Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

i grew up eating this stuff. it's best served with salt potatoes.

i have this bag! but i use it for school - books and such.

if you want to catch an independent movie, go to "the little" on east ave. it's one of the best independent theaters i've ever been to, and it's been around since the 1920s. the cafe at the theater is interesting, too, and they serve wine and beer. just down the street is spot coffee - housed in an old car showroom, it's a must-see if you're a coffee lover. enjoy the terrible, depressing weather, too! ;-)

dark chocolate for me!

coffeefrap - cherimoya is fantastic!!! it has a custard like texture, and it's lightly sweet. the only time i ever had one was at a farmer's market in los angeles, so it was perfectly ripe.

@therealchiffonade: http://www.theonion.com/content/news/soundgarden_inadvertently_reunites

One of my favorites! A friend of mine who owns a marina on Lake Erie introduced me to this dish. My understanding is that the hotel school at Cornell gave the class an assignment: come up with a non-tomato based BBQ sauce. This was the result. Please try it....it rocks!

I doubt it was the yeast being completely dead -- if it was, it wouldn't have risen at all.

It might have been that you didn't knead it enough. Kneading activates the gluten, which is what makes the dough stretchy and able to hold all the gas bubbles that the yeast creates. If the gluten is too weak, the bubbles pop and you've got a dense bread. When the dough is kneaded properly, it will be smooth and shiny and very elastic. You should be able to take a small piece of dough and stretch it so thin that you can see through it. This is called the windowpane test. If you look it up online, you might find photos.

It also may be that you didn't let it rise enough before it went into the oven. And/or you didn't let it rise enough the first time. If you're going by the clock when following directions, the results aren't going to be as good as if you go by the results. Let the dough have enough time to rise properly, even if the recipe says it should be done in less time.

Make sure you're not adding garlic salt and onion salt instead of the powders. You need a little salt in the bread since it regulates the yeast, but too much salt can slow it down more than you want. Different herbs and spices can affect the way the dough behaves, but if you're just adding a little bit, it shouldn't make a huge difference in the final product.

Your dough may not have been wet enough. The problem usually is the way people measure flour. If you can find recipes that use weight in addition to cup measurements, you'll get a better idea of how much flour you really need. Also, you might be adding too much extra flour as you knead, if you're doing it by hand. I use about 2 1/2 cups of flour per cup of water when I make bread, but it can be as little as 2 cups, depending on what kind of flour it is and what kind of bread I'm making. I might go as high as 3 cups of flour, but that's pretty unusual.

The drier the dough is, the longer it takes to rise, too.

Last, if you're looking for a soft, fluffy, pillowy texture, add some mashed potato or some instant potato flakes to the dough. Not a lot. I usually use the potato flakes because they're handy, and I add maybe a quarter cup to a loaf of bread (I make one loaf at a time, where most recipes are for 2 loaves).

anything with lemon...ew

CookiePie, on corn plastics (also called PLA) it's not as good as the propaganda. Sure, they are compostable but it requires a special process that no backyard will approximate and few towns or cities have in place. So, it's a contaminate to composting but also one to plastics as it can't be recycled and indeed ruins recycling efforts of plastic.

According to a biodegradability standard that Mojo helped develop, PLA is said to decompose into carbon dioxide and water in a “controlled composting environment” in fewer than 90 days. What’s a controlled composting environment? Not your backyard bin, pit or tumbling barrel. It’s a large facility where compost—essentially, plant scraps being digested by microbes into fertilizer—reaches 140 degrees for ten consecutive days. So, yes, as PLA advocates say, corn plastic is “biodegradable.” But in reality very few consumers have access to the sort of composting facilities that can make that happen. NatureWorks has identified 113 such facilities nationwide—some handle industrial food-processing waste or yard trimmings, others are college or prison operations—but only about a quarter of them accept residential foodscraps collected by municipalities.

Then there's the issue that more and more people are allergic to corn (which some tie to the genetically engineered strains that have appeared just in the last decade or so) and these plastics are literally deadly to them (which can be ironically unfortunate if they go to the hospital for ingesting food that wasn't supposed to contain it and end up worse because of all the corn derivitive contaminated equipment and medicines there.

The GE corn also requires intensive chemical inputs just to grow which are leaching into our groundwaters and oceans creating other issues such as dead zones which are destroying marine life (including seafood).