Cheesecake Factory is a national chain, specializing in re-heating frozen foods send in from corporate: I wouldn't waste my calorie allotment on them. As is Hard Rock Cafe. Sorry, I don't see traveling thousands of miles to eat something I can get near home.

Ted's is pretty good for hot dogs (and get the loganberry soda while you're at it - a local speciality). The Hatch on the waterfront is ok if you don't mind fried food - their fried bologna sandwich is a regional specialty - and at least the view is good.

There are some very good restaurants in the Buffalo area, but, unfortunately, you need a local guide to find them: they're often hidden in residential areas, disguised as regular houses. I tend to go for red-sauce Italian when I'm there, something I don't find on the West Coast. Fish fry on Friday is an old tradition, but most places are mediocre.

Old-style Catholics Buffalonians had fish fries every Friday, since it was a day of abstinence pre-Vatican II. They weren't seasonal. And there's this big lake near Buffalo that has a goodly number of fish in it. They aren't seasonal. I know McPartlan's: my relatives universally say it's overpriced stodge. Creekside at least has a decent view, although the fish is not the freshest.

The waitress at Hoak's last year seemed boggled by the thought of serving non-frozen and pre-breaded fish. Pity, since Lake Erie has been cleaned up enough that there's now decent fishing.

Around here, the buffets tend to be Indian: lots of sauce-based dishes that can be made up in bulk and sit on a steam table. There used to be some AYCE sushi placse nearby (run by Chinese families): the sushi was, um, passable, but the Chinese dishes, which tended to be steamed vegetables, were decent. And for some reason they always had large bowls of Jell-o.

Frijoles borrachos - pinto beans cooked with spices and beer
Beer bread - use beer instead of water
Carbonade - a Belgian beef and beer stew

And if you don't want to drink it - use it to wash your hair. Or drown snails.

Unique to western New York: roast beef on weck. If you want the full-up, old-style experience, go to Schwabl's in West Seneca, just south of Buffalo on the East Side (yes, it looks like somebody's house. And do try the birch beer - it's like a tart root beer). I usually try to hit one of the old German-style places, but they're fast disappearing, and I have to rely on my native guides to find them.

One thing I do recommend doing: go to Niagara Falls (either one) and walk across the Rainbow Bridge.

If it's good enough for Sam Spade....

Haven't been there in years, but if I wanted a good martini and a good steak and money were no object, I'd definitely chose John's over a random hotel restaurant.

Union Square may not have much per se, but San Francisco is a very compact city, and there is an embaressment of riches within easy walking or Muni distance.

We pickle jalapenos regularly. I've also done carrots and cauliflower, using white vinegar, thyme and oregano for a more Italian taste.

I once did a pickled cabbage, as sort of a short-cut sauerkraut. IIRC, it was shredded cabbage, salt, and boiling water, stored in the fridge for about a month. I've lost the recipe, alas.

I've also pickled lemons: cut up lemons, salt, and Indian spices.

I'm gearing up for my annual trip to Buffalo, and again, I'm looking for interesting restaurants. The constraints: I'll have my elderly, mobility-limited mother in tow, so it must be wheel-chair accessible. I'd love a good fish fry made with non-frozen fish, there being this big lake nearby. Are there any places near Buffalo that serve fresh fried fish (and no, Hoak's isn't one of them)?

Also, are there any must-do places that opened in the past year? We're staying with relatives in Hamburg, so places in that area would be best.
(Mulberry's is already on the list)

TIA!

I'd be cautious about urban foraging: you need to know not only what's edible, but what your local ordanances are, and how the plants were treated. In my town, you can legally pick fruit that overhangs a public sidewalk: other places may have different rules. I know that a lot of the wild fennel plants (which look a lot like the highly poisonous hemlock, btw) are sprayed with an herbicide at certain times of the year. And as tasty as they might be, those pesky squirrels are protected.

You can, though, ask people if you can have surplus fruit, and some people (like me) often put out surplus produce for passersby.

If you're lucky enough to have access to several different stores, find out which ones have which cheap specialties. My neighborhood Mexican market is good for peppers, tomatoes, corn, spices, beans, most fresh vegetables and odder cuts of meat: it's lousy for general groceries, though: Safeway is the fall-back for those, usually.

Unless you are blessed with a lot of storage - including a freezer - learn not to overbuy perishables: if you can't use it before it goes bad it's wasted money no matter how cheap it is. If it's not likely to perish in your conditions - canned beans, tuna, tomatoes, for example - and it's something you normally use and you can afford the outlay stock up: the economist Andrew Tobias recommends tuna futures - in the form of a discount buy stored in their cans under the bed if necessary - as a fail-proof investment!

I wonder where they come from - my tree is just forming fruits now!

Now the next question, just what do they mean by batata? The only use I know of is as another name for sweet potato, but they taste different from the chips I identify as sweet potato. I wish people would use botanical names for ingredients!

BTW, I've had beet chips: they're much sweeter than the ones in the Terra chips bag.

And enchiladas and crepes (kinda the same idea, actually), curries, chili, stir-fried with whatever vegetables are handy. I use left-over bits of meat to doll up plain ramen.

If you're warming leftover chicken, a sauce of some kind helps keep it from drying out.

