gfweb

Mini-me. Uber-creepy in a gentle way.

Any friend of Plum is a friend of mine.

I'm not a dessert person. Does he ever use cheese?

meatloaf, steak, sausage

Best thing about prions is that pigs don't seem to get them. So we have that going for us. Bacon and sausage are safe

Yup. The sheep form of MCD is called scrapie. I was taught that they were different things, but I'm not sure prion taxonomy is all that accurate.

That's right, but we still don't know where US patients with Creutzfeld-Jacob got their prions. At least in theory a cow could have subclinical MC disease, ie look fine, and go to slaughter and end up transmitting disease. Good butchering practice is pointless if pink slime is added to meat.

Wonder what the Mad Cow risk is with this stuff? "Trimmings" might well include nerve tissue.

It is incorrect usage, no matter how common it may be, as documented in Common Errors in English Usage. Exactly right. Linguists have this asinine assumption that if enough people say something incorrectly, it then becomes acceptable (is it Farve or Favre?). This reflects a bigger problem in modern thought, that there are no absolutes. Fortunately this isn't the place for that rant.

There's going to be a lot of funny-looking old ladies in the nursing homes of the future.

Shrimp scampi actually translates as shrimp shrimp. But scampi has come to mean a garlicky sauce and we now see sole scampi etc. RE au jus... Guy Fieri will burn in hell for his egregious misuse of the term on TV. I knew in third grade that prime rib au jus was "with juices" . Clearly hair bleach depletes grey cells.

How bad does a place have to be to rate a sucky judgement? I'd say that depends on how much it costs and how much it misses the mark. IHOP isn't much but they do what they set out to do. A $45 entree place that has gloppy sauce and overdone lobster sucks even though if IHOP served it for ten bucks you'd be happy. We ate recently at a Delaware stalwart, Vincente's. Been around for ages. Vincente has a schtick where he designs your meal based on what you say you like. Charming old guy. But the food is badly seasoned and boring and overcooked. It doesn't come out as he described. It sucks cause it missed the mark he set.

Seems odd, but I've known crappy restaurants to last decades on reputation and a loyal following of old ladies eg Old Original Bookbinders in Philly sucked for as long as I can remember.

I can tell you that scrambled is not the way to order in a diner. They are never pillowy mounds of eggy wonder. Invariably they are chopped up flattop disasters.

Because its neat. ;-)

Is this an example of inverted inverted snobbery?

Artificial sweeteners are bad for you Well, no. They've been tested out the wazoo and are safe as far as anyone can tell. Saccharine in particular has been around longer than most of us and is safe. Sugar, on the other hand, rots teeth, makes you fat, and brings out diabetes in the susceptible. It is easy for somebody with an agenda and an internet connection to make assertions about the FDA and their ability to determine safety, but if you look at the record, the FDA does pretty darn well at what they decide to address. If anything they are over-cautious...which is usually not a bad thing. If you want to FDA-bash a valid target would be all the stuff that they decline to address; like the safety of "nutritional supplements" and food safety. But even then your beef is really with congress who gives FDA their mandate and has exempted botanicals from scrutiny unless they make a drug-like claim.

I agree with pretty much everything above esp the pasteurization issue. All of the big advances in medicine...the ones that prevent large scale disease and death...have been in the public health realm. Sewage treatment, malarial swamp draining and vaccination are the big ones; but not far behind is pasteurization of milk.

Fred Harvey was an amazing guy. All but forgotten now. He brought fine dining to small town America and civilized the place too. A great bio of him came out a couple of years ago.

Where we live there are plenty of chains and plenty of non-chains. The OGs are all backed up with lines at night and the owner operated are busy, but not jammed. I think that the Darden group has got it figured out. I've read that their formula is so loved by the customers that they can't change dinnerware without hearing complaints. Changing a recipe is even worse.

I remember traveling as a little kid and seeing a Duncan Hines emblem on small town restaurants. A paleo-zagat.

Duncan Hines was the guy. Salesman who travelled and made a list of good restaurants.

What am I missing? This. There are a few not safe for work words.

Travel a little in the heartland and an Outback, OG or even a Red Lobster can look pretty darn good. And honestly, they don't suck; they're just not haute

Mrs Hagerty is a honey badger.