Katie Meadow

Most institutional food is the product of restricted budgets. The ingredients are bought in bulk, as cheaply as possible. The cooks are underpaid and under-skilled. Hospital food is additionally crippled by dietary rules as well, such as very low salt and very low fat. The use of canned foods is prevalent. I'm not saying there aren't exceptions, like a bigger budget or a few dedicated souls out there who have some tricks in their bag, but you get what you pay for generally. And American standards are pretty low. When this subject is raised someone always brings up the French defense; how the school lunches are so wonderful. My husband remembers this from his one year in France in middle school. I wonder if it is like that now, or if it was simply better by comparison.

Oh, my mistake, my brain is fizzled.

Is there a person who eats out even once in a while who hasn't encountered inedible food? And you are still annoyed about an incident 20 years ago? Don't eat at "The Tides" restaurant in Gowanus. When we moved into the house we are in now more than thirty years ago we walked over to a funky little Chinese restaurant a few blocks away. I think it was very likely the food came directly out of a Chun King can. I don't think I took a second bite. Within a year the place closed and remained a dusty museum of tables for several more years. Rumors of two brothers and a murder bubbled up, but the truth has remained a mystery. So the moral is if you can get a story out it you are ahead of the game.

It's hard to know where to put this new piece of information I just gleaned from Toni Tipton-Martin's Jubilee. She has a section on baked beans in which her research digs up this possible origin. Most of us think of baked beans as a yankee dish. It's always been too sweet for me; I guess I like my beans soupier and spicier, as in a pot of red chile or red beans and rice. She claims one possible origin is that sea captains brought the dish back from North Africa and/ or Spain and suggests that originally it was the Sephardic Jewish version of cholent, the beans and meat that cooked all night so that you didn't have to cook on the sabbath. That's about as far as she takes it, and she never mentions cholent. It never would have occurred to me! It may have started with a sweet component added, like maybe honey or pomegranate molasses or date syrup. I've never tasted cholent, just heard my mother talk about it from her early childhood. Perhaps it also made its way to the south directly from Aftica, and they added their own local molasses to sweeten in up. Somewhere along the line the meat morphed from beef to pork. I love this theory! Related to news about TTM and not the sabbath, I just heard she has been named editor of Bon Appetit to hopefully bring it back from disgrace. I haven't looked at that magazine in years, so this can only be good news.

In a normal year a guest would offer to bring tzimmes, so the host would never have to make it. Some at the table would wax nostalgic, others would remember the prunes and stay away. @weinooyou are to be congratulated for doing every course yourself. I'm with SE--completely happy with matzoh ball soup, several bowls of it. RIP RBG. If only you could have hung on another couple of months. I know you tried.

I'm with you. The profits on any renovations or upgrades are never guaranteed, but the headaches are. "Taking a loss" is a relative term and may not even be the case, given how long you have lived there. Do the least stressful thing!

Stock from lamb shanks? That means Scotch Broth!

Do you mean that it's wrong to be nonjudgmental or that you are wrong about thinking of yourself that way? Personally I think this thread is kinda silly. There's an awfully wide spectrum from personal taste to quirky to weird to just plain crazy.

Mine too. You can get pretty much the same taste if you roast the misc pieces like necks, wings, whatever turkey parts you get fresh. Takes a lot less time than roasting a whole turkey. For me that means turkey broth more than once a year, so all good.

SO nice to see sabich is back in the news. I've never had a sabich made by anyone but me, so I have no idea what the variety of Amba might be, although I'm sure it is wide. Probably there are local products used commonly by street vendors or restaurants if they don't make their own. I've been using the same Pakistani brand of mango pickle since my first sandwich. It is very chunky, very spicy, not runny and certainly not what I would call fresh tasting. I may very well need to rethink this since the brand I am addicted to (and also use on the side with a curry) is now very hard to source. Not a simple sandwich! To get good Pita bread I need to go to to one deli that makes them fresh all day. To get zhoug I like a different little bistro that will sell me a container of their own homemade, which is awfully good; I am getting lazier by the day. I can read a whole novel in the time it would take to make mango pickle, bake pita bread or wash fistfuls of cilantro.

Ah, the annual quandary: do I buy candy I hate or candy I like? This year I'm glad to skip the whole thing.

They are all very nice people and no where near as judgmental as I am. None of them would ever criticize any dish made by another, bad as it might be. (And yes, I find that really irritating.) The great grandparents were farmers in northern CA and the land is still in the family. They have an annual picnic on the land with extended relatives at Easter time, which really is a potluck. Someone defrosts a deer and brings stew. Awful. There are at least six macaroni salads. Mostly awful. A rattlesnake often shows up and sometimes get shot. My husband's immediate family are a little different. They are physicists and mathematicians and engineers and mostly vegetarians and all democrats. With the exception of my husband I don't believe any of his siblings have ever been to New York and none of them would turn down a toasted raisin bagel. As a family in the late sixties they hiked the Napali Coast Trail in Kauai. Naked. Mom, Dad and four kids.

Agreed. Raisin Bagel is just wrong. With ham it's even wronger. But of course it is also disgusting.

My definition of wrong is when someone puts ham and mayo on a raisin bagel. Believe me, I've seen it. I grew up eating salad after the main. My mother, who was really a terrible cook, believed that the French were always right. When I moved to CA I discovered the more popular way to serve salad in a restaurant was as a starter. I like it that way. By the time I get done with my main meal I really don't have an appetite for salad. My husband's relatives all serve salad at the same time as the main, like hippies at a pot luck.

I've no doubt that time is coming.

@liamsaunt. Well, just go away. Brown butter lobster rolls. KMN.

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.