MarketStEl

Andie, I called them and was told that they don't handle parts for the National brand. Worth the try, though. The cooker we have is a National, model number SR-EA10N. It holds up to 5 cups of rice. Here's a picture. Thanks for your help on this - we really love the cooker and hate to give it up just because the bowl needs replacement. ← Wonder how much the replacement bowl would cost? This looks like the successor model to your rice cooker. It's $90.

A woman after my own heart. I'd love to take advantage of "Teri's List," as it would save a lot of time for me--I'm precisely the shopper she has in mind. I shop at two different supermarkets (three, if you count my occasional forays to Whole Foods), the Reading Terminal and Italian Markets (where the game really doesn't apply), I compare circulars to see who's offering what cheaper this week, I stockpile staples when they're on sale and I have coupons, and I usually buy the smallest size that's on sale when I have a coupon for the product. But Teri only offers a list for ShopRite in my area. The nearest one of those is two bus rides and about 30 minutes away by bus. Yes, it takes me almost as long (20 minutes) to walk to the Acme that is one of my two stores, but at least I can route that trip via the Italian Market and kill two birds with one stone. Maybe one of her franchisees offers lists for Acme and Super Fresh?

My partner and roommate--and probably a few of my friends--say I'm cheap. And partner once said to someone that I hate spending money. I don't hate spending money. I hate spending more than I have to. Which IMO makes me frugal, not cheap. (However, I do actively resist brand snobbery. I will happily use the store brand wherever it performs adequately.) Yes, it's a waste to throw out a container that has usable food in it. It annoys me no end when the roommate tosses a bottle of juice with a little left in the bottom, and his attitude towards leftovers--which, I assure him again and again, rich folks eat too--also gets my goat. (Oftentimes I cook so as to have leftovers that I can pack in a future lunch or have around for someone to prepare if, as is sometimes the case, I can't fix a full meal that evening. But I've spoiled folks, and often if I don't reheat it, it doesn't get eaten.) On the other hand, I find my partner's recent practice of going up to a nearby deli and ordering two or three sandwiches and maybe a sushi combo--then leaving these in the fridge for two, three or even four days, depending--bizarre: Things like these are supposed to be eaten when they're made. It's sort of like leaving a salad with croutons in a container for more than one day (which also happens; I usually throw out said salad after Day Two). Put me in with the not-quite-obsessive-compulsive jar-scrapers. I do get every last bit of peanut butter, mayo, mustard or whatever that I can out of the jar or can, but I don't go so far as to dilute stuff with water to do so (I don't buy jarred spaghetti sauce, so the red wine trick is useless for me, except maybe with tomato puree). I leave bottles upside down to make sure everything flows to the opening. And the whoever it was at Reckitt Benckhiser that redesigned the French's Mustard squeeze bottles with wasp waists should be shot. The design makes it impossible to scrape the bottles properly. I'll have to remember that cutting-off-the-tube trick.

I did not subscribe to, but am receiving, Vegetarian Times--I don't know whether this was because (as I suspect) the Cooking Club of America (which I've discovered is more a marketing organization than a group for cooks, though it does have trappings of the latter) sold my name to them or because I dropped something into a box somewhere on a visit to Whole Foods once. I keep saying I'll subscribe to Cook's Illustrated, but haven't actually done so yet.

Please, please, PUHHLEEEEZE give me a heads-up when you do go back! I'm still sorry I missed this pigout, and even more so now that I see what I missed. (I didn't have the swag on hand Saturday morning, either, which didn't help, but the resumes I was working on made getting away difficult as it was.) But thanks for checking in on me.

Okay. Guess it's time to ask for the obligatory fridge shot, since you've inventoried it. And have your kids ever tried Pocky?

You forgot the Italian Market. And tell her about the Chinatown bus to NYC for emergencies. ← Depending on the emergency, she may not need to take the bus to NYC Chinatown. If she can't find it in ours, she can just hop on the El to 69th Street Terminal.

Tim As noted earlier in this thread--I believe PatrickS posted some stats. The fastest growing segment of the population for obesity are people with moderate to high incomes. So please explain this if income is a major causal factor in obesity. ← From what followed this, I'm sure you do not believe that it is, but it's still worth passing on this old saying among social scientists: "Correlation is not causation." Historically, there has been a strong correlation between income and obesity. But just as the rapid rise in out-of-wedlock births among white teenagers about a decade ago diminished the correlation between race and out-of-wedlock births, so this statistic that you cite will diminish the correlation between income and obesity. I think we can all agree on the base causal factor. It hasn't changed in centuries: Calories in > calories burned = weight gain; gain enough weight and you become obese. What we are arguing over is not the cause of obesity, but the contributing factors that might lead people to consume more than they burn or expend less physical energy than they used to. And yes, one contributing factor is biological: Most people's metabolism slows down as they get older. This is why the phenomenon used to be called "middle-age spread." But that indeed does not explain the rise in childhood obesity. A bunch of factors contribute to that, all of which have been mentioned here already. And to freely adapt Voltaire: Modern mores and marketing, in their infinite majesty, encourage the rich as well as the poor to stuff themselves full of junk food, veg out in front of the television and surf the Internet for recreation instead of exercise.

