On a related note, some Orthodox Jews in New York won’t drink unfiltered tap water because the city’s water supply contains microscopic crustaceans and is therefore not kosher.
DesertRoomie prefers that on her pasta while I prefer shredded Parmesan, imported or not. There’s no accounting for taste so I don’t make fun of her.
But I do refer to it as sawdust.
Considering the name of the dish (‘pick me up’), I would regard it as a crime to have a tiramisu which wasn’t laced with alcohol and strong coffee. Although the recipes I’ve always used prefer Marsala wine to Kahlua.
I usually add 50% vodka, 50% water to make pastries, it makes for a lighter pastry. It’s only a teaspoon or so, and I am pretty sure all alcohol is gone after the blind bake. Totally fine to give that to my kids.
I’ve also used the same techique for muffins, with similar effect.
I worked many years ago at a halaal restaurant where recipes such as deserts that required sherry or port were substituted out with Coca-Cola.
Thanks! I’ll have to try that sometime. Yeah, I didn’t imagine that wine was, like, the central ingredient or anything (obviously ginger is 
) – but it’s my observation that little additions during cooking like that, like soy sauce and sugar (I like your tip to caramelize it a little, I’ve never tried that before!) can really enhance the taste.
(As I’ve said, I cook with wine on occasion in just the way you describe, and feed it to my kids for that matter, and don’t worry about alcohol in the sauce – as others have pointed out, there’s probably at least as much alcohol in the desserts my husband and daughter make, what with my whole family being such big fans of vanilla, and that not necessarily getting cooked down much. And while I’m sure there’s some very uptight member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints who doesn’t add vanilla to desserts for that reason, I have never personally met one.)
Ah, the other thing is that before you make the sauce, you toss the cut-up cooked chicken with a little toasted sesame seed oil. Or a lot, in my household.
Or at the very least, in modern lingo, a “Karen”.
I found a year and a half ago it’s always best to inquire if there are any dietary restrictions I must observe when cooking for others, regardless of whether they are based on health or religion.
While a guest at my nephew’s place, I spent the evening cooking a nice lamb stew for everyone and made the mistake of thickening it with a flour-based roux. Before I could serve it, I was gently reminded that my niece-in-law is gluten intolerant and couldn’t eat a single bite of the stew.
In addition, my daughter realized she’s lactose intolerant around the time she graduated from college. I now try to cook dairy-free dishes for her when she comes over, and I always ask if she brought her medication before serving her anything.
I’m reminded too of the time I cooked a nice dinner for a Russian girlfriend of mine and was told at the last minute that she couldn’t eat it because it was Orthodox Lent and she was prohibited from consuming animal products. I had to make her a hearty vegan dish instead.
So yeah, it’s always a good idea to ask first, just to cover your ass if nothing else.
Sorry it took so long to provide a proper non–linguistically oriented answer. 
I’m still asking myself why everyone was treating this like an actual event with an actual Teetotaler Helicopter Mom who actually said this word-for-word?
I’ve spent way too much time reading r/AITA (the Am I The Asshole? sub-reddit) and Smapti was right:
But, hey, if you’ve enjoyed the thread (back in the day, or looking back over it now), just for discussion of a hypothetical, then more power to you.
Just didn’t want anyone to feel bad for the pasta-server, or mad at the alleged mom. They may not exist.
Yeah, for me it’s just the premise for an interesting discussion. The second I start guessing what “really happened,” The whole thing falls apart. As you say, the whole thing could be fictional. Or maybe it’s real story but the woman is misrepresenting it (i.e. 99% or AITA posts). Unless it’s just so absurd that there’s no way to discuss it, I prefer to stick with the hypothetical. Or to let it veer off into a wider discussion.
I guess it wouldn’t hurt to ask, but in practice all the alcohol evaporates with a few minutes of cooking.
