I had some oysters the other day at the Davis Street Fishmarket in Evanston, which usually has a good raw bar. I had 3 R.I. Wilds and 3 Canada Cups for 9 bucks. The R.I.'s were nice and briney, and the Canada's were slightly sweet.

Cinnamon had some nice oyster recipes and some oyster opening tip links in her recent article - The World is Your Oyster. She's a little wary of shucking them herself. Although opening oysters takes a wee bit of dexterity, doing it properly isn't anymore dangerous than many acts of knife work in the kitchen. I worked on a catering crew many years ago, and opened oysters for several long shifts without a slip, but it seems like every time I go to use a mandolin slicer, I manage to remove at least a fingerprint.

This was my most recent attempt at biscuits and gravy. I figure another few years and I might have it perfected. It took me years to figure out how to do the gravy without making paste, or some sort of congealed mess, and I can't for the life of me, make a good batch of biscuits. These were ok, but not as flaky as they should be. I blame an inconsistent, too hot oven and my beating up on the flour with a few too many strokes and rolls.

You can do all the reading you want on how to make biscuits and gravy, but too many variables make it one of those trial and error dishes. This is the recipe I used. My only alteration was the addition of some bacon (and its grease) and about a half habanero, finely minced.

A few tips from Grandma's Biscuits & Gravy - "Four things are necessary to assure a smooth, lump-free gravy. You must constantly whisk the roux and the gravy throughout the process.  You must add cold milk to the hot roux.  You must incorporate the milk a little at a time. And finally, keep the heat at no more than medium. You can adjust the consistency however you like, but a thick creamy gravy is the target viscosity."

With Roux my Heart is Laden For more detail on roux and cream gravy, including a recipe.

An interesting Cinnamon Biscuit and Chocolate Gravy recipe.

Some food issue editorials.

Our National Eating Disorder "The 'French paradox' is the most famous such case, though it's worth keeping in mind the French don't regard the matter as a paradox at all; we Americans resort to that word simply because the French experience -- a population of wine-swilling cheese eaters with lower rates of heart disease and obesity?! -- confounds our orthodoxy about food. Maybe what we should be talking about is an American paradox: that is, a notably unhealthy people obsessed by the idea of eating healthily."

Free market my eye! "Rod Liddle says that supermarkets are cruel to the customer, cruel to the farmer and cruel to the farm animal" He makes England's supermarkets sound worse than ours.
"For six and a half days every week you cannot buy fish or shellfish in the town unless it's pre-packed anaemic prawns or pre-packed dried-out cod or pre-packed chunks of livid farmed salmon. Then, on a Friday morning, a chap sets up a caravan, tucked away in a quiet carpark, and surreptitiously dispenses Brixham crab and fresh mullet as if they were Class-A drugs. If you want fresh fish in south-west Wiltshire, you have to turn up between ten o¹clock and one o¹clock, just opposite the bicycle shop, nudge nudge. " Registration warning: This article is from the Spectator, and it appears they have a javascript error in their cookie script, so you won't be able to log in if you're using Safari.

The Debate - Should we all be vegetarian? "Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall asks 'Why shouldn¹t we claim the moral authority to kill animals for food on the basis that we are offering them a better deal in life than they would get without our help¹. 'Because' argues Professor Andrew Linzey, 'we don¹t have the right to colonize and kill millions of other sentient individuals as food resources, when one can live a healthy and happy life on a vegetarian diet'"

This food blog's first non-work safe post - Halloweenie cookies. The domain 'porn-bread.com" should give you a clue. "Scatter chocolate sprinkles on the balls to simulate pubic hair,..." Well, you get the idea.

Three good NY food blogs:

Salli Vates' NY Food Page Salli welcomes you into the vast world of her New York food obsession.

Adventures of a Gastronome in Training (GIT) One amateur foodie's quest for culinary enlightenment. Musings on cooking, dining, food products, basically all things edible are fair game.

Curbed's restaurant archive

In the last post I told you about the brilliant Angry Chef, today I send you to the Bitter Waitress, complete with the Shitty Tipper Database.

And a few more :
Baby hippo bakes
Cat food
delectation
Full as a goog
Life begins @ thirty
Orangette

Becks & Posh "is modern cockney for 'nosh' (food). Follow English-Girl-Abroad, Sam Breach, on her culinary journies, mainly in the San Francisco Bay Area, but also on her travels further afield, whilst she plays at being amateur restaurant critic, party planner, good food forager and practising home cook."

Deep End Dining There's many a food blogs claim to be about adventurous dining, but this is the real thing, with entires that include Rocky Mountian oysters and hairy crabs. "There's high end dining. There¹s low end dining. And then there's everything else in between. We'd like to introduce you to another level - Deep End dining. This website is dedicated to seeking and devouring the food uncommon, the cuisine exotic and the entrees less ordered. Have an open appetite and get ready to take the plunge into the deep end."

Eat your heart out

Movable Feast Diary of an Itinerant Chef

Notes from a New Orleans Foodie

One Toque Over the Line I like this guy. This "Angry Chef" writes a damn funny blog on the true nature of restaurants that's worthy of reading from the first post to the end. I'd love to find out who he is. "I own a upscale, nationally acclaimed restaurant. It is expensive.If you can't afford to eat there, sorry. I have overheads you couldn't even imagine and make no apologies for my prices as I am giving you my life. I smoke too much, I gave up most drugs, I despise litigious behavior and will carry the tradition of cuisine to my death. I'm fiercly opinionated and if you're sensitive, don't ask me what I think. Chances are I'm gonna say it sucks."

