Forest Street Kitchen

I had originally set out to write about blogs I love on Fridays during the month of December, but that is turning out to be far more difficult than one might have imagined. First of all, many of the blogs I like are written by people I have come to consider friends, and I like them for different reasons. Picking three more of them and not picking others would just be an adult, blogging version of excluding people on the playground. Some of the blogs I adore don’t have much, if anything, to do with food. That might be upsetting to folks who come here looking for foodie talk and would be alarmed by my politics and/or religious views. Finally, as my friend claudia kindly and gently pointed out (I will tell you, since I’m already talking about her, that hers is a blog I love) that the first “blog” I wrote about, “One for the Table,” isn’t even really a blog.

For all of those reasons, and the fact that I am still not exactly in the pink of health, I am simply going to tell you five things about food that I experienced or thought about today.

1. I had a buffet lunch today at which “cordon bleu” halves were served garnished with what appeared to be straw. Furthermore, the chicken resembled nothing as much as chicken nugget, and I believe that the Swiss cheese was “processed Swiss cheese food.” The chicken was abominable, and I still haven’t figured out the straw, unless it was a Christmas thing - the little Cordon Bleu asleep in the hay? (Edited to add: my husband has pointed out the strong resemblance between the putative Cordon Bleu and the mythical Hamwinkie made famous by Joel McHale of “The Soup.”)
2. Coffee is bad almost everywhere except in actual coffee shops and in my own house and the homes of my friends who really care about coffee. It usually tastes, as my father says, like someone melted a brown crayon in a large pot of hot water.
3. At a potluck the other night, someone brought pickle spears wrapped in mayonnaise and then in ham, cut into bite-sized pieces. That’s all I have to say about that.
4. Some things just don’t hold up well on a buffet, and probably shouldn’t be served that way no matter how delicious the original recipe. These include greens with dressing, which become a bowl of wet, limp, flavored greens. Nuts or croutons in dressing or sauce; the croutons absorb the liquid and become hunks-o-sponge, and the nuts lose all of their crispness and taste like odd, unidentifiable bits of offal that fell accidentally into the salad.
5. If your meringue could be used as Vibram foam soles in your grandmother’s “sensible” shoes, you would do better to make a different kind of pie. No one should ever have to struggle to remove meringue from their fork, upper plate or tongue.