When I decided I wanted to try coffee, when I was twelve or something, I decided I would like it black, because that was the kind of man I was.
If you liked cold coffee black why wouldn't you like hot coffee black?
I drink the first cup or two with cream and sugar, then switch to black for any after that.
During my transition phase to black, I would just eat a small cookie with my coffee. Eventually I cut out the cookie.
Obligatory Low-Hanging Fruit: I do, on occasion, go back.
1: Me, too! I think I thought I was a hard-boiled detective. Heebie, don't you want to be a hard-boiled detective?
I decided that same thing as in 1 for similar reasons when I was younger, along with other, related decisions. ("I will drink my whiskey neat.") But it turns out I like my coffee with milk (NOT cream), and iced coffee with sweetener as well. I do still drink my whiskey neat, and never developed a taste for scotch, some kinds of which I am given to understand require ice.
If you liked cold coffee black why wouldn't you like hot coffee black?
I think the flavor is less intense. Not in the way of watery coffee, though. Maybe the acidity is masked?
I do want to be a hard-boiled detective.
I typically drink my coffee black, but from time to time I'll go though a "with milk & sugar" phase that will last a few weeks, and then I go back.
By the way, is there anyone out there who drinks coffee with milk/cream but not sugar, or with sugar but not milk/cream? I suppose there must be, but I respectfully submit that such people are crazy.
If I put milk and sugar in cold coffee, then I end up slamming the drink in about two seconds. It becomes mentally categorized as a delicious shake, or something.
Then I'm mad because my delicious coffee is gone and I didn't savor it.
but I respectfully submit that such people are crazy
Why is that? I don't like sugar in hot coffee because it seems like the flavors don't meld very well. I like the way milk smooths out the coffee flavor and gives it a bit more body.
I'll drink coffee black if there's only that powdered milk crap, and it's perfectly serviceable. But, like Blume, I *prefer* my coffee with milk (NOT cream), so why not aim to have it that way more often than not? I chafe at the idea that black coffee is somehow more virtuous.
7: But you apparently want to seem more virtuous, or something.
Oh, I do like milk in iced coffee, come to think of it, because then I can drink it in four seconds.
If I put milk and sugar in cold coffee, then I end up slamming the drink in about two seconds.
YES. On the rare occasions I make cold coffee at home in the summer, I guzzle the whole thing and then have 10-15 minutes of extra time when I would otherwise be drinking my hot coffee.
12: Other people's computers suck.
is there anyone out there who drinks coffee with milk/cream but not sugar
Yes. Milk, no sugar.
I like milk (or cream) but not sugar. And I agree with Heebie that black cold coffee is nicer than hot, though I still would prefer some cream (or milk).
Actually, the reason I think black coffee is virtuous is because there's family folklore about how my grandparents started drinking black coffee as part of the war effort and rationing. Now that I think about it.
Maybe that's why the detective does, too, right?
10, 11, 16, 18: I just knew you people were all crazy. And I dig that about you.
On the occasions when I've had coffee with milk but not sugar, it struck me that black coffee or with milk and sugar would have been preferable. But de gustibus and all.
But I still submit that coffee with sugar but without milk is vile.
19: Sugar was tough to get for a couple of years, according to my dad who was in the prime of his dessert-eating years during the war.
I decided I was going to like coffee black as a kid because somebody told me it was an acquired taste, to which my reaction was always "I am going to acquire that taste! Right now!" Same thing with beer, same thing with hot sauce.
I find coffee with sugar (in any form, milk or no milk) fairly disgusting.
I end up slamming the drink in about two seconds
If you're aiming to maximize the caffeine effect, though, that's the way to go.
26: yes! It's fantastic! Practically a caffeine pill.
In 27 "pill" should have read "enema".
I don't like black with sugar, but cream and no sugar is okay. I prefer half-and-half over milk.
One of the more awesome things about having an ice cream maker is the ability to make coffee ice cream with little to no sugar.
20
I don't even drink coffee.
Ditto.
When speaking of coffee, de gustibus can totes be written de goo. It's true!
Ahahaha. 24 is me too. I was told at 9 or 10 that there was no way I would like martinis. OH YEAH???? (The same thing happened with scotch but at the toddler stage.)
I always liked coffee-flavored things, but when I first started drinking coffee it was with cream (or milk) and sugar. When I was a vegan, I ended up switching to black coffee, because soy milk in coffee is gnar.
Has no one linked to one of these threads yet?
from Ajay: "...like I like my coffee - cheap and low quality, but provided free by my employer."
11: I chafe at the idea that black coffee is somehow more virtuous.
The power of negative autosuggestion is strong in this one.
In any event, if my coffee order gets screwed up and I end up with coffee with milk in it, I can drink it, fine. But coffee with sugar in it is gross.
36, 37: I like my coffee like commenting from other people's computers, not one fucking bit.
Does anybody but Shirley (Lavern?) find milk a palatable addition to a cola?
When I'm at home and not drinking tea, I prefer drinking single-shot espressos, black without sugar, at least partly because I can drink a greater number of them than, say, lattes containing the same amount of caffeine, or even (shudder) americanos. This means more opportunities for me to go to the machine, perform the ritual of making the coffee, and drink it. Since each such opportunity is interpreted by my limbic system as a discrete reward, the result is more rat-orgasms in total.
When I'm out, though, I feel that I'm not getting my money's worth with a single shot, so I usually get what Bucksters would call a short latte (i.e. eight ounces, with a single shot in it), no sugar.
36: Also relevant to this thread, that whole riff got going from an "acquired taste" exchange.
("[Y]our" s/b "their". God Christ, but reading my own past words are painful.)
Another just espresso. But with a tiny amount of brown sugar (they don't call them coffee spoons for nothing).
Cream, no sugar, but I find coffee to be very dehydrating these days, so I usually drink tea.
Hot: cream, no sugar; the milk allows you to taste the coffee without the acidity or whatever overloading the flavor. If I'm drinking shitty diner coffee I'll take it black. Iced: with scads of sweetened condensed milk: DELICIOUS MILKSHAKE.
Only tea for me. No sugar, yuck.
40 - my dad drinks milk and diet coke. But he adds milk to all sorts of things, so I don't take his actions as recommendations. In fact, I saw him yesterday, after my mum had left him home alone for 2 days, and he told us he had invented a new recipe: half a glass of brown sugar, a generous glug of vanilla essence, top up with milk.
I don't think that will catch on broadly.
The opposite of 43, coffee I expect/hope to be good I drink black, coffee I'm not trying to taste i'll put in milk and sometimes sugar.
48: Me too. Amazing coffee - black; good coffee - black; diner/gas station/DD/Tim's coffee - cream.
I occasionally drink espresso with just sugar but I'd almost always choose a Americano over an espresso.
Also I gave up coffee for Lent, so thanks guys. Tv yesterday was full of coffee, and today my internet is.
I was always told by my parents that black coffee was what people drank in the western US, and cream and sugar were for the east coast. Something cowboys something. No idea how true this is/ever was.
I have no idea about regional variation except that I can't drink the standard tea of the South.
Or I guess it was that a "regular" coffee in California was black coffee, and a "regular" coffee in the northeast had cream and sugar. This may have been true before the great coffee revolution of the 1990s.
The two current paragraphs on "cowboy coffee" in the Wikipedia article on Coffee preparation stand as evidence on why the extinction of homo sapiens should go unmourned by the rest of the cosmos.
Coffee - cream, no sugar.
Tea - sugar, no cream.
During my one short-term relationship I was complimented by the woman (age 19) on drinking my coffee black, in the manly way. But I don't actually drink coffee black, I just didn't want to use Friendly's's non-dairy creamer and I needed to wake up. So right off the bat I knew I was an impostor.
The wooden spoon and gold plated filter offend you?
My life, is black. My soul, is black. I like my coffee, black. Would you please scratch my, black.
I do normally drink coffee black. If it is crappy coffee and there is soy milk, I use that to cut the burnt flavor. (Can't do dairy.) Never sugar, although I will note that some soy milks are icky-sweet, a complicating factor that is not always predictable in a coffee shop.
But seriously, in what way does it matter? Aside from the caffeine imperative, if someone loves half-milk with 4 sugars, that's what they like. Maybe I'm just a hippy.
There is some coffee I like black (the cup-at-a-time stuff from that one shop on the corner of Divis and Oak in SF, for instance), but mostly I put in a little sugar. HOT TIP, if you're filling the cup yourself, you should put the sugar in first, then a little bit of coffee, then swirl that to dissolve, then fill the cup the rest of the way.
I don't understand you people who seem to imply that only if iced coffee is sweetened/creamed will you drink it very quickly. I drink iced coffee very quickly no matter what.
57: Don't forget ceramics!
The entire conceit of the whole thing offends me. But, yes, that specifically added to the offense. Remember kids, if you stir your coffee with a metal (much less plastic!) utensil you and your so-called coffee suck.
That second cowboy coffee paragraph is hilarious. Someone getting their superiority fix for the day by going on about coffee connoisseurship on Wikipedia.
I use a wooden spoon to stir the coffee in my french press, but only because the long-enough alternatives might scratch the carafe.
24 I decided I was going to like coffee black as a kid because somebody told me it was an acquired taste, to which my reaction was always "I am going to acquire that taste! Right now!" Same thing with beer, same thing with hot sauce.
Coffee, beer, hot sauce: all tastes I never quite acquired, but will sometimes consume in social settings where it seems like the thing to do.
Whereas tea and whiskey I will happily drink when alone.
I drink coffee more than I used to but I still find it, in pretty much any form except cold and sweetened, kind of gross. I'm lactose intolerant, so I avoid milk or cream. I don't find black coffee with sugar to be any more or less gross than black coffee without sugar, so I've stopped trying to use sugar to make it less gross.
52, 54: Ordering your coffee "regular" in NYC can still land you with cream and two sugars. But yeah, not, like, at Starbucks or something. At delis.
Regular coffee has milk and sugar. Yes, I'm from the Northeast.
I do like milk (or half and half) and Coke. I was started on this by milk & Moxie.
Oh, I like tea any number of ways (and usually prefer the tea steeped for a while), but the cambric tea of my childhood is a comfort food.
There's no virtue in drinking black coffee as such; everybody should drink what they like, so you should drink coffee with cream, dsquared should drink Bud lite, etc. However, if this is about feeding your caffeine addiction, get an espresso machine and have three or four hits every morning. Sets you up good style.
I generally do french press or moka pot coffee, with milk. But I just arrived today in guanciale centrale and will be maximizing my intake of these for the next week. Senza zucchero.
Half and half or milk, no sugar. I drink a fair amount of 7-11 coffee at work because of the whole free for guys in uniform thing.
Just black. I used to use cream and sugar, but can't stand that anymore. Don't much care about the taste, although I have beans and a grinder besides my usual Folgers. I sip the second and following cups for hours.
I don't ice it, dilute it, warm it up. Whatever. It's just there, just coffee.
Black, no sugar, as soon as I was old enough to get it myself instead of having parents spoon some of theirs into the milk. I've always loved the taste and smell of strong coffee. (The same with Scotch, green olives, and other "You need to acquire a liking for X" foods. It's part of the overall intensity-seeking, I would bet heavily on that.)
I tend to drink 'long' coffees with milk [usually semi-skimmed/2%] and sugar, but like espresso black. I drink much more of the former, though. Any coffee that's not espresso shot sized, though, I always have with milk. Black americano, blech. Usually I'll have a couple of large-ish coffees first thing in the morning, but then I might only have one more in the rest of the day. Unless I'm really needing the caffeine.
I prefer water to milk when taking No-Doz.
I decided I was going to like coffee black as a kid because somebody told me it was an acquired taste, to which my reaction was always "I am going to acquire that taste! Right now!" Same thing with beer, same thing with hot sauce.
And for the exact same reason, I don't drink coffee or beer. "Acquired taste" always scanned to me as "here's something gross, but you can get used to it." Not enticing.
I did learn to eat hot sauce as an adult.
It's part of the overall intensity-seeking
Yes, this. Coffee, like bourbon or port or habaneros or what have you, fall into that full mouth experience that most things don't give you. See also, cigarettes.
When I was first teaching myself to drink coffee (roughly the same time I was teaching myself to smoke) I took those flavored Italian syrups. What can I say, it was the 90s. Over time I decided that I liked the coffee and didn't want/need the flavorings. Nowadays, The only coffee I sometimes take sugar in is Turkish/Greek/Ethiopian, where the sugar somehow fits with the style in my head.
77: Yup. Smoking, fast cars, motorcycles, guns, hot sauces, etc. Bad boy stuff wired into the genes & amped by PTSD.
It's part of the overall intensity-seeking
This explains a lot. I think many of my food preferences are an attempt to avoid overly intense flavors, scents, or textures. Most of my childhood is an experience of feeling WAY TOO MUCH. The remembered scent of my grandfather's silverware can still roil my stomach. Ugh.
And I could never understand the "you'll learn to like it" mentality. I am pretty sure there has never been a single activity or foodstuff that I have kept going with through misery. If I don't like it initially, I'm not willing to torture myself on the grounds that I might start liking it someday.
(Except touch typing, but I wasn't really concerned with learning to "like" it, more the practical value of mastering it.)
I might add that I was expressly uninterested in "learning" to drink coffee by having it with cream and sugar, as that seemed like cheating. If I was going to drink coffee, it was going to be because I enjoyed the flavor, not because I had successfully masked it.
Worth noting that I don't actually like any hot beverages all that much. Mulled cider a few times a year is about it. I can drink tea with honey if it's socially necessary. One time, to appease an old Italian client, I drank coffee with sambucca (I don't like anise either). I thought I was going to get through it, and that I'd be able to be sociable in a new way. Then I thought I was going to puke. Ugh.
"Acquired taste" always scanned to me as "here's something gross, but you can get used to it." Not enticing.
No, see, it's an acquired taste because once you've acquired it you like it.
