Carrot Top

It's been a while since I had one of their usual burgers, so I have to rely on "taste-memory", but there was not anything too essentially different of major proportions, to my mind, between the two, except maybe a bit of a denser flavor profile and, uh. . .more of it. It could be that my perceptions were skewed by the fact that I was hopeful of finding something that tastes like Hardee's Six Dollar Burger, which I really like sometimes (mostly because of the way it smells, for some reason ) but which sends me reeling to the couch to lay there moaning, a useless shell of a person, for a while after the rare times I do indulge. McDonald's has been freaking my son out lately, which is strange, for it used to be his very favorite. (He's thirteen, barely.) He has switched his fast-food allegiance to Subway or to BK if that is the only thing around when we are out and need to eat quickly. This happened after being served one day by a rather unfortunate-looking fellow at the drive-through window who looked more than slightly unkempt to put it mildly, and whose hands smelled like urine when he handed the food out to us. Drew would not eat the food, and will not go back. To *any* McDonald's. Can't say I'm terribly sad about it, though.

Why so?

ROFLMAO! AAaaaaaaaaahahahahah! I just picked loquat 'cause it sounded nice and I thought I wanted to be one. It was a mere philosophic decision, kind of like when a kid decides they want to be an astronaut. Then I read this, that Domestic Goddess just posted in another thread: I am *not* like a hairy red rambutan. I assure you! ( ) (A case of "be careful what you wish for . . ")

You know you're in the wrong place to eat when it is a Japanese steakhouse and all the guys cooking and the girls serving look like refugees from Yale. (Uh, refugees from Yale wearing traditional Japanese costume, I should say. ) (Tall, blond refugees from Yale. Not that WASPs can't cook Japanese but it sure didn't seem so in this case, in this place ) Sigh.

Lately one of the reasons I recognize for being hungry (sic) is boredom. Bored? Eat. Bad, bad, bad.

Time has passed, and I now am a loquat.

Priscilla, this image will remain in my mind forever. I like to imagine that someday, you and your neighbor will climb her tree, up to the top of it, on a fine sunny morning, and eat loquats together, smiling. And that from then on, it will happen everywhere, all around the world. Sightings will become rare but known, of women who have climbed right up into the treetops where the loquats are soft and ripe and luscious, to rest in the boughs for a bit and smile, while they lay back against the sun-spattered leaves allowing the sweet loquat juice to fall upon their elegant clothes carelessly. I, myself, intend to do it some day.

There was a commercial on TV last night that caught my attention. It was for On Star, and this guy was in the car, lost or something, looking for something to eat or something, and all he had to do was push a button to have a very *very* pleasant woman talk to him in soothing and accurate tones to tell him how to get where he needed to go to get un-lost. She was *so* nice. Her voice was melliflous, she somehow knew how to read a map to direct him, and when he thanked her, her laugh, along with a "Oh, that's okay, I love to help you" was such a light trilling giggle, subliminally sexual as if to say, "Hey guy. I *like* you. You're cute, you know that?" So charming. Of course she was getting paid by the hour to be like that. But what a novel and worthwhile service for those lost and hungry who need help.

Thank you, Domestic Goddess. Egg yolks are good for the face.

Actually, thinking of lemons and kurds and Greek symbols, I might want to combine them all and make a lemon galaktaboueriko (say that fast three point one four times ). With candied pi napple on the side and roast chili flavored pignolis to nibble too, for a balance of flavors. Pilates afterwards, bien sur.

It looks delicious. Another dish to be added to the Licking the Plate thread. The people in the crowd at the outside function looked to be a different shape than people in similar crowds "here". It makes me wonder if it is due to diet in general, or maybe walking more in general? or it could be all that getting up and down to sit on the floor each day, really. Discomfiting as it may seem to those unused to it, that could be a good thing to do for the physique. (Might have to chop the legs off my dining table now for this excellent life-style idea . . .) Thank you for sharing your poem - it was beautiful. I remember my one poem some teacher forced us to write around the same age, and it shows the difference between a natural poet (you) and a regular kid made to write a poem: "Kittens are big, kittens are small, some people don't have any at all. Kittens are cute, kittens are pretty, if you don't like them then move to a city." Lacks a bit of lyricism, there, and yours sure did not. (Of course in later life I would have changed the last line of my poem to, "if you don't like them, then you are just sh*tty" but darn it all I didn't know that word at that age. ) Here in southwest Virginia, as someone leaves, those who speak the native dialect do say, (in a musical drawl with a smile while looking directly into the other's eyes "Y'all come on back to see us, now" and those are my sentiments exactly, Doddie, Most Excellent Domestic Goddess.

