Pilaf technique! It's a good and reasonably common thing with grains. I admit it hadn't occurred to me to try it with pasta before I saw this or something similar a year ago, but I totally believe that it works. Brown is flavor!

Haven't done it with noodles except in specific cases, but for a lot of dishes I'll fry the rice a little first. I've always just called it frying.

Don't think it is a placebo, but then I would think that.

Isn't that how Rice-a-Roni works?

The rice is in the pan when you are browning the little pasta sticks, but the rice doesn't brown, only the pasta.

You mean the San Francisco treat? never made it.

It was my go to dinner when I was living alone in college and graduate school.

5 was me.

My go-to dinner was to buy a jar of marinara and a loaf of bakery bread, and to spoon the marinara onto pieces that I tore off.

My fancy dinner for myself was to make my own sauce (starting with tomato paste), cook some kind of meat in it (sausage, roast - I never learned meatballs then), and it it with bread like that instead of cooking pasta. I don't really like pasta so much as the stuff that is served with it.

Or White Castle.

I've used this technique with paella, pilaf, pad Thai, fideuá (the latter a Spanish version I assume is related to the Mexican.)

You guys have fancier White Castles.

I had a meal kit which was a Mexican style soup in a tomato base with spaghetti broken up into 1 inch pieces and beans. You browned the spaghetti first. It was better than I thought it would be.

That's not a very strong endorsement.

Risotto too. But I've never done it with pasta.

I regularly fry up leftover cooked pasta with eggs and chilis for brwakdast. Uncle Nigeĺs explanatory video about fried rice i Also liked.

I regularly fry up leftover cooked pasta with eggs and chilis for brwakdast. Uncle Nigeĺs explanatory video about fried rice i Also liked.

I kinda love brwakdast. Kind of like the Chicken Lady was overcome while speaking.

This is also the technique (with rice) in Saint Elizabeth David's kedgeree, a truly wonderful dish.

5: It's pretty astonishing how sticky that refrain is. The other Brits may correct me, but as far as I'm aware Rice-a-Roni was never sold in the UK, so I could only have picked up the jingle as a young kid in the 80s when I was spending a few weeks a year with family in the US and watching US TV. Yet I still remember the jingle.

I do this all the time with rice or with other grains like freekeh or barley. It's my basic go-to "can't think of anything else" to just do a kind of pilaf/pilau with whatever ingredients* and type of rice or grain I have to hand. To the extent that when cooking for myself, I would happily do this multiple days a week and with basmati, the whole thing takes about 15 - 20 minutes, start to finish. I have done it with pasta, too, but only with small pasta like orzo, where I'll do a quasi-risotto thing. Fry the orzo in some olive oil and/or bacon fat and garlic, top up with some stock, cook until tender and stir through some peas or broccoli or whatever, add parmesan or pecorino. Easy.

* this could be anything. Chorizo, prawns, bacon, beef or lamb mince (in which case I'll add spices and make something like a keema biryani/pilau).

I feel like someone should teach the Mexicans how to make an easy dinner with just cream of mushroom soup, a can of tuna, and a distain for any kind of edible texture.

And someone should go to France and expound on how to make anything better with Miracle Whip.

You know how there's American-Chinese restaurants which are different from Authentic Chinese restaurants? (Or sub in any cuisine.)

That'd be great to go somewhere else, and alongside the American-Themed restaurant, you could have an Actual-Midwest Dining restaurant, with all the grotesqueries that grandma used to make in the 70s in the heartland.

It could be called "Karen's Place".

24: I feel like the closest cultural equivalent that's actually restaurants is buffets rather than diners.

Buffets are automatically Swedish.

It's cultural appropriation to Americanize the smorgasbord.

Like how I have a real Trangia burner and a fake one from China.

28: Truly inexcusable cultural appropriation -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qNuo_T406w

That'd be great to go somewhere else, and alongside the American-Themed restaurant

Don't Greek diners offer a reasonable version of that?

https://www.thekitchn.com/why-so-many-classic-all-night-diners-are-greek-243252

30: The 70s were a horror all around.

31: They don't serve, say, tuna fish casserole or chicken spaghetti. I bet they wouldn't even know a pimento cheese sandwich if it sat down and ordered a gyro. Or at least I've never had one.

30. Mason Reese went on to become a restaurateur.

A good one?

5: It's pretty astonishing how sticky that refrain is.

I once lived in an apartment facing one of the streetcar routes, and when the streetcar hove into view on the hillcrest we could usually hear the ding! ding!

And even after a year of this I was humming the jingle to myself.

Perkins is authentic Midwestern fare. Don't see it outside the Midwest. Bland and filling.

Perkins is authentic Midwestern fare. Don't see it outside the Midwest. Bland and filling.

The one my parents used to go to after church was replaced by a Chick-fil-A.

We had one in Gainesville when I was growing up.

Chick-Fil-A?

Both. There was a song, "I'm at the Chik-Fil-A. I'm at the Perkins. I'm at the combination..."

I am learning now that at Red Sox games, they play "llorar y llorar" when a Spanish player gets out. I'm kind of gobsmacked by a joke resting solely on someone's race or ethnicity in a setting like that in 2021. Call me a sheltered darling, but.

Boston is committed to racism in sports.