I think I have a rebuttable presumption of distrust for any man who doesn't drink coffee or bourbon (the presumption really is rebuttable, but it's a heuristic).
1. I do not buy the hot foods/coffee as proxy for intensity-seeking. I cannot speak for biohazards case, of course.
2. you know, part of the reason kids don't like a lot of these foods is that kids taste things way more intensely. Part of the reason things get described as "acquired tastes" to kids -- and that many kids don't like, for instance, beer -- is that they taste different for kids.
Anyhow, yeah, no, at this point I drink coffee, use tabasco, drink beer and have the occasional glass of fernet because all of those things are delicious.
"Acquired taste" always scanned to me as "here's something gross, but you can get used to it." Not enticing.
I continue to find this line of argument as borderline insulting as the first time it was floated here. Y'all posers only think you like those groty things!
In college I decided I was going to try to learn to appreciate olives, because several people whose taste in food I respected really liked them. Turns out olives are good! Really complex! With a wide range of flavors! That I am glad I now enjoy.
Not that liking olives now makes me more sophisticated or shows that I have a more refined palate or something like that. You can like or not like whatever you want. But I don't understand the mindset that says 'I don't like this on first encounter, therefore there is nothing here to like.'
82: I don't drink coffee. I do drink bourbon. Now what?
My BF drinks his coffee with splenda but no milk or cream.
I think if we all really concentrate on this thread, we might finally successfully account for tastes.
I usually take sugar or sweetener in tea, but when I spent time in England, I acquired a taste for basic black tea with milk and no sugar.
You can like or not like whatever you want. But I don't understand the mindset that says 'I don't like this on first encounter, therefore there is nothing here to like.'
To be fair to JRoth, I think that's being unfair to JRoth. He was describing his reaction to the description "acquired taste", not his judgment that those who have acquired it are fooling themselves.
90: "This *is* gross, but you can get used to it" sort of seems like that.
Fair enough. I'm pretty sure my reaction is importing things from the last iteration of this discussion.
86 -- you can do babysitting and we can buy a timeshare together, but no joint business ventures or trust falls.
86 -- you can do babysitting and we can buy a timeshare together, but no joint business ventures or trust falls.
86 -- you can do babysitting and we can buy a timeshare together, but no joint business ventures or trust falls.
I drink my coffee black because that way it's not sweet. There are surprisingly few widely available beverages that aren't sweet.
My grandfather apparently drank his coffee black at home, but when he was a restaurant where they had the free packets of sugar and creamer he would put them in, because that way they were free. Child of the Depression.
I'm in the bourbon=yes coffee=no category. Partly it's that I like alcohol and dislike caffeine. But also I like coffee fine while I'm drinking it, but the lingering taste in the mouth ten minutes later really bugs me.
Fair enough. I'm pretty sure my reaction is importing things from the last iteration of this discussion.
Give it another chance; you might like that thread.
96.2: My father-in-law's variation on this was to become wroth if anyone (including the kids) ordered a soft drink or even iced tea with ice. "You get more!" I gave trying to explain that with fountain drinks the cost of the ice probably exceeded the drink itself early on.
Both coffee and bourbon give me heartburn if I drink too much. I blame dystopian fiction for young adults.
Give it another chance; you might like that thread./i>
Something in it was linked the other day and I ended up rereading most of it. So I did!
83.1: I won't contend it's a general thing. For sure it runs in my family from at least my grandfather down to my children. There are stories of him stomach- crawling to a wrecked store to get cigarettes while Russian and German bullets flew overhead. There's a seriously crazy streak mostly kept under rational control, occasionally not.
82: I don't drink either of them and suspect this reinforces your heuristic.
I'm a bit split on the acquired taste thing. I will certainly admit that much of my relatively unsophisticated palate* is do to laziness and where iIhave made a minimum effort it has generally paid off. But I do still have a lingering (over)reaction to folks would insist that via some inevitable progression one would enjoy some more complex form of food or beverage. Scotch/bourbon being advertised this way by people I had no respect for led to several literal fights in my early '20s (when everyone involved was deep in their cups).
*Still greatly expanded from my childhood--I love things like asparagus and Brussels sprouts that I loathed as a child. I once managed to get myself so worked up over asparagus that I threw up at the table. Even I was impressed ("How'd I do that?")
Sometimes I get a heartburn from coffee - or maybe it's acid reflux or maybe heartburn is another word for acid reflux - and it's pretty much the only thing that gives me heartburn. But it's only happened a couple of times, generally when drinking coffee at the start of a long day of driving. The last couple of months I've had coffee a few times a week, which is a few times per week more than I normally drink coffee and I haven't noticed it at all.
Unlike lots of people I know who are used to drinking coffee, I still don't feel any urge to have coffee at any particular time. It's pretty much a calculation of whether I think I need caffeine. But there are times when I feel like I want to drink a coke.
I don't like either olives or beer because I just don't like strong bitter flavors. I feel like this is a weakness in my palate, but not one I'm motivated to try to change. There are plenty of delicious non-bitter flavors in the world.
I have essentially never drunk coffee. I never developed the habit and, so, caffeine makes me unpleasantly jittery.
I have always liked olives. So there.
Maybe you're a supertaster?
I don't think so.
I do suspect that there is a genetic element in how people respond to bitter flavors, but it's possible I only think that because of the experiment in HS Biology where some people thought a given compound tasted bitter and other people couldn't taste it at all.
I do feel like food affects my mood and how my body feels more than some people but perhaps that's just me being overly sensitive.
There are surprisingly few widely available non-alcoholic, cold beverages that aren't sweet.
Very true! And very frustrating!
You can make Kool Aid without adding sugar.
Speaking of unpleasantly jittery, I only recently learned about the grapefruit-coffee interaction. I had a half grapefruit with my breakfast, which I don't usually do, along with my regular two cups of coffee, and by the time I got to work I was uncomfortably jumpy. Enough so that I googled "coffee and grapefruit." And there you go.
104: "Heartburn" is pretty much always reflux. It's often related to posture as well as what you've ingested. Caffeine relaxes the lower esophageal sphincter so being folded behind the wheel might well have triggered an episode.
111: I'd never heard of it until now.
I have begun drinking tea the last few months (a small amount of sugar, no cream or milk). I've done so from time to time through the years, but I doubt if it has been a regular habit for even 10% of my time as an adult.
I vaguely knew that you shouldn't eat grapefruit in combination with certain medications, but it turns out that the same thing it does with those meds, keeping them from moving through your body as fast, happens with caffeine.
112: Ah, that makes a lot of sense. Thanks!
I don't like either olives or beer because I just don't like strong bitter flavors
Maybe you should explore the wonderful and delicious world of Flemish red ales! Yum! Duchesse de Bourgogne is I think reasonably widely available. Rodenbach Grand Cru is fantastic. Neither is remotely bitter.
Yum! Some of the Russian River sour ales are worthy of attention but I don't know how widely they're distributed.
Rodenbach Grand Cru is indeed fantastic. The Barrel 145 was even better, but isn't around much anymore. Duchesse is a good accessible introduction to the style.
I really really liked Ommegang's Rouge the few times I had it, so I really ought to try Cuvée des Jacobins.
I'm on team olives and bitters and hot sauce and flavors. Maybe I should give the brown liquors another try, because I wrote them off when I was first learning to tolerate alcohol.
(true story: when I was in high school, sometimes the mere smell of alcohol would make me puke. I do not have the basic composition of a drinker, but I'm willing to work at it.)
Man is this thread making me want a beer. Also pork rinds. Okay, maybe I can't blame the thread.
Milk, no sugar here.
Jane shows every sign of turning out to prefer "acquired tastes" to the regular kind, turning up her nose at carrots but clamoring for hot sauce, seaweed, and sips of coffee. We'll have to be sure to tell her that heroin is terribly boring and bland.
Am I incorrect in having the belief that heroin tastes bitter? This belief seems to me to have sprung full-formed into my mind on reading 123, but it must have come from somewhere (else), right?
God, Hawaii is super aggravating about food. Routinely sobbing that she hates something like Mac and cheese that she's eaten tons of times before. Hokey pokey is a bit more adventurous, though.
Or not being willing to try anything, even when it's familiar ingredients in a different shape, like hash browns or something.
123: O is all about hot sauce, coffee (you have to watch where you put your cup, because he'll snag it and start chugging), and thai food, but today refused some broccoli, which annoyed me.
127 con't: and here's to that continuing, because The Kid Who Won't Eat Anything is a bugbear of mine, second only to The Grown Up Who Won't Eat Anything Except the Stuff that Kids Who Won't Eat Anything Eat.
I vaguely remember not liking beer the first few times I drank it in quantity, although I liked it just fine as a kid when I had a small glass with Sunday lunch at my grandparents. These days, I think beer is a near perfect drink. Not that I drink it that often, it tends to be wine at home if I'm drinking in the house, and beer less often.
But beer is that perfect combination of cold, refreshing, and not sweet.
On the other hand, her bathtub monologue right now involves lots of sticky gross blood all over herself. See mom? See all the blood all over me? which was freaky for a moment, but is now entertaining.
My kid loves loves loves olives and sardines, but not spicy stuff (the taste for hot sauce in kids surprises me), and rejects mushrooms.
God, Hawaii is super aggravating about food.
I really thought this was going to be about bans on agricultural imports to Hawaii.
129.2: Belgians make sweet beer all to often. That and the price has me avoiding their beer entirely.
Hopefully she didn't just get her period.
I enjoy the taste of bitter foods and have since I was young. I did eat a cigarette when I was a toddler and I still remember it; that was too bitter.
Whenever I go from my ipad back to a computer, I notice that my ipad signature on previous comments is "heebie-heebie". Then I forget about it.
136: Huh, I hadn't noticed that, but so it is. Twice the heebie!
but today refused some broccoli, which annoyed me... The Kid Who Won't Eat Anything is a bugbear of mine, second only to The Grown Up Who Won't Eat Anything Except the Stuff that Kids Who Won't Eat Anything Eat.
Jane has not been interested in anything green other than avocado and seaweed lately. I am cultivating an attitude of "these things come and go" rather than thinking of it as her being picky or Not Eating It in any general sense, which is good for my mental health.
re: 133
Yeah. There's a couple of Czech beers that are lager style beers, but just slightly too sweet for me. There's one that I happily drink in Prague, but not in London. I don't know if that's psychological, or because it's possibly brewed under license in the UK [and is slightly sweeter], or if they just aren't storing/serving it right.
Lately I've been around a lot of parents insisting that their kids clean their plates, while the kids are protesting not being hungry.
I get that it's annoying when your kid won't eat dinner, and then complains about being hungry later on. But I have a kneejerk reaction against someone being made to eat food that they like, but don't want that much. (Ie, forcing a kid to eat their vegetables is a different issue.)
123: My little sister was like this as a toddler. Loved eating lemons and dill pickles especially, anything acidic.
I love spicy food so much that I forget it's supposed to be an acquired taste.
You *will* eat this whole bag of Swedish fish!
I am cultivating an attitude of "these things come and go" ... which is good for my mental health.
It's good for theirs, too.
103: I once managed to get myself so worked up over asparagus that I threw up at the table.
I did the same once with creamed spinach.
I'm a little surprised that people are thinking of olives chiefly in terms of bitterness rather than saltiness: as a kid (and still today) it's the brininess I love.
"these things come and go" ... which is good for my mental health.
My eldest said to me, as I was setting up a computer to play a movie for her, "I'll let you handle the techie stuff." This bugs me a lot more than any of the other princess-y affectations she's picked up. I'm even more bothered by it than I am by the fact that she is getting into a series of books by Madonna.
I'm thinking about telling her she can only do things on the computer that she can learn to do herself
52, 54 and 64: If you order your coffee regular at Dunkin Donuts here, it will come with cream and sugar.
I think I have a rebuttable presumption of distrust for any man who doesn't drink coffee or bourbon (the presumption really is rebuttable, but it's a heuristic).
I don't drink much, but I do like bourbon, consistent with my sharper-than-a-serpent's sweet tooth.
"Acquired taste" for me has often mean "something that tastes good (or at least interesting) but looks bad (or unusual): e.g. (for the young Flippanter), oysters, guacamole, pork belly, etc."
Actually, I don't particularly like guacamole or pork belly even now, but I don't regard people who like them as moral cripples deranged in their aesthetics wrong.
I'm thinking about telling her she can only do things on the computer that she can learn to do herself
That plan can't possibly go wrong.
146: Get RAH's list for what an adult should be able to do and start drilling her on all of them.
Get RAH's list for what an adult should be able to do and start drilling her on all of them.
That plan can't possibly go wrong.
Okay, so perhaps skip the conning of ships unless you're near water or in space.
Okay, so perhaps skip the conning of ships unless you're near water or in space.
That plan can't possibly go wrong.
5: scotch, some kinds of which I am given to understand require ice
Whoever told you this was lamentably imprecise.
Some kinds of Scotch are often preferred with water ad libitum. But ice is always deprecated.
Though I rarely if ever find my Scotch improved by water, even the cask strength stuff.
146.1: I think that would bother me too. There's an entire cohort of (mostly female) online booksellers prone to casual, airy remarks like "So I called my techie and had him rearrange the system to avoid the problem."
How annoying, it seems to me: "my techie"? You had him fix the problem?
In any case, if she's not too young, I don't see the problem in expecting her to learn how to do it herself. You could always explain to her that once she gets older, people will think it's hott.
I did say only things she can learn to do herself, not all things she can learn to do herself.
146.2: "Not until you can spell well enough to type 'goatse' into the search engine yourself."
There are surprisingly few widely available non-alcoholic, cold beverages that aren't sweet.
Isn't this the entire point of seltzer/mineral water?
When I became a wine freak I lost my taste for hot/spicy foods...you cannot drink a good red with heat.
"Shouldn't" isn't the same as "cannot."
Whoever told you this was lamentably imprecise.
Eh, I may also be confusing it with advice for some bourbons, or with the suggestion to add water. Since I don't drink scotch, I don't pay much attention.
