Normally I can read a recipe and imagine the taste of the finished dish. The New York Times' feature on avant-garde cuisine, however, left me totally mystified. Smoked mashed potatoes? Dehydrated bell peppers pulverized and dusted across a steak? Martini jello shots? Beef stock foam?

José Andrés practices this cutting edge cuisine in my hometown of Washington at Minibar. If I can get a reservation for one of the six seats at this tiny restaurant inside Andrés' popular Café Atlántico, I could taste this food from the kitchen of a master. If not, then I need to find a dehydrator and an aerosol whipper and try some of these techniques at home.

Also posted at A Frolic of My Own.

Today! Today is the Annual Dine Out For Life in Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, East Bay Area, Hampton Roads, Honolulu, Hudson Valley, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, and Tacoma. I thought briefly about jetting to Honolulu for a light snack, but ended up making reservations at Chicago's own Angelina Ristorante at 3561 N Broadway.

I lived a block from this place for a year a loooooong time ago and never went. I'll let you know how the food was and just how much the 30% of the bill going to charities in the area turned out to be.

Make a reservation now if you haven't done it yet and help fight AIDS.

UPDATE: Angelina's was great. Two big takeaways from the night - Polenta! We had it fried ina loaf like consistency with a creamy mushroom sauce on top and herbs baked in, and as a mush with the consistency of mashed potatoes and the taste of a savory egg custard. Who knew such a humble dish could be so tasty? Second lesson - Bread pudding. Dark chocolate/white chocolate bread pudding, with a scoop of vanilla bean ice cream to be exact. Wow. Try out Angelina's.

With a bottle of wine, a single appetizer, two entrees (garlic shrimp and skate wing), two desserts, a glass of milk, and a coffee and tip, the total was $120. Dining for Life gets $40 of that. We also picked up envelopes to send an additional donation in and have a chance to win a day as assistant chef at Charlie Trotter's, $500 gift certificate from Marshall Field's or something else worth $500 which I'd remember if my wife had had more of the wine.

Steve Almond is a freak. A Candy Freak to be more specific. Via the excellent bookslut, we discover USA Today is profiling Almond's latest book - Candyfreak:a Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America.

The excerpt on the Candyfreak site is quite amusing:

1. The author has eaten a piece of candy every single day of his entire life.

I want you to look at this sentence and think about it briefly and, if you're so inclined, perhaps say a little prayer on behalf of my molars. This would not be unwarranted, and for supporting evidence, I refer you to Elizabeth Gulevitch, a highly competent doctor of dental surgery who spent most of the early Seventies numbing my jaw. I doubt Dr. Gulevitch is the sort to have established a hall of fame in her waiting room (she was more the Ansel Adams type) but I would like to believe that my run of seven cavities during the infamous campaign of 1973 stands as some kind of record. It goes on.

I'm shocked there aren't any "Almond Joy" puns in the Amazon reviews.

The Candyfreak site has a nice page of links to candy-related web destinations. Brush well after surfing.

Love him or hate him, you have to admit this sounds like a good prize: a trip for two from anywhere in the world to London, where you will dine for free at Jamie's restaurant Fifteen, stay in a luxury hotel and meet the man and his staff personally. The catch? You have to donate £5 to his charity, Cheeky Chops. Oh, and you have to convince Jamie that your most memorable meal is the Most Memorable Ever. Once you have made your donation, a box will pop up asking you to submit your story. Send him an amusing episode and you may well be on your way to London to dine in style!

To enter, visit the Jamie Oliver site here. The competition closes on April 30th, so get your entries in quick!

For a quick summary of the Cheeky Chops mission, continue reading...

Here is what the Cheeky Chops site has to say about itself:

Jamie Oliver had long been thinking about helping unemployed young people by offering them a leg-up into the world of catering. 'Having not been the brightest banana in the bunch myself, I realised that my biggest weapon in life was the determination, enthusiasm, hands-on and "actions speak louder than words" approach my father taught me, and I wanted to get this across to others, especially those interested in food.'

Cheeky Chops Ltd aims to provide unique opportunities for unemployed young people to learn about the hospitality and catering industry through training and practical experience. College learning is supplemented by real-world experience in top restaurants such as The Ivy and the River Café and finally, of course in Jamie’s restaurant, Fifteen. All profits from the Fifteen restaurant will go back to the charity towards training for the current and future intakes of students. It is hoped that these young chefs will be fully equipped with high-class employable skills, self-confidence and, of course, a passion for food, so that they may move forward and carve out their own futures.

There are days when it is a pleasure not to cook. A strange statement for a site about cooking, but I am sure that most of you out there will understand what I mean. Yesterday, the Critic and I played some snooker after work (there is a tournament on Sunday, must practise!) and came home to a spotlessly clean apartment. Our new cleaner had come. I don't think the kitchen has been this clean since the day it was installed. I'm not the world's messiest person, but it's rare that everything in the kitchen - floor, counters, walls, cabinets, dishes - is clean all at one time. I could hardly bear to walk in there and spoil the effect. So for dinner I ate: cold leftover lamb (from the tupperware), half an avacado (from the skin) and one scoop of rhubarb sorbet with a drizzle of strawberry sauce. Heaven.

(And only a spoon, knife, fork, tupperware and parfait glass to mar the perfection of my clean kitchen...)

This is the other recipe I made this weekend from Vegetarian Asian: The Essential Kitchen by Lynelle Scott Aitken, a skinny little cookbook I highly recommend.

I think this might have been the best thing I've cooked in a long time. The hard part is finding the flowering chives. They are also known as flowering Chinese leek, flowering Chinese chives, bông he or kau choy fah.

Try Asian markets for these sorts of vegetables. I found mine at the Mien Hoa market on Argyle in Chicago. Turns out they're related to garlic, which explains the incredible flavor and aroma.

The recipe is simple and fast and the results are delicious

Braised Flowering chives with ginger:

1 big bunch or 2 small bunches flowering chives
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 cloves of minced garlic
2 teaspoons freshly grated ginger
1 small green bell pepper, julienned (cut into thin long strips)
1 teaspoon sesame oil
2 tablespoons soy sauce
1 teaspoon corn starch diluted in 3 tablespoons of water.

Trim the base of the chives by 1 inch.
Warm the vegetable oil over medium high heat in a skillet or wok.
Add the garlic, ginger and bell pepper and stir fry for 1 minute until they start to color. Add the flowering chives and toss for 1 minute more (maybe 2 minutes if you like them less stiff).

Add the rest of the ingredients and simmer until the sauce is thick and clear - about 2 minutes.

Serve immediately by itself or with rice.

