Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

Sometimes I'm in the mood for red pepper flakes, even if the pizza is good quality. To me, capsaicin enhances rather than interferes with flavors, so I certainly would not use it to drown out the flavor of lousy pizza. (But I'm a chilehead. I know to some people hot peppers taste of nothing but burning.)

This is not necessary if hot peppers like jalapenos are already present as a topping on a pizza.

Am I like... the only person who likes this show?

Whatever, the flash mob was AWESOME! Then again, I live in a college town, so I've seen these sorts of spontaneous acts of weirdness before, and I tell ya, I always like them. I mean, come on, it's a bunch of people suddently and without warning cooking a stir fry to music in the middle of a town square. What's not to love? Lighten up people! It's SO much better than the tent revivals or the abortion protests anyway.

Though I do agree that the previous episode with the high school students was the best so far. But I can only take so much tear-jerking, so this week we had a lighter episode. If it was all tear jerking every week you'd complain about that too.

MissBrownEyes, you need to boil water for jello.

The title sounds like something that would be useful for a college student living in a dorm. I actually did a fair bit of microwave cooking for one when I lived in the dorms, once I got sick of the cafeteria food.

But then looking at the cover, that's obviously not what the writers of this book were thinking of.

msmississippi beat me to it. The chestnut blight was a terrible ecological and culinary disaster.

I don't think I've ever had a chestnut. They're practically an endangered species now.

"Cow that grazes on grass contribute to negative global impact than if cows were to be fed grains."

What?

I prefer grass fed because for one thing the cow's digestive system is set up to digest green leafy grasses and forbs, not startchy grains. Look up some stuff about what grain does to a cow's digestive system. It's not pretty. (I would not recommend looking that up around lunch time.)

Grass fed beef is one of those instances where doing the ethically better thing is also the thing that tastes better. I love it when that happens!

As for environmental impact, a pasture is much easier on the Earth than a plowed grain field. Ideally (if the rancher is doing it right), a pasture with cows grazing on it mimics the natural state of the Great Plains, just with cows replacing bison. The native grasses of North America are adapted to being routinely grazed by large animals, to the point that it's actually GOOD for them (though overgrazing is bad). I find it hard to believe that mimicking how the plains were before humans even arrived could be worse for the environment than plowing it up, which tears up the sod and soil structure and allows it to erode away (especially bad with certain soil types, some take plowing worse than others). In natural pasture it would always be covered with living plant material which holds the soil together.

Perrenial, sod-forming prairie grasses are most certainly NOT the same thing as corn, as one commenter proposed, and I've never heard of anyone feeding cattle corn stalks and calling that "grass-fed".

Basically... I agree that carbon footprint is not the end all of environmental impact. I have a Master's degree in wildlife biology, and I know that a well-managed ranch is MUCH more biologically diverse than a cornfield, allowing lots of native plant and animal species to live alongside the cows. Of course it's not as nice as a preserve or national park or something, but it does allow us to get food from a piece of land without destoying it under a plow and killing all the wildlife that had been living there before.

Yay Papa Johns!

That's my favorite pizza chain. Yes, yes, I know that local mom n pop places are best, or maybe homemade, but as far as chains go, they win for me if the other two options are not available. However, they might get extra points for the pickled peppers. I love those.

Though, I haven't had Dominoes in years, but when I was a kid my mom liked that the best, so on pizza night that's what we got. Maybe I should give them another try some time, though I'm not even sure if there is one in my town.

Wow, sounds like we don't just have some bad cooks, but illiterate ones as well. Or is this just some sort of learned helplessness? "Oh gosh, how do I heat up this frozen pizza again? My mom always did this for me."

I also had the roommates who didn't know how to clean anything because their mommies always did it for them. I had to teach one how to clean the shower and toilet when he was trying to clean the whole bathroom with Windex. But hey at least he was trying. The sad thing is that now that I've moved out to my own place, when I go visit these people, it looks like they just plain don't clean anything at all now that they don't have me there. Just move out eventually and let the landlord clean it up. Oh well, at least I get to live in a clean house now.

