Terrasanct

I don't understand why they can't use other sources to make ethanol. I'd hate to see even more acres planted in corn; it's not healthy for the land or for us. In many foods, they wouldn't even need to substitute sugar for the HFCS; they could just eliminate or drastically reduce the amount of sweeteners in most foods. I bought a can of tomato soup the other day and it had HFCS in it. It was way too sweet. What has the corn monoculture done for us? Helped to impoverish small farmers or drive them out of business, require the use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers to grow it on the same land every year, and fatten the populace. What possible gains could be worth all of this? Enriching a small number of large agribusinesses? It makes me want to boycott corn altogether. I can't imagine that growing corn for ethanol makes any kind of environmental sense!

Salsa in jars makes a nice ingredient for some dishes, though. Or if you want a late night snack of chips and cheese with salsa. Of course the quality isn't the same, but it's still fine in its own right. I might wonder why anyone would buy the sliced, boring bread at the store when homemade is so much better...but we all know that most people aren't going to be making their own. It's about convenience.

I don't think it's shallow or snobbery at all--it's a matter of having as many things in common as you can. Certainly helps the relationship. Food is one aspect of that, not everything. My husband and I both enjoy doing things apart, taking drives, exploring, and napping together. The food part is annoying, but it's just one thing. And he will try if I ask him to.

I just celebrated my 11th anniversary; good thing my husband likes to eat in restaurants, I suppose. I've mentioned him here before. He hardly likes any foods. I think the likes list is much shorter than the dislikes. I love to cook and to try different things. It was one of the hardest adjustments in our marriage--I used to cook all kinds of great things for him, only to have him push stuff around on his plate and make sour faces. It's a good thing I don't have much of a temper, because that could really set you off if you've taken a lot of time and effort to make a great meal. I had to learn to cook for myself. Sometimes he likes it; sometimes he doesn't. He has to take one bite, anyway. I have had a few successes--he loves Thai food now even though he told me he hated it when we first met--of course he hadn't tried it, just assumed that he would hate it. Mostly I've just tried to adjust. I love my husband, and maybe food doesn't seem like such a big deal to some people, but I've noticed that people who don't like experimenting with food often don't like experimenting with other things, either. Makes life a bit bland sometimes.

I buy the pre-formed patties sometimes, even though I think they're pretty bad. My husband is a picky eater and won't eat a real-looking hamburger patty because he thinks they should look like what you get at McDonald's. As far as orange cheese, it's almost impossible to get cheddar that isn't orange in the west. I noticed when I lived in New Jersey that there was all kinds of white cheddar. Not sure why that is.

I have never understood why anyone would buy onion or garlic salt. I use the powders, but why pay the same price for something that's mostly salt? The same goes for almost any seasoning with salt in it--just as easy to just add your own spices.

The yeast stays fine in the fridge in a closed container--it lasts months and months; I'm not sure how long. I just made bread with some yeast that I bought who knows when, and it was perfect.

I really can't plan my dinners, so I make sure I have everything on hand. I suppose I tend to buy the same things over and over, but I combine them in different ways. I always want to have easy things on hand, too, so on the days I'm too tired to make dinner I won't end up just ordering pizza. I always have a thought in my head--what am I going to make for dinner tonight? but it changes during the day depending on a lot of factors.

That's interesting--I just sold German Cooking Today on Amazon and wonder if one of you bought it. Are German recipes a lot different from the German-American ones that immigrants brought with them?

I buy bottled water for the containers, not the water. I put them in the freezer and always have cold water. What's hundreds and thousands? Like sprinkles or jimmies? I always wonder why anyone buys cut up meat when it's so easy to cut it up yourself. I only do it if it's less expensive.

I always get the yeast there. Even if you waste half of it, it's still lots cheaper than buying at the store. When I used to bake a lot, I would also buy the 50 pound bags of flour. I just got back from Costco; a typical busy Saturday afternoon there. I saw a blue oval Le Creuset French oven for $150. I thought it said 8 quart, but could have been 5. It looks like a limited time item, probably for the holidays. Another thing I got recently from Costco, not food related though, was financing for my car, at a lower rate than my long-time bank offered me. Hmm.

