ghostrider

Interesting observation. My mom always made mashed potatoes with a mixer, and they always came out with a few lumps (which I too liked & still do). Makes me wonder - did she know exactly when to stop the mixer, or were the mixers of the late 1950s different from modern-day devices?

Well, the shrimp are in Jersey. $5.99 the lb, headless, about 1/2 the price of other wild-caught shrimp at the local Whole Foods. Man do they look beautiful, all nice & red next to several tubs of various-sized gray shrimp. So you know what I'm having for dinner tonight. We'll see how well my peeling skills have survived the long layoff.....

In my (comparatively limited) experience of Europe, the food distribution systems seem to be organized differently, making it more convenient to shop locally, if not always to buy locally produced items. Where I live in Jersey, I'm one of the few who has the option to walk to the (big chain, locally owned franchise) grocer, which I do if I'm buying lightweight items. If I want to buy anything from a local butcher/baker/fishmonger/produce vendor, not to mention my town's seasonal greenmarket, I have to drive. There is no other option. If there were convenient mass transit to such places, I'd use it, but suburban America wasn't built that way.

Eric, I work at a deli just over the hill from you in Montclair, so I get a good sense of the traffic (car as well as foot) on Bloomfield Ave. , & I can tell you that it's dropped off ASTONISHINGLY this week. I am emphasizing this because it's so markedly different from what it usually is. I have no idea where everyone has gone, but we're seeing the same thing. I assume it's some weird seasonal thing & it will pass. Or is the W. Orange Whole Foods just sucking everyone in now?

I would think it would do better on Park Ave. Much more walk in traffic, there. ← I was thinking that the middle school would provide a guaranteed customer base, but then I read further down the page & saw "$3.00 hot dog." Now I think you're right about Park Ave.

The food-miles issue that irks me is the expenditure of resources on shipping bottles of wine all over the globe. What a waste! Do we really need this stuff? (Beer, of course, is another matter altogether.)

Mmmm, good news! Time to start scouting out the Jersey fish markets! Here's hoping for a good full season.

A couple of empty storefronts in my town of Rutherford, on the commercial strip of Union Ave. centered around the ShopRite. Plusses: established food area (2 Chinese places, artisan bagel shop, couple of pizza joints, sushi parlor) lots of foot traffic from the middle school in the next block no immediate competion (not a single hotdog place in town) Minuses: difficult parking situation for drive-by biz Rutherford generally a meat-&-potatoes town, uncertain how a "gourmet" dog would do here.

Not very many they don't. Particularly local/local - last week they had a # of items from the Northeast, so they're decent on regional/local products, but I doubt that there was a single one from within 100 miles. On the plus side, they label their sources well, so you generally know what you're getting up front. This site - Jersey Fresh farms & markets - is one of the best guides to finding local produce. You can search on it by county so you should be able to zero in on places that are within your radius. A word of caution: if you're after truly locally grown items, look carefully for the Jersey Fresh label, & when in doubt, ask the merchant. Some of these markets sell a mixture of local & imported produce. One summer I was at a listed farm market buying what I thought was a late crop of snap peas; they proved to be from Guatemala. Nothing wrong with that; I asked the farm lady because I realized there was no Jersey Fresh sign on the pea bin, as there was on most of their other produce at that point.

Don't the oily brown pellets & ground-up land animals all have to come from certified organic sources in order for the fish that eat them to be labelled organic?

It is not. If, instead of being slaughtered, a foie gras bird is put back on a normal diet after the full two weeks of gavage, its liver will shrink back to normal and it will be none the worse for wear. There is no detectable permanent liver damage. ← I'm not sure that this makes a good case that the bird isn't diseased. It seems easy to make the counter-argument that the bird was diseased during gavage and then returned to health, just as people fall ill and then get well again. These points, on the other hand, seem to be excellent indications that the birds are not diseased.

Ah, splendid paragraph there. Not only do we share teapots, we have virtually identical tea cabinets, down to the color of the stain on the wood. The only difference is that all 3 of my shelves are filled with tea, and tea alone (apart from a corner that's been usurped by my medications, but I don't want to talk about that here.) Thanks again. I come from such a fractured & fragmented family, with both of my paternal grandparents passing on years before I was born, & my surviving grandmother, God rest her soul, not a great cook. It's been so nice to spend time with your clan where there's such continuity & connection between the generations.

Always loved your various signature lines from Fairy Tea. Nice to see the whole thing in one place. Hope your Hall pots are well & whole. Thanks for this wonderful blog.

Curiously, or at least coincidentally, that David Eckert fellow, who does the PBS show Culinary Travels, both lives in KC & recently devoted 2 (perhaps more, I missed one) of his episodes to the restaurants there. (One of them focused on the restaurants at Ameristar Casino, which was curious indeed.) As a MO boy & sometime visitor to KC, I enjoyed the shows.

