Pat

Perhaps it's connected to the current fashion for things being kept simple and done the way they used to be, merged to some extent with concern about being environmentally friendly. (I have no idea, though, if handwashing dishes is "greener" than using a dishwasher. How much electricity is used to heat the water to wash dishes individually vs. what is used in a dishwasher? How much water is used in the two methods? I'm not terribly efficient at handwashing dishes and probably waste more water washing a dozen items than the dishwasher uses for a full load.)There are a few things we handwash but not very many.

For years, I used a large steamer pot (had two inserts--one a small basket and the other the size of the pot) for multiple cooking uses. I boiled pasta and potatoes in it, made soups, steamed vegetables, and other things I probably am not remembering. It was actually probably too thin for some things I used it for, and at some point I acquired a metal dutch oven that had thicker sides and was somewhat smaller and used that for a number of the same purposes.I have some Le Creuset now but managed years without it. Of all of the LC I have, I think the oval dutch oven is the most valuable. Another item I got a lot of use from (and I still have one, but it not's going to last much longer) is a large nonstick RevereWare skillet with a glass lid. I see that item covered in various ways upthread.

Pyrex and Corning Ware do shatter unexpectedly. I posted an anecdote in one of the kitchen mishaps threads about having nested Pyrex measuring cups shatter when I lifted them off a shelf. The amount that they could have banged against each other was negligible, but if there is any kind of hairline crack anywhere, it doesn't take much to make them explode. Those shards are very hard to clean up.My most recent kitchen disaster was an exploding overhead light. The whole thing just blew out and all over everywhere. After cleaning the floor and counters carefully in the whole area, I was still finding tiny shards in odd places a couple of days later. Fortunately, I had no open food out at the time, or I would have had to throw it out. I once had a Corning piece fragment all over and had to throw out pork I had been simmering a long time, since I couldn't be sure no glass got into it .

That recipe looks good, especially with the pepper component. I bookmarked it to try. I rarely make stroganoff. It's not something my mother ever made. I don't think I ever ate it until I was an adult. The stroganoff I make most often (which is quite infrequently) is a recipe for meatballs stroganoff from Good Housekeeping, ca. 1960.Last night I experimented with making a dish I saw described and pictured in an eGullet blog: fettat hummus. Once I had constructed it, it struck me as being akin to a 7 layer dip, but focused on hummus. Since I didn't plan ahead and hadn't soaked chickpeas, I used canned. I hadn't made hummus in ages and couldn't remember what recipe I usually use . I went with a Jane Brody recipe, mostly, with a nod to Moosewood, so the hummus had parsley in it and chopped scallions on top, paprika, cumin, and a couple of slugs of tamari sauce (in addition to tahini, lemon juice, and garlic). The 19 oz. can of chickpeas was the perfect size, as the Brody recipe calls for 15 oz or 1 1/2 cups, and that left just enough over for the chickpea layer. This is how I assembled the dish: Layer in a glass serving bowl, fried pita (small rounds, cut in quarters, split in halves) chickpeas hummus thick (i.e. Greek) yogurt with garlic and mint pine nuts (toasted) olive oil (drizzled over top) Serve with additional fried pita quarters. When I searched online to see if I could get more information on preparation, I saw an Iraqi recipe, which had only chickpeas and not prepared hummus as well. That called for baked pita and drizzling liquid over them on the bottom layer, so I drizzled some reserved chickpea liquid over the bottom layer of pita. Anyway, this was excellent. We both loved it. The remaining portion is in the refrigerator for tonight. I fried up some extra pita chips, so we're ready to go.

He is using it rhetorically, but I think he's oversimplifying. I have to finish the book, but I disagree with his premise that reformers looking at bodily health via food is a relatively new phenomenon. The language of the "science" has changed, and maybe the proportion of how much is fresh air is how much is food, but I don't see it as being that new.

