Dishes

Taking a novel approach, the owners of The Stone Horse, the modest new dining place in Frazer, have fashioned a menu based on a survey of what local residents want in a restaurant. The result is an unexciting but acceptable menu with simple, traditional dishes that it would be hard to object to; combining these with decent preparation, the area's newest restaurant has a lot to offer. The most daring dish seems to be pecan-batter catfish with hush puppies; for the rest, we have baby back ribs, pork chops, veal loaf, strip steak, crab cakes and several grilled fish as blackboard specials.

One of the great joys of the table is vegetables, the food from nature's larder. Cookbook author Viana La Place celebrates that joy in Verdura: Vegetables Italian Style (William Morrow, $22.95). This is an exciting and well-structured book filled with easy-to-make recipes for colorful dishes steeped in hearty flavors. In Italian, verdura means vegetables. "From the beginning and all during my years of cooking, I have always found my greatest pleasure and truest expression through vegetables," she says.

DEL MONTE VEGETABLE CLASSICS. 10 varieties. 99 cents to $1.29 per 9 1/2- to 10-ounce shelf-stable tray. BONNIE: The most common ways to process vegetables are to can or freeze. Unfortunately, this new line of "shelf-stable" Vegetable Classics from Del Monte seems to have chosen the worst characteristics from each type of processing. Like canned, these are high in sodium, ranging from 300 milligrams (Garden Duet) to 480 milligrams (Nacho Cheese Potato and Potatoes Au Gratin)

The Ship John Inn is neither "ship" nor "inn," but it is one of South Jersey's most charming restaurants. The place opened Feb. 14 in what used to be the Greenwich Inn along the Cohansey River deep in Cumberland County. While the building is the same, there's no comparison between the dark setting and desultory cuisine of the old Greenwich Inn and this sunshine-bright mecca for fine food. The restaurant is named after the Ship John, an American cargo ship that sank in 1797, after running aground in Delaware Bay near the mouth of the Cohansey.

City Councilman Darrell L. Clarke says Philadelphians are tired of staring at cumbersome satellite equipment on roofs. His bill, approved Tuesday by the Rules Committee, presents landlords with a choice: relocate dishes to side or rear facades, or apply for official certification indicating that the front is the only location from which a building can receive a dish signal. - Matt Flegenheimer

Long a fixture in Delaware County, the Lobster Pot in Wawa seems to have more lives than a cat and uniquely reinvents itself every couple of years. Never known for superb dining, the place was run for many years by John and Carol Meyers. When they retired and moved to Arizona in 1985, they left their restaurant in the hands of relatives, but hearing that things had gotten even worse, they returned to the area five years later and reclaimed their restaurant. They then did a smart thing and hired a good chef, changed the menu and management and began turning out very good seafood-based dishes.

It's been a half dozen years since I review-visited Chinatown's Harmony Vegetarian Restaurant. In those days, Harmony's food seemed head and shoulders above the heavy-handed veggie fare served up elsewhere. Moreover, though the place was small and narrow, the pastel-pretty decor made dining here a whole lot more pleasant than it was at most of the plain-brown-wrapper health food restaurants of that time. And Harmony today? A few of the dishes sampled on recent review visits to the restaurant were very much like the gourmet treats I'd remembered.

Terry Thompson's newest cookbook, A Taste of the South (HPBooks, $9.95) is an informative softcover whose recipes are interestingly complemented with the history and development of Southern food. "In the South," Thompson said in an interview, "food is an integral part of society. Any time people get together, food is one of the motivating things in the event. " Thompson, who is in Philadelphia this week as a consultant at Cafe Nola on South Street, said that the catalyst for the book - she's also the author of Cajun-Creole Cooking (HPBooks)

Thanks to some sprucing up and careful attention to its food, the St. Davids Inn has become a cozy place for an evening dinner. With a buffet dinner ($14.95 prix fixe) that changes each night, the Spencer room offers a comfortable experience in leisurely dining. Best of all, the food is quite nice. Although there's nothing terribly unfamiliar or startling about the dishes, several revel in rich sauces, and the variety is extensive enough to ensure that you won't go hungry no matter what your tastes.

As anyone who dines out can attest, the suburbs do not lack for Italian eateries or want of pasta. Ristorante La Locanda is classically typical, right down to its old-house location along a major road (Route 3) in an easily missed community (Edgmont). In atmosphere alone, La Locanda cultivates the old-school Italian dining scene, in which candlelight flickers in mirrors and widely spaced tables are arranged around statuary. The restaurant seats 250, but it comes across as much smaller, with dual fireplaces in one dining room and an arched doorway leading to another room, which has a chandelier hanging over a small fountain.

