I’m sure that all of us have our favorite restaurants, right? How about favorite hangout spots? You know, places where you could stay for hours, just carrying on with friends, or maybe listen to a live band, drinking beer or wine and having a good ol’ time. What if I told you there was a place where you could do all these things?

One of my favorite places to visit for a night out is right here in South Bend. It’s a little Irish pub called Fiddler’s Hearth, and if you’ve never been there, it’s definitely worth giving a try. Not only do they have delicious, traditional Irish food, they also serve burgers, salads, and amazing desserts. That doesn't even include the drinks available…thirty-six different types of beer (including Guinness, of course), and sixty-four different types of whiskey! Not to mention several wines and spirited coffees, and sometimes they have stouts that have been aged in whiskey casks. (Read: STRONG, not for the lightweights!)

My first trip to Fiddler’s was on a second or third date with a fireman. He was younger, and I think he was trying to show off how refined and worldly he was (ha!), but I immediately fell in love with the cozy atmosphere and the Pear and Walnut Salad. The fireman didn’t last very long, but thus began my love for “the Hearth.” It became my place, and one that the man in my life and I visit often; we hung out there together as friends before we started dating. For a while, we were there every week; we’d eat a cheap dinner somewhere else, then go listen to live music and have a drink or two at the pub on Thursday nights - the one night a week that I had a babysitter.

If you decide to give Fiddler’s a try, here are some tips:

• · They get extremely busy during lunch and dinner times (12-1 and about 6:30-9), so it may be a good idea to either call ahead for a reservation or go in at an off-peak hour.

• · Be prepared to sit next to strangers. The seating is family style, so there are long tables and pews to sit on. You most likely won't be seated by a hostess or server, just look for an open spot and grab it. Think of it as an opportunity to meet new friends!

• · Be nice to the waitresses! There are usually only 2 or 3 servers for the entire restaurant, so be patient. Tip well (no less than 15%, and 20% for great service is my motto).

• · The menu can get a bit pricey, especially when you factor in drinks, meal, and dessert, so be prepared. It’s a bit cheaper to just go for lunch and keep the drinks and dessert out, or maybe go out for drinks and dessert after a supper at home.

• · If you see a man with white hair, beard, and newsboy cap, it’s probably the owner.

• · Try and visit on a night when Andyman Hopkins is playing. He’s fun and friendly, and you’ll have a great time. Alligator Blackbird plays there from time to time, as well.

Personal favorite menu items:

• · Whiskey sours. They never skimp on the whiskey here, so I don’t have to spend a lot of money on drinks. No worries - I never, ever drive after drinking! My companions usually have beer, either Guiness or Bells Two-Hearted IPA. There’s always something new to try, and always something on special.

• · Fish and Chips is a must. I have never been disappointed when I ordered this meal, which consists of a salad or soup choice, either 3 or 4 beer battered cod fillets, and chips (French fries). The breading is always crispy and the fillets inside tender and moist. Mouth-watering!

• · The Pear and Walnut Salad is to die for. Dark, leafy greens with sliced pears, walnuts, bleu cheese and grilled chicken topped with vanilla vinaigrette, it’s perfect during warm weather. I love this salad so much that I found a recipe for a version of vanilla vinaigrette online and began making it myself.

• · Their bread pudding is the best I’ve ever tasted. It always comes out warm, with a whiskey cream sauce, and it usually takes 3-4 people to eat it all.

So, if you're looking for a new place to try, why not Fiddler's? They have great food, tons of drink choices, they're family-friendly, and smoke-free. Take a gander at their website, where you'll find lunch and dinner menus, a drink menu, calendar of events, and pictures.

How about you, what are some of YOUR favorite places around here? Yes, I'm looking at YOU. Leave a comment and let us know!

**Disclaimer** Photos taken by camera phone.

Just a few links that might be helpful...

