therese

I'm also wondering, so if anybody does a direct comparison I'd like to hear about it. I can easily get the Vermont product here in Atlanta, and pretty much use it all the time. I'm a butter fanatic, having grown up consuming "under the radar" dairy of all sorts from my grandparents' farm. I've still got my grandmother's butter churn (though the dasher and molds were not kept, unfortunately), and if I could lay my hands on local cream would definitely make my own butter (and real buttermilk).

We grilled our Thanksgiving turkey for years, using a Weber charcoal grill with a top, so that it ends up being a bit smoked as well since you close the top. My husband takes care of the details, but I do recall that he had to add charcoal (pre-started) during the cooking time. We've done it with quite large turkeys (one year we hosted a total of 26 people) and don't do anything special like butterflying, etc. The turkey is generally moister than when we do it in the oven. The smokiness enhances the turkey's flavor as well.

A pleasant dinner at the Four Seasons with Mr. Bourdain and the local Dames d'Escoffier (of which I'm not a member, but one of my friends turns out to be, a fact previously unknown to me) last night. Lobster bisque, skate, lamb tournedos with figs, and three small desserts including a really lovely chestnut charlotte (nicely garnished with a lovely candied, not glacee, chestnut). Champagne and passed hors d'oeuvres to start, wines poured liberally throughout dinner. Savannah Hall's a small ballroom at the Four Seasons, nicely decorated and intimate enough for the not huge crowd (total head count probably about 60). The guest of honor was genial if not exactly effusive. It's difficult to sound spontaneous if one's answering a question for the twentieth time in the space of ten days, though. Book signings and a cooking demonstration scheduled for today for those of you who are still planning on seeing him.

If you'd like to save both the money and the space required by the small dishwasher, an alternative to the "wilting plastic dish drying rack" on the countertop is a variation on a feature that's common (or used to be anyway, I don't know how often they're still used, as dishwashers become more common) in Italy: a hidden dish rack. These were typically shallow wire shelves, wall-mounted over the sink, with an open bottom so that dishes could drip into the sink below. Once loading was finished the rack was hidden behind cabinet doors. Anyway, your wife being short means that she wouldn't find the wall mount option very handy. But you could do a drawer option of the same idea, with a plastic tray bottom to catch drips under coated wire racks. Items could even be permanently stored this way. Basically like those nifty drawer-type dishwashers, except that there's no plumbing.

Well, the really key issue here is coming by a live chicken in the first place. They don't sell them at Publix, or even at any of the small farmers markets in the area, and my neighbors would take a very dim view of my building a chicken coop in the back yard. Though there were those people who kept a pair of peacocks...

I'll point out that restaurants (with few exceptions) have never been the place to find this sort of food. Even back when home cooks were butchering their own pigs and chickens and churning their own butter (very much part of my childhood), restaurants were places you ate if you were traveling, dating, or had nobody to cook for you. This latter category was highly suspect: either you were disreputable man who couldn't keep a wife, or you were a wimpy man whose wife was too "sorry" to cook for you.

Interesting choice for a name, given that there was a restaurant of the same name in the old Nikko/Grand Hyatt not so very long ago. But then the target demographic is unlikely to know that. Location very close to Django, a restaurant/nightclub sort of affair that on our single visit a couple of months ago was serving pretty terrible food and worse drinks.

Yes, blue string to tie leeks together. I, of course, would never have had this problem, because I would never have bothered to tie the leeks together into a bundle.

Great story. Sounds like the blue soup that Bridget Jones makes in the movie.

Nice pics, Yetty. From the picture it looks like those are new green peanuts, with lots of little baby ones still included.

Sorrel's tangy sourness comes from the high level of oxalate/oxalic acid in the leaves. Although spinach does not have as distinctively sour a flavor, it also contains a lot of oxalate/oxalic acid. You know the weird "coated" feeling that your teeth get if you eat spinach, particularly if it's raw? That's the oxalate. Both sorrel and spinach are on the "no" list for people who tend to form oxalate kidney stones. Very nice blog, Susan and Prepcook. Thanks for sharing your lives with us.

I steam them until very soft. No need to peel them, just wash them well. I puree them, as I like a fairly velvety texture, but ricing would likely work if you don't mind possibly noticing little bits of peel. I also like to combine parsnips and potatoes, and find that nutmeg (just a little) is very nice (along with whatever else you'd like to use----cheddar cheese goes nicely with the nutmeg).

Our family uses the dough strips (like very thick fluffy noodles) in chicken and dumplings. The ones you can buy frozen (Anne's is only one of the brands available here in Atlanta) work well. Great comfort food. I never used evaporated milk, as it already seems pretty rich (though it's actually not). Glory is a line of convenience foods that's not altogether horrifically bad. Entirely Southern product line, and I don't know how widely available it outside of this area (I'm in Atlanta). Their chicken and dumplings is decent, one of the very few frozen entree sorts of things I'll serve to my family.

Oh, dear, I'd forgotten all about those hideous contraptions. I remember my mother wearing one. I'll also remember my aunt giving me one when I was about 17 (and very thin---5'6" and 104 lbs), the idea being that one didn't want to be the slightest bit "jiggly".

