Katie Meadow

That does look very nice, and I would certainly eat it happily. But pizza with mashed potatoes? No. Never.

Okay, I'm all in with steaming. I did as instructed, which was to subtract one minute from the the steaming time because my eggs were room temp. I don't recall if I missed any note about this in the text, but the eggs are awfully hot if you try to peel them right away. I let them air cool for about five to ten minutes, and they were still plenty hot. Given that the eggs continue to cook when not shocked by ice water it may be useful to note that, depending on what yolk you are aiming for, you may need to adjust a bit to include a little cooling time. My eggs, which were very fresh, peeled easily and were delicious. I did use a steamer basket, with water coming almost but not quite up to the level of the basket.

Black Arks are the absolute best! Very hard to come by here in CA. Our favorite market used to get them for a very very short season, but the last few years they have disappeared. I'm not an apple butter person, and I've never cooked them, but just eating out of hand they are unique.

Mashed potatoes on pizza are one step away from the garbage can. Pineapple pizza, on the other hand, is otherworldly, but only if the fruit is fresh and tart. Yes, I moved from NY to CA and I changed.

Doesn't the flexibility of the kitchen depend somewhat on the type of food being served or on the particular dish? Burgers are a perfect example of something that can be made to order. You can get a plain burger. Or a cheeseburger with a choice of cheese. Or a chile burger or whatever. If you are restaurant that serves burgers it's advisable to be flexible. Have a great meat product and they will come. But some complex dishes rely more on a combination of ingredients cooked together. If a restaurant uses a house-made red sauce on their pastas it would probably be unlikely they could make it without onions. For a while I had coincidental health issues that required some pretty awful restrictions. If you are on a low-fat low-acid wheat free diet don't expect an Italian restaurant to be able to accommodate your every whim. I just ate a lot of sushi during that period. If your friends want to go out for pizza, they may not be able to sub a cauliflower crust, and hold the cheese and tomato sauce. Anyone who has had a three year old knows how to go way out their way to accommodate certain, shall we say preferences. Restaurants are not your mother. If they can easily or happily make adjustments for you, patronize them and tip them well. If not, go somewhere else, no?

@robirdstx I have great fondness for The Owl. Were you birding in the Bosque del Apache?

Must be a good trick to wrap a corn tortilla around that sucker.

I still like the Empire Kosher chicken. I prefer the organic when available. Chocolate biscotti: simple, dry, not too sweet. Tart cherry juice, although mostly I drink it in warm weather. Valrhona chocolate bars, 71 percent, perfect dark chocolate, great price for addicts like me. TJ's flour tortillas. Saddest losses: Pane Guttiau, Sicilian parchment crackers. Gone. Fantastic. You can buy similar crackers on Amazon, but they cost 5 times the price. Chocolate coated sunflower seeds. Not as good as the high price brand but cheap. No longer available. On the bright side: for those of you who have my sickness: the seasonal Butter Toffee Pretzels are back, at least at my local store.

On toast. Make toast, butter it. Add a nice layer of ricotta. Then you can add a variety of things, or not. I like thin slices of tomato and salt and pepper. I am also very fond of a drizzle of honey or sorghum on the ricotta layer, then and salt and pepper. Excellent on a white pullman loaf or a rustic crusty loaf or a rye bread.

Right you are. It's my brain, not your eyes.

https://www.splendidtable.org/recipes/almond-crackle-cookies This should link to Dorie's 3 ingredient almond cookies. The recipe is all over the place. It is without doubt the single easiest and best cookie I know of that doesn't have either gluten, or for that matter, cholesterol, since it uses egg white but no yolk. Has no flour of any kind. Personally I like this type of thing far better than any kind of cookie made with non-gluten flours to try and approximate a wheat-based treat. They are addictive.

@liuzhou thanks for the great picture. Okay, she def could be a granny! Loved the story on your blog about her sauce.

I've also heard this brand called "grandmother's" but just looking at her picture she isn't that old! The brand is, I believe, Lao Gan Ma. One of their products is labeled Spicy Chili Crisp. It has a distinctive taste, very good. I have found it in Oakland Chinatown and assume that there are markets in SF where it can be easily purchased. I don't shop Ranch 99 but I would guess they carry it. The comdiments usually referred to as Chili Garlic Paste are numerous. Sambal Oelek is one example, flavorful and medium spicy. I've never tried the Lan Chi brand.

That's why god invented bread. And dogs.