I think I much prefer a blended scotch/Irish Whiskey on the rocks to drinking it neat, deprecation be damned. Not a good single malt (in general, I like scotch OK but am not that into them).
On the advice of some guy, I now drink cheap, blended scotch over ice and mixed with a liqueur.
159: It's really more like can't. The wine reacts with the heat to burn the inside of your mouth and make it impossible to taste anything. Some wines can handle moderate heat, and a really thick, jammy red like a big Aussie shiraz or Cali Zinfandel can handle more, but real intense heat is almost impossible to match.
Do you drink wine at every single meal, all the time? I can't imagine drinking wine often enough to never leave me the space to eat spicy food. And places I'd be having spicy food also are often not the ones where I'd be excited about having their wines.
Spicy foods and beer are friends.
164: no. If I feel like spicy Indian food I also feel like beer. Summer is more of a beer/casual food time, especially when it's hot. But my favorite meals are the ones where I can pull out a bottle of wine I've been saving or looking forward to for a while. I've gradually become biased toward the foods I can match with those wines.
Also, spent some time in France and absorbed some of the traditional French cuisine attitude toward hot peppers and such...that it's a way to punch or hide lousy ingredients so if you have good ingredients it gets in the way. But in the U.S. lousy ingredients are the norm.
There are surprisingly few widely available non-alcoholic, cold beverages that aren't sweet.
Would iced herbal tea (without sugar) count?
the traditional French cuisine attitude toward hot peppers and such...that it's a way to punch or hide lousy ingredients so if you have good ingredients it gets in the way.
Wow, that's a really stupid theory.
A pepper can, of course, never be a good ingredient in itself.
I've often been told that hot peppers and such were used back in the olden times to make spoiled / stale ingredients palatable, but apparently that's a really stupid theory. Probably racist as well.
160: I have heard that some bourbons are best enjoyed on ice.
161: Deprecated doesn't mean that I don't do it too, of course.
In fairness to PGD, I think we all know what he refers to: hot peppers are frequently used to mask less than stellar ingredients. I would take issue with the notion that they're always used in such a way. Someone who's taken with French cuisine is not going to be looking at Thai food on its own merits.
I am affronted, though, affronted, sir! by the suggestion that there are no decent ingredients available in the US! Stand down, else sabers at dawn!
Lagavulin or Bushmills single malt yes, bourbon no. Had a great bottle of carginane with the cheese course last night. Had some moonshine homemade eau de vie today with a ski buddy. And a Groomer: It is not recommended that you drink while you are skiing or snowboarding...
...you might spill your beer.
No coffee. I liked it in my 20s, but quitting really improved my skin.
Carignane. Too much sunshine and moonshine.
Someone who's taken with French cuisine is not going to be looking at Thai food on its own merits.
Why?
I think what PGD is saying is generally true for very good cuts of meat, very fresh fish, and very very fresh excellent vegetables (that is, more often than not, spice is totally unnecessary and can hurt the flavor of the food, you wouldn't serve a well marbled Kobe ribeye with hot sauce). But there is so much good food -- eg stews -- that can be made with lesser cuts of meat and are delicious and taste totally great.
you wouldn't serve a well marbled Kobe ribeye with hot sauce
Nobody's talking about pouring Frank's all over your steak, not to worry. But something like (just to pick something at random) green papaya salad is designed around 1. incredibly fresh, excellent vegetables and 2. being really, really fucking spicy. I mean, shit, cevhiche is evidently pretty dependent on having excellent, fresh fish, and yet it is often (delightfully) extremely spicy.
And reallly excellent sushi still comes with wasabi.
some of the traditional French cuisine attitude toward hot peppers and such...that it's a way to punch or hide lousy ingredients so if you have good ingredients it gets in the way
This is a particularly amusing attitude, given the traditional knock on French cooking as having developed so many sauces to mask the bad meat.
176: 177 is a good answer. I'm a mostly-vegetarian, and don't go for French cuisine much myself (I tend to think of it as highly meat-based).
180: Not really. It makes a lot of bizarre assumptions about Thai cuisine.
I threw an extra h into 178 just for spice.
Whatever. I'm not really feeling like having a sneery food fight.
to return to the OP... I'd kind of like to learn to not hate coffee. Replacing diet soda as my delivery medium is probably a really good idea... that stuff can't possibly be good for me. When I'm really "on the sauce" or "chasing the 'carmel color' dragon" I drink like white-rat quantities...
Sometimes I don't know what to do with strong flavors. There have been a few occasions in the last several months when I've gone to a restaurant and ordered some kind of dish that heavily involves figs. "Mmm, figs, those are tasty," I think. And then I'm served my food and realize the fig completely overwhelms all the other flavors and that building an entire meal around this flavor just doesn't work for me and I can't make it through more than a fraction of the food before I feel totally overwhelmed by figness. And yet, I do like the taste of figs.
183: Who's sneering?! I just wondered why you think liking French food precludes taking Thai food seriously.
I have heard that some bourbons are best enjoyed on ice.
Huh, I disagree with that guy except for about Booker's and maybe Knob Creek, which I wouldn't pick for a sippin' whiskey to start with, but if I did I'd likely add water or ice.
Yeah I dunno, 178 makes sense, but even in high end sushi the wasabi is pretty moderated and not overwhelming. I guess I'd stick with a position that it's pretty easy to fuck up really good ingredients with an unnecessarily high level of spice. I guess I'm mostly thinking of meat tbh. And Thai food, while great, isn't based around fancy cuts of expensive beef.
I guess I'd stick with a position that it's pretty easy to fuck up really good ingredients with an unnecessarily high level of spice.
It is possible to fuck up really good ingredients in any number of ways, yes. Many of those ways of fucking up really good ingredients are readily available under the rubric of traditional French cuisine.
Well, much of traditional French cuisine is elaborate preparations for not great tough cuts of meat, so I dont really understand that particular point. And it's also totes true that spice is often used to hide lower end ingredients, often very effectively.
It is also worth noting that the regional cuisine that has devoted the greatest attention to serving really incredibly excellent cuts of beef cooked perfectly serves those cuts of beef with... a (mildly) spicy chili sauce!
Probably I overstated with "chili sauce". A sauce with chili pepper flakes in it, anyhow. And lots of other spices.
Yeah, but I'm still sticking with overpowering spice=not good for great ingredients, meat department. You can and people do often use *spices* for flavoring.
Shit, the French approach to a fine cut of steak is to just totally cover that fucker in black pepper.
Well, much of traditional French cuisine is elaborate preparations for not great tough cuts of meat, so I dont really understand that particular point.
I admit I don't really understand it either, but that seems to be PGD's view, and I haven't spent time in France myself, and French cuisine is so fucking meat-based anyway that I can have no opinion as to freshness.
193: I mean, that seems reasonably difficult to argue with. And since it doesn't seem to have anything to do with the assertion that I was originally so down on, I'm comfortable not arguing with it.
Anyway, eat whatever you want, except if you're eating grains you're killing yourself.
Killing your hunger with deliciousness!
It's worth noting that Paleolithic man would have had a very bland diet, and would've run screeching back to his cave if he encountered a modern pepper.
Modern peppers have like ten times the THCcapsaicin as the peppers they had back in the day.
I think we're really talking about medieval European man here: hunks of meat and mugs of wine. Mead for the downscale.
Yeah, but I'm still sticking with overpowering spice=not good for great ingredients, meat department.
Yeah, if it's overpowering. Yet people famously differ as to what constitutes "overpowering" spice.
It's certainly true that capsaicin is a preservative and that the hottest cuisines tend to come from hot, humid areas where food spoils quickly. I'm not sure how far you can generalize beyond that, though, now that cuisine is so globalized.
I've never bought the corollary that spicy food cools you off, though. While it does make you sweat, it's because you're super hot and sweaty.
I tried Thai food and found it too hard to avoid coconut and peanuts so I stopped eating it.
Spicy food doesn't raise your body temperature, does it?
It definitely gives the illusion that your body temperature is raised. You feel really hot and sweaty. It does not seem paradoxically cooling and quenching by any stretch of the imagination.
It speeds up your metabolism, briefly. This is why something like a garlic-hot pepper tonic or a spicy broth can help fight off infection.
Also, I assigned a paper in a class, and I have to deal with two fucking Wikipedia plagiarists. I'm in a field where I never assign papers, but I did. Out of seven students, and one failed to turn in anything at all.
Coffee also speeds up your metabolism, but no one pretends that it cools you down.
Coffee speeds up your metabolism? In a whole-system way? I thought it was just nervous system speed.
Coffee certainly makes fluids run through your system faster.
No, I think it speeds up your whole metabolism for a couple hours.
OT I: John Carter is not very good. It may be destined for "nerd cult" status (cf. Flash Gordon), but not "misunderstood masterpiece."
OT II: Today one disclosed to one's father that one has a new girlfriend. Due to Protestantism/New Englandism, one prefaced this statement with "I will not entertain follow-up questions about this."
Coffee also speeds up your metabolism, but no one pretends that it cools you down.
I have actually seen claims that it does, but some quick googling isn't turning up any support for that.
you cannot drink a good red with heat.
If only there were wine of some other color...
Plenty of whites go great with spicy food, especially aromatic varietals such as Gewürztraminer and Muscat. Also, Thai food (on the subject of which, you should get yourself a copy of this sexxxy book) is, you know, not necessarily hot. It comes in many forms!
Not unrelatedly, one upside of splitting up is escaping the tyranny of one's spouse's increasing intolerance of all but the blandest food. Just the sight of unadorned skinless chicken breasts and cottage cheese makes me lose my appetite anymore.
Speaking of coffee, does anyone have any good recommendations for a coffee thermos? I want something that can hold two or three cups, will keep the coffee relatively hot, and can travel in a backpack while I'm riding on a bike. Go, Mineshaft!
Today one disclosed to one's father that one has a new girlfriend. Due to Protestantism/New Englandism, one prefaced this statement with "I will not entertain follow-up questions about this."
How did he respond?
I mostly drink coffee with sugar and no milk. Iced coffee varies, but most commonly milk but no sugar. Not sure why anyone would drink espresso without sugar. The sugar brings out the flavors, going without is like eating savory foods without salt. The one exception to my no milk habit is cappucino, but it's almost impossible to get one in the US.
And I don't get the thing about no sauces on good steak. Sure, it masks some of the flavor of the steak, but it also adds a good complementary flavor. Both are good in their own way.
185 The one good fig/meat dish that I know involves wrapping fresh figs in prosciutto, sticking them into a partially deboned quail and roasting it. Mmmh, quail.
I've never bought the corollary that spicy food cools you off, though. While it does make you sweat, it's because you're super hot and sweaty.
So, you know, uh, you know how being sweaty works, right? If something makes you sweaty, then that will cool you down. (Not if you're wearing too much in the way of (ugh) clothes, though.)
neb is always careful to only eat spicy food while naked.
Just the sight of unadorned skinless chicken breasts and cottage cheese makes me lose my appetite anymore.
I can't blame you. I say! Where's the green?
Does anybody but Shirley (Lavern?) find milk a palatable addition to a cola?
Sounds vile. I have tried coke with peanuts in it (I think this is southern, traditionally with RC but RC is not to be found in NYC, if it's made at all anymore) and it was rather good. I have not tried hot Dr. Pepper which was something the company advertised in the 50s or 60s or something. It sounds too terrible.
225: Iceberg lettuce. Lest you think I'm kidding, rest assured that I am not.
Texans believe it is traditionally done with Dr Pepper. I have no idea, though. 10, 2 and 4!
Skinless chicken breasts are the tofu of meat. They can be quite good as a vehicle for various flavors, but on their own they're remarkably bleh.
That's not really fair; my parents have adventurous palettes. They're just phobic about fat.
They didn't want to tell you they'd moved to Portland.
221: He said, with the gentle wisdom that makes him generally very pleasant to be around and occasionally infuriating to be related to, "Additional information will arrive in due time."
227: Oh dear. With cucumber? (Not that there's anything wrong with cucumber. You can make a great dressed salad with cucumber, but it will involve ... vinegar.)
I would never divorce your mom, h-g. It's not merely about the food, though that became quite an aggravant (is that even a word? Is now, I guess). Don't even get me started on the usual state of the kitchen.
With cucumber?
Zackly. The whole scene is mostly why I've vastly increased my intake of pickled anchovies, nattō and kimchi.
an aggravant (is that even a word? Is now, I guess)
What language?
neb is always careful to only eat spicy food while naked.
You have toa dmit eating a spicy sweat-inducing meal while clad at most in one's underthings does sound pleasingly decadent (naturally one's mind does not imagine a tawdry wifebeater-and-boxer combo, or a "midnight snack" eaten standing up, or any such stuff as that).
Oh, for sure. My mom keeps a spotless kitchen.
My mom keeps a spotless kitchen.
It's one of the things I love about her.
Didn't read all the comments, so apologies if there is repetition. A few thoughts.
If you're drinking cold-brewed coffee black, it is actually less acidic because the beans are treated differently (not merely just tasting less acidic.)
I started off on coffee with black coffee (well, mixed in with having to drink instant coffee loaded with so much sugar it would make your teeth curl at the Ukrainian family's house I tutored.) and still do on occasion (drinking black coffee all the time makes my stomach hurt, and I find milk neutralizes the acid), but then the quality of the coffee matters more. Shitty coffee is better when cut with milk or other additives.My family's attitude towards alcohol and coffee was, better to start with it straight and learn to like it than get used to drinking some sugary version. I started coffee at about 17, and red wine at about the same age, when my mother forced me to drink it at dinner. I'm grateful now to my family that I missed out on the Frappacino/Mike's Hard Lemonade stage that many teenage girls go through, and both taste totally gross to me now.
As others have mentioned, drinking black coffee with sweets is a good way to start with black coffee. Black coffee and pie is classic.
For some reason, I find cream or even whole milk in coffee slightly gross, but I like low-fat or non-fat milk in coffee. Plain, I can drink whole milk just fine (though I prefer 1-2%), and despise nonfat milk, so I don't know why it is reversed in coffee.