There were no flowering chives left by the time dinner was finished. Everything else had leftovers but these were long disappeared into the bellies of the assembled host.

You can learn a little more about Asian Vegetables at this site, from where I stole the flowering chives picture.

Can you know the measure of a man by the kind of cheese he eats? In a Washington Post study of conservative Red America, Britton Stein fulfills every East Coast liberal's nightmare of middle America: "His truck is a Chevy. His beer is Bud Light. His savior is Jesus Christ."

The long, condescending profile of Stein substitutes a list of consumer products for any actual analysis. I was struck, though, by how important the writer considers Stein's culinary proclivities. Stein loves hamburgers, cooks with a gas grill, and doesn't grind his own coffee. These details, the writer implies, tell us as much about Red America as Stein's church attendance and views on gay marriage. Right wing ideology, it appears, results from bad taste.

It's a silly position, since I bet Stein could make something tasty in his "jumbo smoker" and the Wall Street millionaires who support New York's gourmet establishments probably didn't vote for Gore. When a lazy journalist can offer up a lack of culinary sophistication as a judgment on the culture of half the country, it does show how deeply an interest in gourmet cuisine has penetrated America.

Twenty years ago, would any writer at any paper in the United States even have noticed that someone put American cheese on their hamburger and got their coffee from a can?

Also posted at A Frolic of My Own.

The key to a great vegetable dish is great vegetables. I discovered a new source for vegetables used in Asian cuisine. The bodega-like Mien Hoa Market at 1108 W. Argyle is a find and a half. Not only does this family-run store have fresh vegetables that are hard to find elsewhere, but they are dirt cheap and near other markets where you can find the odd item Mien Hoa might not have.

This weekend, I shopped at Mien Hoa to prepare for cooking at a friend's apartment. Two out of three dishes worked very well. The third I messed up because I was impatient to get food on the table. We'll dispense with that one and concentrate on the winners which both derive from recipes found in Vegetarian Asian: The Essential Kitchen by Lynelle Scott Aitken, a skinny little cookbook I highly recommend.

The leafy green you see a picture of here is Shanghai bok-choy, a smaller and greener vegetable than regular bok choy, which usually has white stems. The specimen pictured is about the length of a large hand (fingertip to heel of hand)

Shanghai bok-choy is the star of the dish we'll do today:

Claypot-cooked vegetables with shiitake and Chinese five-spice

The first thing we'll dispense with is the claypot. We used good a good old-fashioned Corningware casserole and this worked well. If you want to use a traditional Chinese claypot, soak the vessel for an hour before using it.

Soak 12 dried shiitake mushrooms in hot water for 30 minutes. Cut into bite-sized pieces or just halve the tops.

Add the mushrooms to the casserole dish with:
2 tablespoons of vegetable oil
2 teaspoons freshly grated ginger (our addition)
2 cloves of minced garlic
1 medium yellow onion, sliced into half-moons (or wedges if you prefer)
2 teaspoons of Chinese five-spice powder
2 tablespoons of brown sugar (you know it tastes so good)
1 cup clear vegetable stock (or cheat like we did and use regular veg stock)
2 tablespoons Thai or Vietnamese fish sauce (this is our change to the recipe. The original calls for vegetarian oyster (mushroom) sauce which was unlocatable. Fish sauce tastes great here and is cheap and readily available in most Southeast Asian markets.)
1 bunch bok choy or choy sum, quartered lengthwise
4 cups mixed fresh vegetables such as pumpkin, cauliflower, carrot, eggplant, baby corn, cut into 1 inch cubes. Find the baby corn. Even canned baby corn makes the dish.
steamed rice for serving

And now the incredibly difficult prep instructions:

Put everything but the rice in the casserole dish, cover, bake at 400 F for one hour. Eat.

The Shanghai bok choy displayed a remarkable property. If there is sauce on your plate with the bok choy, the bok choy will slowly but surely slurp up the sauce. I'm sure some brilliant biologist or physicist can tell me why a cooked vegetable would do that, but it was amusing. And delicious.

Our five-spice powder is misnamed. The ingredients listed are: Cinnamon, star anise, fennel, cloves, ginger, licorice, szechwan peppercorns, and white pepper. It was also $1.65 at J.Toguri, a local gem at that specializes in Japanese goods including dry food goods.

This weekend I was really in the mood for a Sunday roast. As I often do, I thought "Wouldn't it be nice if we had a roast every Sunday for dinner as they used to do in the Good Old Days?" (You may think these never existed, but they did. My grandfather had home-made soup and roast and at least three vegetables every day of his marriage, over fifty years.) Unfortunately, I'm incurably lazy. Instead of mopping the floor, cooking a roast or finishing the tiling project in the guest toilet, the Critic and I went out and played snooker and grabbed some sushi on the way home.

But the impulse remained, and so tonight I made one of those dishes that approximates a roast without actually obliging you to slave over a hot stove for hours.

The first part of the meal came from an old favourite of Nigel Slater's recipes: Roast potatoes with thyme, sea salt and lemon juice. Here is the recipe:

1) Wash a bag of baby potatoes and dry them.

2) Drizzle a couple of tablespoons of olive oil over them

3) Sprinkle with fresh thyme and sea salt. (Actually, I use this salt, which costs about a euro here in Paris and a staggering seven dollars in Chicago. I should get in the import/export business!)

4) Place in a hot convection oven at 200c/400f for about half an hour, or until they are brown and soft. (It depends on the size of the potatoes, obviously!)

Here is a picture of them before going into the oven. (For the after picture, see above.)

The next dish involved lamb. I used to think I disliked lamb, mainly because I was being fed mutton and told it was lamb. At least, that is my theory. Now I love lamb and can't make it often enough. (Literally: the Critic is convinced he doesn't like lamb because he, too, grew up being told the mutton he was eating was lamb. When I make it he likes it, but he will never admit he would like me to make lamb.) I didn't follow a specific Nigel recipe for this one, but as you will see I was inspired by him.

Lamb Cutlets à la Nigel Slater

2 big lamb cutlets (I get the ones without bones as one of us is fussy)
1 big fat clove of garlic, sliced
3/4 cup red wine
2 Tbs chopped fresh rosemary
salt and pepper

for the gravy
1 Tbs flour
3-4 Tbs water (as needed)
more salt and pepper
1 rounded tsp Caesar salad dressing, home-made

Marinate the lamb cutlets in the rest of the ingredients while you are starting the potatoes. When the potatoes are about 15-20 minutes from being done, put 1 Tbs olive oil and a little pat of butter in a frying pan and turn the heat up fairly high. When they start to froth, swish the pan to mix and slap the lamb cutlets into the pan. Turn up the heat to sear the meat. (Don't worry about the brown bits that will form on the bottom of the pan - they will improve the gravy.) When the first side is brown, flip over. Cook until the inside is pink inside, but not red (about fifteen minutes for cutlets about an inch/2.5 cm thick).

