Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

Roast beef, mashed potatoes with pan gravy, sauteed spinach. Doesn't get more home-y than that for me.

The "Reverse Root Beer Float" at Tramonto's Steak and Seafood in Wheeling, IL: House-made cream soda, house-made root beer ice cream, beignet "French fries" with a cherry puree "ketchup". Delicious!

My first cookbook was my mother's beaten-up, dogeared copy of The Joy of Cooking (with various bits of paper with her recipes tucked between the pages). I think the edition was from circa 1966 or so.

I've never had a bacon dish that I didn't like! Well, OK, the bacon old fashioned was a little iffy, but that's more because I'm not a fan of bourbon :-)

This is bizarre and seventies, but I have a weakness for rumaki :-) Maybe it's the bacon?

It's a bit atypical, but I love Dynamite Springs Soda Company at the Grayslake (IL) Farmers Market. They contract out their recipes to small local bottlers and sell 7 oz. glass bottles of soda.

"Is that...durian I taste?"

"G3"
"You sank my Battle Brat!"

:-)

A warm summer night, marinated skirt steak grilled to perfection, served on a delicious whole-wheat flour tortilla, with just the right amount of veggies, salsa, and crema. So good,

The perfect artisan pastrami on hand-crafted rye with house-made mustard.

Wow. I figured we'd give this show a shot but I can say it won't be going on our Tivo's season pass list. What annoyed me the most? Where to begin? We had White's sage aphorisms delivered in a somber Masterpiece-Theatre-esque setting, we had the usual reality show casting, we had the horrible editing (it's pretty dramatic when your kitchen starts falling apart, but shouldn't why that happened and the consequences thereof at least have been mentioned later?), we had cryptic and rather useless judgments being passed on people's food by White...

Yeah, about fifteen minutes in I reminded myself that NBC's last restaurant-based reality show was The Restaurant, and my impression was that they took what they learned from that and married it to the bluster and self-aggrandizement of The Apprentice and created this turkey.

In short: hated it, won't watch it again.

My favorite way to eat seafood is still sushi; I still need to learn how to make it, though!

I was a sucker early on for Joseph Schmidt Chocolates, brought to us years ago by friends who visited SF.