Over the years I have had kitchen floors that were crappy linoleum (married students' hovel), various qualities of vinyl tile, kitchen carpeting, ceramic tile, and (for the past ten years) solid oak. The oak is absolutely the easiest to maintain, no comparison, not even on the same planet. It is sealed with polyurethane. I wet-mop it with water only and every couple of weeks I mop it with Minwax. I hope never to have anything else.

I could not agree more. After a month in Spain I concluded that you can clean out your refrigerator, put the findings in little dishes, microwave everything, and call it Tapas.

What is the POINT of cupcakes? Why not just eat a piece of cake?

I have seen cupcakes for $6 and $7 apiece in Chicago and New York within the past year.

There is a restaurant in Chicago (Girl and Goat) that has a menu item "Crispy Duck Tongues". Not sure if that's a jokey metaphor for something else or they really are duck tongues. If the latter, I wonder how many it takes to make a portion.

Southern? I thought it was Northern, brought here by Irish immigrants. The best I've ever had was slung by diner cooks in New England.

I like to fry some canned corned beef hash until it frizzles a bit and then pour beaten eggs over it and turn it into an omelet. My mother used to bake it and then poke holes in it and break an egg into each hole and bake until the eggs were set.

If you get hard-up, Stouffer's frozen version isn't too bad.

Expensive restaurants where the menu sounds like Fear Factor. "Are you having the eyeballs souffle' or the roasted pig face with sunnyside-up iguana eggs on top?"

This is the bread I made twice a week for years. It makes extraordinary toast. Dissolve 1 cake yeast in 1/2 cup lukewarm water. Add 1 tablespoon sugar and let set 45 minutes. Meanwhile melt and cool 1 stick (4 oz) butter. When cool, add to the yeast with 1 beaten egg, 2 cups lukewarm water, 2 tsp salt, and 1/2 cup sugar. Beat thoroughly then work in 8 cups flour and knead until elastic, about 10 minutes. Let rise. Punch down and form 2 loaves. Let rise again. Place in COLD oven and turn temperature to 400* then after 15 minutes to 375* and bake bread 25 minutes longer. Brush loaves with butter. VARIANT: Instead of 8 cups white flour use 2 cups white flour, 2 cups whole wheat flour, 2 cups yellow cornmeal, and 2 cups Kellogg's All Bran cereal.

I remember watching an aunt's first (and only) attempt at yeast baking---she set her dough to rise on a REALLY hot back porch in the sun, thinking the more heat, the better, and of course she killed her yeast. Grown up now (and a yeast baker) I always tell beginning bakers to think of yeast as if it were a little baby that you must keep warm and feed but must protect from extremes. Like an infant, yeast likes body temperatures. It eats carbohydrate (sugar and flour), it does better if it's kept out of cold drafts, and it eliminates but in a more pleasant way than a baby does--- bubbles of air that make the dough rise and make the whole house smell like baking bread.

Scotch Woodcock: Scrambled eggs on toast that has been spread with anchovy paste.

Brownies. You absolutely cannot go wrong with brownies.

As you are finding your way around in a new dietary world, an appointment with a registered dietitian is helpful even if insurance doesn't cover it and you have to pay for it. And, note well, a "nutritionist" can be anything and does not have to meet state standards, while a "registered dietitian" does.

You may find the diabetes forums helpful, as well as chowhound.

The taste of rhubarb always makes me think how delighted our rural ancestors must have been with it early in the spring when fruits weren't available yet and they hadn't had much fruit all winter. Rhubarb isn't a fruit but pretends to be one.

Picadillo, which you could do in a slow cooker but is OK in a skillet. Brown ground sirloin with chopped onion and green pepper. Add a handful of raisins and some green olives stuffed with pimiento. Add an 8-oz can of tomato sauce and a can of water and season with salt, garlic, and cumin (don't even think of omitting the cumin). Let it cook for a bit. Serve with rice or makes a good taco filling or fills any hollowed-out vegetable.

You can't chiffonade green leaf lettuce.

Food trucks don't amount to much here due to city regulations but you can get quite a show of Mexican street food at the Sundays only Maxwell Street market (google for directions). Ladies are hand-making corn tortillas, need I say more. Also, the same people that do Frontera run Xoco which at breakfast offers a Spanish street food, churros (long doughnuts) con chocolate (exotic kinds of hot chocolate).

Cranberry juice 50-50 with Vernor's Ginger Ale.

