jgm

I'm pretty sure that after my funeral, people are going to sit around and tell stories about me. And they will include certain uh, anal, habits of mine. It all started in home ec class in my freshman year. We were making fruitcake, and our group was having trouble because there was too much fruit and not enough cake batter. Our teacher came along and threw one of those depression-baby fits; she grabbed our mixing bowl and scraped every last bit into our cake pan, while lecturing us about how the greatest sin in the world, was to waste food. I was surprised to see that after she did that, and mixed the stuff in with the rest of the fruitcake, we did seem to have a better proportion of cake batter and fruit. It was an important lesson. Now I meticulously scrape down every container. Okay, not every container. Lemon or chocolate pie filling deliberately has some left in the pan; after I have my treat, the dog gets it, but there's usually not much there and he gives me pathetic/dirty looks. But everything else is cleaned out completely, whether it's oil being added to a cake, or tomato sauce from the can. My favorite kitchen gadget is that two-part, self-cleaning measuring cup I have. Pure genius. It drives me nuts to watch cooking shows, and see the 'chefs' dump stuff from a bowl and not scrape it out. I understand that they don't want to spend time on TV doing something like that, but I also understand that they're setting a bad example.

Shortly after we were married, I burned something in a porcelain-lined pan that my husband owned. Much of it came off, but there was still some black stuff inside, on the bottom. A couple of weeks later, I was trying to talk to a friend on the phone while making spaghetti sauce, and I burned the sauce. I walked away in disgust. A few days later, when I finally made myself grow up and try to clean up the pan, I was surprised that everything came off, and we had a lovely porcelain lining again. So you might just let some tomato sauce sit in the bottom of it a few days, and see if that works.

I guess cowboy cooking is defined by whether you're talking about cowboys in what we think of as classic cowboy days, or today's cowboys. In 1980 I participated in a commemorative drive in which longhorns were driven up to Dodge City, Kansas (where I grew up) from Texas, along the trail where they had been driven since th 1800's. The two trails used in those days were the Chisholm trail and the Western Trail; I'm not sure which trail was used for this particular drive. I joined the group in southern Kansas, just inside the state line, and was around for a couple of dinners and a breakfast. The trailhands working this drive are people who do this for a living (yes, there still are full-time, working cowboys) so I assume that what we ate is pretty much what they usually eat. We had the usual things you would expect; bacon, eggs, and sausage for breakfast, and probably something like chicken-fried steak for dinner, although I don't remember. They replenished supplies often, and were able to keep things cool in coolers in the chuckwagon.

Out here in the Wide Open Spaces, we have a local joke (probably should offer apologies to Jeff Foxworthy, but I won't): How do you know if you're really a redneck woman? If you can breast feed a baby, drink a beer, smoke a cigarette, and drive a stick shift, all at the same time. Driving conditions here in the Midwest are different from the more populated areas. If it weren't for eating a 3-course meal, or trying to change pantyhose while driving (or both) I'd probably fall asleep at the wheel.

Whoever put that list together was such an amateur. Puhleeeeez! Anything that contains any kind of sauce within bread, such as a cheeseburger with everything, can be wrapped carefully in a napkin and consumed without worry. Everything else, including filled doughnuts, is not a problem for those with a decent amount of coordination. Small bites. Always. Fried chicken? Either hold onto it with a napkin, or have a pile of napkins nearby for frequent hand-wiping. Ditto with other greasy foods. Eat slowly and carefully. Required: a safe resting place for any food, if things get dodgy. Driving and watching the road must come first. If I'm going to eat on the road, I first arrange things within a tray or box so that I can either see them in my secondary vision, or find them by feel. Anything that must be dipped in sauce and then brought to the mouth is best left for another time. A Tide To Go stick will not, as the commercials insist, take out everything.

Andie, did you ever receive that way-cool-looking apple slicer? I'm dying to hear whether it's as wonderful as it looks.

