Does anyone else notice Serious Eats loading a little slow lately?

I believe it the fancy pants animated ads causing the problem.
The ads load up very last, first showing up as a big blank ad-shaped box, then filling in gradually with an ad, then finally revealing it's browser breaking animation.
I usually can't scroll or click around without severe lag before the ads finish loading.

Now my connection is by far NOT slow (fiber optic) and I'm using the newest update of Firefox on a computer not a year old. I don't think it's my computer or connection.

The ads contribute to Serious Eat's engaging food-centric, mouthwatering layout graphically (as well as financially...), but I was just wondering if anyone else was exasperated with how they take hostage of your browser until they're through loading all their bells and whistles.

Hey, SeriousEats Team.

I just wanted to notify you of a very annoying pop up I got while browsing the Talk section of the site (more specifically the recent Food Shopping Road Trip topic).

Screencap is here: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v398/fuuchan/malware_cap.jpg

If that weren't annoying enough, even alt+f4ing out of it immediately prompts another popup that resembles the windows desktop and makes it look like its running a scan. If that weren't scary enough, trying to get out of that will prompt yet ANOTHER pop up that tries to get you to click OK once again to run a "free scan".

So yes. 3x the intrusiveness.

I'm running a scan now on my computer to make sure that very persistent ad didn't plant anything in my comp, but I just wanted to let the staff know that there's stuff like that lurking on the site.

Lately I've been fiddling with recipes out of Asian language cook books. I tend to like the flavor of Asian-style pastries over Western ones, so I figured I would try my hand at making them.

Many of their pastries are flaky and so delicately tender that sometimes they crumble at a touch.

Naturally this calls for shortening, butter, lard and other kinds of fats quite often.

Now I don't know whether these Asian cookbooks just don't have as high a standard of editing as ones we typically see in our bookstores in the U.S., but I often find the recipes seem deceptively easy but the dough is rather finicky when you start to work with it. "Roll and cut" it says, but the dough only stretches and falls apart.

Because of the high amount of fat, even chilling sometimes doesn't help make the dough any easier to work with.
The dough remains almost pastelike.

Do you guys have any experience working with short doughs like these and have any tips?

So I'm searching for a Christmas present befitting my mother who is one of the types who always says she wants nothing but the success and happiness of her children.

My mother is an epic cook. She is responsible for me loving food as much as I do today and knowing what good food is.

Now we have some knives in the house, but one by one they're meeting their demise, mostly at the hands of my father.
The good serrated was rendered toothless when he gave it to the landscapers to cut their sheets of sod with.
One of the good chef's knives snapped today when he dropped it on the floor.

I'd like to get my mom a good knife. One as trustworthy as those old ones that she's used for almost 30 years.

The criteria are that it must be easily managed. No fussy diva knives that have to be sent off to the special place to get sharped every few months.

As she is a petite woman who cooks everyday, I'd like to look into something lighter in weight. I could spend hundreds on a famous brand like Wusthof but those things feel like you could club a cat with them.

So tell me, SE, what knives have you used and what knives have served you best?

Super long story short, I'm trying to make the crust for traditional Cantonese egg tarts.

First try was a flop, dough was too dense and not tender with flaky layers as it should have been. My mother was the one who did the initial measuring of ingredients.

Second try today, I did the ingredient measuring and saw that we had quite a bit less dough than before. My mother told me she had used glass liquid measuring cups.

I had used metal dry measuring cups. It resulted in MUCH less dough since I suspect the liquid measuring cups hold A LOT more than the dry ones do. Possibly twice as much. I'm worried how things will turn out since there is such a drastic difference in amount of flour used.

Supposedly, a cup is a cup is a cup, but what would account for my 1 cup liquid measuring cup being so freakishly large compared to my 1 cup dry measuring cup?

So I went out for dinner tonight, picked a Portuguese place in the Ironbound district of Newark that seemed to have a lot of good reviews and an interesting menu.

The service was fine, but when the entrees came around I was extremely disappointed. I had ordered a paella and it came swimming in a puddle of unabsorbed broth. It tasted like someone had dumped a couple of packets of Lipton soup mix on top of supermarket boxed rice then tossed in some frozen bagged veggies and chicken hacked into hideous hunks. There were a couple of anemic looking shrimp of the ilk you might get in bad Chinese take out.
They topped the whole thing off with a mangled piece of beet, some shredded red cabbage and a half a radish.
Very strange and the whole dish just smacked of cheap corner cutting in the kitchen.

My mom seemed to enjoy her bacalao all right.

I hate to waste food so I had half of it packed up to go (don't ask me what will happen to it, I'm hoping someone else will eat it), but the smell of it in the car bugged me. It smelled like airplane food.

The dinner wasn't cheap and the bad food kinda ruined my night.
I'm a little distressed about the fact that I've gotten so picky that I'd let some subpar food get to me so badly.

The waitstaff seemed a little worried that I barely touched my food but I couldn't find it in myself to tell them that I thought the dish was absolutely wretched. The check came with a little comment card and I didn't fill it out. Everyone else seemed to be enjoying their food just fine.

What do you guys do when you get bad food? Bad service is one thing, but what if the food is just not to your taste? Do you say something or do you hold your tongue?

Today I started to get redirects to those annoying ads with the timers in them while browsing Serious Eats.

You know the type, you click a promising link on the SE page and are instead sent to a whole page with just one really incredibly fugly ad to some dark, dank place on the internet with the count down timer on it. Sure you can click "Skip Ad" but I never thought SE would stoop to those invasive ads.

Is this something SE staff know about or have any control over? No ultimately it doesn't take a lot of time to skip out of them, but they are incredibly unsightly and unprofessional and annoying as they forcefully submit you to bad ads.

Can anyone tell this is one of my net surfing pet peeves...?

Has anyone seen the Whole Foods site today?

Whole Foods Market

Worth a giggle!

Happy April Fool's Day! Or what's left of it.

So yesterday, I made my first loaf of bread ("Hi, I'm Fuu and I use my oven for storage, not for baking" ) from scratch.
I used a very basic recipe for white bread from A Year in Bread.

The loaf was visually stunning, rather picturesque in its loafy shape and color. The insides were nice and soft and a little bit chewy.

Only I think its really rather bland. It doesn't taste like much of anything, not salty, not sweet, not wheaty. The crumb is a bit gummy (you wouldn't know until you started chewing a bite of a slice) and the crust could stand to be crisper.

Any of you more experienced bakers know how to improve a baking novice's blase loaf?

So I have snow crab and salad greens sitting on my kitchen counter. But now I need an appropriate dressing.

My first thought was butter and citrus (all we have is fresh oranges, actually), salt and a little cracked pepper.

But the thought of that greasy melted butter is starting to make me queasy. Is there another, less cloying fat to use? Better yet, any other dressing ideas?

Help me Serious Eaters, you're my only hope!

So I'm thinking about tackling some pastries for Christmas using piecrust dough.

Since I only have some free time tomorrow before the party, I intended to get the dough out of the way beforehand and assemble and bake the pastries the day of.

Now I'm 98% certain pie crust can be frozen for later use with no ill effects, but for how long? Am I better off just refrigerating it?

The party is the 26th, and I would be making the dough tomorrow on the 23rd. Any expert bakers know anything about storing pie crust dough?

I had the chance to try gelato at Grom in NYC yesterday. I was very excited ^_^;
I had the pistachio and wasn't disappointed.

All the other esoteric flavors under their mysterious little silvery lids...I can't wait to try more!

Has anyone else been to Grom? How do you like it? How does it compare to other gelateria in the city?