alexist

I really hate it when cookbook writers (in this case, Tamasin Day-Lewis) go over the top in specifying organic and free range in all their ingredient lists. Look, write a blurb at the beginning about buying good quality ingredients and be done with it. Don't be annoying about it--especially when you're wrong. "Always buy organic, free range eggs because the yolks are brighter yellow and taste better". Well, one: The colour of the yolks is solely due to diet. Most free range eggs will have more orange yolks because they have access to green plants, which produces darker yolks. If you feed a battery chicken a corn-rich diet, it will also have bright orange yolks. (It also produces yellow skin, as you'll notice if you see corn-fed labelled chickens in the supermarket.) And colour isn't correlated to taste, except insofar as the same diet may produce both bright colour and rich taste. As it happens, the various random things that a free range chicken eats can produce a stronger tasting egg--but again, you can duplicate this in a battery chicken. Buy free range eggs because you prefer better treated chickens, but don't make up bullshit reasons.

And no, you're NOT missing the point when you use half vegetable oil in mayonnaise. Quite aside from flavour, extra virgin olive oil can make mayonnaise split, or "go crazy" as Italians say. When better respected cooks than you say that vegetable oil, or half and half, is good for mayonnaise, you might want to consider their opinion.

Unsulphured apricots? Contrary to what you might think, this is not just a nasty additive to keep them bright orange. It also preserves the flavour. The difference between sultanas and black raisins? Sulphur dioxide (and flame drying versus sun drying). Both are made from varieties of the sultana grape (in California, the Thompson seedless). Now, it's possible that you prefer the flavour of unsulphured--some do. But it's one of those prejudices that deserves a note.

I also find specifying things like "top of Jersey milk" to be irritating. Try to keep things reasonably standardized so the recipes can be duplicated easily.

And one from L&O: We're supposed to accept that this great software designer would use his ex-fiancée's pet name for him as his firewall password?! It was totally insecure and vulnerable to a dictionary attack...

And yes, I'm opinionated. But I've got sources to back me up. ;-)