It's almost summer. Hot day, and I left a parcel of natto out to defrost. Forgot about it and left the house. As I was entering the flat, my elderly lady neighbour told me there was a horrible smell coming from the open kitchen window.

"I think you have a dead rat," she confided. I invited her in and lo and behold, it was the natto. She was not impressed I can tell you!

What does natto smell like to you? It smells like sweaty feet and deliciousness to me :-)

I bought a bag of these things and immediately regretted it after taking one out to bake. I was looking for a cheaper alternative to those lovely fat fillets with skin on ... yes, I've learnt a hard lesson about price and quality.

These turn out so dry and nasty!

Any recipes on how to make them even mildly palatable? Should I defrost them? Put them in a wellington or pot pie? I'd hate to waste the lot :( I'm on a college student budget.

P.S. I am lactose/allium/cruciferous veg intolerant.

Looking forward to your suggestions! Thanks :-)

I'm 22 and in the span of the last 3 years, my tolerance for dairy has dramatically reduced to the point my belly gurgles and hurts (gas) about 2 hours after eating anything made with milk.

This includes:
Custards
Cheeses
Flat white
Yoghurt
Creamed soups
Quiche (???)
Whey shakes
Any pastry creams

Of course, I can handle 4 squares of chocolate, but anything beyond that is giving me daily trouble! Eating out is fraught with difficulties as I believe the lactose amounts accumulates.

Does anyone suffer from lactose intolerance or have good ideas how to manage it, or look up lactose data? The effects vary in severity greatly so it is really difficult to predict the response and it's preventing me from going to social gatherings for fear I will get that dreaded gas. :(

*I live in the UK, so this may not be the same as in the US*

I've been wondering lately if the 'fresh' seafood and prawns I get, (deshelled) are actually 'fresh'. I wonder that about the salmon fillets they sell in pairs in the package too. What does "fresh" mean if these produce have been frozen for transport? When does something stop being fresh by virtue of being frozen for a bit longer, and why does seafood sold in this form cost a lot more than its cousins in the freezer section?

In the UK we've got lots of ready meals - chicken tikka masala, spag bol, etc. The ready meals that are being sold 'fresh', I suspect, are no different from the ones in the freezer, albeit having been defrosted.

Are we paying a premium for the illusion of freshness? SE'ers who work in supermarkets, do you know?

I was delivered the wrong cut of meat and it's in the oven as I speak - and I only just realised this! Is there a chance of it turning out the same as a pork butt? :(

Asking this question because I was offered a taste of my flatmate's goose-fat roasted potatoes and I had a strong response ... YUCK. Overwhelming smelly rancid sesame-oil bird poo smell for me. I had to spit it out.

I know that as humans we're all wired to enjoy fatty foods and that fat is an important contributor to mouthfeel and the solubility of complex flavour compounds. But fats aren't made equal, and our favourites differ... here's mine:

My favourite animal fats: Bacon, butter, bone marrow
My favourite vegetable fats: Coconut cream, sesame oil
Processed fats: Aioli, Kewpie mayo, chili in oil, hollandaise

Most disliked: Rancid nut oils, goose fat, 'normal' white mayonnaise, olive oil 'creamed' spinach eugh, lard cakes

What's yours? Do you reckon there's a reason for our preferences?

Received a kilogram of this from a friend who bought it at an ethnic market and it doesn't have a best-by date. It's plain vanilla and has no seeds or nuts in it. We've spooned enough and have about 75% left.

Any suggestions as to how I can utilise this in a cake or pudding?

I cut up some cornish dairy fudge (they look like toffees but don't stick to teeth) and put them as a topping to my pudding in hopes it would melt and glaze it. It did, but on the edges of the tin it turned to a sticky flat brandy snap-like candy.

Does anybody know if this is a shortcut to making brandy snaps?

A pot of salsa I made and left in the fridge for a week turned fizzy. Is it still edible? Has anybody tried salsa like this? Is it by any chance a rural Mexican delicacy?

