So the heading is a shameless gambit to get you to read more from Peter on supercharging your stove (originally posted on Chowhound).
Author: zora
The World Needs to Know
You can get a restaurant-quality flame on your home burner by using a very small drill bit to enlarge the hole the gas comes out of.
Prune, Glorious Prune!
Eating at Prune is kind of big deal, not just because it's sorta pricey, but also because it's like the boyfriend who dumped me before he even got to know me.
More pig pics
More shots of the great New Year’s roasting roundup, at Snapfish. Highlights: the exciting buildup to the blessed event, including construction of the croquembouche, in funny hats.
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Amen.
Never thought I’d refer people to a sermon, but I guess I can get a little evangelical about the wonders of cooking. It’s the next most important thing to knowing how to read, I say. David Mudd says it more thoroughly here. David is James’s brother-in-law, and he thoughtfully emailed his absolutely hilarious and smart blow-by-blow accounts of cooking school while I was in Cairo in 1997 (back before people were so obsessed with the minutiae of cooking school, unfortunately, so he never got a book out of it). I happened to be doing a lot of cooking to save my GI tract from the ravages of Cairene cuisine (see, cooking is verrrrry useful), so among other things, I learned how to make onion soup from those emails. David now lives in West Virginia and writes occasionally for the Washington Post. They could use more of him—I just got through reading half of the most vapid story about wedding cakes.
Astoropolis
Why do I love my neighborhood so? It's all about the groceries. (Has "It's all about..." ever had those words tacked on the end?)
Chowhound gets an upgrade
Al-hamdulillah! Chowhound has finally fixed its egregious search function: now it’s farmed out to Google.
Astronaut ice cream a fraud!
This eGullet Q&A with a NASA food scientist is great–even though she has no sense of humor (note how she just doesn’t dish on in-flight food poisoning like you wish she would). Tortillas are the space-age bread, freeze-dried shrimp cocktail is very popular, but (gasp!) astronaut ice-cream was a one-time deal for the Apollo mission only. I’d get huffy and nostalgic about this, but really, that stuff sucked.
Pig Pics
A selection of Peter’s photos from the party:
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Or, more directly, but less reliably, try this direct link.
If It’s Worth Doing, It’s Worth Overdoing, or It Takes a Village to Roast a Pig (and a Lamb)
Who knew roasting a whole pig--plus a whole lamb, just for the heck of it--could be so easy? Well, aside from the creeping anxiety of spectacular failure beforehand, and the running around collecting weird bits of metal, and the blinding, acrid mesquite smoke the night of...it was pretty easy.