mags

It's hard for me to understand just what you're concerned about here. Are you bemoaning the covert chemical adulteration of our food, the unquestioned environment-destroying sources of our furniture? That's what it sounds like in your last post. And I'd go along with you there. I don't like having trans-fats snuck into my food -- if I'm gonna boogie with De Debil, I want him to sign my dance-card first. But this pro-organic, pro-environment position doesn't appear to have anything to do with the difference between "an honest Cotes-du-Rhone" and "a second-rate Grand Cru Burgundy." Are you suggesting that the latter is somehow contaminated with secret preservatives? That its production requires the decimation of old-growth forest? To bring this post in line with your first, you appear to be suggesting that a dish can't be "honest" if it contains Miracle Whip. This sounds to me like a ridiculous version of fetishizing the "authentic" -- not dissimilar to demanding that the picturesque Thai peasant lady get up at four in the morning to start fermenting those fish, rather than using the bottled fish sauce that's a standard item in her pantry. You wanted the B&B egg dish to conform to your notion of what "should" be in it -- which I'm guessing in this instance included homemade mayo whipped up with Great Granny's whisk and a whole lotta elbow grease. You didn't have the experience you wanted. But rather than blaming the experience, I'd take a look at the expectations you brought to it.

Other than pretty pictures and clever puns?

In Chinese convenience stores, with the rest of the snack-foods, you can get olives that have been "brined" with honey and ginger or anise, rather than with salt and vinegar. They're delicious. I don't know if they're available in the States, though.

Whole Foods in Chelsea sells fresh lotus root -- also fresh water chestnuts, if that appeals (does, to me). Wish they would carry fresh bamboo shoots, but no luck so far.

Or better yet --- caviar! Beat me to it.

(Hiding stiletto in boot and blinking innocently) (Wiggling off into the sunset in a clear demonstration of harmless femininity...only slightly hampered by limp caused by stiletto in boot.)

With regard to the lentils, you'll need to monitor your own carbohydrate levels. Lentils are fairly high in carbs, and it'll depend on your personal chemistry whether you're able to eat them and still lose weight. You might want to look into using soybeans instead -- Eden makes very tasty canned black soybeans, which are very low in carbs, and I've found them an ok substitute for most legumes. I also regularly use frozen soybeans -- edamame -- to substitute for lima beans and peas.

Both dinner and breakfast sound divine, I am pea-green jealous of your ability to eat like that and keep your current weight, and I WANNA SEE PIX OF THE FERRETS!!!

Well, there's actually a famous Viennese cake -- the German name of which I can't remember -- that's made to resemble a rack of venison. Your veggie friends might like that more than they'd like Bambi. But on the other hand, this thread is now long over -- as is the party, most likely -- so ummmm........never mind.

Brenna, a couple of things. First, since you've told us in the past that your favorite foods include Pepperidge Farm Goldfish, various kinds of cookies, and something called "funfetti" cake -- and that you hate all cheese, shrimp, and eggs -- I can certainly understand that a low-carb diet wouldn't appeal to you. But don't make the mistake of assuming that everyone else necessarily shares your tastes. Second, since you clearly don't know anything about low-carb eating, I'm curious as to what kind of knowledge-base you're relying on to make your pronouncements that low-carbing is unhealthy (despite your claim, in an earlier post, that "it's ok to overload on protein, though!") Are you a nutritionist or an endocrinologist as well as a college freshman? Having had an eating disorder, by the way, doesn't qualify you as any kind of expert on other people's eating habits; it just gives you some hard-earned knowledge about your own. Finally, I'm sick to death of adults telling me how I should eat, as though their sense of what works for them will necessarily be true for me. I'll be damned if I'm going to take that kind of ignorant arrogance from a 19-year-old who apparently regards pizza as one of the "essential food groups."