And she puts out.
I wasn't going to mention that. She hates it when you're so crass, btw.
pickled anchovies
There's no need to go overboard, Jesus! Or maybe there is. I'd probably be drinking olive juice at that point. (My family was pretty big into the iceberg lettuce- with-cucumber salad thing; my dad preferred mayonnaise on his. I was eating dill pickles whenever I could get them, to compensate. In later life, I discovered pesto! Life will never be the same.)
Your story is starting to check out.
My family was pretty big into the iceberg lettuce- with-cucumber salad thing; my dad preferred mayonnaise on his.
Ah, gentiles.
Speaking of carrying beverages, my sister told me that I'm running far enough that I should be taking some water with me. On the one hand, I hate to admit my siblings might be right. On the other hand, since coming home I've had about three quarts of water.
I am not a big coffee guy but when I do drink it I drink it black.
"I don't always like women, but when I do, I like them black."
Pickled anchovies are delicious, and I would happily eat them every day.
(naturally one's mind does not imagine a tawdry wifebeater-and-boxer combo, or a "midnight snack" eaten standing up, or any such stuff as that)
One's mind imagines standing in the kitchen late at night clad only in silk boxers and eating some seafood dish bathed in incendiary sauce (and accompanied by a well-chilled Riesling), yes one's mind does.
Ok, re. Coke and milk:
I can one-up you. My grandfather always drank a glass of Schnapps before bed, but in his 80s, he read that red wine was good for the heart and people should drink a glass a day. He went out and bought the cheapest jug of red wine he could find, and every night before bed, he would fill up half a juice glass with wine, and then top up the other half with milk. Then he would sling the whole thing back like he was doing a shot. (I told my friend this story and he called it an "Italian car bomb"). He'd offer me a glass, but I never took him up on the offer.
248, 249: I never heard of mayo on lettuce and my background was about as gentile as you could get.
255: I'm going to go ahead and assume you win.
259: 6.6 miles, but it wasn't very warm.
I blush to think of the multiple jars of mayonnaise in the Flip-Pater's refrigerator.
"Dad, do you have any mustard?"
"I think we ran out of the mustard you brought last Christmas."
253 gets it right. 255 wins the repulsive-off.
The most common Polish summer salad is sliced cucumbers, sour cream, and dill. It is called 'miseria'. As a small child who hated dill with a passion and wasn't too fond of sour cream, I found the name to be quite appropriate.
Discussed here previously, Chileans mix Coca-Cola and cheap red wine. It's called jote. The gringos used to sing, "Jote, Mote, Holiday Inn." Because we're dorks.
263: If you add mayo and bacon bits, it's pretty much cucumbers in dip.
So, do any cultures other than Polish drink sauerkraut juice? You used to be able to buy it on streetcorners in the summer along with kefir. Coke, Starbucks, and iced tea have now taken over.
260: I wouldn't think you'd need any measure besides unpleasantness of being thirsty, weighed against unpleasantness of carrying a water bottle.
I make it a point to exercise in as dehydrated a state as I possibly can, because I'm incontinent like that. So I assume everyone else is being way over-cautious.
266: I think so but nothing comes to mind that I can cite with confidence.
I make it a point to exercise in as dehydrated a state as I possibly can
wtf
266: Sometimes you wonder how bland, international corporations snuff out local traditions. Sometimes you don't.
267: I wasn't unpleasantly thirsty, so I suppose I was O.K.
I never heard of mayo on lettuce
The standard French salad dressing is basically mayo - an emulsified mix of egg yolk and olive oil with a bit of salt, mustard and vinegar.
but the cambric tea of my childhood is a comfort food.
There's a little throwaway line in a Dorothy Parker story where she tells the bartender to make it awfully weak, just a cambric scotch. I sometimes slip this in, to nobody's delight.
Oh and coffee: milk + no sugar, whether it's iced or hot. Always decaf, because caffeine is not fun for me like it is for the rest of the human race. And then I read the next fifty comments and found that some of you people share my woe.
Chileans mix Coca-Cola and cheap red wine
I vaguely remember some NYT piece about Chinese nouveau riche mixing Coke with grand cru Bordeaux. This is why we must maintain defense spending at current levels.
268: otherwise I'd pee my pants.
CLEAR AND COPIOUS, heebie-heebie!
When I was taking CS classes at Chicago there was a guy who occasionally (or at least once, on the occasion about to be related) asked other people about the quality and character of their micturitions. I definitely recall him asking me this when a bunch of us were pulling an all-nighter in … Ryerson? … writing our compilers for the compilers class. He was dissatisfied when I told him about the color, but I can't remember what he thought it was a sign of.
Later someone fork-bombed the computer someone else was working on, and we all laughed. Oh, college days!
269 I'm told that both are awesome for hangovers. I don't get hangovers, but I am thirsty after a night of drinking, and I used to find having only that available the morning after a party rather annoying (tap water wasn't a good idea back then).
274 makes me glad I dropped the one CS class I ever thought about taking.
I drank sauerkraut and olive juice as a kid, but figured that was just me.
I drink assorted stuff you're supposed to drain out of cans of canned food. I find it weirdly delicious, like black bean water or strained tomatoes water.
You and a bunch of people Ronald Reagan hadn't saved from the commies yet.
I liked him a lot, actually. R-ni Cho-dh-ry. Also that was a fun class, except for the part where the guy who was supposed to be my partner for the final project totally flaked out.
278: I thought I was the only one who drank olive juice and pickle juice.
279 without seeing 278, but also on the pickle and olive and sauerkraut juice. Also I fucking love munching on cocktail onions.
I think maybe you all have a pica.
Some of Bave's friends are really into the red wine and coke thing. It's called a kalimotxo. The "tx" means it's maybe Basque, right? It's...gross.
Spicy foods and beer are friends.
Which makes me sad because both seem to tie my stomach in knots. If I had any willpower at all, at this point I would not eat spicy food at all, but the thought of not eating spicy food, to me, sounds like eating iceberg lettuce and mashed potatoes for the rest of my days.
And yet, I do like the taste of figs.
Don't touch the figs.
Kalimotxo does appear to be Basque, yes.
||
I think The Good Wife might even manage to surpass Veronica Mars in my personal television pantheon.
|>
sounds like eating iceberg lettuce and mashed potatoes for the rest of my days.
Actually, I rather like colcannon.
I had to google colcannon.
The internet says "kale," but I'm not sure what that is.
I have an Italian friend who claims that Italians like to drink beer and sprite. I tried it with some Miller Lite (the beer available while when this information was told to me) and it was surprisingly not awful. Of course, I asked my Italian boyfriend about this, and he claimed Italians do no such thing. (Well, first he asked if this guy was Southern Italian.)
On sauerkraut juice...I love sauerkraut, but drinking the juice plain sounds disgusting.
279: black bean water or strained tomatoes water
Those you should add to the food itself. Or save it in a jar in the fridge and add to food that it's appropriate to add to (soups, chilis, stews). Or, you know, drink it if you want to. Don't throw it out. Except that bean juice from a can -- not so good, throw that out.
Drinking sauerkraut juice, pickle brine, other kinds of brines or liquid byproducts of lactic acid fermentation is supposed to be very healthful.
Beer and a soft drink type thing is I think called a shandy.
Jammie's Montana family does half beer half tomato juice.
Then I hope there's a specific version of it called a Tristram Shandy.
Also there's a Mexican half beer half something that I can't remember.
The internet says "kale," but I'm not sure what that is.
Remember when everybody made kale chips? It's that.
I've had an okay one at Lord Hobo. Not sure why you'd choose that over a Bloody Mary.
My objection is to tomato juice. Eugh.
What's the deal with people who drink Bloody Mary mix rather than an actual Bloody Mary? Is this a thing? I hear people asking for it on airplanes a lot.
So, do any cultures other than Polish drink sauerkraut juice?
German, too. Good for the digestion.
Beer + sprite or lemonade in Germany is a Radler, or an Alsterwasser if you're in Hamburg. I learned to drink them during the 2006 world cup, because getting to a bar an hour early to get a seat and then staying for one or more games makes for far too much alcohol if you're drinking straight beer.
I thought a minimal michelada could simply have lime juice, salt, some kind of hot sauce, and beer, and that clamato or tomato juice etc. was a further refinement.
This makes it out to be far less than half even when the tomato is included.
This is a particularly amusing attitude, given the traditional knock on French cooking as having developed so many sauces to mask the bad meat.
French sauces are all about enhancing flavors, not hiding them. The whole idea is lifting up, enhancing, and improving flavors with fats, heat, and concentration. Beef burgundy cooks meat in bacon fat and almost a whole bottle of wine, but those flavors marry with and enhance the meat flavor, they don't drown it out or clash with it. Contrast the use of masking condiments to kick up a bland underlying dish -- there is no downside (and much upside) to slathering bland industrial chicken legs with red hot buffalo sauce, because there's no flavor there to enhance. You may as well just use the chicken legs to as carriers for the condiment and nothing else. Steak au poivre is actually a good recipe to see the difference -- do it wrong (too many uncracked peppercorns, no cream sauce) and the pepper drowns everything else out, do it right and you get a really surprising enhancement of the meat by the pepper.
The French approach to 'good ingredients' is quite different than the 'pure, natural' approach in California and some Italian cuisine...the idea is not a simple presentation of a 'pure' ingredient that has not been tampered with, but the use of concentrated sauces, fats, long cooking, etc. to heighten the flavors of the ingredient and express its flavor most intensely. Sometimes the toughest, cheapest cuts of meat have the most intensely meaty flavors and make the best base for this kind of recipe. The old traditional French recipes based on 'extreme stewing' are great for this -- civet, pot au feu, etc.
In that sense I probably shouldn't have referred to ingredients in my offhand remark above but flavors. The issue with hot condiments and super hot peppers is that they don't match with other flavors very well, they tend to be very assertive, elbow everything else out, and become the whole story of the dish. Not a problem if the underlying food is rather bland and doesn't have much flavor potential, but it is if it does. I guess there are exceptions but that's generally the way I find it.
This thread has gotten a Jewel song stuck in my head where she sings: "You can drink your coffee with sugar and cream." I haven't heard this song in probably a decade and it's not even a catchy lyric, but now it's stuck.
I wonder if PGD has ever actually had good, say, mexican or thai food.
You can just say he HAS never had good mexican or thai food, since especially in talking about food the word "good" can mean whatever you want it to mean.
Court cooking in the case of Thai food, say, on a level with the kind of haute cuisine he's talking about for French.
Micheladas, the spicier the better, are great for hangovers. True, a Bloody Mary is often better, but sometimes there's no vodka.
Thai food is great, but a little one-note sometimes. Gourmet Thai restaurants seem to be rare, and I feel like there's little difference between typical Thai food and great Thai food. With Mexican it's a little different. Tex-mex falls into the same category, but there's somewhat greater variety in the Mexican food you can get here than in the Thai food. I wonder whether that's a reflection on what's available in the US (Asian food in general seems to be pretty watered down and monotonous compared to what you can get in the source country).
Also, the variety in Vietnamese food is greater than that of Thai food and seems to have greatly influenced by the occupation of the French, if the restaurants around here are any indication.
299 etc - yeah, shandy. Is that not a thing in America? (So I don't suppose you have the euphemism 'hand shandy' then either!) Traditionally made with bitter, but I guess more people drink lager these days. If you just want a little bit of lemonade added you can ask for a lager top.
319 is the clear consequence of irresponsible food-threading. But do any of you nihilists care? No, you do not.
It speeds up your metabolism, briefly. This is why something like a garlic-hot pepper tonic or a spicy broth can help fight off infection.
Thank god all those MRSA covered crack and meth heads are hitting the pipe. That metabolism boost is probably all that's keeping them alive.
PGD, you don't have to defend French cooking to me. I like it a lot! I was just pointing out that what you referred to as the French attitude about spicy food fits right in with a history of trashing other countries' cuisines-- including the cuisine of France.
yeah, shandy. Is that not a thing in America?
Apparently, judging from this bit of Robert Lowell, it isn't unknown in Boston:
What were those sunflowers? Pumpkins
floating shoulder-high?
It was sunset, Sadie and Nellie
bearing pitchers of ice-tea,
oranges, lemons, mint, and peppermints,
and the jug of shandygaff,
which Grandpa made by blending half and
half
yeasty, wheezing homemade sarsaparilla with
beer.
the traditional French cuisine attitude toward hot peppers and such
So is food culture a big thing in France or something? It sounds like they've really thought about things!
||
Tierce has suggested an Unfogged East (London division) meetup, some time next week.
If anyone's interested?
>
My Irish grandmother used to give me half beer/ginger ale when I was a kid. She called it a shandygaff.
Haven't actually read the thread, but since I read the post yesterday, I 've been trying to remember a line from a Sherman Alexie story.
It went something like this -- a young woman is joking around with an old black guy -- she says, "I like my men like I like my bus stop coffee -- old, black and bitter."
French haute cuisine is weird in that it is the only cuisine that I think aspires to the level of an ideology. Like, Escoffier's Bechamel? That's modernist abstraction right there. Other cuisines might taste better --- I think a good curry is better than anything else on the face of the earth --- but they don't have the same righteousness.
(Referring to court cooking is weird when talking about French cooking, because the avant-garde of French cooking hasn't been court based since a long time ago.)
332: I'm up for it. Can't do Thursday though.
As for the OP: I'm definitely a black, no sugar guy for coffee. And liking cold coffee black suggests to me that you've already "learned" to drink it black. I can't see how it would be a higher hurdle, hot. Anyway, I can't stand milky/creamy coffee - I'm not sure if its the taste itself or tied somehow to the fact that I drink my tea with milk and sugar, so maybe my brain is priming itself for tea flavour but is getting coffee instead. Although I hate most coffee flavoured things too - ice cream, cake, chocolate, so maybe it is the taste. Sugary black coffee, Turkish style, is fine, though only in small doses.
