munchymom

I spend a lot of money on going out. If my husband and I didn't go out for, say, six weeks, we'd have enough to go to one of the very top places. We like to travel and look for good restaurants when we do. But, we haven't been to anyplace on the level of French Laundry or Charlie Trotter's, because. Well. This is kind of embarrassing for me to admit here, but. Well. I'm a bit of a picky eater. I never thought of myself as especially picky, but I don't like any seafood or any organ meats. And it's not that I haven't tried them - I try something from those categories every year or so, and I still don't like them. A tasting menu studded with foie gras and caviar is like my own personal version of "Fear Factor". And whenever I read about the dishes in the highest-end restaurants, they just don't sound good to me - I remember reading in Wine Spectator about some Michelin 3-star restaurant that had a featured dish of pig's foot stuffed with innards. Didn't really make me want to run out and book a flight. So I guess for me, restaurant-going has not a diminishing-returns curve that steadily rises and flattens toward the top, but more of a bell curve where, after a certain price point, the return starts to drop again. I would rather have 6 $100 meals, or 2 $300 meals, than one $600. I think I'd probably rather have one $300 meal than one $600 - I could spend the extra on some really good wine.

My mom always let me lick the beaters and bowl after she made cookies. I guess you're not supposed to do that now because the batter has raw eggs in it...I say, bah. Raw chocolate chip cookie dough is vastly superior to the finished product, and my son will get to enjoy it just the way I did - if I don't eat it all first!

My husband and I went to Green Zebra last Friday, and had a wonderful experience. We were visiting his parents in the Chicago area, and when we're visiting we like to take advantage of the free babysitting to go to the kinds of restaurants to which one can't bring a 2-year old. I chose Green Zebra for this trip because my husband is a vegetarian and often has trouble finding enjoyable high-end restaurant meals. And of course because of all the wonderful things people said about it here and in the press. We were not disappointed. We started dinner with a signature "Green Zebra" cocktail each - it was tasty, sweet and green, with rum, a blue raspberry liqueur, and pineapple juice. With the cocktails came a little tray with edamame, popcorn with garam masala, peanuts with five-spice powder, and one other thing that I don't remember (Dang it! I should've taken notes.) Then began the complex menu negotiations ("Well, I think this sounds good. But if you get this, then I'll have to get this.") We finally figured out what we were ordering, and also asked our server to recommend a white wine under $50. This was a great wine list, nearly everything was under $50 and lots of unusual bottles. Our request resulted in a bottle of '01 Roero Arneis, Bruno Giacosa, which was dry with a very unusual nutty flavor, almost like a Sherry. It paired great with the food. For the first course, I chose beet salad with mascarpone, and my husband chose cabbage soup. The beets were good - I love beets - and the mascarpone and vinegar were good flavors. In the aforementioned menu negotiations, I had been dubious about cabbage soup, trying to nudge my husband to get the avocado panna cotta instead. The soup turned out to be the standout dish of the evening. A great flavor, rich and deep, sort of like a great French onion soup, but with no meat stock. I have to admit, it didn't really taste like cabbage to me, but to me that's a good thing. My second course was a Gruyere souffle, and my husband's was a sweet corn ravioli. (Sweet corn showed up a couple of times on the menu, which kind of surprised me, with their emphasis on local produce. I don't think they're getting Illinois corn in November.) The souffle was excellent, light and airy. The combination of the souffle with the wine gave the flavor of cheese fondue. The ravioli didn't do much for me. The third course was grilled wild mushrooms on polenta for me, and a duck egg for my husband. I didn't try the egg, because it was gooey and I was afraid of making a mess. My husband said it was good. It was presented poking through a hole cut in a piece of toast, with a green sauce underneath. The mushrooms were another terrific dish, lots of dark woodsy flavor and a great texture. For dessert I went with a creme brulee tasting, which had three different creme brulees, lavender, jasmine tea, and Japanese yuzu. The lavender and jasmine tea had a very subtle flavoring (as in, if I hadn't been told what they were, I wouldn't have guessed) and the Japanese yuzu was a very bright acidic flavor. My husband had a layered chocolate mousse thing, and it was very good. I also had a glass of sparkling wine with dessert. All in all, the experience was great. Our server was very nice and the service was good. I have only one tiny quibble with the restaurant - we were seated in a sort of large booth that contained two, two-person tables, one in each corner. This layout meant that it was very difficult not to overhear the couple next to us, who happened to be on a blind date. It's kind of a weird layout. But on the whole, I'd go back in a second - too bad I live hundreds of miles away. It's definitely on the list for the next time we're in Chicago.

Now I Eat My ABC's by Pam Abrams is one of my two-year-old's favorites - it has pictures of food in the shapes of letters (e.g. "A is for Asparagus" is illustrated by a photo of three spears of asparagus arranged in the shape of an A.) Sorry, don't know how to do the Amazon link thing.