Everything on that list sounds so good! Thanks!

I've never had or cooked chard, so I don't know what to expect from it, flavor-wise. It's definitely on my list of things to try this spring, however. What entrees do you serve it with? I need some guidance about what kinds of foods it does and does not pair well with.

It sounds amazing. Tell me more about the champagne float. What, exactly, was in it? And the olive caramel. Haven't ever had that. I have thought about telling my husband that my grandmother died, so that I could drive up there and enjoy this. Unfortunately, he is well aware that I have no living grandmothers. But maybe I had an aunt in Kansas City, right? She was such a sweet woman. . . and I really can't miss her funeral. . . Gonna have to think up a name for her. Soon.

We ALWAYS sneak food into the theater. Usually it's candy bars; my husband often brings (candy) orange slices, and I sometimes bring caramels. But we've been known to do cookies and other things. I've tried coffee, but I can't find a thermos small enough to fit in my coat, but well enough made that it actually keeps the coffee hot. My next coat, as a matter of fact, will be chosen with regard to what the pockets can hold. The straw that broke the camel's back was when I paid almost $7 for popcorn, only to realize it was a bucket of crumbs. Until then, we often paid the ridiculous prices for whatever looked good at the concession stand. One of our theaters has seats with extra room between rows, to allow waitstaff to pass through. They have a full menu, and we can order before and all through the movie, without getting up from our chairs. When the theater first opened, the food was pretty good, but now it's barely edible. We have to be in the right mood to go --and usually that means we had a really good lunch. We rarely, if ever, sneak anything into this theater. Our favorite, however, is the drive-in. We try to go once every summer, and we'll usually bring fresh hot pizza and our own popcorn. The concession stand has a marvelous array of junk foods, including ice cream, and it's basically just an evening-long pig-out. Memories are made of this!

Last fall, I had my first amazing taste of Honeycrisp apples. I swooned. I praised. I ate. Now, evidently, the season for them is over, and they are nowhere to be found on local shelves. I'm left with the same old Braeburns and Fujis, and I'd almost rather not eat apples at all, than have anything less than a Honeycrisp, which I fully realize may oneday be replaced with some other, even more lovely-tasting variety. Has this happened to you with any foods? Have you happened upon a "better" version of something, and now nothing less will do?

I have a couple of cheap whisks I keep around to fall back on if my good ones are dirty. At the point on the end where the wires cross, there's a bit of rust. One of my friends has thrown a hissy fit and insists I must discard them. I know that if you step on a rusty nail, you should get a tetanus shot; I guess I always assumed that the environment that rusted the nail would also be a place where bacteria would be encouraged to grow --dark and moist. My friend insists that rust, itself, is 'dangerous'. What's the deal?

Okay, I'm going to throw in the towel and ask for help. If I put them under the broiler, it's hard to tell what color they are. I usually rely on the way they smell... if I don't forget them until they smell burned. If I put them in the oven, I never seem to time it right. Burned nuts again: start over and do nothing but watch them until they're done. Last weekend I tried the saute pan method. Obviously, the heat was too high, because they ended up with little burned black spots, before they started to smell like toasted nuts. Anybody have any stroke-of-genius methods for getting this right? The most recent issue of Cook's Illustrated, in the tips section, suggests putting them in an air-type popcorn popper. Which I finaly put into a garage sale last summer and sold for 50 cents.

I'm a fan of Clorox Clean-up. We live in an older house with a porcelain sink, and the only way to get it really white again is to use bleach. I used to run a sinkful of water, put bleach in it, let it set, and then try to find something to pry the plug out of the drain so that I wouldn't have to get bleach-water on my hands. (They have enough other challenges.) Now I just spray the Clean-up stuff on the sink and walk away. It does its job without any further intervention from me. But be careful. You do not want to get it on your clothes: it is bleach.

