mizducky

So here's some entrees, sides, and etc. I've made for E so far, in no particular order: --steak (he loved this) --liver and onions (he loved this) --baked chicken --pot roast, with potatoes, tomatoes, and carrots (he loved this) --chicken stew with giblets --broiled salmon (he loved this--but then it was wild-caught Alaskan salmon!) --Salisbury steak (he loved this) --meat loaf (he loved this) --oven-"barbequed" beef ribs --oven-"barbequed" country-style pork ribs (he found these too greasy) --borscht (I put in too much black pepper for his tastes) --omelettes (he loves these) --melted cheese sandwiches (he loves these) --tuna salad sandwiches --coleslaw (with Miracle Whip, so he loves it) --chicken/rice skillet dish (his suggestion--he loved it) --lamb chops (he liked the idea of lamb, but alas he found these too tough and greasy) --fried rice (outside his comfort zone, but he surprised us both by liking it) Interestingly, E and I just had a conversation earlier tonight about how he's liking my cooking so far. He admitted that it's not as if he finds the food I make unpleasant, far from it. In fact, he admits that it's all quite tasty. It's just that a lot of it doesn't really "do it" for him. Part of his issue is his New England country background, which conditioned him to like really plain and simple food. And part of it is the fact that he really hasn't been all that interested in food, period, for some years now. He totally understands that bad nutrition is part of what got him in a fix before, and realizes that he can't get away with the diet of peanut butter, crackers, and oatmeal cookies that put him in that situation. And it's not like he never eats of his own volition--in fact, he often wakes up in the middle of the night and makes with the peanut butter, crackers, and cookies. Now as far as I'm concerned, there's nothing wrong with grazing--in fact, I do believe that several little meals is in some ways better for the body than two or three large meals with no snacks in between. The challenge is to expand his grazing repertoire to include stuff from other parts of the food pyramid. Hmmm. P.S. I know some of you will ask why I haven't made him any pasta dishes. It's because he tells me that he hates pasta. Apparently the assisted care facility he was in served tons of pasta and macaroni (hey, it's cheap and filling), and he doesn't want to have anything to do with anything that reminds him of that place. Can't say that I blame him for that sentiment.

