redfox

Yep, that's it. Mine comes in a red jar, too, but otherwise is just like that.

Oh dear! And you're allergic to soy, too, aren't you? (Or am I remembering wrong?) I go in for a lot of cabbage, wonderful cabbage, and eggplant.

But bottled dressing is... icky! Right now I am eating a little round of toasted whole-wheat pita with a big helping of tofu (née egg) salad that I think must have started its existence as a vegetarian (kosher for dairy?) chopped liver. It is much less gloppy than standard egg salad, and not mustardy or anything -- you make it by sauteeing mushrooms and onions, then chopping these and the eggs or tofu together until you get a rough, fluffy puree. Salt, pepper, LOADS of dill, and just enough mayonnaise to moisten. Mm!

I am very envious. I love the wild variety of Asian fake meats. "Intestines" sound like they would be good in a kind of chow-fun-ish preparation.

The American Dialect (not "dialectic") Society didn't come up with the word, they just honored it at their annual meeting. The American Dialect Society is an academic society dedicated to the study of dialects of English in North America -- they observe colloquial American English, they don't make it up. Every year, members make nominations and then vote for "Word of the Year," which is supposed to represent the most characteristic or dominant new(ish) word in the national discourse that year. Honors like "most useful" are sort of runner-up things, along the lines of "Miss Congeniality" crossed with the kind of thing that would be voted on for mention in a high-school yearbook.

Their yogurt is delicious, but it's nothing like Total.

I'm still getting the hang of the new ImageGullet. Uploading pictures for the purpose of posting them in a thread seems like it got an awful lot more elaborate, but probably I am missing some efficient way to do it. Anyhow, let's hope it all works okay. I bought some chat masala today, because I was feeling nostalgic for Vik's chat house in Berkeley. Made these chana and green beans and then served them with yogurt, chopped red onions, sev, and chat masala. Good, good stuff, though certainly no actual chat known to man.

Yes, they are great! They aren't entirely carb-free, of course, being onions, but I don't think they're too bad, and they are so much crispier than any I've ever been able to make at home. They're also great with green beans or spinach.

I'm not on a low-carb diet myself, but my husband has Type 2 diabetes, so follows a diet that is roughly the same as Sugarbusters. To make matters more adventuresome, we'd both been vegetarians (not vegans, not fish-eaters) for a long time before his diagnosis and don't plan to give that up. At first I thought it would be impossibly difficult to cook under these constraints, but now we've got the hang of it, more or less, and it's working well. We certainly do eat a lot of eggs, though! For breakfasts we've been finding that some amount of relatively slow-to-digest starch is a good thing, in terms of keeping blood sugar on an even keel through the morning and into lunch. And since we have eggs so often at dinner, and are additionally generally too stupid to cook on weekday mornings, we've developed some other options. One favorite is what we call "breakfast lentils" -- a largeish batch of brown lentils, roughly chopped roasted peanuts (legumes one and all!), crispy fried onions (I buy jars of a Thai brand that's just onions, oil, and salt, for laziness), salt, and pepper. Sometimes I also add minced garlic or fenugreek. Those then go in the fridge and are served in a relatively small dose in the morning with a blob of yogurt, some olive oil, and a garnish. Sometimes it's more of the onions, sometimes cherry tomatoes, sometimes some herbs. We like them a lot, and they're wonderfully mindless in the morning.

Those edamame sticks look like they would be perfect with drinks. They seem a little more grown-up, somehow, than the average snack, but still totally munchy. Did you try some?

Spicy, tart chickpeas and greens with plenty of cumin and amchoor Raita Coriander leaves accompanied by soda water and a really nice lime-and-lemongrass cordial I found recently. (This combination is good with booze, too.)

Tomato salad, of course, and barley risotto with caramelized onions, roasted eggplant, red peppers, and mystery spinach-like green. The green came in our farm share this week and is a lot like spinach, but more wild tasting and with a slightly mucilaginous character. It was perfect with the barley.