As mentioned before in this thread, it takes longer than that. I don’t know if any numbers were posted, but after 15 minutes, there’s still about 40% of the original alcohol left, and to fully cook it off is about 3 hours. To be fair, if you’re cooking a bolognese, you may very well hit the 3 hour mark (I typically do.) This sauce probably doesn’t go quite that long, and 60% reduction after 15 minutes is quite alot, and the amount per serving will be miniscule, anyway.
I noticed earlier that you mentioned Rao’s, and you also mentioned that a good bolognese has wine. Just thought I would point out that Rao’s makes an exceptional bolognese, but the ingredients don’t include wine. Their vodka sauce contains vodka, however.
Rao’s Bolognese Ingredients: Italian Whole Peeled Tomatoes, Italian Style Meatball Crumbles (beef, pork, Romano cheese [pasteurized cow’s milk and sheep’s milk, cheese cultures, salt, enzymes], water, salt, soy flour, spices, garlic, natural flavorings, parsley), Onions, Carrots, Olive Oil, Celery, Uncured Pancetta Crumbles (pork, salt, water, spices, cultured celery powder, sea salt, natural flavorings- no nitrites or nitrates added except for those naturally occurring in cultured celery powder and sea salt), Garlic, Salt, Citric Acid, Black Pepper, Thyme, Parsley
It also doesn’t seem to have milk, so it’s a bit of a different bolognese. (The “official” bolognese as designated by the Italian Academy of Cooking specifies beef only, mirepoix, tomato, broth, dry white wine, milk, salt, and pepper.) Of course, there are probably as many ways to make it as cooks. I’ll mix beef and pork sometimes (especially now with meat prices). Sometimes I’ll use only sausage like in Rao’s. Sometimes I use prosciutto instead of pancetta. If I don’t have white, I’ll use red wine. And so on. But it needs to look more like a sloppy joe-type of thing than a sauce. It’s not so much a sauce with beef; it’s more beef with sauce.
Although i can’t believe it’s simply a function of time, and not also related to the fraction of liquid that’s been boiled off. When i cook in a wok, i add wine and boil off almost all the liquid within a couple of minutes, then add chicken broth and reduce it again.
Anyway, yes, of course your should ask if a guest has any dietary restrictions. But no, i don’t think it’s reasonable to intuit that “wine, at a level such that there’s negligible alcohol per serving” is a problem unless it’s mentioned.
Yeah, that’s a good point. I did think it was curious nothing about volume was mentioned there, but your remark about it being a factor of percentage of liquid boiled off is a better observation. In a bolognese, the wine (and milk in another step) are largely boiled off before going on to the next step. (They are added to the meat-and-mirepoix mixture.) That’s usually about 10 minutes or so of boiling or so for a cup of liquid to reduce it that far. I would think there’s much less than 40% of alcohol left even then, much less at 15 minutes.
Surely it depends on volumes and temperature? Wine added to vinegar does not cook at all. I add a little booze to boiling onion soup and the recipe claims it boils off in a couple minutes. Admittedly, this may not be so. But still little reason for anger.
Oh, no disagreement there. It’s a long thread, but my posts are the friend’s mom is being a dipshit.
Probably in other areas of life, too, or at least child-rearing.
We had a similar mom in our church, who went ballistic because a Sunday School teacher showed a couple of scenes from Shrek. “That’s PG, and I should’ve been warned ahead of time!”
Not only did she complain to the kid’s teachers, but the pastor, the assistant pastor, the head of curriculum for the adult Sunday School, the organist, the little old churchlady who just nodded because she couldn’t hear a thing, and a couple dozen innocent bystanders. Including me, with hatred and spittle.
I was going to have her kid in SS the next year, and I often showed Napoleon Dynamite and Rat Race (where the opening scene is our poor protagonist checking out of a hotel and being told loudly that he’s being billed for watching “Afro Whores” on pay-per-view, over and over… with little Black kids behind him in line).
I decided to take a year off rather than deal with that mom. Pretty brave, huh?
Pick your battles.