mizducky

After literally decades of dealing with doctors, nutritionists, dietitions, self-help books, natural foods stores, medical websites both official and alternative, support groups both official and alternative, etc. etc. ad nauseum, I am more than familiar with all the guidelines about what one *should* be eating. Actually, even the official guidelines have contradicted each other in various places and times over the years, and the alternative suggestions are all over the map, but more on that later perhaps. For now, I shall note that, even despite the contradictions and controversies, I do have a pretty good idea of how I should be eating for optimum health and to help address various health issues. The problem remains, though: how to translate these healthy goals into meals I actually *want* to eat. I have found most official nutrition sources worse than useless for help in this regard. They tend to fail me for the following reasons, which as you will see are closely related: 1) These health experts seem not to be foodies, to judge from their actual meal and recipe suggestions, which IMO evidence the culinary equivalent of tone-deafness. Usually their suggestions are rife with heavily chemicalized and substandard-tasting items such as artificial sweeteners, margarines, low-fat dairy products, flavor-free ways of preparing foods (the proverbial grilled boneless skinless un-oiled unsalted chicken breast and steamed unbuttered unsalted vegetables), and other ideas that I for one find simply hare-brained (no, sprinkling a sodium-free seasoning blend on that poor naked chicken breast and those boring steamed veggies is *not* going to miraculously make them any more appealing). 2) These experts seem to have no grasp on *why* people find the unhealthy foods they prefer so enjoyable. It's like there's an informational disconnect between the culinary world, where *everyone* seems to know that fat carries flavor and salt opens up that flavor to the human taste buds, and the medical world where they just go "oh, fat and sodium are bad for you, so just cut 'em out." Mind you, a lot of their patients are inhaling their excess fat and sodium through highly overprocessed foods like fast-food burgers, etc., which can hardly claim heightened culinary status ... but still. It's like these doctors have no grasp whatsoever of the culinary function of the ingredients they recommend or disrecommend, only the nutritional function, so they have no realization of the culinary doors they are slamming shut when they sentence one of their patients to one of these eating plans. 3) These experts, in their certainly well-intentioned zeal to get their patients healthy, seem to have allowed no sympathy whatsoever for the quality-of-life issues surrounding food. It's like they're going "hey, your health is paramount, and enjoying food is a tiny inconsequential issue in comparison." Well, yeah, certainly it's majorly meaningful to live a long, healthy life, but if the food plan for maintaining that long healthy life is so unappealing that your patient can't bear to stay on it, how are they ever going to reap the plan's benefits in the first place? 4) These experts seemingly have no grasp of the difficulty of the task they're asking their patients to attempt when they advise them to change these life-long eating patterns, probably ingrained early in childhood. Numbers of you have specific food dislikes, that you're totally willing to acknowledge as not amenable to rational argument--you just dislike item X, alway have, and all efforts by your friends along the theme of "oh, you only dislike it because you've never had it cooked right" and etc. just totally fail. It somehow got hardwired into you somewhere along the line. Now imagine that a doctor comes along and tells you you can no longer eat a whole host of your favorite foods, and instead have to eat foods you've been hardwired to avoid since before you can even remember--but you have to do it, because it's for your health and you'll keel over from a heart attack or whatever otherwise. And all they do to help you with that massive transition is hand you a piece of paper with a food plan, and maybe recommend a support group where you sit around and bandy about recipes for lo-fat no-sugar cheesecake. Hell--no wonder people fall off those plans! What nobody has been able to tell me--no doctor, no nutritionist, no diet club guru, no healthy-cooking show, no best-selling book--is how to actually take all these healthy-eating guidelines and turn them into real-world food that I might actually find sufficiently appealing that I am seldom if ever tempted to eat the unhealthy crap again. For awhile, I thought Atkins would be my answer--especially since I am a dedicated carnivore with an especial love for all the fattiest foods. Alas--my stint on Atkins, on top of a lifetime of being said carnivore, provoked me into my first acute gout attack. Even if I were now *not* officially barred from any more Atkins by my doctor, I would never do any low-carb diet ever again ever. If you've ever experienced a full-on gout attack (think gallstone pain, only going off in your big toe), you would totally understand why I've been so effectively negatively-reinforced around that one. So ... I've been working on other answers. Answers that take into account my real-world situation as a foodie for whom the taste and pleasure of my food is actually important, recognizing that no food plan will help me if I can't bear to stay on it. I will put out some of the ideas I have come up with in subsequent posts, but in the meantime I wanted to at least get this topic rolling to see what kind of responses I got.

