Perhaps I wasn't specific enough. I don't seen a failure in American "Cuisine" in general, not in the way you'd refer to "French Cuisine". There are American chefs doing some amazing stuff. Even pretentious assholes like Bobby Flay put a damn fine dish on the table.
1 and 6) Viticulture. Yes, I will fully grant you that the american wines are damn fine. But I'll counter with american beer. Yes, #6 you have Microbreweries, but those are the exception, not the rule. Find me someone discerning who likes BUD LIGHT, or even *shudder* Milwaukee's Best.
2) Not sure where you live. I live in Cincinnati, a generic midwestern city. I can get all of those things too, but not at my grocery store. I'd have to make special trips to specialty stores. I've spent time in Manhattan and San Francisco where you CAN get those things easily. Again, that's the exception, not the rule.
3) True, Asian Cuisine is more realistic these days. You can say the same things about other cuisines. Real Mexican, not nacho cheese laden tex-mex. Real Italian, not pizza and americanized pasta. Though all of the bad sides of those cuisines is here too. How many people in the US truly believe that Taco Bell is mexican?
4) No argument here. The success of FoodNetwork is a clear indication that many people do enjoy food more. Though I would give them marks off for feeding into the Emeril Lagassee cult of personality. (Which is a damn shame, his Louisiana Real and Rustic is one of the best cookbooks I've ever read.)
5) I have a love-hate relationship with WS. They are so expensive that I've never been able to bring myself to buy anything there. They also feed into the notion that expensive gadgets are required to cook, and they aren't. Granted, I lust after the All-Clad stainless cookware, but my inexpensive Calphalon I bought dirt cheap off of ebay serves me just fine.
My question was not so much a query as to the sad state of food in America (Why Can't Johnny Saute?) but more of a question about the split in our culture. There are foodies (Hi there) and there are junkfoodies. McDonalds, Taco Bell, and their ilk are a poor legacy for america to foist upon the world. You don't see "Supercrepes" stands in the mall food court, nor do you see a worldwide chain of Charlie Trotter's.
There's a serious dichotomy in American cuisine between good food and fast food.
I try to do that, but can't as often as I'd like. When asked what I wanted for father's day, I wanted to cook a meal for everyone.
Cajun BBQ shrimp, my world famous Buffalo Chicken Eggrolls, grilled pork tenderloin brined in a variant of Alton's turkey brine and grilled over hickory chips, and a Potato and smoked Gouda Gratin. The Chocolate Fudge volcano cakes and homemade vanilla bean ice cream were canceled due to lack of time. Rave reviews all around (even with store bought ice cream and brownies from a local bakery).
I watch exactly two television programs. NFL Football and Good Eats.
I have three questions.
I learned a long time ago that I enjoyed cooking more than anything else. Part of that is that, being a geek, I live in a digital world, and the analog act of cooking is very soothing. While I will complain loudly at standing in a line longer than ten minutes, I've often spent HOURS on my feet in the kitchen cooking for holidays, and went to bed that night blissfully calm.
In the US today, with rampant McCuisine and dual income families, the concept of cooking has been shoved to the back burner, so to speak. Eating is something you do, not something you enjoy. Even worse, good food is, for many, something you go get, not something you do in your own kitchen.
So, riddle me these questions three...
1) What can be done about the dumbing down of american cuisine? Your show is a spectacular start, but there simply arent enough of them. You actually make other shows irrelevant. I'm no longer content to see the "How" without also getting the "why?" Short of "Good Eats 2", what can be done to teach americans what good food is?
2) You're living the life I'd kill for. You were a Video guy who left to go to culinary school. I'm a web guy who would give anything to do the same, if I could figure out how to pay the mortgage and feed the three kids in the interim. I have taken the path of self education. Your book is, quite honestly, a textbook that should be required reading for anyone who wants to cook. I'm waiting for my copy of McGee's On Food And Cooking, what other resources do you recommend for someone who is very serious about culinary education, but doesn't have the resources for an immersive culinary school?
3) Your equipment recommendations, so far, have been dead on. My Magnum pepper mill is a dream, My lodge cast iron has a seasoning my grandmother would have been jealous of, and Spring loaded tongs have been a fixture in my kitchen since before you did your PBS shows. But I have yet to find a source for your Jomac gloves, and I am still patiently waiting for the Plunger and Plunger Junior to go on sale at Your Site. Hook a brother up, to steal a Nicholson line, "Where does he get these wonderful toys."?
Oh, and I'll slide in one more question. What subjects are on tap for next season?
I've never understood why people get so up in arms about the lack of downloadable ISO's for OBSD
How the hell hard can it be to do the following?
mkdir ~/obsd30
cd ~/obsd30
[use favorite method of obtaining all files from OBSD Mirror]
cd..
mkisofs -b floppy30.fs -c boot.catalog -R -o obsd.iso obsd30
cdrecord [your options] obsd30.iso
(NOTE: I did that mkisofs off the top of my head so it's very likely wrong, but it's damn close.)
