maggiethecat

Girlfriend, that's downright scary! I have a shoebox of Aunt Martha embroidery patterns, including the days of the week tea towel set. I also own virtual twins of the dishcloths, bought at the Ladies' Guild Gift Shop at The Ottawa Civic Hospital last year. You've been busy, Martha of Minnesota, and believe me that's a compliment coming from me! My sewing machine bit the dust after twenty five years of faithful service this October, as I was making my Mother-of-The- Bride toilette. It was a bitch.It's replacement is the only item on my Christmas list, so if Santa is listening I'll have all those aprons I cut out in September completed for next Christmas.

ronnie: I guess I'm going to have to get to Atwood Cafe, if your rec is added to my daughter's. It's her new favorite Chicago restaurant, and whenever she's in from LA she and her husband make sure to pay a visit. Over Thanksgiving they got there too late for lunch, only to find out they serve a fabulous Tea. That's my kind of restaurant.

In 2006 I will find a way to get over my cooking ennui. I don't mean to brag, but the fact is I'm a very good cook, and over a thirty year span I have taken on most major cuisines, mastered bread and pastry and put out a real dinner every single night.I'm looking for new worlds to conquer, but I'm not sure of the geography. I will have more dinner parties, becuase they stimulate creativity and I love the company of my friends, the most talented cooks and hedonists ever: the Chicago eGulls. I will put aside a few dollars a week in a restauarant fund, so I can eat at Alinea and Mota and Mr. Beef. I don't get out enough. And i'll crank out 2000 words a week.

I'm making Chicken and Dumplings with half a leftover roast chicken from Sunday night as we speak. Poach some veggies in the leftover gravy, thinned with stock, add the stripped chicken from the roast, top with Drop Biscuits from Joy. Stick it in the oven for half an hour and use the time to address some Christmas cards.

I'm tempted to cry foul here, Jamie. I was enjoying your classy, witty, informed BC Boulevardier blog, and then you made me cry, dammit.

Here's the burning question: is Maw your real name or a nom de plume? I've always assumed that the Maws were a family from the wilds of Wales. That assumption being (almost) correct, do you feel that your surname influenced your path in life? (My mother's podiatrist's name is, no joke, Dr. Foote . ) I wonder if your path in life might have been different if you had been born with a moniker that referred to a different portion of your anatomy? And I'd like to add my fulsome praise to that of others here. Your blog has made this Arctic week here in Chicago much, much more tolerable -- in fact, memorable. Thanks.

I apologize --- the calculator has become dusty from disuse. 102,199.

Wow, we'd forgotten about Rock and Rye. My personal bartender is forcing orange and lemon wedges into an empty bottle as we speak, because of this thread. I feel wistful that we don't have the real Rock (remember making it in either Chemistry class or Home Ec?) but the simple syrup will have to do. I love horehound, but I don't think it belongs in R and R -- I'm open to trying the the humbugs version if you make it though. (Since moving to the States I have never found a reliable source of humbugs.)I think of Rock and Rye as an Old Fashioned aspiring to be a liquer, and there's nothing the matter with that!

Katie: I see bathtub Asian Pear cider next fall. Great idea. It has come to my attention that link to Jaymes's Fantabulous Caramel Corn is broken. Try going from here, or head to the eGullet Recipe Archive.

I guess I'm the only person here who doesn't have dust on top of my fridge. No housekeeping Goddess, I have grease with a light dusting of cat hair and shredded wheat crumbs. Plus: One forlorn wedge of pannetone, left over from Thanksgiving breakfast. Four Kaiser rolls. Box of afore-mentioned shredded wheat. Avocado green plastic breadbox, slicker then Liberace, and much less attractive. DH loves it. Small plastic baggie of extra buttons from a shirt I bought this summer -- I guess I got dressed in the kitchen. And hooray: that small Phillips screwdriver I've been looking for; an overnight soak in ammonia and it's good to go.

OK, I bite: What are Roasted Adolescents? Artichokes? Andouille? Two week old Brussel Sprouts? (Thanks for reminding folks that an early diet of Stephen Leacock, Wayne and Shuster, hockey and Red River cereal fuels a nation of very funny people, of whom you're a shining example.)