Since the other variants have been mentioned, I'll say that Lee and I have been partaking of tinto de verano, equal parts cheap red wine and Sprite or the like, a splash of sweet vermouth, and some citrus. Wikipedia doesn't support me on the vermouth front, but it makes a difference.
I don't drink coffee much, do drink tea sometimes. I've never learned to like coffee black, nor do I drink beer. Olives are awesome, though, and Mara recently taught herself to appreciate them, so we can have cheese-and-olive night while watching stupid kid movies on the tv.
re: 336
Cool. I can't do Mondays, and Thursdays aren't usually the best for me either.
re: 335.last
I thought court-cooking there was in the context of Thai food. i.e. Thai haute cuisine [court] versus French haute cuisine.
335.last: Nosflow was referring to Thai court cooking, not French.
Oh yeah, I realise that. It's just kinda funny, because one of the signifiers of the bourgeois revolution is the shift from court to restaurant cooking*, which is related to the mass production of haute cuisine. Which is why I can even consider eating top quality French cooking, when there is no way in hell I could afford to eat top quality court cooking, on account that I can't afford to keep a court. So it isn't fair to compare court cooking to restaurant cooking.
* which is also where haute cuisine french emerges, in that shift.
They don't eat McDonald's in France, ttaM. Only foods with super fresh ingredients and sauces that perfectly enhance them.
343: Well, actually, they do eat McDonalds in France, but even the McDonalds in France uses super fresh ingredients and sauces that perfectly enhance them.
Not that French cooking is better than anything else or any nonsense like that. I don't like most French haute cuisine*, and the whole ideology of sauces is fucking bullshit. But Escoffier is a Modernist in a way that almost no other cuisine even allows for the possibility of.
* being vegetarian rules most of it right out, tbh. And what's left is enjoyable, but not that great in my experience.
Thanks for clearing that up.
I've learned so much this morning!
I've learned so much this morning!
Dudes be helpful.
Keir, what do you mean with 'Modernist' in 345? (Serious question.)
Also (punch me if I've told this story before but I love it so) Ho Chi Minh was for a while a pupil of Escoffier's at the Carlton, the latter according to legend trying to persuade the former to give up agitation for pastrymaking, which he also apparently excelled at.
When James Cameron (not that one) interviewed HCM in 1966, HCM asked how the Haymarket was looking these days.
I just relayed that story to a colleague. Tierce, do you work in my office or something?
345 Escoffier is a Modernist in a way that almost no other cuisine even allows for the possibility of.
Whereas Halford only eats Fauvist cuisine.
McDonalds in France is so expensive that it can only be afforded at court.
(I hope like hell nobody actually takes my pronouncements seriously. Because if you are really taking seriously the opinions of a vegetarian Scot on French cuisine, you are in line for heaps of problems, mostly related to the fact that I don't eat French cooking because it all consists of dead animal.)
No, um, what do I mean by modernist? The focus on industrial process, the willingness to edit out traditional practices and processes in favour of more efficient methods, a conscious simplicity, and a willingness to discuss and use new methods of cooking esp. scientific. And a self-awareness -- like, a conscious decision making process around cooking in terms of an ideologically driven commitment to certain ordering principles. Even just the centrality of the brigade de cuisine system to his cooking is pretty modernist.
Like I say, I am utterly not willing to take that argument seriously myself, so don't put too much weight on it. But Escoffier reminds me heaps of Rodin.
350: And W.E.B. DuBois worked summers at a resort on Lake Minnetonka to help pay for college. It was 20 years earlier, but there still ought to be an alternate history narrative in there somewhere.
Not unless your office is hidden somewhere in my flat ajay. The theory would explain our shared obsession with the Antarctic though.
350: And, of course, GEN Westmoreland was very proud of the fact that the only Army schools he had ever attended were Airborne School and Cooks' & Bakers' School. The Vietnam War was essentially a struggle between rival pastrycooks.
My colleague: "A bit like Masterchef!"
350, 351: Apparently not conclusively demonstrated. But too good not to act as if it is true. He also once claimed to have worked briefly as a pastry chef at the Parker House in Boston.
In searching for any info on it, I was somewhat amused to find one of the top results was an ad for a job at the Hotel Equatorial Ho Chi Minh in Ho Chi Minh City.
332: unfortunately I won't be able to make the meetup as I will be out of the country, on holiday in what I suppose we should call Archenland. (Or possibly Calormene?)
but there still ought to be an alternate history narrative in there somewhere.
They both fetch up in New York working for Bemelmans?
ObChesterton: "If a narrow nationalism be the danger of the pastry-cook, who makes his own wares under his own heavens, no less is cosmopolitanism the danger of the grocer."
Telmar!
Hot and to the south and they worship a winged bird-god that accepts human sacrifice: Calormene = California obviously
Isn't the special sauce on a Big Mac basically French dressing?
365, 364: Because of the metric system.
http://thedailyeater.com/2010/04/big-mac-secret-sauce-revealed.html
And mayo.
http://www.slashfood.com/2006/07/17/secret-sauce-is-not-thousand-island-dressing/
Abuse of free time. All in service of a weak joke.
In any case, we shouldn't forget the French fries!
Telmar should be maybe Tahiti.
I have to shamefacedly admit that I never figured out the obviously clever Narnia country-pseud in the first place.
358: The Vietnam War was essentially a struggle between rival pastrycooks.
Love this.
I just remembered being taken to a terribly posh Thai place in Chicago a million years ago. I bet some of you have eaten there, though it's not at all on a student budget and I went there strictly because my friend got to take us out on the company dime. (She was a chandelier salesperson at the time. I remember trying to figure out how to say "chandelier salesperson" in Yiddish because I was taking Yiddish that quarter, and obviously one would want to know.) It's one of the things I wish had not fallen during my vegetarian decade.
372: Arun's? I've wanted to go there ever since writing about it for a travel guide as though I had.
To the OP (sorta): The last three times I was in France (Britanny, Rhône Valley, and huge big solo drive from London to the Med and back) I had literally no good coffee once. Plenty of excellent food and wine, obviously; some OK beer (I accept I just chose badly there); but the restaurant or cafe coffee was ALWAYS fkn AWFUL.
(The best I had on the middle trip was by some way the one I got in the Pret A Manger at Stansted airport)
So was I just really unlucky, or is it something they not much bothered about?
Actually it was lager not beer and it tasted of bananas, but I often find this.
I've actually never gotten the Narnia joke. I also don't understand Telmar or Archenland. I'm feeling unusually slow this morning.
205: It's an acquired taste. As is hot tea in the summer.
That's awfully Dufflepudlian of you, rob.
375. French coffee is usually robusta and accordingly tastes like burnt rubber. Presumably they like it that way.
Because Al's probably not on tap to answer, my understanding is that there's no real joke to Narnia -- it's just that the benevolent but totalitarian dictatorship of the SE Asian citystate where she actually lives is tense and obsessive enough about its public image that repeatedly mentioning it by name on a blog with some traffic might get back to Husband X's place of employment and be a problem. So 'Narnia' is a sort of random substitution. Once you've got Narnia, you get into comedy with the SE Asian peninsula nation that ends in 'Narnia' becoming Archenland, and other nearby countries being other Narnia-books related places. </Standpipe's blog>
re: 375
Funnily enough, I've never had a good meal in France. A couple of decent enough pub-grub level ones, I suppose. And yes, bogging coffee, and their sandwiches and snack foods are amazingly bad.
However, France in this case means Paris, and I've only been a few times. Last time to officiate at the world champs of the sport thing I do, which meant amazingly bad canteen food. Truly several stories below the very worst UK student canteen food I've ever had.
[HCM] briefly worked as a pastry chef at the Parker House where Malcolm X would later bus tables.
The robusta thing makes sense: the French grounds I sometimes buy in M&S (when I forget all past experience/lose my mind) always gives me a horrible sore throat.
The great French culinary experience I've now twice missed out on is a visit to the little nougat museum on the outskirts of Montelimar: both times I was in that area it was shut.
Perhaps unshockingly, bread, cheese and wine in otherwise ordinary supermarkets up and down France are routinely far superior to and far far cheaper than what's on offer in the UK's equivalents.
re: 386.last
Yeah, although the made-up bread/cheese combinations in the couple of French supermarkets I've tried have been 1980s British Rail food level. Maybe I was picking the wrong things.
the SE Asian peninsula nation that ends in 'Narnia'
This had me mentally reviewing all of the names of SE Asian countries, peninsular or not. Malanarnia, Myanarnia, Indonarnia (an island nation is merely a peninsular nation waiting for an Ice Age)?
Hmm, if anonymity is a concern, perhaps my link in 384 should be redacted, or obfuscated.
I tend to attribute the lackluster food I've had in Paris to eating near tourist attractions, but I don't know if that's true or not. Once I tried what superficially looked like a promising restaurant in Paris and it was mediocre; the next week I ate essentially the same meal at a French place in Menlo Park, CA and it was quite a bit better.
384 makes sense (so, not a random substitution) and I'm pretty sure that it's okay, she's done things like that. We just wouldn't want to repeat the placename over and over again.
I've had truly awful food in France by going to places recommended as good value in guidebooks. On the other hand, as tierce says, living off picnic supplies (bread, cheese, meats) was great compared to what I'd expect here.
Never been to France with money for good restaurant food.
Perhaps unshockingly, bread, cheese and wine in otherwise ordinary supermarkets up and down France are routinely far superior to and far far cheaper than what's on offer in the UK's equivalents
This. While on holiday last year we relied heavily on a 7-11 which would have sold little that was fit to eat in Britain - we'd have had to live on digestive biscuits - but in France supplied us with perfectly acceptable essentials at a decent price.
I found the coffee in the cafes was OK, but how far can you fuck up an espresso?
I once had air France screw up a flight from London to Boston so that I had to stay over. They gave me a voucher for lunch at an airport restaurant. I thought that it was surprisingly good, all things considered.
I've also had crap food in a studenty motel with room for 3 people and a fold out bed on the wall.
388: ah, use/mention distinction. The nation doesn't end in "Narnia", it ends in Narnia.
393: There is a lot of variance in espresso quality. Though IME it's mostly an upward skew in quality, not a downward one.
384 fills in the gap in my knowledge. The pseud actually is quite clever.
I suspect that many of these comments are basically the equivalent of "hey, I went to NYC and ate at a random Ray's pizza and some burrito shop, guess what American food sucks" otherwise it's hard to make much sense of them. IMO and E your average mid-range restaurant in Paris is way superior, though with a more limited menu, and relatively more expensive, than you'd find in the US. Less ethnic food obvs and I would say the very cheap food at the taco/burgers/panini (fr) level is better in LA. I guess I haven't been in Paris in 10 years now but it can't have fallen off that much.
With that said, though I think McDonalds is a death cult, the food at French McDonalds was IMO distinctly superior to your standard US one.
395: Right the slimy business end of the peninsula.
372/73: I took CA to Arun's for his 30th bday. Chicago was in the middle of a freakish cold spell (this means a week or so of subzero temps) and we had to get my old Volvo wagon jumped in order to even get there. It was so freakishly cold that we decided to do valet, and I am sure the dudes were amused to park such a beat up old car. If we had found $5 that would have been swell.
395: In my head, where the comment made sense, those quotes weren't for the purpose of making the use/mention distinction, but something more like sneer-quotes, indicating that I was using 'Narnia' in Al's sense rather than in CS Lewis's. I suppose typographical conventions that require mindreading on the part of the reader aren't terribly functional.
The nation itself dribbles over to Bornarnia.
I suppose typographical conventions that require mindreading on the part of the reader aren't terribly functional.
Oh, I ' ' '.
400 con't: It's not such a terrible thing to fall in your vegetarian decade, since it at least had* a full and varied vegetarian tasting menu.
*I'm pretty sure I've read that they ditched the tastings-only menu for a more standard one and apparently suffered as a result.
400: That's freakishly cold for Chicago?
Apparently everyone who ever told me Chicago is terribly cold is either lying or spoiled rotten.
401: Or maybe I knew all that and went with the feigned misunderstanding anyway! Who knows what ever is really going on in the mind of the writer?
405: A week never going above zero Fahrenheit??? Yes, that is absolutely freakishly cold for Chicago.
403: Where is there an apostrophe in 'Love a Parade'?
407: I'd assumed you just meant that the temperature dropped below zero at some point during the day, every day for a week. Never rising above zero during that period does in fact sound pretty cold.
401: aha. In that case I should have said "the nation doesn't end in '"Narnia"', it ends in 'Narnia'."
The several times I visited a friend living in Paris we had awesome food. This was on a student budget, so while I was spending more than I would have at home, and she more than if she didn't have a guest, we weren't exactly breaking the bank. It was definitely dependent on us going to places she knew were good; the few times we just ate somewhere random along the way were not nearly as good. And the one time we went out to dinner with a mutual friend who knew Paris much better, the place she chose was several levels better, and not more expensive than what we'd already been doing.
This is crazy talk, though:
Less ethnic food obvs and I would say the very cheap food at the taco/burgers/panini (fr) level is better in LA
Not a fan of Middle Eastern food, eh? And amazing Japanese food is also to be had in Paris, though I wouldn't necessarily claim it's better than LA.
(Referring to court cooking is weird when talking about French cooking, because the avant-garde of French cooking hasn't been court based since a long time ago.)
The perfect beef burgundy is not an avant-garde thing, Keir, nor do I think PGD was evincing a particularly a-g attitude—indeed, it sounded pretty old-school haute. I just wanted something else where the people making the food will have given a lot of thought to the results and have lots of resources at their disposal.
. I remember trying to figure out how to say "chandelier salesperson" in Yiddish
Stop in at A Chandelier Fur Die Goyim on West 37th Street! Our prices will make you plotz!
However, I see that Kier's "Escoffier is Modernist" line allows me to link this again.
|| Legal/ labor bleg.
I get paid for 40 hours of work per week no matter how much time I put in.
