This is the time of year where I always spend a lot of time thinking about all the unfortunate people in the country who live in food deserts and have no access to fresh fruit. For dinner I had a bunch of cantaloupe that was so juicy and sweet I considered sticking my head in the shower to get the juice out of my beard, and almost did, but then realized I have two peaches in the fridge that are going to make me sticky again so just ride it out.
I honestly wonder how much lower obesity rates would be in the country if children were given GOOD fruit at an early age. And not canned bullshit or sad grocery store red delicious apples. Real fruit. I think were I an adult with children, when I introduced them to new fruits and vegetables I would only give them the absolute best iteration of said fruit/vegetable the first time they tried something. Like make sure they got the platonic ideal of a tomato, still warm from being in the sun, fresh off the vine. Seasoned well. Get it so that their first gut reaction to an item is “This is good.”
Such a wonderful time of year.
So Trump went to the National Association of Black Journalist and appeared on stage for what was supposed to be an hour long Q&A. Trump being Trump, and about three minutes in and his klan hood started to poke through his foundation and blush, and about 20 minutes later his handlers yanked him off the stage like the Unknown Comic at the Gong Show. And you have to watch the whole thing. It’s honestly worse than I am describing it here, with him raging at one of the panelists and then going on a tirade about Kamala not being black enough and only becoming black when it was politically expedient.
Wingnuts online are of course now looking at Kamala’s birth certificate and screaming it doesn’t say black anywhere (it doesn’t) and completely ignoring the fact that it does say Jamaican. At the forefront of this is none other than Lara Loomer, the lifesize colostomy bag who keeps looking for rock bottom and coming up empty.
At any rate, at first, before the event, I was with everyone else thinking it was a bad idea for them to give him the platform, but after the event, I realized the NABJ knew exactly what the fuck they were doing. They knew if you put a bunch of black women on stage with Donald Trump and subjected to him to any questions, he would lose his shit. And boy did he.
Those ladies set a trap and Trump barrel rolled into and wallered around in it like a pig in shit. Well done, NABJ!
I think I am gonna head downstairs and watch some idiot box before bed. Peace out.
War for Ukraine Day 889: Tallyho!
Geoduck
I wonder who in the entourage has the authority to yank him off the stage.
Chet Murthy
A few years back, my local farmer’s market (Castro & Noe in SF) had a vendor selling “lychee grapes”. I tried ’em and was sold. Turns out, they’re Gewurztraminer grapes. I go back every year for ’em (multiple times, of course). Soooo good. 100% with your idea of giving kids the best version of things for their first taste.
ETA: my nephews, unfortunately, seem to be phobic to food with any sort of flavoring at all. So even, like, pizza with -a- topping. Sigh. Heavy sigh.
Paul in Jacksonville
@Geoduck: I wonder why tfg listened to that person.
piratedan
ahh yes, Donald Trump, noted expert of ethnic genealogies.
Suzanne
@Chet Murthy: Your nephews will probably outgrow it. Despite quality, most kids need to try foods a few times before they’re okay with them. And they tend to like blander food at first and then more their way up to seasoning.
Ken
I’m guessing Loomer’s logic (“logic”) was something like:
LOOMER: “She’s BLACK!!!!!”
PUBLIC: “Yes, so?”
LOOMER (realizing that didn’t work): “She’s NOT Black!!!!!”
PUBLIC: “You’re weird.”
Chet Murthy
@Suzanne: When my sister brings them over for pizza, I make one pie with …. -no flavor- for them (not even -oregano-) and then some pies for her and me and whoever else is there, with, y’know, all sorts of interesting toppings. I can’t even get the boys to -glance- at these interesting pies. So, so, soooo sad. She tells me they’ll grow out of it when they hang with their buddies at the mall food court in high school.
caphilldcne
I think what’s amazing to me is he’s normalized racism again. You could not have said this shit by the late 80s without being pilloried. Now it’s all over. I hope they get kicked in the teeth so hard. Honestly Biden should put out an EO that X is an unreliable platform and no government agency can maintain an X account.
Archon
If Trump and the Republicans can win an election like this, with what they are running on and how they are running, American is doomed.
bbleh
I still think this was an unplanned racist-uncle meltdown and the campaign is like “OMG oh FK.”
I gave some money to the local street-folks today. And I tipped well when I had a beer.
Volunteer, dammit! Donate! GOTV!
Enhanced Voting Techniques
I am horribly disappointed Trump didn’t reference phrenology in his rant.
And leave it to Mushroom Dick fuck up even being a racist fucktard.
Fake Irishman
@Archon:
Fair. But if we can beat him twice, once with an old white guy and once with a mixed race woman; well, that also says something about our party and our country too.
Keep the faith friends.
Martin
We’re getting a bit better at the real food part.
A number of states such as CA, MN, IL, CO and VT and a number of others during Covid did a lot of work on this. Some of these states just made school lunches free for everyone. Many also created/expanded their farm to school lunch programs.
Farm to school is tricky because of the distribution. I have an organic farm a couple miles from my house and they provide produce for the local district, but they grow a LOT of different crops and have crop sharing programs with other organic farms so they can do a lot of that work on their own. A couple cities over they don’t have any local farms. Other parts of the state usually have single crop farms, so a range of produce requires working with a lot of different providers, and that’s where these programs start to fall apart. There’s a McDonalds up in the Salinas Valley that we sometimes stop at when visiting my son and one day they had a sign out front that said ‘out of lettuce’ and like, what the fuck? You’re in the middle of a valley that grows something like 70% of the lettuce in the country. But the supply chain is so heavy and entrenched that you can’t easily solve a problem like that, and school districts are really poorly equipped to deal with that.
The loss of family farms really has fucked up these kinds of efforts.
rikyrah
Why can’t British people play chess?
I admit it…I wasn’t ready 😳😳😳
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZPRoCTUes/
Mike in NC
Fat Bastard so wanted to use the n-word on that stage.
Gretchen
@Chet Murthy: How old are the nephews now?
Chet Murthy
@Martin: If rural folks really wanted to revitalize their communities, they’d be pushing for this sort of stuff! It’d increase the labor inputs to foodstuffs, but hell’s bells, we’re a rich country, and if we combined this with greater eco-stewardship it’d be a win-win. Sigh.
Betsy
Please, highlights footage reel linky, please!
cain
@Chet Murthy:
Kids don’t have a refined taste. It’s why they love McDonald’s because it’s full of sugar.
We have obesity because we decided that processed food is the go to. No other country has that other than England I guess. We do processed food because we are told that we need to work all the time so nobody has time to prepare a meal.
Chet Murthy
@Gretchen: ten
Gretchen
@Chet Murthy: here’s hoping eventually they’ll start thinking your pizza looks more interesting than theirs. Although my daughter is 43 and as far as she’ll go for pizza toppings is pineapple, to the absolute horror of her Italian father.
hueyplong
That Miller guy was probably just offstage with calipers.
No doubt the AA community is comfortable with Donald Trump being the arbiter of who is and who isn’t one of “the blacks.”
Lyrebird
I look forward to the day when obsession about details of other people’s birth certificates brings automatic “LOSER STINK” associations.