I buy OBSD CD's to support the project, but I'm not waiting for them to arrive when the files are there for FTP.
I just replaced a Redhat/ipfilter box (My home router) with an OpenBSD 3.0 box, my first. So I've got no legacy baggage.
License Bigots bore me to tears. Darren reminds me of Dan Bernstein with his "My way or the highway" mentality. The QMail lists are half full of people bitching about the license, and it's why I left qmail for Postfix a long while ago (and never looked back. If djbdns had a competitor, I'd be Bernstein free.)
If the whole point of using OpenBSD is to use something audited by the OBSD team, then the concept of using any distribution other than the one I get from ftp.OpenBSD.org is ludicrous.
I used to be part of a team that did sysadmin for a set of about 500 RS6000's all over the globe for a major manufacturing company.
When I was hired I was a Linux only kind of guy and had a sharp learning curve on the differences between AIX and Linux. For example, I once crashed a production sybase server by running killall -HUP inetd, which doesnt quite do what it would do on Linux. (For those that dont know, on Solaris and AIX killall does just that, kills all processes it can get its greedy hands on.)
I cursed and swore daily about AIX. A coworker liked to say "AIX isnt an Operating System, it's a virus that's pretending to be an Operating System"
But there's one piece of AIX that impresses me to no end, LVM, The Logical Volume Manager.
The ability to intelligently allocate, size, and move filesystems was incredibly useful and lent itself to long uptimes.
We once had a drive start to act flaky, so live, in production with no outtages, we moved a sybase database (The equivalent of a raw partition) from one drive to another, with Sybase smacking the database the whole time.
I realize there's been several projects to move towards journaling file systems like IBM's JFS, but I havent seen anything to compare to LVM.
THAT is what we need.
I admin servers in New Jersey and San Francisco. I am in Ohio. We have a portmaster 2 terminal server on the net we can telnet to, then get a serial based login prompt to the machines. The suns talk to the serial from the very beginning. You can get what equates to the BIOS setup screen over the serial. No octopus monitor switch does that for you. And no monitor switch helps you if you're in Ohio and the machine is in New Jersey. New Intel Dual PII/III boards have a bios feature that puts the info out a serial, just like the suns. This may be the Phoenix Bios that others have talked about. A friend has several of these. over a serial connection, the machine boots and you can enter the bios screen. You can get a lilo prompt. That's the kind of control you need over remote machines.
I swear that when I read about Oracle 8i a few months back it was a self contained product that needed no OS. Ran off a Mach Microkernel. If so, then why does it need NT or solaris? does it need Sparc or Intel perhaps?
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps I wasn't specific enough. I don't seen a failure in American "Cuisine" in general, not in the way you'd refer to "French Cuisine". There are American chefs doing some amazing stuff. Even pretentious assholes like Bobby Flay put a damn fine dish on the table.
1 and 6) Viticulture. Yes, I will fully grant you that the american wines are damn fine. But I'll counter with american beer. Yes, #6 you have Microbreweries, but those are the exception, not the rule. Find me someone discerning who likes BUD LIGHT, or even *shudder* Milwaukee's Best.
2) Not sure where you live. I live in Cincinnati, a generic midwestern city. I can get all of those things too, but not at my grocery store. I'd have to make special trips to specialty stores. I've spent time in Manhattan and San Francisco where you CAN get those things easily. Again, that's the exception, not the rule.
3) True, Asian Cuisine is more realistic these days. You can say the same things about other cuisines. Real Mexican, not nacho cheese laden tex-mex. Real Italian, not pizza and americanized pasta. Though all of the bad sides of those cuisines is here too. How many people in the US truly believe that Taco Bell is mexican?
4) No argument here. The success of FoodNetwork is a clear indication that many people do enjoy food more. Though I would give them marks off for feeding into the Emeril Lagassee cult of personality. (Which is a damn shame, his Louisiana Real and Rustic is one of the best cookbooks I've ever read.)
5) I have a love-hate relationship with WS. They are so expensive that I've never been able to bring myself to buy anything there. They also feed into the notion that expensive gadgets are required to cook, and they aren't. Granted, I lust after the All-Clad stainless cookware, but my inexpensive Calphalon I bought dirt cheap off of ebay serves me just fine.
My question was not so much a query as to the sad state of food in America (Why Can't Johnny Saute?) but more of a question about the split in our culture. There are foodies (Hi there) and there are junkfoodies. McDonalds, Taco Bell, and their ilk are a poor legacy for america to foist upon the world. You don't see "Supercrepes" stands in the mall food court, nor do you see a worldwide chain of Charlie Trotter's.
There's a serious dichotomy in American cuisine between good food and fast food.
I try to do that, but can't as often as I'd like. When asked what I wanted for father's day, I wanted to cook a meal for everyone.
Cajun BBQ shrimp, my world famous Buffalo Chicken Eggrolls, grilled pork tenderloin brined in a variant of Alton's turkey brine and grilled over hickory chips, and a Potato and smoked Gouda Gratin. The Chocolate Fudge volcano cakes and homemade vanilla bean ice cream were canceled due to lack of time. Rave reviews all around (even with store bought ice cream and brownies from a local bakery).