About two months ago, an opportunity presented itself for me to try out a new part-time career: that of live-in cook/caretaker for a senior. The senior in question was already a friend of mine, who I knew from church. He'd been suffering from some mild dementia-type mental issues and other health problems ever since I'd known him (about a year). These mainly manifested as short-term memory problems, confusion especially in complex and unexpected situations, and physical shakiness of hands and footing, but his personality (not to mention wit and charm) were largely intact. Around Thanksgiving time last year this man (let's call him "E") went into a health tailspin. To this day the doctors are not quite certain what caused it--the ostensible culprit was a new medication that knocked him off-kilter. But it turns out that, for at least a year previous to the crisis, he had been chronically forgetting to take his (many and complex) prescription medications, to feed himself adequately, and to drink enough fluids. So I for one am convinced that it was the cumulative effects of malnourishment, dehydration, and randomization of medication that eventually wound up putting him in the hospital. For a few months in there we thought we were going to lose him, if not physically at least mentally. He gradually pulled out of the fog, and was moved first to a skilled-care facility, and then an assisted-living facility--in all, about six months away from his beloved home of many years. He eventually became too "well" to need even the level of care of the assisted living facility, but his medical team, understandably concerned that he might put himself in the same bad way again, said he couldn't move back home unless someone stayed there with him. That's where I entered the picture. So what does all this have to do with food and cooking? Volumes. As I said above, while the doctors are still arguing about what the hell happened to poor "E", even they are willing to concede that a major part of it had to do with him not eating right and not drinking enough fluids. Plus my own experiences make me a super-strong believer in the healing power of healthy eating. So I figured I would be an excellent person to make sure E gets the nutrition he needs to stay healthy, in as enjoyable a form as possible. At the same time, hey, I know this guy, and I know he is a person of strong opinion and picky tastes--in everything from classical music, to the style, content, and delivery of our minister's last sermon, to the food he is served. I also know, from numerous after-church lunches we had shared, that he is a notoriously non-adventurous eater. He's an old New Englander from a classic WASP family; the further food strays from the simple meat-and-potatoes fare he grew up with, the less happy he is--even if he agrees the strange food tastes delicious, its strangeness interferes with his full enjoyment. So I knew I had my work cut out for me. Some concessions were obvious and I just went with them. He has strong allegiance to specific all-American brands, even if (IMO) those brands are overpriced and under-quality. Predictably, he hates real mayonnaise and prefers Miracle Whip; he also has this thing for Roman Meal bread--and it has to be the thin-sliced loaf. Only Mother's oatmeal cookies will do--just the plain ones, not the frosted. Only Cabot brand aged white cheddar--he's persuaded the orange color of even gourmet cheddars is due to artificial coloring, and appeared dubious when I patiently explained the annatto-seed coloring was natural and traditional. There are other foibles, some more subtle than others. He dislikes any seasoning other than salt, and likes rather too much of that--even black pepper is too strong for him. He likes his food as simple as possible--any deviation risks a reaction not unlike the character in Amadeus who complained to Mozart that his music used "too many notes." And you should have seen the look on his face when I suggested that there were other types of tuna than the stuff that comes in the cans. On the other hand, he continually surprises me with the stuff he does like to eat. He adores beets, including the beet greens--won't let me put the beets in a vinaigrette, that's already too fancified for his tastes, but does love them simply roasted and the skins slipped off. He actually likes organ meats! He lit up like Christmas the night I made sauteed liver and onions--especially since I know enough not to cook the stuff into shoe leather. He actually volunteered a couple different times that he would enjoy my preparing kidneys or heart sometime. And I have come to learn that, even if he does complain a bit when I cook something a little outside his familiarity range, the fact that it tastes good does still get through his defences, such that maybe several days later I'll hear him admit that the strange new stuff was suprisingly good after all. So what do I actually wind up cooking for this guy? Next post, I'll list as many as I can remember of the meals I've cooked him so far, with notes as to how well they went over. And here's where I can definitely use some help from eGulleteers. I have been avidly following Calipoutine's topic on catering community dinners for 50 senior citizens at a time, and have gotten a number of meal ideas. And my Joy of Cooking is proving its usefulness all over again, as the 1970s edition is like a roll-call of all-American hometown cooking classics. But I can always use more suggestions!

Heh. Randi, I really feel for you. I am now doing a rent-exchange arrangement in which I am cooking for and otherwise looking out for a 75-year-old gentleman with some mild and variable mental issues (forgetfulness, easily confused, etc.), and boy can it be challenging. Rather than drag this thread off-topic, I think I'll start a whole separate topic on my experiences so far; but just wanted to mention here that there are some definite similarities of experience.

I was way busy with "real life" stuff all week so I'm only catching up now with your blog, Kent--excellent stuff. I'd like to enthusiastically second this motion!

That's a pretty damn cool dining experience. (Damn, now I'm jonesing for some soul food. )

My favorite local hole-in-the-wall Chinese place is owned by Chinese, but the cooks - and most of the customers - are Spanish-speaking. The owners have equally good facility with English and Spanish. This is completely Americanized Chinese, not something one would write about in a book (except to say "Don't bother") but I thought it was a fascinating little demographic fact. They automatically bring out extra chili sauce to the Mexican customers, but I have to ask for it. ← Y'know, this business of a restaurant being operated by people of a different nationality than that of the food they're serving is not totally without precedent on the US restaurant scene. For example, even though Boston's got a well-established Italian-American population, the number of little pizza places operated by Greeks was (and no doubt still is) impressive. For that matter, there's lots of classic diners in the suburbs of New York operated by Greeks. There'd be maybe one or two Greek dishes on the menu--say, moussaka--and everything else would be diner standards like Yankee pot roast and etc. ... And there are many other examples. But it could be interesting to explore the aspects of this phenomenon that are unique to the Asian restaurant scene, do a compare-and-contrast maybe.