I don’t think mine says “White” anywhere. I don’t know, Roland Martin (per esteemed commenters here) and Rev. Al Sharpton (video in comments, search for MSNBC) apparently think it was not a win for the NABJ so much as a win for TFG with his racist loser base. Maybe it’s both. It was a definite loss for the GOP’s near-term future! From 2016 I vaguely recall Calif Republicans frantically trying to get TFG to cut it with the slandering of immigrants in general and people from Mexico in particular, but now like then, he does not care that he’s shrinking the party. With them determined to cheat, we have lots of work to do of course, but what a contrast, MVP beaming at the thousands there to cheer her on vs degenerate Don covered in his own stinky attitude.
cain
@Gretchen:
I bought a pizza oven and had a lot of fun making pizzas of different types. My kids don’t eat as much because they are all on no carb, gluten free diets. But I’ve made some great ones.
There is this place called Hapa Pizza that makes Asian inspired pizza and it’s really good. Banh Mi pizza was yummy.
Chet Murthy
@cain: Banh Mi Pizza! I make lemongrass chicken Banh Mi all the time, I should try to do this!
Gvg
I am 60 and still prefer bland food. My stomach has always been sensitive and my taste buds apparently are too. Now I have acid reflux, and occasionally just throw up when my stomach says have a bad day.
can’t take too much sweetness anymore either which is just as well because I am prediabetic and trying to avoid it.
Mom worked hard all my life to try and get me to eat healthy. It didn’t work. Frankly, i don’t really like food. I gained weight when I started having more hunger in my 40’s. Lately, that is finally easing off. I really just like mild boring food that isn’t a lot of work. People are different, sometimes from a very early age.
Poe Larity
What the press should be reporting: Trump Unable To Complete Hour Long Q&A
rikyrah
🥹🥹🥹🥹
NBC Sports (@NBCSports) posted at 6:19 AM on Wed, Jul 31, 2024:
ELECTRIC. ⚡️
New Zealand women’s rugby sevens performed the Haka after winning gold. #ParisOlympics https://t.co/bjd4u9r6wJ
(https://x.com/NBCSports/status/1818607408123449801?t=UYRu44GqUzsD2_InEbB5VA&s=03)
JoyceH
@Lyrebird:
Mine does. It also specifies that I’m legitimate. Of course, that was 1953.
pat
I think the cause of all this obesity is what they are being served… McDonalds? Check the calorie count on a single burger.
I go to a concert band rehearsal and I come home thinking Well, I’m not THAT fat yet. Even the young, college age players are …. well, fat.
JCNZ
The quality of the comments on this site!
There should be a “oh, 1000%!!” feature – despite the despot-in-charge’s loathing of same. I know it’s a kingdom and not a democracy, but even so…
dmsilev
@Ken:
This is going to be the gift that keeps on giving for the next few months.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@caphilldcne:
It’s why Never Trumpers hate him: he makes the ‘inside words’, ‘outside words’.
For years we talked about the Crazification Factor (27%). Felonious D made it clear that another 13% of the country were unrepentant racists.
Martin
@Chet Murthy: Yeah, one of the things I noticed in France was the sheer number of grassy fields with a half dozen or a dozen cows/cattle in them. Nothing like American farms where it’s packed dirt feedlots with hundreds or thousands of animals. Crops were usually a couple of acres and a farm would have a variety, again, no sign of huge industrial farms. Just night and day different.
But I suspect the underlying problems are much larger. They’re a country where people walk to the market, butcher, bakery which are all pretty small. They have national chains but most seemed to be independently owned. That probably allows for more local suppliers, etc. In the US, where we drive to large supermarket chains with large supply chains, that’s not really viable. It requires a much more centralized system. There’s a grocery store directly across from the farm by me and they can’t sell to that store because the supply chain isn’t controlled by the store but the HQ in some other state. And the farm mostly survives on that school district contract and a delivery program to households. They have pretty much no ability to hook into retail at all.
trnc
I’ve heard inklings about the repub plan to bombard Harris with the question “What did you know about Biden and when did you know it,” and I assume the media will expedite. I believe Harris is smart enough to say, “What are you talking about? President Biden is still president and is doing a great job. How many press conferences do you have to see where he educates you about policy for an hour plus?”
But I’m a little worried that some dems will take the bait.
JCNZ
@rikyrah: Oh, 1000%! Kia kaha!
JCNZ
@trnc: Oh, 1000%!
Chet Murthy
@Martin: I’ve read that the EU Common Agricultural Policy encourages local production/consumption. And have also read many accounts of how French schools work hard to source high-quality ingredients for the meals they serve. I know that when worked in France, I ate lunch in many “canteens” of both workplaces and schools (unis) and the food was uniformly better than anything I got in the US at that level. Just amazingly better. And of course, subsidized, so cheeeeeep. For everybody, not just for the richies.
Martin
@cain: I don’t buy that. I live in a community that is pretty immigrant heavy and have seen a shit-ton of school lunches that mom packed, and the bland palate is a pretty white people thing. Lots of kids showing up with spicy, multi flavor foods. I think it’s just cultural – if you feed your kids non-bland foods, they’ll get accustomed to it (allergies and whatnot notwithstanding).
karen marie
I have to disagree. I watched the entire shitshow, and none of the three journalists on that stage were even a little bit prepared. He ran right over the top of them until they were reduced to all shouting at once.
They were taken by surprise at every single fucking thing he said. Any good political journalist should know what the interviewee’s positions are so that when they ask a question, they’re prepared with a relevant follow up. Harris from Fox was just there as Trump’s emotional-support tool, so I didn’t expect her to challenge him on any of his answers, but the other two were just embarrassing.
Martin
@trnc: Yeah, you respond to that by saying “He’s still president you know. Why don’t you go ask him why we didn’t declare him senile?”
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Martin:
This. I actually live in a diverse school district (unlike some of the “valued commenters” here who are opining on this) and volunteer at another girl-centric non-profit whose figurative ‘student body’ are decidedly non-white and my observations match yours.
Anecdotal, sure, but no more so than any other ‘astute’ observations being brought to bear here.
eldorado
remember when you only had to hear from your boring old racist uncle when you showed up for thanksgiving?
sdhays
@Chet Murthy: I was a picky eater when I was a kid growing up in the Midwest. But I now think that a substantial part of that was the blandness of midwestern food. The first time I ate a gyro in high school was a revelation. Same when I tried Indian food at a Diwali celebration (even though I couldn’t handle hot). I guess I’m still “picky”, but there’s a lot of different food I eat because the universe is so much wider for me now.
Anyway, my son won’t eat fruit. We can get him to eat raisins, but that’s it. We had him eating more when he was just starting to eat, but once he became opinionated about food: no fruit! He won’t even try fruit jam. He eats a lot of different things, so it’s not like he will only eat peanut butter or something, but fruit is a sticking point.
He’s 5, so hopefully he’ll eventually come around.
KatKapCC
@karen marie: I think that’s a little unfair to those women. They challenged him well and tried to keep him on topic and actually answering their questions. But there’s only so much they can do when he starts going off like that. One of those women was on MSNBC afterward and she said that, while she’s interviewed him before and knows he can be difficult to interview, she wasn’t fully prepared for the combative tone he took right from the get-go and the rhetoric he chose to use. He agreed to be there and then right away was being very personal and nasty and sniping at them. I thought they did a decent job to remain professional while also trying to get their questions in and to correct him in real time.
