h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I must say I like the softer flours you can get now - cake flour and pastry flour. The last thing you want in pastry is gluten.

Would a clairvoyant contortionist be able to foresee his own end?

I suspect one would bend over backward trying.

You made come out of my nose

The softer farina flours used for cake and fine pastry haven't the same kind of gluten as the harder semmolina or durum wheat used for noodles or pasta, or as much of it.

That from the farinas is a grey gluten, nerve food, while that of the harder wheats is a yellow gluten, suitable for building strong bones and gristle and the chondroitin pads in one's spinal column.

I don't know about the different names. They are numbered here. The numbers are based on the mineral content, it seems.

It must be almost a decade now that I've had to wear spectacles, but I'll still walk out of the bathroom and forget to put them back on after a shower, probably two times out of five.

Life's too short for Buzzfeed.

At least Buzzfeed typically put their long lists on one page. My local newspaper's website on the other hand now turns every story into clickbait slideshows.

Quite a few serious and semi-serious publications split their stories into several chunks and spread them across three, four, five or more individual web pages for no apparent reason other than either to generate page views for the advertisers so they can up their rates, or perhaps they think our attention span can't cope with the entire story in one piece.

To be fair, some do actually give you the choice of viewing it all on one page, but by the time I get to those links I've often lost any inclination to add to their statistics, unless it's a *very* worthwhile story.

There aren't many sounds more reminiscent of childhood than that of a bread knife slicing into a crusty loaf.

Wow - that's a - for me it would be the fridge humming. Everyone else's will be different. They may often be connected with food (comfort food, childhood teatimes) perhaps.

Yep, I grew up on sliced white bread.

For me it's probably the Looney Toons theme indicating it was time for Saturday Morning Cartoons for 3 hours.

Or... the sound of a screen door slamming along with the spring creaking as it does so. It's hard for me now to imagine not having an air conditioned home sealed against the heat, but back then we had screens on the windows and opened the house up. We sweated, a lot. The screens kept the clouds of mosquitoes outside, or at least most of them. And the sound of that screen door swinging and slamming was a constant sound as we kids ran in and out of the house to the shouts of the parents to pick one side of the door and stay on it.


"CRRRREEEEEAAAAK... SLAM! slam-slam....... CRRRREEEEEAAAAK... SLAM! slam-slam" (repeat all day)

I wonder if you can still get old school breadboards like the one we had at home. The ones that have a matching knife that slides into the board. Like this http://ancientpoint.com/imgs/a/f/a/p/g/english_bread_board_with_knife_1_lgw.jpg

I never really got the point of round breadboards. There's nowhere to put the knife, and I never saw one that hadn't warped. And most loaves are oblong. Or perhaps torpedo-shaped, like a bloomer. Leastways, they were when I was a kid.

Well, a web search shows up a preponderance of boards with grooved inserts like this http://www.beyondthekitchensink.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/bread_board_2.jpg

I need to find a phrase, similar to 'gilding the lily', which means taking something that works perfectly well and complicating it for its own sake. Because I can see little point to what they've done there. I know what it's for - to catch the crumbs. But we never had any problem with breadcrumbs when using our board, and I have no problem when I cut bread on my cutting board today. They mostly stay on the board, and a few might fall off, which you wipe up. Job done.

I really wish I could find a copy of a story I read/heard ages ago concerning a recipe passed down generations. I believe it was a casserole, or something. There's a big family gathering and the third generation daughter is making the dish for the family as her mother explains how it's made. A question arises regarding why it needs to be made in two separate casserole dishes, one large, one smaller rather than use a single even larger dish. The mother replies that this is the way her mother taught her. So, they call the grandmother into the kitchen and ask her why it's done this way. She replies, "Oh, that's simple. My oven wasn't big enough to hold a larger dish."


OK... result. Apparently there are many variations of this story. Often it's a turkey or a roast with the legs or ends removed.

http://www.snopes.com/weddings/newlywed/secret.asp

I really love the one about putting the dish rack on the turkey while it thaws.

I've just reminded myself of a fantastic cutting board I made myself years ago, when I had a furniture business, from beech offcuts. It was quite a complicated affair, but complicated for good reason. This is going to be difficult to describe.

The centre was a piece of beech, about an inch and a half thick, 10" from side to side and 8" top to bottom. A rectangle, with the grain running parallel to the long sides.

Attached to each of the two short sides (the ends of the board, you might say), by tongue and groove joint, was one more piece of beech, about 4" wide and the same length as the short sides of the centre piece, but with the grain running at 90° to that of the centre piece - in other words, along the length of these two pieces. So now we've got a board 18" from side to side and 8" top to bottom.

Then I fixed two more pieces of beech, each about 2" in width and 18" long, again with a tongue and groove joint, along the top and bottom of the board, and again with the grain running along the length of these two new pieces.

So now we've got a board 18" by 12" made with five pieces of beech - one in the middle, grain running east to west, one at each end, grain running north to south, and one top and bottom, grain running east-west again. The point of switching the direction of the grain and using tongue and groove joints is so that the board will never, ever warp.

And it never did And it weighed a ton

And I wish I could remember what the hell happened to it You'd think it'd be pretty hard to lose something like that

Well, if you find or make a new bread board, here's the knife you should get to go with it.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1070983896/the-stupendous-splendiferous-butterup

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1070983896/the-stupendous-splendiferous-butterup

How interesting. The first time I see one in a thrift store I'll grab it and write a full report

I can't help feeling a strong sense of irony around the outrage and indignation aimed at BP given their alleged complicity in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill (two other companies were involved), and the triumphalism being voiced over the ruling that they were grossly negligent and could be looking at up to $18 billion in fines (appeal pending).

Particularly, I find it jaw-droppingly ironic to hear comments criticising the company for cutting corners in the name of profit, coming from people in a state where regulations are despised because they 'hold back business and profit', and where, even after one of the biggest industrial explosions of recent times, the state's legislature is resisting attempts to put in regulations which might have prevented that disaster and could prevent others in the future, simply because they will hurt business.

It's funny how personal experience can turn a person's opinions around 180°.