Katie Meadow

Wow. Color me stunned. I confess I never thought birds were that smart, but perhaps that's because my only experience with them was my friend's former Cockatoo named Stardust. Stardust was not the brightest critter. And he only loved my friend. Loathed his fiancee to the point where he'd shreik at her and flap his wings and make his head feathers stand up. He was quite jealous. He also ate the windowsill right off the wall. Mean, destructive and not too smart isn't what I usually seek in a pet. Ernie is sweet and smart. Now I want a bird, but I want a guarantee that it'll be just like Ernie. I'll see what I can find out and report back on the Shank's sandwich. ← We had a Sunday Conure, which is a cross between a Sun Conure and something else I think; we got him as a hand-fed baby. He was very beautiful, but he was loud loud loud. The neighbors at the other end of the block could hear him scream. And he screamed all the time unless he was on your body somewhere or the center of attention. Affectionate? Yes. But he loved us to death and we couldn't take it anymore. You had to spend every waking minute with that bird just to keep him quiet. Perhaps some conures are quieter or more mellow? Lotta research is advised before getting a bird! And if you like to wear earrings your life--or at least your lobes--are at serious risk. That bird did have a very sophisticated palate, however.

I agree that proportion is all with this. I used a good quality olive oil in very moderate amounts--like really what amounted to about 1 little drop per bite. It never occured to me that colored salt would be nice, but that's probably because I never have any. The gray sea salt that we use is also very chunky, so we routinely give it a few grinds in the mortar/pestle to make it more friendly before using for anything.

Hi, what about the bulk dried cranberries at Berkeley Bowl? My husband does the Bowl run, and believe me, if they cost $16 per pound he would never buy them. If those aren't organic (and I don't know if they are) I'm sure you could get organic ones at Whole Foods or Farmer Joe's, also in bulk. The new Farmer Joe's has the largest bulk food selection I have ever seen.

I have one. You can come 'n' git it. Nothing lasts forever, but cast iron is a contender. Mine is un-enameled Wagner Wear/Griswold, which I believe is pre-Lodge and a little heavier. I just can't stand the smoke and grease of indoor grilling, so I haven't used it for years. I wouldn't call it a thing of beauty--but I venture to guess that for most of you who have and use one it's the least pristine pan in your kitchen. I found it much harder to take care of than my regular cast-iron skillets.

My mother is looking for a private dining room to host her 90th birthday and someone recommended this place to her. She hasn't eaten there, but she looked at the space and liked it, likes the location and the people were very nice to her. I looked at the proposal they gave her and neither of us were that excited about the menu. It seemed rather old-fashioned, with the word "fricassee" appearing twice, and other dishes "encrusted" and "breaded." Anyone eaten there? Other ideas? She's dead set on not having this party in the theater district.

Crixa and la Farine are both very good. I've always been partial to the fruit tarts at La Farine--my family always preferred fruit tarts to cake for birthdays--and can't really remember what their cakes are like. Right now I am into their Irish Soda Bread toasted for breakfast! You might also look into Masse's Pastries, which is in that strip along Shattuck near Saul's, over at the Walnut/Vine area. I haven't had their cakes for a while, but they make a dynamite traditional cake (and by that I mean it actually has flour in it!) with walnuts and a chocolate layer and I can't remember what else, and people swooned whenever that cake was served.

