jetsie

Pasta- dried, usually linguine for the same reasons others mentioned. Meatballs- smallish, rough looking, but light and fluffy. Ground beef, lots of garlic, relatively large torn-up pieces of stale, crusty baguette, a shocking amount of coarsely shredded parmesan and romano, and a sprinkle of water, depending on how it's all holding together. (Other seasonings according to mood.) Minimal handling and shaping keeps the texture tender and light. Brown in pan and add to sauce just a few minutes before serving. Sauce- can be fast or slow. Sautee onions, garlic, green peppers in olive oil, add red wine, tomatoes, other seasonings according to mood. Served with whatever toppings people like. There's enough cheese in the meatballs, but the kids usually add more. The Significant Other often adds Sriracha sauce, which makes it taste more like the Vietnamese version of spaghetti and meatballs his father made. Universal comfort food. I love Italian wines, and try to buy those cheap enough that I can throw some into the sauce without crying, but decent enough to drink with the meal.

I try to shop as much as possible at stores that don't use the cards, but gradually almost all the local chains have taken up the practice. Not only is it creepy and annoying to have this information tracked, but they try to pretend they are somehow improving service for you. Once or twice a year I get "personalized" coupons for products ridiculously unsuited to my family, like pet food, geriatric vitamins, instant potatoes(!). I have no pets--I have little kids. Maybe a nice old lady with a cat is out there sharing my card number and getting baby food coupons in the mail.

Has anyone found any decent diet sodas made with Splenda? I just tried Diet Rite, and found it overly sweet, with a freaky sweet aftertaste that stuck to my tongue for 15 minutes.

Woo Hoo! Zero Laxation!

I prefer the stronger flavor of grade B. My Vermonter grandma used to keep some really powerful stuff on hand. I loved maple cream and maple sugar candy as a kid. (Still do.) Whole Foods used to carry jars of maple sugar chunks, which were way too tempting as a snack. Lately I've gotten pretty good grade B syrup at Trader Joe's. Right now the kids and I are on a waffle/maple syrup kick. Someone actually licked her buttery, syrupy plate clean the other morning.

We don't have any bottled salad dressing in the refrigerator. I just make dressing as we need it. To me, most of the bottled dressings have a nasty soy oil flavor or just don't taste fresh.

Chocolate is like my daily bread, but I love to try foreign candies. I'm also a sucker for anything clove or licorice flavored. I find a lot of interesting candy at the local Asian grocery stores. I have a soft spot for Japanese candy, having lived there for a few years as a child. Right now I have an untried bag of "mix candy" sitting in front of me. The flavors are based on the Japanese drinks Dakara, C.C. Lemon, Bikkle, Dekavita, and something without a name that comes in a smiley-face orange can. I've never tried any of these drinks. Some of the ingredients listed include pine juice, ogenge juice (what's that?), and royal jelly. One of my favorite Japanese candies is melon-flavored white chocolate that looks like miniature half cantaloupes. Cute and tasty! Recently I noticed that the Botan Rice Candy imported to the U.S. is no longer millet based. The texture and flavor are not as good, somehow.

It gives me the willies when people pronounce au jus as awe juice. It must have been mentioned elsewhere, but KFC suddenly stands for kitchen-fresh chicken. What can that possibly mean? I know they're trying to avoid the dreaded F word, but kitchen fresh as opposed to what?

I know, weird, eh. It's more of a texture thing. My New England relatives believed summer squash should be cooked until slimy. Think warm, buttered snot.

That old-goat aftertaste gets me every time, too. I'll probably never acquire a taste for liver, scotch, or hot dogs, either. I always loved beets, turnips, brussels sprouts, spinach, and other vegetables kids typically hate. My mother was a very good vegetable cook, though. I always loved olives and strongish meats like lamb. Acquired tastes for me: cilantro, wine, zucchini, grapefruit, and sour cream. Love them now.

I just noticed that we have almost all these sodas at my local grocery store and I've never even tried them! I love grapefruit-flavored soda, so inspired by this thread, I spent a fortune on a little bottle of Ting. It was tasty, but had almost no carbonation. Did I get a bad bottle? I tend to prefer brutally fizzy soda. So far, my favorites are the very light, fizzy European citrus sodas.