Our stockings were double-orange; we received a tangerine in the toe and a Droste chocolate orange higher up. I might have more sophisticated taste in chocolate than I did when I was ten, but the magic of striking that brown orange against the table and seeing it splay into sections never palls. Always a quarter, wrapped in tissue paper -- the denomination I used in my daughter's stocking, although its value had depreciated. In the 60s, it was half the price of a paperback! But it's all about the tradition, including wrapping each stocking gift as carefully as those lolling under the tree in all their beribboned splendour. We often received other food goodies in our stockings -- some Callard and Bowser Butterscotch, say, or a box of licorice allsorts. Back to tradition: When we spend Christmas with my parents I still get a stocking, and it still holds a tangerine, but the Duth orange has been replaced with other edible and potable gifts -- might be a split of champagne, some candied mimosa or a teeny jar of caviar.

If only the Food Channel had some imagination! Talk about a great Reality TV series. It has everything: food, travel, hot guys.... I am completely impressed by how much baking you do. Fresh dinner rolls! Hamburger buns! Mille Feuille dough on board. Do you ever hear your sailors grumble that food at home on leave can't compare to what you and your brigade give them at sea?

Bubblehead Chef: thanks for your generous participation. This topic resonates for me. My English grandfather stole his older brother's long pants lied about his age and joined the British Navy in 1914, at the age of 14. Four years of active service on a sub before he was 18. Supplies grew so low (I remember him talking about salt and pepper soup --water, salt and pepper) that he exchanged his daily tot of rum for food. You cook for young, hungry people. Is sheer quantity ever a problem? Is it possible to run low on supplies?

I loved the Brenda bit where you took your son to Benihana, just because he wanted to go. and I remember thinking that for you it might have seemed like schlock food, dangerously close to fast food. But it isn't. Taking Nick out for flying the shrimp and chicken is so much more fun than a quick drive-thru for a Happy Meal. Your son and the children of folks here have a much better chance of learning to like real food. I respect Jamie Oliver and Alice Waters for their commitment to teaching children about growing theiir own, tasting their own and cooking their own. The food media is all doom and gloom about childhood obesity, banning soda machines and endlessly repeating the new federal food guidelines. How could parents and food writers make a real difference? I doubt that journalistic scolds and no Pepsi in the break room is the answer. How can parents do the right thing?

Hey the season is upon us! Drill out all those cookie recipes. And by all means, learn to love the dough hook! All those seasonal sweet bread recipes like stollen or pannetone that are such a sticky knead if you're using your hands are fun and easy with your KA. Oh my, the attachments are a blast. I can make pasta with my hands and a rolling pin, but the pasta attachment encourages me to make it more often. But, for me, the meat grinder /sausage stuffer is the biggest KA blast. I have an old clamp-on, turn the handle meat grinder sausage setup. But the KA is just fab at charcuterie. Cooking geeks that we are, we have the occasional sausage night: chicken/sage, pork breakfast links, and a pate on the side.

Dang! 102, 073. (KitchenQueen and ronnie -- we have a guest room and a fold-out couch. C'mon down!)

101,623. ← I need to add 19 since I last posted. ← Cool! 101,646.

101,623. Fifi, ma chere: What does it matter that we could all get along with, maybe, six cookbooks? We are giving ourselves hours of pleasure on the sofa and in the kitchen, while supporting food writers and the publishing houses who love them. I'm making my list and checking it twice.

Tah Dah! Thanks mostly to Probono, we've hit a landmark --- we've surpassed 100,000 mark! With my purchase of The Silver Spoonthis thread clocks in at 101,615 cookbooks. And that's just a fraction of the true total. Ladies and gentlemen, start counting your cookbooks!

