This is a few minutes before she was shown the sugar content of the Frosted Mini-Wheats, and she was still happy.

While finding a place to eat out on Thanksgiving, I noticed that all of the local high-quality restaurants included braised beef short ribs on the menu along with the obligatory turkey and a couple other items.

This may be a food trendy thing, not sure. In any case it's good recession markup food. Do a decent job with a very, very cheap cut and 3) profit!

In that spirit I suggested to salome_st_john that we start an All Oxtail Restaurant for the next few hard years. We came up with some specialties:

"Okay sir, that's two of the Mesquite Chipotle oxtails and three Buffalo Oxtails. Would you like some of our oxtail poppers to start?"

"and for dessert: flourless warm oxtail!!"

"This oxtailini..."

oxtail ganache and an oxtail coulis!

mango jalapeno jello oxtail salsa!

oxtail reduction on a bed of ox foam!

oxtail micropearls frozen in liquid nitrogen!

and reconstituted in lukewarm oxtail "broth"! with an aroma of oxtail "smoke"!

Consider the onion;
Mother of a thousand thousand meals
How can word or thought encompass
All its power and beauty?

Just give thanks and eat.

I keep encountering this wonderful salad, once at a French place and twice at Russian restaurants. It consists of:

beets (cooked or canned)
garlic (I use that lebanese white garlic sauce)
yogurt or mayonnaise
walnut pieces

It's so good. So very good. In fact, it's very good and excellent. Go forth and make some.

My friend sooz has a problem. She needs to find a restaurant for dinner in San Francisco. The issue is the bizarre set of conditions she has to fulfill.

The good part is that she has a pretty good budget, so they can go to a nice place. However, here are the restrictions:

1. This place must be vegetarian-friendly, but not entirely vegetarian, because some people will object to a lack of dead meat.
   
   
2. A cheese-based cuisine won't work.
   
   
3. It has to be in the city; East Bay and suburbs will also fail.
   
   
4. Casual clothing must be okay.

To me it looks like that nightmare dinner that inevitably arrives at a chain restaurant. A little help?

these three simple little words:

grilled cheese sandwich

No, we're not running out of rice in the U.S. We are particularly not running out of rice in California, where we grow it. We're also not running out of wheat. If the Costco isn't selling you rice, they probably messed up their order and some junior manager is lying to you about rationing.

The price of food is indeed high and rising. People in less fortunate countries are rioting because they can't afford to eat. Here in the U.S., poor people are being squeezed. People like me don't even notice because we make good money.

This is a good time to think about what you eat. It's an even better time to take a good look at where the food comes from, how it's produced, and how it's distributed. As usual, the root problems are about money: farm subsidies, water subsidies, tariffs, big agricultural companies who control all of those things, and bad government all over the world.

And in the U.S. particularly it's about oil. Because you can't grow food the way we do without artificial fertilizer, which is made of energy. And once we have all that bounty of soy and corn, we have to sell it somehow. And so we convert it into ethanol and celebrate our new energy, free from foreign oil! ...that's made from foreign oil. And up go the grain prices.

For me the threat is not rice rationing at the supermarket. The threat is endless war to keep our own food prices low with cheap oil.

Funny how it comes back there every time!

Via genericus for planetdracula and all the other black metal fan club:

THE BLACK OVEN: Immaculate confections succumbed to northern darkness

Stir gently until just combined. Too much friction annihilates the bubbles!

That was on the cover of the Penzeys spice catalog. Possible explanations include: Burn Victim Aspic, Dragon's Pimple, BBQ Croquembouche, Pineapply Blood Sausage, or really bad glazed ham.

( HOW BOUT MAKIN IT BIGGER )