One of my company's other programs within the mental health division is short staffed, and they want people to take on some extra hours on top of the regular 40. They want people to do this for straight time and not overtime pay.
How is that legal?
|>
Our prices are so low, it's shameful!
For fans of cheap middle-eastern food in France: the Rhône valley is where I first encountered the doner kebab pizza. Obviously I had to try it: I do not entirely recommend it (though it wasn't awful and I ate it sat out in the night air, in front of a huge bonfire made of old chair legs -- which was nice).
I take it Ttam is talking about pre-packaged snacks for one mainly: I didn't think of sampling these -- we were supermarket shopping for several (in Britanny for many) so sticking with simple fresh food (and wine), which scales very well.
how far can you fuck up an espresso?
Very badly. Standard practice in restaurants in the US is pellets, often not dark roasted and potentially very old, since they buy them in a big bulk sack. This means that the modal restaurant espresso is stale and bitter, even though the machine used to make it has great pressure. The pellets are for lady cofffee which is basically dessert in a cup. *$ does better on the staleness, but overroasts, I think through too much time rather than too high temperature. I'm curious about *$ roasting, since about 1/3 espressos there is OK, and I'd like to know if there's a way to get advance warning that this batch is scorched. Is there a roaster in each big city?
Surprisingly, I learned this weekend that getting the beans so hot that the oil actually catches fire, flames leaping off the beans in the pan, is not necessarily disgusting-- the batch of beans I did on the grill that caught fire that way wound up tasting fine.
417: I'm really not sure -- there's a good shot it's not legal. If I were trying to make up a story that makes it legal? If the relevant employees are management/professional so they're exempt, salaried employees who don't get overtime, not giving overtime pay would be allowed. But the company thinks they just won't do the extra work unless they get paid extra for it, so the 'overtime' pay is a not-legally-required bonus?
||
Oh my, 1973 was a good year for pop music.
Reading those lists is impressive, there are a couple of albums which show up on almost all of them (Aladdin Sane, Raw Power, Countdown to Ecstasy) and you think, "okay, sure, that's what was going on in 1973." But then you keep reading and notice that, oh yes, Tom Waits released his debut album that year as did Bruce Springsteen, Willie Nelson released Shotgun Willie, Stevie Wonder had Innervisions, Marvin Gaye did Let's Get It On, Al Green Call Me, Gram Parsons GP, and more and more and more . . .
I realize it's cliched to talk about a golden age of pop music, and I don't necessarily want to make that claim, but that is a remarkable year.
|>
421: I don't understand what "pellets" and "lady coffee" are.
re: 420.last
Yes. As I was diving out between competition sessions, and generally forced to only eat what I could bring in, and not assemble myself, yeah. The quality was massively shitter than you'd have gotten from any UK high-street food shop or supermarket.
I'm perfectly prepared to accept that generic bread, and foodstuffs that you buy and assemble yourself, is excellent. But all the prepackaged stuff, and there was a lot, was minging.
I've done my 'Paris is shit' rant a few times, though. And yet, it really is. I think we are going to go back to Paris again later in the year, partly just because my wife and I are both sure we must be wrong, and just had bad luck last time.
411.2- oh, I wasn't saying that there's no cheap ethnic food in Paris, just that in breadth and quality, that's an area where LA probably dominates. I never had Japanese food in Paris but it wouldn't surprise me if there are a few high end Japanese restaurants that are at least as good as the high end spots here.
I suspect that a Caramel Macchiato something something counts as lady coffee.
Ho Chi Minh was for a while a pupil of Escoffier's at the Carlton, the latter according to legend trying to persuade the former to give up agitation for pastrymaking, which he also apparently excelled at.
This is probably apocryphal. It only appears in Ho's official Communist hagiography, which contains a lot of demonstrably false anecdotes and parables (in this one, Escoffier is meant to have taken the young Ba[1] under his wing after he had protested at the food being thrown away rather than used to feed the poor). It doesn't appear in Escoffier's memoirs, which I think does note that he worked there as a sous-chef (the Carlton has a plaque up saying he worked their as a waiter.
But Ho hadn't actually got started as a revolutionary by then. He got involved in a couple of workers' associations, but he didn't really get politically radicalised until he went to France after the war. Duiker repeats the anecdote pretty uncritically in his biography but probably shouldn't have.
[1] "Ba" as in "Ba Ho", literally "Uncle Ho", as it was common to call him in Party propaganda of the time. Actually while in London he was still going by his birth name; in France he later adopted the nicknames "Nguyen the Patriot", and when it was felt that this wasn't getting the message across "Nguyen Who Hates The French".
I was busy all yesterday, so this is dredging, but:
90 gets it exactly right; I was describing what the phrase connotes to me. 91 phrases it as "This *is* gross, but you can get used to it", which is precisely what it sounds like to me. I recognize that's not how everyone parses the phrase.
I'm a bit split on the acquired taste thing. I will certainly admit that much of my relatively unsophisticated palate* is do to laziness and where I have made a minimum effort it has generally paid off. But I do still have a lingering (over)reaction to folks would insist that via some inevitable progression one would enjoy some more complex form of food or beverage.
I basically align myself with this. I guess I don't feel as if I should need to force myself into things so that I can enjoy them. I love bourbon and like whisky, but I don't much enjoy whiskey, and I've disliked scotch every time I've tried it. How, precisely, would my life be better if I spent a month forcing myself to like scotch? I have many delicious bourbons (and ryes) to enjoy that fill that role perfectly. I don't think scotch drinkers are fakes; I think it tastes different to them*.
I'd add that, while there are very, very few foods that I've forced myself to learn to like, there are myriad foods that I've grown to enjoy more and in greater depth over time. I started with pad Thai from a food truck, and now I'm a voracious eater of pretty much any and all Thai dishes; but I never had to force myself to eat Thai. The one time my mom served me Brussels sprouts, I literally gagged - it smelled like garbage. But it turns out that she made them poorly, and that I really like well-prepared Brussels sprouts. Should I force my children to acquire a taste for garbage-smelling sprouts, or cook them delicious ones that they like without being forced? Which is better for their souls?
* based on their own testimony, I think it tasted bad to them at first, but I assume less bad than it tastes to me. 15 years ago I thought that neat bourbon tasted gross (although I never tasted a good one until well after I'd started to like bourbon a fair bit), and now I don't, so I totally get how one's tastes develop.
427: "French" is an ethnicity, you racist.
426.last: My impression of Paris was that it's far and away the most overrated place I've ever been to. Also there's dog shit everywhere.
French food is not cheap in Paris. Cheap food tends to be of other ethnicities.
you know, part of the reason kids don't like a lot of these foods is that kids taste things way more intensely. Part of the reason things get described as "acquired tastes" to kids -- and that many kids don't like, for instance, beer -- is that they taste different for kids.
I don't think I buy any portion of this. First of all, Iris has liked from her first solid food many things that are described as "acquired" tastes - smoked oysters, onions, olives, pickles, crusty bread, sharp and stinky cheeses - even though, as a whole, she's a picky eater (dislikes tomato sauce on pizza, frex, and is intolerant of spice, even black pepper). I don't think you can get from "tastes more intensely" to "likes a lot of supposedly hard to like foods". Kids certainly have different palates (and they become less tolerant around age 2, presumably for veldt-related reasons), but I don't think "taste more intensely" is a meaningful way to describe the difference.
What's more, I don't associate "acquired taste" with childhood; I associate it with college, when we're supposed to be broadening our tastes to become respectable adults.
422: That was my thought. We work for one program, and it's a separate program. I don't know if we're truly exempt, just normally ineligible for overtime. If you can't get your work done, then you do what it takes.
This would have fallen outside our normal job duties.
FWIW, I ate very well (and not expensively) the 2.5 days I was in Paris, but I've found good food most everywhere I've been in Germany (mostly the Rheinland). I still can't get over getting quite good smoked salmon sandwiches at gas stations.
I don't know if we're truly exempt, just normally ineligible for overtime.
I think according to the FLSA, you can't be ineligible for overtime unless you're exempt. Of course exemption is far too broadly construed.
An ethnicity and and ideology. It's the world's only idiocity.
I do suspect that there is a genetic element in how people respond to bitter flavors, but it's possible I only think that because of the experiment in HS Biology where some people thought a given compound tasted bitter and other people couldn't taste it at all.
I endorse this wholeheartedly. Not the HS part (and I like olives), but the bitterness of coffee and beer and walnuts to me is visceral. They make me want to brush my tongue. One walnut pretty much ruins an entire chocolate chip cookie for me.
I don't think I buy any portion of this.
I'm pretty sure he was speaking from the science, not conjecturing from kids he's observed.
429: yes, I take Cameron's interview to verify that NwhtF did indeed spend time in London, as he asks if he can practice his English a little -- and likely as a pastry worker at the Carlton, which is mentioned, while Escoffier is not. He'd refused to speak to Cameron, then unexpectedly changed his mind -- out of old man's curiosity, Cameron supposes. But refused to talk about politics, and asked about the Haymarket. I doubt this bit was myth-making: surely much too easy for a London-based journalist to catch you out.
French food is not cheap in Paris
"French" is actually about half a dozen ethnicities - you can get good Norman, Alsacien, Swiss, Basque and Marseillais food.
442: He definitely spent a lot of time in London and worked at the Carlton - as a foreigner he generated a lot of paperwork. But everybody else seems to remember him as a waiter who got pushed into a vegetable sous-chef, which would be a lot more likely than an apprentice patissier.
So much for my favourite Ho Chi Minh story. Is 332 relevant to your interests?
My cuisine's fatty sauce enhances my tired old chicken.
Your cuisine's spicy sauce covers up your tired old chicken.
He eats McNuggets....
I'm pretty sure he was speaking from the science
I assumed so, and yet the paraphrase of the science doesn't comport with observed reality.
The claim was that foods generally described as "acquired tastes" have strong flavors, and that those flavors would taste especially strong - and therefore extremely hard to like - among children with their more "intense" tastings of things. So most kids wouldn't like these foods, and ones that do would logically have broad palates in general. But for a kid tasting things intensely to like primarily foods in the "acquired taste" category wouldn't make sense.
What I'm saying is that I don't think that the explanation follows from the science.
I'm pretty sure the explanation is that Iris and Jane are FREAKY FREAKAZOIDS OF NATURE.
So much for my favourite Ho Chi Minh story
No I think it's still viable with only a small asterisk for pub talk - it's not definitively falsified, it has Duiker's stamp of approval and he was definitely working at the Carlton, so the only bit of possible exaggeration is whether he was Escoffier's personal protege, which in the annals of Communist propaganda is pretty small beer compared to the things they used to say about Stalin.
332: there's an East London? Is it the one in Ontario?
447: Now you're starting to make sense.
I forgot to add: Iris likes her coffee with lots of milk and some sugar. AFAIK she hasn't tried bourbon yet, but not for lack of opportunity.
Yes there is, and yes it is, but Unfogged East (London division) includes the London you live in. Also Oxford.
447 -- Based on the limited experience of my one kid and her preschool, strong and/or bitter flavors are pretty palatable to 3-4 year olds: olives, pickles, strong cheeses, seaweed are all pretty common. On the other hand, I was pretty surprised to hear people here saying that their kids like hot sauce -- I did think that an ability to tolerate spiciness (which IIRC is not a "taste" but something else) was something kids did not develop until later in life.
I pretty much imagine Escoffier as a mustachio'd and be-toqued Gordon Ramsay type anyway, so "protege" could just mean "was sworn at a lot".
451 matches what I'd expect. I wouldn't be shocked by a kid who liked sushi; yes by a kid who liked wasabi.
My niece (4) will cheekily seize black olives off the plates of others, as did my sister at the same age. My sister also loved gherkins that early, but currently my niece disdains them (by look alone).
(They are kind of warty and gross by look alone.)
"acquired" tastes - smoked oysters, onions, olives, pickles, crusty bread, sharp and stinky cheeses
Also, no one thinks crusty bread is an acquired taste.
I did think that an ability to tolerate spiciness (which IIRC is not a "taste" but something else) was something kids did not develop until later in life.
This can't be the whole story. Kids in southeast Asia eat things so spicy they would make me cry.
451: It's weird. Baby O likes that Korean hot sauce whose name I forget. It is not nuclear levels of hot and has a bit of sweetness. He also gobbles Thai soups, etc., that CA finds too hot to eat. I was worried at first that he was eating things that hurt him in his exuberance at eating what the other humans were eating, but no.
And contrarily, O swiped a bit of bread off my plate once that had dijon on it and burst into screeching tears. But hot sauce hot and mustard hot are of different qualities.
Jammies fed Hawaii a wasabi pea, as a baby. She was very upset.
I mean, she was getting increasingly furious that he kept denying the peas to her. So he relented.
I dunno, it makes sense that kids in more spice-centric cultures would get used to spicy foods more quickly. But I eat a ton of spicy stuff and the response from my kid has been a pretty vehement "yuck" (she's a very adventurous eater otherwise). Who knows.
Pellets prepacked so that coffee can be prepared by either waiters or busboys by pressing a button rather than by a bartender. Yes, caramel and cream with a dollop of "coffee" is what I'm scoffing at. Decent tea is also pretty simple but basically not available if eating out.
Also, no one thinks crusty bread is an acquired taste.
Dark crust, especially on a loaf with whole grains, has a strong, slightly bitter flavor. Many kids won't even eat Wonder bread crusts (why, I don't know).
I didn't mean to say that grownups had to acquire that taste, but it's in the category of things that you'd expect to be too strongly flavored for "intense tasters."
AB tells the story of being in Ghana and witnessing an infant babe-in-arms reaching its entire forearm into a pot of soup to lick it off. A soup that AB (who likes spice) found almost intolerably spicy.
However, I'm not sure I've met any American kids - including from families that eat tons of spicy foods - who have a significant tolerance for spice. I think it needs to be almost literally the only things available, totally ubiquitous.
But hot sauce hot and mustard hot are of different qualities.
