no boys allowed in the room!!!!

Our version is a cold tuna-and-pasta salad using large shell pasta with small amnt mayo as a binder, extra lemon juice, shredded carrot, shredded cheddar, halved grapes, diced celery, sometimes halved pimiento olives (which I pick out). I think it must have evolved from "how can I feed 6 people with what's in the pantry, and sneak in two or three vegetables?"

i think my mom's pasta salad is good. no mayo or grapes (?) though. usually pieces of fresh mozzarella, olives, roasted red peppers, some other stuff i can't remember.

Oh yeah, where it detours to cheddar and grapes, we're not even pretending that this is related to Italian food in any way. Fresh mozz sounds nice.

i am a fan of cold pasta in general

OH well see that was more when I was a kid. My mom is retired now and makes all kinds of things so we have been cooking together more. My step dad is usually the main cook but they mostly work as a team which is what I would like in a relationship re. cooking.

Last week's egg fiasco had me unnecessarily nervous and quite overly apologetic. I'm over it now since I was able to prove to myself that I am not a complete kitchen ignoramus by making excellent blueberry pancakes from scratch for mother's day and spent more time in the kitchen making lunch and helping with dinner.

I'm vegetarian and am seeing a meat eater. He hasn't expressed any desire to make things with meat when we're eating together which is nice but eventually I'm sure he'll want to. I don't think I would object to preparing meat as long as I don't have to buy it and of course not eat it. Although, over the years I have become increasingly more squeamish when it comes to bloody looking meat. I guess I'll just have to find out when the time comes.

i don't really enjoy cooking meat and would have trouble being with someone who needs it every day. i've been eating more chicken lately but without a dishwasher i'm afraid to let it touch too many surfaces.

ps. my mom always makes tuna salad with apples, chopped almonds, celery, olive oil mayo and curry powder. It is sooo good and one of the only times I will ever eat fish.

My mom's evil salad is small/large shrimps, white grape halves, macaroni shells, boiled eggs, finely chopped scallions, mayo. If I'm not around I'm sure she makes it with tuna. Things I didn't eat as a child: mayo-based salads, Boston baked beans, canned tuna (still will hurl at smell), jello salad, fucking horrible five-bean salad and anything made with Miracle Whip. At summer potlucks I had very little choice apart from grill stuff and fruit.

hb: Plant mister full of water with a capful of bleach, recommended. Best not to accidentally get any on your clothes, though.

Or if your sink has a drain-stopper, dump all the things that touched the chicken in there, cover them w hot water, add couple of caps of bleach, wait 5 mins or so. Drain hot water, wash items normally.

It's not perfect but it's more than adequate for at-home use.

XP now see, that's a mongrel salad too, some let's-add-canned-fish version of the Walforf. I feel better now.

XXP. And WalDorf, obv.

but no one NEEDS meat every day -- maybe my earlier example misrepresented my partner's eating habits. usually we're pretty much vegetarian about 75% of the time; i do like to use meat to flavor things, though, and am not interested in forsaking cheese or butter or honey.

anyway, i just can't deal with the overwhelming (to me) severity of veganism.

"salads" with mayo have disgusted me since the day i was born. i have never eaten one and i never plan to. <-- this is the kind of severity i can get behind!

nah i don't like playing around with bleach, i'd rather just not eat it or throw it into a skillet without letting it touch anything else
i like three-bean salad (green beans, kidney beans, garbanzos w/ balsamic/olive oil dressing + herbs)

There's probably a vinegar rinse that would kill salmonella et al too. I'm sure there are eco-/pet-friendly alternatives to bleach.

i could figure it out if i wanted to, i just don't want to that bad

I've been vigorously anti-potato salad my whole life but I made it 100x last summer per the Cook's Illus recp and I can't get enough. More vinegar-y than mayo, for sure.

Re chicken: it's so much cheaper to buy a whole one or buy more parts and section them out yourself, that I try to do that instead of getting the more processed skinless/boneless/tasteless breasts. But working with it more means it touches more things: knife, kitchen scissors, cutting board, my hands. I try to be sanitary about that stuff.

vinegar solves every problem.

http://www.versatilevinegar.org/usesandtips.html

yeah i clean everything with vinegar

Whenever I've worked with chicken recently I've washed the pieces in lemon or lime juice depending on the recipe, but otherwise I just clean up with thick bleach at the end.

I love nice mayo (it was like a golden door opened when I discovered it went with fries) but anything with raw yolk or obvious yolk used to make me heave when I was a kid.

New question. Not intending flame war or anything, but can I get a sampling of people's feelings about gettin hitched & changing your name?

I have always thought it was so obvious as to be a non-issue that I'd keep my own, and now that appears not to be an option under the circs. Got kinda weird at my house last night.

don't see a reason to change names anymore & would get really mad/uncomfortable @ someone for thinking it's mandatory because it kinda shows their whole philosophy on that kind of stuff

It depends on the name and how it matches the other names.

