Carrot Top

Two of Maine's finest in the same sentence. B&M and lobster. I like that. I admit to being a bit worried about the channel near the B&M plant, though. It sounds a bit like dropping a debutante off for a nice little walk in the worst neighborhood in town.

Here's a workable strategy: Service Suspended Just stop all service till everybody is nice.

I particularly like this one. Wheee! A Paris Hilton glamour moment, no doubt. And let me raise my little pinkie finger and drag this in, too. Even though it's sort of hip to talk this way, from some of the popular opinion I read and hear. ............................................................ As for bikers, I hate to admit to having wary feelings about them. Sorry, all you gentle, kind, nice bikers out there. Ever since (a long time ago) I saw a biker slit one of the nicest guys I knew's throat in a bar with a broken bottle then join his friends to move on out into the darkness of the almost-deserted street to stab, beat, and then murder another guy. Yeah. Those were the days. In retrospect, these kids aren't so bad. And of course, one must expect certain things at certain places, right? Or not. Whole lot of dissin' goin' on, in all sorts of spaces, that's all I can say. Can't say it's just the kids. ............................................................... Oh. Was it solutions you'd be wanting, Busboy? Let me put on my thinking cap. It sort of looks like the thing with feathers.

How dare you. ( ) (Almost forgot to add my laugh. How dare *I*. )

Actually, thinking about most of the restaurants here in town (except for the Chinese take-outs)(or except for the quieter vegetarian place where "sanitation" is a word not yet discovered by the BOH staff from what I hear from those who have been BOH) my picnic table is actually a much more polite place. Especially if you don't want your own ears or your kids ears filled every five seconds with ongoing shouted conversations filled with what we used to call "foul language". (But I hear that being offended by that sort of language used in a ongoing patter is out of style, so it just may be me that it bothers.) Here, it is the restaurants themselves and the supposed "grown-ups" who mostly make the ruckus. I'm not sure what message this sends to younger children who continue to see this when walking into a place to eat. Heh. It's not just the college students, either. I never really realized just how very much professors (most usually the ones that are shortish men with longish tousled hair) love to hear themselves profess. Loudly.

Mmm. Good point. It's the fourteen TV sets blaring ten different sports at the same time, and the college kids (oops, the college men and women) guffawing about their latest conquest of whatever or whomever, and the server that seems to be able to remember to tell us their name but then not remember to get the orders right that don't belong in restaurants. And yet across the land these things grow and flourish. Loud and obnoxious. Yes, I live in a college town. Higher education apparently brings this along with it, as a standard of behavior and place.

Handful of fresh chopped basil or equivalent dry, freshly ground black pepper, pernod, hint of tomato paste, lemon juice. Lick pan. (Just not right away)

I think the "mage" part of her blogname stands for "magic". Which explains everything, as magic is . . .well, magical. So do go on drinking. Just raise a glass to magic. (Or, maybe, to the fact that she has her blog link in her sig line, too, which is where you might have found it the first time. ) As to lime mint, the only place I've ever seen it sold is in gardening stores in little pots to grow yourself. Sigh. Someone ought to start a business selling it in bunches. The relative obscurity of it would allow it to demand a lovely high price.

kitchenmage posts on eG sometimes. Here's a link to her blog.

The Alimentum Spring online journal has been posted with more offerings to read. The print journal which has much more comes out again this Summer.

I have only a few. eG of course. The Old Foodie, who I read daily. bookofrai also has things you will not find elsewhere easily. The Gilded Fork usually makes me sigh with pleasure. And now I count on Serious Eats to provide full and broad-range information and direction to all sorts of cooking, recipe, and food sites, while doing so in an amusing way. Gorgeous site. Eye candy as well as mind candy.

I'd like to add "Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery" by Jane Grigson, first published in 1967. Classic, informational without being precious or self-important, an all-around good reference that will not lose in value or tone as time goes by.

Once in a while over high heat there are some minor bits of scorching in spots if I am not literally sauteeing (tossing). I don't think this is due to the pans but rather due to the horrid sorts of electric stoves that exist in rental homes. The burners are not all that stable besides not being efficient. Blech. I can control this by paying closer attention to trying to fine-tune the heat from the burners (again, not easy, the controls on these stoves seem to operate like dinosaur feet - clunk, clunk - ) or lowering the heat and fussing which is boring and exasperating. Neither of these are great options for me because I have two children in the house so that my focus is not that great - certainly not as great as it was when I was a chef. When you are a chef, people tend to appreciate a focused mind. When you are a mother, they try in whichever way they can to destroy it. But again, I do think that it's due to the stove, not due to the pans. I've had the sort you describe with a "just aluminum" core and think they are even that much worse in this way. Even less heat distribution. When I finally decide where to buy a house and settle down (naturally, the house *must* have a gas stove ) I'll let you know. I *do* know that I have not found cookware that resolves this problem of tool vs. badly-designed heat source yet, for higher-heat cooking besides straight cast iron for some things, good quality teflon for others. This set is good for soups, stews, braises, easy quick light browning with pan sauces to follow, poaching, the sort of middle-of-the road general stuff.

So your hopes from a blog would be to find reportage (if that's a word ). What did you think of the Julie/Julia thing? Did you bother with it at all? I'm curious because it did end up being one of the most famous/successful blog concepts that I've ever heard of (though there may be others that I simply do not know about . . .)