Let me add possible uses of the cheese sauce, which is incredibly versatile: to use up any leftover vegetable (especially good with cauliflower); mixed with cooked broccoli to top a baked potato; as basis for cheese souffle'; for any oven or broiler open-faced sandwich that you can invent; in an omelet; with crepes; to use up cooked pasta as a quick macaroni & cheese; ditto with leftover cooked potatoes as potatoes au gratin; as a basis of a cream soup; in casseroles. You can't have too much of this sauce on hand.

Old texts describe lobsters so plentiful that they could easily be taken by wading out from shore---prisoners complained that they were so frequently fed lobster. Oysters were plentiful--fried oysters were street food in New Orleans 150 years ago. My memory goes back 70 years and I remember when fried sea scallops were on just about every restaurant menu and weren't expensive (now, $24 lb). And I recall that when we moved to the Chesapeake area in 1966, crabmeat was much more plentiful than when we left in 1991, and ten years later when I bought a can of it in Chicago, brand name was a famous Chesapeake Bay name, the can was stamped "Product of Indonesia". All of this speaks to diminishing supply in US waters.

I suspect that "he is a chowhound" is something like "he is a doctor" or "he is a Christian"---they come in many variations. I was appalled recently when somebody posted asking for restaurant advice in my native city and another person responded with a restaurant that costs $200 per person. My idea of enjoying food is taking delight in cooking, in feeding people, in knowing the various food markets of my town---and I would never, even at gunpoint, spend $200 pp on any meal (or eat 11 courses, or seek out a meal of eyeballs or crickets or bull's penis). A lot of what comes over these pages is kind of affected, seems to me, but, different folks etc. It's a big table---take what you want, leave the rest.

The lemon filling should be rich and very lemony, while the crust is, well, crusty and the meringue is sweet. The three together are lovely. I assume your filling will use fresh lemon juice and grated lemon rind---lemon extract won't do the job.
A tart can be almost anything with a crust and a filling. Lemon meringue pie definitely has a crust, lemon filling, and meringue (on top).

My kitchen is tiny and one other person in it gets in my way. Also, I have had well-meaning helpers in a hurry do terrible things like dump sterling silver flatware in the garbage and break good china. Therefore I am absolutely 100% inflexibly firm: NO HELP PLEASE. It is your kitchen. Unless you live in a group home, you don't have to let other people cook in your kitchen. (I am assuming you are talking about guests and not roommates or spouse, in which case it's a whole other issue.) But if it's guests, there is a current fad that cooking has to be a shared party event (vd any episode of "House Hunters" on HGTV). It doesn't. Run your kitchen as you want.

I often heard the family story from my mother's childhood of a rooster intended for the dinner table---his name was Goliath---but unfortunately he fell down the privy and could not be rescued. I expect that poor Goliath might have preferred his original destiny.

Treasure Island carries small liqueur glasses made of chocolate so that you can drink a toast in a nice cordial and then eat the glass. A fun touch after your liquor-infused cake (which, if you can't buy one, could easily be made---any chocolate cake, two layers, each layer infused with the liquor of your choice, layers put together with a bag of frozen red raspberries passed through blender or Cuisinart with a little sugar, top layer covered with whipped cream, a little bittersweet chocolate shaved with potato peeler to make curls on top of cream, et, voila).

1) Frozen red raspberries (I eat them on cereal all year). 2) Truffle Brownie Mix. 3) Frozen broccoli flowerets. 3) Low-sodium Marinara Sauce, the best single low-salt product I know of anywhere, very flavorful but unbelievably low in Na. 4) Frozen Apple Blossoms. 5) Latin Style Black Bean Soup (in carton).

I would suggest that you eat the chicken by holding a fork in one hand and a bottle of Chipotle flavor Tabasco in the other.

When I googled this topicI found someone making Hamine Eggs in the slow cooker (makes sense) so the method is being used in the real world.

I am intrigued by this and wonder if anyone on CH has personal experience with it, maybe from family or from residence abroad. In "A Book of Middle Eastern Food" Claudia Rosen tells how to make Hamine Eggs by cooking eggs in the shell (with onion skins in the water for color) gently for 6 hours or overnight. "This lengthy cooking produces deliciously creamy eggs, the yolks very creamy, the flavor exciting and delicate, the whites colored golden by the onion skins...". She adds that the method can be modernized by cooking in a pressure cooker for 90 minutes. This seems to go against everything we believe about egg cooking---I would have thought that cooking an egg for six hours would result in a golf ball. Can anyone comment from experience?