Wow. That guide, plus the presumption that some of *my tax dollars* went into providing such less-that-healthy info, seriously bums me out. But I can't say I'm surprised. Every time I get a food guidesheet/diet/healthy eating plan from any of my doctors, I am astounded at the kind of food suggestions they contain. Substitutions of artificial pseudo-ingredients, processed products ... then these medicos wonder why people have so much trouble sticking to any of these eating plans! (oh, I dunno, perhaps the fact that they taste disgusting might have something to do with it?) This is drifting enough off-topic that I'll probably start a whole other topic on it, but I'll leave off with this: when even professionals presumed to be experts about health and nutrition seem to lack either knowledge or sensitivity about what actually makes food taste yummy, how in the hell is *anyone*, of any income bracket or level of health, supposed to figure out how to feed themselves healthily? (Note to self: Steingarten's book's been invoked enough times around eGullet, it's probably high time for me to get my hands on a copy...)

I've been known to darken Woody's doorstep from time to time. Great drinks, great dancing. A very dear friend of mine owns The Bike Stop and I certainly stop in there from time to time. Heck - I even worked there when they had the Quince Street Cafe next door, back in the day. And yes. I was the token straight chick on the staff. But the leather queens loved me. I remember having a customer insist that my breasts couldn't be real when I was waitressing in a low cut French Maid's costume one Halloween. I told him it was good genes, not a good doctor. ← Talk about discrimination! As a flaming heterosexual I’ve tried that line twice. The first time I get a kick in the....and the second time I got a lawsuit. ← Well, y'know, it does put a kinda different nuance on the line when it's motivated not by lust but by envy.

There do seem to be a whole bunch of different fish called mullet, as mentioned in this article here. And here's another article speculating on how the word "mullet" might have come to mean both some kind of fish, and some kind of haircut.

Bwah! But it sez they don't actually *serve* any mullet at the Mullet Toss!

I tend to use straws in big iced drinks, simply because having the ice bang up against my lips and teeth bugs me. I sometimes use the straw the bartender stuck in my mixed drink because I'm trying to pace my booze consumption for the evening. I actually find most straws in milkshakes to be a royal pain in the ass. Unless they're the extra-wide ones, the straw gets continually plugged-up by milkshake so that sucking on them means a risk of imploding your eardrums. (And if a milkshake is thin enough to be easily slurped with a standard-size straw, I ain't interested in it.)

Apart from this being a prime example of why our mothers keep telling us to wear nice underpants, I'm quite sure the observers appreciated your smile. ← Heh. While I can appreciate the humor in that position, so to speak, I confess to also being appalled at the onlookers. You mean a man is lying there on the floor, at the point of death, and all these goons can do is get a cheap thrill out of ogling the person actually doing something to keep the poor devil alive? The vast majority of guests at dinner parties I've helped put on have been thankfully well-behaved ... except for those compulsory dinner guests known as family. My mother used to be driven to distraction by her mother-in-law (my paternal grandmother). Sooner or later during her visits we'd look up and see MIL had gone missing, only to find her in some out-of-the-way corner of the house, pretending that she hadn't just been running her finger along a window-sill or shelf to see if it had been dusted properly. (Edited to clarify just whose mother-in-law I was talking about here...and then further edited because the heat is screwing up the connection between my brain and my fingers.)

I think I agree with the author's points in general. However, perhaps for simplicity's sake, she left out those of us who do make an effort to incorporate fresh/seasonal/organic/gourmet-ish aspirations into a tight budget, as a bunch of us were discussing over on this topic. And while I can't possibly speak for everyone in that thread, for me such aspirations have nothing whatsoever to do with elitism and everything to do with wanting to eat healthily and pleasurably, express creativity through the medium of food, and explore world cultures through their food practices.

Chicken salad: I confess to inheriting my mother's prejudice against raisins and similar sweet elements in otherwise-savory concoctions. So salads with raisins, grapes, apples, etc. have a real high bar to get over with me, and I never put them in ones I make myself. My preference is to keep it real simple--just the chicken, some decent mayonnaise, and some diced onion or sliced scallions--ideally made the day before so that flavors permeate and, if I was using white meat, it's had time to hydrate in the mayo. Otherwise I too tend to find white chicken meat problematic, whether in a sandwich or otherwise, unless it's been cooked in such a way as to get it maximally moisturized and flavorized. Like teriaki chicken, for instance--as long as the teriaki sauce isn't too sweet (ahh, my mother's influence again) ... Jack in the Box recently added some rather ambitious (for fast food) ciabatta sandwiches to its menu around here, including what they're calling a Bruschetta Chicken Ciabatta. I thought it actually came out pretty decent--I mean, for something you got in a drive-through. The "bruschetta" part, IIRC, means a mess of chopped tomatoes and etc. piled on top of the allegedly-grilled chicken breast--that, and the lettuce and mayo (I think it was mayo) makes the sandwich a little slide-y and unweildly, but the ciabatta does absorb a bunch of the juices these ingredients generate, and because it's sturdier than a standard hamburger-style bun it helps contain the slide. Admittedly, though, this is yet another chicken breast sandwich in which the breast winds up a relatively-blank canvas to be (hopefully) perked up by all the stuff piled on top of it.

