Thanks for the Crepes

There is a picture of and a little info on Australian snowberries on this page. They certainly sound wonderful. Another thing I will probably not experience, but you might.

@sartoric, I believe I read somewhere that bananas are pretty expensive in Australia, due to legislative support for local growers of this crop that bars imports. I seem to remember $9.00 a pound, which is insane to us who pay from 39 to 69 cents a pound for them. You are fortunate to have good local mangoes. I love that fruit. In fact, I love a lot of fruit. Most of it is so good without doing a thing to it except to wash it. Do you ever get finger limes, quandongs, carambola or snowberries? I will probably never see any of these in real life except we can get starfruit (carambola) sometimes. I love the way the crosscuts look on a fruit platter, but I have never had one that tastes good at all.

I had Huevos Rancheros tonight, thanks to @robirdstx's post in the Ladies Who Lunch thread about San Juan Restaurant in Port Aransas, TX. I started looking at that menu and have had Mexican on my mind ever since. I used a store bought Guerrero flour tortilla from Irving, TX and La Costena canned refried pintos from Laredo, TX. They're both very good brands. I also had a quasi-Waldorf salad with a honey crisp unpeeled apple a little Duke's mayo, and very nice walnuts from Trader Joe's. I don't have celery in the house, so the celery haters will be pleased.

I really enjoyed perusing the menu (warning PDF) for this restaurant. A majority of the offerings are accompanied by full color food porn, and the prices are very reasonable. I would love to eat there.

Yeah, here nothing too in season. We always get imported bananas. They are usually pretty good. We can buy strawberries, but they are white on top and pathetic versions of ripe, in season ones. There is plenty of stored or imported citrus available. I bought a nectarine the other day out of desperation. It's imported from Chile and probably won't be good. We have grapes, mostly from Chile, but we are in the dearth season for fruits here. Sometimes one finds blueberries, raspberries or blackberries, in a tiny package with a price that puts me off looking for where it came from. We have apples too, but they are out of season. @liuzhou, Would you do us the favor of cutting your longan and loquats and showing us the insides? I'm unfamiliar with either fruit. Your strawberries look better than what is available here right now.

@HungryChris, I can still get frozen king crab legs with claws from my local seafood supplier at about $20 a pound. It is steep for my budget, but considering how low in calories, high in protien, and other nutrients, including the elusive B12, along with how delicious it is, it's still on my menu occasionally. Sixty-nine cents a pound! Such a lovely fantasy that has never occurred in my real life. Why is everyone making me jealous today? I like just melted butter in my candle powered butter warmers and lemon with this treat. I think I need to visit my seafood monger sooner than later. Molly Malone is speaking to me!

I have a heavy aluminum 12" skillet I brought over from Tennessee when I moved here in 1986 with a non stick interior. It looks pretty bad, but it's still my go to skillet for many things, like pan-broiling hamburgers. In places where the coating is damaged, there seems to be polymerized black oil. It still works, but I cook omelets in a newer WearEver of the same brand. They make the aluminum thinner now, and I don't like the fit and finish quite as well as the workhorse vintage one, but it is still a good pan and not very expensive. My heavy vintage one is stamped on the back with Manitowoc, WI, but the newer one is most likely made offshore as they are too embarrassed to say where it is manufactured. It certainly won't last as long, but still not a piece of junk, like so much stuff on offer these days. I also have good and heavy steel WearEver cookie sheets, cake and bread pans with non-stick that seems to outlast other stuff, and can accept a polymerized coating after the initial non-stick finish begins to wear. The last skillet I bought had a lifetime warranty and it just might last my limited lifetime. Le Creuset is way over my budget, and I can find cookware that serves me very well that is less expensive. But yeah, if you get a decade out of a dedicated egg and crepe non-stick skillet, I'd say you are doing very well. I just cooked scrambled eggs in a WearEver nope Mirro 8", but same thing, and also stamped Manitowoc, that I purchased before 1999. I start scrambled eggs without butter in the pan, then add it later. The pan is still doing a beautiful job, but I've never cooked meat in it or cranked up the heat on it. I have a knack for maintaining stuff, though. I drove a Chevy Malibu I paid $750 for for over two decades, and much of my kitchenware is quite old too. They just made stuff better back then, I think, especially if you respected it with good care.

