Katie Meadow

Maybe, if his apartment was bigger and he was willing to go for supplies and takeout to Russ and Daughters when I just didn't feel like Thai food again.

I want Significant Eater's life, or at least her book list. I'm chewing through two or three novels a week. If it weren't for the Sunday Times and the daily Two Not Touch puzzle I could make that four. Thank god for eG: my husband really doesn't need to hear me whining, so I have company here. No one can throw a cast iron frying pan in space.

It's unclear to me whether my laziness is the result of the pandemic or just boredom after so many years of cooking every day. Maybe it's both. My main meals are in shrinking rotation. They involve a lot of stocks and frozen marinara sauce which I am so sick of making but are so useful for pasta dishes, pots of beans, simple Asian soups, etc. Chicken stir fry with choi sum is once a week. Shrimp wontons are an easy fix, soupy or not soupy. My major market has good shrimp and good wonton skins, but no pot-sticker skins and a run to Chinatown isn't in the cards lately, so I'm not making dumplings and I'm suffering from a lack of roast duck sold on the hook. It will be sad when fresh tomatoes go away, since my most reliable comfort food is currently tomato risotto. Sometimes I look at the plated pix of ambitious eGer's that have four or five different dishes cozying up on one plate and I'm in awe. Desperation is a BLT or a tuna melt and a root beer float. That cheers me up. Every time.

Okay, but if you order a bowl of rice on the side it isn't usually vinegared, right?

A professional frozen food CEO? If I could think of the vegetable that suffers most when not fresh it would be artichokes.

If I am mistaken surely someone will let me know, but my understanding is that sushi is raw fish (or whatever) that is draped over a mound of vinegar rice. If you want raw fish but don't want vinegar rice order sashimi. The fish is separate and the rice, in my experience is not vinegared. Correct?

Check out David Leibovitz's recent recipe for oven roasted plums.

Yes yes and yes!

And now that I think about it a romantic dinner like that sounds pretty good, candle and all. An evening out. I can't remember what that's like.

The Italian American bistro of my college years in the sixties: red checked tablecloth, chianti bottle with dripping candle, meatballs and spaghetti, garlic bread, and Neapolitan ice cream for dessert!

In service to truth telling my husband says they are actually red. My sense of color must be altered, since the sky in the west is now red. It must be throwing me off. In so many ways. My SIL sent me a long article from the Press Democrat (local paper) about the Bodega Red. Long story short, one guess is that a South American sailor jumped ship in northern CA with a couple of Bodega Reds in his pockets. But there is a definite movement to bring them back. All good!

I like the Zuni Cafe recipe for Caesar Salad. Very traditional. The only change I make is to reduce the eggs from two to one. Seems like plenty. Also I use pecorino or piave cheese, since I typically have one or the other on hand. The anchovies I get may be saltier than some, since I never need to add salt. https://www.bigoven.com/recipe/zuni-cafe-caesar-salad/713610

Bodega Red Potatoes are back from the brink of extinction! Our neighbors are gardening in a small lot my husband and his siblings own out at Dillon Beach. He gifted us a few potatoes he grew from heirloom seeds purchased at the Petaluma Seed Bank. The best potatoes I can remember eating! Just a lumpy looking brown potato, but the inside is pristine white. I parboiled them, cut them into large chunks and sautéed them in butter until there were a few crispy bits. Incredibly good. But then I do like potatoes.

I used to collect jadeite but gave it up when I learned Martha Steward was a major player. I gave mine away.

The closest thing I remember from childhood was Mallomars: a round graham cracker topped with marshmallow and covered in a dome of dark chocolate. I don't remember moon pies. I would sooner jump off a bridge than eat either of them with pumpkin pie spice. Every year about this time I suffer increasing anxiety attacks about PPS. Right there's a benefit of sheltering in place--much last chance of coming into contact with it.

Talk about logic? There's very little in these personal likes and dislikes. I will occasionally suffer a half a banana in the morning, if it is the right ripeness and the moon is in fruit, but anything made or flavored with banana? Forget it. Bread, no way. Banana Split? Never touched one in my 72 years. Augmentin? Find another antibiotic for my kid; even the smell of a teaspoonful made me ill. Was there a banana flavored Necco? I threw it away, if so, along with the licorice ones. Banana flavored taffy was always a very unpleasant surprise.

I don't like banana bread and I really don't like raisins. But I like @weinoo so I wouldn't eat his banana bread just to be polite, and I'm sure he would appreciate that.

Tamales are a huge subject First of all, how many tamales have you eaten that were just so-so or not even good at all? Maybe I'm too picky, but my answer is lots. The filling and the sauce have to be to your taste. The corn package can vary wildly, and once again you have to decide how you like it. Access to locally prepared tamale filling is a benefit, but sometimes it's very salty, so if that's the case there's nothing you can do about it. A great many people don't have access to prepared masa, and so you have to chose whether to go the labor intensive route of prepping the corn kernels, or the Maseca route. You could luck out and find a recipe you end up liking. Or it could be a long search that takes a lot of determination and patience. If you have no one with experience to cook them with you are on your own with thousands of recipes to chose from. I guess I would start with a chef whose other recipes I really liked, knowing that tamales are very personal and very diverse. I like a little "tamale window" here in Oakland. The corn part is outstanding, the filling less so. That I can live with, but I think I could make a better filling myself. A good filling, if it's a red chile one, is a lot of work if you start from scratch with dry red chiles. On the one hand a tamale seems pretty basic but getting all the parts working together to your own taste is a major accomplishment. If I had appreciated tamales more when I lived in New Mexico I could have found someone show me the ropes and have some fun doing it, but sadly I missed my chance.