Here's what I mean about threads. Both in a global sense of self (in the forms of being female and in the connections of feminism and all) and in the personal sense of self - all as connected to food. Why try to sort the threads? Sometimes, to find a good and accurate path to follow for oneself. Other times, because the stories we live and tell are the ones our children hear and follow, believe or not, take in to their hearts as part of who they are and how they will live. My mother was a single mother, ardent feminist, angry woman, and very proud of her Ph.D. She did not particularly like food - it was fodder. So when I grew up to learn about food and how it could show love and succor, it totally blew me away. If I had followed my mother's lead, I would not care too much about food and would avoid many other things that offer love. But then I learned to be a chef. When I was a chef, I followed my mother's feminist teachings, and also by the way profited greatly by the very fact of "feminism" having changed the world. I never would have been able to make a six figure salary as a woman as an Executive Chef in this venue in previous times. Hosannas, indeed, to notions and realities of feminism. As an executive chef, I was paid very well. Got lots of compliments on the things I cooked or the the kitchen under my direction cooked. Excellent feeling. So later on, in another life. I am married, with children. "I am married with children. I cook, at home," I would say. And the comments were blah in return from those who were around to meet. "I used to be a chef," I would say and the bright smiles lit up faces. Where? What did you cook? So much interest shown. In the profession. Of cooking. But *not* in the act of cooking, as mothers, wives, and now more, husbands and fathers are doing at home. The act somehow becomes a different thing at home. If it is done with love, it can give more than one can ever imagine. Yet those that do it are met with such a different attitude than those who do it to make money. My children know how to cook, they have from a young age. But still, there is no sort of religious fervor about dinnertime, and still, they are children and will eat from their mother, will want to be fed by their mother, which is a different thing for a mother to do than it is for a woman to feed a man. A different relationship. And children do make one humble. They do say 'yuck'. They do not want this that or the other thing, whether the President of the United States thought it was the best thing he ever ate or not. If they feel 'yuck' they say yuck. And so it goes. Not a high level of appreciation sometimes. How to fine tune all this for myself, is my internal question. And how on earth to answer this thing I see where professionalism in cooking is rewarded in the world though it really is a job with a salary attached, where cooking at home is thought of so very very differently by the world. Really it is. And with no salary attached, it is a jump of faith to throw oneself into it as sole occupation, as homemaker. Faith indeed, and prayerfully to all that undertake it in this way, it will be a faith rewarded in close-known quiet ways. Would that it could be made safer for those that choose to undertake it, in a world that sorely needs comfort, comfort of the home and hearth. Where have the better rewards been in cooking, for me? As a chef, whose food was well appreciated, where words of thanks were given each day along with the mantle of "chef" that people seem to like? Sometimes I laugh, thinking of how I would be approached here and there if I used the moniker "Chef Karen" (which of course I was). I look at that sort of personal experience and compare it to having been a home cook for a family where somehow my spouse turned out to be a turncoat, where the foods fed him were not somehow appreciated. This can happen. I don't know the "why's". But I do know that they need to be asked, if never, finally completely understood. It is good for each person to see the place they are standing on to see what it is that makes it, so they can love it or, maybe, say "uh-oh". I like the line Henry James wrote, about "the time-honored breadsauce of the happy ending". Food, delicious food, loving food, can sometimes take on that mythical soft and fuzzy sort of power. But is that power real? Or is it all in the narrative, which can not always be written as one might wish it to be.

Interesting questions, Rebecca. To me, the rope you speak of *is* a bundle of threads. To try to see each thread for itself, separate, in its different colors and textures, in a true sense, to use for oneself as a sort of compass or footing, is a fascinating task to undertake. Probably an endless task, but fascinating. I would add to your list of questions or defining points that I put in bold above, also life experiences. Luck has a lot to do with this, doesn't it? Sheer luck? And time and place. And how one reacts to what experiences one has. I know for a fact that I'm the same little red-headed girl I was at four years old. I can feel my personality and see it used in the outside world in the same way. And yet in other ways very much I am not, but the urge is still there to recapture the purity of self that existed in the four-year old Karen. Yet it also happens that the way I live my life is *not* the way the "original" ( ) four-year old Karen would have, for some things have been faced in the course of life that makes certain paths seem surer or safer ones to follow than others. The opposite too, though, minichef. If food is succor given or received, it can be the opposite - a lack of love or pleasure shown in what we give or receive.

Sounds delicious. We might have to all be careful not to eat too much though. I told a friend about Pi Day, and he e-mailed me back:

Rebecca. Remember this that you wrote, from this topic? I've never forgotten it, and don't even have to read it to see it in my mind.

