mags

Robyn, There's no reason why anyone's constipation problems would be worse over Passover. A slice of white bread has less than 1 gram of fiber, and a piece of matzoh -- which will most likely replace the bread on your father-in-law's menu -- has about the same amount. While rice, corn and pasta will (most likely) also be absent during Passover, they, too, are almost entirely lacking in fiber. An apple, by contrast, has about 6 grams. Also, for what it's worth, there's no reason why a glatt Kosher establishment would provide a diet lower in fruits and vegetables than any other kind of nursing home: "meat" and "dairy" meals don't mean that meat and dairy are the only things that are served; the "meat" and "dairy" monikers simply describe the nature of the protein involved. Vegetables, fruits, and grains (except during Passover) make as much of an appearance as they would on any non-Kosher table. Given your father-in-law's multiple health problems and your statement that the facility's doctor has already tried all the remedies at his disposal -- which I assume include the various over-the-counter options, like Metamucil -- I'd suggest that you'd be much better off taking him to a good GI than trying to get advice online. Good luck with it.

I love rathergood.com -- to which I was directed, of all bizarre things, by the Wall Street Journal -- but WHERE ARE THE VIKING KITTENS???? I had to go elsewhere to find them. Viz: http://users.wolfcrews.com/toys/vikings/ (make sure you have your audio turned on) I am also a big fan of Pavorotti Loves Elephants -- happily, still on the original site: http://www.rathergood.com/elephants/

The first time I was in Hong Kong I passed a restaurant with a sign outside saying "YES! We have fish eyeballs in soy sauce!" And I thought, Why is that sign in English? You really get a whole lotta round-eyes looking for the fish eyeballs?

(can't stop laughing) You know, the original idea for this dinner was that it would be sort of vaguely horrible, in an interesting kind of way. But some of the recipes that people have come up with here....no, I honestly don't think there's anybody I hate enough to feed banana-and-lunch-meat pancakes, or cookies made with bacon and Tang and dipped in gravy.

What's truly frightening is the user who apparently loves these bars, and finds them especially delicious when dipped in gravy.

Actually, I gotta say I'm kinda partial to Beauty and the Bean, if only because it contains the extra delight of canned green beans, which have to be one of the most disgusting things going. Plus one and a half cups of hot dog relish. Hunh. That sure is a lotta relish.

Hunh. Banana-and-lunch-meat pancakes. This is a very strong contender for the dessert portion of the menu, although I confess I have never seen Treet, and have no idea where to get it. Also, I hate to give up the Tang pie. Is it overkill to serve two desserts?

Oh gosh, this is swell. We've got the gin-and-canned peaches cocktail, to be served with crackers and the (shuddering) Spam cheesecake. For a salad course, there's the -- this truly blows my mind -- chicken congealed with canned chicken-noodle soup, COOL WHIP (!!) and mayonnaise on a bed of lettuce, Beef Delight as an entree, and Tang pie for dessert. My one concern is that both the Tang pie and the spectacularly weird congealed chicken salad contain Cool Whip. Ordinarily I would avoid repeating an ingredient like that. Do you think it's a problem here? Also, we could use a starch and one or two veg sides -- unless people feel that the hot-dog-and-canned-bean-sprouts dish could do vegetable duty. I personally feel it might make the menu a bit too heavy on the protein. Oh yes, and then there's the bacon-and-chocolate truffles with coffee.

Ooooh, ludja, that looks VERY promising! Particularly as it would go nicely with the Polynesian Beef Delight. I must say, though, I'm amazed they opted for fresh mushrooms: canned would have been so much better suited to the dish's essential gestalt.

I have a strong suspicion that take-out pizza will be involved.

Lastly, does being published on the Food network website count as being a "serious" food publication? Either that, or I'm sure it's published in one of their books. Well, to be fair, the nutritional counts on the Mitten recipe assumes that the recipe serves....1. And if you can eat 1/2 pound bacon plus 1 1/2 pounds pork plus 6 oz. of stuffing....you're a better man than I am, Gunga Din. I suspect the recipe is actually intended to serve 4, which knocks the nutritional counts down to a less staggering level. But I'm with Varmint -- I think it sounds delicious. But the bacon-and-chocolate truffles might make for a LOVELY little after-dinner treat with coffee. And yeah, I think FoodTV counts. And you know, the pork cake just isn't that weird -- it's basically a version of a classic fruitcake, using pork fat instead of suet. WE CAN DO BETTER!

