MarketStEl

Juneau a tourist trap? I usually don't think of state capitals, not even state capitals nestled in fjords with mountains all around and no highway connections to anyplace more than about five miles distant, as places of this type. Usually, they're sleepy, sometimes overgrown little burgs, with little to recommend them aside from the presence of the state government, if that can be said to be recommendation. Then again, Juneau probably has access to really good salmon as compensation, which might justify the tourist-trappery. Which reminds me of a tale I heard many, many, many years ago about a band of Catholic friars who maintained some sort of roadside stand somewhere in the United States where they sold their own foodstuffs made at the monastery, dressed in their traditional robes. According to the story, when a visitor inquired about their religious order, one of the brothers replied, "We're Tourist Trappists." Maybe they were affiliated with this Kentucky abbey? If their cheese weren't quite remarkable, I would suspect yes.

I'm usually a shred-my-own type of guy, but there are times when already-shredded cheese comes in real handy. Especially if it's on sale for $1.99 a half-pound as it was the last time I made homemade pizza, about three months ago. Yesterday at Acme, Mission flour tortillas were on sale for $2.49 for a package of 16 8-inch tortillas. I was buying them with nothing particular in mind, but now that I've seen that crisps recipe, I've got something to try. For some reason, the major supermarket brands of cheese have been going on sale frequently lately. I usually prefer the "America's Choice" (A&P-family store brand) New York State extra sharp cheddar for most of my routine cooking; that has been selling for somewhere around $3.69 a pound for most of the last six months and is now $3.99 a pound.

You mean to tell me after all these years that I don't lose Black Authenticity Points for hating chitlins? While I'm at it: Just had a deeeeeeeeeeeeeeeelicious "soul food" lunch on Friday at a little hole in the wall (literally! There's only room inside for six people to dine, and most of the business is conducted at the sidewalk take-out window) in downtown Chester, Pa., called Cheryl's Southern Style. The owner is the personification of charm, friendliness, optimism and energy, and she's a fine chef to boot. Had I told anyone I was going there beforehand, I would probably have brought the wrath of the Fat Police down on me for my choices: Pork chops smothered in gravy and hot sauce, collard greens and macaroni and cheese. The mac and cheese was creamy and smooth; I'm guessing she doesn't bake hers, as the cheese sauce uniformly covered everything. The collards were nice and sweet, cooked with bacon rather than hamhocks--but I believe even bacon would be a Nutritional Violation according to the Guardians of Virtue cited upthread. And then there are those pork chops! Thin and juicy chops (something I don't encounter too often) smothered in rich brown gravy made better by the tang of the hot sauce. Now all I have to do is try to remember what I did with the two tickets she gave me (collect ten and the next meal is on Cheryl; she usually gives out one with each meal but gave me an extra as a first-time customer. It won't be my last time, either--the food is so good it's worth trekking through Chester's beat-up downtown to go there). All her signage bears a reference to Psalms 34:8. It is actually a very appropriate verse for this establishment. If you're ever in the area, it's at 513 Welsh Street, right across the street from the Chester train station on SEPTA's R2 Regional Rail line. Tell Cheryl that new guy from Widener University sent you.

Transportation update: If the planets align properly, I may be able to dash into the RTM on certain evenings. The following events must all happen: --My colleague Mariane, the graphic designer in our office, must be heading straight home from work, or if she is not, stopping off somewhere north of Swarthmore. --Both she and I are ready to leave the office at the stroke of 5--5:03 at the absolute latest. --Nothing is tying up traffic on Providence Avenue/Chester Road (PA 320). If all this happens, she can drop me off at the inbound platform at Swarthmore just in time for the 5:13 R3 to Market East. This happened as described for the first time today. We pulled up to the platform just as people were boarding the inbound train. Fortunately, the conductor spotted me making a mad dash for the train. The train arrives at Market East at 5:47. That would leave me about 12 minutes to pick up something at the RTM on the way home. Life can be beautiful. But a lot of the time, it won't.

Does that mean I can come over to your kitchen and help myself, so long as I let anybody come over to my kitchen and take some of anything I made with stuff I got from you? What a fun thought experiment. ← I think we can even coin a term for it: Chain meal! Edited to add: And let's not get started on reverse-engineering the dishes...

