fresco

Tommy, No neon? Thought that would be a hanging offence in Las Vegas. (Somehow, I have managed to avoid ever visiting the place...)

"avoid neon signs." Guess that means starvation in Las Vegas.

Belmont3, Good points, although restaurant parking lots (or parking lots, period) are pretty thin on the ground in many big cities.

You're in a strange city. You don't know the restaurants and you don't have a guidebook, or don't trust guidebooks. You're peckish. Using just your powers of observation and rules that you've formulated from years of dining out, how do you pick a winner? (Damon Runyon's rule: "Never eat at a place called Ma's, never play cards with a man named Doc.")

Restaurants, far more than most businesses, are about civility and hospitality--indeed they are almost civility and manners codified. They are not art museums or art galleries. Good manners and even a rudimentary sense of hospitality would suggest that the proprietor and staff of a restaurant would welcome the opportunity to meet any reasonable request by a diner. But it cuts both ways. It is clearly not reasonable to make absurdly complicated, unnecessary or insulting requests for changes simply because you are paying for it. Does anyone else recall the movie Five Easy Pieces, in which Jack Nicholson and the waitress from hell enact the most priceless clash between restaurant rules and customer desire?

Because we live in the centre of a large city, my son and his pals have been meeting for lunch since they were about 10. By the age of 15 or 16, these kids had tried everything from Greek to Thai. And they say small towns are great places to raise kids...

where the charm of the north meets the efficiency of the south. Combined with that storied civil service sense of humour. Swell.

"My wife does no cooking here, its all up to me." Me too. I keep telling my son that cooking will set him free--and keep him that way.

"My wife may cook one meal per year." Ok, I have to ask--is it worth waiting for?

My Friend Flicka (sniff).

RELENTLESSLY cheerful, helpful, smiling til their cheeks hurt smiles, enthusiastic... ARG!!! Fifi, Yup, sounds like Calgary. Have a nice day--or else!

Nationalism makes me uneasy. I can't say I'm any more comfortable with metropolitanism or whatever you call city-based jingoism. I can't recall getting rude service at any kind of restaurant in New York over a number of years. But to maintain that native New Yorkers are all a bunch of salt-of-the earth swell types is just giving in to dumb, and dangerous, sentimentalism. Rude assholes know no borders.

We have dinner out--on the back deck--as often as weather permits. But after years of obligatory lunches and dinners in restaurants--some pretty good restaurants, I have to say--dining out doesn't seem very relaxing or appealing. Being able to cook and entertain at home at our own pace seems a helluva more rewarding, somehow. Now if there was a service that came in, cleaned up and did the dishes...

One of the most notorious examples of recipe plagiarism is one invented by Richard Olney, where he inserted stuffing under the skin of a chicken. He wrote about it in Simple French Food. A few other people picked it up, claimed it as their own and published recipes based on it. I believe Olney grumbled a bit, but essentially did nothing to protect his copyright.

"Giving the game away proves to be the rule rather than the exception among plagiarists. Both in the commission of the original act and in the fantastic excuses that follow it, plagiarism is often calculated above all to result in detection." Fat Guy, A very perceptive observation by your late father. A couple of the more celebrated (!) plagiarism cases in Toronto newspapers involving people lifting from the New Yorker, from a collection of columns by Tom Wicker...in short, stealing in such a blatant way that it was impossible not to get nailed. One unfortunate books columnist was caught twice--and committed suicide.

I think you are confusing fine writing and good writing. Fine writing is usually the province of a few publications whose readers expect the point of view and the writing style to be as compelling as the subject matter. People who read specialty magazines about things like woodworking are not going to demand stylish writing, but they will certainly insist on clarity, accuracy and some acceptable standard of spelling, grammar, diction, etc. And I've no doubt that on the rare occasions when they get stylish writing and a bold, vivid point of view, they're delighted.

Even if readers don't recognize bad writing, they tend to ignore it--bad writing just isn't compelling. But employers should be more vigilant in guarding against shoddy writing. It is every bit as offputting as shoddy food. If you encounter it often enough, you just quit reading a particular publication, which may be one reason why newspapers are losing circulation pretty well across the board.

"But there's currently such a one-sidedness to newspaper restaurant coverage, and too often it comes from an anti-industry perspective. It would be nice to find a cure for that. " One remedy that egullet could offer: annotated reviews. If a reviewer has an obvious conflict/ax to grind/demonstrated bias, his/her reviews could be posted and explained. If nothing else, it would help to keep reviewers honest.

There's nothing unethical (or illegal) about writing something that sucks" Perhaps not, but the tolerance for shoddy writing should be as low as that for plagiarism.

I'm ok with her finding an outlet for "her" writing. The problem was, she had an outlet for other people's writing.

"- Has the recent New York Times incident put editors everywhere on the journalistic equivalent of orange alert? Are writers now being censured for things that newspapers have been tolerating for years?" Fat Guy, There is likely something to this. If so, it is probably a good thing--that is, ethical standards are being raised on publications. Unfortunately, it probably will pass as soon as editors start to forget about the NY Times incident. But the story also notes that the writer had, in both cases, taken material off the Internet and I think this is a major problem. Because it is so easy to do and can be done almost without thinking, many journalists (and, I suppose, non-journalists) don't think through the implications of appropriating material without attribution.

Correction: average size is 223.4sf (including Varmint)

Average kitchen size is now 273.6sf. They all sound great and well used. Keep posting. Thanks.

MatthewB, Although corn is not specifically addressed, it would seem from this excerpt from a piece in the Boston Globe magazine that milk has tenderizing properties: ``Milk is a great tenderizer,'' says Shirley Corriher, author of CookWise (William Morrow), which explains the science and chemistry of food. Italian cooks discovered this when they first braised pork in milk. As the milk simmers, it coagulates, producing funny-looking curds, but after straining and whisking, it becomes a smooth, mildly sweet sauce that doesn't seem at all related to a glass of milk. Root vegetables also benefit from some milk in the cooking water. Potatoes - particularly the yellow varieties, which are creamy to begin with - turn dreamy. Turnips lose their edge. Milk adds sweetness to cakes, gives bread a nice brown color and moist crumb, and provides a little pouf to a cookie dough. Corriher says that milk works to tenderize meat or make foods more palatable because it contains acid, sugar, and protein. Sugar helps the browning process, acid breaks down fibers in meat, and these chemical changes seem to smooth out flavors.

Oh, one more thing--I've calculated your total kitchen size at 54.45 sf. Sound right?