For family dinner on Tday my husband and I inherited the job of cooking the bird. Typically about half the people at the table are vegetarians, so we end up with a lot of leftovers. Some of the meat has gone to the few who like it, but we take home the turkey carcass plus lot's of leftover meat. I don't even like turkey, but since we make the bird, we get the leftovers and that means soup, which I adore. Could you stand to roast the turkey yourself if you had all rights to the remains? A friend of ours who is a chef gave me detailed instructions for actually roasting the turkey (and of course the gravy) a day ahead and packing it up so that it really doesn't dry out and can be heated the next day. For those of us who don't care if anyone sees a platter with a whole critter ready for its Hollywood moment, and for someone like me who just hates the "day of" frenzy, this has been a revelation.

The pork belly pictured above looks better (and by that I mean more meaty) than most. At restaurants I've had yummy crispy pork belly in tacos or thrown into wonton soup at the last minute, but it isn't something I regularly order. And the two times I have purchased it as a slab, even from reputable butchers, it's been more like a block of fat with barely a shred of meat. That's discouraging, and neither looks or tastes appealing. I suppose I could speak up about it and give it a closer inspection but I do have to limit my fats due to high cholesterol so I guess I will switch out my allotment for something that's far less effort. Like cheese. Or a BLT during the height of tomato season. Or coffee ice cream straight from the freezer.

The Titanic menus are remarkable. The Triple Screw says it all. And for breakfast it's nice they give you a choice between fresh fish and not-so-fresh fish, which is what the Yarmouth Bloaters must be.

I'm guessing it really comes into its own at breakfast the next day.

So.....next week it's time for fried green tomatoes, yeah?

@ElsieD The tomato should be flavorful and not rock hard, but not yet red and ripe. The breading should be applied with a light hand; not so thick as to overwhelm the delicate tart tomato. A shallow fry is fine, no need to deep fry. Generous salt and pepper. Fresh herbs, minced, or dried as taste dictates. Love it as a side, but also in a fried green BLT. Best eaten right away! When you see them on a steam table they probably won't be very good. Anyway, it isn't a major commitment, so try it and see what you think. The first time I tasted one I was a convert. And I grew up in New York where most people have never tried it.

For me, speed isn't the goal. The goal is to not have to do it myself. I don't care how long it takes my husband to shuck corn. I just go do something else somewhere else and return when it's done, grateful. There are some kitchen chores I just can't stand, and that's one of them. However, if I found a tangle of cornsilk in bed I might think twice. I'll stop now.

A few years ago we were on the north side of Lake Pontchartrain and stopped at a shack run by a Viet family. They served up very good banh mi and crawfish in a giant vat sold by the pound, which were basically just dumped on the table to suck and pull apart. They were not at all muddy, but quite spicy and also extremely salty; it was hard to taste the meat, to tell the truth, so I don't know how representative they were. I have more patience with small crustacea than either my husband or my daughter, both of whom gave up on them before I did. There are photos of me as a kid doing a perfect dissection of a lobster on a wooden table, looking like nothing else in the world existed. Needless to say I was usually the last one to finish my meal growing up.

I love the iconic packaging; it's always seemed so mysterious. The few times I've seen it in a prominent display it always looked like an art project (I think I saw towers of Spam in Hawaii.) I don't remember anyone I knew ever buying or eating it to my knowledge. I have bought and opened one can, and that was several years ago, mostly out of curiosity. I tried it fried in slices and tried it with potatoes, cut in little cubes for hash. Neither method convinced me to ever try it again. I found it really horrid. I wonder if most of those people who like Spam didn't start eating it in childhood? Clearly there are many things people eat in this world because they grew up eating them. Surely no one ever ate Peeps for the first time as a 60 year old and then continued to eat them. Or did they? Fess up! Upthread someone mentioned the Paul Theroux quote. Yes, it's racist, and it would be hard to put it to the test.

A hybrid tomatillo avocado salsa makes a nice dip for chips or a salsa for your choice of taco filling. I like to roast the tomatillos and blend them with some ripe avocado and the usual suspects: roasted green chiles, lime juice, garlic, cilantro, etc. It is thinner and more tart than the typical guacamole. Also good drizzled over slices of ripe tomato.

@HungryChris, I too love FGTs and they are not easily found at farmers' markets around here, even at the end of tomato season, when you would think they are more common. I especially like them if the batter is lighter, like a tempura sort of thing. They make for an addictive fried green tomato BLT.