Starbucks Gossip by fellow Evanston blogger Jim Romenesko (and one of the first to make a living doing it) has started a Starbucks blog because "somebody has to monitor America's favorite drug dealer."

Sustenance "food. recipes. restaurants. food news" Some tasty looking recipes.

View from the Kitchen "Adventures in Food, Food Writing and Eating, from a Girl Who Aspires to Create Perfect Pie Crust." From Los Angeles.

Vinodiversity is the Blog for winelovers who enjoy Australian wine made from less common wine varieties. No Chardonnay here!

The Ketchup Conundrum "Mustard now comes in dozens of varieties. Why has ketchup stayed the same?" Fascinating study of condiments. "Small children tend to be neophobic: once they hit two or three, they shrink from new tastes. That makes sense, evolutionarily, because through much of human history that is the age at which children would have first begun to gather and forage for themselves, and those who strayed from what was known and trusted would never have survived. There the three-year-old was, confronted with something strange on his plate--tuna fish, perhaps, or Brussels sprouts--and he wanted to alter his food in some way that made the unfamiliar familiar. He wanted to subdue the contents of his plate. And so he turned to ketchup, because, alone among the condiments on the table, ketchup could deliver sweet and sour and salty and bitter and umami, all at once."

First Catch Your Puffin "So, how was the puffin for me? Fine. It had none of the fishy taste that is supposed to render seagull flesh unpalatable. It was strong, dark, gamy. There was an extra pleasure because when I was a child, my parents had made me a member of the Puffin Club, in which middle-class children were meant to assemble and talk about how much they liked reading. You got Puffin badges and Puffin bookmarks. I took a dark pleasure in eating a puffin that had been shot and plucked and roasted for me"

The Perfect Martini "Technically a "Perfect" of any cocktail that uses Vermouth is one that uses equal parts of dry Vermouth and sweet Vermouth. But of course when somebody tells you that they make The Perfect Martini you know that they aren't talking about a "perfect" Martini, but instead are talking about "a Martini that is perfect". Ok, so we've now gotten that out of the way lets examine a little closer what it might mean to make this mythical Martini that is so "perfect"."

I've been neglecting my duties over at the food blog list, but I'm getting there. A few weeks without my primary laptop is my excuse to all of you who emailed asking to be included. I'm also going through the several posts of newly-found food blogs that I promised to add to the list as well, and will eventually get them included.

A la Cuisine Awesome photography and amazing recipes, my new favorite. The latest is White Chocolate and Rice Milk Flan with White Chocolate-Pistachio Emulsion. A lot of work goes into this beautiful blog, not just in the complicated, adapted recipes, but in the photography, which includes great shots all along the stages of the preparation as illustration. This list is alphabetical, but even if it wasn't, I'd put this one at the top.

AromaCookery "The holistic therapy of savoring food and drink (as well as their aromas), to achieve optimum physical and psychological well-being." From Singapore.

Benjamin Christie Australian Chef Consultant

Chronicles of a Curious Cook "Cheap recipes, experiments, menu notes, shopping tips"

Cooking For Engineers "Have an analytical mind? Like to cook? This is the site to read!"

Cook sister! "A South African cooking abroad"

Crumbs "Foodspotting in a Ticinese-Asian kitchen" from Switzerland.

Dispensing Happiness

Food & Thoughts from Copenhagen

Foodster Foodsharing network

The Grub Report

Hot Water Bath talks about canning a lot

Kitchen Chick Ann Arbor, Michigan

The Passionate Cook Cooking is like love. It should be entered into with abandon or not at all.

A Pastry Student's Life

Pho King "Pho King is and always will be about nothing but that most wonderful and complete of all foods, the ambrosia of beef, broth, noodles, chili and lime known as pho"

Relish "Enthusiastically eating in and around Ann Arbor."

The Secret Ingredient is...

super chef blog "Following the careers of super chefs in America and around the world"

Tomatilla!

Via Ritiro N.7 Diary From and about Sicily, which, as you might imagine, talks about food a lot.

Wrapped in Dough A food blog, mostly. NYC-based, but on a five-month hiatus in China.

Years ago I loved finding blogs that talked about nothing but issues concerning blogs. Now there's a food blog that talks about nothing but issues concerning food blogs. Kitchen Conference "on the care and feeding of a food blog"

Flour, Eggs, Sugar, Fortune The story behind a fortune cookie factory. "As astonishing as it may seem, these guys produce and move four million cookies every day".... "While the beginnings of fortune cookies can be traced back to 14th-century China as a clandestine form of communication‹Chinese soldiers transferred secret messages via moon cakes‹the likelier origins were American. In 1918, David Jung, a noodle manufacturer in Los Angeles, handed out cookies that contained uplifting messages as a promotional gimmick."

Squash Those Complaints Cinnamon's latest article tells us all about squash.

Edible Books Also found on Gapers Block

Just a reminder that the Annual Turkey Testicle Festival is this weekend on the 9th in Byron IL.

They even have clothing and a song.