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Thanks on both counts. I'll keep your excellent suggestion for the next time. Tonight I was going to roast the asparagus in ghee, dress with butter then toss with as much sauteed ramps as would enhance, not overwhelm.

Yes? Can mortals get any? I've 6 fat stalks of white asparagus on my countertop from the Cambridge Formaggio Kitchen and all their ramps and I was considering how to carefully marry the two, but this thread is a downer.

*That's* what we all want to know. ETA: Meant to quote @hollywood, not @splinky, but such is life upover.

Nice rims.

Forgive me my innocence, but why does one need specialized microwave cookware? Won't a bowl with a plate on top (or clingwrap) do? We use our microwave mostly for quick heat/warm jobs, or for partial defrosts and haven't needed specialized cookware. Even in recent months when I've had to prepare a lot of food for somebody with unpredictable and urgent needs, it's been simple to make, say, a midnight serving of instant oatmeal in a regular bowl, or to defrost a pre-made mac&cheese (frozen in a pyrex storage container) then blast it briefly in a toaster oven. ETA: Some of our ceramic bowls get hot in the microwave, but our Fiestaware, thick and sturdy as it is, does very well .

Do you have plates whose rims match your every food? Black rims for black-eyed peas, red for red-eyed gravy? Brown for a medu-vadai?

The obvious obituary is here. It's typical of the Times in which we live, that all that matters is money. Simons was also a good mathematician and responsible (or partially so) for many important advances. Such is the level of abstraction upon abstraction upon abstraction of modern mathematics, however, that his work is hard to explain, and it's not clear if the effort would be worth it: “Yeah, I was a good mathematician,” he said. “I wasn’t the greatest in the world, but I was pretty good.” Apart from his mathematics, his efforts also helped uncover an important connection with physics. In the mid 1970s he, chair of the math department at Stony Brook, and Chen Ning Yang, the local physics Nobelist at that university, organized a set of mathematical physics seminars at which it became clear that what physicists called "gauge theories" (all modern theories of the fundamental forces -- except gravitation -- fall into this category) and what mathematicians called "fiber bundles" were essentially the same thing. That proved to be a fruitful interconnection. I was a grad student in mathematical physics at Stony Brook shortly after these seminars, but derived no benefit from the presence of either Yang or Simons. Simons was already off starting to think about money, and Yang considered graduate students dirt and didn't mingle with us. It's hard ultimately, though, to forgive Simons for enriching the Mercers.

I've had it from Heritage, but they don't have (as far as I know) a storefront any more. Their delivery is reliable. I think Murray's may carry it, too.

Was there a tunnel, a blinding light, and -- this is crucial -- did you see Brahma at the end of it, Vishnu or Shiva? If Brahma you're indeed reborn, but oddly in your own body and at your own age (these technicalities are I think allowed) but are still a new person. Do you feel new at all? Even newly stiff joints will do. If Vishnu, you're not the new-you, just you. If Shiva, I don't know what to say. ETA: I realize that you may not be a believer in the BVS trimurti, but as Niels Bohr famously observed of the horseshoe above his office door, it works even if you don't believe in it.

I back what voyager says above. A family member was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer last fall. A few years ago that would have been an automatic death sentence, and a swift one at that. But they've developed powerful chemo techniques since, and between those and precisely targeted, robotic cyberknife radiation the tumor shrank to a point where last week they could remove it. But, even if there had not been sufficient shrinkage, they were optimistic that chemo could so ravage the tumor that it would spend its time trying to fix itself rather than spreading. We were told during treatment that the cancer center at Penn was the place to go to for experimental approaches if standard treatments failed: https://www.pennmedicine.org/cancer

I'm so sorry. As you know, I'm an admirer of your posts on many topics. I'll message you separately.

That makes SteveR a squash-uncle to your brother and you. How often do you think of him?

Treading carefully into the matzoh issue, why don't you all roll your own? Buying a boxed product made months ago (being optimistic) for what's a hasty flat bread seems somewhat counterintuitive. A matzoh is akin to a plain chapati, without the resting time. Flour, water, a hot griddle (and not so hot if you want a crisper product for eggy delights later) and there you have it. ETA: I believe in nothing but celebrate everything. Consider the Chou Parsi I made for Nowruz. I've gefilte fish coming in from a nearby Boston deli -- who has the bathtub for carp anymore? -- but my accompanying matzoh will be mine.

Not totally. Steam's a gas and can, in general, be heated to any temperature, without needing particular pressures. But there are complex thermodynamic issues here involving interactions between pressure, temperature and volume. And, there's the odd phenomenon of superheating. As a cooking instruction, though, go gently into that good steam -- don't rage.

My mother did her custards that way too, and I've done my custard likewise. In these situations you're getting a gentle, slow transference of heat from the steam helping you avoid scrambling, aided/caused by the fact that the heat is set at a low setting. On high settings steam can be pretty hot -- steam-burns-worse-than-boiling-water-burns and all that.