This is about some food myths:

http://food.change.org/blog/view/8_misleading_food_label_terms_every_eater_should_know

This is about fish farmers:

http://http://food.change.org/blog/view/do_fish_farms_offer_sustainable_solutions

And finally, some coffee commercials from the 80's. Apparently, these two people can really sell coffee. The 1st link is an example of the Taster's Choice commercial series that we had here in the States, and the second is what I'm guessing they had over in Great Britain:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpOBFELO0Qc&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igi9u6X4y-s&NR=1

Have fun!

Nancy Willard's "How to Stuff a Pepper"

"Now, said the cook, I will teach you
how to stuff a pepper with rice.

Take your pepper green, and gently,
for peppers are shy. No matter which side
you approach, it's always the backside.
Perched on green buttocks, the pepper sleeps
In its silk tights, it dreams
of sommersaults and parsley,
 of the days when the sexes were one.

Slash open the sleeve
as if you were cutting a paper lantern,
and enter a moon, spilled like like a melon,
a fever of pearls,
a conversation of glaciers.
It is a temple built to the worship
of morning light.

I have sat under the great globe
of seeds on the roof of that chamber,
too dazzled to gather the taste I came for.
I have taken the pepper in hand,
smooth and blind, a runt in the rich
evolution of roses and ferns.
You say I have not yet taught you

to stuff a pepper?
Cooking takes time.

Next time we'll consider the rice."

Nancy Willard

From "Confessions of an Eater"

"I remember the first time I ate compulsively. I was seventeen years old, not yet an introspective person. I had no language or vocabulary for what was happening to me. The issue of compulsive eating had not yet become a matter of public confession. Looking back I can say: 'That was the day my neurosis began.' But at the time, if I knew the word at all, I would not have known to apply it to myself.

I was in Berlin, sitting at the breakfast table with my American roommate and our German landlords. I remember the day vividly, the wind blows, the curtain lifts on the window, a beam of sunlight crosses the room and stops just at the spout of the teapot. A single, amber drop becomes luminous at the tip of the spout. I feel that I am about to remember something and then, unaccountably, I am moved to tears. But I do not cry. I say nothing. I look furtively around me, hoping this wave of strong feeling has not been observed. And then, I am eating. My hand is reaching out. And the movement, even in the first few moments, seems driven and compulsive. I am not hungry. I had pushed away my plate moments beofre. But my hand is reaching and I know that I am reaching for something that has been lost. I hope for much from the food that is on the table before me but suddenly it seems to me that nothing will ever still this hunger--an immense implacable craving that I do not remember having felt before.

Suddenly, I realize that I am putting too much butter on my breakfast roll. I am convinced that everyone is looking at me. I put down the butter knife. I break off a piece of the roll and put it in my mouth. But it seem to me that I am wolfing it down. That I am devouring it.

I notice, with alarm, that Olga is beginning to clear the table. Unable to control myself, I lurch forward, reach out for another roll and pull the butter plate closer to myself. Everyone laughs and I am mortified. I am blushing the way I have not blushed since I was twelve or thirteen years old. I feel trapped and I want to go on eating. I must go on eating. An yet I feel an acute and terrible self-consciousness."

                                                                     Kim Chernin from "Confessions of an Eater"

The Apron

The Apron

By Stephanie C. Merryfield

Four cups of flour…four tablespoons of natural sugar cane… one and a half cups of butter milk… two tablespoons of Clabber Girl baking powder & half a cup of soft, real butter.

This was the start of Nana’s biscuit bread. The buttermilk was one of the ugliest sights the eye could conceive in a kitchen¾clotted and slightly yellow. The smell could tumble a horse. It was only a little less sickening than flies lighting on runny, decaying road kill under the mid-day sun of July. Yet to her it was familiar. She kneaded the dough across the countertop of this small southern home, ignoring the smell.

It was the last small modular to be put in place on Rochelle Road, since the departure of eight of the children for the city. Some, mostly the boys, went to Gary, Indiana. But the girls, they stayed closer to home. Jackson, Tennessee had been home to the Chism’s since the emancipation. To her, the three hundred, thirty acres represented a legacy. Her mind wandered to recessed areas, still covered with evergreens. She kneaded more intently. This home was a gift. What exactly had she received?