Heh not much going on here. Just the 2 of us & 7 cats, 3 of whom always pretend they're starving come dinnertime. I eschewed turkey some years ago when many of our friends scattered & we no longer had big Thanksgiving dinners. Those birds are just too big. These days I'll do a simple roast chicken & whatever veggies strike my fancy when I go shopping next week. And I just got a bottle of Salvati EVOO, $14 the liter, and it's wonderfully green & fragrant, better than many I've had at twice the price. We'll have that on the salad & I'll give thanks that I can still afford these little luxuries.

There's that Hungarian fellow in the UK - what was the blighter's name? - ah yes, Egon Ronay.

You certainly piqued my curiosity. Would you care to expand on that, if you don't consider it a trade secret?

This may straddle the line between a marketing slogan & a TV commercial script, but - you know those irritating Yoplait girls? The ones that are always spooning Yoplait into their mouths and spewing one inanity after another, always ending in "...good"? (As in, "driving off a cliff together good.") Their latest outing has them at a spa, in white terry robes, slurping Chocolate Mousse Yoplait & carrying on about high heels dipped in chocolate. OK getting a little kinky there. Then one of them says, "...dating a MASSEUSE good," a particularly odd choice of words since a MASSEUR happens to be walking by at the time. I'm wondering whether this is simple stupidity on the part of the ad script writer, or a deliberate attempt to introduce a prurient subtext because they're getting really desperate to prop up Yoplait sales. Either way, it's a solid entry in the inanity stakes.

That IS shocking. I'm going to have to start asking the price if this marks the start of a new trend. Yikes.

(About Ray Hilborn) ← When you dig a little deeper into Ray Hilborn's background, you find that he spent two years on the Scientific Advisory Board for Presidents (sic) Commission on Ocean Policy. Considering what some see as the anti-scientific bent of this administration, that begins to make me skeptical of his skepticism. Then you find that he's published papers like this one, which seems to be as unapoligetically ideological as it is scientific. None of this automatically means that his criticism of Worm isn't valid, but it does suggest to me that his commentary may not be completely disinterested. The terms he uses also suggest that he's as interested in publicity as Dr. Worm.

Delightful blog, delightful cats! Been to Florence half a dozen times but not, alas, for about 12 years. Surprised to hear about the changes at the Mercato Centrale. It was always one of our great pleasures to walk around the place & buy bits of ham, cheese, & fruits for our lunch. (I remember finding a great little bakery almost hidden by the vendors at the outdoor street market.) Hope I'm not too late to ask what kind of camera you are using? The colors in your photos are really striking. Or do they just come out that way, regardless of what kind of camera you have, because it's Italy?

Quoting myself, but.... Now that I think about it, I wish I'd known someone who could have imparted such knowledge to me back when we moved from NYC to New Jersey in those unenlightened, pre-Internet days. It was very much an expatriate experience. Only one food shop within walking distance. They don't even speak the same language out here. (Gabbagool, gobbadeal, what the heck were they talking about? ) Nothing open after 9:00, how do these people survive without late-night delis down the block? Etc.

Trying to imagine myself as an expat, I'd find the most value in a tour (or series of tours, depending on how much ground there is to cover) that would show me where the best markets & shops are for various items, and explain to me why they are the best. Ideally this would cover the whole range of merchants, from high-end establishments to the markets where you find the best values. When I read your questions above, I immediately thought back to a week we spent with a friend who lived in Rome (a native, he was an expat in NYC for a few years but ultimately moved back home), and a couple of morning trips to his neighborhood farmers' market. It was HUGE, overflowing with marvelously fresh produce, and tucked away off a main avenue in a residential area where tourists would never stumble on it. Those walks to & around the market opened a whole new window onto the quality of life in Rome for me. If I were living in a foreign land, a similar window onto my new home would be the single most valuable thing for me. I'd pay $25 - $50 for such an experience encompassing one or two mornings or afternoons, perhaps more if more time were involved & I got a sense that the comprehensiveness of the tours would be worth it. Of course I'm working for paltry wages right now so even $25 is a lot to me. If I were in an expat situation where I had scads of money & free time, I'd also be interested in the restaurant tour idea, & possibly the cooking class idea as well; but speaking realistically, knowing where to shop would be the most useful information for the way I live my life now. Others will certainly differ!

I wouldn't expect it to be as good as steel, or lead, either, but it could still get the job done. Anyway it gives new meaning to the phrase, "peppered with buckshot."

That's cast iron...quite brittle stuff. I've broken the small handles off of several terrines trying to remove pates. ← Ha, that's ineresting. I'd expected it to take all kinds of abuse. I have a vintage cast iron frying pan that I got from my folks' kitchen, at least half a century old & still in one piece. Maybe just bad luck that I banged my LC pan at precisely the wrong angle, maybe it had a tiny flaw in the handle area.