Jensen

Okay. I responded thinking that she was discussing only cooking. I do agree with you that there is a wide variety of diverse cuisines available from restaurants. Yes, that it does. But even Victoria has a wider range of groceries available in the mainstream grocery stores than Sacramento. There you have a much smaller city with no large recent immigrant population (there is a Chinese community from the gold rush of the 1860s--I think the 2nd oldest Chinatown on the West Coast after San Francisco--but no recent influx of immigrants). Victoria is very much "white bread" in demographic terms and yet it's easier for me to find a wider range of groceries ("ethnic" and otherwise) in the mainstream grocery stores than it is to find them in Sacramento. In thinking some more about it, I'm not sure it's really because of any lack of adventurous spirit or some sort of xenophobia. The main difference I see in grocery stores down here is the amount of shelf space taken up by "convenience food". Packaged food so that people don't have to cook is much more prevalent here. Things that I used to consider just average groceries are "specialty" items down here. Some of them are starting to appear at my local grocery store but I'm not holding my breath waiting for others (fresh noodles, for example).

Jinmyo, I hate to disagree with you but this is simply not true. As much as I like to complain about my countrymen, the one thing I do like about the US is the openness to many different ethnic cuisines. And I'm not talking only in big cities...in a "Heartland" town of 100,000 I can personally count 7 Korean places, 3 sushi places, two indian, at least 3 (real, non chain) mexican, at least one transcendantly good Italian place, 4 thai, 2 vietnamese, 2 middle eastern, the usual complement of chinese, good and bad....Some execute the cuisine better than others, but all these places are visited by both the recent immigrants and locals alike. But wasn't Jinmyo referring to cooking, not eating out? How many of those restaurant goers will cook those many different ethnic cuisines at home? How easy is it to find "ethnic" groceries in your Heartland town? I can't comment on the average European town as far as buying diverse groceries but I do know that it was a hell of a lot easier to buy them in Vancouver than it is in Sacramento...two cities of the same size, btw.

Costco was in the list somewhere up high. I don't remember if they mentioned Whole Foods or not. (And I still can't find the damn article!) I think the idea can be applied to food though. A bargain is a bargain, right?

I'll go out on a limb and posit a third explanation, one that has absolutely nothing to do with food. Americans love a bargain. They're willing to eat the tasteless dreck because it costs less. There was a very interesting article in the NYT the other day (and, for the life of me, I can't find it again) that discussed the demise of the department store. One of the factoids in the article was curious...the number one favourite store of households with $350K+ in income was Target. I suspect the same is probably true when it comes to food. It's somewhere to "get a bargain".

Potato salad...

I'm out in Sacto and those same three chickens cost $0.89/lb at Costco here. This thread prompted me to check out the sales on the Raleys website; right now, chicken thighs are on for $0.99/lb (reg. $1.49/lb). I usually buy them blast frozen at Costco. I buy chicken breasts the same way.

My grandmother's pumpkin pie recipe uses mace. 1-1/2 cups pumpkin 1 cup sugar 3 eggs 1/2 cup milk 1 T flour 1 tsp ginger 1 tsp cinnamon 1/2 tsp nutmeg 1/2 tsp mace 1/4 tsp salt Preheat oven to 425. Mix all ingredients and put in a pie shell. Bake at 425 for 15 minutes then reduce oven temperature to 350. Continue baking for another 35-45 minutes. Even people who hate pumpkin pie like this one...

Some recent cheap meals here at Chez Jensen: * braised beef shank ($2.99/lb...almost as cheap as hamburger!) * chuck roast in any number of incarnations...Carbonnade Flamande, porkölt (recipe is here in the WW topic), Provencal beef stew * soup! cauliflower, potatoes, squash...the world is your soup tureen * beans! my favourite right now is navy beans seasoned with herbes de Provence and garlic. Yum! Edited to add this: My food costs started going down when I started planning the meals around the vegetables, instead of the protein. I go to the farmer's market every Saturday morning and buy vegetables for the week then use those as the central item around which the meal is planned. For example, the braised beef shanks above were planned to accompany a fresh onion tart (photo of said tart available here).

Ditto for me. However, I should add that I also will get migraines if I eat too much sugar (talk about a sugar crash!) and also from drinking alcohol (not that it stops me...I just keep the meds handy!). I do find that MSG is the least of my triggers though. I think I need to be particularly prone to getting a migraine at the time I eat it in order to actually trigger one. An aside for slkinsey, aged cheeses are also documented migraine triggers. Peppyre, be glad you managed to make it to 18 before being diagnosed. I had my first migraine at age 7. My daughter had her first one at age 6.

Today was my weekly trip to the farmer's market and tonight's dinner reflected that. I planned the meal around some fresh onions that I bought. An onion and Serrano ham tart... Served with pan-browned Brussel sprouts and braised beef shanks... We drank a California Pinot Noir (Steel Creek...disappointing, don't bother) and listened to Ray Charles as we ate...