Have fun blogging! (For the fly photo caption, I was going to suggest the old vaudeville routine: "Waiter, what's this fly doing in my soup?" "The backstroke, I think." Insert rimshot sound effect here. )

Whoa! Only just found time to finally catch up with this topic (the past month-and-a-half of my life has been, erm, eventful ). This is certainly a fun project, FG, and one near and dear to my heart. First off ... Many thanks for the namecheck. And oh yeah, that buffet I reference above is right across the street from MCAS Miramar. I notice there'd already been some comment about the neighborhood around military bases being great hunting grounds for Asian restaurants--that's certainly true in Miramar's case, there are literally dozens of Asian restaurants of various nationalities keeping the Marines as well as the locals well-fed. Next ... coming in late and skimming really really fast, I see that a lot of what I would have suggested you address at some point in your book has already been covered by other posters. But here's one that I don't think has been mentioned yet: in Chinese restaurants, learning to move on beyond stirfries. Somehow in the first wave of US foodie awareness about Chinese cuisines, it became all about the stirfries; and to this day I think if you asked any non-Chinese person-in-the-street to name as many Chinese cooking techiques as they could think of, they'd say "stirfry" ... and maybe "deep-fry" ... and then draw a blank. I know I used to be that way. But eventually I became aware that there are in fact whole bunches of techniques and dishes I never knew from the way-Americanized Chinese restaurants of my youth. Now, when I visit a new-to-me Chinese restaurant and see, say, hotpot or claypot dishes on the menu, my expectations go way up. And if I see pork belly listed, I really get excited. They're not an iron-clad guarantee that this place can put out a great meal, but it at least raises my expectations that this place is going beyond the cooking-for-Anglos stuff. Oh, and I have lots of stories of entertaining conversations with waitstaff variously amused, doubtful, and delighted at the nice Caucasian lady ordering stuff most of their non-Asian customers would fear to touch. Seems with every Vietnamese restaurant specializing in bun bo Hue, I have to go through the routine of convincing them that, yes, I know about the cubes of pork blood, and yes, I definitely want them. My strategy is simply to be my usual cheerful and enthusiastic self; sometimes I say something to the effect that "my friends introduced me to this dish and I really really like it." Which, after all, is true. And yeah, making oneself a regular really helps a lot. (You are covering Vietnamese restaurants too, right?) And oh yeah--thirding or fourthing or whatevering the motion that rice be thoroughly covered--especially the very specific preferences for very specific varieties of rice in different regional cuisines. For example, while much of Thai cuisine calls for jasmine rice, the Lao-influenced northern Thai cuisine really wants glutinous rice. And even though I do like brown rice a lot, I realize that most Asians (outside of followers of macrobiotics and other health regimens) don't have a lot of regard for the stuff. Edited to add: FG, I know you said you don't have a lot of budget for cross-country field trips, but if you can find a way to visit the San Gabriel Valley area of greater Los Angeles I think it would be well worth your while. Hundreds of Chinese restaurants, from low to haute cuisine, all fiercely competing for the dollars and palates of a large and discriminating Chinese population--it's really something to experience.

Many moons ago there was a local Boston-area chain called Bel Canto that did deep-dish-ish pizzas -- actually, they called them tortas -- with great non-traditional toppings. The broccoli and walnut one was sooooo good. Very thinly-sliced potato seasoned with a really flavorful extra-virgin olive oil is also awesome.

