mizducky

Years ago, when my sister or I would drive Grandma to Gonzales from the country place, she knew where there was marijuana growing in a ditch. We always had to stop on the way home for her to pick some. (She said it helped her arthritis. ) You can bet we drove the speed limit on the way home. ← One of the few successful foragings this Extremely Urban Grrl ever took part in was way back in my college days. My friends and I spotted this *huge* pot plant growing blissfully undisturbed in a vacant lot not far from our dorm. We figured somebody must have emptied out their car ashtray there, though we had no idea how it had managed to grow there undisturbed for so long. Needless to say, we disturbed the poor thing right away. And after suitable processing, it succeeded in disturbing us.

That stick sounds like a wonderful keepsake ... but waitaminnit--snake stick? Like, for fending off snakes?!? YIKES!!! You're a braver woman than I am, Gunga Din! Although now, with that whole rig in your trunk, I have a mental image of you as Jungle Explorer in pith helmet (okay, hard hat, but it's close), armed with machete, snake stick, and bug repellant, bushwacking your way through the steamy tropical undergrowth ...

Oh, I totally believe you. I'm sure it's frustrating working in a field where they don't give you enough budget to do it the way you feel it should be done. I realize there are a lot of budgetary pressures on hospitals. I just wish they'd give you a bigger piece of that admittedly-spartan budgetary pie to work with (or better, that the pie was bigger to start with). I wonder if someone has calculated the cost of all the hospital meals that go to waste because patients refuse to eat them, and thereby demonstrated to those responsible for hospital funding that these cost-cutting but taste-destroying food prep methods are penny-wise but pound-foolish. (Actually, I kinda suspect other people must have thought of that tactic long before me, and that it probably didn't budge the purse-string holders one bit. )

← Now, this story reminds me of a friend who liked to make interesting craft tchatchkes out of animal materials (fur, bones, fangs, etc.). So when she went on camping/road trips she scanned the ditches too, only she was looking for roadkill. Somehow I think your road-foraging trip was a bit more, erm, *aesthetically pleasant* than hers.

Well, I for one am glad you digressed, because (1) I digress in my postings all the time; and (2) your digression had me laughing like a hyena! Oh poor Great Aunt Mabel! Needless to say, I am enjoying your blog ... and your creative approach to foraging.

Y'know, this brings up a whole other (though related) question: why *does* some hospitals' food have to be so inedible? Is it simply a matter of cost? Other issues being more pressing? Something else I'm completely missing here? Because I honestly don't believe institutional food *has* to be wretched. I totally understand that, since a hospital's first job is being a hospital not a restaurant, and they have to pump out meals for hundreds of patients, they're not going to have food service equivalent in quality to a good hotel's room service. And I also realize that many patients need to be on restricted diets because of their condition. But I've seen hospital food go by that makes even my old high school's cafeteria lunches look like gourmet eating. It takes some doing to make food quite that dreadful. Given that eating well is so crucial to regaining one's health, shouldn't producing food that patients actually want to eat be a major part of a hospital's mission? (Edited to reflect that some hospitals do better than the ones I've experienced...)

Me too? As I've been wont to say at the end of any cooking extravaganza I've ever helped organize (or any other extravaganza, for that matter), it sure does take a helluva lot of energy to have this good of a time, don't it? Thanks like crazy for sharing all of this.

Hmmmmm ... it wouldn't have happened to be this wild green, would it? In which case, you might want to talk to the vendor about the toxicity problem noted in the article. (I recalled the song "Poke Salad Annie" mentioned in the article--I believe it was covered by Elvis Presley--and so was able to Google it that way. )

What a lovely offer! I will most definitely keep you posted on the next time I find myself up in your territory. (And I'll bring the sketchpad. )

Interesting. I was given the big trip about avoiding all sorts of animal protein when I was first diagnosed with gout, but that's a more specific issue about avoiding foods rich in the amino acid purine. Whereas I'd been bugging doctors and searching on the web off-and-on for years about more general info about foods that might precipitate inflammation associated with my osteoarthritis, and never found any hard info. Calipoutine, could you say a little more about the beef thang in that regard? And gaisorowski--are you serious about the lamb biz? (I would not mind at all doing a "lamb cure" for my aches and pains! ) Meanwhile--definitely enjoying your blog, Calipoutine--I just couldn't think of anything worthwhile to say until now.

