mizducky

I have no data to support this, but I suspect that any bent-and-dent business (and stock) that might have existed in many US urban areas has been pretty much sucked up by the proliferation of 99-cent stores. At least that looks to be the case here in urban SoCal.

Rachel, have you ever witnessed your sister-in-law-in-law eat any of her own non-foofoo creations? I think the only thing more unsettling than that lasagna-puddle dinner would be watching this lady chowing down on it all with great gusto. I think I've written about this in other topics, but the story in my family is that, of my two grandmothers, one definitely inherited the Bubbe Cooking Gene ... and the other most emphatically did not. The slightly scary thing is that both of them, the one who could cook and the one who shouldn't have cooked, worked in food service at some point. My paternal grandmother was a sweet, unassuming, and very brave woman, with many endearing qualities--I can still hear her lilting accent as she called me a "little maidele" and then asked "You know vhat means 'maidele'? A 'maidele' is a little girl." All this somehow made her cooking all the more endearing. Nothing exotic about its problems--she simply cooked stuff to death and used no seasonings whatsoever, not even salt. I think my mother once told me that Grandma had read a "health" book back in the 1930s that said seasonings were unhealthy. Her repertoire was small: boiled-to-death chicken, well-done-to-death roast beef, and the same cut of meat ground, formed into burgers with nothing else added, and again cooked well-done to death. Her salads were always iceberg lettuce with a trace of grated carrots and maybe a few cuke slices, all a bit soggy, with maybe a little vinegar. In the fall she would carefully collect every windfall apple from her yard, painstakingly peel and trim the many bad spots from every one, and either cook it all down to applesauce (this was actually pretty nice, considering--fortunately I like it without any sugar); or she would add the apples to bread pudding, which she always managed to burn a bit on the bottom. Like I said, her cooking didn't really matter that much to me, but the memory still makes me smile. Earnestly and thriftily carving up all those apples--ya gotta love that. (Probably was a well-learned survival skill from the Old Country.)

Ham loaf and freshly-shelled peas--now that's country comfort! Found cherries for $1.99/lb today at a local produce market. I've tasted better quality, but they're definitely hitting the spot right at the moment.

Ditto on the pork belly! A truly luscious cut. I've had good results with this recipe, but there are many others out there. Re: the pork chops--I think 3/4" is just thick enough that, with close supervision, they could be pan-fried or broiled/grilled without drying out. The key is the close supervision--they can go from juicy to overcooked pretty quickly. For doneness temperature, don't go by the numbers in older cookbooks--they're usually way too high for today's lean-bred pork and result in dried-out overdone meat, as do their warnings to cook until no pink remains. I like to still have a little pink showing in the interior, and a finished top internal temp of 150 deg. F. A brine or marinade beforehand will certainly help keep the meat moist. Alternatively, you might consider braising the chops. Pork braised with sauerkraut is a yummy thing. (edited to try and do something about funky grammar...)

Welcome to eGullet, Devagi! I too enjoy eating with my fingers, and do so often, when I can get away with it. Which isn't quite so often in the US--while it's true that we do have a lot of casual foods that are meant to be eaten with the hands, more formal dining places tend to frown on one going after one's asparagus with the fingers, to give just one example. But the Etiquette Police can't see me when I'm at home! Speaking of which ... it's been a long time since I ate Ethiopian food, but I always adored how one used chunks of the yummy flat injera bread as one's only utensil (both dish and food-scoop).

Definitely yum! I must confess that my mother's chicken soup was a lot more rough-and-ready than yours, Pam. She wasn't anywhere near as vigilant about skimming off the scum, only simmered it for a couple of hours tops, and liked to serve the soup meat and vegetables along with the broth, resulting in a yummy but admittedly homely-looking stew rather than a clear and elegant broth. (Oh yeah--no parsnips, and parsley instead of dill, plus always a bay leaf, about a half-dozen whole black peppercorns, and the same number of whole cloves stuck into one of the chunks of onion.) I was rather startled when I left the familial nest and discovered that most other Jewish households do their chicken soup much more like yours.

Oh yeah--I meant to add to the cherry survey. I've recently seen them around San Diego for anything from $2.95 to $4.95 a pound. I bought some a few weeks ago, but the quality was just barely passable. Mainly I see Bings, but occasionally Rainiers will show up, which I fell in love with when I lived in Seattle--but alas, those always seem to cost a little more, especially down here.

Ahhhhh ... memories of me as an eight-year-old, watching my maternal grandmother methodically churn out dozens and dozens of kreplach ... she very seldom visited, and even less often cooked for us, but my mom was in the hospital giving birth to my kid sister, so Grandma showed up and started making like a bubbe , and I got to see whole bunches of really cool cooking. I can't for the life of me remember what kind of filling she made, nor her recipe for the dough. I do recall that she went with cutting the dough into squares, and then pinching them closed into simple triangles. I think I helped pinch and close a few myself. But mostly I recall just watching in fascination. My mom was a fine cook, but she never made this kind of stuff from scratch. Gotta try this someday (though it'll have to wait until the weather cools off a bit around here...)