It's important to remember that a healthy diet is not synonymous with a weight-loss diet. Losing weight is one of many reasons to be on a healthy diet. Everyone has different health needs. After having 18 inches of his intestine removed for a precancerous lesion, my husband needs a very high fibre diet but he also needs a diet with some fat and lots of protein. I need a diet low in cholesterol and salt. Neither of us is overweight. If I spent as much time eating as I do thinking about food and cooking it I would be. I'm with you mizducky when it comes to carb-phobia. The Atkins and Southbeach diets are meant for a relatively quick weight loss. Anyone who goes on that low-carb type of diet should have their cholesterol tested and have permission of their doctor. One unfortunate consequence of those diets is that they give people the impression that carbs, including complex carbs, are unhealthy and in and of themselves fattening. Pasta Alfredo is high-calorie, but that's not primarily because of the pasta. I don't understand exactly how those low-carb diets work, but it isn't because "carbs are fattening." In fact, complex carbs that provide a hefty dose of fibre are the opposite of fattening if they aren't eaten with a self-defeating sauce. When anorexics are starting the process of what is called re-feeding--that means getting as much fat and nutrients into their bodies as quickly as possible--nutritionists will often advise them to eat lots of simple carbs but to go easy on high-fibre foods. High fibre complex carbs make you feel full and as a result you are benefitting from fewer absorbable calories; not getting enough bang for the buck, as it were. Almost no one in this culture escapes having an issue with food, one way or another. As a result, it can be a mine field to discuss healthy eating with people you know and love, let alone with strangers on a thread. If your doctor doesn't tell you to slim down when you weigh 300 pounds he's remiss. If he tells you and you can't listen, you're in the same boat with lots of other people. Denial is huge, and sometimes it takes a close call before a change is made. I think the best way to encourage healthy eating in this venue is to submit to the appropriate threads recipes that you find healthy and fabulous, whatever your definition of healthy. That way we can up our percentages for inspiration.

Wow, this is a very hot issue, especially at eG. It would be foolish to ignore some very hard truths and reasonable generalizations about the rate of obesity in this country, the dangers it presents, its relationship to diabetes and heart disease. Everyone needs to assess his or her own risks; if staying healthy was easy we would see a very different picture in this country. So many things conspire against us: money, resources, access to good foods, time to make good food, lack of education, poor health care, denial and gluttony. At one time or another I have suffered from them all. Yeah, some people have all the luck: they are overweight, eat pork belly with abandon and live into their nineties. But truthfully, not that many. I wouldn't dispute the idea that there is a genetic predisposition to being overweight, but that doesn't mean you won't fall prey to the many related health problems. It just means, sadly, that you probably have to work harder to keep the weight off. My dad wasn't overweight and swam regularly, but was diagnosed with angina and died of a heart attack. I have high blood pressure and borderline high cholesterol. It's about simple math and risk-taking. I want to see how my kid's life turns out, so if the odds of that happening go up by eating bacon only twice a year and having hummus for an app instead of brie, I've decided that's worth it. My chances of getting run over by a train don't change. But it's always good to look where you are going.

I've always read that egg whites should be beaten in copper, or failing that, in stainless steel, but I never knew why. If you google "beating egg whites copper" or some such thing you will find an amazing amount of chemistry is involved. Beaten egg white is by nature unstable because as you beat, the protein molecules are being stretched. A copper bowl actually releases copper ions into the egg whites and helps to stabilize them and adds to their structural integrity. Stainless steel has a minimal ion transfer and that is why many sources recommend adding cream of tartar to compensate. A glass bowl comes in third. I've always used stainless steel, but I don't bake a lot and, aside from the risk of overbeating, never worried much about it. Perhaps the modern hi-tech plastics provide a better environment than the older, more non-porous ones; it does sound like adding lemon juice or cream of tarter is helpful if not using copper.

I am not a big fan of standard Heinz or other commercial ketchup. And once I started to make my own I never looked back. It's very easy to make, takes about 45 minutes to an hour, and uses as the base 1 28 oz. can of Italian tomatoes. My original recipe did not include this, but I add a little of my favorite BBQ sauce during the cooking process and that gives it an extra kick. I use it to "frost" my meatloaf and on burgers or any other things you might use ketchup for. It makes at least a pint and lasts well in the fridge; we're not heavy users in my house so I don't have to make it very often.

