mizducky

I'm not sure how the hell it started, but I've developed a bit of an energy drink habit. Even though I've looked at the figures online (scroll down for the table) and seen that such drinks usually don't have any more caffeine per volume than a cup of regular coffee, somehow there's a weird attraction there. Maybe I'm simply more of a marketing fool than I'd like to think I am. Maybe I'm just bored with the usual round of soft drinks. Whatever it is, I keep buying the damn things. Anyone else? (For what it's worth, my current favorite is Rockstar, the sugar-free or no-carb versions.)

Aw nuts. I had been alerted to Linda's failing health, but I was hoping against hope that she'd somehow pull out of it. Sigh. Another person who I'd only ever met over the net, and she's gone. I too will fondly remember her foraging blog, even if the only foraging I'll probably ever do myself will be for easily-identifiable things like blackberries. Rest in peace, Linda, and may your memory be for a blessing.

I have nothing of substance to add right now, but just wanted to say that I am enjoying this blog immensely already.

I too frequently shop ethnic markets for produce, as well as discount supermarkets such as Food 4 Less, and have found that I have to examine the goods carefully because with the lower prices comes sometimes-dodgy quality. I am pleased to say, though, that I've never gotten grief from any store employee for picking over their goods. Plus, yeah, I'm far from the only person doing so--some of those matriarchs make me look like a babe in the woods when it comes to being picky. I don't mind at all having to shop a little harder at these kinds of markets, because when I do find the good stuff it rivals the quality of the mainstream supermarkets but at a significantly lower price.

You've got the touch, David. I was about to ask you if you were familiar with Bai Tong, the venerable Thai restaurant just outside Sea-Tac Airport, but when I went to look up their website just now I found it a "dead" front page; I also stumbled upon a web posting suggesting they had closed. Do you happen to know the place, and what may have become of it? I cherish the taste and mouthfeel memory of their black sticky rice pudding.

You could always give your extra egg white to those of us who like it.

Oh, the garlic sounds like a fun idea--everything's better with garlic. I might not do it like that recipe, but now I have the thought that subbing some soft-roasted garlic for at least some of the mayo in a "modern" egg salad could be very very nice. An earlier post (too lazy to look back and find it) raised the question of the difference between a hardboiled egg sandwich and an egg salad sandwich. Well, if you make your egg salad pretty chunky as I do, the line does begin to look a little blurred. But in my sandwich-making at least, there is a distinct difference between slices of hardboiled egg laid out on mayo-spread bread, vs. hard-boiled eggs mashed, bound with some mayo, and then spread on some bread. Both of which I like lots, by the way--I just like 'em in different ways. Oh yeah--there have also been some opinions about spreading the salad thin vs. thick. I'm definitely in the spread-it-on-thickly camp--which is a friendlier way to use chunky egg salad anyway.

I adore egg salad -- actually I adore hard-cooked eggs in all forms, including plain, deviled, chopped as a garnish, etc. etc. etc. I have a distinct preference for my egg salad to be majorly chunky. I will eat egg salads in which the egg has been minced or pulverized to a paste, but it almost ruins it for me. My favorite egg salad addition is chopped onion or scallions. Chopped celery is nice too. No sweet additions for me--forget the sweet relish. And while the gentleman I now cook for has gotten me to at least tolerate Miracle Whip in the house, I much prefer mayonnaise. And I like to use the bare minimum of mayo necessary to make all these ingredients adhere into a salad. (I suspect that some of the egg-salad haters posting to this topic may have had traumatic experiences with egg salad reduced to glop by way too much mayonnaise added to way too finely-grated eggs combined with insuifficiently-drained pickle relish.) Seasonings: lots of black pepper, a touch of salt. Sometimes I'll just eat it plain out of the bowl; sometimes I like it on a good sturdy bread, often toasted; sometimes I'll spread it on crackers or stuff it into ribs of celery. I have recently discovered the joys of Chinese preserved duck eggs a.k.a. "thousand year eggs." I bet one could make one hell of a fascinating egg salad with some of those! (Probably using something other than mayonnaise as the binder, though...)

Dude! What a killer opening for a blog! Even if I wasn't in love with the Pacific Northwest I'd be hooked. As it is, I'm now experiencing wicked pangs of nostalgia for that corner of the world. There was a period in my decade as a Seattle resident in which I did a lot of driving all around the region for internship/work purposes. What beatiful country. I have fond memories of that drive across the length of Washington. A couple of times to Spokane, once beyond to Moscow Idaho. That trip I departed the interstates early and drove state and local routes through the Palouse. Just ravishing, those rolling hills... till I realized I hadn't seen another vehicle for seemingly hours and miles and if my little rustbucket Chevette gave out I'd be in deep doughnuts. There are so many other things I wanted to comment on, I kind of gave up trying to keep track of them. Instead I think I'll just sit back and enjoy the show.

