Eavesdropping + food

[resonant]

1. Who wants to recommend me a great vegetarian cookbook?

2. Overheard and overseen:

Me: "Did you ever think that maybe those concrete type people might be better at sex than we are? Like, we're better at thinking of the scenarios, but they're better at the act itself?"
Spouse: "Maybe. But their relentless focus on the here-and-now will become a problem when the here-and-now becomes the fat-and-bald."



At the coffee shop: "They taste good, but they're ugly. Ugly muffins. But they have to fulfill their muffin destiny by being eaten."

"Pretty people are strange. Have you noticed that?"

Kidlet, running past the sign on the door of the school: "Look! 'Open With Care: Fast-Moving Children.' And we're some of them!"

Me: "Why won't they just give you a job?"
Spouse: "A nice job with health insurance."
Me: "And a pony!"
Spouse: "Dear applicant: We have a pony just for you. Her name is Millicent."

"Oh, wait, you don't like to be called Liz, do you?"
"No. When I was a bartender, people would call me Liz because they were too drunk to say Elizabeth."

At the dollar store:
Cashier (female): "What flavor are you getting?"
Customer (male): "Plain, right? That's all you got, right?"
Cashier: "No, we got onion, and bacon-cheddar, and chipotle, and --"
Customer, reverently: "They got bacon?"
Cashier, to me: "They're like children."

At the coffee shop, no context that I'm able to get: "And I'm like: Are you licking her open sores?"

At the skate park, there are skateboards, scooters, bikes, and one wheelchair. (Not, alas, doing stunts.)

At Pier 39:
Tourist with limited English, pointing to kidlet: "How old?"
Us: "Nine."
Tourist, pointing to daughter: "Twenty-seven! Same height!"

Girl of about two: "My turn! My turn!"
Mother: "Sierra, remember: When you start yelling at strangers, we have to go home."

T-shirt: "Toast. Let it burn."

Older female cop in a parking lot, holding a thirtyish woman gently by the upper arm. I'm wondering what the crime is, when the woman turns to the cop and hugs her.

Guy on cellphone, angrily: "I'm really pissed off! Because I love you! And I love Shannon! And I love Dylan! And ..." He goes on in this vein for quite some time.

At the park: Hippy #1: "I'm gonna, like, take my shirt off now, man."
Hippy #2, with deep stoned sincerity: "You can't do that, man."
Hippy #1: "Why the hell not?"
Hippy #2: "Against the law, man. Health codes and shit, man."

On announcement board at airport: "Delay Reason: Aircraft Delayed."

"I'm staying with Johnny as a mentor. I'm staying with Johnny as a --" shakes fist -- "resource."

In my coffee shop lobby: a bike with a white wicker basket containing a bunch of beets.

Downtown at lunchtime, three guys in construction-type clothing are talking about fishing, and someone recommends some tool and says, "You can get it at Wal-Mart."
Second guy, sharply: "I don't shop at Wal-Mart."
Short silence.
Second guy: "It's a union thing, man, what can I tell you."

At the park, a handful of teenage girls are improvising a rap. The words are uninspiring (lots of stuff about haters), but they're all working together on rhythm: beating on the plastic climbing wall, hitting the monkey bars with sticks, someone chanting a catchphrase.

At Peet's: "I should get some food. I've got cash. Can I get some food?"

"I'm right here! Sizzle down!"

"So the people at Ellora's Cave said, 'We can maintain our principles, or we can stay afloat.'"
"Are they seriously in danger of not staying afloat?"
"The more interesting question is: Ellora's Cave had principles?"

Me: "You're still having to sweep and mop yourself?"
Elizabeth: "Yep." Using the broom for rhythmic punctuation: "I was standing up there in my cap and gown ..." [sweep] "valedictorian ..." [sweep] "college of business ..." [sweep] "and this was not ..." [sweep] "what I had in mind."

"An orange pickup?"
"Well, I think it had been red at one time."

"We eat a lot of poison in our lives. Our livers clean it up for us."

Comments

[misspamela.livejournal.com]

The Vegetarian Meat and Potatoes cookbook is my always go-to cookbook!

veggie cookbook

[laurashapiro.livejournal.com]

Deborah Madison's "Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone". I've had it about a year and have done at least a dozen dishes. It's consistent, creative, and well-written. I've been happy with everything I've made.

Re: veggie cookbook

[funkyreunion.livejournal.com]

I second this one! I've had it for, oh my, at least 7 years, and I love it.

[azephirin.livejournal.com]

I'm a big fan of the New Moosewood Cookbook, by Mollie Katzen.

[riverlight.livejournal.com]

I recently got Laurel's Kitchen (http://www.amazon.com/New-Laurels-Kitchen-Vegetarian-Nutrition/dp/089815166X) as a surprise present from my father, and I love it. It's very much the late-seventies Berkley whole-foods type cookbook, very earnest in a way, convinced that food is not just for nourishing the body but for nourishing the spirit as well, and for building community—but it's beautiful in that way, quite luminous. And (importantly, it is true!) I have enjoyed the recipes I've tried so far.

[crysothemis.livejournal.com]

I always love your overheards.

As for vegetarian cookbooks, I still love the original Greens cookbook by Deborah Madison and Ed Brown. I've made at least half the recipes over the years, and I've never found a dud.

Re: veggie cookbook

[celandineb.livejournal.com]

I third it! It's a good reference, too, when vegetables I don't usually cook turn up in the CSA box...

[tingler.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty fond of "Diet for a Small Planet". The black bean soup recipe rocks and the whole wheat rolls are *amazing*.

Good stuff, Maynard.