So I took the 109 into Upper Darby and found that HMart store. Wow. East meets West and both win. Veggies looked great and were fairly priced. Great selection of Asian specialties of all kinds, though I didn't see--or smell--some of the fresh foods I encounter at Wing Phat on Washington Avenue. They do take a multiculti approach to marketing Asian groceries, though. Although there were some items I would have appreciated signs in English for. Then again, maybe management didn't want us to know about those. This won't be my last visit, that's for sure.

I know you've heard this several times before in this discussion, but: Whatever you do, when you slip, don't beat yourself up about how you let yourself and the rest of us down. Mood-altering substances can be crutches, and it's often hard to get rid of those once they are no longer needed. Given how my Dad departed this planet, and given my own predisposition towards depression, I shouldn't even touch a drop of wine. And I didn't, for sixteen months. Now I do. I like to think that I control the drug more than it controls me, since I drink less than I did before I quit and never by myself without food. But deep down inside, I know I'm kidding myself when I entertain this thought. Still, you can beat it into submission. Edited to add: Glad you liked the dip, Marlene. I'll have to try your add-ins next batch. As soon as I download the current crop of pix from the camera, I will post this on RecipeGullet with illustrations.

I can't help but think that you are on to something. After all, while we may exert ourselves less than we used to, most of us and our ancestors have eaten the very foods we are being warned away from for decades without the complications we see around us now. I recall hearing as a young boy how 'complex carbohydrates' were better for you nutritionally. This was at the same time that the most popular brand of bread in the country was a spongy white loaf that was fortified with a bunch of vitamins and minerals, some of which put back stuff lost in the refining of the flour. Now I know that whole wheat bread has never been the majority choice in any modern society I am aware of, but even the white bread back before we were filled with all this Wonder had more texture (and probably less simple sugars) than what we eat now. Certainly the results many who follow the Atkins diet have achieved suggests that maybe the problem is not the fat in the foods we eat; it may well be that it's not carbohydrates per se but what kinds of carbs we ingest.

Do you use Boost Mobile (ad slogan: "Where you at?") They're not the first to use hip-hop lingo to push cell phones--I remember seeing ads in the subway promoting Omnipoint prepaid service (long since absorbed into T-Mobile) bearing the legend, "Contracts are Wack!" But Boost has embraced it far more thoroughly. That is my impression. Unless, that is, we are using the word in its French sense ("source"= French for "spring"). Yes, I have seen US spring water "bottled at the source." I certainly wouldn't call what TJ's does "sourcing." But for those of you whose skin crawls at this use, consider that it may also be inspired by a truncation of a now commonly accepted term, "outsourcing" -- used to refer to the practice of a company contracting out work it used to do in-house.

Oh, one more thing: This should be proof positive that everyone indeed does love a quitter. Good going, Marlene. Hang in there, all of you.

If you don't flour them, by all means season them before frying. If you do, mix in the spices with the flour coating. My usual technique actually produces something more like breading: Dip pieces in beaten egg, then seasoned flour. Repeat both steps. As for the blue cheese dip, if you try my recipe -- which is very easy to cut in half -- let me know what you think of it.

Of course they are! And I'd like to say for the thousandth time, there are no unhealthy foods, just unhealthy eating habits. You don't have to lose one to preserve the other. ← What she said. I also have three words for the Selma High principal who wants to banish collards: Smoked turkey butt. Once again, our national penchant to throw the baby out with the bathwater when a potentially deleterious practice is discovered is given free rein (please, please, not "free reign" -- the term is derived from coach drivers' practice of letting their horses run loose for a while). Yes, given the rising tide of obesity among African-Americans, a group which has long had its share of "Big Mommas," it doesn't hurt for us to re-evaluate the foods we love and try to incorporate healthier methods of preparing them. And personally, I wouldn't mind it if chitlins disappeared from menus, period. But we don't have to swear off fried chicken or collard greens completely: we can flavor the latter in other ways and turn the former into an occasional treat instead of a menu staple.

