Oyster, Shitake, Baby Portobella, and Button mushroom ragout over broiled polenta with crumbled goat cheese on top, served with wilted spinach and cherry tomatoes. (Saw a recipe in Everyday Food and modified it.) I'm chilling with a nice glass of wine at the moment... In a minute I'm going to get up and reheat the last two slices of apple pie and serve it with some vanilla Häagen-Dazs. As a thank you for the tomatoes I've been bringing her (I'm still producing about a pound a day... when will the insanity end?) my non-gardening neighbor surprised us with a pie made with the apples from the tree in her yard. (Cool tree! Two trees grafted together so in the spring it blooms pink and white at the same time!) Life is good!

Uhh, well, if you eat hot dogs, chances are you've eaten most of the things on that list, LOL! But seriously, I'd definitely draw the line at some of those things...assuming I knew what they were before I tried them. If they were being served to me, as a guest, I guess I'd buck up and eat them! Or at least try.... Looking at it objectively, if he finds all of those foods "weird and disgusting", Ray must have been raised at McDonald's! However, I suppose many of the things listed are probably weird to people (or generations, maybe?) who don't really know anymore where food comes from, or how to eat well! I'm sure poverty, and simple "use it up" philosophy made for lots of "interesting" recipes in every culture, too. I have tried many of the more "westerly" foods mentioned. Blood pudding is just blood sausage - you can buy it at any supermarket (though the more commercial varieties are usually way oversalted, I find). I admit, probably a pretty hard sell to generations raised on fast food and products from M&M Meats! A lot depends on what you were exposed to as a kid, and how adventuresome you are in later life. (We haven't travelled extensively, but it's sure depressing to hear about tourists in Milan asking for directions to the nearest McDonald's, LOL!) Crisps are just potato chips. Right here at home, Hostess used to produce some pretty bizarre "flavored crisps" - ketchup, dill pickle, bacon... There was some especially odd combination I can't recall right now, too. Tongue, cooked for sandwiches, and ox-tail soup are both delicious. Anyone of middle European extraction is probably familiar wiht head cheese; I never ate it as a kid, though my mom made it for my dad and sister, and they ate it with vinegar...which made me cringe at the time. Escargot, truffles, borsht, seafood - delicious! "Boudin" is just a generic term for sausage. Schmaltz is just chicken fat, used for flavorful cooking, in the same way that some people might use bacon grease. My brother-in-law, from Kansas, eats some of the odd things on that list - rattlesnake, frogs' legs (from huge bullfrogs), scrapple, Krispy Kreme doughnuts...ooops, maybe the last one's not on that list! Scrapple is pretty much like head cheese but with oat meal added - again, I declined to try it when my mom made a batch for him years ago! He ate it fried, which would make it a little more palatable, I think. Well, all cheese is based on mold, so blue cheese and roquefort are only a little weirder and more disgusting than the norm. Actually, what I find weird and disgusting is that tasteless stuff from the supermarket! Yeah, I guess there's no visible mold on it, or a funky crust that someone may find nasty, but it tastes of...absolutely nothing. Of course on the topic of strange foods, one always has to consider where eggs come from, LOL! Have you heard of the live food restaurants in the far east? DH's brother is an executive whose company markets products to the far east. Anyway, back before he became the president (and could get subordinates to do this kind of thing!), he used to have to do a lot of dinners with clients. Apparently, Korea is/was a very macho sort of culture for doing business, so he'd be taken to restaurants that featured live food - live fish or snakes in the soup, for example. And to get a sale, I guess you had to make a good "manly" impression....gulp. I don't know how popular this sort of thing was in the general culture, but it does exist.

Okay -- cooking for one. I just put all this in one skillet: 1 sautee onions, a little red pepper, some steamed cubed butternut squash, some soaked white beans, salt and when all was kind of done, threw some raw baby kale & sliced grape tomatoes on top and put the lid on. Meanwhile -- 3 eggs with a teeny bit of milk, turmeric powder & pepper, mixed up and on low fire a la scrambled. When it was cooked I put it on top of the skillet stuff and then put it all in a bowl and ate alone. It was just everything I had in the refrigerator. I wish I could practice on some company dish -- a real dish. I found this very good but would I serve it to anybody? I feel very challenged about cooking for friends and I have done it often.

Rigitoni with meat sauce, garden salad, long crusty french log, real butter (always). I put some apples in the oven with butter, cinnamon, and brown sugar right before dinner so that was dessert. The kids have been asking for french toast so tomorrows dinner/supper will be french toast, bacon, and a small fruit salad. Tim doesn't eat french toast or bacon so I'll surprise him with a veggie and cheese omelet.