Remove to a platter and cover with foil. (This is the first time I have done this - usually I would just put in the oven uncovered to stay warm. But if a roast can rest why can't a steak? I don't know if it was the resting period or not, but the meat stayed moist and tender.)

Sprinkle the flour in the bottom of the frying pan and brown a few minutes. Add the marinade from the lamb and stir like crazy, scraping up all the brown bits from the bottom and sides of the pan. Add water as necessary to keep a good consistency. And then came my stroke of genius (if I may say so): remembering Nigel's recipe for lamb which called for putting anchovies in the gravy, and lamenting the fact that I was out of anchovies...I thought of the Caesar salad dressing in the fridge. Is there anything in the dressing I don't like? Answer: no. Is there anything that would taste bad with lamb? Answer: no. I tasted the gravy and before and after adding the dressing and I can tell you it was miles better afterwards, heavenly. It's a shame that a picture of meat with gravy never ever looks as good as it smells. Maybe I should have sprinkled some parsley on top to convince you.

Serve the above two items with fat slices of ripe tomatoes that you have sprinkled with a little salt and pepper and parsley. (I always try to have a nod towards healthy food somewhere in the meal.)

And there you have it: Sunday Roast Dinner on Monday and made in a little over half an hour.

A distraction: Burger King put up a site with a subservient chicken (or more accurately a guy in a chicken suit) that will do what you tell it to do. The site is here.

Try "play baseball", or "cartwheel", or "do jumping jacks". Think up your own commands. It's a great little site if you like the absurd.

Today the sun is shining and the flowers are all flourishing and Paris is as beautiful as can be. In celebration of this fact, I went to the store and bought some Tavel rosé wine, to make the quintissential summer cocktail. (Yes, I know it's April, but that first really warm day makes you want to start early, doesn't it?) It's a very simple concotion and very tasty, with only three ingredients. 1) Good rosé wine. 2) Lemon zest. 3) Peach liqueur. My friend Grant introduced me to this variation on the kir, and he says it's a speciality of the Loire valley. The peach sweetness balances out the tartness of the zest and the wine and when it's nicely chilled it's my favourite summer drink. A perfect way to salute a beautiful sunny day!

Caesar salad is one of those dishes I cannot stop myself from ordering in restaurants even though I know that nine times out of ten I'm going to be severely disappointed. This is especially true, for some reason, in the UK. They know that it should have romaine lettuce, tomatoes, croutons and a sort of a creamy dressing...and there is the problem. "Sort of a creamy dressing" is what you usually get, instead of a sharp lively mixture of anchovy, olive oil, lemon juice, garlic, freshly ground pepper and parmesan.

And yes, I know, a Chicken Caesar's Salad is irreverant, unethical and almost downright un-American, certainly not traditional. So sue me. I love Caesar's salad dressing on just about ANYTHING.

By most accounts, the original Caesar's salad was first made by one Caesar Cardini of Tijuana. Mr. Cardini used a mixture of garlic, heart of romaine leaves, fresh ground pepper, a dash of salt, imported olive oil, fresh lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce (where the anchovy flavor came from), homemade croutons and Parmesan cheese. If you are interested in reviews of restaurant and bottled dressings, you can check out the unofficial Caesar Salad site.

My dressing differs somewhat from the above, but I find it absolutely delicious. I don't know where I picked up the idea of putting mustard in there, but I must have gotten it somewhere. Probably from a Brit...

Meg & Caesar's Salad Dressing

In the 2-cup attachment to your Braun immersion blender, put the following ingredients:

one small can of anchovies, minus the chef's due and a couple for garnish
a lump of young parmesan about the size of your thumb, maybe a little bigger
1/3 cup olive oil
2 garlic cloves
juice from 1/2 a medium lemon
several good grindings of fresh pepper
1 tsp mustard

Whiz with the immersion blender until all is creamy and delicious. At this point you may want to add just a tiny bit of water as it will be fairly thick. However, if you are going to toss the salad (as opposed to drizzling over the lettuce) I wouldn't bother.

I'm not sure where the obsession with raw eggs and Caesar salad originally came from (surely not somewhere as hot as Tijuana?!?) but I've never felt it was absolutely necessary. And, despite my stance on stuffing poultry, I avoid food risks where I can.

The dressing combined wonderfully with the salad I made last night of Things Grilled on My Cast-Iron Grill Pan:
- eggplant slices
- peppers (jalepeno and bell)
- zucchini
- chicken
I brushed the vegetables with olive oil in which a crushed garlic clove was soaking (and later used same oil and garlic in the dressing). The chicken was marinated in white wine, garlic, basil and parsley. They all went together beautifully and it was difficult to resist eating the extra I had intentionally prepared for my lunch today.

Some tips on salad that I have learned over the years:

1. If your lettuce is tired and somewhat wilted, put it in a bowl full of water with a couple of ice cubes for at least half an hour. When you spin it, you'll find that it's become nice and crispy again. (This was my Austrian grandmother's trick!)

2. The best way to store fresh lettuce is in the salad spinner in the fridge. Yes, this is one I found out all by myself by being too lazy to put the lettuce in a bag. If you empty out the water that was extracted in the spinning and put the spinner in the fridge, the lettuce will keep very well for several days longer than in a bag.

3. If you have dinner guests and want to prepare the salad in advance, mix the vinaigrette in the bottom of the salad bowl and put the lettuce in the bowl without mixing. The small amount of salad that is touching the dressing may get a little soggy, but it's unnoticeable in the bowl of nicely dressed salad that you'll have when you mix it at the table. (Mme Hollard, the mother of a friend of mine, showed me that trick.)

And I did eat my salad for lunch and it was very good. It would have been better with a few tomatoes, but alas, we were out when I made the salad and I was too tired to go out again to the store. Such is life.

(One last note on the photo: this was my lunch version, which did not include any chicken. The chicken was too good to save for the next day!)

Almost every food item you can think of has a professional council or association dedicated to lobbying for and protecting the interests of its growers. These councils often have websites with recipes and tips on how to best prepare the item they are known for.

I did a little research and found these council/association sites that are well worth the click, if only for the creative recipes.

The California King Salmon Council has recipes for dishes like Ranchero Grilled Salmon Steak, California Margarita Salmon With Chipotle Crema and Mango Avocado Salsa, and if you drop them an e-mail request at info@calkingsalmon.org, they'll send you a brochure with more recipes.

