Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

Sad to say but a lot of those reasons that shopping in Italy is so great (helpful vendors who give unsolicited advice) would be taken offensively by American shoppers. I did my time in Italy and loved and experienced everything stated above but when I got back to the US I realized that the way people grocery shop is usually so hurried it's hard to appreciate all of that.

To tone down the "artificialness" of cake mixes, I used melted butter instead of oil. But otherwise I have no problems with cake mix. Yes, most of can bake cakes from scratch but sometimes getting something tasty with only having to dump and stir is refreshing in itself. Duncan Hines is my favorite brand.

I do draw the line at canned frostings. They remind me of too much of just pure shortening out of the can. And the boxed cake mixes are usually so sweet they can do without the frosting anyways =)

my favorite canned items:

- muir glen tomatoes
- canned or deli beets, pickled or regular. yes freshly roasted tastes better, but boy they can either create a red mess or at least create a lot of trash - gloves, foil, paper towels, etc
- del monte summer crisp corn in a can is sometimes better then the real thing!
- better than boullion chicken stock concentrate

my favorite is (was) their brickle bar. it was a 2 inch x 1 inch x 0.5 inch thick rectangular candy bar filled with almond buttercrunch, covered in semi-sweet chocolate and then coated in chocolate sprinkles. it was only $1 and then later $1.25. when you include the free piece of candy they give you, such a sweet deal.
unfortunately they stopped producing it a few years ago =(

for me nothing beats honey nut cheerios.

to eat it, i fill the bowl with ice cold milk and then shake a single layer of cereal over top--works best with cereal that doesn't sink immediately. I continue shaking the cereal over the top and eating it one layer at a time until the milk is about half-way down the bowl. by that time, the milk is sufficiently sweet to just drink down..or i've been known to put it in my coffee.

I find it a little funny that on one hand, snobs will turn up their noses and proclaim that cheese and seafood is an abomination, but on the other hand, chefs that are creating daring new combinations are all the rage. B and but those same combinations might be weirder than shrimp and cheese.

Nose to tail eating is another new trend, but it's nothing more than what people did when they couldn't afford to waste any bit of the food. Except now it comes at a high price at a trendy restaurant.

The proper thing to do was to peel your potatoes before you mashed them, and finding a skin in there was yukky, but now the peels make rustic "smashed potatoes" trendy and fancy.

People are all over the organic bandwagon and read labels to see what sort of chemicals are in their food, yet others flock to restaurants that are into the idea of molecular gastronomy and using interesting chemicals to do odd things to food. And some of those same chemicals are the same ones people read on labels and get all squeamish about.

There's room for all of it. I feel about food the same way I do about religion. I don't care what condiments you use or how you season your steak, but I don't want you coming over to my table and telling me how I should or shouldn't eat my food. I might be interested in trying your version if you invite me, or if you explain your reasoning, but I tend to get a little hostile if you just come over to my table and sprinkle your seasonings around.

@Karen Resta, if you want to follow the analogy about Chefs being artists, even an artist at some point has to let go the control of his work, if he wants to sell it on the open market. Some sell to Hallmark for greeting cards, and some sell individual paintings for huge amounts of money, but once the artwork is in the hands of the client/purchaser, it is out of the artist's control. So, if I like the painting hanging up-side down, I can do that in my own home. Everyone may think I'm silly and wrong, and have no artistic taste, but the artist can't barge into my home and hang the painting right-side up. Once I have purchased the piece, I can do whatever I want with it, unless there is some contract to the contrary.

Once you have ordered food in a restaurant, and you have been served, it is yours because you are expected to pay for it. If ketchup or cheese or steak sauce or salt is normally available at the restaurant, it isn't unreasonable to ask for those things if you want to add them to your food, whatever it is. It may be weird, and the staff, your dining companions, and other diners may think you're a nutcase, but if you want ketchup on your spagetti, it's your spaghetti.

Some restaurants in some cities can survive with a Chef who runs things his way and refuses to accommodate reasonable requests from customers, because that Chef is truly an artist and the masses will pay a lot and put up with a lot to dine on that Chef's food. It is as much about the experience of dining there, and the celebrity of the chef, and the atmosphere of the place, as it is about the food. That Chef could get away with demanding that diners eat the food "as is" and the restaurant would still be popular with a certain segment of the population.

But in the majority of restaurants in most cities, a restaurant that wasn't willing to accommodate the diners' reasonable requests probably wouldn't last long.

I'm not saying it's right, wrong, cheesy fishy pasta or not. It's just a reality of the business. In a city like New York, a Chef-centric restaurant would do just fine. Where I live, it wouldn't last.

What about lobster thermidor?

Pasternack's recipe is a riff off Greek saganaki - the ONLY Mediterranean seafood dish with cheese I like. Something about the fact that feta cheese doesn't really melt and make the rest of the dish gooey.

That said, there are several English fish pies that use things like cheddar and potatoes and codfish that are yummy on a cold day...

At a restaurant, it seems to me that the policy should be that the customer is always right. Or that should be the policy if you want those customers back again. Maybe you don't want them back, and that's fine, too.
dbcurrie at 1:33AM on 04/01/08

Interesting comment, dbcurrie. It can go both ways (being as it would be a rule that could be broken if it were to only go one way).

If the cooking is for the customer's taste (or "guest" is a more pleasant word) then whomever is at the table should always be right and the cook or chef would have to put themselves into service to make them happy.

In fine dining often however the chef is supposedly dominant in the guest/cook relationship - the chef (let us capitalize that into Chef) becomes the teacher, the arbiter of taste, the Artist(e).

This is not only because of chef's/cook's egos - it is also because guests like it. There is something about the theatre of being sublimated into the artist-chefs' world, to follow their wondrous lead, that many people enjoy.

Having said that, it is however different in various fine-dining mondes. In restaurants that are open to the public who have deep enough pockets to pay for the experience, the chef will be Artiste and often will refuse to accommodate tastes, as his food is to be understood as an phenomenal artistic experience.

In private fine-dining mondes, deep-pocket no-public admitted places such as the private dining rooms in clubs and the businesses that can afford to have them, the guest's taste will always be accommodated, the chef's ego sublimated to whatever it takes to woo them in their own way rather than in the chef's own way. Taste, being understood to be a highly subjective intensely personal thing, is allowed to be entirely so. One babies one's guests to ensure their pleasure.

Ha ha! Slightly off-topic but I've wanted to say that since reading one of AB's contentious commentaries on the fabulousness of restaurant chefs vs. corporate chefs.

Of course usually the corporate chefs at the top make a hell of a lot more money and don't even have to work weird hours and take to drinking like fishes.

(End rant.)

I'm off to invent a pasta recipe with cheese and fish. :)