annabelle

I'll make a leap of faith here that the Chicago school district that is mandating that the little cherubs eat only school provided lunches are not being bribed with candy rewards for doing their lessons as many school districts do. Because that would be wrong.

US Healthcare is expensive for all of those reasons and, the simple fact that it is the best. Tiny premature babies (<25 weeks) are kept alive until they are ready to leave the hospital, all at the cost of many thousands, if not millions, of dollars. No heroic measure is spared to persons who are injured in accidents and shootings. Care is not refused to anyone, regardless of their ability to pay. Research and development of new drugs, surgical procedures and instruments are costly. My point, to bring it back around the Chicago's school lunch program, is that "healthy" lunches that are not being eaten, are a waste of tax-payer monies. I have long questioned the necessity of schools providing meals to pupils, anyway. I am tired of being lectured to by talking heads on television and unelected public officials such as Mrs. Obama who hold no degrees or special knowledge about nutrition and are not themselves dieticians. This is all my long-winded way of telling them all to get off my lawn.

This school district is ridiculous. No one is going to tell me my kid has to buy a school lunch. I'd take my chances and send my child to school with his lunch and instruct him to call me when someone tries to "confiscate" it. It is no one's business but mine and my kid's if I want to pack him a brown bagful of candy bars everyday.

Why not? My dogs catch and eat raw squirrels, rabbits and songbirds.

Whoa! I used to shop at that store back in 1978 shortly after my first husband and I were married. We lived an easy drive from there and it was sort of exotic and weird. I soon decided it was too expensive and only shopped there for Alta Dena raw milk. There was an awesome Mexican bakery up the hill from there, on the turn by the County Bowl, though. I loved that place and still love Santa Barbara.

It's good to know I'm among friends! I have three full size refrigerators and a chest freezer. Six shelving units in the garage filled to bursting with anything and everything that doesn't need to be refrigerated and another in the greenhouse that one holds empty canning jars and my collection of terra cotta pots, and seed trays, but that's a different story. I also have a huge lazy susan full of spices and another full of flours, sugars, oils and chocolate. I also have at least five sets of everyday dishes and two of china, three sets of flatware and one of silver. And barware. We don't even drink, but we have tons.

I will sometimes buy and eat miniature marshmallows out of the bag when I am running errands. Ditto to the dollar bags of spicy gumdrops or "fruit" slice jelly candies.

Once upon a time when I was newly married, I was tidying up the kitchen after breakfast while wearing a kimono with wide sleeves. I turned around and the cuff of my sleeve caught the handle of my Melitta coffee pot and dashed it to the floor where it shattered in a million pieces including one large jagged one that pierced the top of my foot between my great and second toe. (Another entry in the "Wear Shoes in the Kitchen" Tales.) Naturally, blood started pumping out of my foot and onto the floor while I tried to tie it up with a tea towel so I didn't track blood all over the rug as I limped upstairs to wash it off and to call my husband. We only had one car and he had already left for work. Thirty minutes later, he had returned home to find me and my newborn son both bawling our eyes out and the bathroom looking like a scene from CSI: Philadelphia (where we lived at the time). I ended up with five stitches and a new coffee maker.

From the trailers it looks an awfully lot like Top Chef: Survivor. I'll give it a watch, but I don't know if I'll be in for the long haul.

Pierogis. Mrs. T's are just as good when you are feeding hungry teens and a lot less trouble. Ditto to raised doughnuts. I will make bagels and soft pretzels from scratch, though. I've turned my children into bagel snobs and haters of Auntie Anne's pretzels (mall food). And I totally second the MacGyver aspect of making something once. I boned a whole duck once and stuffed it without breaking the skin. I'll never do it again. I don't care how impressive it was to slice at the table.

Annabelle, that is one heck of a fine sentence. I mean, that's writing! I'm jealous of your skill. Hey, did Mom teach you to write? Thanks! Actually, my mother was a reporter, just like Lois Lane with hats and tight-fitting tailored suits in the '60s. It may be hereditary. One of my sons is also a terrific writer and cook, as well.

My mother hated to cook and you could taste the resentment in it.

I worked in a rather elegant Italian restaurant on the bay in San Diego many years ago. Our lunch service was always very very busy with various tourists, retiree regulars and our boss's private dining room for him and his gombas. For sume reason I seemed to have an affinity for working at mob related eating establishments at that time in my, thankfully, short career as a bartender. The day chef was a young American guy with an awful, awful temper. He swore a blue streak, berated line cooks and sous, and threw cooking vessels. Anyway, I had walked back in the kitchen to check up on one of my customers lunch orders and heard him berating my cocktail waitress, as usual. What was not usual was his picking up a large chef knife and throwing it at her so hard that it stuck into the wall behind her. We screamed and ran out and back into the bar. From what I heard later the sous and the other cooks jumped on him and held him down while someone called the cops. My waitress ran out. I hid/waited behind the bar and next to the phone until the chef got carted away by the cops, was assured that he wasn't going to return and started looking for another job as soon as I clocked out.

I make sauce veloute quite often. It is my eldest son's favorite sauce and he requests it when he is home on breaks from college.

Chris, try my mother's trick of eating cereal out of a very small bowl or a coffee cup. She like cornflakes, but hates them soggy. You eat a few spoonfuls, pour in more cereal and more milk, if necessary, and repeat as often as preferred.

Harry's Plaza Cafe is a good old school steak house as is its sister Joe's Cafe both on State Street.

I've forgotten who said it (Tom maybe?) that chicken and dumplings were big fluffy dumplings. Not here in chicken and dumpling land. They are called slickers and are more of a thick noodle, not a puffy bisquick kind of thing. Hey, if they can get snotty about Italian food and it being authentic, so can I about dumplings being authenti c.

Shelby, I feel your pain about the power outages. We lost our power for twelve days, as well. Thank goodness for the genrator and the kerosine lamps, eh? I have new found respect for pioneer women after living for ten years in Oklahoma weather.

Ech. Sounds like one of my son's college roommates. The guy lived on frozen shrimp and noodles that he nuked in the microwave. understandably, the other roommates referred to him as Fish.

I think everyone worked so hard back then, kids included, that they were out like a light when Ma and Pa got cozy.

I think this is it, as well. I fondly recall Almanzo and his brother and sisters being left to tend the farm for the week while the parents went visiting. After being told not to eat all of the sugar, the first thing they do when the wagon is out of sight is make ice cream, cake and candy.

No slam on Ma, but the best food stories are in Farmer Boy. I still need to find fresh wintergreen berries before I die and I lived ten years in Pennsylvania where you'd think there would be some growing somewhere.

Re: Pesto. I think it comes from the "pesto on everything" phase of the late 80's-early 90's. Not just a little pesto, GLOBS of pesto. Yes, I have made it and I grow several types of basil each year. It's probably the institutional memory and those oogy pine nuts.

Pesto. I can't learn to like it. I've tried and I've tried and I just can't.

Bodega was shown frying chips in two deep-fryers in at least two different shots of the kitchen prep.