RevRick
@Gvg: I didn’t try sushi or escargot until I was in my 50s. But fried foods kill me. I avoid French fries like the plague. Because I can get lightheaded if I sit too long and try to stand, my doc told me to increase my salt intake!
Chet Murthy
@KatKapCC: Gotta agree. When somebody just goes off on gish gallop gaslighting, there’s very little their interlocutor can do, except to impeach the speaker. And ….. you can’t do that as a journalist, at least not in realtime. I mean, there’s two ways to go to do that:
#1 is something a journalist -cannot- do (they’re trained not to do that) and #2 is impossible unless you’ve prepared for it and have a team behind you doing it in realtime.
different-church-lady
@Fake Irishman: Right now there’s a very real possibility he will become the only person to lose the popular vote to three different opponents.
Suzanne
@Chet Murthy: I always did a one-bite rule with my kids. It bothers me when kids raised in the U.S. act weird around food from other cultures. So far, have been pretty successful.
Ken
@different-church-lady: How quickly they forget Pat Paulsen.
Jay
T grew up hating tomato’s, into her 30’s, until she met me. I was growing Black Princes and Sunsugars on my condo balcony.
I made her a Caprese salad on our second date with the Black Princes, and she fell in love.
My ex-nieces and ex-nephews hated tomatos, until they had the Sunsugars.
When we lived at the place, we grew some Anna’s for a couple of years, (gave up growing them because they were water hogs), a meatier red/pink heart shaped tomato, and I considered myself lucky it I got to taste one, because T ate them like apples.
Casey, (our Pit-X) loved the Baby Bunny carrots (commercial bagged, peeled baby carrots) as a treat, until I started growing Nante’s. After having Nante’s, if she was given a Baby Bunny carrot, she would spit it out and give you a look.
Bupalos
I just watched “the sweet smell of success” so I came in reading this in the voice of JJ Hunsacker. And the description Cole is giving there of the Trump event reads in perfect noir patter. Now I’m wondering if I’ve had cole’s voice wrong the whole time. Although it should end with a snide “well done mr. Trump” rather than the sincere complement to the ladies.
one thing I’d disagree with though, the Harris lady was genuinely trying to cooperate with the Trump camp and fluff him. She’s a mess. F-minus for her.
sdhays
@Chet Murthy: Hell, my parents went to Berlin a few years ago and commented on how much better a Whopper was at the German Burger King.
Better quality ingredients.
Gin & Tonic
@JCNZ: No, there shouldn’t.
KatKapCC
@Jay: See, I always liked tomatoes from a young age, but then the first time I had an heirloom type, probably in my early 20s, I was like “Every other tomato I’ve ever eaten was total shit compared to this”.
Honus
@cain: limiting carbs may be a good idea, but there is no advantage to eliminating gluten from your diet unless you have a gluten allergy.
VFX Lurker
I visited Tokyo with two friends in 2018. One member of the group flat-out refused to eat at Shake Shack in Tokyo.
He feared that the Shake Shack burgers in Japan tasted better, and he would never be able to enjoy Shake Shack burgers in the United States if he tasted a superior Shake Shack burger in Tokyo.
Suzanne
@Martin:
LOLOLOL. We also live in a very diverse area, which means we have great food with walking distance. New halal restaurant just opened on the next block.
The bland food is definitely a white people thing, but it is more specifically WASPy. My maternal grandmother made some of the grossest, blandest food ever. But my paternal grandmother, who was from Italy…. damn!
I remember visiting Mr. Suzanne’s granddad a few years ago, and he loved Golden Corral. Said other most restaurants’ food “have too much flavor”.
Chet Murthy
@KatKapCC: That’s what happened to me the first summer of the pandemic: I went to the farmer’s market every week to buy fruit & veg for my mom, and got some for me too. Learned why heirlooms are so great. Now ….. oof, I’m completely spoiled, during off-season my tomato consumption drops to near-zero, just waiting for heirlooms to come back in season.
I have a bunch of cherry tomatoes (still on the vines) I got at the farmers market today: tasted a couple, and they’re nice, but I know that if I leave ’em to sit and ripen they’ll be better in a few days.
We are so spoiled here in California.
Jess
I watched some excerpts of TFG’s excellent adventure and it was hilariously bad. Everyone was laughing at him, and the panelists were all looking at each other like “wow can you believe this guy?” Remember that Die Hard sequel (can’t remember which one) where the villain forces Willis to stand in a Black neighborhood wearing a racist sandwich board? It was kinda like that.
Spanish Moss
@Martin: I gotta agree with that. I am white but I love to cook and I try all kinds of cuisines. My kids grew up eating a wide variety of foods from the time they could eat solid food. It was a shock when they were old enough to start having friends over and some of their friends had a very narrow palate and didn’t want to try anything new.
I remember when one friend was over for a play date and didn’t like what we were having so I offered to make a PB&J. Multi-grain bread, raspberry jam (with seeds), and extra crunchy peanut butter. The kid looked at it and said, “That’s not peanut butter and jelly”. It still cracks me up. I get his point, definitely not typical but it was how we made them and it never even occurred to me that it would be “different”. He was very polite about it and we found something for him to eat, but it was my first introduction to “white bread cuisine”.
Trivia Man
@Chet Murthy: Malls still exist? A good third space fr kids to hang out.
Chet Murthy
@Suzanne: Haha, that reminds me of going out to eat with a girlfriend at Cracker Barrel — where the blackened catfish is SPICY!!!
mrmoshpotato
Yup. I was confused at first (Why would they subject themselves to the orange shitstain Klansman?), but then I understood.
Same with Biden passing the torch. Oh, I was a wreck, but then…
cain
@Martin:
Sure I get that. I think it’s white kids here. I of course did not grow up that way. I grew up on south Indian cooking which is amazing when you have flavorful vegetables. In India, it just sings in your mouth. But here it is just way more muted.
HumboldtBlue
@Martin:
Trivia Man
@KatKapCC: I am convinced that nearly 100% of the poeple who say “I hate tomatoes” have never eaten a real tomato. CMV.
Jay
@Jess:
Die Hard III.
Jess
My nana (who mostly raised me) was a farm girl, first in Nebraska and then in California, and she fed us all kinds of fresh fruit and veggies from her own and her friends’ backyards, including amazing fruit pies from her own apple and apricot trees. So good. Her rule was that we kids had to try three bites of whatever was served, and if we really hated it after that, we could leave the rest. BBQ teriyaki chicken was the limit to how exotic her cooking got, but it was all good, wholesome, healthy stuff and I’m forever grateful to how it set me up for life to appreciate food for the right reasons. Healthy food just tastes better to me than junk food.
Jess
@Jay: Right!
Jess
@Spanish Moss: It’s like they never graduate from pureed baby food…
cain
@sdhays: I grew up in the Midwest as well and when I moved to Portland I never had Vietnamese or Thai food. Even Japanese food as well. Certainly not sushi. Asian food for is was Chinese food. Of course my small town is much more diverse.
Jackie
@Bupalos: The “Harris lady” is from Faux. ‘Nuff said.
Jess
@KatKapCC: There’s a type of tomato called “Lemon Boy” that is just perfect in salads. I’ve only been able to get it by growing it myself.
Geminid
@Chet Murthy: I read in a history of the French Revolution that one of its consequences was the creation of a sizable farmer class out of the peasants who received their liegelord’s lands. Ironically, France’s farmers became a strong, conservative component of the French electorate.
