As of today, I’m writing a new biweekly column for [Culinate](http://www.culinate.com/) called Unexplained Bacon. The gist of the column is that each week I explore some kind of culinary mystery, with the caveat that I’ve been given a special scepter that can dub anything a “mystery”. So, the first case I’ve taken on is: *What are the most rewarding foods to buy online?*

[Unexplained Bacon: Hard Times](http://www.culinate.com/read/bacon/Hard+times)

If you have anything to say about this turn of events, please leave a comment on the column itself over at Culinate.

The next installment will investigate whether a certain Seattle-based chain is good or evil. There will be a graph.

So if you catch me posting here less often, it’s because I’m working on this column. Or because Iris and I are playing Mario Kart 64. Definitely one of those.

I’m late on this, but Laurie’s mom sent me the Oregonian’s [review](http://www.oregonlive.com/oregonian/stories/index.ssf?/base/entertainment/1170208531126900.xml&coll=7) of Pok Pok and the Whiskey Soda Lounge. They gave it an A, the equivalent of four stars, and the teaser said, “Portland’s best Thai Food, period.” Congratulations to Andy Ricker and the folks at Pok Pok, who have created the restaurant of my dreams, although why they had to do it in Portland I don’t know; *that* part wasn’t in my dream.

Also, it looks like the Oregonian, which had the worst newspaper web site in the country, period, has made a lot of improvements since last I looked at it. It’s hard to be a professional curmudgeon when life keeps offering you less to grouse about.

Iris has this lift-the-flap book called Daddies Are For Catching Fireflies. One page shows the daddy attempted to repair a broken tricycle:

> If you say to a Daddy, “It’s broken,” he will try to fix it.

> But sometimes a Daddy can’t fix it.

Tell me about it. A while back I had the hubris to announce that I would begin sharpening my own knives. Well, it didn’t happen. Sometimes a daddy can’t fix it. In fact, this particular daddy generally can’t fix it. The other day Laurie reported that the vacuum cleaner wasn’t picking up dirt. So Iris and I disassembled it and found that the belt driving the carpet brush was broken. We reported this with delight to Laurie when she got home, and only later did I realize that we hadn’t actually fixed it yet.

I let my Henckels chef’s knife get way too dull before admitting to myself that I didn’t have the guts to attack it with the GATCO sharpener, and once again I sent it off to Bob Kramer in Olympia–or, as Iris and I like to call it, Knife Camp. A while back Laurie and I had these Jansport backpacks. Jansport has a lifetime warranty, and if you send your backpack in for service, you’ll get a couple of postcards from your backpack at camp. I didn’t get a postcard from my knife, but when it came back, I said, “Iris! My knife is back from Kramer!” and she looked offended and said, “I think you mean Knife Camp.”

Knives come back from camp so sharp that the edge will catch satisfyingly on a wooden knife rack if you don’t insert the knife perfectly.

For a recent vacation, and with the idea of having something to keep me company while my main knife was away at camp, I did buy a Forschner Victorinox chef’s knife. It cost under $30, and frankly I can’t say it’s worse than the Henckels in any way.

That’s what Cook’s Illustrated found, too, in their most recent issue, when they did yet another chef’s knife test, pitting their favorite Forschner against new entries such as the Wusthof Grand Prix II and the Shun Ken Onion. The Forschner easily won again–sort of. Obviously you can’t do a blind test of chef’s knives, and the Forschner certainly got a boost for being the old reliable. I found that my hand cramped a little when I began using the Forschner, but then I got used to it, and when the Henckels got back from Knife Camp, my hand cramped a little when I switched back.

I say the Forschner sort of won because they also threw in a ringer: a $475 chef’s knife made by Bob Kramer. The Kramer is by far the best-looking knife, but, they asked, is it really better? The answer: yes, definitely. They loved it.

Sure, I’m tempted, but my pair of knives does everything I need. I couldn’t actually describe how a better knife would be an improvement. So I guess I shouldn’t order one. But I’m still going to send my Henckels to Kramer once a year, especially if it promises to send me a postcard telling me what it’s been cutting. Or stabbing.

I’ve been feeling deprived of Asian food recently, so yesterday I had a drunken chicken sandwich for lunch at Baguette Box, and tonight I’m making lo mein for dinner, which raises an old and painful question.

The noodle recipe I’m using is from Cook’s Illustrated, and like many of their Asian noodle recipes, it calls for “fresh Chinese egg noodles,” which it assures me will be found in the produce department of my supermarket. Well, they’re not. The supermarkets near me, which are no podunk affairs, have fresh udon and yakisoba noodles, but no fresh egg noodles. Periodically I take a peek at other supermarkets, and I’ve never seen these noodles anywhere other than an Asian grocery.

Is this an east coast/west coast thing, like how Cook’s is always recommending Pepperidge Farm bread (sigh)? I buy the yakisoba, and they’re fine (albeit $5), but what’s the deal with the egg noodles? East coasters, do you have Chinese egg noodles in your produce section? Californians? West Seattleites?

I’m reading the book Mindless Eating, by Brian Wansink, a Cornell professor who studies how context affects the amount of food we eat.

Wansink is best known for his funny experiments, like the one where he rigged up a bottomless soup bowl from which you can eat Campbell’s tomato soup all day and never run out. Unsurprisingly, subjects given the bottomless bowl ate more soup than those eating from regular bowls. Similarly, Wansink found that people eat more popcorn from larger tub; that people eat more food in larger groups; and that you eat more M&Ms if the candy bowl is on your desk than if it’s six feet away.

Although Wansink’s research seems solid, and I haven’t finished the book yet, I’m a little skeptical. I’m not going to say, as so many of Wansink’s subjects do, that I’m too smart to be fooled into eating more by a bigger popcorn tub. I’m sure I’m just as gullible as anyone. But I do wonder about a couple things that have not been addressed so far:

* Wansink talks a lot about central tendency and very little about variability. That is, he reports that, on average, people ate 73 percent more soup when given the bottomless soup bowl, but I’m curious whether there were individual subjects who ate very little or no additional soup, and what do these people have that the rest of us don’t? (This is the purview of satiety research, a field that has produced a lot of interesting data but not a lot of practical results.)

* Did the people who ate 73 percent more soup compensate by eating less later in the day, after they had escaped from the lab?

It seems like people vary in their ability to stop eating when they’re no longer hungry. Young children are the champs at this. But many adults are good at it, too–at least as evidenced by the fact that they’re not gaining weight. Why?