Beautiful garbage

Sometimes even the garbage looks good enough to eat!  (Complementary colors never hurt.)

Beautiful fruit

My favorite fruit combo is usually peaches and blueberries.  I suspect the complementary colors work on some region of the brain to enhance the flavor sensations and make you think they taste even better.  But this month the blueberries, which have been on sale and we've been buying a lot of, have been inferior -- maybe picked too soon, maybe just too pallid and underdone because something was wrong with the weather.

By contrast, the peaches have been wonderful, especially the white peaches we had this week and last.  I could have just eaten the peach by itself but it was small and I wanted a big dish full, so I added raspberries, a combination that I don't think I've done before.  And just as beautiful as peaches and blueberries.

Special salmon

We've been eating "wild-caught sockeye salmon" from Alaska for several months; it appears reliably in our grocery store for $10 a pound, and many times you can catch it on sale.  But recently other varieties besides sockeye, such as Copper River or king, have been showing up at $20.  We decided that we'd splurge one night and see if the fancy stuff was worth twice the price.

So here's a plate of Copper River salmon.  Beautiful, delicious -- but indistinguishable from plain old sockeye.  We won't be splurging again.

One hundred years ago...

... Europe was in the midst of World War I and times were bad.  Seen in the Imperial War Museum in London:

Coconut show and tell

Isaac had to take something about islands to school for show and tell, so they went to the grocery and got a coconut.  Show and tell was a success, and his mom scored an even greater success when she dropped Isaac and the coconut off in the afternoon and suggested we might want to open it while she was away.

We started by watching a YouTube video.  It looked so easy.  We took the ProduceGuy's advice and used the power drill to punch two holes and drain the coconut water. Meanwhile, in the other room, my husband was watching another video that suggested using a hammer and screwdriver, but Isaac and I got there first with the power tools. So twenty-first century.

He didn't think much of the coconut water.

We progressed to trying to crack open the coconut. The guy on the video took a big meat cleaver and rapped the back side of it around the equator of the coconut, which proceeded to open neatly.  We didn't have a cleaver but we rapped ours with a knife (didn't work) and then with a hammer, with increasing noise levels but not much progress.  Finally after much pounding we achieved a crack and were able to pry with a screwdriver to get it into two pieces.

Now was the time for eighteenth century tools.  We let Ken continue with the hammer and got it broken into several pieces.

All the while I was thinking about my last visit to Australia, when my brother brought home a coconut and he and I were assembling our tools for the assault.  In walked a friend who was raised in India, and was quite amused at the array of brute force we were planning to unleash.  "Wait -- here's how you open a coconut," she said, and proceeded to use very little more than her thumbs and a toothpick to zip the thing open.  Unfortunately I forgot how she did it.

Still frittering away our resources...

Don't you feel all warm and fuzzy when you publicly complain about something and then you find that they've changed what you were complaining about?

Well, today I don't.



Two years ago I complained because I opened a new package of oats and found the tamper-proof band was made out of corn.  What a waste of food.

This morning I opened a new package of oats and found a little change in the wording.  Now it's made from "plants," not "corn."

Fifteen minutes on google reveals -- wait for it -- it's still made from corn, even though somebody in the public relations office apparently decided it would sound better to say "plants."

"Our process does not require corn," the website says, "In the future this will include cellulosic raw materials, agricultural wastes and non-food plants."

But for now, "In North America, corn has been used first because it is the most economically feasible source of plant starches."

That's your tax dollars at work, folks; corn is subsidized by the government so that we can have cheap tamper-proof bands on our oatmeal.  Without the subsidies do you suppose maybe they would make bands out of agricultural waste and non-food plants?  Do you think that would be a good idea?

In mourning

Two of our favorite restaurants are kaput -- one of them changed ownership about a month ago and the other is going to close its doors next week.  The first one was our neighborhood place, the place you could always go to without a reservation, walk right in any night of the week (unless there was a basketball game on the 27 TV monitors).  We went there for the hamburger, or maybe the BLT.  The fancier food wasn't worth it, but when you realized it was 6 pm and no dinner was forthcoming and you didn't want to change clothes or eat anything fancy, that was where you went.  It was five minutes up the street, or on a nice summer evening maybe we would walk.  We probably went there three times a month over the years.

When we read in the newspaper that the place had been sold and the new owner wanted to upgrade from a neighborhood tavern to a "gastropub," we got that sinking feeling.  We've been putting off a visit to check out the new place, but tonight was our chance.

When we walked in the door, all was copacetic.  Not a thing had changed, except that the golf arcade game was gone (in all the years we've been patronizing the place, Ken saw the game used once; I never did).  The same slightly seedy decor, the same tables, the same rickety chairs, the same beer signs in the windows, the same 27 TVs playing basketball.  But the menu -- hmmm.

Truffle fries??   More appetizers than sandwiches and entrees put together?  The BLT has become the BELT (two fried eggs added to the usual)?  The burger looked about the same but was $2 more expensive.  Not off to a good start.

One good thing: the beer was still cheap, and wonder of wonders, the menu showed the beer prices!! Other than the beer, I found one thing on the menu that I was willing to eat, and it was OK, but probably not good enough to lure me back.  I spent the evening looking around wistfully, wishing for our old place back again.

The other favorite restaurant is going to be harder to live without.  It was an Argentine steakhouse, the best beef in town.  It's been open 14 years, and it must have been almost that long since we discovered it and made it our go-to place for steak.  We went there for celebrations, with out-of-town guests, and on evenings when we just wanted someplace special.

The owner explained, "There are certain reasons why I am closing,"  which doesn't explain much of anything. We were there a couple of weeks ago, before we knew it was the end. We tried to make a reservation for one last dinner, but were too late; the last two weeks were booked solid.  I'm really in mourning, not just for great food but for a restaurant where I always felt comfortable and appreciated.  Too bad.