Facts first. Ruth Reichl is a native New Yorker and was educated there, in Montreal and at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where she earned a masters degree in art history. She wrote restaurant criticism for New West magazine, the Los Angeles Times (where she was the editor of the food section), and the New York Times. She is now editor in chief of Gourmet magazine. Reichl lives in New York with her husband, Michael Singer, a television news producer, and their son, Nick. She has won two James Beard Awards for criticism, and one for journalism. She sports a fabulous head of hair and looks good wearing red lipstick. But writing a biography of Ruth Reichl feels as redundant as chronicling the day-to-day events of the great seventeenth-century diarist, Samuel Pepys; if the subject has been so generous, why not direct the reader to the source? Pepys wrote about not only his career moves, marriages and love affairs but also the Plague, the Great Fire of London, and the life of an ambitious civil servant. Like Ruth, he includes recipes. Reichl’s three volumes of memoirs Tender at the Bone, Comfort Me With Apples and this year, Garlic and Sapphires are intimate and inclusive. It’s good food writing, of course, but like Pepys, she provides a view of the world. Her world is American cuisine, culture, and food politics since 1950. There’s a glimpse at that critical mass of idealistic kids who thought that they could change the world. Ruth is the paradigm of the generation now derided as Baby Boomers - it wasn’t about the Brady Bunch and bad hair, it was about peace, love, political change, and Power to the People. Reichl moved from left-leaning Ann Arbor to the People’s Republic of Berkeley, fed the fellow-travelers in a commune and between 1974 and 1977 cooked at and co-owned The Swallow restaurant. She knew Alice Waters back in the day, wrote restaurant reviews for New West magazine and then moved to Los Angeles in 1984 to become restaurant critic, and later editor of the Los Angeles Times food section. Never a food snob, despite every professional qualification to become one, she wrote a flattering review of a taco restaurant called Senor Fish. It’s laminated to the menu to this day. In 1993 she moved to the New York Times, channeled that Ann Arbor state of mind and gave a noodle restaurant three stars. Sixties egalitarianism shaped her reviews. If, dining as one of her disguised alter-egos, she received noticeably different treatment from that she received as La Reichl, she called out the perpetrators in print. Power to the People. Her job as editor in chief of Gourmet and the publication of The Gourmet Cookbook makes her the most influential mass-market media dispenser of recipes in the country. This is fitting. In each of her memoirs she gives us recipes, often as simple as Nick’s fave Matzo Brei , or the huge chocolate birthday cake that was an open love letter to Michael Singer. It’s comforting, and tender: Ruth Reichl is first, last, and always a cook.

Obviously, this was a resolution I couldn't keep! I hang my head in shame. But I have a nice meaty turkey carcass and I'm not gonna screw around. Into a bubbling cauldron with it and some mirepoix, strain, then I'll throw in every good veg and herb that's lolling around the fridge. I hope to make gallons.

Melissa, it must be a regional thing, and I'm jealous of you Southerners. Pickled peaches and red spiced crab-apples? There's no display at my midwestern grocery stores, and I wish there were. The Olde English Bountiful Style is my style because my grandparents on my mother's side were English immigrants. Here in Chicagoland, unlike the genteel southeast, I'm not sure it's the traditional style at all -- in fact I'm sure of it. It's more likely to be Central European , Italian or Hispanic. Or plain boring white-bread American Everyman. Blush. My Thanksgiving decorations? Seriously thinking about running out to Joannes's for the supplies to make the pompom, felt and pipecleaner turkies that Martha features in the November "Living." (I am also a big Della Robbia fan -- but pale blue and white food is a bad color combo!)

So did you pet the sea cucumbers in the fish petting zoo on the pier at Manhattan Beach? They're really soft, those weird critters. My daughter, who lives in LA, has a new favorite spot: Blair's on Rowena in Silverlake. American bistro at its best, with the added attraction of desserts that crown the meal, not simply add some sweet at the end. And , come to think of it, my all-time fave strip-mall restaurant is on Sunset in Silverlake-- the Pho Cafe. I've never eaten better, cheaper Vietnamese in a cool space.

I totally understand what you're saying and actually agree with you. My chef's jacket was a sample from a manufacturer that I paid for myself. I was considering using them at a restaurant I was managing. If I really wanted to be self-important I'd have had my name embroidered on it. To me, it's a full contact apron. ← I have a chef jacket too, but it's left in the dust by my vintage cross-stiched Donna Reed aprons. My mother gave it to my husband for Christmas, and as you say, it's a full-contact apron, and handy when your caterer friends want you to show up in uniform. But I wander from the topic because I am a wonk on the subject of protecting clothing from grease splatters. The clothes don't make the chef. The job makes the chef.