I know practically nothing of my family's food history. Whether that makes me unusual or not, I don't know. I only knew one grandmother, and she died when I was 9. I have vague recollections of cooking with her--pancakes for breakfast when I spent the night. She used Bisquick. (This was in the 60s). She used to make a roast of some sort for Sunday dinner--usually beef, but ham or turkey at the holidays. Often we'd have Friday lunch with her, which was grilled cheese (Kraft cheese slices, I think) or tuna fish sandwiches. She's the only "cook" I'm aware of in my family, on either side.She made cookies from scratch, mostly sand tarts for Christmas-New Year's (a butter-sugar cookie recipe that came from her sister-in-law, who was from Amish country). That is about the only "family" recipe we have. She made cakes that always came out uneven but tasted good. I have her cake pans still. The bottoms come out rather than the side coming off in a springform. They're got to be well over 50 years old by now. I also have a meat grinder from my father's side of the family. There are no recipes from them and I have no idea what they ate, but my father refused to eat a number of foods that they had to eat during the Depression (my FIL is the same way). I know that my maternal grandfather bought black market meat during WWII rationing. He had some contact at Reading Terminal in Philadelphia. At some point, I recall asking people who were older what they remembered about food rationing in the US. That was kind of interesting. My mother got some recipes from her mother when she got married. i think I still have them somewhere. They're not terribly explicit in many of the measurements and instructions. My mother didn't like to cook but turned out perfectly fine basic food. She didn't bake, except the slice off the roll chocolate chip cookies and brownies from a mix. Her sister baked the sand tarts after my grandmother died, but I don't recall her cooking anything else. Both she and the only other aunt I knew (one of my father's sisters) worked long hours their whole lives, weren't married, and didn't cook. I learned some basic food preparations from my mother--baked chicken, meat loaf, roasted potatoes, etc. She came up with the idea of baked frozen peas in a casserole (from a magazine maybe), which was pretty good, but I always seem to overcook them when I try. Anything I know about cooking measures, terms or techniques, I've learned myself through cookbooks, magazines, and trial and error. I don't think my grandmother used measuring spoons, but my mother had some.

I agree. I think using the great-great standard only works to a limited extent, as he's directing it to people of a variety of ages with different family backgrounds. Even if it's just referring to anybody living in a certain time period, it's a pretty broad generalization. In order to have a healthier diet and one less stressful to the planet, keeping in mind the advantages of simple foods prepared simply and kept close to their original form is good, but I wouldn't have wanted to be restricted to the foods my relatives ate in the 1830s. Everything "then" was not pure, often not even water, depending on the case. Diets were more limited to foods that either could be canned or transported within a fairly short distance while kept fresh. Vegetables that didn't grow in a certain climate couldn't be brought in fresh from thousands of miles away. An area that supported livestock but not much else would be a diet heavy in beef. If your diet was based on one food because of an inability to manipulate the environment to grow a wider variety of crops, and a blight hit your potatoes, things got really bad.There were packaged foods being sold well back into the 19th century though not as a central feature of most Americans' diets (not as much as a century later, certainly). One reason Graham promoted his bread in the 1830-40s was that white bread (with all kinds of awful additives) had become part of people's diets in the increasingly urbanized economy. He wanted people to get back to whole grains and fiber. I think Pollan underestimates the degree to which reformers in past times were concerned with bodily health as regulated through diet. Now I'm confused about which thread this should go in.

I don't have a fancy way of describing it, but tonight's meal was really good. It was very flavorful and had a comforting texture. The cooked cauliflower broke up like mashed potatoes, so it gave a quasi-potatoes-2 ways effect. Potato-cheese gnocchi* and cauliflower with sage brown butter, golden raisins, and cremini mushrooms, topped with toasted almonds and pine nuts. *bought premade

His original question related to great-great grandparents, getting beyond this issue even for most young people.

Authors want their books to sell, but, nonetheless, publishers make those the decisions rather than authors. Making money for a mom and pop store is nice, but you're not going to turn away sales from Barnes and Noble or Costco.If Pollan wanted to be extremely ascetic, he would self-publish and sell only through outlets he approved of, not publish with Penguin (the publisher on the copy I have). ETA: I wouldn't expect him to do that.