For some years now, I've had in the back of my mind the notion of throwing a Dreadful Dinner Party. This dream was catalyzed by an issue of Gourmet from about 1967, which featured a recipe for a dish called something like Polynesian Beef Delight. It involved browning quite a large quantity of sirloin chunks, and then mixing them with soy sauce, ketchup, chopped sweet pickles, muenster cheese and a few other improbably ingredients, and then baking the whole concoction, presumably until everything was really most sincerely dead. The Delight was to be served (and this was my favorite bit) with sauteed bananas "as the chef desires." Absolutely! Bring on the sauteed bananas! Couldn't be any worse, right? With Delight as the centerpiece, I conceived the idea of a menu made up entirely of awful recipes. There are only two rules: 1) The recipe has to sound just staggeringly vile, and 2) The recipe has to come from a "serious" food publication -- this precludes both stuff like White Trash Cooking and, sadly, the recipe for "Undescended Twinkies" in Square Meals, which would otherwise have made a lovely and appropriate dessert. I'm soliciting ideas here, but mindful of Egullet's level of sophistication, I'd like to add a third rule: No Weird Shit -- i.e., no "authentic" recipes involving witchetty grubs or raw buffalo testicles or deep-fried bugs. So are there any recipes you've seen that made you swallow hard and think "Jesus, why would ANYBODY cook that?"

1. Blue cheese in all its forms (and nope, I don't want to be talked or trained out of this; it's one of the very few items on my list of Fattening Foods I Don't Like); 2. Celery, anise, licorice, fennel, the whole damn family, raw or cooked, can't even stand the smell (though I can snarf up mashed celeriac if it's got enough butter and cream in it); 3. Almost all buttercream frosting -- gimme whipped cream or ganache; 4. Almost all mass-produced "fruit" flavored stuff -- soda, syrup, jelly, cereal, drink mixes, whatever. Ycccchh. Tastes like chemicals. 5. Canned peas -- but fresh ones are one of my all-time faves.

Cauliflower features a lot, yeah. I love it roasted so much that I'm thinking about pureeing leftovers and making them into kind of faux-latkes, maybe with some sauteed onion mixed in. Like others here, I don't tend to do a lot with the packaged products -- I never cooked with Kool-Ade or ate sugared breakfast cereal before, so why would I opt for sugar-free drink mixes or fake sugared cereals now? -- but there are a few that I find incredibly valuable. 1. Vegetable gums -- either xantham, guar, or "NotStarch" from Expert Foods. They work beautifully to thicken stews, chowder, stir fries, though there are a few tricks to working with them. 2. TVP, otherwise known by the spectacularly unappetizing name of textured vegetable protein, AKA weird bits of soy. Make a very good rice substitute -- I had to stop making faux fried "rice" because it was so good I was eating way too much of it -- and I'm thinking about trying to use it as a sub for bulgur in, say, a Middle Eastern-style pilaf. It needs to be hydrated before use, and will pick up the flavor of whatever it's soaked in -- stock or coconut milk are a whole lot tastier than water. 3. Whey Low. Unlike a lot of low-carbers, I don't crave desserts much, but when I do want something sweet -- or even a hit of sweetness in an otherwise savory dish, like a Thai salad -- I really hate the chemical aftertaste I get from Splenda. (I'm told that only a small percentage of users taste this -- go figure.) Anyway, Whey Low has a lovely, clean sugar-taste. I often cut it half and half with Erythritol, to lower the carb-count, and I find the mixture works extremely well. To my (fussy) tongue, it's all but indistinguishable from sugar. 4. LC bread. Yeah, taken straight it's pretty vile (although the "reduced carb" bread from Tribecca Ovens is delicious, albeit for 8 grams per clice). But toasting improves it a lot. However, I rarely use it for sandwiches, turning it instead into breadcrumbs (for crabcakes, say, or chicken Milanese) or croutons, usually made into stuffing. The stuffing, in particular, is terrific, and the texture is just fine. FWIW, after MUCH testing (I wrote an article on the damn products, and munched my way through vast amounts of LC bread), I have found the bread from Synergy Diet to be infinitely better than anything else out there (the Tribecca Ovens bread -- with its comparatively high carb-count -- excepted). It has a VERY nice texture, and no soy taste. In fact, it's soo good that I'm a little skeptical of the carb-count, and am going to be sending some off to a testing lab. 5. Chef's Blend flour. I've recently become a fan of this stuff, though I have yet to use it extensively. It makes a decent (though -- sigh -- not terrific) coating for eggplant or chicken breasts and I used it to make a zucchini bread (along with almond flour and Whey Low) that was truly wonderful. Nope, it's not in supermarkets, but I'll provide the mail-order info if anyone is interested. What I really want to do is try using it to make a bechamel. Listen, I had a thought -- there appear to be a good few of us here eating either low-carb or lower-carb. And I trust recipes from Egulleteers more than from a lot of LC dieters -- to many of the recipes I've found just aren't up to my food-snob standards. Should we start sharing? I'd be happy to trade my faux fried rice and (tweaked version of somebody else's) delicious fake cornbread for whatever goodies you got.