[mzcalypso.livejournal.com]

Anna Thomas - The Vegetarian Epicure
Didi Emmons - Vegetarian Planet
Whitecap Books - Simple Vegetarian Recipes (infallible guacamole recipe)
Madhur Jaffrey has a couple of good books, mostly Indian and Eastern foods.

Laurel's Kitchen is good too, and the Moosewood books.

Re: veggie cookbook

[bayleaf.livejournal.com]

Fourth! It's one of the best cookbooks I've ever used, bar none. Every single recipe I've tried has turned out great, plus I really like how it is organized.

[scribblinlenore.livejournal.com]

I got some great recommendations for vegetarian cookbooks a little while back. They're here: http://scribblinlenore.livejournal.com/422474.html

My favorite so far has been The New Moosewood Cookbook. I also really like How To Cook Everything Vegetarian.

[octette]

"So the people at Ellora's Cave said, 'We can maintain our principles, or we can stay afloat.'"
"Are they seriously in danger of not staying afloat?"
"The more interesting question is: Ellora's Cave had principles?"


AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH THAT REALLY IS THE MORE INTERESTING QUESTION

Re: veggie cookbook

[xjestx.livejournal.com]

Fifth! It's the best one on my shelf.

"The Winter Vegetarian" by Darra Goldstein is good too, only, you know, not so much in summer.

[sociofemme.livejournal.com]

I'm a little bit in love with your union-loving construction workers. ♥

[lasultrix.livejournal.com]

Mmm vegetarian cookbook recs! I'm not vegetarian myself, but I do love having vegetarian dishes and it's more difficult to pick up vegetarian recipes from the ether.

I think my favourite is the hug. And the tourist. And I'm scared that somebody would name a child Sierra.

[maygra.livejournal.com]

thirding or 4thing the rec for Moosewood

http://www.moosewoodrestaurant.com/aboutus.html

plus, recipes if you want to give them a shot:

http://www.moosewoodrestaurant.com/recipes_archive.html

[amalthia]

I love your random quotes posts so much.

[schemingreader.livejournal.com]

I have many favorite vegetarian cookbooks. Mollie Katzen wrote the first Moosewood cookbook, but then she also wrote a bunch of Mollie Katzen sequels, and the Moosewood collective wrote another set of sequels without her, and all the recipes in all of those books are awesome. Probably out of the whole family tree of Katzen/Collective cookbooks, the one I would rec most is Moosewood Restaurant New Classics--but it's a difficult choice.

I also like Julie Sahni's Classic Indian Vegetarian and Grain Cooking. If you like Indian food, I mean. She gives good, clear instructions. The rice noodle dishes, the stuffed cauliflower, the beets smothered in their own greens (which we also made a lot with cauliflower) her version of coconut rice, the amazing lentil/broccoli/coconut curry (broccoli stands in for some Indian veggie you can't get here)--so much awesomeness, and she always makes sure you have a pot lid handy because the mustard seeds might spatter. <3

[ecaterin.livejournal.com]

Seconding Laurel's Kitchen.

LK is to vegetarian cooking what The Joy of Cooking is to conventional American fare...in the sense of "all the basics you could ever possibly want in your entire life, you'll never be lost and there's zillions of recipes" not in the sense of "really bland granny cooking" :D

LK is full of vegetarian staples (a ton of different spreads for sammiches, a ton of "put it in the oven" dinners, a great variety of snacks-fer-kids, how-tos for every kind of dried legume, nut, seed or exotic flours) as well as really tasty fun food. It's the vegetarian bible - it'll teach you how to approach vegetarian cooking, and every other vegetarian cook book will work better for you because of it :)

[lorem_ipsum]

Tourist with limited English, pointing to kidlet: "How old?"
Us: "Nine."
Tourist, pointing to daughter: "Twenty-seven! Same height!"

*delurks* I am tempted to ask whether daughter's name was Peregrine Took.

[bibliokat.livejournal.com]

I love your overheards!

Girl of about two: "My turn! My turn!"
Mother: "Sierra, remember: When you start yelling at strangers, we have to go home."

That is a good rule!

Tourist with limited English, pointing to kidlet: "How old?"
Us: "Nine."
Tourist, pointing to daughter: "Twenty-seven! Same height!"

I feel this way about my students sometimes. (They're usually about the same age as your kidlet;)

[myalexandria.livejournal.com]

I have moosewood and laurel's kitchen, and they're good for some basics, but I find them mostly too old-fashioned for my tastes; they seem to have started life as ways to adapt meat-based cooking to non-meat-eating, rather than starting with, you know, vegetables. If you're not going for a specific cuisine like Indian, I'd either work on vegetable and grain dishes from normal cookbooks (I love Patricia Wells' "At Home in Provence" and the Once Upon a Tart cookbook) or maybe look into Isa Chandra Moskowitz's two books (there's a third that's all cupcakes), which I like a lot though so far I've ignored all the things made with tofu (or just made them without tofu). I also make a lot of vegetarian stuff out of this book I have on kitchen witchery -- it's all seasonal and stuff, and the recipes are good, but I'm forgetting the name at the moment.

[tevere.livejournal.com]

Ha! This is a particularly awesome bunch of overheards, especially: "Delay Reason: Aircraft Delayed."

These posts make me miss coffee-shop culture, too. I guess the only thing we have here that's equivalent is attempting to overhear conversations in the immigration line at the airport...

[jimpage363.livejournal.com]

My favorite cookbooks have already been mentioned here, but I did hear of a new one that I am burning to try just because of the name: The Veganomicon.

[maggiebloome.livejournal.com]

"Twenty-seven! Same height!" made me laugh out loud.