Cooking Creativity

I've been looking for a safe way to dry age beef at home, and was fascinated by the range of suggestions on this thread. Indeed, if you can afford the traditionally dry-aged, special cooler stuff, it's great. But who can afford mail order steaks or, even, Whole Foods? The Ask-the-Meatman method seemed a bit to iffy/scary for me--and stinking up the refrigerator was also none too appealing. Has anyone here heard of or tried Drybagsteak.com bags? Apparently, they allow you to age in a regular fridge in a vacuum but get really truly dry-aged steak. I found this on the web during my search and read the article they linked to. Seems like a study was published in which they compared the steak aged in this special moisture-releasing bag side-by-side with traditionally dry-aged steak. I'd sure appreciate hearing if anyone else has checked this out. They're a little pricey, but I'd give 'em a try if I had a couple folks to compare notes with.

Trader Joe's is terrific for so many things, I especially appreciate how they can keep the concept of hummus fresh--SOOO many varieties. (Hummus=cheese for the lactose intolerant)

After reading this fascinating long thread on the topic of raw milk, I just have to weigh in with my first contribution to this list. Given that fact that a potential customer of raw milk is probably seeking out this precious Grail believing it has tremendous health benefits, perhaps that customer is also willing to accept the risks. When we abdicate our responsibility for risk to the controllers, we may also relinquish, to some degree, our right to have a certain quality of food. There is so much disinformation and fear around "food safety" in this country, yet so few consumers look at the reasons why we have so much regulation around food safety. If we were not processing such large "cost effective" volumes of food, we would not only have less risk of contamination, but also better quality of food overall. When running a commercial kitchen many years ago, I had to take the Safe Serve training course that "certified" me by the county in which I worked to run that kitchen. The information on disease and potential for spoilage was detailed. The numerous protocols recommended were sound and, seemingly, infallible. However, when the instructor started to state that sushi was patently dangerous--not only because of the risk of consuming raw fish but merely because it was a food which used rice that had been cooled in a potentially dangerous manner, I realized that the training was going too far. If we look around the world at the diversity of food handling practices employed safely on foods often more "raw" that we can generally find in the U.S., I think we can see that there is plenty of room for interpretation. Raw milk, for those who want it, is merely one of those "interpretations" I would say. Let them sign a waiver, like bungie jumping or rock climbing and cease the Food Police-like raids.