsalted butter" (I don't think I've ever seen one recommend salted), a point that she was well aware of... yet she always buys salted butter. She actually asked me: "So what's the difference between salted and unsalted butter?" Seriously? I have a lot of difficult conversations with my mother. But she (and people like her) are probably a main reason why we still see so much salted butter in America. She's well aware that recipes call for unsalted butter, yet she continues to use salted... and is completely unable to explain why, other than the fact that she's always done it this way. Thank goodness she doesn't visit very often.
Baking recipes should always assume unsalted butter. Salted butter is usually intended as a condiment. Salted butter was necessary in the U.S. generally because production was remote from the point of sale, and before refrigeration, the salt was needed as a preservative.
Most recipes I see call for unsalted butter and it's not a "specialty" item - it's right next to the salted butter in the grocery store. Yeah, duh. I'm talking about 40 years ago.
I would argue that it is under control, and breaks out only under extreme duress, such as being forced by imaginary phood phreaks to eat sea salt polluted caramel. That's enough to drive even the mildest among us to reference the classics. The fact of the matter is that I've very likely never wished to anyone's actual face that an animal of any kind, in any particular state of health or disease gnaw their vitals or any other portion of their anatomy, internal or external.
i like you barb, so we're not going to have a tiff, are we? i have become painfully aware that my choice of the term specialty item was unfortunate... misguided... alright, criminally insane. no need to rub it in. but i'm still right. 40 years ago i was probably getting my cheese out of aerosol cans. like a GOOD AMERICAN!
i don't know whether i have eaten caramel that has been dosed with salt from the sea. FROM THE SEA!!! but i checked a handful of recipes online and most of them include either salt or butter, which contains salt... i guess i should confess that i like Payday candy bars.
ooooh, payday, guignol likes those too... i suppose you could say i'm allergic to all candy that does NOT contain nuts.
meh... but everything at restaurants is marked -up. I have little/no issue with restaurants marking-up something that would otherwise require my time and effort to prepare (and something that I might mess up). My peeve comes when something like a bottle of wine is marked-up 300%. If the restaurant has its own private vineyard, then they have every right to mark-up that wine by 300%. Otherwise, it's just shameless.
Sure. Just like the wine, that markup is absurd. It's something that takes very little prep and skill. When I was waiting tables in the UK, I saw less of the wine markup. Most were marked up, say, 8 for a cheap bottle and 20 for a much better bottle.