MomOfLittleFoodies

I'm not a fan of brown rice unless it's heavily seasoned. It's partially a texture thing, and partially a flavor thing.

I buy single issues of the TOH magazines occasionally. I have a stack of TOH from the late 90's that my MIL gave me (she used to have a gift subscription). I've gotten some good ideas from them, but have also seen some really nasty stuff. Like a chicken lasagna made from lasagna noodles, frozen mixed veggies, and that Kraft Singles cheese. I'm cooking for my family, and my preteen sons and the little kids don't really appreciate fancy plated meals, so my focus is more on homestyle and peasant cooking.

Yeah, that makes sense. My personal taste tends to agree with you. I'm really not a big fan colored frostings, but I'll make them for my kids. When I was making my second son's birthday cake last month, I was really shocked at just how much food coloring it took to make that frosting red, and knowing that made it not so appetizing to me... but he loved his cake.

Have you considered using natural vegetable based food colorings?

I generally go to Whole Foods when I need dairy free yogurt and ice cream for my daughter, or nut free cereal bars for my oldest son, or something specific that I can't find at Safeway or Luckys. It's not a place where I do my day to day grocery shopping. Even though their milk prices are about the same as Safeway, the prices on pretty much everything else is higher than the grocery stores or Trader Joes.

Sounds like you had fertile duck eggs there.

A bacon cheeseburger, fries and a milkshake... and a cheesecake.

I opted for the electric coil range rather than the ceramic cooktop one just because I didn't want to have to fuss with special cleaning procedures. With my coil range, a few squirts of 409 and a sponge generally does the job, unless something spills in the drip pans.

That easy to clean thing with the electric helps too. My mom has always had gas ranges, and I always hated cleaning those... it was sure fun to stick a hot dog on a fork or a skewer and get it nicely charred though.

That makes my little galley kitchen look downright spacious.

It seems to me that people tend to disparage electric ranges when they haven't actually used the new generation of them. I hear all kinds of blanket statements about gas ranges being better than electric, but I can say from personal experience that the electric range I have now is way better than many of the gas ranges I've used, and it's just an old style coil one. It gets hotter, heats up faster, and holds a nice low heat forever without any hot spots. I use fairly high end gas ranges at work -- Viking and Wolf -- and I'd take the electric Whirlpool I have in my apartment over either of them. Any day, no contest. ← I'll ditto this. I have a mid-range GE electric coil range, and it's a much more efficient beast than the circa 1984 Whirlpool electric coil range that it replaced. I still wouldn't mind a gas range, but we don't have a gas hook up in our condo.

I tried the chicken shu mai this weekend... they were horribly bland even with the sauce provided.

Sprouts is one of the few places I make sure to go to (along with Marukai) every time I visit my parents in the San Gabriel Valley. I'm generally not going there for the produce though.

To be honest, I remember the slushies they sold better than the tacos.

I remember Pup N Taco... those were pretty good tacos. My aunt used to take us to one in Covina all the time.

That same box of Kraft Mac and Cheese at the local grocery store here is $1.50. The generic stuff is about 90 cents. My parents were pretty poor when I was growing up, but the only canned veggie Mom used was corn. When she couldn't afford fresh veggies, she'd buy frozen over canned. We had our share of stuff like instant mashed potatoes and Hamburger Helper on weeknights, but Mom was on her feet most the day at work, so I can't say I blame her for not wanting to spend an hour in the kitchen making dinner.

I'd try to pop the front off the drawer. that way you should be able to empty the drawer except for the wustoff... that would give you some room to jiggle the stuck knife to get it out.

We have a small loquat tree next to our front door. The woman that lived here before us planted it, and this is the first year that we've noticed fruit on it.

It really depends on why folks buy cheap fast food to begin with. If someone lacks a kitchen, or doesn't have time to run home and cook a meal, cooking is kind of difficult. I enjoy cooking, but at the same time, I occasionally find myself wanting a Whopper with cheese, no onions, with fries and a chocolate shake. Or if I'm out running errands with the kids and going home to cook is out of the way, McDonalds or Taco Bell are appealing.

When I'm dead tried, or it's too hot to cook, yeah, I'm inclined to go with something that I can zap in the microwave.

For me, it's not so much high food prices, but the high gas prices. Most of my family's favorite restaurants are not in our neighborhood unless the local Burger King and Jack in the Box count. What I'm cooking hasn't changed much though.

Woooorlds apart. ← Well, since the closest Chik-Fil-A is 25 miles away, across a toll bridge, it's pretty unlikely that I will ever know the difference. I'm not inclined to drive 25 miles, across said toll bridge, to go to a fast food joint that my kids can't eat at. Kind of like I'll settle for Fatburger when I can't justify the 15 mile drive (no toll bridge involved there) to get to In-N-Out.

I've had decent grocery store sushi... not fabulous, but decent. On par with the stuff the little old ladies make for church festivals at all of the Japanese-American churches I've been to. The sushi counters at the Local Safeway, Whole Foods and another local small chain store have someone coming in twice a day to make sushi. IIRC.

Having never had Chik-Fil-A before, I have no basis for comparison, but I really like these sandwiches.

Recently, in a moment of desperation when I realized that I had no mayo for the chicken salad sandwiches I promised my kids, I made my own mayo. I think if I made my own mayo all the time, I'd use it more often. Now that my son has outgrown his egg allergy, we've been bouncing between Best Foods, Kraft and the organic stuff from Trader Joe's. I also picked up some of the McCormicks with lime from the local supermercado.