I really like love king crab. Snow crab is fine as an appetizer portion, but my fingers become sore trying to eat them for an entree. I can only get either of them frozen, or sometimes the vendor puts them in the fridge case to thaw. I always ask to get some from the freezer in the back for freshness. I'm pretty sure both would be better if I could get them live, but they are fine like they are for me, if quite expensive in the case of my favored kings. We don't have Dungeness over here on the Atlantic coast, except for this outlier, and he has a pretty unappetizing lesion looking thing on the right side of the image on his shell. Interesting that only the males are sold in markets for food. I am sure they are delicious from your descriptions and comparisons, and you have made me quite jealous. I had a much more humble dinner this evening. Three fluffy scrambled eggs and a half of a humongous bell pepper stuffed with succatosh and topped with cheddar cheese near the end of cooking to melt. It hit the spot, though.

Subway locations vary a lot here. I grabbed a sub at one located inside the huge Duke Hospital Durham complex in a food court, that was not only good, but crave-worthy. This was four months ago, and I can't get the roast beef and cheese with lots of veggies, including alfalfa sprouts, out of my mind. The beef was probably top round, cooked rare to med rare, and very good and tender. In Subway's favor, they did remove the yoga mat component in their bread after public pressure. There's a location near me, but I've never been there. I tried to walk there a while back, still thinking of the good roast beef sub I had in November. I got to the legal pedestrian crossing, and there are no sidewalks on the side of the street I needed to be on to get to Subway, and a very steep bank rises in front of the businesses on that side. Last Monday in a do-or-die frame of mind, I walked to a supermarket which required taking that route. I found that there is a six in wide curb that is flat on top at the foot of the embankment, and as queen of the balance beam some 45 years ago, this was adequate for me to make my way through on my successful grocery store mission. I will check out my local Subway soon, and hope they will be good. I doubt they will have alfalfa sprouts, because the Duke location is the only Subway I've ever seen that offers them. I have had some gray meat experiences though. Ordering their version of a cheese steak is not recommended.

Are y'all on a strict diet? That looks like a delightful and elegant lunch, but if it topped 300 calories, I would be surprised.

Lovely meal and fantastic view! What is in the miniature gravy boat-looking dish. Tartar sauce, herb butter, mayo?

Yeah! When I take out a large package of something, make something with it, and freeze the leftovers, it always takes up more space than the original package. As a new singleton, no more big packages for me. I bought a package of only 6 chicken wings when I walked to the supermarket on Monday. I had to pay 40 cents more a pound, and it killed my thrifty soul, but it is a manageable quantity for my situation now. Economics are different now that I'm on my own, and I'm slowly adjusting. I'll eat three the first time and I won't be sick of them with the next three. Also, when you dig something out of an overfilled freezer, that you know is in there, you can never get stuff back in there as compactly as before. I suppose this is due to raw stuff freezing in curves that conform to other stuff, and now they don't because you can't fit that puzzle back together. I will get my freezers under control, but a lot of that will involve my little furry and cute scavengers always with the offerings placed in daylight before they become active.

I have been tackling my overstuffed freezers, but was getting a little depressed about it, and decided not to share that. Case in point: I had a family sized package of Stouffer's "Meat Lovers" lasagna in one of the freezers that was bought at my husband's insistence before his stroke. I was dreading it, but I knew it's quality wasn't improving by extra time in my crappy freezer. So I cooked it the other day. I choked down a small serving and wrapped up the remainder and put it in the fridge. Today, half the leftovers went to the coons. Tomorrow, the little bandits will be happy again. Life is too short, and I'm not quite desperate enough yet to have to choke down something I don't enjoy five days in a row. The stupid thing is that I wasted about half a pound of very good whole milk mozzarella to top this inedible dreck. Some of the stuff in my freezers is too old and "freezer tasting" for my spoiled snowflake self, some of it is packaged in too large quantities for me to be able to finish comfortably. I refuse to keep beating myself up over the waste, which I abhor. I comfort myself that this situation was beyond my anticipation or control, when I was storing things for my husbands appetite, and also that nothing is really completely wasted because my little masked friends eat almost anything. They don't seem to like salad, but other than that, about anything is appreciated. On the way forward, I will buy only things that can be frozen in small one serving quantities that I really like, keep them under three months, due to the limitations of my freezers, and maybe fill the extra space with empty seltzer bottles filled with frozen water to mitigate the bad effects of the "frostless" heat and freeze cycles. On the very much upside, I learned that I can walk to a supermarket, Food Lion, where I can get almost everything I need. It is actually easier than going to the Asian market. The Asian market is a little closer, but the route is much hillier, and their selection is interesting, and appreciated, but they don't have basic stuff like bread, milk, cheese, steaks, ground chuck, Romaine, plastic wrap ... I am conquering some of the things I have been cowering from, and I am pulling through to a brighter tomorrow. Things are looking way up!