The Florida Department of Citrus* has a long page of Citrus recipes. It's heavy on beverages like the Orange Tango and the Mai Tai, but there are other dishes like the Key West Coffee Cake, a simple Grapefruit Granita, and the long-named delicious lookingCitrus Ceviche in Empanada Crust with Banana Sauce and Tonkasu Mayonnaise (I always thought it was "tonkatsu"?). This recipe from recipezaar has a recipe for tonkatsu sauce included in case you can't find a bottled brand where you live.

The California Avocado Commission has so many recipes you have to go through a pulldown menu function to find them. Favorites I found were the Pesto California Avocado Torta, Avocado Caviar (which combines avocados with mango, balsamic vinegar, honey and other great ingredients), and not 1 but 39 different guacamole recipes.

If it's lamb you like, the New Zealand Beef & Lamb Marketing Board is all over it. Their recipe section is beautiful and looks like a Nigella Lawson cookbook. I think they're pushing it a bit when they suggest kids and toddlers will just love the Lambs Liver and Vegetables mush. More popular with the adults will be the Thai-Dressed Lamb Cutlets.

There are Plenty More Councils, Boards, Cooperatives, and Associations out there with web sites with interesting recipes, and I'll look at more in the weeks ahead.. If you've got an ingredient you don't have a plan for, see what their professional association suggests.

*Full Disclosure - my employer does public relations work for the Florida Department of Citrus, which made me think of them. Including their site was not directly influenced by the FDOC or by my employer. I just like oranges.

I started the morning with a smoothie today. Smoothies are a great way to have dessert for breakfast and not feel too guilty about the calories. Done with the right fruit, smoothies are loaded with anti-oxidants, vitamins, and minerals like calcium.

I've seen a lot of smoothie recipes that call for sugar, honey, or other sweeteners, but I don't think you need all that. Most of those professional smoothie places like Jamba Juice or Smoothie King charge an arm and a leg for a drink that often contains ice cream or frozen yogurt which has too much sugar and too many calories for my taste.

Here's the kind of smoothie I like - simple, delicious, and a lot cheaper than the $5 you'll pay at a smoothie bar. I call it the "Blueberry and" smoothie because the blueberries take over the drink once blended.

"Blueberry and" Smoothie
2 cups plain yogurt
1.5 cups orange juice
1.5 cup skim milk
1 cup frozen blueberries
1 cup frozen strawberries
1 cup frozen peaches

Put everything in the mixer. Blend. Drink. Serves 4 or so.

A pinch of salt will help bring out more flavor, but I usually avoid it. If you think the drink is still too sour (and it will have a bit of a tang to it) you can add honey or even sugar, but you really shouldn't need to.

Using frozen fruit means you don't have to use ice which waters down the drink. I suppose the more decadent could save this for the evening and add a bit of rum. Hmmmm - I do have some left in our fridge for tonight...

Do you ever get one of those cravings for vegetables that just overwhelms you? Well, earlier this week I succumbed to one and the result was a veggie pie. I make these fairly often and the composition changes frequently. They all try to mimic the Tarte Provençale I used to buy at a bakery called Yamazaki, when I worked in the 16th arrondisement. I never quite succeed, but this is mostly because I get ambitious and start adding more and more vegetables until it only has the haziests of similarities to the original. (For your information, the original is a dainty little tart with a flaky crust and a combination of goat's cheese, tomato slices, courgette slices and thyme.) This time, however, I decided to make an extra special effort in the presentation of the vegetables so that it would look all pretty for you, our readers. The above photo is how it looked at its best; things went downhill visually albeit uphill taste-wise as time went on.

To make this delicious and vegetable-ridden dish, start with a puff pastry from your local grocery store. Some day I will learn to make one on my own, but it will have to be when I'm on a nice long vacation or retired. Take it out of the fridge before you start slicing vegetables, as it will need to warm up slightly in order to roll out cleanly. Start the oven preheating to about 210C/425F. Then slice your vegetables. My pies nearly always include: thinly sliced rounds of eggplant and zucchini, onions (either sliced or chopped), thin slices of tomato, cheese and thyme. This time around, I departed from my usual mozzarella or goat's cheese and tried feta for the cheese. I also decided to put sliced jalapenos on the Critic's side of the pizza and mushrooms on mine. I usually brush a bit of olive oil on the crust before starting to lay down the vegetables, too. Another departure this time was in the construction of the pie: I started in the middle and layered eggplant, tomato and zucchini slices in a spiral, which looked pretty nifty when I was done. However, by the time I added the thyme, chopped onions, jalapenos, the cheese and the mushrooms, it was all less pretty.

It was very tasty, though. Unlike mozzarella (and to a lesser extent, goat cheese) the feta did not leave one side of the pie in a somewhat sodden mess, as is usually the case. It also went VERY nicely with the thyme. I used dried thyme and it actually worked a bit better than my usual fresh thyme, probably largely because it takes less patience to shake a large quantity of dried than to pick and chop fresh!

So it isn't really a recipe, but more of a suggestion if you are in the mood for a really good vegetarian pizza but don't want all the calories!

For the original, try

Yamazaki
6 chaussée de la Muette
75016 PARIS
01 40 50 19 19

Their salads and sandwiches are also extremely good. I used to think they had the best pastries in the world too, but TWICE they dropped a favourite pastry from the menu just as I had become completely addicted to it. They aren't catching me again - I avoid the pastries now!

Ben Wasserstein in Slate today compares "Gourmet" potato chips and finds they aren't all they're fried up to be. The best score any of them receive from the ten-member panel of twenty-somethings is a 6.35 out of 10. The article is worth reading if just for Nina Frenkel's disturbing illustration of an anthropomorphic chip standing in a puddle of grease.

I don't dislike the gourmet chips, but I have to admit a weakness for the artificial taste of Ruffles. I abstain from them entirely because I know that once they have me in their salty starchy power, no sour cream is safe from being made into french onion dip and consumed. I feel the change coming over me. Fetch the powdered onion soup mix! Hurry!

Is a pound and a half of sodium a day too much?

The miso soup I wrote about yesterday was actually only part of a larger Japanese-themed evening on Saturday. We started out with a Japanese liqueur our friend Tony contributed, called Shochu. Some time ago, Tony brought some of the same liqueur over and when I told him I had a cold, he said, "Ah, but this is a well known Japanese cure for colds and flu." Now I'm not saying he made it up, but I have to say it did NOT improve my cold to consume several glasses of Shochu.

According to the Japan-Guide.Com site, "Shochu is a distilled spirit with a high alcohol content. Rice, sweet potatoes, wheat and sugar cane are some of the most common bases for shochu."

