Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

I'm a shameless foodie and love to cook. I've also lost 55 pounds after a lifetime of chub. I really started to lose the weight after I started cooking for myself and stopped taking advantage of the copious quantities of amazing menus stuffed into my NYC apartment's letterbox. (I now live in the burbs.)

The two main keys for being healthy while eating great food for me were:

1) Start with the vegetables. Most people plan meals around the meat/protein or the starch. I start by thinking, "what veg do I want to eat?" and then think what other things would go well with them. Vegetables bulk everything up - a handful of broccoli thrown into the pasta water during the last 2 mins of cooking; roasted butternut squash in my bulgur and roasted chicken salad. Etc.

2) Go for strong-flavored ingredients. You don't need much cheese if it's a tangy blue, or sharp Cheddar or fruity Parmesan. Also, you DO need a little oil - I use extra-virgin olive oil on nearly everything. There is a world of difference between using none (or PAM) and using even 1 tsp. Especially if you're using any kind of spice or even basic seasoning, the oil is what transports the flavors around the dish.

Oleana in Cambridge is a blissful retreat. Ana Sortun's cuisine is Turkish/middle Eastern influenced, and the food is just incredible. The restaurant itself is in a very pretty area, and the interior is intimate without being stuffy. Honestly one of the best restaurants I've been to in a long time.

My fondest childhood memory is a bittersweet one; it's for a pie that I wouldn't let myself love, yet would give anything to eat now.

Growing up in London in the '70s, my palate was shaped by a thrifty mum who, despite not having a very large household budget at all, was a voracious and experimental cook. Robert Carrier, Elizabeth David, Jane Grigson and even the Galloping Gourmet were all influences and I enjoyed many a brave experiment in budget gastronomy.

It was when company came that she really pushed the boat out. Her favorite dish to make – and the real indicator that I was going to have a great night as the people coming to dinner were clearly our favorite friends who warranted this dish – was her fish pie. It probably cost more to cook than the weekly budget pushed together, but she’d go to Steve Hatt the fishmonger and get a selection of what was freshest. There would always be some smoked haddock in there.

A rich, tomatoey sauce, plus the unctuousness of a cheesy béchamel combined under the perfect mashed-potato crust; yet therein lay the problem. The inevitable result of tomato and cheese sauce combined was an undeniably curdled appearance. The taste was, to everyone’s declaration, sublime. I just couldn’t get over the fact that it looked like sick.

I would give anything to try that again; sadly, I live 3,500 miles away now, and my mother has moved on to farther-away culinary lands and so it will likely never be made by her hands again. Mummy, I’m sorry I wouldn’t eat it. I’m sure it was delicious.

Maybe Martha is an Anglophile? We Brits pronounce the H in herbs. I can't bring myself to do otherwise, and my husband thinks it's awfully cute. I've mostly gone the way of tomAYtoe, though not when I'm on the phone with my mother, heaven forbid.

As for "ahn-deeve," it was someone on Chopped, that was one of the ingredients the other night.

I think someone on the boards railed against "bleu" cheese the other week. I just find it difficult talking about food (and I kind of have to, it's my job!) when I'm not sure, even after nine years of living in the US, how to pronounce stuff. No consistency between Americanizing things and pronouncing them in their natural languages!

If you go just one place, go to Elizabeth on 37th. I had one of the best experiences of my entire gastrolife there, and that's saying something. The building itself is fascinating - take a walk around first to look at the troughs of interesting herbs and greens growing in the gardens. The interior is an old Victorian house, not too fusty but not incongruously modernized either. (Love the bathrooms!)

I went there with my mother, and we instantly knew that asking our sommelier to pair wines would be a good idea. The food was already extremely good - definitely Southern in its roots, but with inspired takes. But the wine - with pairings that surprised us - really transformed everything. A sneaky top-up pour was often given, which was a nice little fillip. We were expecting to see quite a hefty wine tab at the end, but no glass was more than $13, and we tasted some truly special things.

We were given a salad in between our appetizers and entrees. "Great, a sald," we thought, and took a forkful each. Then we realized that all kinds of ridiculous things were going on in our mouths - things we'd never tasted before. Our waitress came over and gave us a quick lesson on what was what - mind you, this is my mother and I, two English women who have eaten out all around the world and grow our own veggies - and we learned about many herbs and leaves that we'd either never heard of, or certainly wouldn't have considered eating in a salad. A while later she came back to our table with a handful of other herbs she'd picked and washed jsut for us to try.

At the end of the meal, the sommelier gave us a bottle of wine to take back to our hotel - a rep from a vineyard was in earlier, tasting it, and had left a case. They wanted to know what we thought!

I rarely rant and rave about the brilliance of any restaurant, knowing that in many cases, one person's amazing experience might be another thing entirely for another person. But in the gorgeous Savannah, when you will probably stumble across a few sub-par meals if you follow popular recommendations, I truly urge you to give this place a try.

Actually, dbcurrie, rereading your suggestion - would you be able to identify what kind of sherry it was? Was it a dry or cream one, would you say? I used a little Tio Pepe fino in mine, but probably not enough to really impact the flavor. Love the shotglass idea!

It's actually the cracked stuff, not the whole pearls - which is the stuff I'd intended to buy! I'm not confident it can/should be cooked in exactly the same way as the whole grains, that the (delicious, thank you!) recipes above use. It looks a lot like bulghur, so I guess I could just look up recipes for that...