This rural place was unlike the home on the farm. She wiped her hands feverishly on the apron. She wiped off of her fingers the loss that culminated in the bank’s foreclosure on the acreage. She wiped from underneath her fingernails the memories of her vegetable garden that had helped to feed thirteen children. She wiped onto the apron flesh that had soothed her husband’s weary brow for over sixty years. Hubert always wanted to be touched. That was his love language; of course the eight girls and five boys she birthed at home evidenced that.

Hubert was a very determined man. He convinced her at nineteen that he would love her always. Savera consented. He purchased the acreage with sobriety and ambition. He wasn’t contented to be a sharecropper. During the winter’s to supplement his income, he left for the city.

“Savera, you’re a good woman.” Those words were of little comfort now.

“Slam,” sounded the oven door, threatening to come off the hinge and burn her ankle. She winced at the thought of the casket door being closed over him during the funeral services. She thought this time he would come home, too, but no. Many times before, he had been in the hospital and had always come home.

“Pneumonia,” the doctor concluded sternly. She said this without compassion, almost blankly before leaving the hospital room.

Savera attempted to encourage the children and their children who had all gathered anxiously in the tiny sterile space. She, however, received little comfort that evening as she watched him slip from this life to another unceremoniously. The two were as they had been before they started a family, alone.

The bread would bake for fifty minutes. This bread has always been comfort food for her children, her grandchildren and her husband. Now, perhaps it would be of comfort to her as well. She removed the old apron and placed it, for the first time in many years, into a drawer¾out of the way. She knew she would not use it as often now. The bread’s fragrance filled the nearly empty house with memories.

Acquiring the Taste: Gender Assumptions of Beer in America

I’ll never forget my first beer, I was sixteen. Now, every sixteen year old knows that there are two things you have to have to get your hands on a case of beer. You need a tall friend named Brian with a pubescent beard and a cheap fake I.D., and a liquor store with a lazy cashier. Luckily for my friends and me, we had both. With victory achieved, and our case of warm Natural Ice in hand, we retired to my friend Tadd’s basement where we planned to hang out, play video games and, thanks to Brian, drink in the orange light of the awful 70’s era wood paneling. As we sat, huddled around the TV, spoiling our innocence playing Vice City, Tadd cracked open a beer and handed it to me. I stared at it, unsure of what to make of its shiny round exterior. Inside the can was this mysterious liquid, it looked like urine, and smelled like it too. I looked up from the can to see Tadd looking at me with an expectant look on his face; so without a second thought I tilted up the can and took my first drink. It was awful, just awful, my previous estimation of it’s smell turned out to be all too true. The strangest thing about my first experience with beer is that I didn’t stop with one, but had four or five throughout the course of the night, and have been drinking it ever since.

My story isn’t unique. A person’s first beer is a kind of right of passage in America, this especially true for teenage males. There is a cultural expectation placed on teenagers by their peer group to drink, and to drink beer. In this case, beer serves as a symbol for masculinity. When we were drinking in high school, we weren’t drinking beer, we were drinking masculinity, because “men” drink beer. As teenagers, boys construct a view of what is masculine from any number of sources, popular culture, peer influence, or the action and tendencies of their father to name just a few. Fabio Parasecoli discusses societies conceptions of masculinity in an essay called “Feeding Hard Bodies: Food and Masculinities in Men’s Fitness Magazines.” Of the shifting nature of the perception of masculinity, he writes, “Masculinities are not fixed or defined once and for all; they do not represent embodiments of discrete states of being. They vary in time and place, in different historical, social and cultural environments”(188).

