Rivka-pretends-she's-well-rounded Meme Part II.

naomikritzer: You live in Baltimore, right? What do you like and dislike about it?

(I visited Baltimore once, for a WorldCon, and had a miserable time and hated the city. So you could talk about how awesome it is and maybe change my opinion.)

From what I've heard, a lot of people came home from that Worldcon with that impression. But I love living in Baltimore.

Baltimore is a nice-sized city, about a million people in the metro area. It's small enough that getting around is not particularly onerous, but big enough to really feel like a city, and to have plenty of diversity, resources, and places to go. I like the museums and the science center and the aquarium and Camden Yards and the symphony and the theaters and the huge old public library.

Compared to other cities, Baltimore is extremely affordable - even before the housing market tanked, we always knew that we'd be able to afford a pretty nice house here. Also, Baltimore's central location makes it easy and relatively affordable to get from here to other places.

I think Baltimore is pretty. I like the long stretches of red brick rowhouses, and the Federalist architecture, and the big graceful stone mansions in my neighborhood, and the Inner Harbor, and the view of city and water from the top of Federal Hill, and the way the city looks from the upper deck of the ballpark. I like the 18th century houses and shops in the old shipbuilding neighborhood of Fells Point, and the covered markets in several different city neighborhoods.

I really love my neighborhood, which was the height of wealthy fashion in the 19th century and is now the arts district and the gay neighborhood. It's economically and racially mixed. I walk out of my house and feel like I am part of something connected and vital. We can walk to the main branch of the public library and our church and the symphony and the theater where we often get season tickets and a great art museum with free admission and a grocery store and the light rail and tons and tons of restaurants. We have great neighbors. People talk to each other on the street. And our neighborhood hosts the book festival and the flower mart and free concerts in the park.

Baltimore has some excellent food. I particularly appreciate all the fresh seafood, and the Greek and Middle Eastern food, and sitting on a terrace or deck drinking local beer and cracking open steamed crabs on the brown paper table cover.

I like living in a place that has so much history, even if portions have been extremely unpleasant.

Things I don't like about Baltimore: the entrenched poverty, drugs, and crime. The fact that Baltimore continues to be one of the most segregated cities in America. The godawfully miserable summers. Corruption. Rats.

Rivka-pretends-she's-well-rounded meme III.

This time I'll tackle the food questions.

ailbhe and minnehaha K: Your dinner.

Tonight we had baked chicken thighs, Southern-style biscuits with butter, and carrot sticks, and ice cream for dessert. Dinner was cooked by Michael, who is getting to be a better cook every day. (Usually the cooking is my responsibility.) The chicken skin wasn't as crispy as I like it (my fault, not Michael's, because he was following my directions) - we probably should've upped the oven temperature. But overall, it was very good.

hobbitbabe: Do you have any kitchen appliances for mixing stuff up, and what do you make with them and should I buy one or more of them? (giant immovable mixer, food processor, immersion blender, old-style blender, etc).

I have a Kitchenaid stand mixer, a generous gift from wcg a few years back. It is, as you say, giant and immovable. Unfortunately, it has to live in the pantry and be carried out every time I want to bake.

I use it to make cakes, cookies, and other desserts. It replaced an ancient underpowered hand mixer. The difference is most notable with stiff batters like cookie dough. I made pumpkin cranberry bars to give as Christmas gifts this year, another very thick-battered recipe, and found that my mixer could easily handle double batches. It's also excellent for things that need to be really, really, seriously, impressively well-beaten, like this gingerbread cake roll.

Oh, and the other difference I almost forgot about: because it has a paddle that is cleverly positioned in the bowl, rather than beaters, you almost never have to scrape the sides and bottom of the bowl when you're mixing. Which is very nice. Should you have one? If you bake regularly, yeah, you probably should.

bcholmes: You seem to have a lot of things to say about food: different recipes, liking exotic vegetables, eschewing chef-boy-ar-dee. What kind of relationship did you have with food growing up?

It was uncomplicated, for which I am extremely grateful. My mother was a good cook in what I think of as the classic home-cooking style of the northern U.S.; her meals were simple (usually meat-starch-veg)
but well-prepared and tasty. Food was never in short supply, and we had free rein to help ourselves except for the hour before dinner, which was known as "starving time." I don't remember negative comments about people eating too much or too little or the wrong things, except in the context of taking more than your fair share of a scarce resource like leftover cake. We did have to accept on our plate at least a "no-thank-you helping" of everything served at dinner, and we were expected to at least taste some of everything on our plate. Oh, and we were required to have milk at dinner, but I loved milk so I didn't mind.

We had family dinner together every night. My mother would start watching out the kitchen window for my father's car at 5:55 every night, and the minute his car pulled into the garage she'd call us to the table. We rarely went out to dinner and almost never had fast food - not as a whole family, anyway. Just if we were traveling somewhere.

I ate a lot of junk food as a kid, and was really skinny anyway. I used to spend my school lunch money (65 cents a day, as I recall) on candy at the 7-11. I'd split it with kcobweb, and in turn she'd share the dessert from her packed lunch with me. That horrifies me today, but obviously I survived it and was reasonably healthy. My mother didn't buy tons of junk food - mostly for budgetary reasons, I think - but we always had cookies, chips, and ice cream in the house and it wasn't rationed. I remember being surprised to go to friends' houses and be told "you can have two cookies."

I have a lot of happy childhood memories about food. Holiday dinners, church potlucks, cookouts and picnics at the lake, standing on a chair to help my mother bake.

Grandma Susan: Given that there is so much conflicting information about nutrition and health, how do you decide what to believe and/or what to feed your family?

Honestly? I spend very little time thinking about nutrition and health. My impression is that this is an area where a lot of people, including health professionals, have very strong opinions - yet the data backing up those opinions is often weak. I think the whole food-as-medicine thing is hugely oversold in American culture. So I decide what to feed my family based primarily on considerations of taste. I try to avoid language about "good" and "bad" foods. I strive vaguely for balanced inclusion of a broad range of foods - proteins, carbs, veggies and fruits - but I don't worry about fat, carbs, sugar, etc. I wouldn't eat pork rinds 24/7 because it would make me feel like crap, but I'm not going to worry about the components of my reasonably balanced and varied diet.

I do try to feed organic foods to babies (Ack! We've veered into parenting territory!) based on the vague idea that pesticides may be more of an issue when concentrated into a very small form, but it's even more heavily based on the fact that Earth's Best organic baby foods taste so much better than Gerber. Oh, and I was careful about introducing potential food allergens into Alex's diet because of our strong family history of food allergies, and I'll probably do the same with Colin.