But the farmers’ conservatism and political strength may have served their compatriots well recently, by resisting neo-liberal agriculture policies.
BR
Seems like the media has found its new narrative, but there are easy dismissive ways for Harris to respond, with mockery. I dunno: “Trump seems to be very confused about me. He thinks I’m like one of those optical illusions that changes when you look from a different angle. That’s ok, he gets confused a lot of the time. We’ll spend our time focused on what matters for the American people.”
Another Scott
@cain:
I think it has much, much more to do with portion sizes. Companies want to increase revenues and the easiest way to do that is to sell more – so bigger sizes at higher prices.
Look at a box of breakfast cereal. 40-60g is one “serving”. Weigh that out, put it in a bowl, and compare it to the picture on the box. The box picture is probably close to 1000 calories of most cereals. :-/ A typical breakfast at IHOP or Denny’s is 1500+ calories. It would be amazing if Americans weren’t overweight if they are led to believe that eating 3000-5000 calories a day is “normal”.
We’ve vacationed in Switzerland a couple of times. The portions are so much smaller there and it usually takes a couple of days for us to adjust. But it’s enough food for us, even with hours of hiking…
Cheers,
Scott.
cain
@Chet Murthy:
I think the problem is that you are respecting the office of the president. Instead if you just laugh and say weird and then move on to the next question. ‘Do you like a mac, PC or Linux?
Hell even better try off the wall leading questions like: do you still like your daughter and would you still want to date her?
p.a.
I have 5 serrano plants from the big orange box. No fucking heat at all from any of the fruits. They’ve been Americanized, like jalapeños have been. I’m old enough to remember when store-bought jals were hot.
My mother was first gen Italian-American, and I remember as a kid asking why restaurants gave us salad first. She just shook her head and said “Americans.”
HumboldtBlue
@Trivia Man:
That’s unfair. I grew up disliking raw tomatoes because of high acid. My mother was a fantastic gardener and I would regularly make her a tomato sandwich from what she had grown, but I was always aghast. The slime in the middle was off-putting and I never got the flavor profile.
I loved tomato sauces, tomato soup, but a raw tomato took me until well into adulthood to enjoy.
cain
@VFX Lurker:
I try to avoid the chains when I am anywhere in a foreign country because I think it’s a lot like colonialism. A way to insidiously put in American culture into age old history.
Kills me to see ancient and historical buildings with a burger king or McDonald’s.
Chet Murthy
@cain: One suspects that that is not something that professional journalists would feel comfortable doing. B/c again, that would inject themselves into the story.
KatKapCC
@Chet Murthy: We are!
I’m trying to remember the details, but years ago, Mixt Greens had an amazing seasonal heirloom tomato salad. I think it also had feta and corn, maybe…can’t recall and it’s no longer on their menu, but damn it was good.
Chet Murthy
@KatKapCC: There’s these peaches that look like flying saucers: “donut peaches” / “Saturn peaches”. Just amazing, a kind of delicate jasmine-like flavor. one farm sells ’em at the farmer’s market on Saturday, and ….. damn, I am just rarin’ to go down and get me some!
Ishiyama
I heard that Pastor Terry Anderson say that Trump is the avatar of his followers’ grievances. Seems pretty accurate.
https://crooksandliars.com/2024/07/houston-brings-house-down-fiery-speech
cain
@Spanish Moss:
I made some experiment in mixing cuisine today. I made a Mexican inspired dish. It’s inspired because I added some Indian ingredients. Specifically, I added anardhana seeds which adds sourness to the dish. Turned out ok! The cumin powder is shared between our cultures. Gonna try other stuff. In Mexican cooking, sourness is tamarind. But in India or Iran we use pomegranate. (In the south we use tamarind as well)
HumboldtBlue
@Ishiyama:
That’s a rotating tag right there.
Jess
@Another Scott: When I was in my 20s I started doing a lite version of the calorie restriction diet (about 1200 cal. per day for a 120 pound moderately active woman). The key is to eat only high nutrition food, with no empty calories. I was never a big eater and always on the skinny side, but this diet still changed my relationship with food. I lost all interest in processed or junk food, only ate when I was hungry, and stopped eating as soon as I felt I had enough. My body told me what I needed to eat and how much. I never had cravings. The experiment taught me that we’re eating all the wrong food for all the wrong reasons in modern America, and that it’s actually pretty easy to maintain a completely healthy diet compared to one that cycles between healthy food and crap. At age 60, I’m healthy, fit, youthful looking, and still under 125 lbs. I credit the diet.
Trollhattan
@rikyrah: Fucking epic.
NZ take their rugby very seriously.
Jay
@p.a.:
In much of the Italian community here, seeds are removed from the tomatoes when making sauce, they they are dried between two paper towels, and then used to grow the next crop, because what is in the store, or Farmers Market, “Isn’t a Roma” compared to the seeds their Grandfather smuggled in from the “Old Country” in the 1950’s.
Spanish Moss
@Chet Murthy: I first had those in France! I had never seen them before and they looked intriguing so I gave them a try. Loved them!
I also loved the French produce markets. My husband and I spent a month in Normandy, working remotely (software engineers) and I learned the market schedules of all of the nearby villages. I loved that you would tell the vendor when you wanted to eat the fruit (e.g. 2 days from now) and they would pick fruits to be perfectly ripe on that day. And they got it right every time!
Geminid
@BR: I catch the “mainsream” media through the CBS radio news. They go for around a minute or so, on the hour and half-hour; a nice, tight format.
Anyway, their lead item for the 11 p.m. news was Trump’s appearance at the NABJ conference, with a soundbite. Then they reported on Harris’s response, with another soundbite for her. I am biased, but it seemed like Trump threw Harris a fat pitch and she hit a stand-up double
Ed. The CBS 11:30 news spent more time on Trump’s appearance and featured a longer excerpt from Harris’s response; a strong answer.
rikyrah
Kenny is back🤗🤗✊🏾✊🏾
https://twitter.com/2RawTooReal/status/1818816188643770445?s=19
cain
@Chet Murthy:
True but you are not going to have an adult conversation. Even a child would do better in this format.
You will learn nothing about his policies.
sdhays
@cain: There’s a Mexican-Indian fusion restaurant near where I live that is amazing! Those two culinary worlds definitely complement each other.
mrmoshpotato
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
Absolutely! It’s why Confederate Cooler Rick Wilson is a “Never Trumper.”
Go fuck yourself Rick, and Steve, and…
They built this.
cain
@sdhays: that absolutely do.
There is a dish that I wanted to try out with Hispanic people and it’s called Rasam. It’s basically a spicy tamarind soup with rice. I’m almost sure they would enjoy that.
cain
@mrmoshpotato:
I don’t know Rick seems to be pretty consistent. He stood by Biden for God sakes
BR
Apparently Dems are having a huge fundraising night tonight thanks to Trump’s outbursts at the NABJ.
And congressional GOPers are distancing themselves:
https://bsky.app/profile/markharris.bsky.social/post/3kymuykuhem2k
JCNZ
@Trollhattan: Oh, 1000%!
KatKapCC
@Chet Murthy: Yessss love those!
Martin
@Chet Murthy: The correct thing to do when he does that is to say ‘Well, you’re not interested in answering our questions, so we’re not interested in asking you any others’ and just shut it down and take his media attention away.