FG, I think the trend toward shorter, dumbed-down pieces is endemic to virtually the entire publishing industry -- or at least to that segment of it that actively seeks to turn a profit. When I started out as a reporter, about 12 years ago, the typical feature story was 2000-3000 words. Today, outside of the New Yorker, the typical feature runs about half that length, and sometimes less. Magazines and newspapers focus-group everything to death, and the overwhelming assumption coming out of all those focus groups is that readers want short, easy-to-grasp articles that they can read while waiting for the microwave to go ping. I have my suspicions about why this perception has arisen. They center around the notion that anyone who has so little to do during the day that free lunch and a temporary feeling of importance feel like good compensation for spending 4 hours in a focus group...is not someone I want to be writing for. But shorter, faster, and, God help us, more "service-oriented" does seem to be the order of the day, pretty much across the board.

Ah... except that it's making a comeback, at least at Grand Sichuan International Midtown, it is. mags, As an "old timer" who grew up in NY, but left as a young adult, I just want to add that egg rolls, shrimp with lobster sauce, and lo mein were the dishes on most NY Chinese menus in the 40's, 50's, and 60's. They were primarily Cantonese influenced, not Szechuan influenced (I'm using the word "influenced" to avoid getting into an "authenticity" debate). Kung pao chicken and the like weren't much available before the Szechuan restaurants started opening in NY in (I think) the '70's. I became aware of those differences when I first visited San Francisco in the 60's, and discovered Szechuan Chinese food, which I had not seen in NY. edited for punctuation. Actually, I was trying to think of why What to Order in Chinese Restaurants seems like a class-marker to me. I THINK it might be because the greater, or over-arching, class-marker may be the extent of interest in the New. Lord, I'm sounding like a bad sociology textbook! What I mean is, upper-middle-class culture in NYC has, through my lifetime at least, been characterized in part by both a constant search for new experiences that haven't yet been glommed onto by the hoi polloi, and by a passion for "authenticity" -- i.e., the opposite of a mass-produced experience, whether that experience involves food or jewelry or theater tickets. We signal our superiority by the singularity of what we buy. At the same time, lower-middle-class culture (at least in NYC, and at least in my experience) has as one of its hallmarks something of a disdain for the new and singular, and a powerful attraction to continuity. My pal is in his early 60s, and, like you, he grew up eating egg rolls and chow mein in Chinese restaurants. (I started going to Chinese restaurants in the late 60s and early 70s, so for me, the Chinese food of childhood was sort of on the cusp of the egg rolls years and the ensuing cold sesame noodle era. ) Today, he chooses to recreate the food experiences of his childhood, while I am on an eternal quest for dumplings that only three other people know about, made according to a centuries-old recipe from a tiny village in Fujien. I suspect we're both a little loopy, and I'm not suggesting that one set of choices is better than the other, only that the choices tend to indicate more than just a momentary preference for egg rolls over The Undiscovered Dumpling. The Undiscovered Dumpling. I may have found a signature line.

I think New Yorkers have a history of incorporating restaurants -- and people's choice of restaurants, and people's choice of what to order in restaurants -- into a broader social context. Village coffeehouses, Le Pavillon, La Cote Basque, Elaine's, Ratner's, kosher dairy restaurants, Katz's and "send a salami to your boy in the army," pizza joints, the importance of not ordering pastrami on white, whether Lindy's sells more cheesecake or apple strudel...they've all been powerful carriers of meaning and symbolism in the city for as long as I can remember, and a lot longer than that. Why that should be so, or more so than it is in some other cities, I'm not sure, although I think Bux is onto something in suggesting that it has partly to do with population density. I think it might also have something to do with various ethnic and social groups staking out identities, and doing that in part through food, such that you recognize "your people" in part by where they eat and what they order when they go there. A dear friend of mine grew up on Long Island and now lives in Westchester, and the class diference between the two of us is underscored every time he tells me that he went to a Chinese restaurant and ordered egg rolls and shrimp with lobster sauce and lo mein. That stuff is delicious, no question, but -- to my mind, at least -- it's also a clear class-marker; your upper-middles moved past kung pao chicken a few decades ago. I'm not sure whether eating habits are such strong cultural markers in other cities. And I wonder whether the fact that they are so strong in New York is a function of people's needing to make clear cultural statements in a city with so many cultural identities screaming for attention. All of which is to say that for at least some New Yorkers, I think, talking about food is a kind of shorthand way of talking about other things, so the transition to those "other things" becomes very natural. You raise a really good question.