Dang! I really need to get my hands on some conpoy ... I've actually spotted a store in one of the Convoy Street strip malls whose signage says it's an herb store, but I haven't had a chance to check more closely to see if it's the kind that also carries dried seafood. Otherwise, I guess I'll have to wait for my next LA run, which might be awhile what with the heat and gas prices and all. There isn't any mail-order/on-line source for these little critters, is there? I couldn't find any so far by Googling, but I'm hampered by being restricted to English.

Hi, Lori! For the mutliple-post quoting thing, all you have to do is click the ADD "" button under each individual post that you want to respond to. Then, when you've got all those selected, click the ADD REPLY button all the way at the bottom of the whole page (not the "reply" buttons associated with individual posts). When the post-editing window comes up it will include all the posts you selected, which you can then edit and insert answers for as desired. ← Thanks, Ellen. I was about to write to Lori and explain, but you explained it way better than I do. Hope you don't mind, but that question has been asked by other eG bloggers and I would like to use your wording in the future! ← Cool! Only I think I need to add to it to make the instructions a little more effective (see below...) Oh yeah--when editing the quoted posts, you have to be very careful when working around the open-quote and close-quote command-lines (the bits in the square brackets at the beginning and end of each quote). The open-quote and close-quote commands work like parentheses: you need both to make a quote format properly, and you need to remove both when you remove a quote, or else the remaining unmatched command can screw up the whole post's formatting. If you accidentally delete even a single character from one of these command-bits, the software can't figure it out anymore and things go wonky. And especially when dealing with nested quotes, it's fiendishly easy to get confused about which open-quote and close-quote goes with which quote. I find it helpful to preview any post that has quoted text in it, and if the formatting's gone feral, I try manually typing in a bare-bones open-quote or close-quote command at the spot in the text where it looks like things have gotten off-track (they look like {quote} and {/quote} respectively, only substituting square brackets for the curly brackets) to see if I can get things back on track. /mizducky, geek to the gourmets

Hi, Lori! For the mutliple-post quoting thing, all you have to do is click the ADD "" button under each individual post that you want to respond to. Then, when you've got all those selected, click the ADD REPLY button all the way at the bottom of the whole page (not the "reply" buttons associated with individual posts). When the post-editing window comes up it will include all the posts you selected, which you can then edit and insert answers for as desired.

Alton Brown has a method of prepping salmon steaks, described in this recipe, that takes this circle method even further, so that you wind up with a neatly-packaged "filet mignon"-like shape. However, I confess to being lazy and not usually bothering. I really really love the steak cut for fish. With a fillet, I always have to mind the tapered ends, which not only cook much faster because they're thinner, but are also more fragile. With steaks, I do have to mind those belly-flap bits (which I was too lazy to batten down), but otherwise I find them a bit more forgiving of my ineptitudes with the spatula. Plus I just really dig eating a nice thick steak-like chunk o' fish. (For what it's worth, every time I've seen the big-eye carp on sale at my local 99 Ranch Market, it's been pre-cut into thick steaks.)

Do your "hens and chicks" plants look anything like these? I'm the world's lousiest gardener, but these guys are high-nostalgia plants for me. We had them in our garden when I was a kid--my mom called them "hens and chickens." The way they'd propagate more and more "chicks" fascinated the hell out of my nerdy little kid-self. But that was nothing compared to the ultra-lush hens-and-chicks I would spot in some Seattleites' gardens when I lived there. I had no idea the darn things could even bloom, until I saw one outcropping in Seattle with this huge robust stalk--rather amusingly phallic-looking, actually--growing a good couple of feet tall straight up out of their midst. Valiantly trying to drag this even somewhat back on-topic, a quick Googling reveals that this plant were sometimes used as a medicinal herb in the various regions of Europe where it has been popular for centuries. (There's also folklore that growing it on the roof of one's house protects it from lightning strikes--which sounds like something you've needed this week ... )

Ah... I was wondering about Por Favor. So Gayla, would you say that "good but not stellar" is a description that would cover that restaurant in general?

Awwwww ... cute kittieeees! The rapt attention with which they're staring up into the camera really makes me smile. What is that gray electrical box-thingie sitting on the floor next to your kitchen's island? I'm guessing it's a humidifier ... ?

To judge purely by the frequency with which I make and eat it, my favorite salad seems to be that pico de gallo/chopped salad thingie I evolved on my own--diced tomato and cucumber, sliced scallions, other cubed veggies as available and appealing (daikon, jicama, etc.), seasoned with chopped cilantro, a tart vinaigrette, and sometimes some minced jalapeno. I also love a good big restaurant chef salad--but only if they keep the iceberg lettuce to a minimum or go with some other greens altogether, and preferably if they use real meats rather than julienning up some glorified lunchmeats. Oh, and then there's the deli-takeout smoked whitefish salads of my youth in the burbs of NY -- but yummy as those are, I tend to think of them more as bagel spreads than "salads" as such.

