munchymom
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Posts posted by munchymom
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We're on US Airways/America West. I'd rather not leave the airport - we're traveling with a 4-year-old and I'd like to minimize hassle.
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I have a four-hour layover in Phoenix this Saturday, coinciding with dinner hours. Are there any good restaurants in the airport?
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So I somehow or other got on the mailing list for Dean & Deluca's catalog. Whenever it comes, my husband and I have a good time chuckling over the outrageous prices they charge for things, but the one that arrived today hit a new level.
"Grilled Corn on the Cob
A Dean & Deluca Exclusive.
Our summer fresh corn on the cob is bathed in chili lime butter. The corn comes uncooked, wrapped in foil and is ready to grill. Preparation couldn't be simpler and it cooks while your barbecue is heating up for your steaks or burgers. About twenty minutes turning occasionally - keep wrapped in foil until ready to serve.
Set of six $32."
They're charging thirty-two dollars. For SIX EARS OF CORN. Plus $15.25 for next-day delivery. Someone, somewhere, is buying corn on the cob at the price of eight dollars an ear.
And after all that time in transit...the corn won't even taste good.
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I would say that "entertaining but a bit preachy" hits the mark pretty well. The writing is very good, lots of humor. It definitely doesn't have the grimness or the purism of the No Impact Man - they do continue to use coffee and spices, for instance. The (mostly successful) positive spin put on the local diet in this book is "Look how wonderful these home-grown, in-season things are!" rather than "I must deny myself everything good to eat so I can be righteous." They're definitely experienced cooks - Kingsolver's teenage daughter has sidebars in the book that give recipes and menu ideas, in addition to brief essays about a teenager's perspective on the project. They make their own bread and cheese, grow lots of produce and poultry, and discuss the results in rapturous terms. I enjoyed the book thoroughly - as I was sort of trying to get at in my previous post, I think the preaching is reasonably tolerable if you tend to be in sympathy with the point of view to start with. If you're not open to the ideas, then I imagine the "preachiness factor" would be a lot higher.
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The organic/all natural/whatever white cheddar Cheetohs are pretty darn good too.
I'm under no illusions about the health-enhancing properties of white cheddar Cheetohs, but I like them for one particular reason - they don't turn your fingers orange. If I'm going to eat Cheetohs, those are the ones I get.
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Adding my voice to the chorus of PBS, PBS, PBS!
Rick Bayless - Mexico One Plate at a Time
Jacques Pepin - Fast Food My Way
Charlie Trotter's Kitchen Sessions
are some of the standouts.
I don't have cable, so I don't have much to say about the Food Network, but suffice to say that every time I stay somewhere with cable, I watch a few shows and come away with no desire to get cable.
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This is a recommendation, not a review, because I'm not all the way through it yet. Barbara Kingsolver's new book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle documents a year of Kingsolver and her family eating only locally produced food. They live on a farm in Virginia and with a few exceptions eat only what they grow (vegetables, fruit, chickens, eggs and turkeys) and what they can get from farmers' markets. This book is a very entertaining read; the parts that discuss the nuts and bolts of farming remind me a bit of E.B. White's farming essays in One Man's Meat. She insists in a few places that she's not being preachy, but she is, shall we say, a strong advocate for the local-eating lifestyle. To a layperson, the science/political advocacy parts appear well-researched and well-argued. If you're one who spends a lot of time here defending Monsanto and chain restaurants, you'll probably find yourself throwing the book across the room with some regularity.
I don't think I could do an all-local diet myself (being required to drink only North Carolina wine would send me over the wall in a week or so) but I do try to consume locally when possible. I'm way too lazy to grow anything myself, and I think the homeowners' association would frown on a chicken coop in the backyard, but we have a couple of great farmers' markets here and I consume quite a bit from there. I'm completely in sympathy with the anti-agribiz arguments; I find it really scary that we're planting the whole country (and increasingly the rest of the world) in genetic monocultures.
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A natural foods store in my area gets some cheeses from a goat dairy that are labeled goat "swiss" and goat "cheddar" - if something similar exists near you, it might work? I've never tried them, so I don't know how close they are to the real thing. But check out the health food stores.
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I second those who have chosen Sausage McMuffins and Sausage (no egg) McGriddles. I always dip my sausage in the maple syrup, so the sausage McGriddle is a perfect combination for me - but egg with syrup? That's just weird.