Tonight: *Tomato salad with Green Zebras, Paul Robesons, and halved Sungolds, fresh mozzarella, lots of basil, real balsamic vinegar, sea salt, olive oil, and pepper *Frittata with farm-fresh eggs, red pepper, onions, and thyme *Toasted bread We have had and will be having many variations on this meal this month. I love summer. Also, by God, the tomatoes are better this year than they've been in ages. Aren't they? (I'm in Maryland.) Drinking: 1 part lime and lemongrass cordial 1 part citron vodka 5 parts fizzy water

Myself, I don't own any vases, nor do I have a basement!

The Phoenix is very much still open, still selling wonderful pasta (retail and wholesale), coffee, and pastries. They're still (or now, depending on how long it's been since you were last there) serving lunch as well.

The goat cheese stuffing sounds excellent. Ordinary tomato soup is worth remembering too -- the classic kind you ordinarily make with canned tomatoes and have with a grilled cheese sandwich. If you have different colors of tomato, you can be all fancy and make a golden batch and a red batch, say, and pour them into the bowl simultaneously from opposite sides. I am managing to go through this week's batch of heirlooms pretty well just by having them with basil, olive oil, salt, pepper, and a drizzle of the good balsamic alongside just about everything. (This morning they were next to an omelet; last night they were next to some french green lentils with caramelized onions; yesterday lunch they were over toasted pita and some butter lettuce with fresh mozzarella...) I figure that this makes them count as different dishes each time. This should be enough to use all of mine with no trouble at all, but then I don't have a whole big, beautiful crate. I did use a couple of the big ones in a ratatouille. I wondered if I would regret it -- would they just turn into generic tomato mush? But no, it's wonderful and making it with all truly excellent, fresh ingredients, including some kind of pale green squash instead of zucchini, is of course all-important. (Duh.)

Walnut bread with good butter, thinly sliced gruyere cheese, dripping ripe tomatoes and sea salt. Acme baguette with a little chipotle mayonnaise, roasted peppers, fresh mozzarella, and basil (pickles and good potato chips on the side, please). Toasted homemade pita with egg salad -- but only my mother's egg salad recipe will do. It's got sauteed mushrooms and onions and loads of dill, and everything is chop-chop-chopped into a coarse caviar-size texture. It is drier and fluffier than ordinary egg salad, and I love it.

Meanwhile my local liquor hut (Montgomery County) sells all of its beer warm "to promote home consumption." HARRUMPH.

Sitting here eating cracker after cracker heaped with the green pepper ajvar from Paula Wolfert's Mediterranean Cooking (so delicious, and I wonder why so different from the red ajvar you see in the supermarket, or rather why you never see this version elsewhere) and drinking bourbon and soda. A far cry from the multi-course extravaganzas but just the thing for a sticky evening after a day of housepainting.

I just bought a few of these yesterday -- blackberry, grapefruit, and clementine. So far I've tried the blackberry and found it very good, though it could have been a shade less sweet and I would have liked it even more. Clearly I should have bought one of each for a full sampling; I don't know what I was thinking. Tell me more about these cocktails! They aren't just Izze + vodka, are they?

I totally agree that it would fail to fix the cost problem. I just think it would also fail to fix the PR problem! (Because the problem isn't that anyone is mistaken about the fact that it means "moo" as in cow and "latte" as in milk. It's that it also brings "mulatto" to mind, gaffe-ishly.)

I don't think the problem is that anyone is mistaking what they have in mind! It's just that the resemblance is highly unfortunate. It's not an insult on DQ's part; it's a gaffe.

We're both feeling exhausted and overworked around here today, so all we had was my mother's special egg salad (drier and more finely chopped than ordinary egg salad, something like mushroom caviar extended with plenty of hard-boiled egg and dill) on toasted pita bread. Lots and lots of blood orange and soda. Feeble noises.

Often, for me, it's nothing but coffee. I have a midmorning snack instead, and those are very much a mixed bag. Today it was Ak-Mak crackers with Paula Wolfert's green-pepper ajvar on top. Holy Pete, is that stuff good.

Wow! How tragic to have never encountered an Atomic Fireball.