I was first taken to Lutece 20-odd years ago, when my father took the clan to celebrate something or other. More than two decades later, I still remember the salmon-and-fish-pate en croute, and that incredible frozen raspberry souffle. I also remember that my stepbrother's stick-insect girlfriend ordered clear broth, steamed fish with no sauce, and berries for dessert. I thought she was nuts, and I still do -- which may be why nobody will ever mistake me for a stick-insect. A year or so later, Lutece was also the first "fancy" restaurant to which I ever took myself (and a friend) -- and this when I was making about $20K a year and trying to live in Manhattan on the take-home. I will miss Lutece, but the Lutece I'll miss actually folded its tent long ago.

My father was for many years an enormous food snob. He used to bug the shit out of waiters in French restaurants by ordering "rrrrrrrrat-ta-TOO-ya" -- you know, what most Americans call "rat-ta-TOO-ee." Once, when he and my stepmother and I got stranded in Hyannis late at night, he asked at the Herz counter for the name of a good local restaurant that might still be serving dinner. He returned to the car, beaming, and announced that we would be going to someplace called "Denise." It was, of course, Denny's. Where my stepmother and I did the sensible thing, and ordered cheeseburgers, and my insane father ordered the seafood salad, a medley of ocean-fresh seafood, crisp vegetables and our homemade tangy vinaigrette served on a bed of lettuce with olives and continental breadsticks. He deserved what he got. Anyway, when I was a tot, before his hardcore snobbery had set in, he used to make my breakfast, regularly serving up his two favorite sandwiches: bologna and ketchup on white toast, and raw ground beef on Wheat Thins, crowned with a dollop of ketchup. He would deny this to his dying day, but I knows what I knows. Plus, I loved them. Tomato sandwiches -- on white bread with gobs of Hellman's -- remain a favorite of mine. Even better if you stick in a slice of sharp cheddar, but I guess at that point they veer away from trashy. And cold leftover take-out Chinese stir-fry -- of pretty much anything -- is great on a kaiser roll. Mayo optional. My college roomate used to make sandwiches of sliced raw hot dogs on white bread with Miracle Whip and dribbles of bottled Italian dressing, but he never persuaded me to try one.

I have to say, I'm with Adeguilio. I've been to Craft a few times, most recently about 2 months ago, and though I certainly didn't dislike it, I'd be perfectly happy never to go again. The last time I went, I had grilled scallops, which were delicious, and split a three-way lamb dish (braised shank, roasted rack, grilled kidney) with Mom. That, too, was good. She had a wonderful potato gratin -- although I don't think I've ever tasted an un-wonderful potato gratin -- and I had some grilled mushrooms, which were underseasoned, and some roasted cauliflower, which was so boring that I put off trying the Egullet version for FAR too long as a result. En fin, much of our meal was good, some was not very good, and the only thing that was truly stunning was Mom's pumpkin panna cotta. It was a nice meal, and I was perfectly happy to go, but I can't imagine getting excited about it. Yes, I very much appreciate the structure, the ability to design my own meal, but the individual components didn't seem to me to be executed any better than...well, frankly, than I could manage. And I'm sure many of the members here could do a lot better. Sure, it's perfectly possible that my palate has been dulled by too many intense flavors, that I'm unable to appreciate the exquisite subtlety of a perfectly grilled perfect mushroom that tastes of nothing more than bosky mushroom-ness. But basically, I like salt. Pepper, also, is a good thing.

What a terrific friend and husband you're being! BTW, Eden Organic makes very tasty canned black soy beans, which work great in hummus. A cup of the beans (roughly 8 oz.) has 22 grams of protein, 6 grams of fat and 8 grams of carbohydrate (of which 7 are fibre, which doesn't get digested). Of course, if you puree them into hummus, they'll represent a lot less than a cup in volume. They can be a bit difficult to find -- and make sure you don't get Eden's regular canned NON-soy black beans by mistake -- but I can give you a mail-order source, if you like. However, I would definitely check with your doctor, as there is a fair amount of controversy regarding soy. Also, re the shakes: I have loathed all the ones I've tried, though your wife may well find some of them tasty enough. There has been a rush in the low-carb-products industry to sweeten things -- including shakes -- with "sugar alcohols," rather than with Splenda or older sugar substitutes, because the sugar alcohols taste better. Unfortunately, the SAs also tend to cause significant gastic distress for a lot of people, so even though SA-sweetened shakes might be yummier, I'd suggest being VERY wary. Look on labels for ingredients like malitol, maltitol, lactitol, xylitol....pretty much all the "ols." The last thing your wife needs right now is a miserable case of gas and the runs.