I used to work at a place near a Hardees restaurant, and at that time they had a "Frisco Breakfast Sandwich" - ham, egg and cheese on grilled-in-butter "sourdough" bread. I was addicted to those things, and also to Hardees' Tater Tot-like hash browns. That was my default breakfast in those days. Probably not unrelated to that fact, I weighed 190 pounds in those days.
These days, I try not to abuse the fast food breakfast too much, but sometimes it's just irresistible, and on those occasions it's a sausage McGriddle for me. (The McDonald's hash brown patty is officially Not Worth The Calories, but about half the time I succumb and get one anyway.)
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I attempted last night to replicate a Gino's East deep dish pizza. I used a recipe I found online for the dough:
1 pound bread flour
1 cup water
1 package yeast
1/3 cup corn oil
1 T sugar
1 t cream of tartar
(The recipe called for yellow food coloring, but I decided to forgo that bit of authenticity.)
I topped the dough with one pound of shredded mozzarella, sauce and vegetables.
I baked it in a 14 x 2 inch round cake pan at 450 for half an hour.
The flavor was okay, but the bottom of the pizza was extremely soggy instead of crisp. (The top, where uncovered by toppings, was crisp to the point of almost burnt.) Where did I go wrong? Should I pre-bake the crust for a while, take it out to add the toppings, and then put it in to finish cooking? Any other ideas to help combat the sog factor? (One thing I thought of is that one pound of cheese wasn't quite enough for a 14-inch pizza - the layer of cheese was probably thin enough to let the sauce soak through.)
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Check out the date on the Alinea post.
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Walker Brothers Pancake House in Wilmette, IL.
ETA: You only have to stand in line if you want to go on a weekend morning, but darn it, that's usually when I want to go to a pancake house.
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I just don't understand how my experiences can be so different from everybody's here. Really, a majority of parents let their kids run wild in restaurants? As in, more than half? Here in Charlotte, people bring their kids along everywhere, and even fancy restaurants have kid menus and high chairs. I just haven't seen much of that behavior - either before or after I became a parent - and I spend way too much time and money in restaurants. This week, I took my mother and my son to a medium-upscale place that has a kids menu, but in no way is kid-targeted (no games, toys etc.) It was early evening, and at least a third of the tables had kids there - but no one was making a fuss, running around, or being obnoxious. That's been my experience all along.
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I've been racking my brains to try to remember - we met in college and I've killed off quite a few brain cells since then. I think the first meal together was that he took me to a party at his friends' who made pasta with long-simmered beef ragu. First meal he made for me - the contents of a care package sent by his mother - I remember pistaschios and dried fruit - supplemented by some rice with vegetables and lots of wine to drink. First meal I made for him - I shudder to think. My cooking specialties at the time were things like boiled ramen noodles combined with Campbell's Vegetarian Vegetable soup. (Yes, I added the ramen seasoning packet to that concoction - I must have gotten ten years' worth of sodium with every serving.) Whatever I made, it can't have been good. Thankfully things are better now. First and several subsequent restaurant meals: Tuesdays at Zorba's Restaurant on Green St. in Champaign, IL. The Tuesday special was $1 veggie sandwiches and $1 baskets of fries - a pretty substantial meal for two bucks.
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Wow, I'm glad you're so perfect. In my opinion, if I keep my child seated and conversing at a reasonable volume, nobody in a restaurant has any right to comment on any other facets of our dining experience, including the food he orders, the topics of conversation, or the level of reverence we bring to the meal. Give me a fricking break already.
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My boy is 4 and he loves to help in the kitchen. Our favorite weekend morning activity is to make muffins - I measure out all the ingredients and he does the pouring and mixing. Cookie baking is also a favorite.
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Here's what I do:
My servers are told to get the kids' meals out asap. If the adults order appetizers, then the childrens' meals should come then. If not, then we ask the parents if they would like the meals as soon as they are ready- then we get them out fast.
