maggiethecat

Saltines with Cheese Whiz was the junk food of my youth, and God, I loved it. Today, Saltines seem to function mostly as a Distant Early Warning in a cubicle: if you see a woman with a sleeve of Saltines on her desk, she's pregnant and ain't sayin' yet. The guys have a bag of Cheetos for their midmorning snack. Full disclosure: For reasons I can't fully comprehend, I'm writing a piece about Saltines. Damn , I should be typing away about Molecular Gastronomy or something sexy, but I'm stuck on Saltines. Help a girl out: Saltines were used in escallopes, as breading, as filler for a meat loaf. I'm trolling for further adventures with Saltines, like their place on a platter of of oysters in New Orleans (Lance's) or the mattress for a canned sardine at one of my Grandmother's Liverpudlian girlfriends at High Tea---Toronto, circa 1963. Any salty reminiscences or cool recipes?

I think these have sat in the meat drawer of my fridge for ( ) almost a year, been pressed into service, and yes...I'm still alive! The money I spent on the KA meat grinder/sausage-stuffer attachment was one of the two or three best investments I've ever made in kitchen equipment. Seriously.

Oh my gosh: This brought a reminiscent giggle, to say nothing of head-scratching in disbelief that I'd forgotten Laurentide. Dude, if you'd ordered an O'Keefe in Montreal we would have stuck a big "I'm a loser" sign on your back. Regional, indeed! Gee, I'd love an O'Keefe right now--way better than Bud or Miller. Where was the original brewery?

I'm with you here, on both counts. Good craft beers flourish on either side of the border. And I don't think it's just expat nostalgia that makes me agree with you about the superiority of many Canadian mass-produced brewskis. They have more flavour and character than their American counterparts. I started drinking pitchers of Ex at The Swiss Hut on Sherbrooke when I was at McGill -- still love the stuff. But how could I have forgotten Cinquante, my brother's beer of choice back in the day? I've been away too long.

67,828. (Abby, I'll start adding yours into the total when you reach 300. )

67, 580. That's rounding off Abby's "countless" at 300. Yes, totally arbitrary!

More flexible than a Slinky, but less than the leaves of a yet-to-be-poached artichoke. Give it a shot, Peeps! The Smackdown may become a much more serious competition in the future, and why not? The writing and intellectual skills on this site demand it. So let this bit of frivolity be a chance to get your name in lights, and add a cool cookbook to your library. And start thinking about the next topic: "What I Ate This Summer." Three thousand words.

If I see much more one-step-above-Wonder bread labelled "artisan" I might take a peel to the bakery stand.

OK, I was having the preprandial martini and looked to my left. Aha! Purslane growing in my monarda didima! I reached over, plucked a microscopic nibble, and ate it. I didn't get sweet and lemony, I got hot and peppery, like watercress to the max. I looked again and noticed that although the leaves were succulent, and looked just like the lovely art that accompanies this piece, the stems were green, not red. So...did I pluck purslane, or did I eat some heart-racing psychedelic -vision inducing noxious weed? (Tongue's still burning, but any visions so far are probably gin-induced.)

67, 110. And I'm off to Borders!

This article could not have been better (or worse) timed;I have just spent an hour trying to eradicate that red-stemmed succulent from my garden. No more! Thanks, Zora.

What Suzanne said. Cool!

Jeff Smith did something amazing: He told people that you could be Frugal. In the last days of Haute Cuisine --and disco!-- he said to me that legumes could be a Good Thing. In his way, he paved the path for Mama cooking and regional cuisine. Bless him.

67,105. (Yes,Susan, it was a birthday present: now 7.95 on the remainder shelf at Borders. Nice chapter on Minnesota!)

My calculator had gone missing---just found it in the corner cleverly hidden under a pedicure flipflop. That's 66, 918, including one for me: "Heartland" by the incomparable Marcia Adams, author of "Cooking From Quilt Country."

Wraps in general and plastic wrap in particular. God, I hate them all. Rick Bayless's shilling for the BK sandwich is as nothing compared to the horror Mario Batali's (who I worship as a cook as much as I do Bayless) hawking for that crappy stick-to-anything wrap he whores for. Won't cut properly, sticks only to itself and does not seal around an open container any better than the house brand plastic wrap. It's horrible. So I thought: Ok, this new plastic wrap with the little guillotine built in will work better than the claw-tooth monster attached to all those long rectangular boxes. It doesn't. Foil generally sucks too. Back to the future, folks: the only wrap that cuts neatly is the wax paper my mother used in the early sixties. I'm thinking that butcher paper and plastic bands are the only way to go. I feel better now.

OK, Archie, in the cause of science, I'll bake a potato sometime today. I've never picked up the chocolate aroma, but I have to say that baked potatoes in general seem to taste sweeter than they did in the past, not just Yukes, but even the standard russet.

65,890. LOL. If this book is tempting Julie to take a turn in the kitchen, I'd better find a copy for myself. Thanks for the tip, Alex and Ronnie.

You don't like hot dogs? What's not to like? Well, taste and texture, for two! Oh, and aroma for three. The smell of cooking weiners makes me gag.

I thought that we had settled this and were going to bury this obvious fault of yours under the rug and never talk about it again. I am extremely dissappointed in you. What Brooks said. Archie, remember: cornichons! I will never get to eat enough caviar or raw oysters, and it makes me sad, like knowing that I'll never be a professional merengue insturctor. That said: Sashimi. Sushi. Cook fish, dammit. Peanut butter. Hot dogs.

65, 577. And yes, Dear bloviatrix, I might have to recalculate mileage to chefg's new place!

Dr. Johnson got it right, I'm afraid. Cucumbers smell wonderful, but so do cigars, and I don't eat them! (Well, if I were having dessert with Tony Bourdain at French Laundtry...yeah, maybe.) But my mother and I discovered that cucumbers can be a steamy girl's best friend. We were making dinner together on a July evening, in the last house my parents owned without air conditioning. Sloppy with sweat, we were preparing the suppertime leafy green thing, fueled by generous G and Ts. My mother applied a slice of cucumber to my forehead (well, you had to be there!) and it stuck. It felt divine, the fragrance floated me into some shady Norwegian Wood, and my body temperature took a little dip into some sylvan lake. So I stuck I slice on her forehead, then she applied one to my chest, then I slapped a few on her arms... We sat down to dinner garnished with cucumber; Daddy has long since learned not to question these things. Cucumbers are cool.

Heaven knows I'm flexible with deadlines, but let's shoot for July 17th.

Round Three has been judged, and the winners will be posted starting next Monday. Round Twenty-One will remain open until the entries arrive at some critical mass -- like six, say. The quality of the entries is really high. But geez, give those three a run for the money. Er, cookbook.

I wish I could remember the order of Mohs hardness scale. Hmm...Tortellini give cats....