Tara McConnell has taken simple stoneware and turned it into kitchen gear QVC shoppers can't seem to get enough of. As chief designer and president of Temp-tations L.L.C. in Exton, McConnell is on the shopping channel twice a week, demonstrating tried-and-true 9-by-7-inch baking dishes and 21/2-quart cow-figure bakers. "This is so stinking cute," she said on a recent broadcast with host Mary Beth Roe, the camera lingering on a hand-painted casserole set. Only about 10 minutes into an hour-long show, Roe said 600 shoppers had already placed orders for cow- and chicken-theme ceramics.

So there we stand, my husband and I, two presumably mature, rational people planted on either side of the dishwasher. We are not smiling. The issue at hand is how to prepare the dinner dishes for that appliance, a discussion that is decidedly not new in this kitchen. My husband believes that dishes need to be prewashed - one might even say "sanitized" - before they ever reach the racks. I, on the other hand, insist that dishwashers clean dishes and silverware better when they are not antiseptically clean.

KELSEY BEZILA likes to say she's been cooking with her father, Jim, ever since she could tell the difference between brown sugar and white sugar - probably when she was about 5. Now that she's in college, her spring-break visits to the family home in Mount Ephraim, N.J., include preparing the traditional Easter dishes of her father's childhood. (Easter is March 31.) While Kelsey never got to cook much with her paternal grandmother, Jim is making sure that the family recipes get passed down.

A GREAT MYSTERY lingers at the heart of "Silver Linings Playbook. " The mystery isn't whether Pat Solitano, played by Rydal-born, Oscar-nominated Bradley Cooper, will ever find mental health. Nor is it whether Pat will get back with his ex, fall for the dancing girl down the street (Jennifer Lawrence, also Oscar-nominated), or reconcile with his Eagles-worshipping, OCD-suffering, gambler dad (Robert De Niro, another Oscar nominee). The riddle at the center of this flick, the conundrum that's confounded viewers nationwide, is: What in the Rocky Balboa are "crabby snacks and homemades"?

WHOOPI GOLDBERG lives on the comedic edge, whether it's on the stage, on set or in her swivel chair on "The View. " She doesn't shy away from the controversial - she welcomes it. Back in 1990, in "Whoopi Goldberg Presents Billy Connolly," Goldberg began a bit by singing, "Where have all the negroes gone?" She urged members of the audience to sing along with her and "follow the bouncing Negro!" Despite early hesitation, they did. "And they said y'all wouldn't do that!" she laughed.

Different tastes in movies? Good couples learn to disagree. Can't stand each other's music? That's what headphones are for. But if you two can't come together around common flavors at the dinner table - especially for a special meal - there's gonna be trouble in Romanceville. The pressure of Valentine's Day doesn't help, and I normally shy away from crowded restaurants in favor of something more intimate at home. But lately, a rising trend in "dishes for two" at local eateries has caught my eye as potential relationship-building material, not just on Feb. 14 but at any time of year.

WHAT DO the Walkman and iPod, the iPad tablet and now the new, second- generation Dish Hopper satellite receiver/recorder have in common? All are disruptive technologies that screw with the system, threaten the status quo. With its cunningly effective commercial-skip feature called Autohop, the Dish Hopper is a land mine waiting to explode, threatening the future of advertiser-supported network TV. No wonder broadcasters are trying their best...

The Hopper is either a multi-room DVR featuring a kangaroo mascot, partner units called "Joeys," and an innovative commercial-skipping function, or it's an existential threat to commercial broadcast television - the biggest since, well, the Betamax. Either way, you might want to pause the TiVO for a moment and consider what's behind this battle, which has been playing out in the courts for much of the last year and more recently in the court of public opinion. The Hopper was unveiled a year ago by Dish Network, the satellite service that's the nation's third-largest provider of multi-channel pay television.

The Florida socialite with Philly roots who inadvertently toppled a CIA director has finally spelled out her side of the story. Jill Kelley told Howard Kurtz of thedailybeast.com that she was threatened with blackmail, didn't know the threats came from a woman, never pressed charges, never swapped 30,000 e-mails with a general, and never asked for an $80 million fee to land a deal with South Korea. In November, just after the presidential election, David Petraeus, who rose to fame as commander of allied military forces in Afghanistan, resigned as CIA chief, amid allegations of an affair with biographer Paula Broadwell.

YOU THINK you're eating lots - or are gonna eat lots - this holiday season? Chances are, you ain't got nuthin' on the 28 diners who took part in a 10-hour, 40-dish feast at South Philly's Le Virtù Sunday. You read that right: 40 dishes. Four-oh. And 10 hours. One-oh. (Well, for some people. Not everyone who came and saw also conquered.) Here's how it went down. A little before 2 p.m. at the drizzly end of last weekend, many Philadelphians, some suburbanites, a few out-of-towners filed into the East Passyunk Avenue restaurant with empty stomachs, elastic waistbands and varying degrees of anticipation.