Can you give the examples of whom you are speaking of in the phrase written above please, Sandy? I'm curious. Most bloggers are writing more in the style of personal journaling, perhaps? Blogging seems to have that sort of personality as a natural trait, unless one actually *tries* to stretch it.

I have that set plus some more pieces of the same. Gift from bf. I like them for most general-purpose cooking. Nice-looking, nice heft, and the balance of handle/body seems "right" to me, more "right" than the other sets in the same range. Good extension of arm, not unwieldy or requiring odd little stretches of upper arm or movements/shifts of wrist as some of the others did that I tested. That may be specific to me, as I am petite. Before deciding, I would go with your wife to a good department or cookware store and *feel* the various pots and pans. Lift them. Move around a bit with them. That can help a lot in terms of making a decision.

I've decided in my own mind to title Serious Eats a "blogeteria". A collection of many things, laid out nicely, easy to access.

Igorot recipe? The closest I've had to lizard is this. But I'd definitely try grilled lizard.

And yet, I can remember being a manager in a corporate setting and in actuality, having to find solutions to work problems caused by . . .guess what . . .children. Those things that require care by the parent, those things that do *not* go away. Children. And yes, children don't always act like adults in restaurants. Do we live with that as a part of life, as Miligai suggests? Not usually, in our culture. We push harder, to make them *not* be a problem, for anyone. And we push harder with less support, often. For the traditional systems of being surrounded by family and neighborhood supports are often not there, as well as the reality of more of us actually being "one" raising the children rather than "two". "No problem!" A shiny happy people life is our goal.

I'm in agreement with all of the above, Ingrid. But added to "guilt" I'd add simple tiredness and overstress . . . and added to women that leave the workforce I'd add women that remain, too. And those that have no truck with any of this would respond "Anyone that chooses to have kids should know this." I turned fifty years old this year, and am still learning things that I *should* have known. Goodness knows how those people who mouth quotes like the above "you should know this" manage to get through life knowing it all, and so very early and securely. Wow.

I've read some posts here and there from servers who claim that the reason they are in the business of being servers is *one thing*. One thing only. Not as a career choice, you know. Unless it's somewhere where the tips will be very very high (and then of course it really is the same thing in a way but shaded just a bit differently . . .). They are there to *make money*. Some servers see a table with children and they think: Not as high check average. Chinka-chinka-chink. The decision is made. Pay attention to another table first.

Adults (or I should say parents, as nobody so far has identified nannys or babysitters as being problematic in this way - but of course they are getting paid to watch the children which somehow makes it different in our society, doesn't it . . .) who are too busy doing "their own thing" (talking to each other, using their cellphones, whatever) to supervise their children in restaurants or more often coffeehouse-type-of-places are (to my mind) the indirect subjects of two recent stories in the NYT. One is about the culture of multi-tasking that pervades our society at various levels (sometimes, maybe, this *can* be geographically sorted to a point) and another is one step further away, but speaks about the desire to succeed. The second article focuses on young women, who still even today generally more than their young men peers, will have to struggle with whether they will be mostly a career woman or mostly someone who raises children, or whether they will get up on the high wire to do the lovely acrobatic act called "having it all". We've got a lot of mixed messages going on that affect these young women. Obviously these mixed messages will ultimately affect our society at large (yes, in restaurants, that most public place where we show ourselves to the world and to each other) and will affect their own families as those families grow. It's sort of hard to have it all. Yet somehow the seed has been sown that indeed, it is possible. I wonder, myself, how possible this is for how many, ultimately. Can the best cellphone and the right shoes make life flow in some special way? This, is what it seems to me is happening, mostly, when disruptions occur with children and their adult attendees in restaurants. Kids, often enough, are just not as well loved as a cellphone and a double latte with the perfect haircut. Or maybe its not that they are not as well loved, but they sure can be more difficult to deal with.

Performance art. When I read this, it lodged there for a bit, as it sort of made sense. But something was bothering me about it. Something just didn't fit. And then that bothered me, for one does want to believe in people doing good things for good reasons. This morning it came to me in a flash. Why I couldn't wrap my mind around it as performance art. The reason is that it's not. The right pieces aren't there, somehow. What it is, is a sit-com. Perfect. Every single piece needed is in place. Could be a winner, too.

Happening upon this book was certainly an eye-opener for me, Sandy, and I'm glad you found some things of interest in it too. My own background as a "self-taught" chef whose formal education only went as far as the ninth grade in school did not offer me the varieties of cultural initiations to readings on race, gender, and class that are now more commonly found at the university level for those who attend. Of course I learned a lot on my own, as we all do, in different ways and forms. But the specific focus on the dinner table as expression of these things, and the impact of how the literature discussed in the book affected our culture, was absolutely scintillating reading. I did not find the tone overly academic at all or boring in the least bit, as sometimes happens with me in terms of academic sorts of tomes. A bit of the alternate universes of all sorts that co-exist as we all live together and dine together (or not) is shown in these chapters. Funny, but since then - when expressing some of the things I read - I actually got called a "fast-food feminist". Which had the hint, when written by the person who wrote it, of the "N" word about it. I have to admit that the only way that affected me, in the end run, was to finally say to myself, "Yes. I *will* be a feminist now. For *you* are an (ignorant) idiot." My mother would be proud. (Edited to add the word "ignorant". Meow. )

I'm wondering if anyone has read this, this year. I didn't, but am curious as to what those who did read it might think of individual pieces or of the collection chosen for 2006 in general . . .