It was very nice over ice, and despite the above quote it didn't feel like it had a very high alcohol content to me; it was more like a dry sherry in taste and effect.

The main dish I prepared for our Japanese feast was Salmon Teriyaki. I know that it's probably one of the most common non-sushi japanese dishes outside Japan, but a girl has to start somewhere and I like to go safe initially. I confirmed with Stacey that it was, indeed, a bona-fide Japanese dish before deciding. Incidentally, when I asked her how to make it, she said, "Um, you buy some Teriyaki sauce..."! But having spent so much money on all those intriguing base ingredients, I wasn't going to settle for a store-bought sauce. I hit the web. The following recipe is a combination of several I found on the web and it really was easy to make and extremely good.

Salmon Teriyaki (I did it MYYYYY way...)

1/3 cup soy sauce
2 tablespoons mirin
2 1/2 tablespoons rice wine vinegar
2 tablespoons brown sugar
1 1/2 tablespoons chopped peeled fresh gingerroot
4 scallions, finely chopped
1/2 Tbs corn starch
3 medium salmon steaks

Mix all of the above except the cornstarch in a shallow bowl. Rince the salmon and place in the marinade, turning a few times to cover. Put the bowl in the fridge for half an hour, taking it out to turn the salmon after the first fifteen minutes. Set a ridged cast-iron griddle pan on the stove and get it really hot, so hot that you don't want to place your hand too close to the cooking surface. I didn't think to brush the pan with a bit of oil before starting, but it probably would have helped if I had. Slap the fish on the pan, and pour the marinade into a small saucepan. Add the cornstarch and cook until thick and glossy. Turn over the fish once it has browned nicely and formed a crust. (If you are lucky this will work. My fish was getting over-cooked when I wanted to turn it over, which is why it did not turn out photogenic and you are not looking at it. Maybe I shouldn't have bothered turning it.)

I served this with rice and a nice crisp salad of grated carrots and soy bean sprouts, dressed with a delicious sesame dressing I bought at the Japanese store (photo at the beginning of this post - it was prettier than the fish).

We accompanied the meal with some hot sake, which I had to serve out of a gravy boat because the set of sake cups my mother gave me a couple of years ago did not include a carafe. Ah well, necessity is the mother of invention and the gravy boat with a tea cozy on top did a good enough job of keeping our liquor warm. And it, in turn, kept us nice and warm.

I have to say that this meal was such a success that - far from encouraging me to new Japanese horizons - I'm afraid to depart from such an obviously good menu. The only thing I would change next time around would be 1) not burning the rice (oops) and 2) doubling or even tripling the amount of sauce. We ran out of sauce long before the fish....

Chronology of preparation for all the different dishes:

1) Set the konbu to soak for the miso soup.

2) Prepare fish marinade and put fish and marinade in fridge.

3) Grate carrots, mix with a handful of soy bean sprouts and put in fridge.

4) Prepare other miso ingredients. Make miso soup up to (but not including) the point where miso paste is added.

5) While waiting for miso soup to finish cooking, start rice.

6) Start ridged griddle pan heating.

7) Cook fish and start heating the sauce with cornstarch.

8) Add the miso paste to the soup, put the fish in the oven (covered) to keep warm, turn down the heat on the sauce and the rice and serve the first course.

9) Dress the carrot salad, bring out with the rest of the dishes and serve.

10) Suddenly remember the sake: put it in the microwave, heat and serve!

All of this goes best, of course, if halfway through the process someone hands you a glass of Shochu. It may not cure the common cold, but it certainly is inspiring!

Chicago Magazine has long been one of the best resources for reviews and news about the restaurant scene in the City by the Lake. They now have a new online feature called "Morsels", written by Penny Pollack & Jeff Ruby that serves as a sort of "Kup's Column" of the Chicago restaurant community.

If you'd like to skip having to bookmark the site, you can have the column spammed - er, delivered to you by e-mail by sending a message to chimagmorsels-sub@email.trb.com.

It also makes for a great excuse to post a picture of my hometown.

The new Chicago Magazine Best Restaurants issue hits stands early next week. Best Chef, Best Restaurant, and Dish of the Year awards among others are on the line. Will Charlie Trotter challenge Rick Tromonto to an iron chef-style cook-off using only froths? Will Rick Bayless edge past Grant Achatz's chocolate sea bass (no, really) with cuitlacoche quesadillas? Will Alpana Singh take back the sommelier of the year award?

Chicago Magazine does not put the results online, so you'll just have to find a website that covers food that happens to have writers in Chicago who can get ahold of an issue. I think I can suggest one.

One of the reasons I really wanted to consult my friend Stacey about Japanese food is that I have been wanting for years to try my hand at miso soup. I have a recipe book on Japanese cuisine, but although it has many soup recipes none are that basic standard of every Japanese restaurant I have ever visited: miso soup. When in Chicago, I regularly stock up on the powdered version available in my favourite health food store (Sherwyn's) and I have even gone so far as to buy a packet of the miso paste...but then I am stopped dead in my tracks. What next?!?

So I told Stacey about my goal when we visited the Japanese grocery store and she made sure I got all the right ingredients. Whew.

It turns out that Miso soup is not only incredibly delicious, but incredibly easy to make. On Stacey's advice (combined with the cryptic instructions on the box of miso paste) here is the recipe.

My Miso Soup (home-made - yippee!!)

2 strips of konbu (dried seaweed, cut in big pieces)
1/2 cup katso-bushi (or at least this is what I assume it is from the recipes I have read; the smell and look are consistent with dried tuna flakes - I just bought what Stacey told me to get!)
5 cups water
a small bunch of enoki mushrooms
2 small bunches of certified organic Alaria dried seaweed, purchased at Sherwyn's some time ago in the vague hope I would some day learn about miso soup
silky tofu (to taste - didn't put in too much as the Critic doesn't like it)
4 green onions/scallions

Soak the konbu in the water for at least half an hour to bring out the maximum amount of flavour. Bring to the point of nearly boiling and remove from heat. Remove konbu from broth. (The Epicurious recipe I looked at afterwards said "reserve (it) for another use" - no idea what would that be?) Add the fish flakes and bring back to the boil; cook for a few minutes. Strain the broth and return to the heat. Add the alaria seaweed (cut in bite-sized morsels), the tofu (ditto), the onions (chopped finely) and the mushrooms (ditto). Cook for 15-20 minutes, to allow the seaweed to expand and the flavours to mix. Just before serving, add 1 heaping Tbs (55g) of miso paste.

