For Bill
A little while ago I read that Bill had been given some Cajun (?) food to try and it didn’t taste the same as he was used to. (I can’t find the post , so perhaps it wasn’t Bill after all, any way I’m sure he would be interested in this.) It reminded me of this passage from Blue Highways:

“It was past noon and I could have had lunch from any of two dozen frylines without knowing I was seven hundred miles from home. Maybe America should make the national bird a Kentucky Fried Leghorn and put Ronald McDonald on the dollar bill. After all, the year before, franchisers did nearly three hundred billion dollars of business. And there’s nothing wrong with that except the franchise system has almost obliterated the local cafes and grills and catfish parlors serving distinctly regional food, much of it made from truly secret recipes. In another time, to eat in Frankfort was to know you were eating in Kentucky. You couldn’t find the same thing in Lompoc or Weehawken. A professor at the University of Kentucky, Thomas D. Clark, tells of an old geologist who could distinguish local cooking by the area it came from and whether it was cooked on the east or west side of the Kentucky river.”
William Least Heat Moon, Blue Highways, 1982

Having quoted all that, I’d like to say that I enjoy reading about people’s enjoyment of good food, whether cooking or just eating out. My American blogger friends especially. I think it’s rather unfortunate that a lot of French people, who have never been to the states, think that the only food consumed in the U.S. is à la McDonalds.

P.S. Bill and Stacey now have a cookery blog
Found the post I was after on there too!