fresco

I've had lunch at restaurants a couple of times since the outages, with no ill effects. But I've also noticed a couple of news stories about people suffering food poisoning after dining out post-blackout, and predictions are there will be an increase in such cases. Some places are tossing tens of thousands of dollars worth of food, but when you are running a small, marginal place and you've already had a bad year, the temptation to try to salvage something must be enormous.

Depends on whether you're dealing with the tax man or not. They do tend to be more literal than literary, don't they?

Absolutely. But it's really difficult to persuade a significant other that you're not "wasting" money on yet more cookbooks "because you never cook out of them anyway." Isn't money spent on books of any description considered to be an investment rather than an expense?

Sorry, can't help you with this. But it did get me wondering: whatever happened to the California growers' campaign to have prunes renamed "dried plums"? Did it just get laughed to death?

You might want to check out Brian Fowkes's eGCI session on Monday on Dungeness crab--he also suggests substitutions. It is a killer.

Have you actually cracked this bottle yet? Did you want a cigarette afterward?

There was a particularly vicious anti-Starbucks campaign when they first arrived in Toronto in the mid-nineties: http://www.eye.net/eye/issue/issue_09.19.9...EWS/med0919.htm

It's not literature, and it's not "modern," (it was written in 1970) but what about Nicholas Freeling's The Kitchen Book/The Cook Book? One of the great things about all the stuff Freeling did or wrote is he had few pretensions. The "cook" part of the book where he includes recipes has a "written to order" odor about it but Kitchen, if not literature, is close kin.

She's been living in Toronto, and, thankfully, influencing urban planning here, since about 1969. In the early Seventies, the Village Voice sent a reporter to Toronto to interview Jacobs. Among the things she said is that the area of Toronto she was living in reminded her of Greenwich Village in the Fifties. I've never been absolutely sure whether this was meant as a compliment or an insult.

Orwell. IMHO he's a better essayist than novelist, and some of his best essays,including In Defence of English Cooking, A Nice Cup of Tea and The Moon Under Water, treat the rituals of food with uncommon deference.

Jane Jacobs may be food related, if only unintentionally. She has been an advocate, practically forever, of cities put together on a scale that works for people. One of her observations is that neighborhoods with a good mix of, say, restaurants and homes, tends to keep people on the streets day and night, which is healthy. The Vietnam war does not have a lot to recommend it, except, from my perspective, that it caused a lot of smart, talented people to move to Toronto, including Jane Jacobs and her then draft age sons.

It's not Chinglish at all. Garoupa is the original Portuguese name for the fish, "Grouper" is the English corruption of the name. In Hong Kong it's always called as "Garoupa" on the menus. Don't want to get into the middle of a debate about which came first--grouper or garoupa. Either way, it's a great tasting fish.

I see it on menus at Chinese restaurants all the time. Think it is grouper.

I've heard that there are two problems with this wine: If you suggest having it to your SO, she is likely to say, "Not tonight dear, I'll have a headache." And if you drink alone, your palms turn hairy.

I'm in. Especially looking forward to meeting folk from the Heartland--whom I've found to be uncommonly mannerly, gracious, judicious, funny and great--if I may be permitted to generalize. But as I warned Matthew, may be arriving with wife, daughter, visiting brother from NZ and possibly daughter's beloved--probably just ahead of a blizzard from the Great White North.

Oct. 3-5.

It did seem to me that the more cookbooks I accumulated the less I actually used them for recipes, because, of course, you internalize so much. Hard to recall whether this was always true, but I would much rather read a beautifully written book that tells me something about food than a beautifully done book that tells me how to prepare food.

Hey! Watch it. The midwest doesn't start until Pittsburgh... after you pass through the Deep South's northern annex, a/k/a/ Pennsylbama (or Pennsyltucky in some local patios)... Some of them patios can be rough-spoken places.

I agree. And please, slkinsey STOP, STOP, STOP, ENOUGH ALREADY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! You should be ashamed. When you have had a few people on these boards publicly accuse you of slandering 90% of the American population when such was not your intent, then you can lecture me on whether or not I should be ashamed. Until then, please keep it to yourself. You started out by saying that people who have not had the benefit of your unique set of experiences were somehow not fit or qualified to dine at a place like Babbo. Now you are extending that to people who post on eGullet, and specifically, to the person who kicked off the whole Babbo debate. That makes the people who are qualified to post a pretty exclusive club. Has there been some dramatic change in eGullet policy that no one has told us about?

Perhaps "mainstream" would work? Think of it as in, cutting edge/avant-garde which tops off and stablizes once the rest of the crowd catches up? Not as pejorative and can be extended into many, many fora, not just foodism. Soba Soba, I do have to think that a restaurant owned and run by a chef who struts his stuff on the Food Network is mainstream by definition. Babbo serves recognizable food and drink, charges what the market will bear and will let pretty well anyone in as long they are presentable and their credit cards work, correct?

Sam, Might I suggest that you admit that you were talking rubbish, apologize, and exit this one?

Get a room, baby. The convention would seem to call for a thread called "Foodblog: NeroW" Perhaps with the subtitle "Not the violin guy... the other one." He never played the violin in any of the Rex Stout series that I read.

That's it.

Yargh, I hate that one! We get one in my neighborhood that plays "Do Your Ears Hang Low" and then this horrible lady's voice blares out: "Hello? He-ll-oooo?" It sits on the corner right outside my window for 10, 15 minutes at a time. I feel like waving a white flag at it. Hmmm, do any of the kids (or their parents, or the ice-cream men) realize that "Do Your Ears Hang Low" is just a sanitized version of the old wartime ditty, "Do Your B**** Hang Low"? Really, truly. Think about the words.... not sure how far back it goes though, if the soldiers sang that during the Civil or Revolutionary war. Hmm... haven't heard that one in years, but always thought it was English because of the line "like a continental soldier". Maybe the American version is different.

Aw, come on, Jinmyo . . . what about the *garlic press*? I can't get this image out of my head of a bunch of bored-looking guys in fedoras with a really strong odor about them, shouting "Sweetheart, get me rewrite."