A pi tattoo? That's very cool! That would be a tough limerick to top, it is so musical! But I'll add a Pi Story . . . Heh. I've heard good things come in little packages. Mini-pi may be of great value. .................................................................. Here's a story to pass the time - Pi Rules Pia reached the door of her apartment panting with exhaustion. The twenty pounds of pickles she'd carried up four flights of stairs had left her feeling rather pissed off, but still she was very much looking forward to preparing for the meeting of the Pious Pi Club that was having their annual gathering in her home tonight. There was still so much to be done. She brushed past the ping-pong table rented for the occasion that filled most of her living room and wondered again at how thirty one people and one large St.Bernard dog (borrowed for the evening from a neighbor, to make up the neccesary "point four" that the scene required) ever managed to fit in there, but they had been doing this for the past four years now, and intended to go on doing it for the next twenty-seven years, with the last party being held .415 of a year later. Now that party would be some bash, she thought, and wondered if Pippin, that cute guy from Picadilly Circus, would still make her feel pins-and-needles when she looked at him for more than 3.14 seconds. Not for the first time, Pia (whose specialty was the co-joined studies of glands and numbers) mused again at Pi and the function of the pituitary gland. That subject could keep her happily entertained for hours! The pickles were now safely ensconced on the triangular pie-table near the end of one of the three grouped sofas. How perfect it looked, the huge jug making a solid presence hinting at "just that bit more than three", architecturally, which actually made Pia's heart skip a beat with the sheer visual pleasure of it, so delightfully underlined for the casual eye with such mathematical precision. Reaching into the antique pie-safe she'd sponge-painted, Pia pushed the swing of her shiny caramel-colored asymmetrical-cut hair behind her ears. Time to really get busy. The Pinochle game had to be set up (she herself preferred Parcheesi but the group had voted that Parcheesi was just a game where a lot of excess letters had gotten in-between the beauty of a "P" and "I" and that the notion was disturbing, so the idea had been voted down), the pickup sticks specially ordered from a group of Tibetan monks whose previous careers had been as mathematicians needed to be arranged at each place of the tables set in the dining room, and of course the food needed to be finished and set out. With a sigh, Pia pushed an Edith Piaf CD into the player. "La Vie en Rose". The energy of the little songbird's passion filled Pia with determination and resolve. With a deep breath, she approached the kitchen. Most of the food had been brought earlier for re-heating. One good thing about Pi-lovers is that they were darn organized! None of this last-minute dashing-around nonsense. Things were Done Right. She started to remove things from the refrigerator. The chicken piccata was placed on the counter as she heated the oven for re-heating. Whoever had brought it had added pignoli nuts, she noted! Lovely! A soupe au pistou was put on a slow burner to warm. Ah! Pierogis! She hoped there were enough. Thirty-one pierogis never seemed to last too long with this group. The chilled whole pike stuffed with pistachios, with its Pilsner glaze, shimmered enchantingly. Pia momentarily wondered if that guy with the pica disorder, who never ate at these parties, would be tempted by it, for it was truly glorious. The pita breads were arranged on a large golden platter, so much meaning in the circumference and diameter of each circle, each line, every single one of them. An enormous tray of picadillo accompanied by pilaf was next to be added to the countertop to await the oven's warmth. Cindy, who had been a chef before her second career as a famous piano-tuner, had made a Pithiviers of pigeon, with little numbers carved into the round surface of the pastry. 3, 1, 4, 5, 9. Pia felt her heart lurch from the sheer beauty of it, and a tear of joy escaped to trickle down her cheek. She added her own contribution, a pineapple upside-down cake, perfectly square, and hoped that everyone would realize that it also demonstrated Newtonian Principle. A quick little smirk lit her face, thinking of how she would inform them all of this fact at dessert-time. Soon enough, all was ready. Pia prepared to greet her guests. She was wearing her usual costume of a Pirate, and wondered how they would dress this year. The door was opened with loud happy greetings over and over again, after the guest would tattoo three loud knocks and one small one. "Piacere!" they shouted as they entered. Soon Pia was surrounded by her peers. A piranha, tottering slightly sideways with the heaviness of his costume, had slid through the door. Picasso was over by the bar, pouring absinthe into three small glasses. A pixie watched him, laughing gleefully. The Pillsbury Doughboy was wedged into a chair, grunting something about the three extra pounds he'd gained after giving up cigarettes. Most of the guests were out on the piazza, poking at the pinata, which this year had been made to look like a pimp. "Pianissimo!" Pia called. "Time to eat!" "Piffle," the pixie responded. "Pi-time is always play time." The party was glorious. The numbers and circles and squares flowed through the conversation and the food, making a pleasant time for all. The foods were all enjoyed, and everyone had left but Pippin. Pia smiled at him, a little gleam of hope rising in her throat (and, admittedly, various other places). Would he think to kiss her three times very hard, then once more lightly, then four times in tiny little pecks, then one more time hard then five tiny pecks finished by nine little licks perhaps? She turned towards him. "What was your favorite food tonight, Pippin?" she smilingly asked, turning her face framed by its asymmetrical haircut up towards his very round face, nicely framed with a perfectly trimmed square haircut. She'd always liked redheaded men, against the advice of her redheaded girlfriends, who had warned her against them for some vague unknown reason. "Too mischievious," was all they usually would say when asked why. Pippin paused, turning his head just the slightest bit sideways as he looked down at Pia. "Well . . you know . . . I think it was that pizza someone brought." Pia turned away, her hopes dashed. Pizza. The man preferred pizza. She could not ever love this man, she knew. Pizza. What a mess, in all ways. But as she showed him out the door, she clicked her tongue against her teeth three times. Tsk tsk tsk. After all, there were many Pi parties left to go to in the coming years. And that, of course, was what really mattered.

