Katherine

Your lordship, this is just plain silly. Do you refuse to eat dishes that have a known provenance outside of the kitchen they are currently being prepared in, or do you merely pass judgement on those who make and eat them?

Have you successfully made blender mayo before? The first time I made it, I was impatient, and though the stream seemed slow, it broke into a yucky mess. Since then I've found that if you take about 4 times as much time to add the oil as it ought to in a fair universe, the mayo will come out perfectly emulsified. After the oil is incorporated, I add the lemon juice, stirring with a spatula, as the mayo is now too thick to mix any more in the blender. I would add the crushed garlic cloves at the beginning, too, so the blender can liquify them in better. But consider that classic caesar dressing is made on the salad with coddled eggs. If you're not going to do that, you might consider (as I have done in a pinch) mixing some mayo in with oil and vinegar to use as a base, so it is not too mayonaisey.

Do you see regional differences in French comfort food, as well?

How about the area where I live, where the French-Canadian ethnic people have always made a sausage they call boudin? If you arbitrarily assigned the name "boudin" to a specific product made in Acadia, Louisiana, now they'd have a sausage with no name. They weren't trying to knock off some NO product, they just have a sausage with the name of boudin. Does the fact that you find one example of a product more to your taste than other examples mean that you could decide that one was more authentic than any other and assign the name to that particular product above all the others?

There never were any up here in Maine, unless I missed something that was well hidden. I haven't been out of the state much, so I wouldn't know if any of the ones I used to see on my travels had closed. But two chains out of -how many?- where you can get some kind of meat and veg. There should be more. Surely most markets would support ONE. But I guess most people don't care about balancing their diet, as long as the food is filling, cheap, and more or less tasty.

Chicken Out sounds exactly like what I'm looking for. Since all the locations are in Maryland, I won't hold my breath. Almost worth relocating for, but not quite.

Yogurt is getting closer to ice cream in sugar and calorie content all the time. Admit it, America. You want dessert for breakfast. Have a sundae.

We used to have a rotisserie place in the area, that had lots of vegetable and salad choices. We don't anymore, they sold out to Arby's. Salads get boring really fast, and commercial dressings suck. I'll still be waiting for a place that serves a quick meal, and packing my own lunch until it arrives.

Thank you! I also do not get PBJ. Frankly, there are certain things I simply refuse to eat now that I am out of grade school: PBJ, boloney sandwiches, and mac 'n' cheese from the box. Now, on the other hand... a nice peanut butter and bacon sandwich can be extremely tasty (especially if you fry it in the leftover bacon fat) -- although it's probably been 15 years since I had one. Grilled peanut butter and cheddar cheese, mmm. (Better use the unsweetened peanut butter, tho.) Seriously, for the first 3 years of her schooling, my daughter insisted on bringing a peanut butter sandwich to school with her. It was peanut butter and jam, or peanut butter and chocolate. Now that she's in college, and home for the summer, she actually brought up how much she appreciated having the lunch she wanted, while all around her kids were bringing in stuff their parents thought they ought to want to eat, or making do with junk.

Most places let you double up the meat for a relatively low charge. Seriously -- a double Whopper has a respectable amount of meat (though still dry and overcooked). Subway will let you double the meat for about $1.25 extra -- though even doubling, Subway remains, in my opinion, the stingiest of fast-food places. (I remember when they would break the slices of green pepper so you got only a thin strip of pepper running down the center of the sandwich.) That's true, but if you look at what's left on your plate after you throw away that giant roll you paid for, even with the double meat it's not a meal. And I want a vegetable, too. Whatever happened to vegetables, outside of the sandwich garnish?

That and speed-pourers in your liquor bottles makes you feel like a real bartender. Tap that baby on the edge of the counter, remove the glass with a flourish. To prevent excess dilution, shake quickly and pour promptly.

When I wanted a shaker, I went around to all the upscale kitchen shops, but found what I was looking for, the regular shaker they use in bars, at the restaurant supply shop. Topped with a beer glass, very professional, and you save enough money to throw in a waiter's corkscrew, too. Or a pair of champagne pliers.

Some of the worst food I have ever eaten in my life came from the kitchens of great hotels. Works for me. Less I have to make if I don't have to share with you.

I used to own a ferret. I agree.

I never eat at fast food places, and I always plan to bring food with me from home. Why? Because fast food is always a tiny portion of meat, a tiny portion of vegetable at best, and a huge quantity of starch. The "healthier" and more "creative" the place, the more starch they include. So the wrap place around the corner from where I used to work, the one with all the exotic fusion flavors, would serve a "grilled tuna" thai-style burrito, with rice, beans, huge burrito tortilla, a little shredded cabbage and carrot, and less than an ounce of fish. Plus, they served it with tortilla chips. It was three times as much food as I could eat, and almost all starch. I'd love to be able to pick up a chicken leg quarter, small salad, and a vegetable. It doesn't have to be cooked to order. If anybody opens a place like that, I'll spend my money there.

Good God, Katherine, you actually admit to keeping a bottle of pickle relish in your household! Try some diced cornichons in your Russion Dressing . Are they sweet and gooey like pickle relish? They need to be to carry my Russian dressing. My recipe came from a "great hotel" kitchen that I worked in as a teen...

Actually, I was thinking of making some Russian dressing, with the mayo I made yesterday, sweet pickle relish, sour cream, chili sauce... The ONLY thing sweet pickle relish goes into in this household.

Gee, my daughter never voluntarily ate off a kid's menu in her life. She amazed all the Koreans by eating sushi off the platter at 4. We rarely had snacks around the house, and for dinner she ate what was put in front of her. Which was good stuff. I have friends who will go back into the kitchen and fix something different for the kids if they decide they don't feel like what's for dinner. That was never an option in my house.

Thanks for the reference, Jaz, I will have read that book again. Many child nutrition reference books, including the popular What To Expect series, recommend way too much fiber for small children. Whole grains are more nutritions, provided you get enough of them, as they are less digestible. For impoverished people, getting most of your calories from processed grains may mean malnutrition in the long run, as they are short on B vitamins. So a diet composed mostly of white rice can cause beriberi. It would be necessary to increase the quantity available if you were to substitute whole grains. This is what that agency should have done. They were providing insufficient rations to a captive audience, an improvement over starvation, but not much of one.

Blueberries? I had a teacher who used to say this, and would never use blue food coloring in a cake for that reason. Blueberries are actually red on the inside, if you mash them with sugar, he would say.

The Bloody Martini.

A long time ago I read about a school where they put together committees to decide what was going to be served in the cafeteria at lunchtime. The parents and food administrators would come up with ideas, the lunchroom would produce samples. But only after everyone agreed on the product was it ready to progress to the next step: the kids' committee. If it didn't pass there, it didn't get served. The only vegetable that was ever served was broccoli with cheese sauce, and they ate it every day. There was virtually no waste in that cafeteria.

Aaaannd... Mickey D is hurting lately. See... It works! I understood that Micky D's problems are more of a service issue. In other words, it doesn't matter how cheap it is, if fast food isn't fast, people will make a turn into the next driveway and have a whopper.

Last year I went to a science fair of research exhibits by students at the university I attend. One of the students in the health sciences attempted to correlate dietary fat intake to bodyfat content in student volunteers. They found a slight but insignificant negative correlation between fat intake and bodyfat content. In other words, contrary to what we would expect, from what we read in the media, there was no relationship found between the percentage of fat intake and the percentage of bodyfat in these volunteers.

Yup. That's a pie.