Katherine

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.

What was your family food culture when you were growing up? I grew up in the sixties, when “modern women”, although they were mostly still housewives, were no longer doing much cooking. My mother was very old-fashioned, and fixed everything we ate at home from scratch. She had a garden (poorly maintained and not particularly productive), and canned lots of tomatoes. We ate a lot of casseroles, “goulash” (macaroni in tomato sauce), fatty pork chops layered with potatoes and cream of mushroom soup (yum), big ol’ tough-and-gristly beef liver with onions (which I hated), sometimes swordfish or halibut, utterly plain and bland (which I cannot eat to this day), and homemade breads, cookies, and pastries. My mother was a “heath food fanatic”, and back then what that meant was you didn’t trust the government figures as to how much of various nutrients/vitamins/minerals you needed to ingest. Considering that at the time they were recommending that growing children consume large quantities of sugar to get the calories they needed to grow up strong and healthy, and that ½ of an orange was enough fruit and/or vegetable to fulfill your need for vitamin C daily, it made no sense to trust them. So if you figured the vitamin C requirement was way low, probably everything else was low, too, including the protein requirements. So mostly what we ate was giant slabs and piles of meat. I remember roasts of beef, pork, ham, and lamb, baked chicken, meatloaf, oven burgers (made always from a meat loaf blend). But most fondly I remember the flank steak. The five of us would polish off two full-sized flank steaks in a meal, and there was rarely a few little slices left for my father to eat with his eggs in the morning. My sister is a vegetarian now (no dairy, but fish), and says that meat never really agreed with her. Faulty memory chip, she was always first to be served, took the largest portion, and came back for more the most times. Was meal time important? Meal time was the default. There were no other options. Was cooking important? As with meal time, it was the default. Meals were always prepared from scratch. We occasionally bought frozen food as snacks, but mostly when my thrifty father found a real deal on something that was discontinued. So I clearly remember coming home from school and fixing myself a box of carrots with marshmallow sauce or corn with brown sugar glaze from the freezer. I think we had a case of each of those to use up, and they weren’t bad. But when you ask,"Was cooking important?" if you mean as an art form or vision or other ambition, then, no. What were the penalties for putting elbows on the table? They just corrected the miscreants, and they stopped doing it. Who cooked in the family? My mother did all the cooking (except for training us to make cakes and cookies) until I entered junior high and she to work to earn some money for college for us. Then, I would be home for a couple hours before she was, so my sister and I began pulling shifts in the kitchen. At first it was just things like spaghetti, made with homemade canned tomatoes and sauce, but after a while I started looking through the cookbooks for interesting ideas. I remember a creamy mushroom soup that I put through the blender. One thing that really stands out in my mind is that my own trajectory and my sister’s were so different. After a few meals of things like half-raw baked eggplant casserole, her cooking was no longer in demand, and she stopped. She only occasionally cooks now, and her husband does most of the cooking. Were restaurant meals common, or for special occasions? We used to eat out a lot, several times a week. We had restaurants all over the place (within a 45 minute radius) that we liked, inexpensive to moderate in price. Sometimes my father would come home, having heard about a restaurant that was more than an hour away (keep in mind that where we lived was more rural than suburban, so the restaurant density wasn’t very high), and off we’d go. I think we ate in every restaurant in the area that was suitable for families. Did children have a "kiddy table" when guests were over? We rarely had more than one guest at a time. I vaguely recall a time when there was a child’s table, but it seems to me it was because there were too many people for one table, and the adults sat at one, the kids at the other. When did you get that first sip of wine? My mother occasionally had a glass of wine, and I think she went through a case every year or two. We never drank it at home with meals. I think the first wine I drank at home was one that I made when I was in high school, fascinated by a British home-winemaking book I had gotten by mail from a book list. It was for an orange wine. The problem was that the gallon bottle called for was a 5-qt, not 4 qt like the ones we have here, and so after I put in all the ingredients and filled it up with water, it was a lot sweeter than the recipe intended. Fermentation was really slow, and clearing took forever, due to the nature of factory orange juice. When it did finally clear, about the time I moved away to college, it was like a dessert wine. Strong and sweet. Was there a pre-meal prayer? I recall an occasional prayer, but I don’t think they happened every day. It wouldn’t have been on Sunday after church, because we didn’t do a “meal” on Sunday, it was more of a grazing thing. One of our favorites was to buy baked beans at the local doughnut shop on Saturday night. The leftovers Sunday noon tasted completely different. That doughnut shop had ethereal Bismarcks, too. Was there a rotating menu (e.g., meatloaf every Thursday)? I seem to recall that back then and there, Wednesday was Prince spaghetti day, and Friday was Prince lasagna day. (Hey, Anthony!) We had pasta almost that often. How much of your family culture is being replicated in your present-day family life? I’m into quality food, and I’m into home cooking, but I’d have to say I think I’ve got the best of both my father and my mother in me. My father never cooked (specialty: jelly omelet—don’t ask), but he loved to eat, whereas my mother was an able cook who was so obsessed with nutrition and health trends that it minimized whatever pleasure she might have gotten from the food. It seems like maybe she really couldn’t tell the difference, and was operating on a different paradigm, where a tasty end product was good, but non-essential. She fed us all-natural snacks that were the precursors of power bars (which I cannot eat, and I have vowed to never again consume food that tastes like medicine), things flavored with yeast, blackstrap molasses, and other nasty stuff. Liver powder, anyone? I recall when I went away to college. I came back home for Thanksgiving, and she had gone low-fat, and we’re not talking minor adjustments here. She made the “cream” gravy for the turkey with skim milk. She was so pleased, telling us that “It tastes the same.” No, it didn’t. Neither did the evaporated milk she whipped into a foam with artificial sweetener taste like whipped cream. Ugh. So I live to eat, and I only eat things that are worth eating. My daughter and I always ate home-cooked meals at the table when we were home together (breakfast was a biggie), and she has told me repeatedly since she moved away how much she appreciates the meals, and the box lunches she got growing up. She is, however, spoiled by the quality of the food at home, and less willing to consume inedibles she encounters. I will close with a story to illustrate my philosophy. When my daughter was about 14, she and her girlfriend decided to go trick or treating. (She is small and could pass, her girlfriend is not.) Afterwards, they were chatting on the phone. Her girlfriend said that her mother had gone through the bag and inspected all the candy to make sure that none was tampered with. My daughter turned to me and asked, concerned that I had never cared enough to do this, why I had not. I told her that I hadn’t needed to, as I had so spoiled her with expensive high-quality candy that I knew she would never have eaten any of that stale junk. She realized that this was true. She wailed to me, “You ruined my childhood!”