Katherine

That works when they're sawn up into short segments, but here it's more like 8-10" pieces. Real caveman stuff.

Put the potato on the pizza. With bacon.

I've seen beef ribs up here, though I haven't bought them lately. They're just so large, and there's something so primitive about picking up such large bones and gnawing on them in the presence of others, regardless of how tasty they are. You have to have several very hungry people to roast a slab of them.

I'm no French major, but I've got a funny feeling about your verb agreement there. Wouldn't it be "Quelques jours vous mangez le porc" and "Quelques jours le porc vous mange"?

Good job!

Yep, I think Katherine's meals win. God, what you did for that man should qualify you for sainthood. Were you spending the night there, or could you at least eat before and after you went there? Before I moved up to the area and got my own apartment, I stayed there on visits. But it happened fairly soon that I got my own place. After we were married, when we ate there, that was the meal. Since it was what he grew up on, even though he recognized that certain aspects were, say, inferior when compared with absolute standards, in his opinion it was certainly good enough for me. There was always that discrepancy between what the rest of the world considered minimally acceptable and what was good enough for me.

It's not the American way, but I agree with you totally here. There is an exact quantity of toppings that belongs on a pizza, and putting more on makes it a confused and soggy mess. If you want a pile of toppings, make it deep dish. Every time I make pizza, my daughter says it's the best she's ever had. And she's a person with exquisite tastes.

You people obviously never met my ex-mother-in-law. She holds the record. The two of us, my ex- and I, were together far, far too many years, and during that time we ate an unbearable number of meals at her house, at my ex-husband's insistence. The meals all run in together. Well, certain things do stand out. You know how the Japanese will gently heat a pot of dashi containing a block of tofu and a multitude of baby eels, which burrow into the tofu and cook there? I was served the opposite, an ear of corn untrimmed of its rotten spots (no vegetables were ever trimmed of their rotten spots) where the cornworm tried to get out during the boiling process, and almost made it. I can still see it looking at me. I have an iron stomach, but that was one meal I didn't finish. In our first years of acquaintance and marriage, we used to eat there every Saturday, Sunday dinner, and most Sunday nights. Saturday was always Friend's canned baked beans, the cheapest hot dogs available (I forgot to tell you that everything served here was always the cheapest available, though money was not tight), small grey hockey-puck-like burgers [The texture only was like that of a hockey puck. It would have been too much effort to make them flat and regular in shape--so they resembled UFOs.) made from the cheapest hamburger available, and white bread. Always cottony white bread. Sunday supper was the meal that we stopped going to first. Occasionally she would fix something fresh, ie, new, but often it was something like chili--leftover beans from Saturday night, with leftover MASHED hot dogs, and a packet of chili mix. Sunday and holiday dinners were the real standouts. Meats were generally put in the oven the evening before on the lowest setting (fluctuated between 'dessicate' and 'incubate'). One popular meat was 7 bone chuck, a cut that for years was sold for less than fifty cents a pound. For a reason! It was only about 25% meat! It was lightly floured, and baked in a pan covered with foil until the grease rose halfway up the meat. There was very little actual meat in those bones. His father would sit at the head of the table and make a big show of carving the "roast". At least once I ended up with a bone and a nodule of gristle as my portion. Yes, the gravy was poured directly from the pan into the gravy boat, and not degreased, so there was at least half an inch of grease floating on top for people to pour on their plates and sop up with the white bread. Chicken cacciatore was popular. Chicken backs and necks (packed with equal parts of carcass fat blebs) at the time sold for $.12 a lb. at the local market. She would put several pounds of them into a kettle, add potatoes and unseasoned tomato sauce, and simmer it until the bones fell apart. You got to pick the vertebrae out of your teeth, too, more fun! One year we all piled into a borrowed school bus to drive down to Florida. They packed food to start the trip, including a crockpot of chicken cacciatore. Son #3 put his hand on the pot as he entered the bus. "Oh, boy, still warm!" He said. A sinking feeling traveled from my stomach to my abdomen, but the cacciatore was, in fact, never heard of again. I suspect it was pitched when the tentacles growing out of it encircled the leg of a front seat passenger. Turkey was served for the holidays, especially Mother's Day, the day when the wimminfolk cook up an extra big meal for the menfolk, who sit around, patting themselves on the back for being so good to Mom. Turkey was baked for about a day in a roasting pan covered with foil, with some water added. If the water didn't cook away, the turkey steamed in the pan and essentially disintegrated ("Oh, boy, tender!). If the water did cook away (and it might have been cooked away for a long time by dinnertime), the turkey looked like it had been napalmed. I had once said that I liked dark meat, so thereafter they gave me a leg, whole, because you couldn't have sliced it without a carbide cutoff saw. It was hard on the jaw. The white meat, on the other hand, was so powdery dried out that they served a jar of salad dressing at the table to help people choke it down. Vegetables were cooked until they were tender enough to cut with the back of a spoon, and garnished with a large quantity of store-bought coarsely ground pepper that looked like nothing but cigarette ashes. She was an old-fashioned cook, raised by an elderly female relative, as was my mother, but there the resemblance ends. My mother was able to follow a recipe. My MIL could neither follow a recipe nor choose one. So, often, as the family "gourmet", I would be served all sorts of delicacies that the dog wouldn't have eaten. A dish of canned mushrooms in canned unseasoned tomato sauce might be set at my place at the table. Jello salad with a generous dollop of store-brand salad dressing that had been unrefrigerated after opening. A standout was the baguette she bought, hollowed out the slices, and refilled with a mixture of cottage cheese, dry Italian dressing mix, and red food coloring. It tasted as bad as it looked. The dessert that comes to mind was the pudding she served that was lumpy and stringy. How do you do that to a box of pudding? She told me the directions said to "stir like crazy". This gave me some major insight into the minds of people who can't seem to get recipes to work for them. You see, actually, what the box said was "Beat for 15 minutes on high speed with an electric mixer." Spoon for a minute, electric mixer on high for 15, same difference. I remember weeks spent at the summer house with a turkey sitting out on the table for people to pick at til it was gone, and weekends there with neither fruit nor vegetable, white bread only: the fiber-free experience. I can't end this without mentioning breakfast. My ex was the eldest of 4 boys, and the other three were still living at home when I first met him, so I got to sample some breakfasts. Bacon ends and pieces (those big thick hunks of fat and meat) were pan-fried until cooked but unrendered. This was served with scrambled eggs that eager diners generously slathered with imitation Velveeta chunks and grape jelly, so as to leave jelly in the imitation velveeta and imitation velveeta in the jelly. Bleh. After our divorce, my ex-husband remarried, and his new young wife (who basically has no food taste or cooking skills, but is at least cognizant of this fact) refused to eat there except for special occasions. So I can amuse my daughter with these stories, but she has few of her own, and did not have the opportunity to participate in such a character-building experience as I did in my tender years.