Gary Rhodes has a recipe for fruitcake ice cream, and Delia Smith has one for Christmas Pudding ice cream, which should be fairly similar. If you want, I'll dig them out and PM you.

Totally tangentially, what I find really frightening about this book -- the Feeding Harry one -- is the no-hope writers they got to blurb it. Who has heard of more than one of these people? Or even one of them? Every year at my bookstore, we hand out a clutch of joke awards. One year, one of the categories was for most pathetic blurb. The book that won had a single blurb on the back, and the guy -- the blurber -- was identified as "Mitch Gampion, Stuntman in Deliverance." This was not, you understand, a book about stuntmen, movies, or squealing like a pig. It's just that Mr. Gampion was the only person known to the author who could pass -- albeit in real dim light -- for a celebrity. So didn't the author of Feeding Harry know any stuntmen? On the other hand, it may not have been her fault: Publishers are notoriously clueless. A few years ago, St. Martin's -- which has gotten more than one lifetime-achievement award for cluelessness -- published a book by a first-time writer. Out of pure hubris, the writer had sent a copy to Saul Bellow, who never blurbs ANYTHING. But he blurbed this one. He sent St. Martin's a paragraph to the effect that this was a wonderful book, and he's a Nobel laureate, he should know. St. Martin's said there wasn't enough room on the cover.

The food does look great, particularly those yummy-looking taters. And I am amazed at the amount of food a Growing Boy can consume. A few years ago I was in Chicago on business, and took my nephew, then a college freshman, to dinner. He had: Two large Cokes A spinach-and-bacon-and egg salad in a bowl the size of a hubcap The entire contents of a basket of rolls A dozen grilled scallops A 24-oz steak A 16-oz baked potato "with all the fixins" An entire head of broccoli with hollandaise Most of a bottle of wine Most of my grilled mushrooms An enormous slice of apple pie with an equally enormous scoop of ice cream Irish coffee I just stared in awe. I mean, I'm no slouch in the fressing department, but this was...a revelation. And then the bill came and I started crying.

I think the fallacy is in trying to claim that the rise of supermarkets has been entirely A Good Thing OR A Bad Thing. I lived in the UK for a few years in the early 80s, after having grown up in New York. There were no supermarkets anywhere near where I lived, and while I was charmed by buying my meat from the butcher, my bread from the baker, and my produce from the nice greengrocer who got in two aubergines a week just for me, this was also -- according to my Manhattan-honed sensibilities -- a highly inconvenient way to shop. None of the stores in my area -- I was living in Clapham -- were open on Sunday, and they all closed at 1 in the afternoon on both Saturdays and Wednesdays. I was able to buy olive oil, but only because I placed a special order with the grocer. When Sainsbury's opened at the Angel, my entire block -- and I'm serious about this -- took a field trip up to Islington to marvel at the wonder of bread piled just steps from the lamb chops, five different kinds of dish-washing liquid, and all of it available till 8 at night. But pendulums almost always over-correct. And while the rise of enormous supermarket chains, in both the U.S. and the UK, has had some very beneficial results, it has had some decidedly less-than-desirable results as well.