Rand Richards Cooper takes an interesting look for himself at the foie gras issue. Although we have a debate over this issue going on other threads, I'd be interested in hearing about any issues you think he has left out, or anything else that should be mentioned. It was an educational article for me, and I learned a few things. Comments?

For those wanting a complete list, go back and look at post #52. It looks pretty complete to me, and lists 27 books. I'm all excited because my mother finally parted with her set when I visited her at Christmastime. She's been kind of difficult about that kind of thing in the past, and I've worried that the TL books could become victim to one of her whims, and end up at a tag sale somewhere. I'm very relieved to have them in my possession, although there are less than a dozen. Now I have a new project: collecting the whole set! I'm happy to know about the Good Cook series. Another project.

A few random thoughts about the soup. . . I recently heard someone say that if lentils are more than a year old, they lose their flavor. Even if you haven't had them longer than a year, it's possible something has changed about the lentils before they get to you; maybe they're held in a warehouse longer; maybe they're a slightly different variety of lentil. Same idea holds for the spices and seasonings you are using. Understanding how flavor combinations work, it's possible the cumin or one of the other seasonings is somewhat different from what you used then, and maybe the combination of ingredients unique to this recipe highlights that difference, although perhaps you wouldn't notice it in other dishes. I think our palates change, depending on what we've eaten lately. Less than 10 years ago, I adored those stupid little powdered sugar doughnuts that come 6 to a package for around a dollar. And I do mean adored. For awhile, I ate them every day for breakfast, until I made myself stop, and find something healthier. Then about 3 or 4 years ago, I started making a conscious effort to add more fresh fruits and vegetables into my daily diet, and to start making new recipes. One morning about a year or two ago, in a rush, I picked up a package of the doughnuts. When I got back to the office, and started eating them, I was appalled at the way they tasted. Horrible! So maybe it's the foods I've been eating lately; maybe it's the aging process itself. I have also grown more sensitive to salt in the past few years. Dishes that taste fine to everyone else, nearly gag me sometimes. It could be that now that I'm eating fewer processed foods, my tolerance for it has changed. Or again, it could be the aging process.

The harm is in the potential for a tantrum that develops at less than a moment's notice. Many, many times --too many-- I've been in a restaurant where a child's behavior is deteriorating, but maybe the dinner is almost over, so they hesitate to take the child out; maybe the poor behavior is due to hunger, and dinner should be here any second... etc. In my experience, behavior has to deteriorate pretty badly before parents are willing to exit with the child, even temporarily. If this stuff starts happening in a family restaurant, I have the right to be mildly irritated (but I not necessarily will be). But I've gotta tell you, I spend all day dealing with temperamental people and their sometimes very extreme problems. If I've called a friend to meet me after work so that we can unwind over a drink, and we picked a place intended for adults, I would be really irritated to find children in there. I don't want to hear the fussing or anything related to it, that often can happen with even the most well-behaved child. And lest anyone launch a tirade at me for hating children, see my post above. I don't. Let me put it this way. There's a time and a place for everything. If the bar is a casual place, then I wouldn't automatically say it's off limits to children just because it's a bar. The place mentioned in the beginning of this thread was characterized as a "fine drinking establishment" and subsequent posts led me to believe that their prices are reflective of that. The issue, in my mind, is that there are some establishments where one has a right to expect an adult atmosphere. Children just don't belong everywhere.

Maybe this is a whole new thread, but how do you arrange your spices? Alphabetically? Or do you group them? If so, what kind of groups?

I hate this, too. What makes it even worse, is dealing with Mr. jgm. We both have our little fiefdoms. Mine is assorted condiments. His is barbecue sauce and salsa. Neither of us will part with a single jar, unless the other can demonstrate it's inedible because of mold, foul odor, or because it no longer bears any resemblance to its original form. We're thinking about painting a line down the middle. Don't even get me started on the spice cabinet. He will NOT look at what we have, before buying more. 7 containers of chili powder, anyone? By the way, we had the same kind of arguments when we moved in together. All of the excess stuff went into the garage. My thing was "The red lamps are not coming into the house." His thing was "No human being needs this much Tupperware." A year later, a tornado settled all the arguments. We're hoping for another.