cdh, you just described to me people eating what would average out to three square meals. It's true that just-cooked vegetables are higher in certain vitamins than overcooked ones. But I think it's a mistake to raise the bar so high that you would judge no one ever to have eaten a nutritious diet anywhere before. Edit. Sorry guys, if you missed that post, I'm putting it in the bad meals thread. That's what happens when you have two windows open. You post on the wrong thread.

And demonization.

I agree that somebody in a Third World or peasant society will be happy to add more processed foods to his diet, and that processed foods are a high class marker. But that's not the case in the US (or, I presume, Japan). I doubt you'll find many foodies disparaging the traditional American diet, if (as you seem to be implying) you mean the American diet pre-1950. Indeed, traditional cooking techniques are regularly romanticized and imported into upscale cooking. Using fresh products has become a high class marker; it's the poor folks who eat Big Macs and Wonderbread. Actually, when I say "traditional American diet", what I'm talking about is the traditional three square meals. Three meals with modest portions of meat, vegetables, starch, etc, fruit, small desserts, and no snacks except for the growing kids and the field workers. People who packed a lunch took a sandwich on regular bread and an apple for lunch. They had eaten breakfast, so they were able to hold out for suppertime. I grew up in an old-fashioned household that served meals like these. The foodies glorify certain aspects of the American diet, while the nutrition police disparage it as having no redeeming value. cdh, there have always been good cooks and bad cooks. That was homemade salad dressing you described, the predecessor to Miracle Whip. Food fashions change, and people no longer consider overcooked vegetables or meat to be properly cooked. Few of us nowadays would consider food seasoned as they did back then to be anything but bland and underseasoned. These things--cooking time and seasoning level--are a function of style, and not a reflection of nutritional value. You can't look at a few narrow examples to describe an entire cuisine. I went to a yoga resort where Indian cooking was idealized. They were convinced that their food was somehow an authentic representation of some aspect of Indian cooking, but nobody would have even guessed that.