The older gentleman I now cook for is convinced that white cheddar is better than the yellow stuff, because the white stuff is free of added color. He looked very dubious when I gently explained to him that the yellow color was due to anatto seed and not an artificial color. He's idiosyncratically picky about many other foods as well--for instance he prefers Miracle Whip to real mayonnaise, and only likes Roman Meal bread. I respect his likes and dislikes--he's a sweetie and deserves to have his idiosyncracies respected ... but at the same time I can't help smiling and shaking my head. A lot of people really do need and want their food to be familiar, what they grew up with, even if that familiar image has been created by marketing. On a certain level I don't get it--but hey, I'm a damfool foodie freak so what do I know?

Hi, Sheena-- I'm enjoying your travelogue lots already! As you know, I am a big fan of Korean food, although I feel I still have tons to learn, so I'm looking forward to learning more from this topic. I love your mom's jars of fermenting foods out in the great outdoors. This is the second topic in as many days that has reminded me of my maternal grandmother's habit of keeping jars of fermenting sauerkraut out on her tenement flat's fire escape during the winter. Gotta love that immigrant inventiveness in translating homeland ways to new circumstances.

I am loving that you use your fire escape as cooking space. My mom, who was born on the Lower East Side in 1930, told me tales of her mother (Eastern European Jewish emigree) keeping crocks of fermenting sauerkraut out on the fire escape in the winter. I also love the fact that just a simple cast iron pan will do for roasting coffee.

New York suburbs grrl saluting New York City grrl. Respect! I too dig your store, and sympathize with how it eats all your time. And oh those miniscule East Coast city kitchens. I remember cooking a memorable dinner once in a friend's phone booth of a kitchen in Boston. Looking forward to lots of New York nostalgia.

I confess that I don't especially care for the sensation of sweating, whether brought on by hot weather or hot food. But that doesn't stop me from enjoying spicy food at whatever time of year. (Actually my wimpy tummy is more of an impediment, but I seldom let it stop me either...)

From the article cited by the original poster: Yeah, that jives with my personal experience. All the nutritional info I'd learned over the years was definitely useful -- but only once I developed the personal motivation to modify my behavior. And making modifications on behaviors so deeply-seated and ingrained into my psyche so early in my childhood took (and continues to take) a major amount of effort. Further, the behavior mods only even began to take on my head once I put all my understanding of my behavior to work. Alas and as I've harped on before, my experience is that a lot of weight loss pundits, having apparently not ever experienced having to lose weight themselves, have a hard time grasping how truly difficult this behavior modification is. And I don't think I could have done any such work while I was still living under my parents' roof--the familial psychological terrain regarding food and overweight was just way too fraught with shame, guilt, blame, mixed messages, denial, and modeling of poor behavior. I generally have a positive attitude towards public programs to address various social ills, but I confess to being dubious as to whether any public program can be devised to address these issues of behavior modification and family dysfunctionality around food in any kind of large-scale way. And that's not even touching the socioeconomic and media-message issues. I'll tell you one hunch, though--if someone could figure out how to market healthy eating and sensible weight loss as really "cool"--in a way that kids accept as cool, and not just yet another embarrasing adult attempt to appear cool--things might really get somewhere. Like, if some rap or rock star that parents really disapprove of suddenly went vegetarian and did a whole trip about how rebellious and bucking-the-system it was, I bet you'd see a whole bunch of kids decide to annoy their parents by demanding tofu and wheat germ.

I had one friend whose childhood term for the above-referenced pasta item sounded more like "piss-getti"! (with appropriate amounts of childish giggling). And when my kid sister was very young, it was just "sketties." Another one from childhood: "sparrow-grass."

Reading the corporate history off of that website really appealed to my wacky sense of humor. Apparently Jelsert just kept acquiring other companies making those little frozen tubes of sweet stuff until they've wound up pretty much cornering the US market--they keep separate brand-names like Otter Pops going because they have strong regional followings. And somewhere in there they even developed a "freezer bar" type product just for dogs! (scroll down) Mmmm ... beef and cheese ice! I think the brand I knew when I was a kid growing up in the New York suburbs was Pop-Ice (Jel-sert apparently owns that one now too). I did eat them back then, but I thought of them as low man on the totem pole of frozen treats--the one I really craved was Good Humor's Chocolate Eclair ice cream pops. Heh. Even as a child I was a food snob.