Clearly, the only thing to do at this point, that makes any sense, is to call an international eGullet convention, pool our funds, and buy one of those things, and see if it works. We can all have a lot of wine while we're waiting, and we might as well eat, too. Where shall we gather? And will we need a guest speaker? We can raffle off who gets to/has to take the pasta cooker home, and use the money to buy more wine.

A few years ago, when I worked at Dean & Deluca, I used my employee discount to purchase both their Test Tube Spice Rack and their spices in tins. I couldn't get links to the exact products to work, but this is a good place to start - click on "Herbs and Spices." The tins are wonderful spice keepers; I think the product stays fresher in them, and they certainly are easy to sink a measuring spoon into. Due to an unfortunate incident that involved large amounts of water spraying all over the kitchen, some of them are now rusted, but are being replaced one by one. The only downside, is that sometimes getting the lids off and on can be a challenge. The tubes are easier to use than I had thought they would be. But I keep them in the cabinet, so that light will not destroy the contents, and I forget to use them. So time and age destroy the contents. The solution, of course, is to do so much cooking that the spices and herbs can sit out on the counter and be gorgeous, and light doesn't get an opportunity to destroy them.

It occurs to me, on this cold Sunday morning, that homemade doughnuts, still warm, and a pot of really good coffee, would have to be another possibility for soothing a tromped-on soul. As for the Valentine's Day stuff, it's a head game. It always, always depressed me when I was single. Now that I'm married, it's a rare year when we both remember to celebrate it. If it's on a weekday, we're screwed, because we work different shifts. If it's on a weekend, the restaurants are so crowded we don't want to go. So this year, I've decided to be daring. I'm having a colonoscopy. And once back in the house, the love of my life will go off to work, and I'll spend some time with the lesser, but still very important loves of my life: the dog, the cats, and all the food I can find.

I'm a biter, except when I have a cookie that's coated with powdered sugar, or that I know from experience will crumble quite a bit. In that instance, rather than have powdered sugar or crumbs all over my clothing, I'll break it into bite-sized pieces over a plate or napkin. Oreos, I eat only in private so that I can be a child again. The middle absolutely must be eaten first; the first wafer is eaten in bites; the second one is shoved whole, into my mouth. And I absolutely do not dunk it in anything. Vanilla or any other flavor of sandwich cookies are eaten just like a regular cookie. (Oreos are special.)

A long time ago, on a planet far, far away, I was a reporter in a small community. The local city council was in a quandry; every year, beer licenses for several gas stations in town came up for renewal. Every city council member had a problem with that; they really didn't want to do what to them, enabled drinking and driving. And their legal department had told them they could be sued if they didn't renew the licenses, since state law allowed gas stations (as well as other businesses) to sell beer, but didn't give any decision-making authority to counties or municipalities. So they had a formula worked out whereby they took many, many votes on each license; some members abstained for some votes. Every year, the entire license-granting process took several hours --all in a public council meeting that would then run until well after midnight. In the end, the measures would all pass, but the whole thing was choreographed so that each council member had voted against each renewal more times than they had voted for it. Don't ask me how they did it; they had it worked out somehow. And somehow that allowed them to have clear consciences. So when I was talking with the City Manager one day, I asked him why they simply didn't make the gas stations sell only unrefrigerated beer. That's what some other states have done over the years. He thought that was the most ridiculous thing he'd ever heard. I said yeah, maybe, but at least they didn't have to go through multiple votes for every license, the way the local council did. Of course, simple logic would reveal that it doesn't matter where you buy beer; if you're going to drink and drive, you're going to drink and drive, and if you're not, you're not. Licenses for other kinds stores that sold beer were routinely granted with one vote. Ridiculous, it seems, is in the eye of the beholder.