Actually, they don't build up there. That's the problem. Being completely indigestible, they pass right through you.

It looks like it was on the back cover of Cook's Illustrated magazine. I went to their website, but it doesn't seem to be one of the ones they have on sale there. I did, however, find this one and I have linked it to the page where it is sold.

Make sure you eat at the barbecue at the corner of Rt 25 and Rt 16 in Tamworth.

I was in an office lunch meeting once where I had the opportunity to pull out my micro peppermill to season my food. They were all suitably impressed.

I thing if we took an overall look at most cuisines that are represented as super-healthy, we would find that the foods most often used as examples represent a small part of what people actually eat, or that people who do eat that way are impoverished and would buy more meat and processed foods if they had more money. If you look at the traditional American diet, it included more fruits and vegetables than are eaten today by many people who look down on it.

My office is currently in the midst of a microwave popcorn 'debate'. Half of the people here can't get enough, and the other half are extremely verbal about being repulsed by the chemcial-laden fake-butter smell that wafts down the hallway. I'm repulsed, but quietly. Even worse, someone in an office where I was working put popcorn in the microwave located in the center of a large office/lab area with shared ventilation, mis-set the timer, and walked away. People realized something was wrong when clouds of black smoke filled the central area. The microwave survived, but it was a long, long time before the odor vanished.

You know, Dave, now that you mention it, that first batch of mayo that I broke had EVOO in it. After that I started doing 50% EVOO and 50% nut oil. But I finally settled on 100% pure olive oil. It has exactly the taste I'm looking for, and I haven't had a failure. I find it's easy to drizzle the oil into the blender if you replace the lid insert with a funnel. Aside from that, I just put 1 whole egg with the salt in the blender jar and add oil, adding lemon juice at the end. I've heard that food processor mayo can be bitter, due to localized overheating from friction under the blade. I've never tried it myself.

The ones I had in Galicia never had onions in them, only potatoes. Maybe it's a regional thing. Without onions they are too bland. You can't add enough salt to make up for that. Nevertheless, I had them for breakfast in bars several times a week (silly American!), and was served them for lunch and dinner countless other times. I have read they are often served with tomato sauce, but I did not encounter this. I think that the American love of the "kitchen sink" concept goes counter to the nature of the tortilla, which is to be plain. This is why so many Americans who make tortillas add so much stuff that it's really a frittata.

I don't know anything about Mexican ingredients in the UK, but maybe this will help.

When I was in Spain last year, I picked up the habit of dressing the salad at the table, like everyone in Galicia does. The individual diners salt and pepper their greens, then add vinegar and oil to taste. The key is to sprinkle vinegar sparingly, and drizzle evoo generously. It's super easy, and leaves no waste. Only when I crave something special, like creamy blue cheese, do I "make" dressing.

One the other hand, I used to go to pick up my daughter at her babysitter close to their dinnertime. Sometimes I would walk in and say that it smelled great, and she would be embarrassed that there were "cooking odors" in her home. She hated the smell of food cooking, thought it was a sign the exhaust fan wasn't being properly used.

It doesn't matter what I'm cooking, my daughter will come in the kitchen and say it smell really good. I've had her say it when the only thing on the stove is a hot pan with a pat of butter in it. Of course, last week she came into the kitchen from outside and said it smelled really good. I wasn't cooking anything at the time. What she was smelling was the remains of a rotten watermelon that I had just finished cleaning up. I thought it smelled gross.

If your trash goes to an incinerator, you can put it in the trash without any guilt, as it will aid in the incineration process. Most treatment plants are designed to handle oil (but not grease). I definitely would not pour it down the drain if you have a septic tank.

Either that or they'll insist you custom cut them a tiny piece to their exacting specifications, so they can taste it, even though they were stuffing themselves pointlessly only moments earlier. Sort of a combination of wanting very special service and wanting to appear virtuous.