mizducky

Oh, I believe you. I've gotten some screwy advice from health-food store clerks myself, over the years. And I would have never recommended carob for that task. Er, wow.

Oh--now I remember that thread! You might want to tell her about Sunspire brand carob chips--totally vegan, sweetened with malted grain sweetener rather than cane sugar. I have tasted these and they're quite nice. Also, scroll down that same page to see totally-vegan chocolate chips (although those do still contain sugar).

I may have what might seem a lame question, but here goes: did the recipe for muffins call for sweetened or unsweetened chips? (Whether carob or chocolate?) While I would never claim that carob is an adequate substitute for real chocolate, it may well be that part of the problem in this case is the use of *unsweetened* carob chips. Myself, I would think *unsweetened* chocolate chips would be just as unpalatable in a muffin as unsweetened carob--I'd rather think you'd want to use sweetened chips, wouldn't you? I have had baked goods with properly sweetened carob in them, and while they don't taste like chocolate, they can be quite nice. I happen to think that the reputation of carob as an ingredient has suffered unfairly from all those attempts to position it as a chocolate substitute--people get so disappointed in its failure to be chocolate that they then fail to appreciate it on its own terms. It is IMO a perfectly okay ingredient--as long as you don't *expect* it to be chocolate.

Ah ... roasted vegetables, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways ... My personal favorite roasted-veg mix is chunked skin-on potatoes, chunked onions, and wide strips of sweet red pepper, liberally doused with good olive oil and sea salt and roasted all together. The peppers and onions infuse their sweetness into the potatoes. I can eat a whole panful of this stuff without batting an eye. I would have thought it was impossible to screw up roasted vegetables, but as I recall the Marriott-catered employee cafeterias at Microsoft used to screw them up on a regular basis. Cold, limp, grayish, and slimy from excessive amounts of low-grade olive oil--blech. But then, a lot of food at the once-terrific cafeterias at The Big Soft had gone noticeably downhill by the time I bid them adieu.

This may mark me as being somewhat brain-dead, but I have gotten a kick out of Jack-in-the-Box commercials ever since they re-invented their corporate mascot as fast-talking Marketing-Suit Clown several years back. Every time I think they've sorta worn out that whole ad campaign, they come up with another chapter that cracks me up. Yeah, corporate marketing is Evil yadda yadda yadda ... but that doesn't mean it can't be damn funny, and someone down at JITB headquarters has definitely got their humor clown-hat on right. Honorable mention for fast-food corporate marketing humor: the infamous Quizno's SpongMonkeys. I know, I know--you either loved those bits of Flash-animated roadkill, or you loathed them. I loved 'em--they just so totally subverted every single thing people try to teach you in Bland Innoffensive Marketing 101. (But then I knew of and loved rathergood.com long before its owner's creations got bought for that ad.) Erm ... I suspect you might have been seeking comments on fast-food industry cleverness as regards their actual product rather than their marketing. I guess I just can't think of any fast-food *product* innovation that I find particularly clever.

Well, I'll tell ya, with all the confessions being made in this topic, I am feeling mightily empowered to get over myself. Ah, the joys of liberation. Heh. My family's dinners tended more to schizoid double-bind trips, as my parents' love of food would collide with their loathing of the familial tendency to overweight, often in a most, erm, *pyrotechnical* way. Even when I was a grown adult, living on my own for many years, my mother still felt she had the right to criticize the amount of food I ordered when we dined together. Small wonder I'm still twitchy about what "other people might be thinking" when I eat in public! But like I said, I'm getting over it... Heh. Now *that* I'm definitely, unrepentantly guilty of. I could never understand hosts who would think a bowl of chips and another of dip was adequate fodder for guests. Ya gotta make that board *groan*, baby! So all your guests ooh and ahh at the fantabulous amount of food! (And you as host get rewarded with fabulous leftovers for the next two weeks!) No no no! This is excellent! And way cheaper than therapy! (Not to mention a helluva lot more entertaining.)

Oh, another thought on this: I'd wondered about my bouts of food fatigue before, thinking gee, is this a manifestation of a jaded gourmand who's lost touch with the primary function of food as fuel/nourishment in a scramble for culinary novelty for its own sake? Is my palate just getting dull from age? Is it just that a lot of foodstuffs just don't have as much flavor as they used to due to the whole farming-as-industry thang? Maybe, to a certain extent all of the above are involved. But I finally decided there was also a possibly positive reason for food fatigue, due to evolution of all things! Since optimum nutrition (without resorting to vitamins and other nutritional supplements) results from eating a wide variety of different foods, maybe humans evolved some kind of internal "food fatigue" behavior that would *prompt* them to grow bored with eating just one thing all the time and instead seek out variety. I dunno--this surmise could be simply bunk. But at least it amuses me.