What's so sacred about a bagel? The chain-store bagels are huge hunks of refined white flour without a large amount of nutrition. (And since the topic of the thread is fast food, the chain-store ones were the ones I had in mind - I don't know if a real bagel bakery in New York gives you the same outsized serving as, say, a Breugger's.) At least a McMuffin gets you some protein. And I agree with you on your other points - my only point was once a decision has been made to eat fast food, what seems like a healthier option may not be one.

Fast food is an immense industry. It's not going anywhere. Given that people will choose to eat fast food, it seems only fair to give them the tools to do it as wisely as possible, rather than just writing off the majority of the population and saying "they're fat because they deserve it for eating that crap." Fat and calories aren't the whole picture, true, but they're a really big part of it.

Education really is the key here, and making nutritional information easily accessible is the most important first step. Sure, any idiot can see that a Monster Thickburger is too much food. But, without nutritional info available on site, one might be inclined to think that a Tuscan Chicken sandwich from Panera is a healthier choice than a Big Mac. Wrong - the Panera sandwich is 860 cal/52 g fat, while a Big Mac is 580/33. How many people decide to be "good" and get a bagel with cream cheese from a bagel shop (appx 500/22) instead of a Krispy Kreme glazed donut (205/12) or an Egg McMuffin (300/12)? Even trying to make good choices sometimes backfires in the absence of information. I know all these calorie figures because I went out and bought a book that lists most fast food menus with nutrition information when I joined Weight Watchers. But if the nutritional information were easily accessible at the restaurants (perhaps even displayed on the menu) I might not have needed Weight Watchers.

I also use "pointy", but with a completely different meaning. I've been doing Weight Watchers (well, sort of, seems like for the past few months I've been doing "Weight Ignorers" instead, but anyway) and they give you a certain number of "points" you can eat every day - the points are based on the fat, fiber and calories in a given food. So if I eat something that's particularly high-fat or high-calorie, I might say something like "That was so good...too bad it's so pointy!"

My parents have a couple of code words - "Average" means terrible. If they really didn't like a meal, they'll say it was "very average". Their other one is "interesting", which also means terrible. The first time my husband ate with them in a restaurant, he said, "This salad dressing is really interesting" and they got this stricken look on their faces. I had to jump in and say, "No, he really means it's interesting!"

I don't know what you mean, "bygones", I'll be sitting down to just such a turkey at my mother-in-law's house this Thanksgiving. Of course, when we had Thanksgiving at my house a couple years ago, the white meat was okay but the dark meat was terribly undercooked, so I guess I can't complain.

I have a reservation at Green Zebra in a couple of weeks and I have a few questions for those who have been there. How are the portion sizes? For two people should we order 6 dishes? 8? More? Is there anything that's so incredibly tasty we should order two so that we don't have to share? How does wine pair with the food, should I try to pair different by-the-glass selections with different courses, or try to find a bottle that goes with everything? And my other big question - is on-street parking available nearby? Thanks, and I promise I'll give a full report after I've been.

I am floored that in North Carolina, at the height of the apple season, the grocery store is selling apples from New Zealand. I mean, there are apples growing RIGHT HERE! How can it possibly be more cost-effective to ship them from the other side of the world?

I hate to admit it, especially here, but I've fallen into this category from time to time. Since starting Weight Watchers I've been more mindful about trying to eat only what's really good, but it's easy to default to eating whatever's there. In my own home I can just not bring in the junk food, but if I'm in someone else's house, say, my in-laws' for instance, and they have big bowls out of chocolate-covered peanuts, even if the peanuts are slightly stale, and the chocolate is actually "chocolate flavored coating", well--I'm still eating them. For me it's really easy to do it, and really hard to not do it - even if the food is something I never would have bought for myself in a million years.

I always liked the Spaghetti-O's with meatballs, but NOT the ones without meatballs. The sauces were different - the no-meatball ones had a sauce with a weird sweet flavor, and the meatball ones had a sauce I liked. I also liked the Chef Boyardee beef ravioli, though now I shudder to think what must have been in that "beef" - what a weird texture it had. I haven't had any canned pasta since college, though.

Does the Coffee Cup have good hash browns? I've yet to find a decent hash brown or home fry in Charlotte. Potatoes that come with breakfast are always soggy or undercooked, not crisp. I figured it was because in this part of the world, the default breakfast carbohydrate is grits, but I really like hash browns better!

You might enjoy the Fresh Market on Providence for good meats and cheeses and a few specialty products that don't make it into the big supermarkets. I've seen ads for a place called "Ferrucci's" in Cornelius, but I've never been there.

It's all about where you're coming from. I might complain about some aspects of the Charlotte dining scene, but on the whole I'm happy with it. Before coming here, I lived in Manteno, Illinois - 60 miles south of Chicago. Our options were a 15-minute drive to Ruby Tuesday's, TGIF, Applebees or a Greek diner. Otherwise it was at least an hour one way to go out for dinner. When I moved to Charlotte I thought I'd gone to heaven, with lots of decent places and a few very good places within easy reach. What we don't have, and probably won't have, is the ultra-high-end. But there's plenty of quality here. I always find someplace good to go out to eat. Of course, there's more mediocre than good here. But I think that's true everywhere.