Heh. There's a whole several-square-block stretch of the Ocean Beach neighborhood (or "OB" as it is fondly known here in San Diego) that's pretty much a total 60's throwback--lessee, you gotss yer juice bars, record shops, "antique"/thrift shops, youth hostel, headshops, burger and taco joints, live music venue, organic-vegetarian food co-op, free-form artists' collective ... and a crowd of surf-punks, bikers, young hippies, old hippies, random assorted cranks and street people, and just plain neighborhood folks with kids in strollers who appreciate a little flair in their neighborhood. Easily my favorite neighborhood in this town, and I wouldn't mind winding up living there one of these centuries. I did make a pilgrimage to Haight/Ashbury a couple decades ago, and it was already way yuppified then. I'm almost afraid to know what it's like today. Did stay at the Red Victorian Inn, though, which at least to judge from their website has still got its freak-flag flying okay. Obviously not California, but I must mention my favorite hippy-dippy place back in Seattle: Mr. Spot's Chai House. They have definitely got the Left Coast vibe goin' on. (And they make some excellent chai as well as espresso drinks.) Edited to add: Jeez, I almost forgot! When a friend and I took a driving vacation across the desert a couple of Februarys ago, we were pleasantly surprised to discover a lovely little nest of alterna-groovy attitude out in Twentynine Palms. Apparently a whole bunch of artists and musicians settled out there to groove on the desert. A lot of this colony's activity seems to center on the wonderfully-named Joshua Tree Beatnik Cafe, which mixes old school hip with new-stylee hip (they've got WiFi Internet). We had a nice evening there catching up on our email, sucking down some lattes, and absorbing the vibe.

Y'know, I think this entertaining reciprocity thang is a very delicate balance ... and part of the equation that's only briefly touched on by the article is the fact that, to have a really successful party, you do need some good party-goers. Almost at the end, the article quotes one "inveterate party-giver" as saying "I don't look for reciprocation. I look for people who help me have a good party." I'm not 100% in agreement, but I do believe that guest life-energy is an essential party ingredient, one that no amount of killer cuisine can cover up the lack of. When people bring the gift of themselves--not just showing up physically, but also party-energy-wise, you could be eating delivery pizza and the party will still be a hit. So I do count showing up in a mood to party as a form of reciprocity. Mind you, I do also appreciate some more tangible reciprocity. But personally, I really don't *want* it to be baldly tit-for-tat--various members of my family used to lay that trip on various other family members all the time, and all the angst engendered by that scorekeeping just made me want to scream and climb the walls. I prefer a more general warm-fuzzy sort of reciprocity, a sensation that I'm included in the social memory of the extended friendship group, in that whenever there is an event of any sort, people remember to think "oh, and we need to invite Miz Ducky, she's a helluva lotta fun." And that results from my having demonstrated over time, by being a lively guest as well as a lively host, that I *am* in fact a fun addition to a party. Currently I have the CHAOS thing going on at my place, so no in-house entertaining right now. But I do try to at least offer to bring something with me when I go to somebody else's house, or at least do some reciprocal act, to keep on demonstrating that I'm that person you want to have at your party. For instance, I helped entertain the kids at a friend's recent Halloween party by playing quick-sketch artist. I think the parents were more blown-away grateful for that than by any plate of Halloween goodies I could have brought to share.

Our family fare when I was a kid was an interesting mix of classic Jewish foods and 60s/70s-style American comfort-and-convenience classics (including some flagrantly traif foods). So, to me home tastes like: --big vats of soup: my mom was another who served her chicken soup with the big chunks of vegetables and still-on-the-bone chicken that had been cooked in the soup; she also made a split-pea/barley/beef soup to die for, based on those little cellophane tubes of soup ingredients sold in the supermarket's Jewish foods section. --this home-made concoction my mom invented when she decided that Hamburger Helper was a rip-off. We christened it "Hamburger Thing." It was gooooood. Her meatloaf was yummy too. --My dad's sole culinary contribution beyond the occasional tossed green salad: steaks grilled on the ancient portable charcoal grill out back. Typically my mom would make her own barbecue sauce (from a recipe out of either Good Housekeeping or Better Homes and Gardens, I forget which), buy chuck steaks, tenderize the heck out of 'em with the Adolf's, and then hand the lot over to Dad. The amount of char my dad put on the meat would probably be deemed carcinogenic these days, but we all loved 'em that way. --Occasionally my mom would put in the extra work to make a Jewish delicacy like boiled beef tongue. I maintain an unholy passion for beef tongue to this day. --For a nice Jewish lady, my mom did some darn fine pork chops. Thanks to her, oven-fried chops coated in Kellogg's Cornflake crumbs is another of my childhood nostalgia trips. --Our refrigerator was always packed to the gills, mostly with deli foods and other assorted chazerei: paper-wrapped packages of cold cuts; jars of pickled things (cukes, herring, you name it); *good* rye bread with properly chewy crust; spicy brown mustard and horseradish; *good* bagels and associated fixings; and the occasional package of smoked whitefish, sable, lox, etc. (these did not last long). In fact, the sight of a big fridge crammed with deli containers and packages may be my single most nostalgia-provoking "taste" of home.