Make that "will route my journey home via 69th Street." At least some of the time. The shortest trip back will be for me to take the 109 or 113 to Chester Transportation Center and catch the 5:22 R2 back into the city--which will get me to Market East just 3 minutes after the RTM closes--but the second-shortest trip would be to take the 109 eastbound all the way to 69th and take the El in. This should get me into town around 6:15.

Not sure about cc, but we just had a really good burger not long ago at KC Prime in Lawrenceville[...] ← Any relation to Derek Davis' now-closed Manayunk steakhouse?

My blue cheese dip recipe--which produces a huge amount of smooth, not chunky, dip, not sauce--is as follows: 1 pint sour cream 1 8-ounce package cream cheese, softened 1/2 pound blue cheese, room temperature, crumbled Combine all ingredients in a bowl. Pulse with immersion blender to further break down blue cheese chunks. After blue cheese has been reduced to fine particles, run blender steadily in a series of 1-2 minute bursts to thoroughly mix ingredients. If you find the consistency too thick, you may thin it with 1/4 to 1/2 cup milk, added slowly until desired thickness is reached. Optional add-ins include onion powder (up to 2 teaspoons) or garlic powder (up to 1 teaspoon). Killing a few other birds: --Dave: I usually do bacon on a rack in an oven roasting pan as well--it's the best way to produce a large quantity of crisp bacon. As I often make biscuits at the same time, I usually cook my bacon at 400F for 10 to 15 minutes, turning once. --I usually bake my buffalo wings rather than fry them, so they're a little less crunchy, but I find that if you cook them at 375F for about 45 minutes, drain the fat and juices, then turn them over and cook for 15 minutes more, you get acceptably crispy wings. The wings I made tonight were coated with Old Bay prior to baking, then tossed in wing sauce. --Marlene: You should try the Gates' Barbecue Sauce recipe that was featured on "From Martha's Kitchen" a couple of years ago. I don't know if this recipe is still up on the Food Network web site. As it's Ollie Gates', not mine, I don't feel comfortable posting it to ImageGullet, but if you all can convince me I'm being overly fastidious about this, I may add it.

This has been a fascinating exercise the three of you have shared with us. My question now is: Does the food you eat taste any different now? Are you hungry for more of it already, or has there not been enough time for your metabolism to slow down? I see that Frank's now has a ready-to-use Buffalo wing sauce. I didn't check the ingredients label to see if it's just Red Hot and butter or not, but as my local supermarket was all out of regular Red Hot when I went to lay in my Supe supplies on Friday, I wasn't going to stand on authenticity. And I don't feel like going into the kitchen right now to check the label, either. Angela: I see you get creative with your Buffalo wing sauce. I will probably coat some of mine with my homemade Gates' Barbecue Sauce in addition to the Buffalo treatment. (As I type this, the ESPN commentators are poring over Donovan McNabb's latest comments on the whole Terrell Owens affair and picking apart poor Donovan for not stepping up to the plate and yanking T.O. back in line after he made those remarks about how well the Iggles would have done with Brett Favre at the helm. I hope his mom has plenty of Campbell's Chunky Soup for him tonight.) Hope you all enjoy the game too, those of you watching for the game, and to everyone else, let's get together later to critique the commercials. Oh, one more thing: W-o-r-c-e-s-t-e-r-s-h-i-r-e. You can stick the spelling bee gold star on this sheet of paper over here. Anyone else notice how enamored the Brits are of superfluous letters in their words? --Sandy "Melvil Dewey had the right idea" Smith

For you? I'll gladly give your stomach time to recover. That pushes this to -- April Fool's Day! Maybe in honor of the occasion, we should add a Pizza Hut or Domino's to the mix as a ringer.

If you lived in the Miami area, I would have recommended you check out the Così coffeehouse/sandwich shop chain. They do not follow a fast-service model like that of Starwich or Pret à Manger--just the opposite: their restaurants (I live just down the block from one) are deliberately designed to be comfy hangouts; they are about the only examples I've run across of a rare genre of decor, "corporate funky"--but they also base their menu on really, really good bread--in this case a toothsome and slightly salty flatbread that they claim derives from a recipe dating back to Roman times. It's really excellent bread, and they put equally high quality ingredients between it. This being Philadelphia, where people are used to getting excellent sandwiches on equally good bread for somewhere around $5, I hear occasional complaints about the price of Così sandwiches, which start at $6.50 and go up from there. But I'd say the overall package they offer is a very good value, and their outlets are popular--I can't tell you how many times I've run into friends and acquaintances at my local Così while en route to or from the RTM or the State Store or the convenience store right across 12th Street from it.

