annabelle

NY cheesecake with blueberry sauce is the best. And, sorry, MINE is the best. No sour cream, just cream cheese, sugar, eggs and egg yolks, lemon peel and a little juice, a teeny bit of flour and a little milk in a sweet cookie crust. I only make it about once a year since it is so rich.

NY cheesecake with blueberry sauce is the best. And, sorry Dan, MINE is the best. No sour cream, just cream cheese, sugar, eggs and egg yolks, lemon peel and a little juice, a teeny bit of flour and a little milk in a sweet cookie crust. I only make it about once a year since it is so rich.

Don't fear the cheesecake. Embrace the cheesecake, especially the New York Cheesecake. I always make mine in a springform pan and do not seive the batter. I do beat it with a flat beater for about 8 minutes before pouring it into the partially cooked crust, and cut through it with a spatula and rap it gently to remove air pockets. I also don't use a water bath. To avoid cracks on the surface, don't open the oven door to peak at it while it's cooking. I have also never used a boutique cream cheese, so no help there.

I'm sure that Meredith is the exception, but I have found that most nurses have appalling diets. I am a lab tech and we have our share of junk food junkies, as well. I know what you are saying about people expecting your authentic homemade BBQ, too. I used to take turns making homemade baked goods with one of the other techs, cinnamon rolls and birthday cakes, until we had had enough of the special requests and went on strike until we received a sufficient amount of groveling after they had to eat cupcakes and donuts from WalMart for a few weeks.

Thanks, Steven.

Who picked the Meatless Monday thing? Was it Mario Batali? I'll take a leap and figure that Mario's family is Roman Catholic and his folks probably did meatless Fridays before Vatican II. Is the Meatless Monday for the sake of alliteration? A jab at being inclusive even though Catholics don't keep Fridays as a fast day any longer except during Lent? It bugs me for some reason.

Jerry, loving your blog! I totally agree about the potlucks at work, too. When I worked at the hospital there were a few of us who made homemade things every.single.time and the others brought bags of generic chips or paper napkins. I have only been to Kansas City once and that was to pick up a tractor a few years ago. Nice folks, though. They loaded it on the trailer for us and told us a quicker way to get back home.

I've got all the time in the world. I knew that Nova Scotia meant New Scotland, so I'm not all bad. And I love hice hockey.

Peter, can you tell us a little more about PEI vs Halifax vs the Mainland or whatever you call it of Canada? I know next to nothing about it. I see that most of the labels on the items you have photographed are in French and English. Are there many French speakers outside of Quebec? Are there aboriginal peoples/Inuits or what have you? You spoke of wearing a kilt earlier at the wedding. Are there a great many Scots in NS?

As for the quality of the food on most children's menu, I can't get excited about that, either. We very seldom ate out when the children were small because we were broke. When we did, it was really exciting to just BE at the restaurant to them. Most of the time, they ate all the bread in the basket, drank forbidden soda-pop and people watched. If they ate anything else: great. If not: no harm, no foul.

@ScoopKW That's always possible, of course. I think your friend is two standard deviations from the norm, however. My boys were extremely picky as toddlers, but will eat nearly anything today. Once they could sit at table in a chair, not a high chair, they got whatever we were eating and learned to eat or go without. In fact, they are a little on the food snob order today. I wonder where they got that from?

Exactly. If you have a child who won't eat anything but bacon or grilled cheese sandwiches for months on end, give them bacon or grilled cheese and eat your own meal in peace. They'll come around eventually.

There is an All-Clad outlet store in Canonsburg, north of Pittsburgh and about 2 hours from Akron, OH. They also have an online store that is comparable in pricing. If you or one of your friends/family is active or retired military, AAFES has some really great deals on cookware, with the bonus of there being no charge for shipping if you are in the US.

One of my favorite movies, Tin Mentakes place over the course of several weeks and includes a number of breakfast scenes at different dinners in Baltimore in the 60's.

To me, it is also the unwillingness to try to figure out what went wrong and then to try to fix it. I'm either fearless or foolish, but I can't think of anything I've been afraid to cook or bake and I have been doing just that since I was six or seven. Peoples irrational, to me, fear of pie crust for instance, mystifies me.

Nice work, Peter! I feel cooled off looking at the water. It's been 104 here for, well forever, it seems. That canoe of beer is fun. I'll have to recommend that to the Finger Lakes in-laws.

Where is the dividing line between poor/unskilled/uninterested and bad?

I just looked on Bing and there appear to be a number of links to her recipe collections. I feel your pain with having all of your cookbooks in storage. Been there, done that.

Steven, have you tried out Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone? I have its first run edition and there has been at least one revision/supplementation since I bought it about 16 years ago. It is very approachable, has a large number of recipes that are easy to follow and have helpful tips for tweaking to your specific likes and dislikes. It has a lot of kid-friendly recipes that I used when my boys were going through different phases of hating everything to help them over that hump. Now, our family is not vegetarian, except on Fridays during Lent, but I still use a number of the recipes quite often as they make use of fresh ingredients, readily available cookware and techniques, and are fresh, quick and tasty in that they appeal to my family's tastes. My pet peeve with many vegetable heavy diets is that they are so very time consuming. Soaking, peeling, chopping, stringing, seeding, et al. A little goes a long way. I do enough of all that when I put up our canning every summer. Best of luck to you and it would have been a crime not to eat that pizza!

This is a beautiful blog, FrogPrincess. It makes me homesick for San Diego.

The Bicycle Thief the cafe scene where the father takes his son for lunch and they are eating a slice of pizza and drinking wine in tumblers while the families at the other tables are eating luxurious foods and giving them dirty looks.

It's already been mentioned, but I have to go with Good Fellas. "Did you put onions in the sauce?" "Yeah. I put onions in the sauce." "He always puts too many onions in the sauce." "It's still good sauce, though." That scene in prison and the scene at Tommy's mother's house where they went to borrow a shovel in the middle of the night and she insists on making them a meal.

I was the same way until I turned 50+. I'm still not fat, there is just more of me. I agree with your meal plan, as well. I have eaten that way for ages and it works well.

Like you, Janet, I find that if I eat snacks, I do not eat my proper meals. Indeed, it leads to me later eating another snack rather than a meal. But, I have never been a snacker. I think it is probably the influence of my French extraction mother who discouraged snacking as a weight control method.

My youngest son actually loves those gross Twizzlers with the "fruit" filling. But, he's only 14 so I'll cut him some slack.