Some more information on the ingredients:

The konbu is cut in long, thickish strips and looks fairly tough. I'm not sure what else you would use it in, but now that I know you CAN, I'll try tasting a bit the next time I use it.

The fish flakes are weird and smelly. The sell-by date on them is 04.12.16. (!)

The alaria has a variety of uses, according to the back: you can soak it over night and use it in a salad, add it to soups, blanch it, roast it or fry small pieces as a snack. I was pretty happy with it in the soup. It claims on the back to be "an excellent substitute for Japanese Wakame" and it really was very nice.

The enoki mushrooms were a bit hit. The Critic even admitted that they were very nice (although he hastened to add that I shouldn't put in more next time as it was just fine as is). Stacey tells me that mushrooms are always cooked in Japan. The idea of putting raw sliced mushrooms on a salad is an alien concept.

Miso paste comes in many different varieties. The ones with yellow labels tend to be sweeter and the ones with red labels more savoury. In fact a lot of the comments Stacey made about foods seemed to come from the color of the food or label involved. When we were in the pickled foods section, her comments ran along the lines of "well, the red ones are okay, but we didn't like the yellow ones and these orange ones - they are daikon - are pretty good..." I don't know if this tendency to recognize food by color is Japanese or expat-confronted-with-Japanese or (most likely) both.

Tofu also comes in many guises and fried tofu is also used in miso soup. However, Stacey recommended the silky variety (which is what you get in most restaurants) and I thought it was great. It has a lovely texture to go with soup.

So there you have it: My Miso Soup. It was so good I might even make it again tonight; it's certainly much better than those little envelopes of freeze-dried soup. I have a huge tub of miso to finish up in the next few weeks - I'll have to ask Stacey if it freezes well!

When I first heard the subject of this edition of Is My Blog Burning, I immediately knew what my task would be. I needed to reproduce, as faithfully as possible, the cake that my Grandma Liebezeit would buy each of us every year for our birthday. Or maybe it's only my imagination that we all had the same cake: my sister was born in December and my brother in February and the cake calls for fresh strawberries. No matter, in my mind, this remains the One Perfect Cake. Despite the fact that (obviously) chocolate cake is better than white...I always asked for this cake on my birthday.

Thompson's was my grandmother's favourite store in Park Ridge, IL. I don't think it's around any more, but it really was an institution in its day. It was a very large supermarket with very good produce, not part of a chain, made amazing rotisserie chickens and of course...the Cake.

I wrote my brother and sister last week to ask for their memories of the cake, to help me reproduce it. They didn't write back. So we are relying on my childhood dreams here. As I remember, the cake was layered - probably three layers. Between each of the layers was a filling of whipped cream and sliced fresh strawberries. The frosting on top of the cake was rich, thick butter cream. It was so rich it made your teeth ache. But the genius of the cake lay in the whipped cream and strawberry filling: I don't remember it being sweet at all (aside from the natural sweetness of the strawberries) and this is what saved the cake from being cloying.

Having been failed by my siblings (did I mention that?) I turned to a more reliable source for the Cake, my Fanny Farmer Cookbook. My sister recently mentioned that she got a copy of my mother's 1950's edition on ebay. So now there are only two of us in the running for my mother's copy...

Anyway, I have my 1980s edition, which is good (it includes tacos and other "exotic" foods) but not as good as my mother's (no chocolate oatmeal cookies recipe). I chose the recipe for Velvet Cake as the base for my Thompson's cake. The book says "This simple cake with its fine flavor and smooth, velvet texture is an old classic. It would be a good simple cake to fill and frost for a child's birthday." Just what the doctor ordered.

Velvet Cake (departures from original in parentheses)

1/4 lb (115g) butter
1 c (200g) sugar
4 eggs, separated
1.5 c (210 g) cake flour (as usual, I forgot and had to use normal unbleached)
1/2 c (1 dl - whatever this is) cornstarch
1/2 tsp salt
4 tsp baking powder (1 sachet levure chimique)

Preheat the oven to 350F/180C. Butter and lightly flour two 8" round cake pans. (I had to use roughly equivalent square ones.) Cream butter and slowly add the sugar, beating until light. Beat in the egg yolks and 1/2 cup cold water. (AUGHHH! FF did not mention this in the ingredients...panic as I wonder if I'm following two different recipes? No, all is well...) Combine the flour, cornstarch, salt and baking powder and add to the first mixture. (Too many dirty bowls are going to be involved in this project - dump the dry ingredients in with the butter/sugar/egg mix and stir well instead.) Beat egg whites separately until stiff, but not dry. Gently stir a third of the whites into the first mixture, then fold in the remaining whites. Spread the batter in the pans and bake for about 25 minutes, until a wooden toothpick comes out clean. Cool in the pans for five minutes before turning out onto racks.

The Filling

1 cup cream (I used crème fleurette, which did not beat as well as I hoped)
1.5 cups sliced fresh strawberries.

Beat the cream until nice and thick, or until your patience runs out. Spread half over the flat side of one of the cakes. Cover with strawberries. Spread the rest of the cream over the strawberries, and top with the second cake layer, flat side down.

The Frosting

1/4 lb (115g) soft butter
2 cups (one full container) confectioner's sugar
1/2 cup milk
a handful of ripe strawberries for coloring the piping

Mix the first three ingredients with a mixer and use most of the frosting to cover the top and sides of the cake. This is an engineering feat that I did not appreciate when I was a little tot. The cream and strawberries want to ooze out from between the layers, and butter cream frosting doesn't stick to either of them. Never mind, it's made with love and if it were perfect, no one would know you made it at home, right? I used mashed strawberries to color the remaining frosting, mainly because the red food coloring has inexplicably gone missing from my kitchen.

And the verdict? It was very, very good, if I say so myself. It wasn't QUITE as good as Thompson's, but it was in the right vein. I think next time I'll divide the batter in three layers and spread the same amount of filling between the cakes. This would certainly make the frosting less difficult to apply.

Here is a picture of the inside of the cake and here is a picture of a slice of the cake. Mmmm...

Here we are at the third Is My Blog Burning? This time out - a cake walk - hosted by shiokadelicious.

Now I'm new to cooking, and certainly, I'm no expert on cakes. So I turned to a woman who's raised three children and run Girl Scout Troops for years and years - my mother-in-law, Rosalind McFall.

She of course, dug deep in her recipe box and gave me... someone else's recipe. I think she should be able to claim it as her own after 21 years, but she's pretty scrupulous about giving credit.

My original plan was to make this cake two different ways. The first is the original method, as copied down from the yellowing recipe card she'd written it on back in 1983.