I second the Souplantation/Sweet Tomatoes recommendation. They spoiled me as far as salad bars go. There's always a line out the door during their peak times. My sister-in-law used to take an empty foil-lined purse when she and my brother went to the Souplanation so she could take some of the muffins home (they used to have huge muffins and now they're comparatively dinky). I love their tart sourdough bread. ← Myself, I confess to being very disenchanted with Souplantation. Yeah, they have lots and lots of salad-fixin' choices, and they look really fresh ... but I find the veggies' flavor to be lacking--makes me suspect that they're using mass quantities of pre-cut veggies delivered either by their own commissary or Sysco. And while there are lots of choices, on closer inspection the choices are rather pedestrian. Broccoli florets--yawn; no mesclun in sight. Meanwhile, their pre-made salads tend to be gunked up with overly cloying-sweet dressings, one of my personal huge bugaboos. And many of the dressings available for ladling over your green salad have the same problem--though at least they have oils and vinegars available for you to mix your own. Maybe I am jaded because I eat so much vegetation these days ... nah, I think I found Souplantation boring even before I went on the almighty health regimen and would freely indulge in their pasta bar (which, in hindsight, was pretty damn pedestrian too). I've actually had better luck with salad bars that are incorporated into Asian buffet restaurants. Admittedly, the quality of the buffet overall is reflected in the quality of their salad offerings, but the good ones will not only have reasonably fresh and well-stocked salad bars, but also include some items unique to the Asian-buffet universe (like big peel-your-own shrimp, mussels on the half shell, interesting--and spicy!--seafood salads, kumquats, etc. etc. etc.). Local to San Diego, I would recommend Great Moon, Sunrise, and East Buffets for their salad bars as well as the rest of their offerings.

Once again, I find myself wishing eGullet had an "applause" emoticon. This so totally jibes with my own experiences in building my weight management routine. If only we could get this strategy out into the minds of the masses, the entire diet industry would go broke (and we'd be much the better for it, too).

Happy bloggin', Marcia! I'm a big long-time fan of sun tea myself, so imagine my dismay when, inspired by the conversation here, I decided to Google for additional info on the stuff ... and turned up the following: "Sun tea" (tea brewed by being left to steep in sunlight) can harbor dangerous bacteria Now I have to say, I have been brewing herbal sun tea for literally years, and have never seen any such signs of bacterial contamination as described in the linked article, nor have I ever gotten sick from the stuff. And I'm probably not going to alter my sun tea routine one whit. But anyway, there's the info, for whatever it may be worth.

Another incredibly cool-looking recipe. Although I had a little laugh about this step: If this were a photo taken in my kitchen, it would also include a shot of my household's cat merrily licking away at this awesome chicken-lollypop the humans left hanging out just for him! (I keep telling him that it's not his food--but he keeps ignoring me. )

Whoa! Glad you're more-or-less in one piece after that accident! Yeah, that is one helluva way to start one's day. (What is it about blogs and Murphy's Law, anyway? ) Thanks for a most excellent blog--keep on fooding like that, young man, and you will go far.

You've been *very* busy while I've been gone, I see. Y'know, my first real flowering as a foodie was when I was 22, fresh out of college and rooming with the recently-graduated computer supergeek who became one of my major cookery mentors. We and our circle of friends cooked and dined with similar abandon--the city in that case was Boston, but the quick coming-of-age as a foodie was similar. So I'm getting an especial kick out of watching you carry on. I haven't been following your posts elsewhere--do you also have friends at school that you cook up a storm with, or for?

Wow. Go out of town for a couple of days, and look what happens! The heads look so ... intense. I don't know what would be cooler--eating a dish like that, or having friends to share it with who would really appreciate it.

Now see, I used to think gravy was a food group. May I also say kudos on your excellent photography of your excellent food. That closeup of the pistaschios made me go "Mmmmmmm ... nuts!"

I like to make a salad of tortellini and marinated artichoke hearts. I add other things depending on whim (finely chopped red onion, slivers of bell pepper in red or other shades, sliced pitted black olives, chiffonaded basil, etc.). I dress this in a nice mustardy vinaigrette; depending on the flavor of the brine in which the artichoke hearts were marinated, I sometimes add some of that to the vinaigrette too. Tortellini in different colors are always fun in this too. The whole-wheat pastas I've used I thought a bit too rough-textured to be enjoyable in a cold salad, but maybe that's just me. I also understand there's some newer whole-wheat pastas out there that have a smoother texture, but I just haven't gotten around to trying them.