I always count my items, too. One day I was waiting in a regular checkout line with my full cart, when an aggressive cashier dragged me over to the unoccupied express checkout register and insisted on ringing my items up there. Naturally, the empty store suddenly filled with a rush of people needing one or two things, snarling and evil-eying innocent me. The cashier didn't stick up for me. She must have been a bit of a sadist. I'm still traumatized all these years later. heh. The D.C. area is also a magical land of self-involved, self-important, oblivious yuppie lunkheads (any possible present company excluded, of course). I don't know which is worse here--Whole Foods or the Trader Joe's across the street. (My old CA Trader Joe's of ten years ago was very cool, in contrast.) As for dealing with outrageous express-line scofflaws, I have good results with the face-saving, "Oh, I bet you didn't see the TEN ITEMS ONLY sign. I always miss that too." At this, everyone, including the cashier, usually pauses and stares until the offender skulks off to another line. I hate grocery shopping.

Even though I'm otherwise a dedicated people watcher, (some would say voyeur), I don't bother to look into peoples' grocery carts. Sometimes I notice the stuff people have in the checkout line, if it's a particularly bizarre, intriguing combination. This attitude comes from the way I shop at different stores for different items. I'm also feeding a family that includes a teen of massive appetite, a picky toddler, an infant, and a skinny domestic partner with peculiar tastes. Observers at GreatBigGiantGroceryStore might think I'm a junk-food maniac who doesn't eat vegetables or meat. Observers at Whole Foods or Trader Joe's might wonder how such a veggie-crazed health nut stays so fat. We have all these stores within a mile of each other, so I think a number of people shop this way around here.

Soy oil! Especially in mayonnaise, but it's in just about every convenience/processed food these days. I can't be the only one who finds the taste overpowering and unpleasant. At least it forces me to cook and eat better.

After hearing about Pho 50 here, we've tried it a few times and found it tasty. The broth has not had the depth of that at Pho Tay Ho, but still it was better than many places. The quality of meat and other ingredients was very good. We're lucky in northern VA to have pho places every few miles, it seems. A lot of them are no great shakes, but we're spoiled. I'm looking forward to trying Huong Que. It sounds like a find, since it's not really typical for a Vietnamese restaurant to have both excellent pho and an excellent general menu. I don't always feel like eating pho, especially in hot weather, but my Vietnamese SO craves it year-round.

Wonderful recap! Scariest/most bizarrely edited moment: Mama looming over Rocco (who appeared to have slept clutching his little light-up blue cell phone) the morning of the banquette slumber party. How did the girlfriend keep from screaming?

Are you talking about the giant globs of white paste that the teacher would serve on squares of paper? Mmmm. Some years we had minty flavors! My kids' generation has to buy Elmers or glue sticks, so they've completely missed this treat. I had a thing for sour flavors--ate a lot of whole lemons, raw rhubarb with salt, and practically grazed on wild oxalis. I'm over paste, but still go for the sour stuff.

Count yourself lucky that you're just now noticing these things. *shudder* I've always had to make an effort to tune it all out, whether it's strangers or loved ones---the dear one who ate like a toddler, stuffing her fingers in her mouth and smacking her lips as she chewed; the one who moaned loudly through every meal; the one who never stopped talking, no matter how full her mouth was; the flamboyant tongue eaters you mentioned (who seem more often to be women); the one who likes everything so painfully spicy he always has to stop mid-meal for a big honking nose blow. I see nothing. I hear nothing.

Has anything good ever been made of canned salmon? My mother, normally a pretty decent cook, once tried to get us to eat an abomination called "Salmon Wiggle," which was basically canned salmon in a flour and milk sauce. There may have been peas involved. I've blocked it out. My hated childhood food was hot dogs. (Yet I loved bologna. It's all about temperature.) No one could believe a child would hate hot dogs, so I spent many lonely hours at the dinner table.

We've stopped at the pho shop near Micro Center, too, and thought the pho was surprisingly decent, considering it feels a bit like it's in the middle of nowhere. Our regular place for the past nine years has been Pho Tay Ho, in Cullmore Shopping Center at Bailey's Crossroads. It's consistently pretty good, though not superb, as it was its first few years. We're on the lookout for the man who set up their standard recipe and cooked there before moving on to other shops years ago; he's well known in the Vietnamese community for his pho talent. He's an older, rather dapper Vietnamese man, with unnaturally black hair, fine skin, and a tendency to tent and twiddle his fingers as he stands around watching customers. If you think you spot him, post here, please!

One day I was charged $12 for a bunch of three daikon. "Gee," I thought, "That's pretty steep, even for Whole Foods." Then I noticed they'd been rung up as parsnips. I didn't mean to embarrass the cashier, (after all, um, daikon do look somewhat like parsnips on massive steroids), but I couldn't help burst out laughing. They suffer from chronic produce confusion at this particular branch.