Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

He has a tenuous relationship with grammatical rules. His diction is terrible. His metaphors often don't make any sense. And he is frequently wrong or incurious about the food itself.

What he says of Bill's applies to his own writing style: There's no there there.

the pizza bianca is great. i had it straight from the oven one day and it was heaven. the other pizza's are good too, the potato is the best

Awesome. You know that is a fresh fish! My mouth is watering.

@Lorenzo: That thing about eating monkey brains is true, though I've never seen a news article on it and I kind of doubt it's still happening. When I was growing up my weirdo brothers used to obessively rent this series over and over again from a local video store. It was called "Faces of Death" and just featured really horrible, creepy footage of people and animals dying in unusual ways. They'd force me to watch it and I'd cry and have nightmares.

Some of the stuff really stuck with me, like the segment where these Americans in Vietnam (I believe) watch as a live monkey gets held down by a head vice and then gets it head cracked open. Everyone begins eating the brains. It was disturbing, to say the least.

Agreed. This is cruel, without any justification. Really? The extra minutes of suffering added that much savor to your meal? Honestly, if I was out with someone who ate this, I would wonder about their character. It's on par seeing children torture dogs - you know something's wrong there.

This is not the same as foie gras or veal or other controversial food - the animal is killed quickly (one hopes) in those cases. This is just causing suffering because you can. Truly disgusting.

I was disturbed by the video too (saw it in my rss). Yes, I understand that animals are killed all the time for human consumption, and it could have been a mistake (horrible, horrible mistake) for the fish to have been boiled almost to the point of death, but did they have to keep poking chopsticks into its mouth?? That was the truly cruel part - PUT IT OUT OF ITS MISERY! I didn't think it was funny at all, and I'm glad that SE had the decency to remove it.

The previous comment is the best: that in the animal world, many predators begin eating their prey while it is still alive. Especially fish. Of course, they don't let it sit on the table thrashing about, half-dead from having been tossed in hot oil, before eating it.

People can be beyond cruel to their food. There have been reports (not well documented it seems, though) of live monkeys having their skulls hacked open to people can eat the brains while the monkey is still alive. It's not clear from the news reports whether this is true or the stuff of Indiana Jones fiction, but it would not surprise me.

@zach. agree with you about the difference. It's a critical difference.

In Japan, we have this savage way of presenting sashimi called ikezukuri (=live sashimi).
Live fish is filleted and made into sashimi, which is then put back onto a still-twitching fish. That's just to show off how "fresh" the fish is and how good the chef is. But most of the time fish kept in a tank are starved, so they are not any better than fresh fish killed on/near the ocean.
Thankfully people have realized that it looks super cruel by people from other countries and it's not even that good, and I think less chefs do that these days.

The half-life of a fresh bagel is less than six hours. I am skeptical how a six-day old bagel would taste, or worse yet, one stored in the refrigerator for 10 days.
A fresh bagel that is sliced and immediately frozen, then toasted, is OK, but not as good as a fresh-baked bagel.

I come from Brooklyn, where one of my fondest childhood memories is the daily walk I took with my father and uncle to the neighborhood bagel bakery (in Boro Park).

I now live in California, after living 20 years in Massachusetts. I have never been able to find a Brooklyn-style bagel, and I wonder if they still exist.

My childhood bagels were hard and chewy, there was no way to make a sandwich from them. I ate them radially, schmearing the exposed end with cream cheese and eating my way around.

At the company cafeteria today, everyone was talking about bagels, and all but one person laughed at me for eating bagels the way I did. The one person who concurred with me, was a Bulgarian. He was a true Bagel maven.

I love pumpkin pie, sweet potato pie, and I will eat butternut squash right out of the rind once it's roasted. I bake pumpkin bread and pumpkin pie in autumn, not really for the holidays so much. I generally love squash. I once made pies from a squash in Peru just because it was a novelty. These squashes/gourds are so big it takes two people to carry one. It's important to remember that pies aren't just a desert - they are often the main course, filled with meats, vegetables, and spices. My family usually has pumpkin pie around Thanksgiving and Christmas, but we also get tired of traditional holiday foods. Frequently, for Thanksgiving or Christmas, we will decide to have something different at the table. Last year we had an incredible Italian dish that my father prepared for Christmas, and I smoked chicken and baby back ribs for Thanksgiving. It didn't change the spirit of the holidays at all for us. So, I guess the important thing is that you enjoy what you cook and eat during the holidays.