Here's a short article on the fire from the King 5 website. I don't think I ever went in the Scarlet Tree while I lived in Seattle, but I know the Roosevelt neighborhood well, and as the article says, I suspect the loss of that joint is definitely going to hit a bunch of folks there pretty hard.

Y'know, these points brings up something I forgot to say earlier. Ditsydine, in your initial post you observed: "If I shop for just a receipe--my budget is blown." I have noticed a similar syndrome: somehow my grocery bill almost always gets way out of hand if I am shopping for specific ingredients to follow a specific recipe to the letter. Inevitably there are some ingredients that just don't happen to be at a good price that week, and others which are specialty items, which, even if each is cheap individually, start to add up. I noticed this, for instance, during the Pad Thai cookoff--it was nice to augment my pantry with a whole bunch of new ingredients, and each of them individually were pretty reasonably priced, but ya spend a little here and a little there, and suddenly you're talking significant money (to borrow an old political saw...) Whereas if I shop flexibly, being guided by what looks good and is priced right in the market that day and what I already have at home, rather than a predetermined goal of "I want to make such-and-such a dish and nothing else," my grocery bill stays much more under control. This does require a little pre-planning in terms of taking inventory of the pantry and fridge before I shop. It also helps that my cooking skills have improved significantly in recent years in terms of understanding general techniques as opposed to blindly following recipes by rote (I have Alton Brown to thank for helping me make that transition). I still do the occasional splurge on a totally-new recipe that requires purchase of lots of new-to-me ingredients, but I have also learned to find the creativity of taking whatever's available and cheeeeep and making it work. That's pretty much traditional cookery in a nutshell any way, innit?

It's not that the diner is early in the trip, it's more that it's a decent bit off the route. ← Okay, now I'm confused. You did say you were looking for diners off I-87 just north of New York City, right? Well, the diner I cited, at least to judge by the scale on Google maps as well as my memory, is just a smidge over 1000 feet from the Nanuet exit on I-87/287 AKA The New York State Thruway. So I seem to be missing something here ... ? (Not trying to be difficult, just having trouble visualizing your route ... are you coming up from New York City, or picking up I-87 from the New Jersey Turnpike or Garden State Parkway etc.?) Edited to add: oh wait, you say in another post that you're starting in Philly. So yeah, you probably are missing that bit of I-87/287 coming up from Manhattan ... (don't mind me, I'm a map freak... )

Sincerest condolences on the death of your grandmother, takomabaker. She sounded like a grand old dame (and I mean that in the best way possible).

I've never really found all that much difference in taste in commonly-available bottled waters. The tapwater I run through my Brita filter is quite tasty enough that I just don't bother with bottled water at home; and away from home, bottled water is more a convenience than anything else (I dehydrate in something like 30 seconds flat in the July SoCal sun). In fact, I've been known to fill empty bought-water bottles from my kitchen tap and take them with me on car trips around town. Yeah, if I were making beer or something, I'd definitely get a lot more achtung about the water involved. But otherwise ... nah. It's wet, I drink it.

Well, I imagine you might pass this joint so early in your trip that you wouldn't be ready for a pitstop yet, but maybe you can plan to have breakfast there at the start of your trip? The Nanuet Diner is an old childhood favorite of mine--my family used to go there all the time. It's just off an 287/87 exit onto local Route 59, and across the street from the Nanuet Mall. Classic Greek-influenced Jersey diner fare, just crept slightly over the line into New York State. Mind you, I haven't been back to this place in years, but if it's anything like it used to be, you'll get a damn good meal. Here's a map.