I forgot the rotisserie chicken! I've got one in the slow cooker right now, making some chicken noodle soup with the homemade-style noodles also from Costco. The chicken makes the best broth. Since my husband won't eat chicken, I prefer to buy it already cooked because he doesn't like the smell of it cooking, either. *sigh*

I live in a town with no good grocery stores, so I'm glad to have Costco. There are only two of us at home, so I don't buy as much produce there as I used to, but there are some things I always get there-- Coffee, sharp Cheddar, eggs, maple cured bacon, rosemary olive oil bread, balsamic vinegar (it's aged for quite a while, I think), salad mixes, canned chili for my husband, salmon, and the meats, which are better than any other store here. Sometimes I'll pick up wine and beer, too. Oh, and cream cheese in the big block if I'm going to make a cheesecake. I don't use a lot of convenience or processed foods, but I like to try the samples, anyway.

I love using my crockpot. Big batches of chicken soup, so I can always have some in the freezer. Also works well for onion confit.

Women and men are different from each other, but there is more variation amongst individual men and women than between the two sexes. My daughter cooks more "like a man" than I do, whatever that means. And she does bang the pots around, too.

How about cannelles? Does it have two syllables or three? I need to learn French just so I can pronounce all this stuff.

The next time you go to Sheridan, go a bit south on I 90 and stop in at Story, Wyoming. It's a pretty little town, mostly summer people, but a few live there year-round. There's a general store with a deli, and the times we've been there, the pies and other desserts were excellent. I think they serve breakfast and lunch there. This time of year, I'm not sure of their hours. The store is fun to wander around in, and has a surprising number of gourmet items for a small town in Wyoming. http://www.pineycreekgeneralstore.com/menus.htm

My kids used to love it--I found it messy and too sweet. But the name is cute.

That's true, I'm a lot closer to Tim Horton's than real Mexican food. This brings up an interesting question--what ethnic groups eat goat? Because I was thinking of some a bit farther away, and the prejudices people might have about "common" foods. Like how chicken wings used to be the food of the poor until Buffalo wings became popular.

Some of it has to be plain old squeamishness--no one wants to eat the cute animals, or the ones that seem "wrong" for some reason. Bunnies are cute, therefore to be petted, not eaten for dinner. Goats have a different problem, I think. More of a PR problem. Look at all of the biblical references to sheep and goats. Sheep were the good guys, of course, and goats were on God's bad side. Why? It's an interesting question. Does it have anything to do with who eats goat meat? For myself, I'd love to try it, but I've never seen it on a menu or for sale at the store. Maybe we're losing the diversity in all of the foods we eat, unless you count foods invented and produced by factories. What is cheap to raise/easy to transport/uniform in taste? That's what's for sale. When I was a kid we raised rabbits for food for a while, had cows and chickens and made things like headcheese. We gathered wild nettles, oysters, crab, fish, and berries. When did people stop being omnivores?

I should have specified--for my needs, it has to be low carb or at least sugar free. That eliminates a lot of the obvious choices, unless they're high fat as well. I can tolerate fat better than sugar.

The bars are small, but they do have a fair amount of fat, but also lots of protein. If I could figure out a low fat to make them adhere, I'd make them that way. Any ideas?

I have psyllium and also a cereal made with it. I use the husks to make a very filling cracker rather than stir it into liquids. The stuff can be a little scary, though. You really have to be careful to drink enough with it. I tried the psyllium cereal in one batch of protein bars because I wanted more crunch--it was great at first but it absorbs a LOT of liquid and the next day the bars were inedible--big chunks of hard, gummy cereal interspersed throughout them. Ugh. I learned not to use the cereal with liquid. Flax meal or seeds provide lots of fiber as well, without the strange absorbtion problems. Oh, and I used cocoa nibs once for crunch. It turned out pretty well.

Maybe it's not fat that's the problem; it's processed fat or things made with fat. I don't think buttering your veggies is the problem, I think it's eating pastries or whatever that are made with fat. All of those things are overabundant in carbs as well. I say, eat the succulent fat under the skin of the whole roast pig at that luau, and skip the doughnut.

I think so. If you look at the science, there really isn't a correllation between fat intake and fat on the body. It's become popular to think there is. Didn't the problem with obesity come about around the time of the USDA food pyramid? The government didn't have our best interests in mind; the food pyramid was pushed to sell more grain from American farmers. Personally, I think it started with the massive overconsumption of soda. When I was a kid (admittedly, eons ago) an ocassional can of soda was a real treat. Now it's part of every meal. Hey, they have to use up all that American-grown corn syrup somehow! Well, okay, that and fast foods--another rare treat that has become a staple. If we got rid of fast food and pop, people would probably become thin again.