Right on to all of that too. I have ranted about much the same things on a frequent basis on my weight management blog. This is by no means to say that there aren't doctors out there bucking the trend, though ... Bless you, cats2. But alas, you are evidently one of the minority of doctors who does take time to address this issue with your patients in a humane manner. I regret to report that the majority of doctors I have encountered are rather more like the ones Fat Guy rants about. I even, quite memorably, had one doctor who repeatedly (and with an extremely unempathetic manner) brought up bariatric surgery, even after I had emphatically told him several times that I was Not Interested. And curiously, when I started working on my weight through managing my food intake the old-fashioned way, he pooh-poohed it! It was as if he preferred me going through the expensive hazardous surgery to doing it the healthier way! Thanks a lot, dude, for being so supportive of your patient's own initiatives! You better believe I fired this guy ... but I felt deeply concerned for the rest of his patient base who might not be as ornery as I am.

I'm so glad I caught up with your blog before it closed! Many thanks for including us in your very busy week. I may well be turning up more often in your senior dining thread, as I've just become housemates with an elderly friend who I'll be looking out after, including cooking meals for. Take care, and get some well-deserved rest!

Michael, my deepest condolences on the loss of your friend. This is a subject that hits very close to home for me. Watching my father die of kidney failure and other complications brought on by poorly-controlled type 2 diabetes, entirely caused by his eating habits, played a huge role in kicking me into my current weight-loss adventures. I did get to see him for a few days near the end--I became very aware that I did NOT want to die that way. I also took a long hard look at how much all my dad's rationalizations about his behavior sounded a little too damn close to my own for comfort, and realized that if I didn't start doing something about all that and soon, I might well go out just like Dad, or something just as nasty. But even with such an intense demonstration of mortality fresh in my mind, it took another whole year of thinking about it before I finally was able to follow through.. It's just so damn hard for those of us with messed up eating programming to override and change it. I honestly don't think the difficulty of it can be fully grasped by anyone who has never needed to change a behavior so deeply ingrained and so deeply buried under layers of psychological wounds and weirdnesses. Not to mention the unique challenges food intake management presents to food enthusiasts: Right on. I swear that any weight management plan that doesn't take into account the fact that we enjoy food is doomed to fail.

Thanks for the plug! Yep, kalypso has done a great job of covering the waterfront, so to speak. I think I can only add the following: If you're willing to take a relatively short taxi ride to Barrio Logan/Logan Heights, due east of Downtown and East Village, you can find some decent Mexican eats--as the "barrio" indicates, you'll be traveling into the 'hood. I haven't done a lot of exploring over there yet, but so far I dig El Siete Mares (specialists in seafood, as the name indicates). To get Korean barbeque, I'm afraid you're going to have to take a longer taxi ride, up to Kearny Mesa--maybe you can stage a food escape with some of your fellow conference attendees. I don't have much personal experience with this cuisine, but I believe our buddy Kirk (mmm-yoso here on this board and on his excellent blog) likes Buga, just west of the I-805 on Clairemont Mesa Blvd. There's also a huge nexus of Asian restaurants of a variety of cuisines just a couple miles east of there, lining Convoy St. from about Clairemont Mesa Blvd. south. Check Kirk's blog for lots more details. And one of my favorite little downtown food finds: when you've had it with the Convention Center, just slip out the back way and start walking towards the water, and eventually you'll come to the Embarcadero South Fishing Pier, where you'll find JJ's Sunset Deli, a little open-air sandwich stand that makes a damn nice ribeye sandwich.

Yeah, tofu shirataki are made of konnyaku with some tofu added. I may be wrong, but I believe the tofu shirataki were developed for non-Japanese consumers who would like the low caloric content of konnyaku products but might be put off by regular konnyaku products' bouncy texture and translucent "color". The opaque white tofu shirataki look a bit more like conventional pasta, and also tend to have a much softer texture--still not like pasta made from wheat flour, but closer than pure-konnyaku shirataki. There is a certain amount of misinformation floating around the web about konnyaku products and alleged wildly negative effects on the digestive system, so take these wilder stories with a grain of salt. FWIW, I've eaten a whole lot of konnyaku products of various sorts with no negative effects whatsoever.