Oh, exactly. I certainly met plenty of people at college who happened to have attended prep school, and were great people. It was the folks for whom having attended "the right prep schools" was not an academic brain-expanding thing but soley a class status thing, part of a whole way of categorizing the world into the worthy and the unwashed, who really got up my nose. ← I don't think I attended one of those "right prep schools." Since all of those are New England boarding schools (well, a couple of them may be in New Jersey), and mine was a day school in the Midwest, it couldn't be "the right school" by definition. Except in the context of Greater Kansas City, that is. --Sandy, suddenly looking forward to his 30th high school reunion later this year, even if that means encountering the bigoted redneck who now runs Russell Stover Candies, his family's company

Say, your employers sound just snooty enough that maybe you can convince 'em to pop for a trip to Pennsylvania Dutch country this summer so that you can return with some of the finest fresh foods grown anywhere and let them brag about what you found. Do it late enough in the summer and you can also return with some of the best tomatoes around too.

The PB TJ's (boy, does that ever sound like geek code! ). ← Speak for yourself, Ellen. It sounds like a sandwich to me.

I really should look at the calendar before announcing dates, shouldn't I? How about March 11, then? I should be getting paid for resume work that week.

Okay, it's no longer premature. March 4 it is. I just got the official letter offering me the job in the mail, and just like Penn and Drexel do, Widener pays its professional and administrative staff once a month. (Well, maybe not so sad. The resume-writing gig can serve as an income supplement, and it pays me every other week.) So: Who's game for a visit to Apollo and NYPD? And: Anyone want to research other past winners to revisit?

BTW, in case any of you doubted that this board gets noticed by food professionals: I was at the RTM yesterday afternoon around 4:30 to pick up ingredients for a tossed salad for today's PGMC retreat and blue cheese for the dip for tomorrow. As I am sometimes wont to do, I dropped into the RTM office to say hi to Paul. He looked at his watch and said, "Got off work early?" I was right in my assumptions, but the merchants who agree with Paul have opening on Sunday as their highest priority. But for now, the main push is just to get them all to stay open until 6 like the signs on the door say they will.

Sandy, Lebanon bologna, which I rate amongst mankinds greatest inventions, is named after Lebanon. However, Lebanon is it's own county. Just north of Lancaster County. Pennsylvania has 67 counties. Lancaster is but one of them. Astonishingly to many, lots of the counties are between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Geographicly speaking, everything west of the 69th Street terminal is NOT Lancaster County. ← Mea culpa, but I did know that you had to travel through Delaware (or Montgomery, or both) and Chester counties before reaching Lancaster County. Reading is the Berks County seat, and the state capitol of Harrisburg is the same for Dauphin County, but I had indeed not been aware that Lebanon was the county seat of the county of the same name. I haven't traveled extensively through the state, but I have spent time outside the Philadelphia area--my second encounter with the Keystone State, for instance, was a cross-state trek via US 30 from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia when I was 14 and still living in Kansas City. (Mom wanted to see the things you couldn't see from the Turnpike. One of the things we saw was the famous Ship Hotel (or whatever the name of the place was in the '70s) on the side of the mountain in (I believe but am not sure) Butler County.) I've also been to Harrisburg three times (it fascinates me in the same strange way Wilmington, Del., does), to Lancaster, to Scranton, to the Poconos and to Mauch Chunk^W^WJim Thorpe. (Edited to add: And to Reading on several occasions back when the outlets were hot. So in terms of counties, that's Berks, Carbon, Dauphin, Lackawanna, Lancaster and Monroe. And into Pike to visit Bushkill Falls.) I guess I'm reciting all this by way of asserting that, while I may not have all my Keystone State geography down, I'm no parochial urbanite.