Tag: restaurant

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Chinese New Year Starts Next Week

Next week is the Chinese New Year. It is the biggest holiday for people in China and many Asian countries, and also for people who live in many big U.S. cities that have their own Chinatown districts. I have been to Chinatown in San Francisco, Oakland and Washington, DC. Each one is a treasure trove of great food at authentic Chinese restaurants, natural medicine shops and imported gift items.

The cities have big parades, firecrackers, and many traditions and superstitions that everyone must honor and observe. The one that I like is you cannot sweep your house on New Year’s Day or you will be sweeping all the good fortune for the coming year out of your door and you will not have good fortune.

Next year will be the Chinese Year of the Water Snake. I don’t know very much about what birth years are included in the Year of the Snake, but I will try to look them up and see what calendar sign is related to my own birthday. You should do the same!

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What On Earth is Celery Root?

I just watched a Paula Dean cooking show and she had a guest on the show who brought out a thing called celery root. I have never in my life seen anything that looks like that, and this guy claims that we can all buy it at our local grocery stores. I seriously doubt that, but maybe it is something that I have just never noticed before. So next time I go shopping I will be asking the produce manager for celery root and see if they have it around here.

He says you have to peel the celery root and that causes a lot of waste. The idea of wasting a lot of food bothers me, so that is Strike One against buying celery root. After you peel it and make sure everything you cut into is thoroughly clean, you slice it into big chunks and boil it in water on the stove top. After you cook it for 20 -30 minutes, you have to push it through a hand tool called a ricer. That is Strike Two – I don’t have a ricer and I can’t think of anything that I might have in the kitchen tool drawer that would be a good substitute.

Then he adds the cooked and riced celery root into a big pot of boiled but drained white potatoes. Mixing them together with some butter and whole milk, and you have a big pot of tasty mashed potatoes.

I don’t think all that extra work is worth it for me to make this in my own kitchen. If someone has a restaurant and they want to do this and put it on the menu, I’ll be happy to order it at least once and try it. But in my kitchen, I don’t feel the need to add celery root to my mashed potatoes. I’ll do fine with my own way of making that.

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Different Pizza Toppings

As a kid, we had pizza a lot. My mom probably ordered pizza for the family every Friday night through our whole childhood. She almost always would order pizza from Pizza Hut, and she would order one pepperoni every time, and a second one with different toppings depending on how adventurous she was feeling that night. I think her favorite was probably sausage and mushroom, but she also liked canadian bacon with pineapple and a vegetarian topping with extra black olives.

Nowadays we have a lot more pizza places to order from and a lot of local restaurants are in the pizza making game, with specialties like brick oven baked and hand tossed dough and toppings that can be anything from spinach and garlic to shrimp to barbecued chicken.

I still like the good old standby pepperoni pizza – especially if this is from a new pizza place and I’m trying it for the first time. If they do OK with the pepperoni, I will have more confidence trying a different topping next time I visit that place.

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Everything is Fried

One of the problems with getting good food in the South is that they sure love to fry everything. When you are trying to stick to a heart healthy diet or if you cannot eat a lot of fried foods because of gall bladder issues, eating out in a restaurant can become a real challenge for finding healthy foods. Even the Chinese food is a Southern version and almost everything on the Chinese take out menu is fried. I almost never use my frying pan at home any more. I would much rather broil or grill my meats and either boil or nuke the vegetables.