I too stopped at a similar little truckstop somewhere along that same stretch, several years ago--wonder if it was the same one? My memories are that it was not a chain, was definitely on the rustic side, was doing lots of business, and that it looked like its clientele included lots of locals as well as long-haul drivers. There was seemingly nothing else for miles around. I'd been holding off posting about it because I couldn't for the life of me remember its name or exact location. But places like that demonstrate some of my personal road-luck philosophy: sometimes it's fun to just pull off the highway wherever you see signs of life and see what happens. Worst case scenario, you get to do a little amateur cultural anthropology and get a story to dine out on for years to come. Best case, you discover a fun place to remember for future trips.

Haven't been yet, but my musician buddies in The Steely Damned are playing there July 3rd, so I'm going to see if I can weasel my way onto the guest list--which will hopefully leave me a few bucks in my wallet to try the food.

What do you all think would happen if a newbie, when told to go get a left-handed whisk or whatever, responded with "Oh come on, there's no such thing!" Would he be viewed as a spoilsport? Hailed as refreshingly sensible for a newbie? Set up for a much more devious trick? What?

Maybe it's the late hour at which I'm reading this, but this photo showing the poor lost little asparagus down below the grate really cracked me up.

Hi Randi--happy blogging! I keep meaning to contribute to your topic about cooking for the senior dining program, especially since I'm about to start a live-in assistance arrangement with a senior friend of mine who is a similarly picky eater, but I've been so flat-out busy that I've hardly had time to read eGullet, let alone participate. I may not be much in evidence in your blog either, but I'll at least be lurking. Have fun!

Cool! I've been using gochujang and toban jian interchangeably for years now, so it's nice to know I'm not the only one. ← what's toban jian? I can't remember if its dwanejang of jajang? I use gochujang and dwaenjang in my own rendition of mapo tofu, so that is a good example of using korean ingredients in chinese cooking. ← Toban jian is (at least one transliteration into English of) the Chinese version of chile-bean sauce. It's similar enought to gochujang that I imagine there was some cultural crossover at some point. I've used both to make mapo tofu at one time or another, depending on which I could find at the market.

Cool! I've been using gochujang and toban jian interchangeably for years now, so it's nice to know I'm not the only one.

As a person who normally doesn't care much for mixing sweet and savory items, I confess I have had mixed feelings about the greens/nuts/dried fruit salad ever since I first encountered it. That's probably due at least in part to the fact that so many exemplars I've sampled have really overdone the sweetness component, either by dumping on way too many bits of dried fruit and candied nuts, or using a sickly-sweet berry vinaigrette, or some other such gaffe. Yeah, Caesars are at this point way the hell too over-exposed, but at least I could count on them to stay well within the bounds of the savory without any sweet glop on 'em. But usually I couldn't care less about which dish is fashionable and which passe. I think I recall somebody mentioning several posts back that they felt fried calamari had been way overexposed too (sorry, feeling a little too lazy to find the post). Me, I loved fried calamari before they were fashionable, and I'll probably keep on loving 'em way after they've gone back out of fashion ... and I bet if I wait long enough, they'll eventually come back into fashion again, and I'll still be loving 'em. But I do care when a dish becomes so fashionable that even the clueless places start doing the dish ... and start wrecking it in the process. That's probably how I wound up running into a few too many sickly-sweet greens/nuts/dried-fruit salads drowning in oversweet raspberry vinaigrettes. Ick. I'll even take the passe chef salad instead.

There's a number of Asian cooking techniques in which cuts of pork with the skin still on are first braised, then deep-fried to crisp up the skin. I've yet to try doing this myself because I'm a real wimp about messing with deep-fat frying, but the concept sounds very appealing--definitely the best of both worlds.

Y'know, even though I love gizzards, I don't think I've ever bought a package of just gizzards and cooked them as the main event. The gizzard was always the cook's treat along with the other contents of that bag of trimmings that come with a whole chicken or turkey--or, when I was a kid, the gizzard was one of the bits my mom and I fought over. Or it would wind up with the other giblets in the gravy for the Thanksgiving turkey. In any case, all I ever did to prepare it was to simmer it with some onion and/or garlic until it got tender--which, with a gizzard, does take awhile. Never bothered to trim off the silverskin--didn't know that was a done thing anywhere. If you simmer them long enough, evidently, the silverskin becomes not much of an issue. They'd still have some chew, but I liked that. This topic is reminding me that I really should just buy a bunch sometime try something a little more interesting with them.

In addition to the misuse of cream cheese in sushi rolls, I have mixed feelings about those who go one step further and put lox in there. Sometimes this actually works for me, but only if a really mild sweet-flavored Nova lox is used. Otherwise the lox's flavor is just way too strong and blots out just about everything else. And meanwhile a whole other part of my head is going "I'd much rather have this lox on a bagel and some actual raw fish in this roll."