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I thought I hated vegetables when I was a kid their were either canned, steamed, or simmered to oblivion and never seasoned or incorporated into other dishes.  As an adult, I have learned to cook with vegetables and discovered the miracle of oven roasting, and it turns out they are good.

I have brought back a lot of wine from a lot of places.  I frequently bring back jams, honey, or maple syrup.  My favorite is probably the Virginia ham, though.

Ooh, I might have to do that.  My husband only likes blueberry or pecan, two pies that I really don’t care about and get bored of very quickly.  Sometimes I want a dang apple or pumpkin pie!

I have an old Betty Crocker cookbook. Although it has nightmarish salads and a lot of molded foods, it actually has some great staples for things like buttermilk pancakes and chocolate chip cookies.  It also has a version of Hollandiase sauce that is shockingly easy and better than you get in most restaurants.

As someone born and raised in America, I agree with you about the repulsiveness of so much sweet and savory stuff. The worst is sugary meat like candied bacon or sugary ham. It just tastes wrong to me on a primal level.

If we worked together, we could make either the best or the worst popovers ever.

Mine pop, but I cannot get them to release from the pan.

Croissants, ugh!  I can never get the lamination right.

I have never understood the fuss over pie crust. It always works for me. This is my favorite recipe. It tastes good and is more forgiving than most

Buttercream frosting.  I just can’t get the texture right.  It is one of the very few things that I will just give up and buy.

This!  I am probably an above average cook, and I make a variety of breads, by my homemade pizza dough just will not behave itself, and the toppings always end up leaving it soggy.

Yeah, it sounds like the allergy is so severe that it could be something like the bread came from a bakery that uses milk products in the bread and contamination occurred there.

That argument is bullshit.  There are plenty of places in the world where people work in restaurants and aren’t exploited.  If a system is based on exploiting the most vulnerable, the system doesn’t deserve to be saved.

I have a hard time crying for the restaurants.  For decades, their business model was based on being as exploitative of employees as they possibly could be.  It is rare that one even offers regular hours.  The gig economy sucks, but if you are going to work for no benefits and no chance of promotion, you might as well…

I agree completely. I hate the pickle-batter separation of spears. The best one are when they use the ridge-cut chips (like the ones in the photo). All that surface area really holds the batter.

Chips.  Non-negotiable.  Spears don’t have a good texture.  I have learned to ask if a menu doesn’t specify chips or spears because spears are always bad.

School free/discounted lunch programs are so shameful that kids will decide to go hungry rather than participate in front of their peers.  In my school, you got a brightly colored ticket and had to stand in a separate line.  In some schools, the kids aren’t even given the same food.

I grew up poor. Not surprisingly, so did my parents. I remember on the first day of school every year being given the form for my parents to fill out to get me free or discounted lunch. I never took it home because I inherently understood the shame. Recently I had a conversation with my mom and she said that she knew…

The version(C rations) given to soldiers during Vietnam is how my dad started smoking. I wonder what they are currently getting soldiers addicted to.