Dianabanana

Try your test again in a couple of weeks . . . if you catch my drift. Sometimes a girl just has chocolate on her mind.

Okay, now I am interested to know what is in this sandwich that makes a person who doesn't much like sandwiches roll his eyes and moan aloud! Spill!

Perhaps the milk had been frozen....clearly she wasn't drinking year-old milk. ← Well, that's a thought. The carton was unopened when she took it out of the refrigerator, so I suppose she could have been saving it in her freezer for a year and taken it out in advance of my visit, although, given all the other circumstances, I kind of doubt it. But that never occurred to me. If it was ultrapasteurized, though, I think it could remain in the carton for a year without becoming too gaggingly smelly. My college roommate and I conducted numerous inadvertent "experiments" with ultrapasteurized milk from the dining hall, and it was bizarre and disturbing the way it never got stinky like normal milk.

Once when visiting my grandparents, we found a carton of eggs in their refrigerator, half of which were broken. Not hairline cracks, but big gaping cracks. When we tried to throw them out, my grandmother started yelling "Those are perfectly good! You can't throw those out! What are we going to have for breakfast?" *** I used to do volunteer grocery shopping for the elderly. On my first delivery to one woman, she asked me to stay for a cup of tea. "Would you like milk in your tea?" "Yes, thank you." As I was taking my first sip, my eyes happened to fall on the expiration date on the pint carton of milk. It had expired more than a year previously.

Yes, the catbox story is the winner by a mile. Ugh.

I keep mine in a white porcelain ramekin, covered by the white porcelain lid from a broken Chinese tea mug. I only fill it halfway, so it only has a few weeks before it gets empty, then it goes through the dishwasher. I stick my fingers right in there, but I'm a pretty compulsive handwasher. I'm careful not to get garlicky fingers in it, because that's a nasty surprise the next morning in your pancakes. Even so, I usually get the package of salt out when baking, just to be safe.

Hand"washing" dishes by piling them all into a basin full of soapy, greasy water, swiping them with a rag, then "rinsing" them by passing them under a stream of water for one nanosecond. Food eaten from these dishes tastes like nothing but dish soap. Mountain Fresh Dawn oatmeal, anyone? Almost everyone I've seen handwashing does this. One of the things I love best about my husband is his obsessively thorough rinsing. And while I'm on it, why are so many dish detergents scented? Why do we need our dishes to be perfumed?

But, on closer inspection, how strange that they all appear to have been picked sans stems. I wonder why they would do that? It makes decay set in very quickly.

Wow, how beautiful!

I didn't learn until I was in my 20s, but you could hardly call what I did "foraging." The first house my husband I bought was waaaaaay out in the woods. Right behind the woodshed was an enormous huckleberry patch, right next to the garage was a field of wild stawberries, and right at the top of our driveway was a big blackcap bush. I used to wander out in my nightie for a snack on summer mornings. Gradually I learned about other plants from library books and other people. As for mushrooms, in my first semester of law school I met another girl who was interested in mushroom hunting and we took a community enrichment class together one Saturday. We didn't learn very much from the class, but afterward we bought David Arora's All That the Rain Promises and More, and started hunting on our own. In the spring we would head out right after we finished our last exam. She became one of my best friends and although she now lives 300 miles away, she still comes up every year in the spring and fall and we go mushroom hunting. Some of the happiest days of my life have been spent sitting in the middle of a huckleberry patch, drunk on the hot, sweet fragrance of berries and pine, making desultory conversation with my friends and family.

I keep a couple of these in the map pocket of the car, so I always have something nice to read if I'm stuck waiting for someone. The books are the right size, the stories/poems are the right length, and the writing stands up to repeated readings.

About ten years ago, one of my mom's coworkers, a woman from India, was trying to start a business manufacturing her own traditional Indian snacks. One of them was a delicious, rich cracker with ajwain, really very good. She had some labels made up and packaged the crackers in nice tins with the labels affixed. And the label read: Centuries Old Savoury Wheat Crackers

My cherries cost $0.00/per pound, as in FREE, all 30+ pounds of them, as they come from my backyard tree. Half the limbs overhang my deck, so I don't even have to leave my chair. If I'm feeling ambitious, I can them in syrup (pits *in*--crucial, as the pits are what create the delicious winey flavor), or brandy them, or pickle them. If, as usual, I am feeling slothful, I just eat what I can reach and then sit in the aforementioned deck chair watching the birds and squirrels eat the rest. One of the nicest things I've done with them is the recipe for Russian Pickled Cherries in the Joy of Pickling. I forget what all is in it, but I think cardamom figured prominently. Going home now to pick cherries!

We live in a forager's paradise in my part of the PNW. Huckleberries by the gallon, Nordstrom shopping bags full of chanterelles, wild strawberries as big as the tip of your thumb. My friend's parents own a piece of land that they logged in order to pay for her college tuition, and, as avid morel hunters know, morels love disturbed ground. We haul sacks of morels out of there every year. We are also lucky to live in an area with lots of abandoned orchards, particularly prune-plum orchards. Prunes are not susceptible to pests, so bushels of unblemished prunes are free for the taking, and make the most delicious, tangy dried prunes imaginable, completely unlike those plump black things in the supermarket. Of course, there are also lots of other things to forage, but these are the ones that we go after in quantity. Also, a word to the wise: Morels and booze don't mix! David Arora of Mushrooms Demystified fame says that morels contain small quantities of rocket fuel, which, when combined with alcohol, will induce vomiting. I passed this bit of information along to my husband as he prepared to pour himself a Maker's Mark while I cooked our morel-heavy dinner. He scoffed, he poured, and he ate, then spent the next three hours projectile vomiting while I stifled the urge to say "I told you so!"

