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Category Archives: Food

Two lemons a day keep the doctor away

Tuesday, June 18, 2019

It’s a miracle of nature that the best summer drink of all — homemade lemonade — also is some of the best medicine you can get. If you do some Googling and reading on the virtues of lemons, you’ll find plenty of people who swear that lemons can cure arthritis. Surely that’s too good to […]

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This just in from California

Monday, June 17, 2019

iPhone XS photos by JMG Regular readers know that I have been breathlessly following Burger King’s rollout of the Impossible Whopper. The rollout started in the St. Louis area. After meeting with great success there, and an 18 percent increase in same-store sales, Burger King rolled out the Impossible Whopper in the San Francisco Bay […]

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Why is Mexican so hard?

Thursday, June 13, 2019

A very inauthentic chili relleno Other than those Americans who live close to the Mexican border, or in California, most Americans know very little about good Mexican cuisine. Readers in Europe: Do you have Mexican restaurants at all? I’m guessing not. At the risk of being snobbish about restaurants in America, there is low Mexican […]

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Restoring a vintage cast iron skillet

Thursday, May 9, 2019

The 1940s skillet after stripping, scouring, and one seasoning treatment. It looks brand new! I bought this vintage cast iron skillet at an antique shop in Stuart, Virginia, for $17. It’s a great skillet, and it was a good bargain, though it’s not as collectible as some vintage cast iron, which is very much a […]

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Vegan burger report (updated)

Wednesday, May 1, 2019

Click here for high resolution version. Not only did this vegetarian burger greatly exceed my expectations, it was so convincing that I felt disgusted with myself after eating it, as though I really had snarfed down a big belly load of pink-in-the-middle beef. This is the “Beyond Burger” from Beyond Meat. As a near-vegetarian, I […]

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Good timing, Burger King

Saturday, April 6, 2019

About a month ago, when the Green New Deal was at the top of everyone’s news feeds, right-wingers market-tested a new 2020 theme for scaring the deplorables: Liberals are coming to take away your hamburgers! As reported by the Washington Post: “They want to take your pickup truck. They want to rebuild your home. They […]

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Grilled pumpkin

Wednesday, April 3, 2019

The smallest of my little pumpkins — too small to make a pie or even a pot of pumpkin bisque — grill beautifully. You could grill any winter squash, of course. A Japanese winter squash, kabocha, has an edible skin, I believe. I grilled this pumpkin in the skin and cut off the skin at […]

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Pumpkin lasagna

Wednesday, April 3, 2019

Pumpkin lasagna was an all-day job, and I can’t say that it was a great success. No matter how hard I try, I just can’t roll homemade pasta thin enough. And the pumpkin, which was already soft from baking, lacked texture in the lasagna. Still, I’m not going to give up on figuring out ways […]

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Parched peanuts

Friday, March 29, 2019

Did our lean grandparents and great-grandparents eat snacks? I believe they did. What those snacks were, no doubt, varied from region to region. Popcorn, I suspect, is an old commodity. Here in the American South, parched peanuts were a common snack. I have a clear memory from the age of 6 or 7. I was […]

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Rethinking cookware: Back to the Iron Age

Tuesday, March 26, 2019

A vintage copper saucepan, circa 1970, that I recently bought on eBay. It was originally sold by Williams Sonoma and is stamped “Made in France.” It probably was made by Mauviel. I believe the French would call it a “sauteuse evasée,” or flared sauté pan. Last month, I wrote about buying a Lodge cast-iron wok. […]

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