This particular practice doesn't work well for me. If the kid's meal comes out first, then he's finished eating by the time our meals come out, leaving him unoccupied at just the moment we want to be sitting at the table and eating. Before the food's arrived, we can distract him by taking him for walks outside, writing sentences for him to read, playing 20 questions - but once the food's in front of us, we want to eat it! It's easier if his comes out at the same time, so we're all eating at once. We do tend to order an appetizer to share if we're not in the kind of place that puts bread on the table as soon as you sit down. Also we try to go to places where the meal tends to be fast-paced (and save the leisurely meals for babysitter nights.)
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Ah- my parochial perspective. It's been a long time since I went to a bar that wasn't attached to a restaurant. (Here in NC, those are "private clubs", and I've never bothered to join one). Still and all, I see bartenders pouring things (bloody mary mix, orange juice, lemonade etc.) out of translucent plastic bottles with spouts on - I would think simple syrup could go in one of those without too much trouble from the health inspectors. And the bottle of syrup I saw was a little 8 oz. thing - I wouldn't have thought it was meant for the commercial market.
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Why is processed white bread so sugary? I went through probably ten years of not buying white bread, then decided one weekend that I needed to make The Perfect BLT (which of course requires toasted, squishy white bread.) I was shocked when I took a bite of the bread - it tasted like candy! It does go well with a tomato sandwich (Duke's Mayo only!) because the sweetness complements the acidity of the tomato - but with most savory foods I can't stand the stuff.
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Spotted another one today at the liquor store: bottled sugar syrup. Why does this product exist? What could be simpler than simple syrup?
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Hummus. It takes about two minutes in the Cuisinart, and you can adjust the seasonings to your own taste (I like a lot less garlic and more tahini than most store-bought hummus.) Same for any other bean dip/spread.
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If one is gaining weight and is uncomfortable about it then we are each capable of reviewing what we are eating and making the appropriate adjustments.
If we are eating in restaurants that refuse to disclose the nutritional content of the food they're serving, then we don't know exactly what the source of the problem is. (One could choose to eschew all restaurant food and only eat food prepared by oneself at home - that's not a route I was willing to take.) It's not intuitive which foods are healthier than other foods, nor is it obvious from a menu name which foods have more calories and which fewer. ("Chicken and Broccoli Pasta", anyone?) When I was doing Weight Watchers, I would sometimes eat at chain fast-food places (which provide info on their websites) instead of independent delis or whatever, because I wanted something "countable." Because even after studying all the materials and reading all the calorie guides, I couldn't guess from looking just how many calories were on that plate. And before doing the research and reading the materials, sometimes I made the wrong choices, thinking I was being healthier. Gee, I'd really like a hamburger and fries, but I'll get the salad with chicken because it's healthier, right? Oops - turns out the salad, once you include the oil in which the chicken was cooked, and the salad dressing, has more calories and fat than a burger and fries. Who knew?
When many of us have posted in this thread about the difficulties we've had with this, to just keep repeating, "Duh. It's obvious. Everybody knows," well...it's kind of frustrating. That's what made me dig up all that research I posted upthread - I thought maybe I was the only one who couldn't accurately estimate the nutritional content of a restaurant plate. Turns out not to be the case.
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That really does make for an ugly menu board- also possibly confusing to display numbers that are not the price. And presenting calorie count in isolation without additional nutritional information is of limited utility at best, and can be misleading. I give that plan a thumbs down. I like the way McD's does it now, with nutritional information printed on the obverse of the paper that goes on the tray. Easily accessible if you want it, but reasonably unobtrusive. If every restaurant had such a fact sheet available, I'd be thrilled.
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So, if everybody already knows what's in the food they're eating, then what's the big deal about making the nutrition information available? Why resist it so hard?
It's not about forcing people to not eat food that's bad for them, it's about being able to make an informed choice. Potato chips have a nutrition label on them - a nutrition label that makes it eminently clear that these things contain no nutrition and way more fat and calories than are good for you. Nonetheless, people buy them by the megaton. Either they don't look at the label, or they look at it and say, "Well, it's not good for me, but I like it, and I'm going to buy some." And some people who are watching their calories look at the label and choose not to buy them, or to have them only when they really want them as opposed to every day. Why should making choices in a restaurant be any different? Why hide the ball?
Hazing rituals
in Restaurant Life
Posted
What is it about working in kitchens that encourages this kind of hazing? I mean, most of my work has been with computers, and I've never shown up on the first day and had someone ask me to install a left-handed version of Microsoft Word.