Cultural perceptions of masculinity are not always accurate. Beer is a perfect example of this. If one were to take a random survey consisting of an equal number of men and women, it is not at all unlikely that the number of people who claim to enjoy beer would be roughly the same. However, beer continues to have a predominantly masculine cultural conception. Take for example a phrase we’ve all heard, “girlie drink” which is generally used to describe any mixed drink which is not in its majority, beer or whiskey. Teacher, writer, and semiologist Roland Barthes, author of essay “Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption” offers some help explaining these kinds of cultural labels. He writes, “Food [or drink] serves as a sign not only for themes, but also for situations; and this, all told, means for a way of life that is emphasized, much more than expressed, by it. To [drink] is a behavior that develops beyond its own ends, replacing, summing up, and signalizing other behaviors”(Barthes 33). I didn’t drink my first beer because I liked beer, I drank it because I wanted to be perceived as masculine. I was engaging in a behavior, not enjoying a beverage. From this perspective it can be seen that the consumption of beer, and its culturally gendered connotations have little to do with taste in actuality, but with an expected set of behaviors. The image of beer in the U.S. is one of incredible masculine stereotypes, from advertisements with giant, scantily clad women astride the the Rocky mountains, to millions of dollars in sponsorships of activities like Pro Football, and Nascar. When beer is marketed to women it is usually in the form of the beer/fruit hybrids that are growing in popularity. This is because beer, as it is traditionally brewed, is assumed by the culture to signify the masculine, and to market it otherwise would undermine its supposed gender significance.

I kept drinking that night at my friends house because it felt good, it made me feel like a grown-up, and it made me feel like a “man”. Mostly however, I drank because I felt like I should, like it was what I was expected to do, because I was a man. In my mind, men drank beer. So I drank, and even though I hated it, I kept drinking it, and i kept drinking it, and I drink it today. The most unbelievable thing is, I now love it. As I sit writing, next to my computer a cold bottle of Samuel Adams Octoberfest, a seasonal brew that is one of the highlights of my fall, sits slowly sweating onto the coaster that my wife makes me use. I’ve had a beer in every state I’ve ever been in, and I’ve sampled exotic beers from around the globe, from German Lagers that go down smooth, to Indian brown ales that will pucker you for hours. I never would have experienced any of them, if I hadn’t made myself learn to like beer. I don’t know that the cultural gender bias of beer is a good thing, it is certainly not an accurate thing, and it may be changing. Even if it does change, young adults will likely continue to force themselves to drink that strange yellow beverage called beer, and learn to love it, and that is not such a bad thing.

Dexter Premier :):)

So, I've been down and out for about the past week.... very sudden wisdom tooth extraction that I was in no way, shape, or form ready to encounter. Pretty much everything that could go wrong with the extraction...did.

Alas, I am still under strict instruction to consume only soft foods. This can become rather inconvenient as cottage cheese....ice cream....and soup become rather boring after the first few days. See, I love food...all kinds; and I'm running out of soft foods to try. I suppose I could attempt mixing them all in a blender, but, I'm not too sure how that would pan out. :)

Anyway... as some of you may know (since we talked about him in an in class exercise a couple weeks ago) that Season 5 of Dexter premiered last night... I'm a new fan of the show, and watched the first 4 seasons on DVD.....so I was very excited to watch the new season in suspense along with the rest of the Dexter fan-base. In honor of the premier, I wanted to have a big party and invite all my Dexter loving friends over. BUT, I was still pretty weak, and wasn't much fun, so I decided against it. Nevertheless, my lively spirit could not be dampened and I decided a little quiet baking wasn't going to hurt too bad....plus, cupcakes are a soft food...right?

Those of you who enjoy the show will understand the meaning... for those of you who don't I'll just give a quick synopses. Dexter is a blood spatter analysis for the Miami PD by day...and a serial killer by night. Don't worry though...he only kills those who slip through the justice system (usually :) ). He wraps them up in plastic wrap, and gives them a quick and painless death, plus, they deserve it, so we never feel bad for his victims.

So.....

I baked red velvet cupcakes, frosted them white, and splattered them with red food coloring.....only after I wrapped a pan in plastic wrap of course! So here you have it ladies and gentleman.... Samantha's red velvet blood spattered Dexter season 5 premier cupcakes!!! :




<----All ready to bake!
Mmmmm.... yum :)

<-----Did Dexter Morgan visit the apartment?


<------I'd be caught red handed :)