Tropicalsenior

Ah, but you do it so well.

Except for her baking spices I think that that was all my mother ever had in the house to cook with, but she was a darn good cook for the time that she lived. In our house, Campbell's soup was foreign food.

So true! And a lot of times if you get anchovy, it is right in the middle of a big blob of iceberg lettuce in ranch dressing.

Too many people have been turned off by getting a big bite of anchovy in their salad or on their Pizza. They are salty, but if they are finely chopped or used as an ingredient in salad dressing they can be wonderful. I've converted quite a few anchovy haters.

I've made a lot of it working in restaurants, but I have to admit, it's not something that I will make it home nor will I order it out. I can't say that I would give that description to anything that we sent out, but she's got the ingredients right.

Yep, I got one of those stories, too. A little pizza place opened up down the street from us so we gave it a try. They had something that we had never seen on a pizza menu down here. They had anchovies. So the first time we ordered Pizza we ask for anchovies but they were out. It was pretty good pizza so we tried it again later, still no anchovies. Finally I asked the guy why he never had anchovies and he admitted that he didn't even know what they were. He had just copied his menu from some other pizza place. After that, when I went to order our pizza I just took anchovies to put on it.

Got you. Caesar isn't Caesar without anchovies, Pizza isn't Pizza without anchovies. We're going through anchovy withdrawal here. Since the pandemic began, there have been no anchovies for sale in Costa Rica. Anybody want to send me a care package?

I'm not saying that. I'm just saying that if you put rabbit in it, don't call it venison stew because most people don't like to find hare in their stew.

I only read through a few of these and most of them are vile. If I were to go vegan I would follow the example of @shain Her vegan dishes are layers of flavor, texture, and color and they are not pale limitations of classic dishes. But your point is taken. Even the Italians are messing with the traditional.

I've seen this before and I loved it. You get the gold medal!

I'm the same way but if I see Caesar salad or fettuccine Alfredo on a menu I at least want it to resemble the original dish. We had one seafood restaurant here that had Caesar salad on the menu. It didn't resemble a Caesar salad in any way shape or form but it was delicious, full of bacon, so I ordered it every time I went there.

Therein lies the conundrum. Carbonara does not have variants. It is a specific style of a specific dish. I think this article from Epicurious explains it better than I can. Would you ever throw tomato sauce in Cacio e Pepe.

I'm not advocating that everyone go back and cook just the way it was before. Food evolves, it has to and it should. Most of it is good, very good. But some bloggers and television chefs take a perfectly good recipe, tear it apart and add to it until it doesn't even resemble the original. This is all done in the name of putting "my twist" to it. I can't tell you the times that I have clicked on a recipe and thought, what in God's name were they thinking? I think a lot of good food has been ruined in the name of fusion. I cringe every time I see Mexican lasagna, Italian tacos, or my favori

When I was pregnant with my first daughter I craved canned sardines in tomato sauce. I bought them by the case. After she was born I couldn't stand the smell of them. The strange thing is, she loves them. No one else in my family will eat them.

I had to read that twice. You kind of threw me there. I thought that would be the final outrage, coffee in carbonara. Yes, I'm sitting here right now with a big cup of Costa Rican coffee in front of me. I still laugh about the time that we had visitors from Seattle and they brought me several bags of Starbucks. I didn't have the heart to tell them that Starbucks buys coffee from Costa Rica. I just kept it and gave it to my Costa Rican friends for Christmas.

How inconsiderate of her!

My husband absolutely hated beef stroganoff so for years I fed him beef and sour cream gravy with mushrooms. He loved it.

I know we're just getting into a matter of semantics but that's still implies that it is carbonara, which it is not. By saying that something is inspired by another dish, it means that you have taken the basic premise of the original and added your own touch to make your own dish. With all the billions of recipes on the internet it must be hard to come up with names that are original and that people will be drawn to. The other day I saw a recipe for Yummy Nummy Beef Stroganoff. You won't catch me clicking on that one!

Just one word will do it. Inspired. Carbonara inspired.

i feel like you're deliberately misunderstanding me in order to maintain your outrage. I'm not outraged I'm just a little sad. There are a few Classics it I do feel strongly about. The ones that I mentioned. I think that you will find that most of the outrage has come from the Italian Community. There are some national dishes that they do feel very strongly about. The Italian government has even gone so far as to publish and official recipe for bolognese. Regional favorites fall into a completely different category. Take for instance goulash. Every region, every family, an

For those of us that have the means and opportunity, that may be true but in my case just as an example, it becomes even more difficult. I live in Costa Rica and just the other day I was checking something on Amazon and the product cost $17 but it would be $34 shipping. Because I've been in isolation, going to Chinatown or too many of the small specialty shops that carried import items has been out of the question and many of the small specialty shops have closed permanently. During the height of the pandemic they were not considered essential businesses and they just couldn't survive. So

There are some classics that when you change the ingredients they completely become something else. I'm afraid I'm a little bit of a purist on this. The hair on the back of my neck goes up when I see recipes or menu items labeled Chicken Caesar, Fettuccine Alfredo with Mushrooms, Salmon Carpaccio. The classic was made one way and one way only and if you change the ingredients, it is no longer that dish. Adding just one word to the title of the recipe would have made a big difference. They could have called it "Carbonara Inspired Tomato Pasta" and I would have been completely fine with it.

Fortunately for me, eating at home was never a problem. My mother, who was a very good cook, was not German and our meals were plain old homestyle midwest. My nightmares were the family reunions and the holidays with my father's family. We never had to eat sauerkraut at home.

That might be most of my problem. I can't get a good strong flour here. I need some of that good ol winter wheat.

Never used figs, in fact, no such thing in Nebraska then. All I've ever seen used was prunes and raisins and lots of other dried fruit. But mostly prunes and raisins.