1. The "days without eating in a restaurant" counter now stands at 202, and I'm becoming increasingly sure that it will make it a full year without any challenge. The "days without takeout" stands at 33.

My stat block is increasingly pointless, but I've kept this far so I might as well keep rolling with it until the end of 2020.

Restaurant Stats ( Read more... )

North Dakota was not a hot spot of ethnic dining when I was growing up. There was one decent Mexican place and an acceptable Chinese-American place that started out across the river in East Grand Forks and moved into Grand Forks proper after the flood. And... that was about it while I lived there. The Onion back in 2003 made fun of the state as a ( Read more... )

As noted last week, our weekday breakfasts when I was growing up had little variety, but the weekends mixed it up. Eggs & toast were popular options, but the real excitement was the rarer occasions when we had either french toast or waffles. Weirdly, although my mother was opposed to single purpose kitchen devices, she had specific devices for both ( Read more... )

As I alluded to recently, M's favorite recipe is the Pan-grilled Sea Scallops from 660 Curries by Raghavan Iyer. I mark recipes I've made with post-it notes, and the post-it note for this recipe says "OMG! Sauce is so good!" This is one of the few recipes that M ever requests when I ask what she wants for dinner.

Pan-Grilled Sea Scallops1 pound ( Read more... )

My mother cooked almost every night, and baked bread regularly. However, as someone who was more than usually nutrition conscious it didn't feel like she fed us a lot of desserts. We ate ice cream with some regularity, because everyone in my family loves ice cream. There very occasionally chocolate bars and other store bought desserts, but even ( Read more... )

1. The "days without takeout" reset at 29 days and now stands at 5. The "days without eating in a restaurant" counter now stands at 174 ( Read more... )

First: My parents have added commentary to the taco postMy family did not keep kosher when I was growing up. Since my father's family also had not kept kosher when he was growing up, this isn't greatly surprising, but even if we had been so inclined there were so few Jews in North Dakota that any kosher meat had to come from the Twin Cities five ( Read more... )

Anything that was leftover from my mother's flank steak made fantastic sandwiches with mustard and cheese. Just about the only sandwich I liked more when was I made the same sandwich with leftover meatloaf ( Read more... )

It's Memorial Day weekend, which is the unofficial beginning of the grilling season in the United States. Grilling is often seen as a stereotypically masculine activity. Even in homes where women do much of the cooking, men are often the ones firing up the grill. That was not the case in my childhood home, where Mom did 100% of the cooking, ( Read more... )

As I mentioned last time, my childhood home backed up on a field. Most years that field was planted in some variant of wheat, which is the major cash crop by far in North Dakota. Only once can I recall that it was planted in potatoes, which were another big crop when I was a kid. The year with the potatoes led to the discovery of my one (and so far ( Read more... )