Yup, I am completely hooked on roasted cauliflower. This stuff is amazing. And I would second the suggestion that it tastes like hash browns, rather than french fries. Which is good, cause I like french fries, but I purely love hash browns. I had some tonight in a bowl, mixed with some caramelized onion, with a fried egg on top. This was fantastically delicious. For my next trick, I'm going to try pureeing the roasted cauli and turning it into a sort of faux potato cake. I'm in love

Not sure what the goal is here. If she needs lots 'o protein with low carbs, then the grits and oatmeal suggested earlier are not really a good idea. Way too starchy. Soy may be your best friend for a while -- I'd look into something like TVP (texture vegetable protein), which is basically bits of processed soy. Insanely high in protein, virtually zero carbs, and works quite well as a sub for rice -- in rice pudding, say, or fried rice. Soy grits can also be delicious, though not exactly grits-like, and any good healthfood store should be able to provide them (along with TVP) or order them, if necessary. Do check with her doc before going heavy into soy, though I second the miso idea, though as others have suggested, liquids may not be ideal, since they take up so much space for relatively little protein-punch. Another idea would be something like chicken-breast-and-tofu pate, otherwise known as mush. Super low in fat and carbs, v. high in protein, and only semi-solid. You might also want to look at some of the low-carb cookbooks out there, as they'll feature recipes that are low in carbs but comparatively high in protein. Be careful about legumes other than soy -- including chickpeas -- as they're relatively high in carbs, despite their high protein counts.

Not sure if you've already opted for the Nabisco route -- which is a great and honorable route -- but I've been playing around with an idea for a cake, sort of a cake-shaped zuppe inglese. Plan is to build it in a springform pan, with the bottom and top layers being thin layers of pound cake of sponge cake, middle layer being chewy almond macaroons (all drizzled with Grand Marnier), and the filling between the layers being canolli cream, with candied orange peel and chopped chocolate. On top is either piped canolli cream or chocolate ganache, and sides get covered in caramelized almonds or chopped pistachios. Part of the beauty for me is that it's entirely made ahead and chilled overnight.

Hey, I'm just thinking, what about St. Ambroseus, now in the W. Village? Or Tartine? And is Patisserie Lancianni still in the East Village? They used to make a swell hazelnut-mocha cake, and great key-lime pie.

I'd nominate the development of high-fructose corn syrup, which -- because it's so cheap -- has been added by the bucketload to just about every processed product in the market, thereby helping to create a craving for sugar that is disastrous to both our tastebuds and our health. For similar reasons, even though it's not technically a technology, I'd add the supersizing phenom to the list.

LOL...I love this book but I didn't know anyone else even owned it! =R= I swear by his recipes for gazpacho (best I've ever tasted) and coleslaw (ditto). And I've found some things I like in both his diet (low-fat) book and his book on casseroles. Oh, Ronnie, I owe you the draft of that article on low-carb products -- check your PMs.

There are several cookbooks I turn to over and over again for ideas, rather than specific technique -- and also because they tend to be quirky collections of beloved recipes, rather than any kind of scholarly attempt to explicate a specific cuisine (though I like many of the latter as well, particularly Marcella Hazan for Italian, Barbara Tropp, Ken Hom, and Grace Young for Chinese -- haven't cooked from Fuschia Dunlop yet -- and Julie Sahni for Indian). Anyway, my quirky picks would be The Town and Country Cookbook, by James Villas Sophie's Kitchen and Sunshine Food, by Sophie Grigson (I LOVE these books) The Frog Comissary Cookbook, by Steven Poses Pretty much anything by Nigel Slater Pretty much anything by Simon Hopkinson Big Flavor, by Jim Foebel How to Eat, by Nigella Lawson All of the The Good Cook series from Time Life -- now OOP, but widely available And oh, yeah, I really like Moro: The Cookbook -- thanks to somebody or other for reminding me! Oh, and I'd throw Burt Green's books in there as well, particularly Green On Greens. If nothing else, they're such a pleasure to read.