I took him to mean that as well. He's talking about foods in as close to their original form as possible, as I read the article (and however far I am through the book). He may not have mentioned cooking because he assumed that people would be doing that. I don't think he's necessarily a raw food advocate, and people will be using fats and spices to cook.There was that one particular comment about how he and his mother don't eat that stuff anymore, and I thought it referred to margarine, crisco, and transfats--if not exclusively, primarily.

It (the beet and goat cheese martini, et al.) is not something that appeals to me personally. I'm slightly intrigued by breaking food and beverage into components and rearranging them in unexpected ways, enough so that I enjoy reading about molecular gastronomy but have not yet had a compelling urge to go to Minibar.

I'm not sure, but he sold a copy sooner than he would have if I hadn't seen it there .

While I think it's generally a good guideline, I'm not sure I'd really want to eat only foods my great-great grandmother would recognize as food. The elder of my two grandmothers was born in 1876 (the other, I believe, was born in 1898). I don't know when my great-great grandmothers were born, but their food choices were far more limited than those of my relatives who lived in the twentieth century. While I was interested in Pollan's concept of nutritionism when I read the Unhappy Meals article, I wonder how much it is a 20th-21st century version of the 19th century ideology/ies espoused by Graham, Kellogg, and their health-promoting contemporaries. I can't really say too much more without reading the book.

So much for reading the other books first. I saw the new Pollan book at Costco ($13.49) and have started reading it. I haven't gotten far enough into it to make any comment, though.

Interesting. I've brined turkey, but I wouldn't think of brining individual poultry parts. Dinner tonight was an adaptation of a Julia Child recipe for French Onion Soup gratineed with cheese. I used leeks, shallots, and garlic to round out the specified yellow onions, since I had them to use. I managed to grate some ancient gruyere (mentioned elsewhere) very finely, but it was hard to get any bigger pieces. That meant that the cheese over the bread didn't give thorough coverage when it went under the broiler. No edge-to-edge cheese barrier on the soup bowl. Tasted great, though. The rest of the meal was mostly leftovers turned into a stirfry (pork, broccoli, bell pepper, onion, garlic, wild rice).

You seem to be doing better at it than I do, if that's any consolation. Cream of carrot soup sounds good. Thyme would be good in that, if you have it. (That's something I always have dried because I buy it at Penzey's in big bags that last forever. Different project ).I'm making a 4-onion soup tonight to use up garlic, shallots, and yellow onions (why do I buy them at Costco?) and a stray leek. If it's still grate-able, I'll be using the rock-hard gruyere in the cheese drawer, making this a French 4-way onion soup. I've got a baguette in the freezer I can pull out to use for the bread.

Is it 1/2 cup? You could try whipping it, but that's a pretty small amount to start with. You could always mix it with milk or half and half to stretch it for cooking. You can use it in coffee. Put a couple of tablespoons into a soup. Do you have potatoes? It would be nice in mashed or twice baked potatoes or a gratin.

That sounds wonderful. I'm working more on the bland end of the spectrum, but I was planning to put a little miso in at the end, and simmering a couple of star anise in the broth sounds like a good idea. Thanks!

Right now I'm simmering an improvised chicken soup. My husband's not feeling so great, so other plans have turned into chicken soup.

salad of red butter lettuce, radicchio, radishes, carrots, and crumbled cheddar; balsamic vinaigrette baked chicken breasts steamed green beans with toasted almonds rice pilaf Marvelous Market olive bread with kalamata olive oil for dipping

That sounds good. Thank you.

. I used to follow a recipe for it and pretty much now throw things together without noting what I'm doing. This was the original marinade, from the Post's Dinner Tonight feature in 1996. I usually use a little orange juice or honey instead of sugar. Sometimes I use hot sauce instead of all or some of the soy and mustard instead of or in addition to the ginger. If it marinates too long, the bourbon flavor can be too strong in the final product, especially since I don't measure the bourbon all that carefully . I don't usually marinate overnight--maybe 6 hours.

I read the article that is the precursor to it but haven't seen the book yet. I recall the part about not eating anything your great-great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. I've got a bit of a backlog of books to get to, so I won't be reading this until I've cleared some of that out.

Are they the directions given here?I must say, it does sound intriguing.