I watch exactly two television programs. NFL Football and Good Eats.
I have three questions.
I learned a long time ago that I enjoyed cooking more than anything else. Part of that is that, being a geek, I live in a digital world, and the analog act of cooking is very soothing. While I will complain loudly at standing in a line longer than ten minutes, I've often spent HOURS on my feet in the kitchen cooking for holidays, and went to bed that night blissfully calm.
In the US today, with rampant McCuisine and dual income families, the concept of cooking has been shoved to the back burner, so to speak. Eating is something you do, not something you enjoy. Even worse, good food is, for many, something you go get, not something you do in your own kitchen.
So, riddle me these questions three...
1) What can be done about the dumbing down of american cuisine? Your show is a spectacular start, but there simply arent enough of them. You actually make other shows irrelevant. I'm no longer content to see the "How" without also getting the "why?" Short of "Good Eats 2", what can be done to teach americans what good food is?
2) You're living the life I'd kill for. You were a Video guy who left to go to culinary school. I'm a web guy who would give anything to do the same, if I could figure out how to pay the mortgage and feed the three kids in the interim. I have taken the path of self education. Your book is, quite honestly, a textbook that should be required reading for anyone who wants to cook. I'm waiting for my copy of McGee's On Food And Cooking, what other resources do you recommend for someone who is very serious about culinary education, but doesn't have the resources for an immersive culinary school?
3) Your equipment recommendations, so far, have been dead on. My Magnum pepper mill is a dream, My lodge cast iron has a seasoning my grandmother would have been jealous of, and Spring loaded tongs have been a fixture in my kitchen since before you did your PBS shows. But I have yet to find a source for your Jomac gloves, and I am still patiently waiting for the Plunger and Plunger Junior to go on sale at Your Site. Hook a brother up, to steal a Nicholson line, "Where does he get these wonderful toys."?
Oh, and I'll slide in one more question. What subjects are on tap for next season?
I've never understood why people get so up in arms about the lack of downloadable ISO's for OBSD
..
How the hell hard can it be to do the following?
mkdir ~/obsd30
cd ~/obsd30
[use favorite method of obtaining all files from OBSD Mirror]
cd
mkisofs -b floppy30.fs -c boot.catalog -R -o obsd.iso obsd30
cdrecord [your options] obsd30.iso
(NOTE: I did that mkisofs off the top of my head so it's very likely wrong, but it's damn close.)
I buy OBSD CD's to support the project, but I'm not waiting for them to arrive when the files are there for FTP.
I just replaced a Redhat/ipfilter box (My home router) with an OpenBSD 3.0 box, my first. So I've got no legacy baggage.
License Bigots bore me to tears. Darren reminds me of Dan Bernstein with his "My way or the highway" mentality. The QMail lists are half full of people bitching about the license, and it's why I left qmail for Postfix a long while ago (and never looked back. If djbdns had a competitor, I'd be Bernstein free.)
If the whole point of using OpenBSD is to use something audited by the OBSD team, then the concept of using any distribution other than the one I get from ftp.OpenBSD.org is ludicrous.
I used to be part of a team that did sysadmin for a set of about 500 RS6000's all over the globe for a major manufacturing company. When I was hired I was a Linux only kind of guy and had a sharp learning curve on the differences between AIX and Linux. For example, I once crashed a production sybase server by running killall -HUP inetd, which doesnt quite do what it would do on Linux. (For those that dont know, on Solaris and AIX killall does just that, kills all processes it can get its greedy hands on.) I cursed and swore daily about AIX. A coworker liked to say "AIX isnt an Operating System, it's a virus that's pretending to be an Operating System" But there's one piece of AIX that impresses me to no end, LVM, The Logical Volume Manager. The ability to intelligently allocate, size, and move filesystems was incredibly useful and lent itself to long uptimes. We once had a drive start to act flaky, so live, in production with no outtages, we moved a sybase database (The equivalent of a raw partition) from one drive to another, with Sybase smacking the database the whole time. I realize there's been several projects to move towards journaling file systems like IBM's JFS, but I havent seen anything to compare to LVM. THAT is what we need.
I admin servers in New Jersey and San Francisco. I am in Ohio. We have a portmaster 2 terminal server on the net we can telnet to, then get a serial based login prompt to the machines. The suns talk to the serial from the very beginning. You can get what equates to the BIOS setup screen over the serial. No octopus monitor switch does that for you. And no monitor switch helps you if you're in Ohio and the machine is in New Jersey. New Intel Dual PII/III boards have a bios feature that puts the info out a serial, just like the suns. This may be the Phoenix Bios that others have talked about. A friend has several of these. over a serial connection, the machine boots and you can enter the bios screen. You can get a lilo prompt. That's the kind of control you need over remote machines.
I swear that when I read about Oracle 8i a few months back it was a self contained product that needed no OS. Ran off a Mach Microkernel. If so, then why does it need NT or solaris? does it need Sparc or Intel perhaps?