I understand why they don’t do that, but the media needs to figure out the equivalent of that.
Villago Delenda Est
@rikyrah: And smokin’! Layin’ down truth!
Geminid
@BR: This is a big story, I think. I wonder if Trump will make it bigger now.
wjca
Which is all pretty much tasteless. Although there’s no reason it has to be.
VFX Lurker
Good point. I had not considered that aspect.
JCNZ
@Gin & Tonic: But why not? The writing on this site (and Josh Marshall, James Fallows, Jonathan Katz, a few others) has kept me sane-ish over the past few years, down here in the South Pacific. Any acknowledgement of a clever or witty or reassuring comment from a member of the b-j community just gets buried. Weird.
BR
@Geminid:
He’s got the gross parts of the base fired up digging into birth certificates, but that is a pretty small online base that was already fired up.
Martin
@HumboldtBlue: Yeah, I forgot about the memorial.
Dangerman
Shit, what did his team expect? Put him in a King Size Bed with several buckets of extra crispy and he’s face planting to the point of his arteries saying “Dude, fuck this”. Put him on stage with NABJ women and expect him not to come close to dropping an N bomb is either delusional or intentional.
Chet Murthy
@cain: It’s true that they’ve been pretty good of late. But OTOH @mrmoshpotato: is right, that they did build this Frankenstein’s Monster of a G(r)OP, and they really haven’t adequately apologized for that. Nor (yet) adequately atoned for that. But it’s OK on two counts:
They can redeem themselves: it’ll take time, but they -can- do it. And part of redemption, is understanding that the people their former work victimized …. aren’t going to forget on a dime.
Martin
@cain: Yep. And it’s always the worst American export as well. Burger King instead of In-N-Out.
Chet Murthy
@cain: haha, in the early 90s when I worked in France, I at first had trouble finding good veg in restaurants, so I finally resorted to going to McDo’s for a salad. Then my work colleague R. pointed out that I could get a salade nicoise (among many other things) and …. well, I was OK. Never had to go to McDo’s again. And then I learned about the Moroccan restos (cheep too) that made couscous, many of which were veggie (b/c cheaper). That helped too. And eventually I moved into a place where I could cook, and it was all fine.
Spanish Moss
@cain: I have never heard of anardhana seeds. I am going to have to look into those! I had never tried (or even heard of) cumin until I was in my early twenties. Bought some cumin seeds for a recipe and after tasting the finished dish I wondered, “Where have you been all my life?”.
HumboldtBlue
@cain:
For Mexican cuisine, Diana Kennedy has you covered.
HumboldtBlue
@Martin:
So did I.
Chet Murthy
@Spanish Moss:
I’m curious: how did you find housing ? I’ve thought about spending time in France, but ….. it seems a little daunting finding housing, and I’ve read so much about Airbnb’s sucking ….. (and hotels …. feh, I’d like to live in a proper apartment).
Eliana Steele
@Martin:
Not to argue w your observations, but I live in Whatcom County WA and we have quite a few small holding dairy farms where you see exactly that: grassy fields with a few dairy cows. We have a pretty active cheese making and unpasteurized milk small holdings. I am not recommending necessarily but I was enchanted when we first moved up here — I was a city girl from Chicago and only had witnessed milk in cartons at the supermarket. Seeing the “ladies lying down in the fields slowly chewing their cuds and looking peaceful makes my days sometimes… This does not pertain to your central point, but I wanted folks to know the small dairy holdings are still around…
wjca
I mostly just go with skipping potatoes and rice. Although my wife’s cooking tends to be heavy on rice. (Even several generations, you can see reflections of the fact that Japanese meals are named “morning rice”, “midday rice”, and “evening rice”)
Geminid
@BR: And Trump can’t bear to be wrong, and hates to back down; a brittle personality. His best course would be to move on and change the subject. Maybe he’ll do that, but the thin-skinned Trump is not a rational actor now so he might prolong the story.
BR
The KamalaHQ is on fire. This time literally:
https://bsky.app/profile/adampknave.com/post/3kymw3zulhc2b
I am cracking up more in the last 10 days than I have in ages.
wjca
We’re lucky that the University of California’s Botanical Garden folks run an annual spring sale of vegetables for gardens. Enormous variety of everything. Especially including tomatoes.
Kent
Is the NYT actually starting to learn? This is their current front page this evening:
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53893553762_9b149101c7_b.jpg
Wapiti
@Chet Murthy: When I was a ravenous teenager, and the family went out for pizza and ordered a bunch of pies for the table, I’d ask for a small anchovy pizza. Then after eating my share of all of the other pizzas, I’d eat the untouched anchovy. Calories.
Chet Murthy
@Kent: I’m a believer in Bayesian reasoning. Let’s see them continue doing this for …. a month or two, and then I’ll start to believe they’re learning (or changing, or whatever). A day, a week? That’s just them lacking agitprop to shove onto the front page, so they go with the truth.
Frankensteinbeck
@Dangerman:
The NYT told him he’s getting 30% of the black male vote. He’s racist as Hell and thinks everyone brown is stupid and easy to lie to. He needs that 30% and is worried it might slip with a black Democratic candidate, so he went to tell them she’s not really black and immigrants are taking ‘black jobs’.
wjca
Perhaps they will distance themselves sufficiently that the cult declares them apostates, and refuses to vote for them. Meaning they lose in what are now relatively red districts. Cue tiny violin.
divF
@Jay: We are great fans of Nantes carrots, ever since a few years ago a local produce store started carrying them. Madame divF likes raw carrots, but now won’t eat any other carrot raw besides Nantes. Sweet, tender, with no woody layers.
The latest big thing at our house are the kiss melon varieties. Really sweet, and great ice-cold.
ETA: dry-farmed tomatoes!
Omnes Omnibus
@cain:
If you are living in the foreign country, sometimes you will find yourself a bit homesick and craving something American. The chains provide that.
Spanish Moss
@Chet Murthy: We only stay in hotels for short, intensive sightseeing weekends. Otherwise, we get vacation rentals of apartments or houses. We start by Googling “vacation rental in …”. Most often we end up using VRBO (which has rentals all over the world), but we have used a number of good British sites and local sites as well. All of our experiences have been great! But it is very important to only consider places with good reviews. I wouldn’t consider a place with no reviews at all.
We found our place in Normandy through Holiday Lettings. I can’t recommend the place we stayed in Falaise highly enough:
https://www.holidaylettings.co.uk/rentals/falaise/1036217
https://www.holidaylettings.co.uk/rentals/falaise/4500087
The area was beautiful and the owners were so friendly and helpful.
wjca
Apologies later. Right now, they’re doing God’s work with their ads. The volume of Trumpist denunciations is testament to how effective those are.
Priorities.
Maxim
@wjca: Wouldn’t that be beautiful? We can hope.
Jackie
@mrmoshpotato: I disagree. Never Trumpers aren’t populists. And they are supporting Harris. They supported Biden. Despite their conservative differences – they hate Trump and MAGA.
Maybe down the road they’ll be against Democrats, but until TCFG and MAGA and White populism are in the rear mirror, they are mostly voting Democratic – or not voting. In this aspect, we’re all in accordance.
cain
@Omnes Omnibus:
Yeah I get that. It actually works both ways – Italians will come here and know that a burger king will taste the same as back home.