Stopped there for lunch today, thanks to this forum. I had the ma por tofu lunch special: very picante (helps with the hay fever) with a nice underlying blend of spices that came through. Meatier than other versions I've had. My partner tried the Hunan squid, which needed one more note, I thought. The price was amazingly low for the quality and quantity. We're definitely planning an evening trip with more people in tow so we can try more of their dishes.

I rarely put cheese in risotto: if you stir it vigorously enough while cooking it it makes its own creamy sauce.

Asparagus and scallop risotto sounds good to me right now. Or asparagus and other seafood, or just plain asparagus and mushroom, or green onion. Or just substitute more asparagus for the cheese (I like asparagus!). I like to use a little dry vermouth as part of the liquid as it has an herbal flavor that highlights the veggies, IMHO.

Tardigrades? Damp, mossy places usually, I think.

The cookbooks - mainly by being old enough to have bought them new :) Or library sales, used book stores.

Same here: if you make it like mine, the sausage and peppers has enough veggies in it that a salad is superfluous, but you do need something solid. Plain polenta fits that need.

My recipe is also for 2 9" pie crusts, and I use a couple of tablespoons of water.

"Easy as pie" is IMHO the biggest lie in cliche-dom. It took me decades to get up the nerve to even try a pie crust, and I end up relying on the "this is what my grandmother's felt like" to tell when it's right.

That seems like a lot of water. Doughs can vary a lot depending on the weather conditions, so proportions can vary as well.

I use an old Fanny Farmer recipe: 2 cups flour, 2/3 cup fat (usually shortening, sometimes lard, sometimes a mixture), salt, and ice water (i.e., the water container actually has chunks of ice in it). I use a pastry cutter to mix the flour and fat, supplemented with fingers, until I have lentil-sized pieces - I think pea-sized is too big. Then I add the water a teaspoon at a time until I can form the mess into a ball. It's a bit sticky.

Was your butter at room temperature when you tried to incorporate it? Or the same temperature as the flour?

For some things, like ceviche, yes - but I have a lemon tree. Otherwise, they have completely different tastes - but so do Meyer lemons (which grow in my area) and Eureka lemons (which don't).

According to my Spanish teacher, they're both called "limones" in Central America.

A private dinner with Nero Wolfe would be fine, or Rusterman's for a special night out on the town. Vesuvio would be great for a more casual dinner. I'd avoid the Spouter Inn*, though: it's a quaint enough New England B&B, but the waitress tends to bark the rather limited menu at you ("Clam or cod?"), and you may find yourself sharing your room with a total stranger.

*Moby Dick

I'm all about Riesling, myself, although I have no problems with a gewurz or a chablis on occasion.

I'm sorry I missed this episode!

Fish! There's a guy who comes in from Half Moon Bay (on the Pacific) with fresh fish - if you get there early enough!

Yesterday was our local market's first day: I came home with strawberries, mushrooms, baby artichokes and sheep ricotta. Looking forward to stone fruits in a month or so.

Is this a sauce you made, or a canned/jarred one? Either way, once the salt is dissolved the only thing you can do is add more liquid to dilute it.

For future reference, for home-made sauces add the salt just before serving, and use less of it. I've found that using kosher salt just at serving time tricks the tongue into thinking that there's more salt than there is in the dish. For packaged sauces, the only thing you can do is read the label.

With that much the poster can afford to experiment!

I'd go with roasted chickpeas a la the first reply, after making hummous.

5 miles - or half an hour during rush hour! Mountain View has a lot of decent, inexpensive places, but traffic has increased a lot recently, which limits how often I get there. Depending on where he's living, though, the train is a possibility for dinner.

In downtown PA, I prefer Janta to Darbar for lunch: their buffet is smaller, but it changes more frequently and has IMHO more interesting vegetarian dishes.

Like mushrooms? Dry, a little earthy, nothing like canned mushrooms, which I find slimy and tinny. Fresh button mushrooms tend to have a subtle taste, there but not forward. I've never had any that tasted of iodine.

Staghorn sumac berries are edible: my nephew harvested some and made a tart lemony drink with them for a Boy Scout project. The cultivated one may have been bred for better taste, though.

California Sauternes - which AFAIK no longer exists - was a dryish white wine, not a cooking wine per se but often called for in cookbooks prior to 1980. It bore no resemblance to French Sauterne, either in taste or price. Sherry has too much sweetness - I'd go with a cheap chablis or a generic white blend.

AKA ajo blanco. Mine always turns out too garlicky (yes, that's possible) - I think we have stronger garlic here on the West Coast than whereever they're writing the recipes.

Another favorite is minted cucumber yogurt soup.

Not it they want their business to grow!

Now, as someone of obvious European ancestry I've occasionally gotten some odd questions from other shoppers, like the one in the Indian grocery that wanted to know what I was planning on doing with the okra I was buying (he didn't know it was a traditional Southern US dish), but on the whole they treat their customers about the same as the "regular" chains. Maybe it's because the Bay Area has a lot of ethnically mixed neighborhoods, especially on the Peninsula: the little Mexican grocery where I buy my peppers and masa ("You're going to make your own tortillas? Cool!") is on the rather nebulous border between a predominantly recent-Mexican immigrant neighborhood and a much more affluent mostly White one, and a wide variety of people patronize it. At 99 Ranch, which caters to a mostly Chinese population, the other patrons seem to love to give me cooking advice, especially for fish.