Tess

The best thing someone gave me last year was some pink sea salt from Hawaii plus a couple of herb and spice blends based on Hawaiian salts and some hot sauces, also from Hawaii. My relatives like to receive those fancy holiday treats from the Williams and Sonoma catalog. Sometimes they (the treats that is) are even marked down right before Christmas. One of my sisters always wants marrons glacees and she gets them if I can find them not too steeply. I also send them selections from The Spice House. People sometimes send me pears from Harry and David and I have to admit I like them. I realize they are just comice pears but those are not all that easy to find or cheap around here.

Bryan, what is it they say? When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

There's been a backlash against Roy's especially since it's been a chain on the mainland, but in my opinion the one in Hawaii Kai is just fine.

Exactly. Hey, some people don't like to cook. And as weird as it seems in this day and age, the article and some of the posts here demonstrate that in some circles women are still *expected* to cook and men are not. Until those expectations become equal, I think women who refuse to get interested in cooking may be exercising some healthy self-preservation.

I like to make a Hawaiian dish called poke with raw tuna in soy-sesame dressing and other ingredients (seaweed, green onions; it varies) and pink Hawaiian salt. You can actually buy a mix for the dressing in Hawaii but I've never seen it on the mainland.

Thanks, Ron. I'd missed that.

This is what really disappoints me: I never thought Nigella was mean.

Hi. I'm on Weight Watchers but, like therese, I find the Montignac ideas useful. One thing I've found useful with the work situation is changing my schedule up. Lunch is a problem I have often solved by reversing meals and having something more like lunch for breakfast, and then more of a snack at lunchtime. This saves packing a big lunch, eating whatever your colleagues are eating, or paying a lot to buy lunch out. It helps if you are in the habit of getting up early, so that you're hungry enough to eat substantially before leaving the house. Whether or not you can just skip lunch with your colleagues, of course, depends on the work culture. (Mind you, I'm sitting here weighing about what I did three months ago, but it has worked in the past.)

And that has to be foremost on your mind when you have a business like that-- keeping things together for your employess. It would be nice to have time for television appearances too, but he's not Geraldo.

Is ponzu not used on fish in Japan?

It seems to me like he could make most of this same argument while comparing the shows to advertising rather than porn. Except for the music part maybe, but advertising's got a big budget for music. And of course the camera is going to dwell on the stuff they are cooking. How would they show cooking more thoughtfully on TV? I feel as if this porn argument is less than the sum of its parts.

I enjoy Burros's writing, but I would be kind of ticked off if I was dining in a restaurant and a reviewer made comments about me like that. Oh well, I guess it's the sort of restaurant where you have to expect to be noticed if you're a celebrity.

...unless the dish has bugs in it?

I wouldn't mind putting in that kind of money if it tastes good. Per serving it's not that bad for a main course. I won't be cooking a turkey this year, so it's not a temptation.

Mmmm, Bahsen Afrika. A lot of Pepperidge Farm cookies, especially the Milanos, taste like dirt to me. I had a co-worker who ate an entire bag of Mint Milanos every day for lunch.

Surely a lack of skill or knowledge will come across to a restaurateur, who will also have enough discrimination not to make big decisions based on what one person says in a book? Or maybe some restaurateurs don't have enough sense, in which case I think they have other, bigger problems.

You're right, I think. (My boyfriend works in the travel industry.) I think there's travel and there's travel. When I was a kid, my family used to go to various places in Europe (from the midwest US) for a couple of weeks at a time and while I really appreciate that they did that for us, I don't think it was enough to broaden our food horizons very much. Later, I went to school in Italy and was there long enough to get an idea of how people actually shop, cook and eat. A trip to Rome, Florence and Siena with my parents before that was fun and we ate at some nice restaurants but it was not that eye-opening with regard to cuisine. You have to get into the life of a place somewhat. There are a bunch of places I want to go, and I accept that in some cases it will just be for a couple of weeks as a tourist, but I can understand why people wouldn't see the point of doing that.

I completely agree. Also, I'd like there to be more affordable choices in wine at most places, but I suppose I'm dreaming.

I just remembered this piece in favor of biased book reviews. I like an honestly biased review, myself-- whether it's of a book or a meal. There shouldn't be anything that's actually false or misleading, but everyone has a perspective, at least in the sense that every review treats the book (or meal) at hand through the filter of all previous meals the reviewer has eaten or books he/she has read. Why not be open about that?

Cornish pasties!

Kids I know like to make tacos and other things that require assembly.

Wait, how could a book review be objective? It's an opinion. ← Does "opinion" necessarily = "not at all objective"? An opinion can be more or less reasoned, more or less biased. I think you can come to objective judgments with regard to lots of statements made in books. A review will normally be a mix of subjective and objective, I would think. Asking for a review to be totally objective is probably unrealistic but so is saying that all reviews are totally subjective. Maybe the best you can hope for is that a reviewer will make any strong biases clear.

In answer to the original question, I like to print recipes from the internet when it's something I'm already pretty familiar with. But I like to sit with a cookbook and read through whole sections to get new ideas. A decent cookbook is about the whole collection of recipes and other materials, for me.

I agree, on the one hand. On the other, do you think it's wrong to share conflicting points of view? This memoir excerpt was posted to a discussion site. I'm a little troubled by suggestions that it needs to be protected from criticism.

What gave me the impression-- which I'm ready to believe might have been wrong, was such language as "simply as a work of literature." I also don't think it's a "fact" that writers of memoirs shouldn't be called on to defend them. Whyever not?