No. Dining out does not have the same value for me that food does. I have the same approach to clothing. It's just not that important to me that I must spend a lot of money on it. I'll agree that this is very much an individual thing. I hate spending more than twenty bucks on a pair of jeans because I don't value the product highly. That's it, I guess...do you value the restaurant experience enough to pay that much for it? It's not about food per se but the whole dining out experience. (If I won a couple of million dollars, the first million would be spent on finding an appropriate home for my dream dogs...food would come after that )

Soooo . . . Who makes this wonder and where can I find one? (If you said so earlier, please pardon my laziness. It is Friday night. ) I must clarify that the hair spray goes in the "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter Because I'm Delusional Anyway" container. My unfiltered olive oil goes in a container that calls itself "Mist of Oil". It's made by Ekco (no, that's not a typo!) and the address under the Ekco corporate logo is: World Kitchen, Inc. 1 Pyrex Place Elmira, NY 14902-155 I googled "mist of oil" and "ekco" and got nothing but then googled "ekco world kitchen" and "oil" and "mister" and got a whole whack of returns (none of which I investigated because I'm lazier than you are... )

I'm lucky in that my oil mister has continued to function, even though I use unfiltered olive oil. I like the idea of the fake butter sprayer thing (btw, I have a friend who uses the same container for hair spray...it doesn't gum up for that either). Another kitchen "gadget" that is great to have is a foaming soap dispenser. I had one from Pampered Chef that just gave up the ghost and I really miss it.

With this comment in mind, I would have to say that, at this point in my life, I would not pay $300 per head for dinner. I will pay premium prices for food/groceries but that sort of dollar value for dining out is unfathomable to me. I guess I'm in touch with my inner Scotsman a little too closely...

What have you garnished that with? green onions? butter? I've been hankering after something like this for days and I happen to have some steamed and smashed kuri squash in my freezer. Yours looks sooo good, I might just have to make something like it tomorrow for dinner.

There's always roasted cauliflower or slkinsey's cauliflower soup. My favourite use for cauliflower is a curried cauliflower and cheese soup. Start by sweating some chopped onions in some oil. If you use powdered curry spices, add them now. The best soup I've made used the Lee Kum Kee curry paste though and that can be added later (you can find that at just about any grocery store and for sure at T & T). Add the cauliflower chopped up and a whole bunch of chicken broth. Cook cook cook it. When the cauliflower is soft, get out your potato masher and smash it up. (I guess you could use an immersion blender too.) Now stir in the curry paste. Cook it a bit more because the curry paste needs to get hot to blend in better. Once it's completely mixed in, add some milk if you're watching your fat intake and cream if you're not. I'm not sure how much...enough to make the soup a nice creamy colour, I guess. Don't let it boil after this point. Then, add some grated white cheddar. Stir it until the cheese has melted and then serve.

It looks like it's going to be another great week in the Foodblog thread... I'm really looking forward to your blog, Placebo.

Depending on the usage, I will use any amount of the leek. I made a leek salad once that was incredible and involved trimming only the tired ends off the green part. The leeks were parboiled and then cooled. After being attractively arranged (wrapped around themselves in a circle) on the plate, they were topped with a vinaigrette and some hard-boiled egg yolk crumbles. The taste of the leeks was truly memorable.

I got 7 out of 11. Thank god I got the Canadian question right!

Please elaborate on the crockpot congee! I tried congee in my rice cooker a while back but it didn't work out very well; my cooker doesn't have a porridge setting and so it eventually burbled all over my countertops.

I'm not one to back away from a challenge and so I went off looking for AMCO. I'm happy to report that the hunt for the AMCO website was successful! It is a subsidiary of Focus Products and can be found here.

I made some last week, following Marlene's recipe in Recipe Gullet only without the demi-glace (now revealed to be glace de viande) because I didn't have any. Oh, and I put sherry in it, not port. I decided to make it over two days so that I wouldn't have to leave the crock pot plugged in while I slept. This was not for safety concerns. I don't care if I burn the house down but I didn't want to risk burning the precious stuff. Some of it was served with dinner that night but I can't remember what we had, other than the confit. Tonight, I served it with oven-grilled pork chops, braised sauerkraut, and warm cabbage slaw. Mmmmmm....

I've been making "pork and beans" using a smoked ham shank and white beans. I saute some onions and garlic, add the prepared beans, the ham shank, chicken broth, and roasted tomatoes if I have them, tinned tomato chunks if I don't. I season it with herbes de Provence and then put it in the oven for a very long time. Before serving, I take the meat of the bone and shred it. Yum!

I've done this twice in the past year. The first time was the occasion of my 40th birthday; my sisters took me to Tigh-na-Mara, a resort on Vancouver Island, for the weekend. I happened to be blogging that week and so the food is chronicled here (click). We had such a good time that we did it for my mum for her 65th birthday too. The weekend had a similar plan to it: dinner out on Friday and the rest of the meals in the cabin. It's a fab way to spend some time. The next milestone birthday among us will be my eldest sister's 50th birthday. I'd like to do a cycling tour in France or the Netherlands but my mum says she'll be too old. (and I'm not sure she liked my suggestion that she drive the sag wagon.)

Waaahhhh. I want your life.... Great blog.