Supperly Mobile: I come from peasant stock. The kind that makes good soup.

The Just War: Good news from the Penzeys Spices Harvest 1999 Catalog of Seasonings:

The quick resolution of the conflict in Kosovo seems to have averted the anticipated sage shortage.

Support Our Sponsors: I'll Shoot Anyone Who Tells Me This Isn't Butter, And Then Myself!

Cholly's just back from Los Angeles, and the big news in the LA Weekly seemed to be cosmetic surgery, which takes up as much space as the Web and sex combined in San Francisco papers: thirty large ads before the movie listings. Breast implant before-and-after shots, skin abrasion, nose breaking, bone scraping, hair reshaping, wrinkle stuffing, lip puffing, liposuction, hard questions ("Incision - Underarm vs. Nipple Vs. Bellybutton?"), and one thing so awful I don't even know what it is and I don't think I want to, either:

This is the most disturbing mystery I've wanted to keep mysterious since reading the conclusion of Chinese Gastronomy's entry on "live monkey brain of Kwangtung":

"Any sauce?" we asked. He just shrugged. "The usual soy sauce and ginger." He went on to the description of another small horror called "Three Peeps" -- a descriptive name which requires no further elucidation. It was served with the same sauce.

The Miracle of Digestion: I've finally finished off the large bag of Vietnamese coffee I was given a couple of months ago, whose distinctive Vietnamesisity was that the beans had been roasted in butter.

It's tempting to say that the odor while brewing was unimaginable, but in fact it was pretty much exactly what you'd imagine except more intense. I'm just sorry I never got around to trying a mug with one of my other favorite treats, microwave popcorn dredged in Dutch cocoa powder, for the complete colonial experience.

The Miracle of Digestion (via Cardhouse): What finer way to celebrate Halloween than with a prepared foods professional convention?

• "Vodka Revitaliser combines premium vodka (4% by volume) with the stimulating properties of glucose, taurine and caffeine"
• "organic egg liqueur" (in vibrant yolk-yellow!)
• "'Cannabium' drink contains mineral water, caffeine and hempseed extract with a maximum of 0.3% THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), the chief intoxicant in marijuana"
• "Carbonated yogurt provides a light tingle on the tongue," courtesy of Brigham Young University
• "Alcoholic sorbets in the Freaky ice line include whisky & cola, rum & cola, cocktail, and vodka & energy"

Spinach: Eat what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.

The Passable Kingdom

Mares eat oats
and does eat mares
and little lambs eat those does.
A kid'll eat little lambs,
wouldn't you?

Our motto

"That is what he liked, what most of us really like: to eat and drink in disorder and endlessly in continuous ingestion, alternating a little bite here and a little swallow there, all day long."

Fudger Rotunda

I don't understand why some of the same Yankees who'll gladly order plaintains with black bean sauce from an upscale Caribbean restaurant nevertheless mock our more luscious domestic equivalent, peanut butter and banana sandwiches. But when even the English sneer at a food, my mind goes suspicious.... (link via LinkMachineGo)

(Admission: I'm upwardly mobilized enough to prefer grilled [margarine on the outside and sandwich on the skillet] to fried, to usually choose plain bread or toast or bagel over grilled, and to slice-and-tile rather than mush [allowing for interstitial fragments of chocolate].)

Beef to the heel

The most successful cult of the new millenium explains how to maintain an illusion of extravagant indulgence, maximize damage to the world at large, and still achieve the ultimate goal of self-starvation.

And that seems appropriate enough.

And I can well believe that it attracts the same sort of people who devote limitless funds and non-renewable resources towards ever more closely approximating a pad of paper.

But I must shake my head (I have a tremor) at the selfishness of it all: Me, me, me. Aren't there other people to consider?

Sure, we got rid of the estate tax, but do we really want our children to inherit our awful regime of fad malnourishments and exercise machines? Do we really want to allow any competitive advantage to sexy, wiry convicts and migrant labor?

It stands to reason that if you give a big, strong, bored, and lazy animal unlimited access to appealing food, it'll get fat. So if you want to stop the plague of obesity, stop it at the root.

You know, people often ask me, "Cholly," (they call me Cholly, I don't know why) "given your indolence and deliciously varied gluttony, how do you stay so svelte?"

And I answer, "Millie," (I like to call people Millie) "it's on account of smoking, boozing, and traumatizing can precipitate the premature birth of an underweight infant with metabolic inefficiencies and a damaged immune system."

By simply following a few simple principles like those (all easily found [frequent repetition, large typeface, plenty of margin] in my series, The Unwed Teenage Mother Way To a Thinner Tomorrow), you can save a child's self-esteem.

More to the point, your child's self-esteem.

Can you afford not to?