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Monthly Archives: January 2016

Breakfast at home …

And remember, anything MacDonald’s can do, you can do better. And cheaper. And not have to eat off of paper. This is a homemade sausage biscuit with Morning Star vegetarian sausage.

Lunch on the road …

Probably many of the people who eat at Jim’s Grill in Yadkinville remember when it was a hot spot in the 1950s — curb service, window trays, juke box, the works. It’s on U.S. 601, which runs north to south across most of North and South Carolina and which used to be part of a […]

And they lived happily ever after

Note: This post contains no spoilers if you have watched the series through Season 6, episode 3. Those in the U.K. have already said goodbye to Downtown Abbey. Here in the U.S., we have five more episodes to go. I never gave up on Downton Abbey the way some did. Sure, it’s a soap opera. […]

Who’s eating whose lunch?

Update: As of 7 p.m. on Jan. 23, the Sanders video had had 1,890,434 views on YouTube after two days and was rising fast. The Trump video had had 28,828 views after five days. It’s fascinating to watch the political propaganda that comes out in election years. The propaganda is a kind of mirror that […]

100% stone-ground whole-wheat biscuits: You can do it

I need some new food photography dishes, don’t I? I love the taste of organic stone-ground whole-wheat. It tastes like wheat, and I love wheat. I also make no apologies to anti-gluten partisans, because I think that good wheat breads baked at home from good organic flour are not at all the same thing as […]

Book review: a biography of Theodore Parker

American Heretic: Theodore Parker and Transcendentalism, by Dean Grodzins. University of North Carolina Press, 2002, 656 pages. It’s surprising that Theodore Parker isn’t better known than he is. Parker (1810-1860), a transcendentalist, was a friend of Emerson. He inspired Thoreau. He was in the thick of things in the Boston-Concord area during his era. Abraham […]

Snowy Sunday morning

I’m sure that everyone who lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains and the foothills are very glad that the winter’s first snow fell on a Sunday morning. There’s no excuse for leaving home.

4 eggs down, 2 dozen to go

I had not made ice cream in well over a year. But the chickens have been laying well lately, so I start thinking about how to spend some eggs. Ice cream was a start. If you want to make ice cream, you have to crack some eggs. Proper ice cream has egg yolks in it. […]

Leftover grits

As long as you’re making grits, make too much. Bring the leftovers back the next day as fried grits. Grits and polenta are notoriously hard to brown. But if you shape the grits into patties before they cool, wrap the patties in a paper towel to help remove excess moisture, and put them in the […]

Putting up with pale: Winter tomatoes and winter eggs

The tomatoes above were grilled on a gas grill. The sausage is Morning Star fake sausage. Those winter tomatoes almost look real in the grocery store, don’t they? Then you get them home, and they’re tasteless and mealy. They’re barely fit for salads. I know of only one way to get some taste into them […]