Ground Beef: a posting of interest only to those in my immediate area, for which I apologize

Miss Edith is a carnivore -- not an omnivore, I'm sorry to admit, but definitely a carnivore -- and I've been known to make quite a meatloaf. Notarius would live almost solely on meat if he could, I'm sure. So meat -- including ground beef -- is definitely on our shopping list.

In the news recently there's been a lot of huffing and puffing about the safety levels of ground beef. Horrible things have been happening to people eating hamburgers because there are bacteria in the beef, and this is attributed to uncool practices at the beef processing and packing plants. Miss Edith was chatting with a friend about this (yes, on Facebook, ok, I admit it) and she said that she would no longer buy ground beef. It was just a food item that had ceased to exist for her, because she is scared for herself and her husband and her two young sons. I understood her fear.

Well, it didn't immediately occur to me, though it should have, but as it happens in my neighborhood -- and not far from where my friend lives -- there is an excellent little grocery store where the butchering is done in house. They grind their own beef, their own lamb, their own pork, everything. They make their own sausages. While nothing there is kosher, the quality of all the meat is excellent, in my experience, and I would urge people who live in New Haven and its environs to please consider giving the P&M Market their business, at least when it comes to buying meat. The owner of the store, Pino, and I have chatted about how they handle beef, and I have great confidence in the skill of the butchers (who've been doing this for a long, long time; if you need advice on how to cook a cut of meat, they'll talk to you about it) and in the quality of the things they sell.

Again, that's the P&M Orange Street Market, which is on Orange Street just at the intersection of Orange and Cottage Streets, around the corner from Lulu's and next door to that friendly little liquor store where you can always grab a bottle of something decent on the way home.

STELLA!

For some months, Miss Edith has been vaguely following the sad story of the Stella D'oro bakery in Brooklyn, which was having serious financial problems, and union problems, and today I read in the New York Times that it is finally closing.

To many readers of this blog (I use the term "many" loosely here), this will mean nothing; I grew up not thinking about this at all, but I gather that Stella D'oro cookies were a kind of regional thing. For me, they were an essential party of my childhood. My mother, a born and bred New Yorker, clearly felt that a life without Stella D'oro cookies was not worth living; she often ate their Breakfast Treat cookies all day long. Their Margherita cookies -- long, ridged, sort of shortbready cookies that came in packages showing the vanilla cookies alternating with the chocolate -- were always in our house. (Naturally, the kids preferred the chocolate, but it was fine, because my mother liked the vanilla ones. I think she always had them with coffee.)

But the real showpiece from Stella D'oro was the Swiss Fudge cookies. These were a rich, round vanilla cookie with elegant little ridges, that held in their center a perfectly smooth round blob of dark fudgy chocolate. If you refrigerated the cookies, the chocolate became as stiff as a chocolate bar, but in a warm room they had a slightly chewy feel; these cookies were our idea of heaven. Swiss Fudge cookies were a real treat. When my brother went away to college, my mother would mark his homecoming by buying a package of Swiss Fudge cookies and he was capable of eating an entire package on his own in one sitting. Whenever there was something special to celebrate, my mother bought these cookies. It wasn't that they were really so special; it was just that she knew how much we liked them.

I haven't bought a package of Stella D'oro cookies in a while, a long while. I remember eating a package of them with Notarius, who thought they were ok but no big whoop. That's ok. Things like this, I acknowledge it's all about sentiment and less than we would like about the true objective quality of the cherished thing. (The ice creams of our childhood are somehow infinitely wonderful -- but how many adults really want to eat a Hoodsie cup? Right.) But I am sorry that I won't be able to buy Stella D'oro cookies anymore.