She had just returned from the grocery store and was starting to cook his favorite, chicken and mashed potatoes, when the phone rang.

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For dinner, Karzai joined the first family for some all-American fare: fried chicken, mashed potatoes, green beans, cheese and garlic biscuits and pineapple upside down cake.

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On the kitchen table his lunch awaited him, a plate covered with an inverted plate to keep warm: chicken, mashed potatoes, cooked carrots, and green beans.

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Favorites: roast chicken with garlic mashed potatoes and a wild mushroom jus, and poached skate in a spring garlic broth with potato gnocchi and asparagus.

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Favorites: roasted stuffed chicken with garlic mashed potatoes and a wild-mushroom jus, and poached skate in a spring garlic broth with potato gnocchi and green asparagus.

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Around our house, when not infected by the Birdseye plague, real food often meant chicken-fried steak with mashed potatoes and cream gravy, sugar peas, field peas, black-eyed peas, lima beans, green beans, all greens, ambrosia, okra, corn, tomato aspic, squash casseroles, pot roast, fried fish, chicken and dumplings, hot rolls, biscuits, cornbread, cakes, pies, fudge, divinity and Mama's homemade vegetable soup, which was world famous in our family.

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The early crowd at the Hollywood Diner ("Where the customer is the star") was unmoved by Buffett, a fixture with his usual order of chicken-fried steak with extra mashed potatoes.

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The iron stove had a cast-iron warmer on the top, and in that warmer would be pork roasts and pork chops and fried chicken, two gallon pots of butter beans with salt pork, navy beans with ham bone, rattlesnake beans glistening with bacon fat, pans of chicken and dressing, macaroni and cheese, cornbread and cathead biscuits, mounds of mashed potatoes and sweet potatoes, skillets of fried green tomatoes.

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