I'm sure Bobby Flay has many rubs for steak, but his recipe for Cowboy Steaks was printed somewhere a coupla years ago and it's my go-to for grilling rib-eyes. So, for what it's worth, here's a BF dry rub. The recipe says to rub the steaks and let them sit for an hour before grilling. He says it's good for four 12-16 oz steaks. 1 Tbsp kosher salt (I think this is way too much salt, so I use less) 1 tsp Hungarian sweet paprika 1 tsp garlic powder (I don't like garlic powder, so I use less or sometimes rub in a little fresh pressed garlic) 1 tsp coarse ground black pepper (I often cut back on this and add in some New Mexico ground chile) 1 tsp dried thyme 1 tsp finely ground coffee (grind it fresh!) '

Try2cook...a fantasy in pink! I totally forgot about this, but my mother used to always insist on having saltines with chocolate ice cream, so clearly she was ahead of the curve. I'm sure that when I was young and stupid I made it clear to her what a bad idea I thought that was. Not to break any important traditions, my daughter, home from college, looked at us like we were total idiots when our jaws dropped over our ice cream the other night.

So I'm spending my five minutes per month whipping through Via Magazine and see a small snippet about a restaurant in Marin County favored by Mario Batali for its pizza and its ice cream dessert: vanilla ice cream--served soft, looking for all the world like carvel--drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with sea salt. So I had to try it at once. I used a very nice local organic vanilla ice cream and made no attempt to soft-serve it, dribbled on some good olive oil and then a pinch of gray salt...and...it...was really good! It took about six bites to adjust after a lifetime of ice cream on my home planet, but suddenly I needed another bowl to make sure how good it was. Has anyone else had this, I mean besides this restaurant's fan club? Has it been all over the place and I just never noticed?

It would be sad to think that the processed fast-food nugget, which is a way to provide a poor quality product in a crunchy inexpensive package, came before simple boneless fried breast-meat pieces. If nuggets came first, that would be sort of like, "You've seen the cartoon now read the book." I'm guessing the motivation came long before the desire to please children (or those so sloshed they might be in danger of catching a bone in the throat) and followed the same pattern as many other fried foods that found their way into sandwiches, like fried oysters or fish, making those foods more economical and more portable. The chicken had to be boneless and sized in long pieces to fit in a roll. So my vote says the "fingers" made with real chicken right off the bone came first.

Scotch, neat. My husband is a regular, I'm an occasional. If there's any good dark chocolate around the house, then count me in. Nothing beats a sip of scotch alternating with letting a little chunk of bittersweet chocolate melt on your tongue. Mmm, yummy.

'Nother idea: if heirloom beans are of interest you could pop into Rancho Gordo's retail outlet on Industrial Way. I'd stop there if I was going to Napa...but then I'd keep going and head on up to Calistoga for a mud bath! I just noticed there's a recent thread about the Oxbow market in Napa. Just one more place I haven't been, but I will add to the chorus praising Fatted Calf. I don't eat a lot of charcuterie, but their rabbit pate is out of this world.

There is a relatively new restaurant called Ubuntu in Napa. Take a look at their website and see if it's your cup of tea. It's vegetarian and pricey and getting lots of press lately and rave reviews. I haven't been, but it sounds very interesting.

I've had great success with a sort of combination of the roasting techniques above. Scrub the beets but don't peel. Toss in a roasting pan with olive oil and salt. Use a pan with 3 or 4 inch sides, at least as high as your beets. Cover the pan with foil and roast til tender at 375 degrees, half hour or more, depending upon size. Let the beets stand covered at room temp 15 or 20 minutes. Then they are super easy to peel. I love them in salad, but usually can't resist eating a couple of them hot, right away. The beets leak and make a yummy sauce in the pan which I save and add to my dressing. I love a mix of different colored beets. Goldens are nice, since you don't have to deal with staining.

You might try asking Andrea Nguyen, the author of "Into the Vietnamese Kitchen." I believe she spent her childhood in southern CA. Either way she's a wealth of information and very generous. Check out her website at vietworldkitchen.com and you will find an email address for her.