It's up to you to do what you want for your own reasons. It's not something that should be discussed in the hypothetical because every situation is different. Every decision to keep or change one's name could change acc. to the circumstances. That's my philosophy.

I did what I wanted (changed my name, shifted former surname to middle name) because it's what I wanted to do under my individual set of circumstances. Not going into any reasons on the internet.

Sounds stressful, though. Sorry L.

...but if partner is asking for negation of your name then :/

YES harbl which since I know his philosph, I thought it would never come up and therefore I never BROUGHT it up. I "forgot" his family is Roman Catholic & I appear to have misunderestimated how strong the tradition/history is there.

Also he says that it's "normal" and possibly even legally required for womenz to change their names at marriage in (most of?) Europe, which I would never have guessed. Maybe sexism is a thing like "racism" that Europe thinks it's so "over" that no one talks about it.

i have heard that about europe

It's just not true. Has he been to Europe?

He's from there.

i'm unsure of what's actually going on here:

1) are you trying to change his mind?
2) are you trying to convince yourself to agree with him?
3) are you genuinely trying to make this decision because he has proposed?
4) is this conversation about a decision that is, at this time, purely/almost entirely hypothetical?

The third one, but it turns out it is contingent on my not keeping only my own name. Which we had simply never talked about before, so we both feel blind-sided by the other.

I of course think he's being 100% retarded.

aha. well, at least it's not hypothetical -- those conversations are like precedent-setting provocations to argue.
on the other hand, congratulations?!

that's kind of a weird condition? like forgetting the point of getting married?

well i guess it depends what you think the point is

My understanding of the point last night was mostly "What fucking year is it again?!? Oh wait Southern Europe plus RC, you can't tell your family, can you, yeah now we're getting somewhere...."

Sorry, dint mean to be a big downer. Carry on with cooking or defining femininity!

eh there's a whole board for talking about cooking

How does he feel about making up a name that isn't either of yours? I know a few couples who did this and it worked out fine. They either meshed their last names together or came up with an entirely new one.

No, their name goes back a long way and has regional significance, it's not possible/acceptable to change it. That's the whole problem, apparently it will simply be too great a problem/too offensive to...his parents? Customs? The Church? I can't really tell who we're talking about here.

Well, unless there are serious Vanity Fair points to score for changing, hang onto the maiden for work at least.

I agree with Suzy. You could change it legally and sign your christmas cards with it but keep it for other purposes. More communication about this is needed between you too, obviously.

what a shitty compromise though, but i'm the worst compromiser

i mean it only makes sense if your only concern is having your own name at your job. if you just want to keep your name because it's your name, then what

Yeah, I don't know. If you legally keep your name and you have kids, then you still have to decide what the kid's last name is going to be. Is hyphenating an option in your situation Laurel?

Yeah it was too personal and too vague yest, not a discussion of real pros and cons. We will discuss again, esp after my nightmares this AM re feeling trapped & helpless & alone. For the time being I've agreed to hyphenate but the usage might be situational.

I got the msg as a kid that women who didn't take husband's name were non-believers who didn't understand God's plan for their lives (ie subservience), and that refusing to change was a sign of lack of commitment to the relationship and a warning sign of selfishness in other areas and/or that they might desert their families at any time. At some point that started to seem unfair and a lot like a load of shit, so I went the opposite direction.

Now I have to rethink -- obv the above is not true but neither is the reverse, necessarily. Trying to find potentially new and less reactionary comfort zone re this stuff.

laurel you are starting to make sense. it's neither one nor the other -- you have to find the solution that is right for you. you should do whatever you want; only you (will) know what that is. it's really hard to know what to do (what you would do) until you can evaluate your own unique individual circumstances.

i changed my name and did not do it because i am a devout xtian (not even a xtian at all) or because my husband asked me to (he didn't care) or because of the children (there are no children) or because any other reason you can probably think of. i did it for my own reason which is mine to know and has nothing to do with anyone who has the audacity to ask me why or question my decision to do what i want with my own fucking name.

ur not necessarily the reactionary one imo, keeping your name is pretty normal now

there are many options and they are all more or less normal in 2010 imo

I don't think I am either, harb, but a certain amount of this IS about compromise and how far am I willing to take my principles/what am I trying to achieve?

I do care about my name, am proud of it etc but it was acquired through adoption in a prev generation so it's debateably not even rly "mine" and etc etc. I'm not making excuses for giving it up, in fact I can't imagine giving it up, but just saying it's not black & white to me anymore.

It does seem like a load of shit. I once heard that Mrs means Mr's. I wonder if there is any truth to this. It got my fires burning hearing about it and it made me completely averse to the name change thing when I was pretty apathetic about it before. Of course it is a highly personal decision and who knows what I'll feel about it by the time I get married, if that even happens. Right now I think it will be based mostly on how cool the last name I'm supposed to adopt is compared to mine.