fresco

Monica, I don't agree with your choices, but free time is precious. Enjoy.

What's against a second food network is all the food or food oriented programming on other channels or networks, especially PBS. On Saturday, for instance, you can pretty well create your own food network by channel surfing. Some of it is actually pretty good.

We dine together as a family as often as our 20-year-old son's schedule permits (school, basketball, friends). His friends often dine with us, as do our friends. It makes for interesting conversation. Books are infrequently allowed at the table. Never television.

Toronto is blessed with food from all over the world. Within about a 10-minute walk from home, I can pick from Little India, one of several Chinatowns, Greektown, the city's only new-age shopping mall (complete with organic supermarket and a bunch of places that sell crystals, etc.), plus an upmarket speciality grocery, and on and on. Further afield, Kensington Market provides everything from West Indian to central and South American ingredients. St. Lawrence market is good for seasonal produce from surrounding farms. Portuguese, Italian, Somali, Thai, Ethiopian? No problem. They (and dozens more) each have their own community and shopping district.

Pixelchef, Think the McDonalds outlets in Paris serve wine.

Bux, My experience is that every meal is a nice meal with wine. Or at least a nicer meal.

In Richard Olney's fairly awful memoirs, Reflexions, he writes extensively about the Richard Nelson plagiarism case. He says he was initially unenthusiastic about taking Nelson to court because he was worried about the expense and wondered "what good would it do." But he did file suit after a lawyer told him that he had a case, based on Nelson lifting 33 recipes and barely changing a comma. "It was not a question of recipes but of language and style," Olney writes. It does not seem as though the financial settlement was very large, considering the extent of the plagiarism. His account goes on for several pages, and is a fascinating glimpse into the legal ins and outs of plagiarism in an otherwise not very fascinating book.

NYC water is definitely better than NYC wine.

I have no first hand knowledge of the geography of drinking habits, but people tell me that wine consumption in the US is largely confined to the northeast and California. Beer and bourbon, or so I'm told, rules in the midwest and perhaps in the south. Here in Canada, I suspect that the wine belt is a little more evenly distributed, thanks in part to the arrival post war of millions of people from the wine drinking countries of Europe. Where do you live and what do the people in your area drink with dinner?

Watching television is something that is easy to perfect.

Mamster, The President's Choice 10-pound Club Pack of three-cheese frozen lasagne isn't my idea of a good time, but I guess I'm glad it's there for people with no time or inclination to cook. Obesity may be a problem for a complex variety of reasons (including a Food Guide that was, if you'll pardon the expression, grossly oversimplified) and a country that still consumes a diet more suited to an older, agrarian time, but I think you can easily make the argument that people are better fed now than at any other time in history. I'd rather not see the cooking skills of the average person atrophy to the point of uselessness, but other people mourn the decline of literacy, or carpentry skills or whatever. It's probably not dangerous to the human species when these skills wither away, but it does make the world a less interesting place.

Airlines charge extra for meals--and America's business newspaper of record says they're often worth it. http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/b...ess/6016241.htm

Which will then spawn a novel by a foul-mouthed Glaswegian: Foodspotting.

Perhaps it was Olive Garden that Joni Mitchell had in mind when she wrote, "They pave paradise/and put up a parking lot." I notice she herself used a Big Yellow Taxi. Correction: It was her "old man" who cabbed it.

It sounds grotesque as I write it, but my impression is that home cooking in North America (and perhaps right throughout the developed world) is becoming more of a rarefied experience with every passing year. Despite the thousands of recipe books published every year,preparing meals from scratch has done an interesting class reversal. Not long ago, every peasant family had probably two or more people who could cook, and cook well. Now, thanks to McDonald's with fast food and your local supermarket with prepackaged meals, an entire strata of society has mostly stopped cooking. Proficiency in the kitchen is now a mark of culture, up there with having read The Great Books, or knowing The Great Composers. Perhaps someone from Europe can help me out here, but I have heard that Delia Smith has become the best selling cookery writer in France, because cooking skills were passed on from mother to daughter until about 20 years ago. When this generational exchanged ceased, there was no French version of Fannie Farmer or The Joy of Cooking to take its place. Nor, despite the proliferation of even good cook books and the existence of the excellent eGullet site, is this situation likely to change. Once the two-income family became an economic necessity, food preparation rapidly passed from the home kitchen to the factory and centuries of skills and knowledge began to disappear. Wasn't it McLuhan who observed that veneration begins when something has passed into obsolescence?

Unmentionable Cuisine, By Calvin W. Schwabe. A 476-page study of taboo foods around the world, from dog and cat meat to insects and reptiles. With recipes.

Rachael Ray, Bobby Flay, Great Canadian Food Show, endless, endless, endless Martha Stewart and Emeril reruns... that's pretty well what happened. Sorry, I want read the answer as well, but it is a pretty dizzying and nauseating descent.

In making bruschetta yesterday, the salt got left out. (It was a group effort and that's when mistakes get made). It was striking what a difference it made, and not for the better. While correcting the mistake, I noticed that we had three different kinds of salt--the standard table variety, kosher salt and sea salt. In the course of a week, we use all three, and now that it's warm enough to grill a lot, a ton of kosher salt gets used up in brine. How many varieties of salt do you have in your kitchen? Or do you avoid the stuff altogether? [Admin edit: topic merge begins here]

S'kat, Actually, I find it refreshing that there are people who are delighted in places like Olive Garden. Would that we were all so easily pleased.

Does anyone recall reading a piece a couple of years ago about a securities analyst who built an uncanny reputation for predicting which food chains were going to do well or flop? Possibly in Forbes. Her secret: she actually took the trouble to dine in these places and assess the food and service. Don't know what it says about the state of chain restaurants, but sure was revealing about the securities industry.

Lyle, I think there are parts of the world where steakhouses ARE regional cuisine. And not too shabby regional cuisine, either.

Knorthrup, Could lead to heartache (and heartburn). In Montreal, the French slang for cop is, essentially, "donut." In other places, I suspect cops hang out where they can eat free or at a heavy discount. Don't know about truckers, but "18-wheeler" and "fine palate" aren't often heard in the same sentence.

Sammy, Not a good sign: people sleeping at the bar.

zilla369. Isn't there a hoary old joke where one person carps that the food in a restaurant is terrible and her friend chimes in, "Yes, and the portions are so small."

Friends in New York say they know people--a lot of people--who do not own coffee makers, but simply order in in the morning. At first blush, it sounded depraved, but if every second establishment on the high street is a deli with pretty good, inexpensive coffee and delivery...