Just about everybody has a car, or access to a car, as everybody now works in a factory or a shop or whatever (instead of on their own farms) and that's rarely within walking distance. Public transportation is non-existent. "Back-breaking labor" no longer occurs in factories---it's against the law. Mining, depending on the sort of job you do, may or may not be physically arduous. About the only sort of jobs that involve the same degree of physical effort seen previously are in construction---digging ditches, roofing, etc. And yes, when I was talking about affluence earlier I was referring to the population on average, not to individuals. I live in an affluent area of Atlanta, and I can literally go for days and never ever see anybody who is even remotely overweight---like Paris, but everybody's running instead of smoking.

Garter belts and stockings are a great option here in the Southeast, where the summers are just too hot for pantyhose. And yes, they're more comfortable if one is slim, but then so is everything else.

You don't have to go as far as Malaysia (unless, of course, you're already in the neighborhood) to see what happens to a poor agrarian population that becomes suddenly affluent. My mother is from Appalachia, and she points out that when she was growing up (born in the late 30's, left the area about 1960) that obesity was extremely rare. In fact, just about everybody was rail thin, and pictures of family and friends from that era bear witness to this fact (my mother and her sister were positively scrawny). Even though her family was one of the wealthiest in the area (until late in the 1960's, after I'd started spending summers on the farm, they had the only telephone for about a five mile radius, and it was located on the wall in the front hall so that neighbors could use it for emergencies) they still worked very hard, every day. Want hot water? Build a fire. And in order to build the fire you'll have have to haul coal from the coal bin (located some distance and down the hill from the house, adjacent to the road so that the coal can be delivered by truck) and split kindling. Want stewed tomatoes in the winter? Plant them, weed them, harvest them, prep them, can them, store them. Want butter? Rear a calf, breed her, milk her...well, you get the idea. This lifestyle is no longer the norm, and may well have disappeared entirely from the area. So caloric expenditure has dropped drastically. At the same time food's become much easier to obtain, much of it remarkably high density calorically compared to the earlier diet. What's amazing is that they're not even heavier.

So I'll devil the devil's advocate: Assume you've got somebody who is genetically predetermined to be overweight, but that person's caloric intake does not exceed his caloric expenditure, because that much food is simply not available and/or producing it (or doing whatever other work is required to get through life) is so strenuous that whatever calories are consumed are burned off. So what you've basically got is a fat person living in a skinny body. Obesity is closely linked to affluence: increased caloric intake, decreased caloric expenditure.

Well, time to change your mind. Apples figured prominently in my childhood diet, pretty much all them grown on my grandmother's farm in western Virginia. Much of the south is not particularly hot, as much of it's at elevation (Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia all either partially or predominantly mountain), so apples are well-suited to the climate and relatively short growing season. The type of apple my grandmother preferred was a type she called "Transparent". Tart, very juicy, very thin pale green skin. I've never seen them anywhere but in that part of the country, and even then I haven't seen them in a long time. Great cooking apples that she used for making apple sauce and apple butter (canned, of course, to last the year) and fried pies (from apple sauce, a treat for the hours spent milling it by hand). Also great for eating straight up. Incredibly great apple-y scent, not even remotely like grocery store apples. The apple trees grew in what was called "the bottom" on the farm: a relatively narrow valley through which a stream meandered, used for grazing milk cows. So very reminiscent of a Flemish painting, with happy cows grazing under huge mature apple trees. Because peanuts and apples do not necessarily enjoy the same growing conditions, you wouldn't necessarily expect to find boiled peanuts and apple cider in the same place at the same time unless you were in an area that had some overlap, like Georgia. I'll add that beer also makes a fine accompaniment to boiled peanuts.

A really great beverage with boiled peanuts is apple cider. Hard cider's even better. And it's not a question of us having kept boiled peanuts a secret, but of most non-southerners finding the idea of non-crunchy peanuts quite offensive. I've spent years getting people to try them, and the majority are just freaked out by them. Were the peanuts in question freshly harvested "green" peanuts? Assuming the little ones hadn't been culled you'll have had some that still had spongy shells. I used to work with a guy whose family grew peanuts, and he'd bring me enormous bags of green peanuts every year.

And it can be particularly difficult to remember to tip on comped items if one's had more than one glass of wine, you know?

I do remember eating various sorts of canned pasta as a child, and finding them, well, repulsive. My kids wanted to try them a while back, so I got a few types for them to try. Neither one would even swallow the Spaghetti-O's (ran to the sink to spit them out), and the other cans are still in my pantry. Sounds like they'll make excellent donations to this year's Thanksgiving canned food drive.

Whew, that's a relief. We'll be doing without the chicken fingers as well.

Oh, and ditto on jgm's rant. Twinkie's and instant chocolate pudding. Eeeew. Was the pudding actually "made" by the chef? Or did it also come in a can or a tub? As for using chrisamirault's technique to end food battles, I guess I'd have to start serving dessert routinely. Which I don't, and certainly wouldn't consider using it as a bribe.

Bleudauvergne nails this precisely, and I'll point out that some French (and Italian) women will make a particular point of eating more than usual in front of Americans, particularly if the Americans in question are overweight. My French "mother" and her sister-in-law (both extremely soignee) routinely ate pate and bread and cheese and mousse au chocolat in company, but switched to steamed fish and spinach in private (including most family dinners). When we ate at the grandmother's house she prepared a special meal for the women "of a certain age" who'd gotten to the point that they needed to watch their intake to maintain their tidy silhouettes. All that said, the diet and lifestlye were overall better at that time (several decades ago) in France than in the U.S. in my opinion. But that's all changing, and it's reflected in the demographics.