This is the Turtle Cake recipe from "Ann Tharp - Xmas '83" as recorded and modifed by Rosalind McFall:

Turtle Cake
1 box German Chocolate Cake Mix - mix as directed
Melt 3/4 cup butter & 1/2 cup Eagle Brand Milk, add to cake mix
pour 1/2 of mix into a greased and floured 9x13 pan - Bake 20 min at 350 degrees.
While baking, melt 1 package caramels and remaining 1/2 Eagle milk in double boiler.
Cook cake - spread mix evenly over baked cake
spread rest of batter over caramels and bake 20-25 minutes at 350 degrees.

Finish top with sifter powdered sugar. You may add 1/3 cup nuts to the top in desired.

Rosalind's comments - the nuts make the top of the cake look more interesting than just an unbroken sheet of white. A bag of caramels is about a pound - similar to the bags of caramels you see around Halloween. We couldn't find a one pound bag, so I bought two 9.5 oz. bags and snacked on the rest.

I tried this recipe, starting with a startling number of brand-name ingredients:

I have some ideas on how to personalize the recipe. I don't usually like recipes that rely on pre-processed goods like the box of cake mix, since you never know when they're going to change the recipe or how the final cake will be different if you can't find the exact brand of mix.

Also, when I think of "turtles", I think of those gooey pecan/caramel/chocolate clusters that Fannie May and Fannie Farmer used to sell before they thoughtlessly closed all their stores (editorial comment ends here).

I may give a from scratch version a whirl before the day is out, but I don't think I'm going to have time. I'll post the from scratch recipe and result later on. For now enjoy the original.

Sometimes people ask - why do you bother with trying from scratch recipes? Why do you bake? Why not just buy the finished goods at the store?

To those people I can only offer this explanation:

It's all about licking the mixing bowls clean, baby!

The cake as made was a big hit. I did something to it that was apparently unthinkable, but that yielded very nice results - once it's cooled completely, refrigerate the cake. The gooey caramel will firm up a bit and the sweetness will be cut just a bit by the cold. It's a delicious cake anyway you slice it.

One note - I find a number of recipes similar to the original on the Internet, some even mentioning the Eagle brand sweetened condensed milk. This is clearly a recipe that's been around for a while and that continues to be popular.

This afternoon, I finally got together with my friend Stacey for a trip to the Japanese grocery store. Stacey and her husband spent 18 months in Tokyo, only returning to Paris in January of this year. So they were ready for some Japanese food and I was eager to benefit from the fruits of their culinary experiences there.

Walking through the store with Stacey was a real lesson, and I wish I had brought a tape recorder to keep a record of all she told me. We spent some 20 minutes at the first refrigerated section alone, as she took me over the various produce available.

Some were, of course, already known to me: soy bean sprouts, lemon grass shoots (not strictly Japanese, but the store stocks other Asian specialties too), tofu. She also pointed out the daikon, a sort of Japanese radish that is as common as potatoes to a European in Japan. (I bought some pickled daikon and will report back later as to the taste!) She was also familiar with the lotus root, which to me always looks like it's from a Star Trek episode. ("Captain, it's a rare delicacy from the Haliburton galaxy, prized for it's distinctive shape...") She wasn't too enthusiastic about the taste or texture, though, so I decided to give it a miss.

Stacey also advised me on the purchase of mirin, a sweet rice wine, and some rice wine vinegar. In fact, as you can see in the photo, I went wild: all of the above, plus gyozo dumplings, sake, the dried fish (katsuo-bushi) and seaweed (konbu) and miso essential to a good miso soup, as well as these fascinating mushrooms and some decorative, edible shiso leaves.

You will certainly be hearing more about these lovely ingredients and how I use them in the next few days! For the moment, though, I am busy preparing for the Is My Blog Burning: Cake Walk Edition, and the aftermath of baking and cooking at once looked like this.

Not looking forward to cleaning the kitchen...

Address of the Japanese store:

I have no idea what the name is and cannot find it in the yellow pages on-line. If you live in Paris and want to visit, the store is in the rue Linois in the 15th, between the quai de Grenelle and the rue Robert. It's right near the Darty, across the river from the Maison Radio France. Next time I'm there, I'll ask if they have a card!

Last night, I decided to try to reproduce - with a few minor departures - a dish that I always order when we go out to our favourite Chinese restaurant, in the Paris suburb of Boulogne. The restaurant is owned and operated by a very good friend of ours, Mr. Kai-Yin Cheung and it's called Chez Ming. Steve has his favourites: Potage Pékinoise (Hot and sour soup) served with the spiciest hot oil either of us has ever tasted, followed by skewers of shrimp and beef on a sizzling platter. But for me it is, and will always be, the Poisson au Gingembre that makes my evening.

So last night, I decided to try my hand at imitating Mr. Cheung's delicious dish. Usually, it comes to the table covered with thinly sliced spring onions and ginger and basking in a lovely dark mixture of soy sauce and nectar of the gods (i.e. I have no idea what else he uses). My spring onions were looking distinctly fall-ish, so I decided to try julienned leeks instead. As I don't actually have a steamer large enough to contain the fish I bought, so I decided to "steam" everything by putting wine and soy sauce into a baking pan, covering it with foil and baking in a hot oven.

First, I put about 1/3 cup dry white wine in the baking pan and added about 3 Tbs soy sauce. Then I added the sliced leeks.

The next step I would skip the next time as unnecessary: I put the pan in a hot oven (200c/400F) in order to give the leeks a little more time to cook than the fish. Next, I sliced some small mushrooms. I layered the the mushrooms and then the fish on top of the leeks. As a final touch, I dribbled a couple of tablespoons of soy sauce on the fish. I baked it for about ten minutes.

Do you notice anything missing in this? I didn't.

I had started rice cooking before preparing the fish, and steamed brocolli just after putting the fish in the oven. (It seemed like the perfect vegetable for this dish, and was.) Everything done, I plated it and it looked pretty nice, I thought:

And it tasted pretty good too...despite the fact that I forgot the fresh ginger. Yes, that's right, it was called "Fish with Ginger". Kind of hard to forget, you would think, no? But I am only here to make you all feel nice and smug about how much cleverer you are about cooking. How very embarrassing. Still, it wasn't bad. Just not as nice as it could have been.

So if you would like to try this at home, I would suggest doing exactly as I did with two exceptions:

- put everything in the pan at once

- don't forget to julienne a couple of inches of fresh ginger and add it with the rest...

Or better still, go have the original:

Chez Ming
4 av Gén Leclerc 92100 BOULOGNE BILLANCOURT
01 48 25 57 03

Everything we have tried there is good, though the dishes I mentioned are our favourites. Cheung is also a recurrent champion in the Paris snooker league, so you can admire his cups all over the restaurant. (Yes, that's how we met him - Steve has hopes of some day taking an actual match off of him...)

