Katie Meadow

I assume the fiery illustration is the fresh hell of corn, according to the Dante of eG. Just make sure the fire is still burning when I grill my beautiful milk and honey corn that I brought back from the farmers' market this morning! Yum only begins to describe the thrill. Only two weeks into peak corn season and I'm already depressed about it being over.

The short grain "sushi" rice I cook in the rice cooker lasts better overnight in the fridge than long grain. Sometimes I will eat a portion of leftover rice for breakfast, or, as noted above, use leftover rice for making fried rice. Even so, I don't use it after two days. If I have long grain rice to save I usually only do it if there is a lot of leftover sauce or gravy or whatever, and I make sure to mix it into the rice before refrigerating. Then at least there's some hope for it the next day. Dried-out rice just isn't very appetizing.

Everyone should be required to experience a beef feedlot. The level of pollution becomes very obvious just from a close drive-by. Lamb is now considered as bad or worse environmentally than beef, but in this country we just don't eat that much lamb, so focussing on reducing beef production and consumption makes more sense. It really is possible for most of us to cut way back on red meat. If you need to find a substitute--something that looks like meat or that has high protein or whatever--well, go for it if it works for you. Ultimately eating little or no beef is a sacrifice that is less difficult than many others that help the environment, and if an overwhelming number of people participated it could have a big impact. I am not a vegetarian, nor do I believe that eating animals is necessarily unethical, especially given that resources vary widely on the planet. I think of red meat as a special treat, although truthfully the longer I go without it the less I care. I'm not ready to give up the occasional BLT (yes I know that's not beef!), but just a few of them every summer during tomato season can be enough of a reward. I still eat some chicken and sustainable seafood, but if we don't start paying closer attention we will all be left with nothing but tilapia and rodents. Okay, I'll take my drugs now.

I have the same one. Works just fine, fits in a shallow drawer, and doesn't look like a tool of the inquisition. Admittedly I don't use it very often; my knife skills are decent and I'm very lazy. I got it after giving away my expensive deBuyer contraption (purchased on eBay) that came in what looked like a saxophone case. I used it once. I can thin-slice a cucumber by hand in half the time it took to set that sucker up. The lucky recipient of the giveaway was over the moon about it and I haven't heard whether he still has ten fingers.

My feeling about sets is that they are overwhelming and that not every size pot and pan is most useful made from the same material. Also those getting married these days have been living together or on their own for a while and usually have an eclectic collection and a few favorites. I'm also not enamored with appliances as gifts unless requested. Here's my absurd bias: the most useful pot is a 5 or 6 qt. enameled cast iron dutch oven. I like the 5.5 qt Le Creuset. And they are aesthetically appealing. If the couple doesn't have such a thing already it's a workhorse with a relatively long life and....colorful!

We used to get frybread or fry bread in New Mexico when we went to the pueblos for various events or at concession stands at fairs. It was often called Navajo bread.It wasn't topped with anything in my memory. It has a long and twisted history. Here's one source: https://www.cowboysindians.com/2013/10/more-than-an-indian-taco-2/ Fry bread is a simple wheat bread that is deep fried. I don't know how the term "Indian taco" originated; At least during my time in NM--the late sixties and early seventies-- it wasn't something we saw on menus. Tacos of course are typically made with corn tortillas, so I believe the intention was to use fry bread as a base for Americanized taco fillings such as beans, ground beef and grated cheese. It would be impossible to fold such a construction the way you fold a taco. Flour tortillas are usually made with white flour, so the ingredients may for them may indeed be closer to the ingredients of flour tortillas, but cooked in a completely different way. How fry bread migrated into NM and Arizona is a long story itself, but how it migrated into eastern Canada must be an even longer one. How it became associated with or called bannock must be another strange tale, as bannock is a Scottish oat cake. There's a wealth of online analysis about the history of Indian fry bread and its travels.

We all have to come to terms with where our food comes from and whether or not to eat animals. Everyone's time-table is different and I've never met two vegetarians with the exact same rationale. I find plenty of foods unappetizing and some foods really gross for whatever reasons. I never believed in requiring my daughter to try everything, either. I get the impulse, but mostly it just seemed like too much work. @fondue I can sympathize with your son's culture shock. He'll figure it out, one way or another and will become a more tolerant person for it. After seventy plus years I don't want duck soup surprise either. His response seemed more grown up than mine might have been. He sounds lovely.

Thanks to @andiesenji I ordered the Tellicherry peppercorns from Sir Spice. Best moment was opening the bag under my nose. They are fresh and tasty, so no complaints. I have two pepper mills.One is a Unicorn that I found in my mother's kitchen when she died and seems a very adequate work horse and I appreciate how easy it is to refill. However if the refill sleeve accidentally gets shifted, which has happened twice, the result can be pretty annoying, and since the whole thing is black it's easy to miss that the hole is exposed. The other is an upside-down style from Cole and Mason. It's very solid and the five grind selections actually are pretty effective, which is not true of most grinders in my experience. I had one of those standard Danish teak grinders from the fifties, and that lasted sixty years. It wasn't very precise, but I always liked the mid-century look of it, and the feel of the wood. None of my pepper mills ever housed a black widow.

