GG Mora

Salady Viet foods do it for me. Fresh crunchy vegetables & bright flavors.

I'd say you got off easy.

I may be totally wrong, but I have a strong hunch that the correct verb to describe the setting of a custard would be "tard".

There used to be a restaurant in Manchester, VT, called Pam-Pam. Underneath the name on the sign it said (quotes theirs) "A Good Place to Dine". Talk about dimwitted marketing.

And she commutes by bike. Good on ya, girl! We had four wild turks in residence around the bird feeders for a few weeks. We don't own any guns, so I kept praying that one of the cats would take one down for us....

Let me be the first to welcome you to Blogville. Frisée and lardons salad...yum. But how can you stand it without a glass of crisp white wine?

Yes, yes, yes! Potatoes fresh from the dirt! Also: Chanterelles Strawberry-rhubarb pie, from that brief, shining moment when the two seasons overlap

Ms. V and K – So glad to hear the check gods have smiled on you (albeit after hijacking your check to a remote location; remember what I said about checks and fate?). I've felt your pain, now I feel your relief. GG

Just another hilarious typo: at the gym this morning, I noticed that the sign on the Ab machine says "Works the abs, lats, and obloquies."

The West Boondocks Café, 10th Ave. & 17th(?). Barbecued breast of lamb, candied yams, black-eyed peas, collards. And live jazz. Been gone at least 15 years, maybe more.

Depending on your definition of wonderful, the cost of living is generally tied to the wonderfullness of a place. More wonderful = more expensive. Vermont is like that; we all pay a premium (several, actually) and make sacrifices to be able to live in such a wonderful place. Would I trade? Not on your life. Um, not really.

Ms. V and K - I'm enjoying your blog, too (imagine that), particularly because your photos are so fast-loading. Since I'm still on dial-up, the photo-heavy blogs, while lovely and lively, are a real pain for me to keep up with, so I generally sit them out. Pity, really. I feel your pain regarding the endless wait for checks in the mail. I'm an IC and have been only sporadically employed for the last 8 months (that's finally changing) & it seems remarkable that fate has so much power over when the checks arrive (regardless of when they are mailed). For example, after going unpaid for 3 months leading up to Christmas, a substantial check was due to arrive in the week or so before. Instead, fate dealt us a frugal Christmas (which was not really a bad thing) by delivering the check on the day after. Similarly, I just last week went off to the UK to learn some new tricks and drum up some new business. Fate was kinder this time. Money was tight leading up to my departure, but a check was due...It arrived Monday morning and I was flying out Monday afternoon. Those endless trips to the mailbox, only to be disappointed, are just demoralizing. I can't recall any serious mishaps during my blog week, unless you count a 2-yr-old's smearing of chocolate mousse all over my vintage (white) damask tablecloth. GG

Hm. Maybe a classic has to start as a fad and then do hard time as a cliché to prove itself before being anointed as a classic. And it's entirely possible that mango salsa is headed in that direction. But a lot depends on what it's served with. Some "chefs" will smack a gob of MS on anything to try and seem au courant. At a restaurant here in SoVT, one that gets WAY too much adulation, the chef had the nerve to do the following appetizer (and I don't even know where to begin deconstructing its misguidedness, but the mango salsa would be a good start): Potato pancake topped with a crabcake topped with a slice of seared foie gras topped with mango salsa. Someone shoot me. That's neither fad nor cliché. It's a culinary abomination.

For all of you that are over garlic mashed potatoes (but they are SOOO good), try saffron mashed potatoes. Or horseradish mashed potatoes (but only with freshly grated). Weee-o, baby.

We get them here in SoVT, so I would be surprised if you didn't have them in Maine. Let me take a nyah-nyah moment to tell you all that I have chanterelles growing in the woods behind the house (in season, of course). Just to whet your appetities.

For the record: I was in England last week on bidness and saw a TV spot for Persil (a dishwashing liquid), in which a cheery housewife pulled a just-washed dinner plate from the suds-filled washing-up tub in the sink and placed it, with a bit of happy suds still clinging to the edge, directly into the drying rack. I saw the ad 3 times, so I was able to confirm the sequence.