I still don't understand finding ginger "hot", but my own kids (and MIL, iirc) have said this. Maybe I just never encountered it in any intense form at a suitably tender age.
446: I can't really figure out what you're saying. By "kids taste more intensely" I meant that kids, on average, have more taste buds than adults. This doesn't say anything about the range of differences within kids; just about kids on average compared to adults on average. It's perfectly possible for there to be kids who are way out on the lower tail of the distribution of taste buds within children, who would therefore enjoy foods that were too intensely flavored for other children. It is also perfectly possible that those children would preferentially enjoy "acquired tastes" (because they are more flavorful or novel or whatever; why do adults enjoy these things?) while other kids would find them unpleasantly strong as children but palatable as adults, and yet other people would never find them palatable, as adults or children. And obviously none of this is the whole story of taste preference in children or adults. All I was saying is that you can likely explain a good bit of the resistance (again, on average) of children to "acquired taste" foods by looking at the actual developmental physiology of taste receptors.
One walnut pretty much ruins an entire chocolate chip cookie for me.
Huh. I eat walnuts by the handful when they're in the house, but then I have yet to eat a nut or a green that I didn't like, so maybe I'm just down with the bitter.
I was going to ask whether we could develop hot-spice tolerance in the womb, if we lived in the right parts of the world, and our parents ate accordingly.
Then I decided it was probably an impossibly stupid question.
Then I realised I wanted to know why it was stupid question (if it is).
whether we could s/b whether we might, obviously
438: right, well they just never put in that we work more than 40 hours when we put in our time sheets. Does that make us exempt?
The housing support workers do proper shifts, and they are eligible, so the company is very eligible to use per diem workers for that.
Although there's something else about fussy kids -- I was one, and am raising one: Newt, for all his fascination with cooking and general kitcheney adeptitude (did I brag onblog about the very generally successful coq au vin he did for Buck's birthday? I hung around and asked socratic questions about whether he'd forgotten anything, but he did most of it himself, from browning the chicken pieces forward) has a very limited range of acceptable food. I was like that until college: bread, meat, a small selection of unsauced vegetables, buttered noodles.
And what I remember being nauseating about unacceptable food was flavors that seemed subtly off and unpleasant textures rather than strong flavors (I wouldn't eat anything with a strong flavor either, but that's not what I remember as disgusting). Mayonnaise; canned baked beans; cooked carrots -- lots of things with mild or sweet flavors, but pasty or otherwise offputting textures. Maybe having more tastebuds makes it easier for a fussy kid to identify subtle flavors they dislike, and losing that nuance broadens the range of food they like.
470: It means they're treating you as exempt, but not that they're right to do so.
471: right, I mean, the "more tastebuds" thing leaves a huge amount of variation, both in terms of food characteristics and individual preferences, on the table. But it is nonetheless both factual and likely extremely important in the evolution of taste over a lifetime.
Aren't tastebuds unrelated to the sensation of heat/spicyness? This is a factoid remembered from a magazine article or something, so it could be totally wrong.
right, well they just never put in that we work more than 40 hours when we put in our time sheets. Does that make us exempt?
If you are officially exempt, I'm surprised they do time sheets for you at all (at my workplace, only the non-exempt do, though I guess it's different if you need to bill your time). So maybe yes you are, maybe you aren't and it's shenanigans.
Yes, you don't have tastebuds in your eyes, but you don't want to rub chilli oil into them: and if you're chopping really hot ones you can feel the tiny oil-drops settling on your face
Although it looks like even if you aren't exempt at the moment, it would be very easy to make you so based on the "professional exemption":
Professionally exempt work means work which is predominantly intellectual, requires specialized education, and involves the exercise of discretion and judgment. Professionally exempt workers must have education beyond high school, and usually beyond college, in fields that are distinguished from (more "academic" than) the mechanical arts or skilled trades.
Taste is pretty complicated. Capsaicin and Piperine light up TRPV1. Sanshool, the active ingredient in Szechuan pepper, is detected by a different protein, KCNK18. Smell is not as simple.
Amniotic fluid transmits flavors to human fetuses, affecting later taste preferences, definitely.
I don't bill my hours, but I do fill out fictional timesheets like BG: a full day is 7.5 hours regardless of the amount of time I worked. Not sure what the point is, except that it allows the accumulation of vacation and sick time in units smaller than a day.
Aren't tastebuds unrelated to the sensation of heat/spicyness? This is a factoid remembered from a magazine article or something, so it could be totally wrong.
It's correct - it's also in the big Harold McGee food book. Hot spices are irritants and the burning hot sensation on your tongue is, in fact, pain.
iirc The Oxford Companion to Food demolishes the "we like the pain of chilli because endorphin rush" theory by pointing out that chilli in the eye also releases endorphins and nearly no one outside the mineshaft likes chilli in the eye.
I'm not sure if I ever knew of this particular Brit/US spelling difference or did once and forgot it. An easily disguised one.
And for some reason I want to say "chili in the eye" like "pants on the ground".
And of course nociception is bafflingly complicated and inextricably involved with taste in all kinds of ways.
Quah was supposed to be released in 1973, but some record company morons thought the public wouldn't like Tom Hobson's vocals, so the recorded a couple more songs in 74.
And this one is for HG: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwinGX7Fouo
(Because HG is the wacky idol of the island's eye)
Baby O likes that Korean hot sauce whose name I forget.
Kochujang! Combinations of mathematical symbols and numbers denoting affection that I assume would be erased if I typed them!
471.2 makes a ton of sense to me.
466: Well, again, I don't even associate "acquired taste" with childhood, so pointing to the number of taste buds I had when I was 5 as relating to the reason I find scotch unpleasant now seems entirely irrelevant.
Point being, you don't need to count taste buds to explain the phenomenon in question, and doing so doesn't resolve it anyway. I suppose that if you want to equate "acquired taste" with "grownup taste," then you might get somewhere, but IMO that's not what the term means.
Thanks to LB for taking the trouble to give the Standpipean explanation; I did know where Narnia actually was, having copped Al's identity when she came on board as a much heralded BWO.
I'd seen some reference to the cleverness here before but thought it was one of those crosswordy things which might dawn on me some day.
An acquaintance of mine refers to the beer/soda mixture as "a Monaco." He always orders this by name, acts really surprised that the bartender doesn't know what he's talking about, and then informs the assembled company that "it's very popular in France," before clarifying that he wants half Budweiser, half red pop.
I've been meaning to mention chocolate in this discussion for awhile. While the modern world has brought us a surfeit of ever more bitter chocolates, there is not a strict mapping between the sweetness of chocolate and the intensity of its flavor or the [sophistication]* of its profile.
Point being that you can have a quite intensely chocolatey cake or even truffle, and very very few people would consider it an "acquired" taste, even if they end up preferring a sweeter or creamier or whatever form of chocolate. Which is why I'm rejecting intensity of flavor as a stand-in for the need to acquire the taste.
I presume that childhood exposure to sweet chocolates conditions us to liking nearly any chocolate as we age, but I'm having trouble believing that an adult from some chocolate-deprived corner of the globe would retch at her first taste of chocolate in the form of, say, a flourless chocolate cake. But perhaps that's my own failure of imagination.
* not quite the word I want; I don't mean in terms of worldliness, but in terms of the depth and range of flavor
479 is so. We work 40 hours with a paid half hour for lunch. Some of the team leaders make you keep track of your time religiously. Others just ask how many hours you worked. But if I go to the dentist, I say that I worked 37W and 3 Sick hours.
But, to be fair, sometimes I work less than that and get paid for 40.
(That's not to say that emir isn't also the wacky idol of her island's eye. Or LB of hers. Or Tierce of his.)
Adding anything more than the most tiny amount of sugar to chocolate is bullshit. Fuck that noise.
Actually, I watched Newt deliberately acquire a taste for dark chocolate. I like dark, but until a couple of years ago, he didn't and would complain if that was what was available. Then he found out that it was supposed to be 'better', and convinced himself that he really did prefer it. It was chocolate, so it wasn't as much of an effort as kale would have been, but it was definitely deliberately accustoming himself to something he initially disliked.
481: People inflict pain on themselves for the endorphin rush in culturally acceptable contexts where they believe there will be no lasting damage, or even some health benefit.
If someone could convince a whole bunch of people of the effectiveness of a medicinal ritual where you stick chili peppers in your eye, people would pay to do it.
It would be a tough sell, though.
I'm assuming there's a sexual fetish that involves chili peppers in the eye, but I'm not googling it.
I remember reading an account by a blogger who was into BDSM of shoving a chili pepper up her butt. I didn't turn out to be the kind of exhilarating pain she was into.
I didn't turn out to be the kind of exhilarating pain she was into.
You're not a chili pepper?
Actually, I love the phrasing and wish it were a real fetish. "Oh yes, I'm totally into BSDM. I only date guys who are total pains in the ass."
496: True, and some people just like to be spanked too, but most people don't eat hot foods for that kind of reason, do they? Anyway, OxBoF says no, and argues that the attraction is more likely that it's a low-cost stimulant* of subtle flavour, which is also mildly addictive.
*of heartrate, appetite and digestion
However it also says: "One ancient codex shows an Aztec parent propelling a (presumably naughty) daughter, arms bound and tears already starting from her eyes, towards the clouds of smoke rising from burning chillies." So the psycho-sexual dimension probably does (or did) also exist.
I'm sort of thinking of dyeing some fabric with tea now and I blame this comment thread. (No cream, salt as a mordant and maybe some vinegar too. This is probably a bad idea.)
500: Also there is the theory that people in hot countries eat chilies in order to induce more sweating, but I have not read any scientific evidence to that effect.
Aztec cuisine is kind of awesome: the "ch" aisle alone gives you chillies, chocolate and chewing gum (aka chicle).
"Oh yes, I'm totally into BSDM. I only date guys who are total pains in the ass."
I suspected that her partner talked her into it, knowing she wouldn't like it, because he was, well, a sadist.
There is a (presumably apocryphal, I heard it at work) story of a sadist who felt that his partner was enjoying giving him oral sex too much, and decided to "punish" her by making the act more unpleasant. He decided to achieve this goal by making his penis taste unpleasant to her, and he decided to achieve *that* goal by smearing it liberally with chili oil.
It's obviously untrue, but it was well invented.
As spicy food will sometimes make my nose flow, once, when I was congested, I experimentally rubbed a cut chili pepper in my nostrils. It didn't have positive effects.
501: Please tell me you read the All of a Kind Family books growing up.
The beer bar around the corner from me serves Monacos for brunch.
half red pop.
What, like Tizer? Eurgh.
As spicy food will sometimes make my nose flow
...will make him what?
Food update: I made my non-mayo egg salad again. This time: olive oil, shallot, garlic, parsley, mustard, tahini, lemon juice, salt, pepper. And eggs. It's good, but I really want rye bread instead of the semolina I've got right now.
...will make him what?
Strip, apparently, as per 238.
507: oh yes, of course! I almost recommended them to Natilo's little pal but then didn't go back to the thread to do it. But I've dyed one of Mara's t-shirts with tea, which left it sort of dingy-looking and fit only for bedtime since you can still see the stain on it, but it would probably be very foolish to do it next with fabric I want for a quilt and I should instead tea dye some of my own clothes if I want to do some dyeing.
Like, just now for dinner I made tofu/broccoli/shitake in chili garlic sauce. It was fairly spicy, containing a few generous tablespoons of sambal oelek. Baby O couldn't shovel it in his face fast enough. His eyes watered a bit, but he wasn't at all distressed.
Quah was supposed to be released in 1973, ... Idiots.
I'm home from work and finally got a chance to listen and was surprised to find that I was already familiar with a different version. In this case the Stacy Phillips/Paul Howard version (you can see them playing it live here) [see also].
I liked the version from Quah, but it's always odd when you're listening and at the same time hearing a different performance in your head.
a few generous tablespoons of sambal oelek
Wow that is pretty impressive. Still, I cannot believe that you are feeding TOFU to a BABY. What about the lectins??
516: He is fat and weak! BECAUSE OF THE LECTINS!!!
It's OK, you can still stop the TOFU based weakification through effective countermeasures.
If he can't walk yet, should I just get him teeny tiny kettlebells?
You don't need to be able to walk to do pushups. Tell him to put down the sambal oelek and give you 20 good ones. We can start on the kettlebells next month at paleo day care.
"Paleo day care": I am now picturing him being chased around by sabre-tooth tigers.
After reading the first 100 comments of the thread and then searching in vain for the strings "snob", "single origin", "pour over", "chemex" and "aeropress", I am surprised to learn that I may be something of an outlier around here, coffee-snob-wise.
So yeah, I prefer single-origin coffees (coffees harvested from a particular plantation, rather than a regional blend). In a recent effort to bring my coffee expenditures under $1/oz for beans (single-origin prices just went up to around $16 for a 12-oz bag of, say, Stumptown), I switched to some local roasters that traffic in single-origins but also sell slightly discounted blends. I don't think of myself has having very fussy tastes, but when I tried the Trader Joe's Five Country blend that some other relatively snobby coffee drinkers recommended, I was surprised at how much less I liked it than the fancy stuff. Go my taste buds!
I use an Aeropress, which Kraab and M/lls very sweetly sent me as a gift. They didn't use it because it was too penis-pumpy for them. (But it's just penis-pumpy enough for me!)
And so, yeah, I drink it black. I do enjoy an occasional cappuccino, though, and sometimes I'll drink diner coffee with milk and sugar.
522: Hey! I have a Chemex *and* a stupid fancy espresso machine. I actually prefer the Chemex coffee, but it was so much more complicated and meth-cooky than just button-pushing on the machine.
507, 513: Good idea! I read those too, hadn't thought about them for awhile.
Here's how I read 522:
coffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffee$1/ozcoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeeStumptowncoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeevcoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeepenis-pumpycoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffee
Resisting the urge to comment "Whoa, they do look scary" in my FB thread, after my colleague shared this photo, of black NY senators all in hoodies.