It takes a *lot* to scare me away from a bathroom. I do grant special dispensations to, say, old Chinatown restaurants with funky bathrooms--there seems to be this informal rule that the better the food in one of these joints, the freakier the loo. But I give extra negative marks to places that aspire to higher pretensions but let their bathrooms turn into a sty--as does one bar/restaurant/nightclub here in San Diego which shall remain nameless as Fearless Housemate's band plays there regularly, which unfortunately means I've spent too many nights there wading through discarded toiletpaper on the floor of the bathroom only to discover no paper left in the stalls themselves. There's another bar here in the greater San Diego area, a comedy club, whose bathrooms turn into unintentional comedy all on their own. Not only are the men's and women's rooms incredibly tiny (they essentially took spaces small enough for single-use bathrooms and turned each into two-holers), but the hall by which you access both is miniscule. The men's room entrance is positioned such that all the women lined up for the women's room can get a good eyeful of the urinal action every time a guy sidles in or out the door. Especially after a show (with a two-drink minimum), this engendered lots of entertaining ad-libbed comments from all concerned when everyone rushed the bathrooms en masse. As to unisex bathrooms--heh. Seen lots and lots of those. Between hippy-dippy joints with a laid-back "whatever" attitude, and high-activity gay bars ... ah yes! Memories from my mis-spent youth, wandering into the ladies' room at the current Hottest Club Of The Moment and having to fight my way through the drag queens to use the mirror. Always brings a nostalgic smile to my face. But my favorite unisex loos were those in the sadly deceased Speakeasy in Seattle--I think they may have been Seattle's very first Internet cafe, a terrific space with great coffee and munchies, as well as a great live performance program, but sadly closed after a disastrous fire several years back. Speakeasy's two bathrooms had entrances side-by-side. Both doors were identical except for a flat sculptural-looking piece of brushed/distressed metal mounted about eye-level, one in the shape of a square, the other an upward-pointing equilateral triangle. I frequently saw people standing perplexed before the two doors, puzzling over which of these symbols was meant to be male and which female--if the triangle were point-down, they might have had a valid argument that it was the female symbol, but without even that cue they were at a loss. Eventually some regular would clue them in, or at least they'd notice regulars of either gender coming and going through either door as they pleased. I think that was sorta the point, to cause people to question the cultural assumptions with which they were indoctrinated. It amused me, at any rate--though admittedly I am easily amused. (By the way, the rest rooms themselves were always spotless, as was the whole rest of the cafe.)

Oh dear. I seem to have just inhaled a number (and I'm *not* saying what that number is) of slices of Obscene Chain Delivery Pizza. They had a special. I couldn't possibly turn down a special, now could I? Plus I can have the remainder for breakfast. If there's any left. Yep, I've got it. But good.

Hey, next time you find yourself stuck for fresh and interesting spins on any of the big holidays, I'm sure you could find at least a few aspiring food writers here who would be more than happy to play guest columnist ...

Heh. This might be a slightly different take on the topic from what you intended, but I got a terrific education on cooking reasonably good food for way cheap when I was on unemployment for a year (thank-you, dot-com bust ). I not only became an expert on the relative merits of the various food-banks in Seattle, but got quite inventive in combining food-bank offerings with real cheap supermarket buys to produce decent wholesome food. My main strategy was to use time-tested "poor-folks food" techniques, taking some cheap high-bulk starch and doctoring it up with seasonings and just enough protein etc. to give it character and make it more nutritious. Regularly got a whole lot of beans, rice, and potatoes from the food banks, along with random smatterings of vegetables, a few canned goods, and occasionally some cheese and other protein. Shopped the supermarkets looking hard for bargains, day-olds, and reduced-for-quick-sales items, and for super-cheap high-flavor meat oddments like ham hocks, chicken necks and backs, turkey wings and tails, bacon ends and trimmings, and random assorted offal (fortunately, most Seattle supermarket meat departments had not banished their butchers, so trimmings and offal could be regularly found). Then I'd make big batches of rice and beans or split pea and barley soup or dirty rice or the like, using my meat gleanings as embellishment to the grains and/or legumes. Mind you, I was bloody sick and tired of beans by the time I clawed my way into a full-time job again, but at least I was able to survive on the unemployment checks without too much freak-out. And I hardly suspected I was ahead of the curve on the whole offal vogue!