But my objection is seeing this stuff on historical buildings – it just seems wrong to me.
wjca
So true. My only ever experience with Burger King was in Riyadh. (My boss pick the restaurant. Mostly, I think, for the wifi.) Cardboard patty and some horrid sauce. Definitely validated my picture of American fast food chains.
Darkrose
It depends though. My mom, who did most of the cooking, was Black and from the South. She cooked a variety of food, but for a long time all I would eat was spaghetti with butter, cheese pizza, and hot dogs with no bun or condiments. I refused to touch mushrooms, and asparagus was right out; both changed when I hit my mid-30’s.
There’s a 22-year-old guy in my weekly raid group who almost never eats fruit. It’s not because of income or location–it’s because he’s neurodivergent, and finds the texture of most fruits revolting. I tend to go through phases of eating bland food because I have what my mother used to call a “tender tummy” in addition to a fairly low capsaicin tolerance. TL;DR: Food preferences are complicated and individual.
cain
@Kent:
Not initially, see this tweet:
https://x.com/Fly_Sistah/status/1818861102643466414
Initially they had “Trump says Harris only became black recently”
Omnes Omnibus
Based on today’s right wing freakout about Harris’s race, this came to mind.
Jackie
@BR: Kamala’s HQ is awesome!😂
HumboldtBlue
@Chet Murthy:
I have no idea how it happened (well, yeah, I do, it’s from watching villa/château restoration videos) but I went down a rabbit hole with Suzanne in France. Normandy properties galore.
cain
@sdhays: I think I saw one or two in LA. But I feel like they do more in a presentation type of thing – eg indian burritos or something like that. Not literally modifying the food.
One of my friends with to Iran and picked up some pomegranate paste. This stuff is dark, and thick and doesn’t have any sweetness.
My mother-in-law at the time one day picked it up and made some traditional dish thinking it was tamarind :D
Maxim
@Darkrose: Yeah, it’s very common for neurodivergent folks to have foods they can’t eat. Fruit is okay for me, mostly, but there are some textures that I cannot tolerate.
Martin
@Kent: I don’t know if this is correct – it’s a thought I’m still trying to work through – but a dynamic I’ve seen in academia is that the manner in which you adjudicate an argument has a big bearing in how the argument is received. And I don’t just mean being persuasive or not persuasive, but you have to do it in this specific way. And I wonder if that applies here to the media.
I don’t think it applies universally because I still believe that the reason why WaPo generally covers politics pretty well is that they are a DC publication and why the NYT doesn’t is because they are from a business, not politics city and so they evaluate how information comes at them differently.
But I wonder if Harris doing politics so far in a different manner than Democrats typically do is having an impact on how outlets like the NYT process it. The content isn’t different, but the way it’s done is different.
cain
@Chet Murthy: Yep, I think his actions speak louder than words.
We used to give John Cole shit for years about him being a Republican. He voted for Bush twice! :D
HumboldtBlue
@Darkrose:
Yup
cain
@Chet Murthy:
I assume you must have worked in some small town as I’m sure that Paris or Nice would have had veg restaurants certainly Indian ones.
Kent
But sometimes you get surprises. For example, the McDonalds in Guatemala are absolutely fabulous.
Chet Murthy
@cain: Weeeeeellllll, like I said, “kind word in the House of Commons” (what Churchill said about Stalin). But he’ll have to be a stalwart supporter of our side for a lot longer than a couple of cycles, before I’ll welcome him with open arms, ‘msayin’
Martin
@Kent: I didn’t eat in one in France, but I did like they served all their beverages in a proper glass the few times I was sitting near one. There is only so far the French are wiling to go with fast food.
BR
@Kent:
Yeah, the McDonalds restaurants around the world are way nicer than the ones in the US, almost fine dining in some places. I don’t get it.
Chet Murthy
@cain: HAHA, you’d think, wouldn’t you? But in 1991-94 Paris, it was actually pretty rare. I remember visiting my grad school classmate in Saarbrucken (where he was working) and he told me about all the veggie restos in Germany (and how there weren’t as many in Metz, just across the border); and that was my experience in Paris, too.
Near the end of my time there, there was a group dinner (for a colleague who had won something-or-other) and his (vegetarian) wife picked the resto: so it was a nice veggie resto. And my colleagues were all -shocked- that it existed, that the food was so good, etc, etc.
I understand that things are different now, and that’s great! But back then, my experience was that “restaurant French food” was significantly more meat-focused than “home cooked French food”.
Spanish Moss
@Chet Murthy: To add one more thing to my comment about vacation home/apartment rentals: if you avoid peak times you can often get a very good price for an extended stay. Owners would prefer to have their properties occupied rather than empty, and there is a lot of availability while school is still in session. Our month in Normandy in late spring cost the same amount as just a week in July would have cost. And the weather was lovely!
cain
@Spanish Moss: It’s dried pomegranate seeds – they are used in some dishes like chole. Some of the Indian spice mixes will add it there.
My kid did end up liking the dish, but I think I’m going to marinate in tequila overnight and then a second marination. I added a spice mix of achiote, 3 different kinds of mexican chiles, lemon, cumin powder, chilli powder, anardhana that I crushes and turned into a powder, and oregano.
cain
@Chet Murthy: Huh! So interesting. I lived in Dublin in 1995 for the summer, and there was a number of indian restaurants so I could get veg food (I eat everything, but I do like veg food a lot) there.
The interesting bit there is that while there are a lot of Indian restaurants, they aren’t a lot of Indians. Then I took a trip to England and with Leicester and saw more brown people than I have ever seen outside of India.
VFX Lurker
One exception: the wonderful eggslut microchain has a few locations around the world, including Tokyo. Their Fairfax sandwich is too rich to eat every day, but “The Slut” brings happiness and joy to everyone who appreciates a coddled egg.
cain
@Spanish Moss: Next year, we’re going to be in Northern Italy – I’m salivating. Can’t wait to go. My wife is also excited. We usually do our europe trips around the same open source conference. This year it was in Denver and before that in Latvia.
One time, we had one in Spain and then in Greece all along the mediterranean, so fun!
Chet Murthy
@cain: Aaaaahahahahahaaa ….. when I was scoping out postdocs in the summer of 1991, I had a choice between Edinburgh and Paris. I visited Paris first, then took the train up to Edinburgh. I attended a conference there, met all the people I’d be working with, etc. Real shindig: got to eat haggis, tour Mary King’s Close (old plague street, walled-up), climbed up to Arthur’s Seat, etc. And we went out for drinks and dinner in the town of course. Lots of good Indian food.
When I chose Paris over Edinburgh, one of my big reasons was (and I quote) “I don’t think I can eat straight Indian food for a year”. I mean, the Indian food was good, but the Scottish food (and other Brit food) …. *whew*. French food was infinitely superior. Even though basically any foreign food got “French-i-fied”. Like once I had Chinese stir-fry with my boss in what passed for Paris’ Chinatown (the 13th Arrondissement), and they put -butter- in the stir-fry! Eek!
BR
I just realized that if Harris can retain momentum for another few weeks, the NYT might start realizing that they are about to get caught on the wrong side of history and will tread lightly. They don’t want to have a long trail of semi-racist and semi-sexist articles leading up to Harris’s historic win.
