I feel like table salt is useful for people who bake with it and for people who have a cherished collection of older recipes that assume it. Otherwise, I kind of scratch my head when people wonder why you need kosher or sea salt. It just seems like a backwards question.

I have a big box of kosher salt for cooking and sea salt for the table. Somewhere I have fancy finishing salts that don't get used unless I've tricked a lovely lady into joining me for dinner. "I eat like this every night, honest. And all of my shirts are this clean...."

Someone should write a short story called "What We Talk About When We Talk About Boston".

If someone ranking "Boston" restaurants or bars means only the City of Boston, they will tell you. Otherwise it is assumed they are including at least Brookline, Cambridge, and Somerville (in practice, these tend to replace Charlestown and East Boston. Life isn't fair).

You have no idea how confusing this is to people from Southern New England. I'd just successfully compartmentalized gravy-gravy and pasta-gravy, and now you tell me there's tomato gravy-gravy?

I guess it'll be Bolognese for breakfast and Pancake Suppers this week. I need time to process.

I found a super-explicit carbonara recipe in a bargain bin cookbook that broke all my mistakes down for me (No more scrambled egg pasta!). Pancetta consumption is up considerably in my hosue. Also a big fan of bacony butternut squash soup.

Crispy is the key in my book--done right you end up with these super soft pillows surrounded by a thin layer of crunchy perfection. When I can get that balance right every time, I will immediately gain 10 lbs.

How precise is precise, and what's the temp range? I can see this actually being worth a look if it functions as a more precise slow cooker with added stirring. Coming home to perfect sauces like I can come home to a pot of chili is worth a lot more to me than jams. The other use I can think of is making custard for ice cream at the exact right temp-- no more scrambled egg vanilla!

@ Kenji - I grew up on the South Coast, but my mom's family is old school Salem and Beverly. Roast beef could mean the Sunday carvery type deal-- an open faced sandwich with thick cut roast beef, au jus and a dollop of horseradish. Or it could mean a thin sliced RB sandwich topped with bbq sauce and cheese.

Or it could just be tough cold cuts on a room temp roll with a slice of American cheese. That last option was some bait and switch BS, mom.

The point is, if you aren't on the North Shore, I think most New Englanders assume "roast beef" is the Sunday roast version, which is generally served with horseradish.

Didn't really need the unsubtle dig at Boston to start this off.

Also, the Independent and Tavern at the End of the World as dive bars? I get the "redefinition" of diveyness, but there's no way that word can possibly include those places. "Oh yeah, it's a real dive, aside from the cleanliness, the Belgian and German beers on tap, the cheese plate, the wine program, and the extensive cocktail list."

Please do not encourage Harvard students to leave their square. They need to progress through the hallowed stages of de-douchifying before being let into polite society. Once they reach Stage 4 (successfully hang out at Charlie's for a complete evening without annoying the hell out of the prickly staff), they are allowed to venture out to select Central Sq dives. Those who fail can stick to Harvard and Davis Sq bars or take a taxi across the river.

Oh, Paul. If only you could embrace all the weird awesomeness you've given us instead of pretending you've always been that hack from Wings. People would totally love you just as much as John if they knew you were the one making the crazy tape loops and "grandpa music".

You could have been a Grizzly, Paul. You could have been a Polar bear. Instead you're a god-damned koala. Sure, you're the "cute one", but you aren't even a real frickin' bear.

Sigh. Now I've gone and ruined my day. At least there's gonna be some chicken later.

Get a Lodge cast iron skillet and a Tramontina dutch oven. Cheap, economical, sturdy.

1) Your roommates aren't going to take great care of your stuff no matter what "ground rules" you set. It's not necessarily that they're jerks. They might have zero kitchen knowledge.

I mean zero.

Not "my housemate Jeff makes Carbonara with cream! Haha!" zero.
"Jeff left a small pot on the stove for an hour, because he thought that's how long it takes to boil a cup of water for EasyMac," zero.

Take the advice of people who've been there. Leave the nice stuff at home.

2) No one likes that kid who moves into a cramped student apartment and takes over half the kitchen cabinets. Especially if the stuff comes with a bunch of rules. If you want to bring something nice, make it a knife or other small item. That way you have your nice thing, but more timid (or brutal) cooks have room for their cheapo gear.

Maybe your roommates are ALL avid cooks and aspiring chefs. In that case, great, you can bring the good stuff to school after winter break or next year.

Bar pie is awesome, and I'm glad Kenji is educating people at this crucial time of the year. Every September, thousands of unsuspecting freshmen from the Tri-State area fall victim to bad pizza in college towns across the Northeast.

This is New England, not New York or New Jersey. That means unless you're getting a pie somewhere legendary, you should be eating bar pie, tomato pie from a bakery, or something out of the oven of an Italian grandmother.

Your other option is to get so drunk you no longer care about your tastebuds or your health. This is why there are so many broken bottles and sloppy students strewn across college towns. It's not that students are irresponsible drinkers. They have to be that drunk-- they're eating Greek pizza later.

I see a drunken Food Lab (Drinks Lab?) waiting to happen! Assuming the pre-mixed drinks are made daily (so no spoilage of ingredients), bottled and chilled cocktails are simply replacing the icing of a cocktail shaker with the large-scale chilling of a fridge. What's missing is the water that gets melted into the drink while it is shaken or stirred. I think we can fix this oversight.

Given an optimal shaking time x and the force of the shaking held constant, you should be able to pretty accurately predict the water released from ice of a given shape, size, and temperature-- just weigh the ice before it goes in the shaker and then weigh what's left after straining the drink. If you add that amount of water to the bottled mix, shouldn't cocktails chilled to the same temperature taste the same, regardless of whether they are bottled or made to order?

I assume these will be poured into the appropriate glass-- a man gesturing with his Negroni in a soda bottle simply does not have the same gravitas....

@Meredith Smith - You are way off geographically. Pizza strips, party pizza, bakery pizza-- whatever you want to call it, its native habitat is Rhode Island and the South Coast of Mass-- the forgotten part of the hand between the wrist of Central Mass, the palm of the South Shore, and the fingers of Cape Cod.

Bakery pizza doesn't come with cheese at all usually-- we always had the grated cheese next to the box so people could add their own. Pretty sure you could get a sprinkle at the bakery, too.