Do you fancy the mouthfeel of a glazed, smooth top bun with teeth sinking into it, or the bottom bun that soaks juice?

I personally really fancy the top bun, especially when melted cheese and slippery burger sauce and lettuce insulate it from disintegration. I like the mouthfeel rather than the sog. The sesame seeds are awesome too. Now if I could have two top buns ...

I have some trouble with puff pastry - sometimes it's crispy and flaky (usually so when made into cheese twists), other times it is doughy and somewhat like a flat croissant. Once I tried to make coconut-jam puff-pastry easy buns they completely collapsed into a flat cookie-like creation.

Why is it so inconsistent?

(I've always used storebought supermarket own-brand puff pastry)

I recently quad-posted (or perhaps quintuple) on a thread and I'm really sorry about that! I just can't actually delete them. I don't want to spam and all but it'd be great if I could correct the error there. The message-posted cgi page never loaded so I refreshed a few times...

While we're on that topic, could we have nested comments so people can reply directly to a thread? It'd make all the @soandso easier to catch up on.

All the dressings and capers, chiles, bacon-bits and what-not are fine and dandy, but what really does it for me is the snap. Say no more, snap's the word. Tell me about the snap.

Having grown up in Asia my exposure to hot dogs and sausages are meagre at best. British bangers this side of the pond are crusty and juicy with a coarse grind but just not 'bouncy' in the snap like a kielbasa, but rather crunchy-crisp and rippy.

On a scale of 1-10, 1 being biting cleanly through a flaccid cold supermarket 10cent frankfurter, and 10 being ... a hot pork intestine casing cheese-filled kielbasa (apologies if I don't know how snappy things can get), I'd like a snap-o-meter rating for all the hot dog reviews.

I'm saying this because I bought a Swiss-cervelat hot dog in and it ruined my day. That was a very fat supermarket frankfurter wrapped in a bread roll.

What do you think? Is a snap-o-meter useful?

The only times I've made slow-cooked beef, they came out light greyish brown, not unlike some corned beef. Sometimes they turn a bit browner, but not by much.

I had been eating into a steak and ale shortcrust pie here (Brit!) and I realised I have no idea how to make beef that deep and brown. Think a brown between the hue of dark chocolate and milk chocolate. I've loved slow cooked beef all my life in various forms - steak pie, beef brisket rice, ribs, rendang, but somehow have no idea how it's done.

How does it get so brown? Does anyone know? The brown isn't just on the outside but through the entire chunk of meat ...

I get it. Food means different things to everyone. There's subjective pleasure and favourites to be derived from the vast world of culinary wonders. But have you ever wondered if some things ... don't (really) have a place (any more) in our diets?

I'm not trying to be utilitarian, don't get me wrong. I'm just wondering if there should be a focus on quality, not quantity (or variety for the sake of variety).

I'm asking because ... I can't. I get too cold, and I am only fond of super-hard ince cream where I chip away at it!

I've had to shift my stuff to a smaller fridge today and ice cream is the first casualty (i.e. no space, has got to be eaten)... this is far more difficult than I had thought!

I had made some char-grilled mediterranean vegetables and frozen the leftovers. Some time later I was intending to defrost them before popping them into the oven.

Some couple of days later I realised my butter had picked up flavours from that dish! Now I am fully aware that this is my own fault for not wrapping that stick of butter better and all, but..

...has anybody used this characteristic of butter for some creative culinary purposes? Care to share?

I think italian-herb butter tastes weird for sweet usages, so I'm wondering if anyone has tried floral or cinnamon butters based on this.

Any titles that literally hold the reader's hand and teaches them all the basics to assemble a healthy, one-person portioned meal? I don't just mean spag bol or shepherd's pie or toad in the hole or popping a pizza into the oven.