I feel much safer buying sashimi-grade fish for home consumption from people who know their sashimi--namely an Asian grocery catering to Japanese customers. In fact, I get most of my seafood these days from Asian markets; the rest is the flash-frozen seafood from Trader Joe's.

Gorgeous stuff. I really need to figure out some way to afford another trip to France. For what it's worth, there's a restaurant here in San Diego that does avocado tempura. Decadently delicious, though it's so rich that I only order it if I have a companion to share it with because I can't finish an order on my own.

I too wonder if it might be the spleen. I have never cooked a spleen, but I've seen spleen (either beef or pork) for sale in local Asian markets. My one hesitation is that the spleens I've seen at market have been a bit longer, and a little thinner in diameter, than the chunk of meat in your photo. But as I said, the ones I've seen have not been from goats. In any case, the texture looks right--at least, as best one can tell from a photo. This page has a photo of a beef spleen for comparison purposes. I'm pretty darned sure the butcher would not give you the gall bladder, as if I recall correctly it's not only inedible, but the bitter bile fluid it contains can render inedible anything it splashes on.

Hi, Klary-- Check out these very informative links from Wikipedia: This one directly addresses your cookery questions, such as: But it also explains a few legit reasons for, say, keeping the lid on a pot of water (it can't effect the final temperature, but it helps your water come to a boil faster). Meanwhile, this link goes over a bit of the science behind boiling.

Are you simply using the mystery clamp as a pastry/cookie cutter? (As someone who has spent all of two weeks in France in her entire life, I am enjoying this blog greatly.)

Hell yeah. Many times. The roast beef and boursin sandwiches made by Formaggio's in Harvard Square in the late 1970s. The humongous pastrami and corned beef sandwiches made by Katz' in New York City. The bahn mi dac biet made by K Sandwiches here in San Diego. My own stinkbomb special--liverwurst, raw onion, and brown mustard on good pumpernickle. A really good cubano or panino made by someone who knows their way around a sandwich press. And many many more. Hey, not every type of food is going to be mindblowing for every individual, but as far as I'm concerned a well-made sandwich is a thing of beauty and a joy for ... well, however long it takes me to inhale it. However, there are many not-well-made sandwiches that are decidedly NOT things of beauty. Being pre-made does not in itself doom a sandwich to irredeemable nastiness, but it certainly stacks the deck against the poor thing. Still ... in a shopping center in San Diego's Hillcrest neighborhood there's a Quizno's just across from the local Trader Joe's. Made-to-order and toasted and pepper bar notwithstanding, I still pass up the Quizno's for the pre-made TJ's sandwiches on a regular basis. I dunno, maybe I'm just letting the establishments' respecitve vibes overly influence me ... but I just can't make myself go in the Quizno's. And I even liked their SpongMonkey ads!

As a confirmed sauerkraut fan, I'd love to know more about Chinese sauerkraut. Is it made with what we Anglos call Chinese cabbage/napa, or some other type? Could I buy it by the jar in my local Asian grocery here in the States? Just did a quick Google search, and didn't find much info, so anything you have time to tell me would be most welcome.

Oh dear. No, I wouldn't, but not because it's an energy drink, but because the combination of tomato and clam juices gives me The Fear. The drinks I tend to prefer go for a sort of grapefruity flavor reminiscent of Fresca. I think I'm saved from the problem of the sickly-sweet energy drinks by virtue of the fact that I stick to the low cal/low carb ones. That does mean I'm getting a dose of artificial sweetener with my other chemicals, but then I haven't been able to shake the diet soft drink habit either. Hey, I'm not saying it's gourmet--I'm not even saying it's logical. But for whatever reason, I find myself drinking the darn things.