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT

I found this photo on the CNN site - kids, don't try this at home! They look like they came out of our Easter Eggs, don't you think?

(Just in case you are worried about the poor little chicks, this is the caption that ran with the photo: Chicks in Easter-egg colors feed at Triple D Farm and Hatchery in Palmer, Alaska. The hatchery sells a few hundred for the two weeks leading up to Easter each year. Owner Anthony Schmidt says a nontoxic dye is injected into eggs before the chicks hatch, coloring their down. The birds' natural coloring returns as they grow feathers.)

We've mentioned Dining Out for Life before. Chicago's day to participate is April 29th and AIDSCARE is looking for volunteers to host a restaurant. Hosting is simple - you invite everybody you know out for dinner at one of the participating restaurants.

A portion of your dinner tab will go to help fight AIDS and help the victims of the disease. Metromix has a list of the restaurants participating this year which includes everyone from Ann Sather (mmmm... Cinnamon rolls), to the Chicago Diner (mmmm... beet loaf), to Mama Desta's Red Sea (mmmm... injera), to the Signature Room at the 95th (mmmm... uh, altitudinous food).

What if you don't live in Chicago? If you happen to be lucky enough to live in any one of the cities below, invite a batch of buddies out for a meal. Just make sure you eat at the right restaurants on the right day.

You'll have a great meal while doing something good for your community. Go on, get dessert. You deserve it.

April 22nd - Minneapolis, South Bend,
April 29th - Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, East Bay Area, Hampton Roads, Honolulu, Hudson Valley, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, Tacoma

I never thought I would meet a cheese I didn't like. Maybe some that I like slightly less than others. But a cheese I didn't like? That would be heresy!

Well, call me a heretic and slap me with a cracker - I've found one. I bought it on Saturday at our local cheesemonger to serve with the Easter dinner. It's called a Boulette d'Avesnes and it looked colorful and intriguing on the shelf in the store. But I was sadly deceived.

According to my cheese reference book, the Guide des Fromages de France et de l'Europe (Sélection du Reader's Digest, yes, they apparently have them here too) the Boulette d'Avesnes comes from the Northeast of France and is made from raw cow milk. It was originally made with the buttermilk leftover from buttermaking. Nowadays, it is made from broken or unsuccessful Maroilles cheeses. Now this, to me, explains a lot. It has a slightly acidic taste, so you can imagine it being a descendent - even if no longer direct - of a buttermilk cheese. And then Maroilles comes close to being a cheese I don't like. When it's too ripe (fait) it can be really sharp. I mean really sharp.

So what was my Boulette like? Firstly, it was wrapped in plastic wrap, which is never a good sign in my book. It usually means slimy cheese, and the Boulette was indeed slightly slimy. Looking further, it seemed promising: the cheese is covered with paprika (which we like) and has a crumbly interior. Peppery and spicy and crumbly....but no. It has a slightly bitter peppery taste and even the texture is somehow unpleasant. It was the most popular cheese in that everyone tasted it...but everyone disliked it. (Did you try that red cheese? It's really nasty! Let me have a taste...)

So maybe I just had a bad experience. I recently added a comment to a US food blog posting about époisses where the person had obviously been sold an inferior cheese. If there is anyone out there who really likes Boulettes d'Avesnes, write and tell me where I went wrong and how to find a good one! I would hate to wreck a perfect record.

Last minute update!

According to this site, the cheese is best appreciated with a strong red wine or a small glass of gin. Isn't everything better with a small glass of gin?

This article on another kind of tipping has been making the rounds, and it's well worth a read, even if you live in Chicago, where it doesn't seem too hard to get into even the best restaurants. I'm headed through New York next week, but unfortunately I don't have the petty cash for this kind of adventure. Maybe next time?

Venkat Balasubramani is hosting weekly dinner parties at his house and blogging about some of the results. Makes me wish I lived in Seattle. Today he's got recipes for apple chutney and pakora up. I do wish he'd say some more about the spices, which he has sounding quite ominous and intimidating!

One of the reasons I bought some of our Easter chocolate from Chocolat Jadis et Gourmande (49, avenue Franklin Roosevelt, Paris) was that I noticed these little fellows in the window. They are supposed to be egg-cups. (How silly is that? If the eggs are hardboiled, they do not need to sit upright. If they are soft-boiled, you are eating them hot and goodbye chocolate!) But to my mind, they were obviously napkin rings. So I bought ten of them, although in the end there were only nine of us at dinner. With Marianne's help, I put colorful paper strips in the holes to protect the napkins.

After putting out the nine brothers of this fellow on the table, my stepdaughter came in the kitchen with him saying, "Angela and I decided that you should have the extra one, Meg, because you made such a nice dinner." Well, that's very nice of you, my dear. Especially as I bought them...! Still, it was a nice compliment and she has good manners.

I'm a day late to hunt for eggs for Easter, but the proto-avian is always in season. Eggs are used to bind together dishes of all sort from savory to sweet, and make a pretty good meal by themselves.

Chicken eggs are our preferred type, but people also eat duck, goose, and quail eggs.

The age old question about eggs as been if they are good for you. Washington nutritionist Katherine Tallmadge takes up the issue in the Washington Post. The good news - eggs aren't necessarily bad for you. The bad news - eggs the way Americans like them - "alongside foods high in saturated fat, such as bacon, sausage and buttered toast," aren't exactly celery as far as healthy eating goes. One other interesting factoid from the article - the Japanese are the biggest egg eaters in the world - averaging 328 of the ovoids every year.

I found a Poultry Fact Sheet from the University of California, Davis that describes some of the ways egg producers are trying to make their products more attractive to consumers. Many people are increasingly concerned about not only egg nutrition, but with the BSE scare, consumers are becoming interested in how all their food is produced.

Regular eggs are laid by chickens in cages inside factory farms. Many of these chickens have their beaks clipped to keep them from attacking their neighbors. The industry claims this is not a big deal- akin to clipping a dog's claws - but this is one of the hot buttons for anti-cruelty and animal rights activists. Generally, these chickens do not have access to the outside. A picture of a particularly crowded site with other problems can be found here. Caution - the pictures from the site that picture comes from are not pleasant in the least.

Eggs from caged chickens account for the majority of domestic egg production and generally have the lowest price. Many of the types below can go for two or three times the price of standard factory farmed eggs.

Cage-Free eggs are laid by chickens that are not confined. They may or may not have more space than their caged counterparts, and they may or may n