Backstory: my boyfriend relocated to Japan to work and has been filling up on Asahi and porky, fatty deep-fried things daily at a 10pm dinner. His health is taking a hit and he notes somewhat bemusedly that he hasn't had any vegetables for a long time.

To give you an idea, his culinary know-how is that of a teenager, ranging generally from reading cardboard sleeve instructions, piercing films and pressing buttons on the microwave.

I think a cookbook is in order. What do you think? Have you any titles or suggestions?

It's been a long day and you've finally made it home. Nothing fancy or fresh in your kitchen. What do you do to jazz up something you have on hand?

I don't usually have leftovers, so I try to pass muster with what sad student staples I have. I open a can of plum tomatoes (or sometimes a ragout sauce in a jar...), mash it, add some garlic, herbs, paprika and chili powder, beans, pickled cabbage, pickled chiles, slice up some deli meat and mix them into a bowl. I crack two eggs, cover and nuke it for 2 minutes ... lazy shirred eggs.

Any lazy bachelor dinner ideas for 'one of those days'?

I like them waxy, small, skin-on and boiled. What about you?

While surfing the nets I came across this bit of news - forgive me if I'm late to the party. (link here)

Scientists claim that they have found individuals with a consistent ability to distinguish a fatty solution compared to one without the fatty acids. What I'm curious or perhaps confused about is this: does one taste fat, or are we merely able to discern it based on mouthfeel? I personally get a parched throat when eating fatty things, so the idea of flavour for me is moot (I would know there was fat dissolved based on my dinky throat).

I've thought the consensus is that fat is a carrier for flavour, and many purified forms of fat carry flavours from their sources.

Or perhaps I'm wrong - most 'flavours' go beyond sweet, salty, sour and bitter, and salt is an amplifier for flavours and not a flavour itself, so it follows that fat may both have a flavour and carry flavour?

Do you think fat itself has a flavour on its own? Can you taste fat alone, and what does it taste like to you?

The pictures on the main site don't load for me and there's a status of 'Waiting for ....amazon...' at the bottom of the window for me. Does anyone have the same problem or solutions?

I tried getting off Google Chrome Incognito but using just Chrome alone didn't resolve the situation.

Pictures on rest of the individual articles load perfectly fine. :S

I read about the 'supertaster' status of certain folks who have extraordinarily acute senses of taste and found a test on the internet where they send you a liquid that you subsequently taste. Depending on what you do taste they grade your taste sense.

Has anybody tried this and are there any supertasters on SE? :)

(article: http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2010/06/how-to-tell-if-you-are-a-supertaster/ )

I'm a chai tea latte addict and I *love* it with soymilk, extra hot and spicy. I've been bleeding my pockets dry by feeding my addiction with Starbucks, Caffe Nero etc (I am in London) - does anybody have any good recommendations for the powder mix they use?

I like a chai with a good spice, peppery nutmeg note optional (this is the Starbucks flavour with a gingery kick). I'm not one for a tame vanilla chai, so please help out!

I noticed that my school cafe uses Zuma, it'd decent but doesn't come close in intensity to the Starbucks one ...

I had just about all the spices to cook a cochinita pibil and thought it would be a good time to try cooking it. It's been a long time since I had this fantastic dish so I thought I would attempt to cobble it together.

Went to the local supermarket (they are all small metro grocery types here) and could only get pork loin steaks and a foot-long skinny tenderloin.

I marinated the steaks and the tenderloin separately overnight, following this recipe and roasted the steaks for 2 hours at 300 deg F.

The steaks came out gray, dry, albumin-oozing and sitting in a puddle of deliciously spicy and oniony OJ marinade.

I think the problem is obvious - I got my heat-to-mass ratio wrong and cooked the hell out of something that could be really exquisite. Now I have the tenderloin coming up, what do you reckon I ought to roast it for, considering it isn't 2 pounds of pork butt but more like 12 ounces of pork tenderloin?

What do you think went wrong?