Based on observation in my family, I've always thought the gene for this particular behavior must be carried on the Y chromosome. Why, oh why, would someone leave three crackers in a box? What's with the one ounce of soda left in a bottle? Just finish the stupid things and throw the container away! I think it's related to the gene for cramming more and more into the full garbage can, rather than just taking out the bag when it's full.

My husband and I went to City Tavern a few weeks after we moved here, four years ago. We haven't been back. Nuff said. We tried Salute a few weeks ago, and - well - didn't have as great an experience as Helen Schwab did. It seemed like it took forever for us to get noticed when we walked in, and then we were at first directed toward a table near the door, then (after some conferencing among the staff) told that that table was reserved, and had to wait for another table to be cleared - maybe 5 minutes. The "reserved" table never became occupied while we were there. Were we not good-looking enough to sit at the front? I don't know. Then, we weren't given menus when we were seated, and it took a good long time for our server to come, at which point he wanted to know what we would have to drink. I had to ask for a menu. It may have just been that the restaurant's leisurely pace didn't fit our post-concert, starving because we waited to have dinner until 9:30 PM, having a babysitter waiting at home - mood. But, for instance, it took about 15 minutes from the time I ordered my glass of Prosecco until the time it arrived - which, they're only hurting themselves, because I certainly would have dispatched it and ordered a second and quite probably a third if they had been available. The food at Salute was good (although I'll second the review's mention of "restrained portions"), and we'll probably give it another try sooner or later. Maybe when the squash blossoms come back in.

I went to UIUC in the early nineties and the food was dreadful. You were required to buy a 21-meal-a-week plan, and I rarely woke up for breakfast, so I always felt ripped off. (Except at finals time - I would get up for a power breakfast of a bowl of oatmeal and two hard-boiled eggs. I would reflect that the breakfast food was better than the other meals, and I really should make an effort since I was paying for it anyway, and then not do it as the next semester rolled around.) The hot food was gray, mushy, mystery meat, overcooked vegetables, limp oily pasta. I would try to get things that had the least amount of processing, like a baked potato or a whole chicken breast. Desserts were often frightening - I remember having a contest with lemon meringue pie where everyone at the table got a piece, placed it meringue side down on the plate, then held the plate upside down in the air to see how long the pie would stay there. I think the winner was somewhere around 2 minutes. They did have a salad bar, and I would often take a bowl full of raw broccoli or peas, top with butter and microwave for a couple minutes. They also had unlimited soft serve ice cream, and giant bins of cold cereal available at all meals. I would usually have a big bowl of ice cream topped with Cap'n Crunch. Despite these habits, I didn't manage to gain the "freshman 15" until I was a junior and moved off campus, with a Taco Bell in walking distance, a roommate who delivered for Domino's and brought home pizza all the time, and of course vast quantities of horrible beer.

I had occasion to make this cake over the weekend. Ordinarily I never bake (literally - I had to go out and buy cake pans). However, my son was turning two, and I have somewhere managed to acquire the notion that if a child's birthday cake is not homemade by his mother, said mother is certain to burn in hell. I made the recipe as originally written (starting with mixing all the wet ingredients), and even with the mixer on the lowest speed I quickly realized at least one reason it isn't often done that way. I had to add a few spoonfuls of the dry ingredients just to get the stuff to stay in the bowl. I managed to mix the cake and get it into the pans without further incident, baked it for one hour, and took the pans out to cool. There were a few tense moments when the cakes failed to come out of the pans on the first try, but after a heartfelt prayer and a hefty whack on the cutting board, both cakes emerged unscathed. I frosted the cake with buttercream (the Marshmallow Fluff recipe) and decorated cheerfully. Perhaps by his next birthday I'll learn how to frost cakes without the crumbs all getting in the frosting. The verdict? The cake was DELICIOUS. Great texture, great flavor. Seriously - I couldn't believe a dessert that tasted that good came out of my kitchen. I might not even wait until the little guy has another birthday to make it again. [Edited to add that my avatar is a picture of the birthday boy enjoying his cake.]

I think the term you're looking for is "oenophile", although "wino" works just fine for me!

I've only ever found nutritional yeast in the natural food store, sold out of a bulk bin. It gives a really nice depth of flavor to vegetarian soups and sauces - I'd probably put a quarter cup into a typical 4-serving batch of soup, but you can experiment with it. Too much makes the food taste a little bitter. And then there's that wonderful hippie snack - popcorn topped with soy sauce and nutritional yeast. It really is good! I like it on steamed vegetables too.

If you have a vacuum-sealed jar, take a heavy knife and smack the pointy tip down in the center, thus piercing the lid and breaking the vacuum. Works every time, as long as you don't want to re-seal the jar.

My computer's in the bedroom, and I don't eat here. But I do drink! Late evenings will usually find me online with a glass of wine.