Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

Haddock and chips, only in New England, served with coleslaw and ketchup. Fried clams a close second.

They're not weird, but I want to know what happened to the reduced-fat ranch Pringles I used to crave in grad school, about a dozen years ago. They have reduced fat in every other flavor. Were these just so addictive that they were considered unsafe? If I bought them I couldn't stop till I'd eaten the whole can.

I have to go to San Diego in a few of weeks for a conference and had not been looking forward to it, but you've given me a new lease on my trip, especially since I didn't do well in the fish taco department last time I was there. So many thanks, Erin!

Erin! After I read the article in the NYTimes, I swore that I had to find a way to bring real frozen yogurt here to DC. What do you think? Heard any rumors? I'll even invest my own money!

I have to pick just one thing?? Torture is right. How about the pesto ricotta gnocchi?

depends: milk, dark, with or without nuts, fruit, other stuff... as long as it's real.

Mulled cider with bourbon

I made the cheese-straw apple pie from this site. It was pretty tasty, and not too hard; I kept the butter and then the dough very cold, which helped manage the crust. There is *a lot* of fat in that crust - butter and cheddar cheese - and it came out nice and crispy, and really did taste like a cheese straw. However, the granny smith apples I used were sour and otherwise tasteless; next time I'll use a somewhat sweeter apple and/or use more brown sugar, for a better contrast with the completely savory crust. Also, I imagine 2 teaspoons of cayenne would be way too much; one was plenty.

Um, "loaded" with monounsaturated fat? How is that possible? Lard has to be mostly saturated fat in order to be solid - in other words, lard. Just basic chemistry. Whether or not saturated fat is bad for you is still an open question.

KarynMC, you could always ask them to roast the dressing outside the bird for health reasons... so the turkey bacteria don't contaminate it, it never reaches a high enough temperature to kill them, etc...

Black pepper. Pretty much everything. Boring, I know... Ginger and cinnamon are tied for second, and I use them in dishes both sweet and savory.

I love it. Can I get a poster of that to put up in my kitchen?

- French Fry Girl

There was a cool story on NPR this morning about umami, the 5th taste, which has been shown to be glutamate, and we apparently have taste receptors for glutamate (a.k.a. glutamic acid). So am I wrong, or isn't MSG just the sodium salt of glutamate?

Just because it's in regular foods, though, doesn't mean people don't have a sensitivity to large amounts of it, or in the form of the sodium salt, which might make it more easily absorbed... as we were reminded constantly in toxicology class, the dose makes the poison.