Another periodic victim of food fatigue here. I think of it as kind of equivalent to that classic girly phenomenon in which you paw through an entire closetful of clothing, every item of which now looks either boring, cheap, unfashionable, or just "what the hell was I thinking when I bought this," finally arriving at the conclusion that you just have "nothing to wear." Yeah, on a certain level I laugh at myself about both phenomena, but they both do happen--so what do you do? For myself, I find I can often get out of the culinary version of this phenomenon by visiting a food market I've never been to before. When confronted by whole new arrays of ingredients--or sometimes even the same ingredients but just arranged in a more fetching manner--my cooking creativity usually reawakens and goes "oooooh! lookit all the purty toys to play with!" For the sartorial version of this phenomenon ... well, sometimes Goodwill is the beneficiary of my boredom.

Actually, I've seen a number of health pundits suggest that several small snacks throughout the day is better for you than the two or three large meals common in so much of the world today, in that the "grazing" approach makes it easier to control one's appetite and/or lose weight. So maybe you're actually ahead of the curve here. For me, one of the great pluses in going out for Asian food (preferably with a bunch of friends) is sharing a bunch of dishes so that I can get tastes of everything. Absent a bunch of friends to do this with, I'm left to the uncertain culinary skills of various local buffet restaurants. I seldom have the nerve to deliberately over-order at a sit-down restaurant, mainly out of self-consciousness--I am rather heavy-set, and I just can't quite chase from my mind the perhaps delusional thought that "everyone" in the joint is watching the fat grrl order way too much food.

My favorite school-lunch sandwich when I was a kid was sardines on white bread. No fancy extras--didn't even toast the bread. By the time lunch rolled around, the sardines would have drained a bunch of their fishy goodness into the surrounding bread--yum! Perhaps other kids thought my smelly fish sandwiches were weird, but I loved them so much that I never even noticed.

You had me going for a second there! I was getting all ready to ask how you got such a lovely-looking crust out of matzoh meal! (Hadn't even thought as far as the salami/cheese combo ... )

Oooh! I used to love going to Pomodoro after chorus rehearsal when I used to live in Seattle.

Welllll ... I would count onions per se as a vegetable dish. However, since in my book the best onion rings are a good fifty-percent or more batter-coating by volume, that does sorta tip them over into the starch category.

Depends - can you tell me which local synagogue he used to perform in during dances?? ← Oops and alas ... no entry on that in my little mental rock-trivia file. Now if you'd asked for an analogous level of detail about my favorite nice Jewish rock-boy, Donald Fagen ... (and that may be as close to on-topic as I can bring this response) ... Again, let me add my thanks for a terrific and heartwarming blog!

Yeah, I do think the potato layer on the bottom provides some stable foundation for the rest of the moussaka, especially when dishing out individual portions.

When I was a teenager, my mother inveigled me to endure Weight Watchers with her. There was this recipe for a "legal mock cheesecake" concoction that my mother and I used to make--mostly whipped cottage cheese sweetened with canned crushed pineapple, topped with powdered cinnamon and baked. The only thing more wretched than that dish was the pathetic way in which both my mother and I wound up craving it as the only relief from the rest of the food plan. Needless to say, we didn't last long in the program.

Heh. Dare I suggest that there are sentimental as well as culinary, practical, and economic factors at work here? My very first lobster dinner (that I can remember) was when I was a kid, on vacation to Cape Cod with my family. It was at a restaurant that, with adult perspective on childhood memory, probably was a tourist trap all the way, but when I was a kid I of course didn't know that--and apparently my parents didn't care, or maybe they were just glad they found a place that was okay about families with kids on their first foray into the Cape. There, amidst the fake fishing-net-and-floats decor, I assayed my first boiled lobster aided by the helpful if corny instructions on the paper placemat. It was a lot of fun, if a little daunting to keep the mess under control. And it tasted wonderful!--apparently, even tourist traps in Cape Cod can manage a tasty lobster, if for no other reason than they do a huge volume of them. On later Cape Cod vacations, my parents got a little more savvy, because we stumbled upon this classic lobster shack, with the weather-beaten picnic tables out back and everything, and basically stuck to that for most of our lobster consumption. Even as a kid I appreciated feeling a lot less constrained about making an unholy mess as I went for every last edible bit of my bug. So now I've got these picnic tables, the wood turned gray from many seasons out in the Cape damp, their plastic-table-clothed tops littered with paper plates full of lobster shells and corncobs from our feast, indelibly linked in my mind with What A Lobster Dinner Should Be. But I no longer live within easy access of a classic lobster shack like that. Or even a Cape Cod tourist trap restaurant. I have very occasionally cooked a live lobster at home, though it is a bit of mess and bother. But if I did really crave lobster, that's what I'd do to guarantee a good meal, because right now I just can't afford to dine in places that I have some hope of doing it right, and it just isn't worth it going to the cheap places since, unlike even the cheap places on Cape Cod, the cheap places here are almost guaranteed to screw it up. Case in point: I had the recent misfortune to dine at a Red Lobster for the very first time some months ago. Not my choice, but that of my dining companions who were treating, so I felt like I couldn't object--even though I couldn't help feeling a little underwhelmed as this was supposed to be my companions' big "thank you" for a bunch of business favors I had done them. But my sense of underwhelm only grew when I tasted my boiled lobster. Overboiled, rubbery, watery, with a nasty aftertaste that made me wonder when they'd last changed the pot of water the poor thing had been dunked into--though now I suspect that the poor bug may have been boiled in advance and then nuked for serving as described upthread a bit. And here I had ordered the plain boiled lobster thinking that, as the plainest preparation, it was the one they could screw up least. Perhaps I should have ordered one of the dishes with tons of stuffing and sauce and etc., so as to best conceal the damage done. All I can say is, if places like Red Lobster are the main exposure many Americans get to seafood in general and lobster in particular, it's no wonder to me that I run into so many people who say they don't care for the stuff.

