Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

I know the easy pitfall of "what was the matter with me before" when someone compliments weight loss. I don't know about you, but it was another way for me to beat myself up and self-shame. It took me a while before I could understand that "you look great" was usually shorthand for "I know you accomplished something that wasn't easy, and I want to acknowledge your success".

Oh--and congratulations! I know you accomplished something that wasn't easy. :)

These are extraordinarily easy to grow and absolutely delicious to eat straight from the vine--even the family poodle thought so. She would routinely chomp away at any beans she could get so the bottom half of our plants were generally bare.

If this is the same guy that reviewed Cavalli's under the name "Jay J." (what are the odds there would be two such similar monikers related to Campania's), then I would just like to thank him and point out that he's a class act. Thanks to his very positive review, I discovered my go-to pizza (despite the fact that I live a good 30 minutes away) and the VPN movement.

Pumpkin Pie Brûlée

It combines my two favorite desserts. :)

pickled sour mustard greens...just like Mom makes

yum.

This place also used to make the best mung-bean-filled sesame balls I've ever had. I haven't seen them there in a while, but I'm hoping that's just about my bad luck and poor timing.

That literally just made me tear up a little.

I'm sorry, but isn't a bit patronizing to think that just because these people came from a more rural setting that we need to infantilize them and assume that they had no clue what they were doing? Yes, I find these commercials more than a bit ridiculous and, outside of using them for a very odd foreign-food-ketchup-crave in the mid eighties, have never been the biggest fan of the fast food restaurant that they're shilling. But really? "Raping them by distorting cultures to sell a product"? I don't think these people were kidnapped and forced to be in these commercials. They seemed willing, and I'd imagine that they were paid. Just because they're rural doesn't mean they're idiots. I know that in the case of the village in Chiang Mai province, they live in a province that is a center of tourism within easy reach of the largest metropolis in the north. Having family still choosing to live in the more agriculturally-focused bits of the area, I have to say that there's something distasteful and condescending about this rhetoric of ignorance that purports to defend their purity as if they were children.

Respect their culture if you will. See the absurdity in how they're being portrayed. But to wag a finger at the corporations for treating their cultural heritage while purporting to defend them by falling for these ridiculous stereotypes of the easily-fooled country mouse is just as painful to read and look at. I say counter-program, find out about the people and regions as they actually are, learn about their food, and realize that tv fakery is...well, fakery. How often have you seen the tv or movie portrayal of a city that you've been to or lived in and thought "it's nothing like that"? Well, it happens everywhere.

Pumpkin pie brulee, please :)