Uh oh, what is Le Bastogne? I've never seen this one!

And who doesn't love le Petit Ecolier?

I've been dubious about Chinese quality control ever since reading Tim Clissold's hilarious and sobering descriptions of foreign objects found in Chinese beer bottles in his book Mr. China, and this recent spate of news stories has pushed me to take the matter seriously. Soy sauce colored with human hair? Eels fed birth control pills to make them grow longer? Not worth the risk to me. I have now stopped buying most things made in China unless they come from a very reputable, well-established company--for instance, Pearl River Bridge soy sauce. I assume (perhaps naively) that these companies have the capital to implement adequate quality control and a reputation to uphold. I, too, am a big Uwajimaya shopper, and have found that for many items there is a Japanese-made equivalent--usually more expensive, but that's okay.

Not only do I not like pre-made sandwiches, just this week I decided that I don't really like sandwiches period. I've had good sandwiches, but I have never taken a bite of sandwich and closed my eyes in ecstasy. I've never had a sandwich so good that I've eaten it in reverential silence. There just seems to be a limit to how good a sandwich can be. I think the bread masks the flavor of the filling, and the filling keeps you from really enjoying the texture of the bread. Slightly OT, I know, sorry--but it's been weighing on my mind this week and this seemed like the place to toss it in. Have I just been hanging out with the wrong sandwiches? Have you ever had a sandwich that was truly mind-blowingly good?

I'm with Tina Turner, I don't like the way they make me feel. Very often I feel nauseated after taking them, and even if I don't, I just feel kind of hopped up in an unpleasant way. Before I stopped taking them altogether, I learned never to take them in the evening because they disturbed my sleep. Also, the yellow pee just seems wrong. No real food gives you pee that color!

I tend to eat the kind of rice that's traditional with whatever else I'm eating (basmati with Indian, jasmine with Thai, etc.), but my default rice is Japanese koshihikari. Recently, though, I bought a bag of Japanese haigamai. This is the "germ" rice, where all of the husk has been removed, but not the germ. It was delicious! Everyone I served it to said it was the best rice they'd ever had. It was soft like white rice, but subtly nutty tasting, and kept you full much longer than white rice. Then this week I went back and bought another bag of the exact same thing, and it's horrible! Kind of mushy and feedy tasting. I'm so disappointed and perplexed. Has anyone else ever tried this rice?

Did he say why? It doesn't seem like it's a sanitation thing--I mean, any bacteria on the outside are going to get cooked anyway--but it does get slimy on the outside, and it seems like all that oxidized slime might not contribute to delicious fresh fish flavor. At least that's what I've always assumed.

Fish. Apparently the Japanese have a saying that goes something like "If it's fish, wash it twice, wash it thrice." Don't know if it actually makes a difference to the finished product, but they know a thing or two about fish, so I just do it. Gloppy bottles. Saves washing out the fridge and cabinets later, plus crusty lids and sticky bottles are so demoralizing when trying to get dinner together after a long day. Bagged salads, because it does seem to remove some of that stale smell. Although frankly I think I'm going to stop using those altogether. When have you ever stuck your nose in one of those bags and smelled the fresh, green, mineral smell that you should? It's always just kind of dead in there. And I know the question is about what we wash "besides fruit and veg," but just want to throw in that I've been an obsessive fruit and veg washer ever since catching a stockboy at Safeway spraying RAID on the fruit in order to knock down the fruit flies!

I will never again . . . . . . painstakingly marinate and grill $26 worth of troll-caught king salmon, remove it from grill onto plate, and, while patting self on back for beautiful rosy-golden crust and professional-looking grill marks, inexplicably, spastically send salmon sailing over the deck railing and onto the lawn below, to be instantaneously set up on by gleeful dog and cat. . . . during lunch rush, curse finger guard on commercial meat slicer as “damned nuisance” and proceed to slice roast beef without it, completely severing entire pad of right index finger. This one was done by my mom in my grandparents’ deli. Lunch rush had to go on without Mom and Grandma as they drove to the emergency room with Mom’s bit of finger in a cup of crushed ice. Amazingly, it was successfully reattached. . . . put block of frozen chopped spinach in pot to cook and, unable to find matching lid, use lid which, while technically too small, does perfectly fit just inside the pot. Turn away and KABLAM! Spinach on ceiling, walls, floors, cabinets, hair, clothes, everywhere. And of course I had just finished painting the kitchen (and not spinach green!). . . . while pondering purchase of ceramic knife in crowded Tokyo department store, test thumb against edge of knife just to see if it really is sharp. Knowledge of Japanese was not necessary as frantic Japanese searched their handbags for something to stanch the bleeding, while gesticulating to one another in what was obviously international sign language for “oh my God this stupid gaijin is bleeding everywhere!” And yes, I bought the knife. (Actually, I turned to my husband and said, “Sold!”)

Phew, that's what I've been saying! Now I can hold my head up in the wine shop! (And thanks for the welcome.)

Hi everyone. This is my first post. How do we pronounce Fernet Branca? My mom can't get this in North Carolina and is always asking me to pick some up for her here in Seattle, and I never know how to pronounce the "Fernet" part. It looks French, but I know this to be an Italian product. Is it fer-nay or fer-net? [While trying to find the answer to this online, I came across this line from an article on Fernet Branca in the SFWeekly: "If you can imagine getting punched squarely in the nose while sucking on a mentholated cough drop, you'll have an idea of Fernet-Branca's indelicate first impressions."] Diane