ArchTeryx
@rikyrah: GodDAMN that was awesome to see. IIRC the Haka is a Māori war dance and these women fought all the way to gold. They earned it. Show them what you’re made of, warriors!
KatKapCC
@Kent: Still can’t get themselves to use the word “lie”, though.
Spanish Moss
@cain: I am so envious! We stopped our international travel during Covid, and my husband’s work schedule these days has made it difficult to make any kind of long term vacation plan, so we haven’t picked it up again. Our only international trip was to Vietnam last year for my son’s wedding, which was an amazing experience. Hopefully my husband will retire early next year, so we are looking into a culinary tour to Turkiye after that.
karen marie
The fucking excuses! I mean, come the fuck on! HOW LITTLE ATTENTION DO THEY PAY TO ANYTHING?
I just don’t understand.
Martin
@VFX Lurker: Not sure Eggslut even qualifies as an American chain. Seems like it was international from the get-go.
karen marie
@rikyrah: The NAJB should have had him interview Trump.
KatKapCC
@karen marie: I didn’t take it to be an excuse. She was very clear on the show that she knew what he was like, but the way he acted tonight was different than what she’d seen from him before. Sure, they knew he would ramble and lie, but it went beyond his typical garbage. And while I will say that the woman from Fox didn’t do shit to counter him, one of the others did certainly try to correct him, like when he started babbling about post-birth abortions or saying Harris never called herself Black until recently.
ArchTeryx
@BR: This is the paper that fluffed Adolf Hitler. I don’t think they’ve ever been capable of shame or self-reflection. Ever. They don’t give a hoot about being on the wrong side of history. All they give a hoot about is their wealthy readers and advertisers.
jonas
Hanging out in the OC this week in CA, some friends introduced us to a new food destination, Northgate in Costa Mesa, a Latin grocery store, except it’s like the size of a Costco and inside is an entire Mexican food bazaar with every kind of taco and food stand you can imagine, from tamales to menudo to tortas to fish tacos, birria, and fresh churros, a tequila bar, ceviche bars, mariachi bands and then the meat counter. God, the meat counter. And then the fresh tortilla factory pumping out these steaming hot bags of fresh corn and flour tortillas. I think half my body weight was taco when I left.
As one buddy put it (maybe after a couple of Modelos), “Are we still alive? Because I think this might be heaven.”
KatKapCC
#WhenITurnedBlack is trending. Some of them funny, some very serious, but I think it all really illustrates just how revolting these attacks on Harris’s identity are.
karen marie
@KatKapCC: The interview was delayed for more than half an hour due to technical problems. How were they unaware that he was having a temper tantrum before he even walked out?
And that first question – I mean, oof. How do you not expect verbal diarrhea from Trump when your first question is a list of things he has said in the past followed by “and what do you say about that”?
The whole thing was very poorly organized and executed. It annoys the shit out of me because it gives him opportunity to play the victim, because the whole thing devolved to four people shouting. Professionals should know how to control an interview. That was a life lesson in how to not conduct an interview. Apparently, it’s not a lesson that any of the professionals have or will ever learn given it’s the fucking year 2024 and Trump has been a blister on everyone’s ass for the last nine years.
jonas
@Chet Murthy: Edinburgh is a charming city and incredibly international — you can basically find anything from Indian, to sushi, to Turkish and Argentinian steak houses if you want. I had great ramen once in Edinburgh. But yeah, you can’t beat living off the green markets in Paris, picking up a fresh baguette or two each morning, maybe some flowers, along with every wonderful fresh vegetable or cheese or fruit or fish you can imagine. It becomes this lifestyle that’s so hard to give up when you return to the States and are faced with driving 20 minutes to the local Krogers or whatever for what, by comparison, is just weekly sadness.
Old Dan and Little Ann
@cain: My wife and I explored Ireland back in 1999 for 18 days. Our first night at some pub in Bunratty I ordered a ham sandwich. One piece of ham between brown bread. It did not get much better after that. The afternoon we were walking through Galway and I spotted a McDonalds. It made my day. lol…..
edited for spelling.
Martin
@jonas: Yeah, that’s the best Mexican market in the area. Good pick.
You’ve got a solid half million latinos within about 8 miles of that market, so, yeah, we can support large, high quality ethnic markets
You can see why some of us like it here. ;)
KatKapCC
@karen marie: I agree that inviting him in the first place was a strange choice. I just don’t think the interviewers are the ones who should be receiving the lion’s share of the grief when he was the one spewing hateful garbage.
karen marie
@Old Dan and Little Ann: Never order a hamburger in a bar in Amsterdam in 1977. It was ground ham formed into a patty on a bun. Absolutely disgusting.
Just for laughs, I went into a McDonald’s in Rome in 1986 and got some French fries. They tasted absolutely foul. When in Rome, eat pizza.
way2blue
A few years ago, I had a toddler visiting and she headed straight to the Sun Gold tomato plant on the deck and started ‘harvesting’ tomatoes. Loved it! That smell of sun-warmed tomatoes on the vine. Yum.
karen marie
@KatKapCC: My comments are not “the lion’s share of the hate” that’s coming out of that interview. I’m just really irritated by everyone acting like the people who organized this interview – JOURNALISTS WHO COVER POLITICS – were so ill prepared to deal with him, especially given the specific circumstances that preceded him walking out onto that stage.
They did not cover themselves in glory.
They gave him ammunition to counter the people talking about what a racist piece of shit he is.
Aziz, light!
@BR: The NYT has never been anything but the voice of the one percent. There will be no pivot.
jonas
@Chet Murthy: I once ate at a restaurant in a small (iirc) Swiss or Austrian town years ago and the “vegetarisches Tagesgericht” was a salad topped with fried chicken tenders. They’ve gotten better since, but we had a good laugh at that one.
Maxim
@jonas: That sounds amazing. There’s a Mexican grocery chain up in LA County where I am that has some good food, but nowhere near that big or varied.
I just saw a handy post on the book of faces: “Basically, people who don’t mind being called weird are ‘good weird.’ People who get mad when they’re called weird are ‘bad weird.’”
Maybe not universally true, but it seems like a good rule of thumb. And I am seeing multiple memes a day continuing the weirdness theme over there.
Chet Murthy
@jonas: haha, yes, back in 1991 my grad school classmate made jokes about “Fleischsalt” (flesh salad) in Germany. He said that the predominance of meat in German cuisine was the reason for there being such a vibrant vegetarian restaurant community there.
jonas
Lol, my wife and I were like “I can see us retiring a few blocks from here just to have access to this place.” Then her cousin — who lives nearby — reminded us that the cheapest, most run-down, gang-tagged house in the area runs a little north of $1 million these days, so we were like yeaaaaah. Ok , maybe when we win the lottery.
danielx
@Kent:
No. This has been another edition of Simple Answers To Simple Questions.
Maxim
@jonas: I visited a friend in Paris a few years ago (pre-pandemic) and that’s what it was like. Walk downhill, and you hit the market district with all the fresh food. Go uphill instead, and you’d reach the Eiffel Tower. But eating while I was there was so much fun.
Ruckus
@Suzanne:
Mom’s side was very, very Italian so we grew up with a lot of Italian style food and a wide variety of things to eat. Which also got me to try a lot of different foods. Now of course I didn’t like all of them but still a wide variety is very nice. And then I was in the USN. That killed taste buds pretty much quicker than anything else. There is a large difference between survival and enjoyment…..