Interestingly, neither of the two recipes in that NYT article this morning called for MSG as a separate ingredient. It's a peculiar article and it's defense of MSG seems mainly to be: it's in tons of stuff we eat, so enjoy! It would have been more insightful if they had provided non-Asian recipes that included the strategic use of straight MSG in home-cooking. All those sauces have complex favors and large amounts of sodium, so it's hard to know what's what. And what are "normal amounts," anyway? When I make Vietnamese sandwiches at home I use about 8 drops of Maggi in one sandwich. The Drunkard's Noodles recipe uses a full tablespoon of it along with 2 tblsps of oyster and same of fish sauce--for 2 large portions of food! I am one of those people who used to ask for "No MSG please" in Chinese restaurants, since I did get an unpleasant buzz as I went out the door. I can only assume that they would eliminate the extra dose that was added on top of the sauces that already contained MSG, but it was usually enough. I still believe that less is more, but then my tolerance for salt is pretty low as well. I checked out that row of products at the top of page 5. Basically it's a junk food extravaganza, implying that the fifth taste amounts to not much more than an overdose of MSG and sodium. No thanks, I'll just have the seaweed broth.

The feet I get are very clean, so I just give 'em a quick rinse and toss into the pot. I usually use one whole chicken, 2 lbs backs and at least 1 lb of feet.

I too have a funky old grinder. I find that it grinds rather unevenly, but I do two things to help it: I stir the grounds mid-grind once or twice. When most of the coffee is coarse as it should be, there is a layer of grinds that are too fine on the bottom. I skim off the coarse grinds for the presspot and use the fine stuff for something else. When I first started pressing I stirred briefly with a wooden spoon. Several years ago I just got bored of that and stopped stirring. I pour the water in carefully, swirling a bit. I can't detect the slightest difference in the final result. I always thought that paper filters filtered the oil out of coffee, whereas the presspot (which is really a refined version of cowboy coffee, no?) filters nothing, really, it just keeps the grounds out of your coffee. A gold filter filters some oil but not all of it. It's really a matter of taste, whether you like quality that the oil imparts. One thing I do find makes a big difference is to let the water in the kettle cool down a minute before pouring.

I really appreciate the concept of the maps, but truthfully, when I was planning my trip, I found them hard to decipher. The pushpins, balloons, or in this case baskets, obscure detail and once you stick on a lot of them the organizational benefits start to decline. But then, that could just be me. What if you had regional maps and provided a master list of towns w/their market dates that was organized by those regions? If most people are like me, and if they plan on having a car, they will already have gotten a good road map to help them plan; no map on line that I could find came come close to that kind of detail. The Provence-beyond list I mentioned above seems really comprehensive; I am guessing there are other regional market lists available. That way anyone planning a "market" trip would have every possible town/day easily accessible for the region they will be visiting. Then there could be some way to plug in recommendations, comments etc on any given markets, so when you click on a town up comes whatever reviews have been submitted. Am I dreaming?

When we were in Provence in October we went to the daily market in Aix and then the next day, the Saturday market, which is of course much bigger and includes many winding streets organized by subject: antiques, clothing, scarves, etc. That was a beautiful food market, set in a lovely square where you can have cafe au lait and watch the show. I cook at home all the time, so a vacation for me means eating out. But when I got to that market what did I want more than anything? A kitchen. We bought twice as much fruit, cheese etc as we able to consume in picnics during the next couple of days. Believe me, I ate a dangerous amount of figs, but they were the most astounding figs I have ever eaten. When we planned our trip (sadly it was only a week in provence) I checked a website called Provence-beyond. The link is faulty, so I suggest googling "Provence-beyond markets." The second site of the search will yield a wonderful catalogue of markets sorted as you like, either by every conceivable little town or by day. Our only snafu was l"isle-sur-la-sorgue. We planned to stay the night there before the weekday market, but discovered that our hotel was not right in town. The parking situation in that town is a bigger nightmare than NY. Even on a weekday afternoon when there was no market we could find absolutely nowhere to park! If you don't stay right in town you will never be able to go to either of the markets there. The big antques market on the weekend sounds amazing. Some other lifetime.

Winter gin (for martinis): Bombay Dry Summer gin (for G & T's): Tanqueray Dry Vermouth: Noilly Prat Sweet Vermouth: Martini and Rossi Red (I like it for an aperitif) Vodka: Skyy (mainly for Bloody Marys)--love that Noxema-blue bottle. Scotch: Cluny. Perhaps in my next life Macallan 18 yr will be my house pour. But we're house poor. And the scotch sees more action than anything else. If anyone knows a cheap scotch that's better value than Cluny lemme know!