Could we make that roasted mango with cedar-infused salmon salsa, planked hollandaise and asparagus foam?

???

Boxty and applesauce. Lots of that. And a lot of "culinary" experimentation (like how to dress up Kraft Mac & Cheese). Certain roomates were ultimately banned from cooking activities, specifically after being entrusted with making sandwiches for a day trip and turning up tunafish on whole wheat....with strawberry jam and cinnamon. Where's that green puke-face when you need it?

Jell-o's just Jell-o. Jell-o salad is a cliché. Unless it's Rachel's stunning gay-pride Jell-o mold. Honestly, I wasn't looking for a semantical clarification. I'm just curious about others' guilty pleasures. And maybe that thread's already been done. Mango salsa started as a fad; now it's a cliché. But it was still delicious over grilled salmon.

Any time I see or hear the words "mango salsa" in a restaurant, my knee-jerk is "Oh, God, this place is soooo stuck in the 90's". And also, often, "Yuck", when it's used to defile an otherwise Godly foodstuff – foie gras, for example. But today... Today I bunged into the fish monger and picked up some salmon, by request of one of the kids. Grill it, I says to myself. Then I stops by the groceria for some attendant produce. Head of Boston lettuce for dinner's salad, coupla zucchinis to sauté up with too much garlic, bunch of fingerling bananas for school lunches. And there are giant and perfectly ripe mangoes for sale. A deep-down instinct says "mango and salmon" and I instantly slap myself for being soooo stuck in the 90's, but I pick up a coupla mangoes anyway and, for good measure (or, really, to try and dilute my clichéed impulse) some Granny Smiths, Vidalias, a lime and a bunch of cilantro. When I get home, I whup together a marinade for the fish: crushed garlic, spot of soy sauce, spot of fish sauce, lime juice and a lot of OO. And then I do the unthinkable. I make a :swallow hard: salsa of mango, apple, onion, garlic, cilantro, lime juice and fish sauce. And I grill the salmon until the flesh is cooked ideally and the skin is charred and crunchy and I sauté up that zucchini with the too-much garlic (and skip the salad because now it's 8 o'clock and we're all damned near starving). And that, um, :cough: salsa is the perfect counterpoint to the salmon, all tart and bright and fruity to the fatty rich crispy smoky fish. And I find myself totally unrepentant for my transgression. Sometimes clichés hang on for good reason. So, do tell: what are the clichés you still cling to?

Interesting. The ferns in my yard are past the fiddlehead stage, while those in my secret motherlode spot are about a week away from harvest. Anyway, here's a pic that shows just what you should look for in a fiddlehead fern: shiny, grass-green shoots covered with an onion-skin-colored papery husk. I'll post more pics as they progress, and will try and find some no-no ferns. If I'm not mistaken, some of the "off-brand" ferns are not just bitter, they can be toxic. Will research.

You might be looking for Burlington-centric, but I have a fave Asian Market in Hadley, MA: Tran's Asian Supermarket on Route 9 just over the Coolidge Bridge from Northampton. It's got everything you could possibly want in an Asian market, including fresh produce (I've gotten fresh durian there) and cookware. I got a nice flat-bottom spun-steel wok for about $16 and a bamboo steamer very cheap. They have a huge selection of packaged Asian groceries. For example, there must be 20 varieties of fish sauce, as many or more of soy sauce, all kinds of dried noodles. Fresh lo-mein, many varieties of tofu and miso. Fresh lime-leaf, long beans, Thai eggplant, rau ram, etc. Best prices anywhere on little bottles of ginseng extract. Coolers full of Viet and Thai soft-drinks. Jars of fermented fish, pickled garlic, all manner of curry pastes, dried spices and herbs. It's tiny, but warrants at least a few hours to take in its treasures. Worth a long trip for provisioning. Edit: punctuation.

:Dean scream: Yeah, man, the F-heads are happening! I'll wander out with my camera tomorrow and snap some pics, both of fiddlehead and non-fiddlehead ferns, so aspiring foragers will know what to look for. Maybe I'll get me a fishing license and see if I can land a trout or two to go with (been a long time since I've cast, though). Edited to add exerpted quote from something I wrote elsewhere.

Legal in Vermont.