Y'know, I grew up in Rockland County, New York, just over the state line from Bergen County, New Jersey, and spent a large part of my youth exploring all different parts of Jersey. So yeah, I know there's a lot more to Jersey than Sopranos territory--Princeton, the Pine Barrens, the shore, the affluent communities. But as I have always said, almost every stereotype has at least some small grain of truth to it. And the plain fact of the matter is that the Sopranos-land version of Jersey is still alive and kickin' too, and totally leaving that out would paint just as incomplete a picture of Jersey as leaving out any of the other parts. (Plus, in some ways, I actually feel more at home, personally, in Sopranos-land Jersey than I do in Affluent Rural Jersey. But hey, what the heck do I know? I come from the suburb of New York that, if anything, gets even less respect than Jersey. I mean, at least people mention Jersey; Rockland County is so below the radar it doesn't even seem to merit being the butt of jokes. )

Heh. I am all about cooking on a budget. I'm living very frugally now, and also had the lovely experience a few years ago of getting laid off and living on unemployment and food banks (thank you, dot-com bust!). Here are my own favorite strategies: 1. Animal protein is damned expensive. The more you can economize on meat/poultry/fish, the better your budget will fare. I never went totally vegetarian even at my poorest, but I did eat a lot more meatless meals, and when I did use meat it was more often as an accent/seasoning than the meal's main event. It helped greatly for me to take a few lessons from cuisines from less affluent cultures and communities--Asian cuisines in which a little meat goes a long way in a stirfry; soul food in which a single ham hock flavors a whole potful of greens or beans; etc. and so forth. And speaking of Asian cuisines, tofu is great for your financial as well as physical health. 2. I hear ya about rice and beans getting way boring after awhile. But they're so budget-friendly, it's worth coming up with strategies to perk them up a bit and make them more attractive. Try other grains besides rice--bulghur, barley, millet, kasha, etc etc. Try different types of legumes--I discovered I found chick peas, lentils, and black beans to be a whole lot more interesting to my palate than pintos and kidneys and navy beans. Spike the grains and legumes in various ways--spices, herbs, tomato products, onions, garlic, vinegars, chiles all help a lot. And don't forget variants on the grains/legumes theme, like hummus; split pea soups; lentils vinaigrette; fried rice; kasha varnishkes; pilaus; tabbouli; even a nice risotto becomes reasonable if you can find a bulk-foods source for the arborio (like at my local food co-op) ... 3. A lot of the cheaper foods (the beans and rice, the braiseable cuts of meat) do take more time to cook. The crockpot has already been mentioned as one tool to make these foods more manageable time-wise. I also highly recommend the pressure cooker--especially handy when you come home from work hungry to discover you forgot to stick dinner in the crockpot before you left in the morning. There are all kinds of fancy expensive pressure cookers out there, but you can find cheap-but-reliable ones that will serve you just as well in your local Target/KMart/big box store. 4. The bulk foods bins in your local natural foods market are your friends. Generally the price per lb./whatever will be significantly lower than the equivalent food in the fancy packaging on the supermarket shelves. And the variety of foods available in bulk form keeps growing. 5. Your local ethnic markets are often your friends as well. I have often found that produce is significantly cheaper in the local 99 Ranch than at the local Von's/Ralph's/Albertson's, and one can also often find some real bargains at the meat counter (like chicken legs for 25 cents a pound). 6. Farmer's markets also offer many bargains--especially when closing time looms near and vendors drop their prices to get rid of stuff they don't want to haul back home. You might need to trim off some bruised and banged-up bits, but that's a small price to pay when you get a whole crateful of veggies for cut rate.

Okay, this is my admittedly non-Asian-background observation of the way tofu gets labeled and packaged here in the US, so bear that in mind: What I see in markets around here: there is "regular" tofu and "silken" tofu (as well as a whole bunch of other types of dried, pressed, seasoned, fermented, etc. tofus, but let's just set those aside for the moment and concentrate on the two main categories...) Anyway, both "regular" and "silken" tofu are each available in a variety of firmnesses, variously designated as soft, medium, firm, etc. But the "regular" tofu, regardless of firmness designation, is always of a slightly spongy texture, the sponginess more pronounced in the firmer varieties and almost undetectable in the softer ones. This tofu tends to have a skin, which will be slightly tougher and more obvious on the firmer varieties, and maybe completely undetectable in the softer varieties. This "regular" tofu is the one most often sold immersed in a water bath. Whereas the "silken" tofu, again regardless of firmness designation, will always be uniformly creamy and smooth-textured, with not even a hint of sponginess, and always skin-free. I don't ever recall seeing the silken tofu sold immersed in water--I tend to see it in those aseptic shelf-stable packages that are such a bear to get open. In other words, the key distinction between "regular" and "silken" as marketed in the US is the texture (spongy vs. creamy). It does seem to be the case that a given firmness-designation of "regular" tofu is a bit more solid than the corresponding firmness-designation of "silken" tofu. Adding to the confusion is that there don't really seem to be any standards for those "soft", "medium", "firm" etc. designations in either style of tofu. In addition, it can be hard to tell the softest varieties of regular tofu apart from silken tofu without the packaging to give a clue, and nigh impossible once both are thoroughly mushed up. But those complications aside, I just go with "regular"=spongier and in the water bath; "silken"=creamier and in the water-and-airfree aseptic packaging. Works for me.