I tried one, Toliver, while taking the kids through the drive-through a while ago. The "Angus" designation made me curious. It was disgusting.

Thank you for mentioning a story, something to read. I am eternally grateful to you for freeing my mind from absorption and contraction by the all-powerful Pi. I love your idea. A cake made to look like a raft, with marzipan figures of Pi himself laying prone on the surface, surrounded by the animals (if indeed that's what they "be" ). Fantastic. And I would only need three assistants to produce this, as I would be willing to do .14 percent of the work involved. Thank goodness my mind is uncluttered by excess or advanced schooling. Never heard of that. Do you mean this guy? It would be difficult for me to peel six or eight ripe ones like him. Maybe Pontormo would help me.

Are you quite sure that the idea of Pi is Greek? Sometimes these things turn out to be ancient Sumerian or something, instead. It would be wrong to make a Greek pie where an Ancient Sumerian pie would be more historically accurate. Because I went to your recommended Pi Day site and clicked on "Learn about Pi" and this is what it said: Probably they were too busy turning around in circles 3.14 times each minute to have the time to tell just anyone who happened to click on the site any information.

That sounds good. And clothes shopping is always fun. I've been longing for a lemon curd tart myself but would then have to find fresh redcurrants to top it in order to fit the pi-size requirements that have now filled my mind. This is so satisfying. Hmm. I may just take to meditation and hum "piiiiiii, piiiiiiii," instead of "ohmmm. . . "

Yes, infinitely Too Much ness, I agree. The only almond tart recipe I really like is from Alice Waters. Very simple, not oversweet. But the problem with that recipe is that in order to get 31.4 almond slices per portion, it would have to be made as a long rectangular tart and cut into giant size pieces. Like, maybe the size of a salad plate. (A square salad plate of course. Let's not lose our balance here by thinking in the round. )

The one problem I have with the GPS devices is that when they talk to you in some places in cities where there are overhanging things that get in the way of the signal, there is a hesitation with what they tell you, and if you are driving fast which anyone with any sense does in a city (while swearing, naturally, with some vigor at the others who are trying to cut you off) you can drive right past the turn unless you slow to a stupid crawl while, instead of arguing with your spouse or companion, instead you yell at the GPS which does not respond in any sort of interesting way at all. All it does is give you a dull monotone of a ridiculous-sounding voice saying "Recalculating directions. Recalulating directions." If I am going to have a fit over getting correct and prompt directions, I would rather have a fit with a human being whom I can smile at later. I have no desire to smile at at GPS. But of course guys are different. They just might.

I very much enjoyed living in Paris with my little black Pomeranian "Wolfie". We dined together often (in the casual places, I did not bring him to dine with me in the temples of cuisine ) and his adorability brought smiles to many faces. I loved dining outside in Greece with cats wandering around my feet being decorative and entertaining. Yes, I like the idea. Often, I prefer to look at a dog or a cat than the scenery or the people. Heh. P.S. I just noticed your photo, Anne! Ah. Proved me wrong momentarily, for I am glad to see you!

It's the best way to be, don't you think May miladyinsanity? Actually nut tartlets would be nice. Using sliced almonds baked in tartlet tins with a pecan-pie type-base as binder but lighter. I bet thirty one point four sliced almonds would fit into an average tartlet tin. Nut tartlets would be appropriate to serve to people who think math is nuts anyway.

Yep. Damn sexy too.