First, I'm not sure that sales are an irrelevant figure, at least in the context of this conversation. Certainly they're not what investors are interested in, and since the financial press is largely targeted at investors, sales -- as opposed to earnings -- tend to get short shrift. But from the POV of the consumer, sales have real significance, since they provide a snapshot of the extent of the impact of the company in question on our daily lives. On the basis of sales -- and speaking as an American living in NYC -- WalMart has an enormous impact. For one, the company's purchasing choices are a hugely decisive factor in determining what products are and are not available to the consuming public. WalMart has a well known history of putting small players out of business, so for many people, WalMart's line of goods is the only option. Additionally, WalMart's ability to purchase in bulk "helps" determine which products manufacturers and producers will bring to market: If WalMart is interested in buying X from you, but not interested in your hand-crafted, locally sourced Y, odds are that Y will go by the wayside. So even if the handful of smaller, individually run shops that still exist in your area WOULD be interested in carrying your Y, you're probably not going to bother supplying it. While I have no background in groceries, other than as an enthusiastic consumer, I do own an independent bookshop, and the chain bookshops, like Barnes & Noble, have had an equally profound affect on publishing: What sells at B&N largely determines which books get published, and which go out of print and thus become unavailable. As for the notion that WalMart -- used lazily here as a proxy for enormous, category-killing chains of various sorts -- has reduced the cost of living for consumers...I'd like to see some numbers. Certainly, the statement has logical appeal: WalMart has vast economies of scale, and can thus sell goods at lower prices than its smaller competitors. But cost-of-living isn't really a single-factor concept. You can't look solely at the amount (or the percentage of income) spent on food, for example, to determine whether cost of living has gone down, because the quality of that food also plays a role. If consumers are buying nothing but jelly beans -- say 2000 calories per day worth of jelly beans -- their cost per calorie will be less than if they are buying organic meat and produce, but the quality of those calories will be substantially lower. Finally, while WalMart does have a history of putting small shops out of business, that's not the only affect it's had on local retail environments. WalMart also has a history of going into relatively small locales, closing down the town shopping district (by forcing the local grocer, hardware store, drugstore, etc.) out of business....and then closing up shop itself. With no local options, and now no WalMart either, consumers are forced to drive sometimes 20 or 30 miles -- usually to the nearest WalMart -- to buy their basic necessities. The cost of those trips (gas, time, depreciation, and so forth) also has to be factored into any analysis of WalMart's impact on consumers' cost of living.

Pan, you clearly take me much too literally.

Sophie Grigson and Simon Hopkinson. I'll buy any cookbooks they come out with, even if it means paying Amazon's usurious shipping charges.

Tsk, Pan, you just broke Rule #16 in the International Girlfriends' Guidebook. If you'll turn to page 94 (97 in the revised edition) you'll see very clearly that it reads "There IS no other side of the story. He's a louse. Feel free to saturate his expensive handmade wingtips with sticky stuff." And what does Ondine's being in Australia have to do with it? First of all, the International Girlfriends' Code is...international. Believe me, they have louses Down Under. And they also have sticky stuff.

I also assumed that the dish under discussion was simply red-cooked pork, but in looking at the picture, the pork butt seems to have been stuffed -- with shrimp and tree-ear mushrooms, maybe? -- before being fried/braised/steamed.

I'm all for creative revenge. Years ago I got dumped by (cringing) a Scientologist. He had given me a copy of Dianetics -- which I never read -- and I burned it (all except for the cover), scooped the cover and the ashes into a baggie, and left it on his doorknob with a note saying "You're right, it IS explosive. In fact, it just spontaneously combusted." So if this momo left his shoes or suits at your place, I wouldn't just give'em to Goodwill. Hell, there's no fun in that. Are they nice, pricey shoes? Terrif. Fill them with honey and mail them back. Or buy a tin of the ugliest paint available in the Benjamin Moore line, and and dip them. Then there's a line of revenge I've only ever read about...but do regard as brilliant, though it does require both time and effort. Think of the most annoying, persistent organizations you can come up with -- fanatical religious sects are good, conspiracy-theory websites, those outfits that are always calling to pitch debt-consolidations services or timeshares in Florida -- and sign him up. Be sure to tell them that he works odd hours and particularly enjoys being called, or having his doorbell rung, at 4 in the morning.

Love tuna melts -- and yeah, with sweet pickles -- but as a low-carb girl these days, I've taken to mixing tuna with chopped scallion, mayo, chopped olives, black pepper, and parsley, and piling it into halves of a big red pepper. By me, that's a real nice lunch. I've thought of trying to do the melt number with this, but a big part of the pleasure is the juicy, crisp pepper, and the broiler would kill that.

I gotta tell ya, I think that revolution is going to be a long time coming. But by all means, take it to the streets.