A lot has changed in two decades, tejon. For now, I will simply leave it at that.

Virginia Tech is self-op. I don't think they are a large university, in comparison with some others. . .(?) ← 25,000 students--"the largest [university] in the Commonwealth"? No, that's not small at all. That's about 2.5 times the total student enrollment (including part-time students in our University College) at Widener University's four campuses (the link gives you info about the main campus in Chester, home to the undergraduate college, which has an enrollment of about 3,000). Smaller still is Swarthmore College, about 10 minutes up Providence Avenue/Chester Road. I should ask how they handle their campus food service.

Nice plate there. And Ryan has impeccable taste in veggies.

I don't get it. Ahden pronounces it right. It's not so hahd. Yeesh. Blog on! ← I went there! But they never served that cheese in the dining halls. Polynesian Meatlike Balls, on the other hand...

Good luck in your campaign to replace Aramark. I now work at a small university where Aramark handles food service. The terms of their contract are such that even if an office like mine wanted to support a small restaurateur or caterer in Chester by hiring him or her for a function (civic engagement with our dollars, dont'cha know), we couldn't. Maybe you need to be a larger institution in order to get the freedom to use alternate food services?

I knew that sooner or later, we would eventually wind up in the "Do The Suburbs Make You Fat?" part of this argument. This, in case you haven't heard of it, is the latest calf added to the herd of scapegoats for the obesity epidemic. This blame exercise argues that the physical arrangement of suburbia, with its strict segregation of uses and street systems designed so that it is all but impossible to walk from your house anywhere but to a neighbor's, has contributed to the obesity epidemic, and there are now studies floating around out there that show a correlation between lower residential density and increased incidence of obesity or overweight. I'm sure that the lay of the suburban landscape does nothing to help matters any, but I also suspect that its contribution to the overall problem is a marginal one. jsolomon has probably identified a culprit we don't talk about that much: namely, the engineering of exertion out of our lives. All those labor-saving devices have worked as intended--and if our level of physical exertion has gone down thanks to these devices, which I suspect it has, but our calorie intake remains the same as before, well, you do the math. However, the "the suburbs make you fat" argument is not totally specious insofar as it points to a policy and/or planning decision that could help contribute to a counter-trend: namely, engineering opportunities for exertion back into our lives. We've--well, I've--occasionally chuckled about the folks who drive to the gym in order to ride the stationary bike there: Why not ride a real bike around your community instead? Or ride that bike to the gym and use another piece of equipment once there? If walking to the store is impractical because the street pattern in your subdivision requires you to walk for about a half-mile to the entrance, then another quarter-mile along a main road to reach a convenience store whose rear you can see from your back yard (or could if the fence weren't there), then you won't walk there. (Of course, the short as-the-crow-flies walk really doesn't do much for your physical condition, while the three-quarter-mile walk in each direction might have a little benefit, but we will lay this inconvenient fact aside for now.) The short of it is, as jsolomon said, we need to put some more physical work back into our lives. The easiest way to do it is to make it part of our other routines instead of separating it into its own sphere. But that might be a lot more difficult now than we might imagine or than it was even two decades ago.

FYI: Lester Holt is part of the reserve squad on NBC's "Today Show," doing the half-hourly news updates when Ann Curry is elsewhere, filling in for Matt Lauer when he's away and co-hosting the Saturday and Sunday editions. Food and cooking are a regular part of the morning-infotainment-show mix. --Sandy, suddenly remembering a "Today" installment from France in which former co-host Bryant Gumbel, a notorious cheeseophobe, dons a face mask before entering a Paris fromagerie

Ready to go to the other extreme? The co-owner of the Green Valley Dairy advised against storing the Pennsylvania Noble Cheddar I had just purchased from him in either the refrigerator or the freezer. He said that chilling the cheese at all kills its flavor, and that it will actually keep for a decent amount of time at room temperature. I agree with him on the effect of chilling on the flavor. I even notice it with less exalted Cheddars than this one.

Since JohnL brought it up: Speaking broadly, state ownership is inferior to private ownership when it comes to satisfying customer needs, but there are always exceptions to the rule, said exceptions depending on how the state views its role. In the case of booze, I offer you the New Hampshire Liquor Commission as a counterexample. It is so, however, mainly because the state has a beggar-thy-neighbor approach to raising revenue, arising in large part from the electorate's aversion to the thought of a broad-based state tax (NH is the only one of the 50 states with neither a sales tax nor an income tax, and any politician who proposes instituting either signs his political death warrant the moment he or she does do).

The reason this is coming back up is because it was on Oprah on Tuesday (2/28) (don't ask me how I knew this, I just did ): Oprah's Best of the Burgers ← Read this tidbit in today's Inquirer. I thought Oprah had sworn off the things, though.