Never one to miss an opportunity to say I hate something. Miracle Whip belongs in the Museum of Inexplicably bad American Foods. I grew up on Hellman's, switched to Best Foods when I moved to CA and then discovered Duke's and never looked back. Yes, Heinz Ketchup was ubiquitous when I grew up. I find it nearly inedible now, and that's why it is the only condiment I am willing to make from scratch--and I do, although I am not a heavy user anyway. On my plate eggs and ketchup will never meet. But eggs with red chile New Mexico style? Now that's heaven. When I have fries I really want aioli with them. I never even heard of putting ketchup on a grilled cheese sandwich. Who does that?

I am loving this. More please is right. I can get behind the Guinness in a New York minute. I'll have the neeps and tatties, hold the haggis. My spellcheck really doesn't cotton to those foods. I had to spend a fair amount of time correcting "needs" and "tattoos." Drink enough Guinness and you might stumble out of a tattoo parlor with a poorly drawn haggis on your......well, where would you want that?

Forgive me if I wasn't clear. I'm not worried about your finances, although no opportunity for kindness to you would be missed, I hope. I just want you to spend your dollars on anything that doesn't enrich Chris Kimball. I can go lower, but I'm not sure how. Okay, that's not strictly true.

It's hard not to like Dorie, but I have to admit that I own French Table and rarely consult it. I don't think I've opened it in two years. But she's a generous spirit and there are a couple of her simpler recipes that I have made many times. As for Chris Kimball, he's never been a conundrum to me. I just plain hate him. Beyond the fact that he is a pompous phony, he seems determined not to give even one recipe for free. All the sites associated with him do that blurry thing which infuriates me no end. So stingy! If had a copy of that Milk St book I would send it to you for free. Maybe someone out there has one.....

My husband claimed he would prefer a graham cracker crust. I can certainly see that. It's just that saltines are so funny.

Yep, it's his recipe.

I'm not much of a baker. And I especially don't do pie dough, although my husband can. I make great brownies and a couple of good apple cakes and two dependable types of cookie . But I've had this cartoonish recipe floating around for years and I realized the other day that if I don't hurry up and just get it over with I'll be dead before ever tasting it. Some of you have no doubt made it or heard of it: Atlantic Beach Pie, from North Carolina. The pictures always look fabulous and the ingredients are downright silly. The crust is made with saltines, sugar and butter. The filling is made with egg yolks, sweetened condensed milk and lots of lemon juice. And that's it. I can't remember the last time I bought saltines; it must have been forty years ago....or more. My mother used to buy them to eat alongside chocolate ice cream. Yes, she was strange. As for condensed milk I went through a phase of making Viet iced coffee years ago, so I do remember what that's like. And I remember having it in tea in Mexico; always fun along with fresh made Mexican pastries. The recipe suggests topping the pie with whipped cream, a sprinkle of sea salt (it's Atlantic Beach Pie, after all) and lemon zest. I didn't have any whipped cream, so I simply salted and zested the top of the custard. Okay, this pie is addictive. It gets served cold, from the fridge and it so easy it's embarrassing. Also the recipe leaves you with bit less than half of a sleeve of saltines. They're really good. It's like discovering a new exotic cracker. I had no idea.

A quick survey of various sources yields the following: Most sources attribute the invention of the fork as a dinner utensil to 4th century Byzantium. Supposedly it morphed from Greek and Roman two-pronged tools that migrated to the tables of Byzantine nobles. It is also the most common theory that the fork then traveled to Italy before the rest of Europe during the Middle Ages. Apparently the Medici's were early adopters. I'm sure they found them to be very useful for stabbing each other. With the pointy end, of course. Oh, and my vote goes to fork twirling as the main reason to avoid breaking long pasta. You break it for kids who haven't acquired that dexterity yet. It was invented by the Phillistines.

That would be Serengeti spaghettis.

I could no more "make" breakfast than I could put together an IKEA object before eating one (breakfast, that is.). I'm with you, @Smithy. Cutting down on wheat has put a painful crimp in breakfasts for me, since I do need some grain and it has to be simple. It kills me that my husband bakes great bread and I just can't eat as much of it as I like--or as I used to eat. Toast and a few strawberries would be my every day choice for breakfast. Or a bagel with cream cheese and lox if I was lucky, feeling flush or able to think ahead. For grain I've switched to a mainly rice diet from a mainly wheat diet. I will often heat up left-over short grain rice with butter and add a little smoked salmon for breakfast. It works, but chopsticks are essential. And since this is the India cooking thread, if I have made a vegetable curry the night before I'm pretty happy with leftover rice sauced with a modest amount of curry. Before noon I'm no way ready for anything that oozes or comes from a pig. The breakfast thread never ceases to amaze me. It makes me feel like I'm from Jupiter. But not in a bad way.

