OOTS #1299 - The Discussion Thread

[Tzardok]

Ah, there's a little problem with that: I live in Lower Saxony. I'm not gonna drive eight hours for a piece of bacon, no matter how good it is. That would have to be at least a one-and-a-half weeks holiday.

[Peelee]

Ah, there's a little problem with that: I live in Lower Saxony.

Ah, i understand. Poor planning on your part.

For reals, though, if any specialty markets have it or if you can order some shipped, it's totally worth it.

[halfeye]

Why is no one promoting steak tartare?

Hakarl on the other hand shouid probably be tried once (so far I haven't).

[Timy]

Yes. I usually ask for medium, and I get them a little pink on the inside that way. It makes my wife angry with me, since she thinks I'll die from eating that. She won't even order medium well because even a little pink makes here think we'll die. So she orders burgers well done.

You should introduce your wife to carpaccio. Getting her to try to might be an uphill battle but one bite and she'll almost certainly ease up on you eating meats cooked for less time.

I had similar problem with my wife and managed to make her taste a tartare I made her. It was some kind of proof of love on her part ^^

But whe still eat her meat "well-done" and wince when I cook it medium for our daughters :p

[danielxcutter]

My parents still never have steak under medium well. Funnily enough my sister agrees with me that it’s better at medium at most even though we don’t have a lot in common.

[Doug Lampert]

Huntsville exists because Von Braun found out about the Redstone Arsenal and planted his base of operations there to repurpose the military rockets to space exploration and transportation.

Minor correction: My understanding is that Von Braun just wanted out of El Paso/White Sands area to someplace with some living plants.

Senator John Sparkman is why they chose Redstone Arsenal. (There were some decent arguments in favor, the river is available for transport, there were and are rail lines, and the government owned lots of underused land on Redstone Arsenal, but John Sparkman is "why Huntsville".)

Of course Huntsville was preexisting, a 19,000 or so person town with a bunch of cotton gins, a county seat, railroad hub, army base, A&M University nearby, and did I mention a bunch of cotton gins. But I will admit that Redstone Arsenal and MSFC are why it's the Huntsville metro area rather than the Decatur metro area, but there'd be other stuff here even if they'd never put the rocketry programs here.

[gbaji]

That's not my experience. There's a catfish place I go to with some frequency that has red beans with the only other edition being spices. It is usually a side for the catfish, but I really like it and they also serve rice with a few of their dishes. I've had them make me the red beans on rice, and enjoyed it with a nice cold beer.
Great food for Lent when I am not interested in fried catfish.

In these parts, red beans and rice literally means "red beans and rice" (ok, there's usually some herbs added in there). There's a well known Mexican restaurant right off the freeway in Chicano park that literally has a line around the block for lunch (and they only serve lunch). The ladies inside make torillas by hand while the food is being prepped and then consumed. One of the best sellers is a simple bowl of red beans and rice, with a fresh warm home made tortilla. Seriously heaven.

I've actually never eaten red beans and rice that had any sort of animal meat in it at all (not that there wasn't a hambone involved in there somewhere, so...).

I think he's talking about city centres becoming ghettos, which does seem to happen. The central shopping districts are in decline due in large part to online shopping. Suburban sprawl and expansion into the green belt is part of the decline of the city centre.

Didn't intend to spark off a whole debate with the "distibuted city" comment. But yeah, while I don't go as far as Brian on this one, there is some suggestion that city centers are increasingly becoming just about the transport hub, with populations moving into suburban areas around said centers. And this includes many of the service style industries as well. Shopping was becoming increasingly distributed away from city centers well before the rise of the internet (and that in turn got a huge jump from Covid). Business parks, hospitals, and other service related stuff have been cropping up outside the areas of what one would label "downtown" for a very long time.

And yeah... sprawl... blah blah.... Kinda depends on terminology and where we draw the lines here. I think there's also a distinction to be made between "big city" and "small/medium town" as well. Many of the communities in the areas around the county I live in would be considered mid sized towns all by themselves in most areas, and serve the same function. And yeah, it gets even more complicated when we start introducing concepts like "metropolitan area" into the mix (that's a strange and somewhat circularly defined thing all by itself!).

I would say, that as a general observation, there is no need for the people in an area to live or work particularly close to the transport hubs themselves (obviously excepting those who work in said hubs). So while there is still a lot of value to having locations where sea, air, rail, and road transports converge, I'm at least seeing a trend towards using those spaces just for those things, and moving the people, and the things that those people actually interact with (shops, restaurants, theaters, etc) some distance away from those transport hubs.

I love rare burgers, will usually cook them that way myself when i grill at home, and there is at least one restaurant I know of that will cook its burgers rare. I don't eat them often, but i do get my fix when i need. I appreciate the concern for not getting one, though!

I also lean towards medium rare on a burger. The issue is that you really really have to trust whomever handled and ground the meat. It's the outside of the cut of meat that gets exposed to whatever bacteria may show up via handling, so when cooking it, it's the outside that is cooked, kililng that bacteria. The inside can be left rare and be safe. But when meat is ground, the outsides are now inside as well, so any error in handling will result in bacteria in the portion of the meat that you didn't cook enough to kill it.

And, sadly, the most common source of this handling error isn't the meat packing plant, or while being transported (though that does happen), but in the use and maintenance/cleaning of the grinder itself. If you have your own meat grinder, or really trust the people who are grinding it, you're probably ok. But even then there are elements outside your control. Every once in awhile, someone mishandles the meat at the plant, and the surface is contaminated, so grinding it just pushes that into the center of the patty, and you're screwed if you don't cook it to medium.