Hi Susan-- I think Septemberdog61 may have meant a dish I've seen spelled as pastitsio, which I too have seen made with this kind of pasta. It's kind of a Greek answer to lasagna, only topped with a bechamel sauce like a moussaka, and spiced more like a moussaka too. Here's a recipe with pictures, including a picture and description of a pasta rather similar to the one you've got (not quite as long, but still spaghetti-length and tubular).

Pam, let me add my appreciation to the chorus here. I've been majorly enjoying this glimpse into your family's catering biz, and am in awe of your herculean labors--and their gorgeous results. Have a terrific Passover--and wow, hope you don't nod off from exhaustion in the middle of the first Seder!

Snopes.com debunks that urban legend here.

I don't know about that.... "Free Bird" might just work... [cut to young kids flying down the interstate in a covertible with soundtrack] "And this bird you cannot change...." [cut to steaming fried chicken pieces with voiceover] "Now at KFC, the Free Bird Meal Deal! Buy one classic KFC bucket and get a two pieces absolutely free! (Limitedtimeofferforparticipatingrestaurantsonlysomerestrictionsapply.)" [cut to young kids smiling, flailing drumsticks, and singing along] "Won't you flyyyy hiiiiigh freeeeee bird, yeah!" ← Urk. You just scared me. Because I hate that song with a strange and irrational passion (probably because of too many "Freeebiiiiird"-yellin' idjits at shows) ... but you're right, it really would work in a commercial, and now I'm dreading the thought of being barraged by it on all the airwaves.

I found this article on Passover customs among Jews "from Portugal to Persia," also including India. The website from which it comes looks really fascinating--it belongs to a woman whose family came from one of the traditionally Jewish communities in India, and who has published a whole bunch of pieces on those communities as well as other topics related to Jewish culture.

Quoting from the CNN article: This makes it sound like the new Kentucky Fried joint is also aimed at chasing the recent trend in so-called "fast casual" dining, something like Jack-in-the-Box is trying to do with their new JBX Grill restaurants. As to their picking "Sweet Home Alabama" -- I bet that was based not only on how that song instantly says "The South" to lots of people, but also on its continued heavy-duty popularity. It's in regular rotation in Fearless Housemate's band's repertoire; whenever they play it, the dance floor immediately turns into a traffic jam. (Heh--and it also shuts up the inevitable idjit in the back yelling for "Freebiiiiiird!" )

Oops, thanks I'll edit it. See, what you did to the eggplant seems to take just as much effort to me. The eggplant I used this week was quite sweet, so if you want to just skip the breading that's fine. Just brushing them with oil and baking sounds good to me too -- just add more cheese to the sauce and maybe sprinkle some bread crumbs into the layers. ← Yeah, I think you're right with the equal effort thang. I think it's just sorta psychological with me--I seem to have some kind of mental block that breading stuff is labor-intensive. Plus, I've done the eggplant-salting routine so many times I can practically do it in my sleep. I'll get over it one of these days, I'm sure.

Heh. Change of plans. Moussaka happened tonight after all. My starting point was Rachel Perlow's recipe in RecipeGullet (thanks, Rachel!). Changes I made: --halved the recipe as I'm basically just cooking for myself --used all lamb, because I looooooove lamb so (and the darn stuff was so bleepin' hard to get! ) --because I was feeling a little lazy, I didn't do the eggplant cutlets. Instead I did the salting/weighting/purging routine with the raw eggplant slices, then greased them up with some olive oil, laid them out on oiled cookie sheets, and baked them as they were, in a 350 deg F oven for about a half-hour. --didn't have any decent wine of any sort in the house, so omitted that. --used a couple of big russet potatoes instead of little white potatoes, partly because that's what I had in the house, partly because I like how the starchy russets kinda weld together when casseroled in a layer. --my bechamel tightened up a whole lot after I added the egg yolk and parmesan, so just before I was to pour it on I stirred in a couple spoonfuls of plain water to get it loose enough to pour. Some pix: The dish resting after just emerging from the oven. Note the elegant plating! At this point in the evening, I was into "snarf food while at the computer" mode. I think it came out pretty darned tasty, if I do say so myself. And I'm glad I did follow through on my lamb obsession--I can really taste it all the way through. (An aside to Rachel: I think your recipe in RecipeGullet is missing its last step--how long to bake the moussaka and at what temp. I assumed 350 deg F for one hour. Worked for me.)