When I've done the whole baked/roasted salmon routine, I've tended to stick with the lemon slices/fresh herbs routine (I'll get an assortment of herbs depending on what's available and what sounds like it will play well together). I'll put some of the herbs and lemon in the cavity, and some in gashes slashed in the sides of the fish. Then seal the whole fish up in heavy-duty oven foil (oiled on the inside so the fish doesn't stick), slide onto a baking tray to catch the worst of the drips, and into the oven she goes. With salmon steaks (I prefer steaks to filets, but I don't see why you couldn't do this with filets too), I either keep it totally simple with just some salt and pepper, or I go for a mix-and-match pan-Asian thang. I make a marinade of good soy sauce (I love the rich flavor of Chinese dark soy sauce), a little toasted sesame oil, a bunch of minced fresh ginger and garlic, and a bit of kochu-chang, mixed together and thinned with a little water as needed. The marinated steaks can then be either pan-seared, broiled, or grilled (one of the reasons I like fish in steaks is I think they have less tendency to break apart on a grill or broiler than fillets do--but you still have to remember to oil the grill or broiler grate for easy fish-removal).

First, a bit of a downer note: you may want to discreetly inquire about how "safe" it is to leave food in that fridge. It is my sad experience, when bringing food or personal items to family members in hospitals, nursing homes, etc., that too many of these items have an unfortunate habit of growing legs and walking off. I don't like contemplating who would be so low as to pilfer things from people too sick to notice (staff? other patients?!? yikes!!!) but it happens, and I'd hate to have you go through the effort of making a whole bunch of lovingly prepared home-cooked food only to see it vanish without your loved one getting to enjoy it. Now ... having gotten that unpleasantness out of the way ... what you should make really seriously depends on the condition of the patient. Some conditions and medications really mess with a person's appetite and taste perceptions. When my mom was in the hospital with cancer, we were going nutz trying to find things that would induce her to eat. Fresh melon cut into chunks wound up being the winner. When my dad was in with kidney failure, I had to navigate his depressed appetite and diabetes as well as non-existent kidney function--for him, low-carb diabetic-safe cranberry juice really worked. I'm guessing your loved one is in better shape than either of these examples if he's mobile enough to access that fridge around the corner. But his appetite might still be extremely variable, depending on what he's dealing with (and the wretchedness of the hospital food might be masking an underlying temporary appetite issue...) So--all other things being equal, I'd tend to go with nutrient-dense but still relatively easily-digestible foods that can be easily broken into small portions to suit a variable appetite. The proverbial Jewish penicillin and other soups would fit the bill. Some really luscious fruit. Cheese and crackers. Mixed nuts (go easy on the sodium if there's any concern about blood pressure/fluid intake). And hey, nothing wrong with some cookies (as long as he has no blood sugar issues)--if he's stuck in the hospital, he's totally entitled to a few indulgences to take the sting out of the stay. Anyhow, that's what I'd do.

Y'know, I haven't yet gotten into taking notes on restaurant meals in a big way (although I see that coming... ). But, when dining alone, I have frequently pulled out the notepad or Daytimer I always carry with me, just to scribble general notes-to-myself to pass the time. Nobody has ever asked me about it. I figure if they did, I'd simply tell them I'm a writer and I'm jotting down ideas for my next story. (In fact, oftentimes that has been exactly true.)

Good point. Silly me--what was I thinking? Hey, ya learn something every day. It belatedly occurs to me that part of my confusion probably stems from the fact that my own and only experience in actually practicing Kashrut was as a young adult in the context of a Havurah, many of whose members were various flavors of vegetarian. Most community meals wound up being milchig/pareve, so while I got a real good grasp of the rules concerning those, I didn't get nearly as much education on the fleischig end of things. Of course, *now* I'm going "duh! and here all this time I was thinking maybe people just served the gefilte fish by itself before the rest of the meal just to be fancy?!?" So, yeah, I'm definitely glad I asked--I don't *like* to be ignorant!

Actually, this depends on the particular version of kashrut being observed. Some traditions hold that fish is "pareve" and thus can be eaten with either meat or dairy; others do hold that fish should not be eaten with meat. Edited to add: oy. The more I go Googling on this particular point, the more contradictory opinions I keep turning up. This site, for instance, says in one place that fish is pareve and can be consumed with either meat or milk, and in another place *on the same page* says: "Jewish law forbids the eating or cooking of meat and fish together, but they may be eaten one immediately following the other by rinsing ones mouth between eating them and washing the vessels and utensils." Okay, so now I'm confused.

When I lived in Seattle, my absolute favorite Thai restaurant was Bai Tong, right near SeaTac Airport on Pacific Highway. When I went back to Seattle for a visit in 2003, I caught dinner at Bai Tong again just before my flight back to CA. It was as excellent as ever. Thai Thom in the U-District was also a favorite of mine. Watching the wok flames at such close range is sure a trip.

Heh. Been there, done that, have the poundage--and the peculiar pantry items--to prove it. (Alliteration totally unintentional. )

No. They are Calzuro clogs. ← As the man himself sez in this eGullet Q&A, he had been a big fan of Calzuro, but recently discovered and is loving the Crocs. (sez she who has been coveting the Crocs but can't make up her damfool mind which color she wants )