Thank you for that link to the Listeria information. I avoided all the things listed in that article including deli meats while I was pregnant, and at times felt silly, especially when associates chided me for being ridiculously paranoid. Reading that article makes me glad I did stick to it because it is so dangerous to unborns and there were outbreaks in the news during my pregnancy. I wish I had something that clear back then. It really helps to know more precisely where the danger lies and to whom, and what can be done to reduce risks.

I just tasted the Edmond Fallot mustard you recommended(seed version) -- it was so good I almost thought I'd died and gone to heaven. I'm a little ticked that all these years I thought French's mustard was what mustard should taste like. Thank you! The people in France should give you big money for promoting their products.

Love your posts!

Greets

I don't know what happened either. After noticing the sour cream/coconut milk error, I think I got a little overzealous in checking the other ingredients for mistakes and must've entered 1.5 lbs for the bananas instead of 1.25 in my calculator.

As for going by fruit vs. weight; I'd say no. Sure, it makes stuff easier for john/jane doe out there, but john/jane doe also seem to have issues with recipes in general. A peach from Georgia is gonna be bigger than a peach from Ontario. Here in Canada, we seem to get bananas bigger than they get in the Dominican Republic (I don't get this, personally). This recipe would probably do fine, but a banana bread could end in dry disaster.

As a line cook myself, I really appreciate weights and precision in recipes (otherwise I probably wouldn't have been so anal as to correct someone with far more experience than I). It's not so important in non-pastry, but man did it help me out when I first started cooking. I think an accurate scale is one of the most important pieces of equipment a home cook can buy. All grocery stores have accurate, audited scales for the customer's use. If people used scales more often, it'd remove one less "failure vector" for the recipes they use, and allow them to focus more on technique. We cooks use scales, and if people want to cook like we do, I feel they should learn the same basics. As one of my chefs once told me "imprecision is a learned skill"

Anyways, enough rambling.

I don't always know how to describe something when I taste it, but I can always "taste" something from a good visual (usually live) and I'm tasting that bleu de Termignon and pining for it with my glass of zinfandel. I have a great fromagerie in Tokyo, but have never seen this bleu on the list. I'll be calling them post haste. Thank you for opening up my world. Nancy

makes me think of the famous cdg quote "How can you govern a country that has 248 varieties of cheese"....and then on top of that, the cows are eating violets.

and what's wrong with squid??

a bientot