Turkey neck pot au feu-- so in my wheelhouse, @weinoo. I always throw extra necks into my turkey stock so we can indulge. The closing of Brennan's in Berkeley was extremely sad. It was an excellent bar and a sort of hofbrau/cafeteria/restaurant all rolled up into one. Best Irish Coffee in the world and the only place I knew that made a great Mexican coffee. The food was classic: roast turkey dinner with fixings, meat loaf, corned beef. You could also order a turkey wing or a turkey neck with a variety of sides. How perfect is that.

Humble apologies are due. I haven't been terribly nice about summer squash, and now I beg the pardon of all yellow long squashes. I thing they taste better than zucchini. Tonight I made a recipe called "Summer Squash Gratin alla Juanita." Juanita More, I learned from five seconds of research, is a well known drag queen in San Francisco. Her recipe for a casserole is very simple and involves yellow squash, fresh tomatoes, shallots, garlic, cilantro and chile. I used some roasted poblanos from my freezer. I didn't pay too much attention to the ratio of squash to tomato, but the amount of tomato should be enough to keep the casserole moist, as there is no other liquid involved. For the last couple of minutes after baking, the dish gets a snowfall of Oaxaca cheese and a brief turn under the broiler. I used less cheese than the recipe called for, since I didn't have that much in the fridge and I prefer less cheesy anyway. The tomatoes caramelize a little under the broiler. Really, although I expected more of a potluck sixties hippie thing, it was much better than that. Delicious. We had it over/on the side of long grain rice. I used a mix of dry-farm early girl tomatoes and sungold cherry tomatoes. As long as the tomatoes are flavorful I don't think it matters much what they are. Happily there are some leftovers, always a bonus for those of us becoming lazier by the day.

My mother ate one and only one sandwich when she was out at a deli. Turkey, ham, coleslaw and russian dressing on rye. We called it the Natalie. The bread was not toasted. There was never any swiss cheese within a mile of this sandwich.

Forgive me. I don't have any enlightened ways to deal with pattypan squash. The name is cute, though. Here's my pathetic contribution, having cooked them maybe once in my life: they don't deserve their own thread. They should be lumped in with all summer squash. Zucchini may have a case for its own thread, but only because most of us actually remember what it looks like and because the fried flowers have a certain panache. Plus zucchini is available all year round, whereas many "summer squashes" are more local and more seasonal. Yeah, don't tell me I'm cranky, I already know. The air here in the Bay Area is so foul from smoke that I can't decide whether to stop breathing or just give up and buy some marshmallows and graham crackers. On the positive side, I already have plenty of chocolate.

I am one of those people who don't like green bell peppers, although I like many fresh green varieties of New Mexican chile, which I roast and use in a variety of dishes. I can't stand bell peppers raw in salads or on pizza. That said, one green bell pepper is all it takes to make a big pot of red beans and rice. After a couple of hours of cooking with onions, garlic, celery, smoked ham or ham stock, good quality beans and all the usual suspect herbs and spices you won't know it's there.

This is an interesting list: https://www.southernkitchen.com/articles/eat/8-best-black-southern-cookbooks This list must have been published before Toni Tipton Martin's Jubilee, since it includes her earlier book. The Edna Lewis/ Peacock book was my first intro to some of these dishes. I don't believe you can find just one book that will do it. Not that one book on anything will do.

David Lebovitz"s Moelleux of Summer Fruits, currently featured on his website, is dynamite. I've made it twice, the first time with plums and the second time with peaches. Both excellent, but we preferred the plum, as the fruit was tart. I made two changes. Both times I used the reverse ratio of AP flour to almond flour, so the balance was in favor of AP flour. The second time I made it, instead of a tsp of vanilla I subbed in !/2 tsp vanilla plus 1/4 tsp almond extract, which I really liked. The plums didn't need to be peeled, making it even easier. We're talking very simple recipe here; basically the whole thing can be put together in the time it takes to heat the oven. Plums are my favorite summer fruit for baking. Many varieties work well in baked goods and many are available all summer and into the fall. And because they are so common, it's easier to find them in the right stage of firmness and/or ripeness. And mediocre plums get sweeter and tarter when baked. DL recommends using apricots, which I'm sure would be delicious, but timing is everything, and their season is short. Speaking of plums, I've made several small batches of jam. If you have an excess of berries they can be mixed in with the plums. I don't bother to peel plums for jam, so it's easy to make in small batches for immediate use. And plums are so forgiving! Very ripe is perfect for jam, but even somewhat ho-hum plums make good jam. Just throw in half a scraped vanilla bean and a splash of framboise or cassis. As usual, @David Ross, your huckleberry porn is as annoying as can be. If they grew in these parts I would train in bear-wrestling. A huck shake was one of the high points of my life. And that was followed by huck pie.