Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

Even with all the amendments, I'd still rather have beef. Turkey has never been my favorite food.

Your recipe was a serendipidous find for us. I had a couple of double thick, stuffing size pork chops thawing for tonight's dinner and was wondering what to do with them that would be new and exciting. Meat I had, mushrooms I had, a red onion rather than shallots, our own dried pears from our own pear tree. I chopped all this up and the other requisite ingredients and we had a feast! One of those memorable meals that we will eat again and again. Thanks for a great meal! (ps: what's the other half of the olive oil for?)

PS: I have eaten in France, Italy, Greece, Lebanon, Egypt, Germany, Bangkok and god knows how many other places and tips were expected everywhere

How do you convince a veteran to take a job that involves none of the perks of the working world. You work long long hours for barely enough pay to keep a shirt on your back (if you're lucky). You are always at the mercy not just of the weather, but of the bank that is going to loan you money for seed, or the new tractor. This same bank generally owns the mortgage on your land, and when you fall on lean times, as farmers are wont to do, will foreclose on you without mercy. No one is going to fill in for you if you are injured or ill. No one is going to get up at 4am to make sure the cows get milked if you don't do it. 10,000 new farmers? It would be my guess you'd be lucky to find 10 people nutty enough to want this kind of life, much less 10,000.

Let's get serious and find out what an "organic" chicken is. "Free Range", "certified humanely raised", "hormone free", even "organic" itself is just so much labeling bullshit. I quit eating chicken for many years because it all tasted foul (pun intended). It was only when I discovered an independent grower who raised birds that were treated humanely, that were hormone free, that were free to roam, that were fed on organic feed and the goodies that they could scavenge from their "range" that I found a chicken that was worth eating. Its meat did not smell like a chemical bath nor a mud pie. Its color was almost white rather than fatty yellow. The breasts were firm rather than mushy, and the day-old legs and thighs did not smell rancid or funky. In fact, it was the chicken that we raised when I was a kid. I suggest to anyone who would like to taste a real chicken to raise them themselves, but, barring that, to spend some time on line finding a local grower who does just that. The price will be high, but the chicken will be worth paying money for.

I have no idea what you are talking about, not having had the good grace to read your earlier writings, but having been a practicing (and published) writer, my suggestions would be: a) let it all hang out; b) damn the consequences. If all you want to write is "pretty kitty" stories, then I won't want to read you and neither will 99 percent of your audience. Get tough and stay tough!

Cooked celery

Occhi di mare , , , a sicilian sea creature . . . horrible and horribly salty

Bones give meat foods heft and succulence. Without them, meat is just a convenient paste formed into patties of various hefts (ah, sirloin steak!) and chewiness (ahh, rubber chicken!) . A piece of meat on the bone tastes better and those of us who love to cook recognize that fact and do our finest work with something which has bones. Boneless things are, well, spineless and insipid, in structure as in taste.

When I was a kid I worked in a lumberyard and we had an old German carpenter who was building for us. He was up and down ladders all day, sawing, roofing, nailing. He easily outworked me (ahh, the ennui of youth), and his lunch was invariable: homemade biscuits slathered with bacon grease. He lived into his nineties and worked until the last day of his life. He gave me this recipe for firestarters: liquefy a coffee tine of bacon grease. Stuff in as many dry corncobs as the can will hold and let them marinate on top of the woodstove overnight. Pull them from the can and stick them in a snowdrift until they're hard, then use them to start the wood fire on cold winter mornings when you don't want to wait for it to catch.

SALT! A great idea! I have a couple of cast iron pans in need of reseasoning. Great idea.

McD's double cheeseburger and large fries. Great to stuff a stomach, but doesn't do much for the heart.