They DO know how to boil Ramen noodles and heat soup, so I guess they're doing better than some. If a clean bathroom came pre-packaged, then they'd have one. One even hires a maid every now and then to clean her place, even though we're absolutely NOT in the sort of socioeconomic class where you'd expect a person to be able to afford to hire a maid. But I think it's the same sort of helpless, "pay someone else to do it for you" type of attitude as when people pay for take-out rather than cooking their own food.

I feel like calling my mom right now and thanking her for making me cook and clean when I was a kid.

After browsing SeriousEats today, I realized that Flanagan needs to see that blog where the teacher is eating the school cafeteria lunches every day.

Also, I can't believe that anyone would seriously argue that "teaching to the test" is a GOOD thing, but Flanagan and her supporters seem to be arguing that. Seriously, it was bad enough when I was in school and had to take the standardized tests, but at least I got a *little bit* of material that didn't have to do with raising my test scores. There was art class, music, phys ed. I would have loved a gardening class had it been available. I didn't take shop or home ec, but those were around. My high school had a school farm just outside of town where kids taking ag class could raise a steer or hog for slaughter. (But I guess that's ok because that's kind of a redneck thing, while raising vegetables is for those dirty liberal hippies.)

Nowadays... well, I used to work for a nonprofit where I would go to schools and do a little one-hour, free program on wildlife. Lots of schools welcomed me, but the ones that turned me down (or let me come and then gave me a bad review when I handed out the evaluation sheets) usually said something like, "this has nothing to do with the TAAKS test [or whatever they're calling it now]". They considered ONE HOUR in the entire school year wasted because it didn't have to do with the standardized test.

Do people really want reading and math to be the ONLY things kids learn in school? School sucks enough already, and you want to take what little fun stuff in there is out of it?

When I was a kid is when they had the 59/79/99 cent menu thing going, and Taco Bell was one of the few restaurants we could get food from regularly because my mom figured it was just as cheap as eating at home (as long as you stuck to the 59 cent menu). If nobody felt like cooking that night, and it wasn't Tuesday when Sonic had their half price hamburger deal, it was a Taco Bell night.

I retained these eating habits into college when I was on my own but still on the lookout for cheap, filling, easy food. Luckily there was a Taco Bell near where I worked my part-time retail job, and a Taco Bell on campus for days when I had classes.

So yeah, I've eaten a lot of Taco Bell in my life. I've got kind of a love-hate relationship with the place, because this is exactly why poor people are fatter than rich people. If you're a lot more worried about how much your food costs rather than how nutritious it is, being able to fill up on a sack full of 59 cent bean burritos and crunchy tacos is pretty appealing.

Now that my youthful metabolism is going away and I'm about 25-30 pounds overweight, I've cut out the fast food, but I still can't bring myself to hate on Taco Bell too much, because where would I have been without it? For a lot of people, this is the only "restaurant" they can afford to go to.

My locavore rule is IF I can source it locally, I will, rather than have it shipped in, but some things just don't grow here, and I try not to feel bad about it, because the coffee growing people need to make a living somehow, right? (organic fair trade of course)

I like soymilk though. I liked it as soon as I got the idea out of my head that it was supposed to taste anything like cow's milk.

My grandma, who was German, used to buy me Pfeffernusse for Xmas, and then my mom took up the tradition.

I've only had storebought (my matriarchs were not cooks), but I really have been wanting to try making them myself. Especially since I sometimes have trouble finding them at the store.

"Oh Lee, I could never buy pre-made peanut butter cookie dough. That would be like me buying a jar of someone else's peanut butter!"

Aw, that's just sweet.

I like the made-from scratch fancy fresh cranberry sauce with walnuts and spices and orange peel (haven't tried maple syrup though, thanks for the idea).

BUT, if that's not available, I also love the jellied can-shaped stuff. Always have even since I was a little kid. I like it better than they chunky whole-berry canned stuff (does that have like, stems and twigs in it or what?), and I'd actually consider it a close second to made-from-scratch sauce.