Though honestly? The risk of that is much lower than many people think. I have a coworker who grew up in Hamburg, Germany. He's often quite surprised at just how squeemish Americans are about eating raw/rare meat. His favorite thing when he goes back home is to stop by the local butcher, buy pork, and then make his own pork tartare for himself and his wife.

Yes people. That's raw (as in not cooked at all) pork. Deal with it. Pork is actually a funny one all by itself. I love pork. I have a pork loin recipe I make all the time. The correct color for cooked pork is "pink" (not red, not with a red eye in it, but uniformly pink). When cooked that way, it's freaking delicious (and perfectly safe). But you cannot get any restaurant in the US to cook pork to any color other than grey/white, and then cover up for the lack of flavor by speading some kind of sauce all over it. That's not because that's the correct way to cook pork, but because American eaters have had generations of "pork must be fully cooked all the way through to freaking death!" drilled into them. So if they see it cooked any other way, they will complain and return it to the kitchen, and I'd assume restaurants, even if they know it's perfectly safe, and would taste 10x better cooked correctly, know also that they'll end out throwing out half their pork and lose money if they don't over cook it.

Which is... sad (and why I never order pork dishes in restaurants).

My parents still never have steak under medium well. Funnily enough my sister agrees with me that it’s better at medium at most even though we don’t have a lot in common.

Yeah. My parents too. Not sure if this is a generational thing, with folks needing their meat cooked to death or something. My dad, who was a genius with chicken btw (he had a grilled lemon chicken dish he made when we were kids that was amazing!), cooked steak to the point of shoe leather. And let's just say that my mom was not the greatest cook in the world (too be fair, they were in the "everything comes in a can" generation). I'm pretty sure I was in my 20s the first time I actually had a properly cooked steak and it was game changing. IMO the only properly cooked steak is medium rare. It should be cooked to the point where there is no longer any raw/chewy/gummy (you know what it's like when you chew into raw beef) sections in it, and not one second more.

I suppose it can also vary based on the cut of meat, of course. But my general go-to rule of thumb for all forms of steak is that the more it's uniformly pink through the entire "inside", the better it's going to be. The trick is getting it there.

[KorvinStarmast]

What's her opinion on rare steak? On sushi? On ... dare I say it ... Mett?

She used to like sushi, now she no longer eats it. She'll eat a medium ribeye if I grill it.

Why is no one promoting steak tartare?

Good question. (There's an Ethiopian dish very similar to that which I had in Chicago once. Good stuff.

[Peelee]

Minor correction: My understanding is that Von Braun just wanted out of El Paso/White Sands area to someplace with some living plants.

Senator John Sparkman is why they chose Redstone Arsenal. (There were some decent arguments in favor, the river is available for transport, there were and are rail lines, and the government owned lots of underused land on Redstone Arsenal, but John Sparkman is "why Huntsville".)

Of course Huntsville was preexisting, a 19,000 or so person town with a bunch of cotton gins, a county seat, railroad hub, army base, A&M University nearby, and did I mention a bunch of cotton gins. But I will admit that Redstone Arsenal and MSFC are why it's the Huntsville metro area rather than the Decatur metro area, but there'd be other stuff here even if they'd never put the rocketry programs here.

Pft. Guy sees a road named after a Mega Man villain, renames himself to that, and suddenly he gets all the credit for MSFC.

[F.Harr]

And she's a good mom too.

[Menas]

Are we done derailing? Back to the strip at hand, what's Sunny going to do next? Probably whatever Serini says, but what will that be?

Also, what would be the tactically best thing for Sunny to do, which is an entirely separate question?

Seems like we have some serial derailing going on.

As for Sunny, I think that might depend on the Paladins. I'm thinking Sunny is currently unconscious.

[Kardwill]

Seems like we have some serial derailing going on.

As for Sunny, I think that might depend on the Paladins. I'm thinking Sunny is currently unconscious.

Not for long, since he's just one lay-on-hands away from being awake. And I don't see O'Chul and Lien deciding not to heal the kid, especially since
a- they probably want to know what is going on in the chamber above.
b- They were waiting for someone to come and lift them, and Sunny fits that role perfectly.

[Doug Lampert]

Are we done derailing? Back to the strip at hand, what's Sunny going to do next? Probably whatever Serini says, but what will that be?

Also, what would be the tactically best thing for Sunny to do, which is an entirely separate question?

Seems like we have some serial derailing going on.

As for Sunny, I think that might depend on the Paladins. I'm thinking Sunny is currently unconscious.

Yeah, there's discussion of something other than Star Wars going on, having lurked on this forum from well before my 2006 join date, I have to say that I think Star Wars is the actual subject of all threads and the posts about the comic or D&D is simply a relatively rare derailment.

Not for long, since he's just one lay-on-hands away from being awake. And I don't see O'Chul and Lien deciding not to heal the kid, especially since
a- they probably want to know what is going on in the chamber above.
b- They were waiting for someone to come and lift them, and Sunny fits that role perfectly.

Yeah, it would be very wierd for either O'Chul or Lien to not heal Sunny.

[Peelee]

Yeah, there's discussion of something other than Star Wars going on, having lurked on this forum from well before my 2006 join date, I have to say that I think Star Wars is the actual subject of all threads and the posts about the comic or D&D is simply a relatively rare derailment.

A wise person once said all threads on this forum are Star Wars threads. Except Star Wars threads, those are Lord of the Rings threads.

[Precure]

Nah, Star Wars thread are for petty complaining about the people making and working for Star Wars.