Martin
@jonas: Yeah. Almost double that over where I am. I’ve got the asian markets – Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Indian and Persian near me.
Same deal with speciality butchers, seafood, food courts, all that. Lots of choice.
brendancalling
I can’t speak for anyone other than myself, but I was delighted with Trump’s appearance. I hope to hear more of his opinions about race and women—the more the better! I thought he made a major impact—perhaps not in the way he intended—and more people should hear what he has to say. The more he talks the happier I am!
jonas
I’ve been traveling today so didn’t see Trump in all his racist shit-flinging glory at this NABJ interview, but wasn’t one of the panelists interviewing him Harris Faulkner from Fox News? How did she spin his trenchant insights about what Black people get to identify as, as long as he approves of it?
Repatriated
@Gin & Tonic:
Agreed, this blog shouldn’t have “likes” points, due to Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
Like or agree with a comment? Link/quote and say so, and preferably also why. Pursuing “likes” (if one had the option) would become an end in itself, rather than a useful means to determine which comments are “the best” comments.
Other blogs might work differently, but that’s the commenting culture here.
cain
@Chet Murthy: lol
I think what I hated most about french food in Paris was beef. It’s just not the same so I tend to avoid that and go with the other stuff.
Overall, I feel like parisian food that I get in restaurants in the “tourist” areas somewhat unremarkable – except for the bakery stuff, and stuff like chaud.
The other thing is, the closer to the Seine, the more “French” people get. Go out in teh outer rings and you hear a lot of different languages and more French immigrants and more angry French drivers :D
I loved Edinburgh, I did so much walking around there. Just felt like a great city. My wife wants to move to either Edinburgh or Dublin. I love Dublin, but I have not been back in Dublin since 1995.
jonas
@Chet Murthy: “Fleischsalat” is only “salad” in the sense that “head cheese” is “cheese”. It was never meant to fool anyone into thinking it was anything but a bunch of shredded bologna and salami meats in dressing, maybe with some pickles and olives or tomatoes thrown in. You’re right though that a lot of German towns, especially university towns, always had one or two good vegetarian restaurants that were these openly funky alt-community hang-outs where people could (if briefly) escape the dominant wurst-and-schnitzel culinary culture.
cain
@JCNZ: Sure, respond and then 💯
:D
cain
@JCNZ: Sure, respond and then 💯
:D
VFX Lurker
@Martin: eggslut started as a food truck in Los Angeles in 2011. Then it opened a stall in Grand Central Market in 2013. It has four locations in Los Angeles now.
I’m (un)fortunate to live within walking distance of the Glendale location.
Gretchen
@Suzanne: I love that “too much flavor”. I grew up in an Irish household, and got together with an Italian in grad school. “You won’t like this, Peg, it has flavor.”
jonas
@cain: Dublin is a wonderful city but damn…bloody expensive. Like, NYC/London expensive, especially in the historic center city with all the pubs and clubs. There are probably a lot more reasonable areas on the outskirts and such, but I was shocked at what it cost to stay/eat out there for a couple of nights last year.
Martin
@VFX Lurker: Huh, I thought it started in NY.
HumboldtBlue
Nonna Pia’s Baked Tomatoes
Jesse
There are some pretty big issues with food in the US, but speaking as someone who currently lives abroad, I have to say that there’s a lot of “familiarity breeds contempt” going on in this thread. There are all sort of issues with food in various places. Kids having very easy access to snacks in or very near school, for instance, is a huge issue in many places. Living in Germany, I’m amazed at the low quality of most raw vegetables. It’s OK, but not “wow, never saw that in the US before, incredible!” level. Obesity levels are rising here, and have been for many years, though they remain lower than in the US. People have talked about the fact that people in dense cities just drive a lot less, and that has major consequences. In particular, people in these situations can typically just walk to the grocery store to get their stuff, though, again, people *do* drive to get discount groceries in bulk, just like in the US. And you need to go to the grocery store much more frequently, of course And the people living outside the larger cities are just like their US counterparts: you need to drive to the grocery store. For a person living in, say, rural Germany, it’s laughable to suggest just walking to “the market”. Of course they go to a chain, with their car.
TL;DR The grass isn’t always greener on the other side. The US is large and spread out. Food policy is hard, and expensive, and basic facts like geography play a huge role.
Sister Golden Bear
@Chet Murthy:
We are indeed. I’ll freely admit to preferring food on the less seasoned/less sauced (≠ bland) side, but in large part that’s due to growing up growing with “California cuisine” before it was a thing. I.e. having an abundance of fresh, quality ingredients — especially fruits, vegetables and seafood, meant they could take center stage with relatively simple preparation.
I had a rude awakening in college when I went back East twice for internships and discovered how bad produce was, and how bad “ethnic” food could be. I still have nightmares about the Chinese restaurant in Allentown that used canned green beans in their dishes (sorry RevRick). Yes, I know there was superb Chinese food in NYC—but I wasn’t there. And the “Mexican” food… well I’ve repressed my memories of Chi Chi’s. Admittedly, being on a starving college student’s budget also didn’t help.
Martin
@Sister Golden Bear: Oof. Chinese in Allentown. That’s rough.
BethanyAnne
@cain: A good hot rasam is amazing. And Bahn Mi pizza! /boggle. I had never even thought of that. My favorite Indian food, though, is bhindi bhaji. I loved okra since being a kid – PaPa grew them in his garden. But what Indians do with vegetables … holy hell we are so lucky that so many moved to the US. Damn!
opiejeanne
@Martin: We ate at a McDonald’s in Paris, almost as a dare, and were pleasantly surprised. The food was great. They had other things on their menu than just the burgers, like ham sandwiches on French bread with nothing but butter. That trip the ham sandwiches were everywhere and cheap, 4-5 Euro and big enough for 2 to share, and consistently delicious.
The place that shocked us, though, when we were kind of late for lunch and hunting for some place to eat, and wandered into a fancy-looking place that turned out to be Pizza Hut. The salads were very nice, the pizza was decent, and they had an extensive wine menu.
JCNZ
@Repatriated:
Goodhart’s Law? It’s Cole’s Law – unique to this site…
MagdaInBlack
@brendancalling: I’ve been saying since the debate that people need to have the full metal trump experience instead of curated news clips. This was one of those experiences. I’m glad people see him like this. And I also had the same thought as John: he was set up to show his true trump colors. He didn’t get the usual softball questions, and he got some pushback and it pissed him off.
Barry
@BR: “I just realized that if Harris can retain momentum for another few weeks, the NYT might start realizing that they are about to get caught on the wrong side of history and will tread lightly. They don’t want to have a long trail of semi-racist and semi-sexist articles leading up to Harris’s historic win.”
They are an enemy, like Trump at the black journalists’ meeting.
Bupalos
@KatKapCC: I’d much rather they say Trump made a bizarre claim or incomprehensible claim than a false claim. “Harris was full on Indian and only recently turned black” isn’t really in the realm of truth v. lie, it’s a post-truth move aimed at poisoning the well.
Booger
@JCNZ: Mmmm…coleslaw.
Chris T.
@Eliana Steele:
Whatcom represent! (Bellinghamster here)
We need a good bakery though. And lots more of various restaurants.
Kayla Rudbek
Super Dave
Cole, you made me do a spit take. Made my day!