Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

Also, I'll probably get slaughtered for this, but I LOVE instant pudding and...... *cough cough* hate from scratch pudding. I have a problem with the texture, in the opposite way that most people do, I suppose.

I'm not going to pretend that Big Macs are fancy fabulous cuisine or anything, but something about their combination of flavors really works for me. Just enough sauce, not too much lettuce, and not overpowering cheese.

I was excited to try the Carl's version (because at Carl's I can get fried zucchini instead of fries). Sooo disappointed. Too much burger, not enough sauce, and the cheese is so.....strong I guess is the word for it. It comes nowhere close to a Big Mac.

Nice try, Carl's/Hardee's. But your burger tastes like fail.

Milka chocolate from Germany. Fell in love with it when I took German in college. I'm not a fan of milk chocolate most of the time, but Milka and Trader Joe's brand are my go-tos.

Using a steel will help extend the life of your knife, but most steels don't sharpen, they hone. And while it's important to have a straight edge, I'd say you should still sharpen your knives once a year. That being said, I'd recommend this gadget, or even sending them out to be sharpened, over any sharpening stone. You can really mess up your knife by not getting the right angle. And most people don't remember that German-style knives have a different angle than Japanese-style knives.

I can't give you an unbiased opinion, since I work at W-S, but I will tell you I've used it and I love it. I think my favorite part is that it saves your presets so that if you always use a certain temp or time, it will remember. Our Cuisinart rep even said she preferred the Breville. I'm not trying to sell you on this one, but it's the best I've seen.

The point of the show wasn't to get amazing chefs and have them cook amazingly.....they do that in real life. The point was that when those amazing chefs were guest judges, they sometimes didn't appreciate how difficult the stupid challenges were. Some of them thought "hey, we could do better." Voila! Bravo has a show.

Thanks guys!
@caramel: no, it just says "peppers".
@Erin: that was my guess, but I didn't think someone would put such spicy peppers in pickles. I guessed wrong. ;)
@finewinendine: if you like heat, get these. Such good flavor, and the heat really settles in your chest and throat.

It's not like the post has some descriptive title or anything to warn you that "New York is not the only place for a restaurant". How could one discern what this post is about without reading it fully, then ranting about it? Also, it's not like anyone on here has ANY interests whatsoever outside of food-related articles. Oh wait...

Love the posts, Hannah! Keep 'em coming...no matter what you choose to write about. :)

I'll second rheods and say we've had McCafe in Cali for over a year now. Love the lids, but they've had those for drip coffee for a while. And all of the non-drip drinks (cap, etc.) seem low on espresso and high on everything else. Vanilla latte was more like warm vanilla milk with a splash of espresso. Most aren't terrible, if you don't love espresso. Overly sweet maybe, and sometimes burnt.......ok, so it's not great coffee. But if you don't care, $2 is pretty cheap.

I heard that the salt kills a lot of the germies. You just wipe it with a damp cloth, like simon said.

We've had this happen too, and it was Trader Joe's eggs. Hmm....

The sign is like this at the TJ's further from us, with the express lane. The closest one to us doesn't have one.

Anyone know where you can get malted barley flour? That's the secret to Bouchon's cookies, and we've been looking all over for it. We found regular barley flour, but not malted.