If you want to up your tamale pie game, Rick Bayless has a recipe on line. He uses Masa Harina para Tamales, the nixtamalized corn flour that comes in a bag. If you make a sauce using dried red chiles, or in a pinch ground chile powder, it really takes off. Rather than ground beef I like to use shredded pork from a roasted shoulder (like Pernil, the Puerto Rican version) or shredded chicken, even from a rotisserie bird. This is more like the Tamale Pie home made in the southwest. Very satisfying and of course easier than making your own tamales.

From the scary to the hilarious. Scary: the fact that this is even a thread. Hilarious: that I own one of those letter openers. It was some promotional item I was given years ago, and I have to say that it's worth its weight in plastic for actually opening letters. But I am not going to use it to open a cucumber. I never thought of an English cucumber as a puzzle in need of a solution, so I will just struggle along with a knife and brute force for that .00001 mil shrink-wrap. Be careful getting slippery cucumber juice on that doohickey. The blade is sharp. @Darienne I will watch for you on the "I will never again...." thread.

I never heard of fried pickles until I was in Atlanta several years ago, celebrating my daughter's getting her masters degree in Public Health. The entrance to the bar was a giant skull. We were there with a bunch of her friends and a few other parents. I've never though of fried pickles as toppers, but more of a meal in themselves. I had a large basket of them along with a fantastic coffee-tasting beer. We were at a large table on an upstairs open air porch. It was lovely. Public health all the way around. My ideal would be a half sour pickle with an ethereal tempura-like batter. The fried pickles I've tried since are nothing to write home about and would sink like a stone if you tried to skip them in a pond. Good ones are scarce as hen's teeth. @weinoo let me know if the Pickle Guys come up with something enlightened and I'll note it for a destination the next time I am in NY. Every once in a while I think about making them myself, but I don't. I haven't personally deep fried anything in my life, so there's that.

There are discussions in other threads about the difference between polenta and grits. Both are cornmeal, which can be ground coarse, medium or fine for a different texture. In my experience the Italians usually prefer polenta ground more finely than Southerners like their grits, which is often toothier. The main difference though is that grits and polenta have traditionally been made from different types of corn: dent corn vs flint corn. To further complicate the issue is nixtamalization, a process used in the Americas. Grits can be made from hominy, which is nixtamalized corn, but I have no idea how common that is. There is so much conflicting information and misinformation about the various types of corn, their origins and how they are used that it makes your head spin. Anyone wishing to learn more should do the research themselves. There are six types of corn and the things that can be done with them is, to put it mildly, complicated. When it comes to color, as far as I can determine both dent and flint corn can be white or yellow. I buy my grits from Geechie Boy Mill on Edisto Island. I prefer white, and my husband prefers yellow. They do taste a little different, but they are the same type of corn, and both make me happy. They now sell specialty color grits--red and blue. I've never tried them because they cost substantially more. During the late sixties and early seventies I lived in New Mexico and blue corn was commonly used for griddle cakes, tortillas and other things. My memory is that it was typically ground finer than you might want for grits. Personally I prefer grits to polenta; most grits sold by artisanal operations in the south are on the coarser side and, to me, have a more "corny" taste. When you buy stone ground grits grown from local corn it will probably be fresher than any boxed Italian sourced polenta, but it's been so long since I actually bought polenta I could be off base here. For cornbread I like a medium grind corn, so it has a bit of a bite to it. Bob's Red Mill medium grind cornmeal is my go-to for breads and pancakes. I love cakes that have cornmeal as a percentage of the flour. If a recipe calls something Polenta Cake I just use that same Bob's medium grind cornmeal, but that toothy quality might not be to everyone's taste. However, if you like the taste of a certain coarse ground cornmeal but want it finer you can always grind it down a bit yourself. Not to disparage anyone here on eG, where help is so readily and generously given, but again, when it comes to corn be suspicious of all information. Mine included!

@Margaret Pilgrim Thanks, I'm looking forward to the info, whenever you get around to it. I don't think I have ever had a Salvadoran Tamale. I used to be wild for loroco pupusas. In case that is unknown to anyone reading this, loroco is a vine. It is a little bitter, the way artichoke is, but impossible to describe the taste. I used to be able to buy it fresh at Mi Pueblo, that large Latinx chain which went under a year or two ago. I haven't found any substitute as good as Mi Pueblo in the East Bay.

Thanks for posting these. The Seafood Watch is a great resource. I think you can bet on the fact that the place you buy tilapia from will not know where it was farmed or what type it is. I don't eat tilapia, partly because of these recommendations but also because it is about the most tasteless fish ever. I rarely eat fish tacos out because when not specified it is most likely tilapia. Several years ago when all the data was released about the mis-labeling of fish and seafood, whether retail or restaurant, I just about gave up on variety and stuck to the same identifiable few critters that are sustainably fished or farmed in the US and Canada. I almost never eat red meat any more, so my sources of protein keep shrinking. And getting pricey. I can't remember if it was here or in the NYT that someone noted the price of this year's haul of Copper River Salmon was selling for around $47 dollars per lb. Not that I'm buying that. Poor planet, you will be better off when we are gone.

Margaret, who is the vendor for the Salvadoran tamales?