I don't think this is a winner, because I'm not sure if anyone actually ate any, but it is definitely old cheese. In fact, it's the oldest cheese ever discovered, according to several sources, but I can't recommend them*, in Xinjiang, China in a cemetery with mummies with the 3,600 year old cheese attached to their necks and chests. The mummies were buried in the dessert under overturned boats with a bunch of long poles around the graves. The mummies and the cheese were amazingly well preserved. I thought it was particularly interesting in that China is not the country that usually comes to mind in association with cheese. *The NY Times has an article with some nice photos (24 blocked ads), and the IBTimes article is interesting too, but both are completely infested with ads, including video and audio that Ad Block couldn't completely defeat. The linked China Daily article is clean.

It will be hard for Chipotle to get a foothold here, at least with me, with places like Rancho Grande and The Esmeralda Grill to contend with.

Well I'm no Stephen Raichlen, who I have witnessed use over a thousand dollars worth of ingredients on tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment on a single episode of his show. But I have smoked hundreds of pounds of meat, veggies and other stuff like cheese and seafood on my cheap little Brinkman Smoke'N Grill which set me back all of $40 USD. I don't have it anymore, and don't know if it's available, but I do have one of the stainless steel grills it came with (in 1986) that I use on my gas grill that was converted to charcoal when it broke. The Brinkman design was a charcoal pan near the bottom of the smoker, a water pan (which could also be filled with beer, wine, stock, aromatics, or whatever) and then two stainless racks above both of these pans. Then the cover goes on the cylinder to make a sort of Artoo Detoo-looking deceptively cute, but very effective smoker. Bonus! If you want to grill instead of smoke, just raise the charcoal pan to the first of the two rack supports, and place a rack over it on the second rack support. There was a temp gauge built into the hood and it had a latched door where you could add more charcoal or wood chunks or chips without lifting the lid and releasing all your heat. The water pan mitigated temps from the fire below, and prevented most ash floating up to the food. The water kept the food moist and everything from wild Canada goose, to whole turkey, whole ham, ribs, chickens, unhusked corn, and on and on came out so very delicious. I loved this smoker. It's sort of like braising to start with, because of the steam from the water pan. I never tried it with lean meat like rabbit submersed in braising liquid, but if I were going to try it, it would be with a set up like this to keep it in a moist environment and to keep floating ash from the fire at bay. One Christmas, I had already bought a whole ham and the boyfriend came home with a turkey from work unexpectedly, so I smoked both in the Brinkman. Turkey (leaner) on the lower cooking rack, with the ham above to baste everything with fat. Oh! I just love, love this design. The water pan catches drippings so the fire doesn't flare up from fat dripping in it. If you want to cook forty pounds of meat like I did over a cold and windy 24 hours, you will have to stoke your fire with more charcoal and wood chunks about every four hours, including getting up from sleeping. The Brinkman was not only cheap, but the design was poor man's perfection, a masterpiece. If I ever have another $40 to spend other than on basic survival and sanity maintenance, I am getting another one or similar design, if as I suspect, Brinkman doesn't offer this anymore. Also, if you are going for max smoke permeation I would not pre-sear any meat intended to be smoked. And if the Brinkman design/method can make a mean old male Canadian goose with very lean meat edible on an open rack over the water pan, I would anticipate it would do a fine job with farmed rabbit as well without putting it in a liquid bath.

