Idlewild

Brilliant! But do you find the garlic flavour cleans off easily? I use my microplane for a lot of stuff and wouldn't want to garlic all of it up. (Most of it... just not all of it )

I do wish she'd stop saying "we." Frankly I would hate to have lunch with her social set. If they expect me to play diet mind games when I'm eating, to hell with that. Also, the so-called man food all sounded delicious. What really entertains me is being married for 8 years to a vegetarian, and having rather infrequently been given the correct dish first time when we order characteristically. They always try to fob me off with the salad and give him the gigantic hunka meat.

We made a Gantt chart for thanksgiving cooking last year - it was our first attempt at cooking the whole spread. I'm not American and my husband is not actually well versed in the preparation of all the traditional dishes so it came in really handy for us to be able to see at what point we should be doing which task.

My first cookbook was a Mr. Men production with cute illustrations in bright colours of foods we never cooked - potato boats with bacon sails on little toothpicks, sausages floating in baked beans. I did love looking at the pictures. But the cookbook that I read for pleasure over and over as a child was Round the World in Eighty Dishes. I read that until the covers fell off. I stole it when I left home. I don't know that I cooked from it much but it was definitely a huge influence in how I thought about food. Edited to mention: I also loved sitting down and reading my mother's very own folder of recipes clipped from magazines or written down by hand. There was one page where she'd saved the cover of a magazine section on biscuits (cookies) that had beautiful seventies lettering, I think it said "The Best of Biscuits" and all these lovely decorated biscuits arranged in rows. A star shaped one with pink icing and sprinkles is lodged in my visual memory. I could also draw from memory the photo accompanying a recipe for little cheesecakes with tinned mandarin segments from further back in the book, or the icecream that had pineapple chunks folded in from the page opposite the cheesecakes. Every now and then I'll demand that mum drag out the folder and transcribe a particular recipe for me, just so I have it.

I am very excited that at the work cafeteria when they serve Moroccan chicken with lemon and green olives, it's always on the bone, skin on. Some people complain but it makes me happy. It makes me kind of all because it's a work cafeteria and you'd think mass produced skinless boneless would be the choice to appeal to the masses, but someone back in corporate menu planning cared enough to do it right! We eat bscb at home more than other chicken because Mr. Wild is a former vegetarian who doesn't like that thighs actually taste like something. This has me in a bit of a state but when I'm getting protein just for me, it's the thighs, thanks.

I will never again forget that ham can be kinda the same shade of pink as uncooked chicken and as a result spend ages trying to get chicken cordon bleu to finish cooking through, including sighing in despair and chucking it in the microwave before realizing that's not raw chicken that bizarrely refuses to cook, that's the filling. I feel appropriately stupid, also I have blisters on my fingers. (Well, a blister from trying to remove the meat thermometer from the chicken, and flip the chicken, at the same time. Hot pan!)

I'm not entirely sure that the assumption that people who make free with the vulgarities have an otherwise poor vocabulary, or that they will over time lose access to their broader vocabulary through lack of use, is valid. Actually it makes me somewhat angry; it seems like a patronizing tool to persuade people to crimp their vocabularies, rather than to broaden them. Sort of analogous to "if you keep doing that, you'll go blind." Let me say that in my day to day life I swear like the proverbial motherfucking sailor and yet I have not detected any great atrophy of linguistic capability as a result. I'd also like to say that it's not mere lack of imagination that leads me to the liberal larding of profanity, it's a choice about how I present myself and how I wish to be perceived among my peer group. I'd say with some of the celebrity chef personas in question, that there is a great deal of theatricality in the way they present themselves -the chef-as-rockstar, chef-as-thug persona. I think most people of reasonable intelligence are capable of deciding when and where it is appropriate to loosen the tongue and let fly the fuck. Having said that, I think it's up to the editorial staff of a publication as to whether "fuck" flies in print. I do think it is losing its shock effect, but not to worry, there are always plenty of contenders for words that must not be spoken in polite company. It's just that the taboos shift around, not that there are no taboos left.

Edit- One more:

We order too much chinese from our local place. So. A couple of weeks we tried eating healthier, ordering out less, you know. Eventually we give in. The lovely husband makes the call. I heard his end of it. He gave our address, then this: "No, we haven't ordered in a while. Uhhh. I've been kind of busy." I bust a gut laughing. It's a restaurant, not some girl he ditched without calling back. The delivery guy comes around with our food. I hear him at the front door talking to my husband: "So, I hear you've been busy. Oh dear lawd. We have the kind of relationship with our takeout place that they lay guilt trips on us? That can't be good!!

Lovely journal. Good to hear you're teaching the kids to cook- and great to hear that so many of them want to learn! I had a really good cooking education in high school in the late 80s, and am always surprised at how little many of my peers learned in school or before they left home! I think that it's great that you're giving them a grounding in such an important basic lifeskill that can also bring so much pleasure.

My beloved grandmother couldn't cook. My great-grandmother was apparently fantastic and my mother has wonderful memories of coming home from school to her fresh baked treats and so forth, but for family dynamic reasons she refused to teach my grandmother to cook. So without fail when we stayed with granny she'd threaten us with bread and dripping (mmm! And I didn't live through the depression so I thought that was a real treat) and then serve us bacon, crinkle-cut frozen fries baked in the oven, and tinned baby carrots. On the other hand when I got a little older she also used to serve me crackers and tinned pate de foie gras. And the bacon, fries, carrots routine wasn't untasty. We never got that sort of food at home, only wholesome home cooking, so it was a treat. But when she moved in with us when I was a teenager it was sort of shocking to discover that it wasn't just what she cooked when the grandchildren were staying, it was pretty much all she ever ate. I'd tell you about my aunt's cooking but I do love my aunt and she always meant well and has a heart of gold so I can't bring myself to do more than mention dried-out gritty chewy scrambled eggs. Served with love and white toast

This is my husband's favourite cake. I do add more blood orange than the recipe calls for, and also kind of douse it in an orange syrup while it's hot. Just delicious. I wish I had a better source for blood oranges as it's pretty much the only cake I'll bake that isn't too sweet for him to eat.

I refused to register. Was grumpy enough about having to marry to get legal paperwork just to live with the man I love, without turning it into a festival of consumption. Yes, I was young. And cranky. Now I'm old and cranky and have a kitchen full of stuff and the china I want and so forth anyway, which we bought as we went along. Spending the first years of your marriage with shitty knives and pans builds character, right? I think if I did it over, I still wouldn't register, but if people insisted on knowing what we wanted I might be more forthcoming with general suggestions rather than telling them that they don't have to provide gifts just to show they're happy for us. That didn't actually go over terribly well and we still ended up with decorative towels of a nature I will never use. (Thoughtful though, as the aunt who gave them had considered glassware and then realized that'd be much more hassle to move to another continent.) I was kind of annoyed by the grabby tone of the NYT article. I think one of the tag lines was that you only get one chance to equip a kitchen so nicely. I know it was all tongue in cheek but I'm still not that keen on the wedding-as-household-building tradition. Oh sure, it's sensible and whatnot, it just rubs me the wrong way for some reason.

Oh my god. You got King Island cheeses. You win at life. Everything looks tasty! Glad it was a good bash.