I should point out that some regions of the USA apparently consider their citizens more mature than do others. US alcohol laws vary, sometimes wildly, from state to state, and even between municipalities within the same state. For example, while California allows sale of everything from beer to hard liquor in supermarkets and etc. 24/7, Washington State restricts hard liquor sales to state-owned liquor stores (which are not 24/7, in fact they're closed on Sundays). And there are still counties out there where it's as if Prohibition has never been repealed; even owning alcoholic beverages bought elsewhere is a crime in these "dry" counties, which proves a real goldmine for local police forces as they follow booze buyers from "wet" counties over the line into their "dry" home county. Yep, it's pretty whack as far as I'm concerned, and having once lived in a couple of the more restrictive areas here in the USA, I definitely feel your pain up in Ontario.

Wow--I'd never been out to Brooklyn College, so I had no idea. If you'd posted those photos without identifying info, I would have assumed they were from some part of Harvard's campus I wasn't remembering. Definitely gorgeous. And yeah--environment does make a difference. Doesn't have to be expensive, it just has to be not-ugly, is all. I've taken classes at some schools that shall remain nameless, that went with a lot of souless architecture and paved-over public spaces, and found them distressingly soul-numbing. Understanding the parody aspects of that treasure-boat beer poster is really delightful. Now I'm wondering if there isn't an anime commercial of those seven merry beer-swilling gods running on Japanese TV somewhere--I can just picture it. Pan, thanks loads for the New York food extravaganza! It really has been years and years since I experienced anything like that myself in "the city", and now I'm all nostalgic for the joys of exploring the little joints and food carts and street festivals and whatnot.

Have you tried these folks yet? (They have Las Vegas and NJ/NYC locations.) By the way, you realize you're going to pay a higher price if your trip overlaps into the Labor Day weekend, right? If your plans are flexible enough that you can make the trip finish before Labor Day, I bet you'll get a better price.

Yes, except I don't remember them being round. They were made in huge rectangular pans, and they cut off as much as you wanted. They were sold by weight. (Or maybe I'm imagining this? Does anyone else remember buying them in this form?) Well, whatever shape they were or are, they're darn good. The more onion the better, of course. ← Nope, you're not imagining that. I remember seing--and eating--that style too. (Damn, I'm hungry now! )

Actually, I don't think I really addressed your point #2 as such--when the proteins relax again, that's not so much from further cooking but from removal of heat energy. But yeah, there is enough residual heat energy that the meat does continue cooking for awhile even out of the oven until that excess heat radiates off. (That's the same reason why it's best to remove an omlette from the pan while it's still a tad runny, as residual heat will continue cooking it; otherwise, if you waited until it was perfectly done to removed it from the pan it would wind up being rubbery-overdone once it sat on the plate for even a couple of minutes.) There's also a point I neglected to address, about whether that browned surface on the roast really does hold the juices in. I've read the authorities who debunk the concept that searing meat surfaces holds juices in. It just doesn't match my observations that breaching that surface starts the leakage. Maybe I need a little elucidation on that point myself. In the meantime, though, I'm gonna stick with what I've observed.

Hmm...that's different from what I was thinking of, but I know this, too, and like it very much. I may be describing something that should be called by another name. ← Heh. Check my previous post--I found another picture that looked closer to my childhood memories of a foccacia-sized bialy-thang. Here it is again ...

Onion board is also known as "pletzel" in Yiddish. The ones I fondly remember from my childhood weren't so much cracker-like as kinda like someone took a bunch of bialy dough and made a large, skinny, squarish foccacia-like thang with it. A little flaky, a little chewy, baked golden-brown, generously flecked with browned bits of onion. Insanely good with standard bagel-fixings. Edited to add: here is a picture of an onion board--this one's a little bit fatter than the ones I remember from when I was a kid. Edited *again* to add: Oh wait! Now here is a picture of an onion board that looks a whole lot more like my childhood memories. (Yes, I'm obsessed--why do you ask? )