*Sigh* I thought there was a magic solution. Both my freezers are above fridge frostless models, so go through that heat up, cool down cycle which is so destructive to the quality of food. To add insult to injury, one of them even accumulates, not frost, but ice. Leave an ice tray a week, and it has noticeably sublimated. Leave it more and it can disappear. I am also overly sensitive to "freezer taste" and repetition. I'll figure this thing out eventually though. Thanks for the information.

@blue_dolphin, I'd particularly like to hear details on how you seem to come up with freshly cooked beans for one eater without having a ton of leftovers. I used to soak and throw a pound of beans into a crockpot and that was fine for two eaters, especially when the other one ate two or three times as much as I did. We'd eat beans and cornbread one night and bean, cheese and onion burritos the next, and I'd freeze half of them. That is not feasible now that I'm by myself. I'm so sick of leftovers, but the raccoons are fat and happy.

@MSRadell, That is my view on Chipotle's chain, too. I can go to my choice of sit down restaurants of either the Tex Mex variety or authentic taquerias and Mexican or Salvadoran restaurants around here cheaper. Gorditas (no, not like Taco Bell's misnomer), sopes, huaraches, pupusas and complimentary salsa bar, anyone? I won't say the food is better, because the only time i darkened the door of our local outlet, my husband and I looked at the line, looked at the prices, and walked out to go visit a more welcoming place. If I have to stand in line and pay a la carte for every little nickel and dime addition, it better be at a discount, not a premium. I do respect their philosophy of purchasing better raised ingredients, and wish them much success. The more mainstream demand for better products, the more the costs of supplying them will be brought down for all of us.

I had that Lagunita's Pilsner years ago at a trendy upscale Neopolitan pizzeria, Bella Mia, which is long defunct, but the beer was so good I've been looking for it ever since. It was the best one I ever had.

This is what I do, but in my little vintage Revere Ware 1 qt. pot. It's mostly stainless, but has a copper bottom. It works fine for me as long as I give it my undivided attention, and I DO mean complete attention.

A Himalayan cooking class! How exciting! Was a reason given for this?

Of course there is The Chef and the Farmer in Kinston, NC, population 21,677 at 2010 US census. With Yelp reviews. Doe's Eat Place, in Greenville, MS, population 34,400 at 2010 census (and elsewhere). With more Yelp reviews. The Suicide Bridge Restaurant in Maryland, for the famed blue crabs, with more Yelps. The Hurlock population was only 2,092 in the 2010 census. There's the Blue Willow Inn in Social Circle, GA, pop. 4,296 in 2013. With some reviews. This is a topic near and dear to my heart, and I'd love to hear about others' experiences and input on this subject. I participated in this topic from Roadfood.com on "Surviving Duncan Hines Restaurants". There is some good info to be found there, but many of the restos are closed, converted to hotels, or grown up around with development. Hope this helps in your quest for info, and I will be very much looking forward to others takes on this subject.

Well Kenneth, all I can say is you had better really appreciate your wife and good luck with your gardening project.

Wow! We love our poisonous food processing here, don't we? How did you find this out, dscheidt, because, sadly and unsurprisingly, it's not disclosed on ingredient lists? You seem to have an inside track, and I would love to know your thoughts on this matter. I wonder if our beloved and light White Lily biscuit flour here in the American South is also subjected to this chlorine treatment. I understand chlorine is a water soluble gas and should evaporate, but still? Flour still retains a bit of moisture and perhaps the poisonous dissolved gas as well. Yeah, I'm aware I have no choice but to drink chlorinated recycled sewer water alternated with ammonia periodically from my city water system. I don't understand why "politicians treat me like a mushroom, 'cause they feed me bull and keep me in the blind." As performed by Travis Tritt from his "Lord Have Mercy on the Workin' Man" from his 1992 album T-R-O-U-B-L-E. The song is written by Kostas Lazarides, who interestingly is of the unlikely Greek nationality to be writing country songs. I actually rarely listen to country music, having a low tolerance, but this is one of my favorite songs of all time. What is so terrible about your average consumer Jane and Joe having information about how their food is handled, processed, where it's from and what the bleep is in it? There is so much money and effort spent against this simple freedom of information about food that it is scaring me quite a bit. How far are we from "Soylent Green" when we start sliding down this slippery slope?