522: you don't roast your own?!? Sheesh why not just drink boiling hot Coke Zero.
Fucking Stumptown. My delicious hometown coffee, and they sold out to Wall Street and got priced out of my reach. Trader Joe's coffee sucks. Fortunately, there are alternatives here, but to be a true Portlander I'll probably have to start roasting my own.
Here, try my coffee-grounds-encrusted, boneless, skinless chicken breast.
Coffee-grounds-encrusted, boneless, skinless chicken breasts, hooray!
525: with the cup of Coop. Las Capucas I just brewed rocking my world, that's how I'm going to read everything for the next hour. Except set to the hamster-dance music.
The cafe I mentioned way upthread, that does the single-cup thing, does it one of those pour-over dealies. I really liked that coffee.
533: With cottage cheese!
Just for that, I posted a photo in the pool of the kind of lunch I make if left alone. I would drop anyone who brought cottage cheese within ten feet of it like a bad habit.
You would eat slide ice ribbons?
||
I thought I had tinnitus, or something; I was having that seemingly locationless high-pitched noise sensation. But it was not tinnitus! I was just listening to Sachiko M.
|>
What an unpleasant song that must be.
Equatorial natives mask terrible songs with hot peppers and spices.
So perhaps you could try that, Frenchy.
Mmm, slide ice ribbons. With hot peppers. The Eskimos have, like, forty words for how delicious they are.
543: and it's 25 minutes long!
(Actually it's not just Sachiko M. credited on the album; Toshimaru Nakamura and Otomo Yoshihide are also involved. But I suspect this is mostly her for some reason. Maybe I'm wrong.)
The sudden trendiness of pour-over coffee confuses me. It's more or less how I make coffee, but I do it that way because my parents did it that way, and a Melita cone and pot is cheap when you're a student, and I still use it. I assume I'm missing some important subtle difference and my process of pouring hot water over (just-ground) grounds in a conical filtration device is somehow insufficient.
All of a Kind Family!
Sorry to have disappeared, and belated thank yous for the help with the wa/rehouse issue, (Natilo I will write you back). It is a tea wa/rehouse. Dairy is deprecated but we've each discovered the others sneaking it in.
Unfogged West, I am with you in SF.
I can't find the comment where you mention how long you're in town, but yeah, some sort of meetuppy thing would be good. Email me? (Unless your comment was implying that you're right now meeting up with Unfogged West, and I wasn't invited.)
re: 522
I have an Aeropress. It's good. My wife, who is always sceptical of my gadgets, loves it with the zeal of a convert. TBH, though, I don't buy particularly fancy coffee. Bog standard Lavazza 'red', or whatever beans look interesting and not to expensive when I'm at the shop.
522: I used to just go to cafes that did pour-overs, but one of my new cow-orkers bought us a hand grinder and this single-cup-sized thing with a spring-loaded bottom that holds a filter. (It's kind of like a Melitta cone, only the coffee brews in place rather than filtering through; when it's done brewing you put it on top of a cup and it drains.) So now I find myself carefully measuring out the precise weight of beans, then grinding them by hand and even letting the grounds bloom before brewing. I don't even recognize myself anymore.
sudden trendiness of pour-over coffee
I think you're a couple trends behind. Japanese Ice Method was "IT" last summer, and I'm sure we're on the way somewhere new soon.
http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/10/ristretto-on-the-rocks/
Apologies, Alex: timing of UfE meet-up not intended to exclude you (or indeed ajay, but he is an unbiddable man of mystery ) -- I misremembered when you were in SF and thought you were already flying home...
501: this was traditional with lace, as cream-coloured lace was preferred to white for some reason. I had a wine/purple velvet dress for winter Sundays when I was about 10 which had cream lace trim and my mother used to dye white lacy socks with tea to match. (No mordant, so they would fade again).
554: I realise that I am giving the impression that I had such a dreadful time at the UNY meetup that I am actually fleeing the country in order to avoid UUK. This is not the case. (And I would be all for a Narnia meetup, but I will have virtually no time actually in Narnia this trip - later in the year looks better though.)
Next year in Graham Land!
re: 554
Aye, I forgot Alex was away. Well, I'm easy. Happy to meet up next week, and then again whenever Alex is available. Tube into town for beer and chat isn't arduous.
FWIW, I'm probably going to be on the east coast of the US at some point soon, and also Germany, Norway, and Netherlands. Although I don't think there are Unfogged outposts there.
558. There's Martin in Amsterdam (I think).
re: 558
Yeah, I'll be going from Rotterdam to the Hague, without much free time, I don't think. Possibly a little one evening in the Hague.
East Coast meetup! Where on the east coast?
I don't know how I could have forgotten to mention it in this thread already, but last spring I stayed in a rental house outfitted with a Moccamaster. A pretty regular drip coffee maker with really good temperature control (I think it gets the water hotter than most?). That thing made amazing coffee. If I had some combination of more counter space and less aversion to appliances, I would definitely have one by now.
558: Let me be the first to suggest Fresh Salt.
Let me be the first to suggest Fresh Salt Lord Hobo.
As spicy food will sometimes make my nose flow, once, when I was congested, I experimentally rubbed a cut chili pepper in my nostrils. It didn't have positive effects.
I have some woo woo homeosomething nasal spray with capiscum. It produces a tingly sensation I don't find unpleasant but doesn't do much for my constant congestion. (I used OTC nasal spray for years...it's supposed to be very bad for you but it's the only way I don't wake up with the inside of my mouth tasting like a freeway off-ramp in Alabama in July. I've thought about giving up and going back on it.)
oh yes, of course! I almost recommended them to Natilo's little pal but then didn't go back to the thread to do it.
Well I'd heard of naming them but never recommending books to them.
Sitting here by the fire, watching the Bitterroot mountaintops glowing pink in the dawn, reading about you folks shuttling hurriedly from one busy city to another, I'm almost tempted to make myself a cup of coffee.
(Ok and where the fuck do you buy a melitta cone? Remember the thread where it was established that you are history's worst monster if you don't have a coffee maker for guests? I went out and bought one of those little double boilers that looks like Candela's earrings in Women on the Verge because I don't know nothin' about birthin' no coffee and didn't realize it was an espresso maker. Now I'd like to find the means for plain old coffee-making. I figured: people love coffee! This will be in every Duane Reade! This turned out to be untrue.)
Girl City fight!
We've captured Bave, and we're holding him hostage at least another year!
I went out and bought one of those little double boilers that looks like Candela's earrings in Women on the Verge
You mean a moka pot? (I don't remember the earrings.) It's not really an espresso maker, and any guest who's picky enough to need something different should be shown the door.
I believe people have mentioned getting a "everyone here is so much smarter than me that it makes me feel bad" vibe, and it doesn't happen to me often here, but this thread is causing it. Apparently I know nothing about coffee, cooking or France, despite spending hundreds of dollars this month on the first (cappucino machine for my girlfriend for her birthday), getting noticeably better at the second in recent years (maybe there's no actual problem except for the lack of deliberate experimentation), and living in the third for a year. Ouch.
214
Coffee speeds up your metabolism?
I've noticed that, yes. 99 percent of the time I have coffee on a full stomach and it's not noticeable, but once in a while I have a full cup or more before breakfast, and that definitely gets my heart pounding.
I take my coffee black with sugar, but I've been broadening my tastes a little bit with the aforementioned cappucino machine.
As for French cuisine, it's true that their main courses tend to be meaty, but isn't that equally true of British and American dishes? (Whatever "American dishes" would mean, but anyways.) There are plenty of side dishes and snacks that are vegetarian or could easily be with just minor changes, like crêpes and ratatouille. Admittedly, though, going vegan would be very hard just because of all the cheese.
Now that I actually look this up, what I just mentioned and most other food I think of as traditionally French is native to the Loire, which is where I lived, and nearby areas. So that probably affects what I think of as normal to begin with.
As for a hypothetical East Coast meetup, I'm not up for traveling much these days, but if anyone stops by DC, speak up and we'll see what we can put together.
Coffee speeds up your metabolism?
I've noticed that, yes. 99 percent of the time I have coffee on a full stomach and it's not noticeable, but once in a while I have a full cup or more before breakfast, and that definitely gets my heart pounding.
But metabolic rate is different from heart rate. Just because you're sitting there with your heart going 90 bpm rather than 60 bpm doesn't mean you are burning significantly more energy.
Apparently I know nothing about coffee, cooking or France, despite spending hundreds of dollars this month on the first (cappucino machine for my girlfriend for her birthday), getting noticeably better at the second in recent years (maybe there's no actual problem except for the lack of deliberate experimentation), and living in the third for a year. Ouch.
Just imagine if you were reading this website as an amateur bicyclist!
Funnily enough, the 'French'* meals I cook most from the French cookbooks I have tend to be vegetable dishes. Not really vegetarian, as they sometimes involve chicken stock, but there's nice things there.
* bastardised by me into lazy versions.
as an amateur bicyclist
Or me! I put a lot of miles on my idiotic little machine, but I'm slow, unskilled, and utterly confused by maintenance. (I should post and ask if there's anything more elementary on maintenance than Sheldon Brown. He looks informative, but not so much on the question of "So, you're looking at a secondhand bike that functions okay. What would it be likely to be a good idea to do to it, and how often? And how would I tell specifically what it needed to run better?" Like, I just took my bike to the mechanic for a tuneup. What's a tuneup, and how would I do one?)
But metabolic rate is different from heart rate. Just because you're sitting there with your heart going 90 bpm rather than 60 bpm doesn't mean you are burning significantly more energy.
Possibly, but in this case, the heart rate is part of a general sort-term metabolic increase.
re: 578
I hardly ride at all, and have mentioned failings with bike maintenance before [V-brakes always frustrate], but when I used to work on my bike more often, a 'tune-up' would just mean:
cleaning it properly
brakes: check pads, adjust or replace as necessary, grease pivot points
chain: clean/lubricate
gears: check it's shifting properly across range, stopped at right place, etc
general: recheck height of seat, mudguards (fenders, etc), general lubrication of bits that need to move smoothly [lithium grease for some, ordinary chain oil for the chain]
I expect that's less than a proper bike mechanic or someone experienced (Sifu, Blume, etc) but it worked OK for me.
579: does caffeine do that? (googles) I stand corrected.
Jesus: nobody complained about my coffee maker gaffe, but once I knew of the error, all the internalized coffee-shame from that other thread convinced me I had to make amends.
chain: clean/lubricate
As in, remove, clean properly, and relubricate? Or just dribble some oil on it while turning the crank? I've been doing the latter, but have been reading things indicating that I might as well be rubbing it down with industrial abrasive.
general lubrication of bits that need to move smoothly [lithium grease for some,
Does this include taking apart the crank/axle assembly? How often? What about all the various sprockets?
580 is pretty much what a tuneup is in my understanding. IME most shops make a distinction between a tuneup and an overhaul, the latter involving a tuneup plus truing the wheels and repacking the bearings. It's all dead simple, and I'd recommend taking a class from a shop if you have the time. It'll save you money and hassle in the long run.
580: No, that sounds about right. Other than keeping the tires aired up (check this often) and oiling the chain (which I don't do particularly a lot -- maybe a couple of times a year), I don't pay that much attention to my regular commuter bike. The fenders get out of whack occasionally and I'll fiddle with them, and I clean it up once a year or so. But this is largely because it's got ancient components, so there's not that much fine adjustment that can be done-- maybe make sure the brake pads are okay, and are still hitting the rims in the right place. But I usually check the front and back brake before I set out from home (don't know where I picked that up, but it takes all of 8 seconds), so I have a good idea of how they're doing on an ongoing basis anyway.
583: No taking anything apart! And no to taking off the chain. Get as much gunk off as you can with a cloth and/or a stiff brush, and then put oil on from the top side of the lower run of the chain.
So I'm oiling the inside of the loop.
re: 583
No, the only thing I've occasionally taken apart are the brakes [and then lithium grease where they pivot]. Just generally cleaning and lubricating in place for the chain, and the rest..
When I got my tuneup, they sold me a new chain and some new sprockets on the grounds that the chain had stretched and worn out the sprockets. It certainly runs more smoothly now, so I agree with them, but how did they diagnose that? Just look and see if the sprocket teeth look asymmetrical, or the chain seems to be fitting into them irregularly or loosely?
If your chain's really gunked up, you can clean it in place with one of these and then oil it.
Idea being that the most gunk gets on the bottom side of the lower run of the chain, so if you lube from the top of the top run you're sending it into the chain to grind away at it.
just dribble some oil
That's all I do. I've cleaned the chain in the past when switching wheels, didn't think it helped much. Look for wear on chain links and teeth once a year. Where I live, the soil is clay rather than sand. Grittier soil would be more abrasive, so cleaning more often would be good in that case
re: 584
Yeah, I've done the bearings in a wheel once, and the bottom bracket once. I wouldn't probably do either again. Too lazy.
587: exactly.
589: Probably from the wear patterns on the sprockets and the distance between the links in the chain. Chain 'stretch' is actually wear in the bushings, making the holes bigger, so the chain can stretch further. There's a chain indicator tool that has a little tooth on either end that can go down into the spaces. If the second tooth doesn't go in at all, your chain is fine. If it can go in a little, you need a new chain, all the way and you need both a new chain and new sprockets.
Addendum to 594.2: If the 'stretch' gets bad enough, your chain will start to skip, which is unbelievably annoying, so best catch it early.
Thanks, this has been helpful. I was sort of assuming that real bicyclists repacked their bearings twice yearly or something.
Remarkably similar to the ladybits thread.
549: Right on. With the events of the last week, I'd forgotten all about it, but offers of assistance still stand. (Probably more enthusiastically now, even.)
568: Tsk, tsk, tsk! You should be glad that her father never got the point of this blog!
which is unbelievably annoying, so best catch it early.
It is also bad for your gears.
"Some like the knuckles, and some like the ears,
But the most of them folks, they loves his gears!"
I seem to be the only person on the internet who likes that song.