It may be a moot point after all the disagreement on the issue, but I was able to get a link to the original series. The link will take you to the column I described, and on the right side of the page, there are four related links. The first is a sidebar, about transporting the elderly to stores, and the next three are the three main stories in the series, in order. http://www.charlotte.com/mld/charlotte/living/13991541.htm ← (I'll read the series later, when I get home.) One example of a supermarket operator who has figured out that you can make money in the inner city is Supermarkets General (Pathmark), which has made opening inner-city stores something of a specialty over the last decade or so. Their store at North Philadelphia Station is busy at almost all hours of the day.

I kinda sympathize, but not much. If this women thought her only choices were moldy grapes or . . . cookies, its no wonder her daughter is overweight, and it sounds like she needs some training on how to shop. Eating healthy doesn't have to be any more expensive than eating unhealthy. Even if the produce is garbage there are plenty of other choices. ← For instance...? If you like, I could invite you to come along with me to the one "food market" I've seen so far in Chester--which, like so many inner-city stores in cities without supermarkets (Chester being one such place), has a very limited selection of fresh anything--and maybe we could put together a healthy grocery list from what's available. I will grant that she has choices other than cookies or bad produce, but in most cases, those choices are all highly processed foods that carry their own downsides with them. About the only fresh meats to be found in these stores are in the deli case, if the store has one. (Chester residents are not completely bereft, though. Those with cars--or those willing to schlep their stuff back home via SEPTA bus route 118--can patronize a Save-a-Lot about a mile beyond the city limits in suburban Brookhaven, and the no-frills Save-a-Lot chain does offer a good selection of decent, reasonably priced fresh produce and meats. But Chester is fairly spread out for a small city, and for many residents without cars, getting to the Save-a-Lot would require a bus ride downtown first to transfer to the 118. In older, denser, low-income urban communities, there's really no substitute for a good supermarket within walking distance.)

You--and John Whiting, who made the same point in the post above yours--are right. I guess my injection of Philly addytood into the post obscured the message I wanted to convey, which is that it shouldn't take a celebrity to get people to notice this subject. (I'm engaged in a similar argument on another board about a story in Washington in which DC EMTs left a New York Times reporter to die because--despite signs to the contrary--one of them assumed he was a "John Doe" lying drunk on the street. Critics of the local media--and one of the Washington Post columnists who is riding the story--point out that real John Does don't get this kind of media play when they die through incompetence of this type. They should.)

If the direction Iron Chef America has taken lately is any guide, the viewers may agree with you. Some of them, at least.

FYI: The GQ article in question came out in June of last year, and there is a discussion about it over in Food Media & News. One other relevant point: The author, Alan Richman, is a Philadelphian. This is not to say that the Rouge Burger and the Barclay Prime sliders don't deserve to be on a list like this--they do. But recall Calvin Trillin's dictum: "Anyone who doesn't think the world's best hamburger is served in his hometown is a fool." (Trillin followed his rule as well, proclaiming to the readers of Life magazine in 1971 that the world's best hamburger was served at Winstead's in Kansas City, Missouri. Having had these, I can tell you that Trillin was a devotee of the thin patty, not the thick one.)

I refer you to my post upthread. Tell your friends in Allentown, Lancaster, Harrisburg and Scranton to write their legislators. Better still, tell your friends in Coudersport, Shippensburg and Crawford. If you know any, that is.

A book I recommend highly every chance I get: "The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community" by Ray Oldenburg (Marlowe & Company, 1999, third edition). This classic, which first appeared in the late 1970s, is an attempt to figure out why American lives are so fragmented and Americans' sense of community so frayed. The preface (available on Amazon.com; click the link above, then choose "Look Inside" to see it) makes it clear what Oldenburg thinks is the reason: our postwar suburban landscape has eliminated the sorts of businesses that attract a regular neighborhood clientele that often just "hangs out" there, socializing informally with friends and neighbors. These businesses -- Oldenburg calls them "third places," being neither work nor home -- provide the glue that turns physical settlements into true communities.* Fine dining establishments usually do not qualify as "third places," because their prices are such that most cannot afford to patronize them regularly. Diners, OTOH, do, because they are affordable enough that neighbors can--and do--patronize them repeatedly. (Fast-food places do not because even though they are extremely affordable, they are not designed to encourage lingering.) It seems that some, maybe even most, of these BYOBs have tried--with some success--to bring the elements of the "third place" to fine dining. Most of these places are just pricey enough that they won't draw much of a working-class or college/grad-student clientele, but they may become "third places" for affluent urbanites. Leaving the food aside for a minute--and I realize that we're really here for the food--to the extent that these new BYOBs add an extra degree of variety and richness to the "third places" already extant in Center City, I would think that everyone should encourage their development and growth. *I realize that all of these establishments can also be found in suburbia. However, the fact that the typical Auto Age suburbanite must make a special effort to drive to them--he can't just "pop 'round" to the bar or coffeeshop--makes them no longer useful as third places.