The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
DAY ONE: I am not ripe.
DAY TWO: I am not ripe.
DAY THREE: Despite my high hopes, I am still not ripe.
DAY FOUR, at 4:23am ET: Oh my God! It has happened! I am fulfilled, because I am now, at least, fully and perfectly ripe! Oh joy! Let there be dancing in the streets, for I am at long last ripe!
DAY FOUR, at 4:28am ET: Alas, though I loved being ripe for five minutes, no one has consumed me, so I must now instantly, completely, and utterly rot. Goodbye, world.
Here’s a product I’ve discovered lately:
Yes, it’s red licorice!
I’ve got an unconquerable sweet tooth, I must admit. I have to be really careful about indulging it, for obvious reasons, so I try to err on the side of small servings of high-quality sweets. I’ve recently found this stuff, Wiley Wallaby Licorice.
The Store recently started carrying this brand. It’s a bit on the pricy side (a bag of this costs around 2.5 times what a standard bag of Twizzlers does), but it is high quality in that just a few pieces satisfies the craving. A bag of this stuff (full disclosure: I’m on my fourth bag) lasts me a few weeks, when consumed at a rate of two or three pieces at a time, only once a day. I’m not likely to sit and plow through a bag of this like I would a bag of Twizzlers or Red Vines. (Red Vines are particularly dangerous because they, like Twizzlers, are hollow in the middle, and that cavity is wide enough in Red Vines that you can use them as a straw. Imagine sipping your cola through a piece of licorice. Evil, I say!)
Pieces of Wiley Wallaby are much, much shorter, being only about two inches long. But they’re much, much fatter, and what’s more, they’re solid. Behold:
These are a chewy-candy delight.
Now, in “the wild”–meaning, at The Store–I’ve only seen three flavors of this stuff. There’s the Classic Red, which is just about perfect as red licorice goes. And there are Green Apple and Watermelon, neither of which I have tried because I quite honestly don’t like either of those flavors in candy settings. Maybe they’re wonderful in the Wiley Wallaby universe, it’s possible, but I’m not spending that much to find out. Looking at their website, however, I am intrigued by a few other flavors: Blueberry Pomegranate? Huckleberry? Yes, I may well be trying those.
But for now, this stuff rocks.
This has been a non-commercial endorsement. Nobody at Wiley Wallaby has paid me for this. (But if they want to send some free licorice my way, I am not so churlish as to say No.)
I love breakfast sandwiches. Whoever first put eggs and meat and cheese on some kind of bread should be awarded a Nobel Prize.
In fact, there should be a Nobel Prize for food. But that’s a thought for another time.
Tonight was Breakfast Sandwich for Dinner Night, which happens pretty frequently at Casa Jaquandor because we love them and we always have stuff on hand to make them. What’s nice about breakfast sandwiches is the variability: they’re not unlike burgers in that regard. About the only thing you have to have is bread, egg, and cheese. Anything else is fair game: extra protein, grilled veggies, more cheese, hot sauce, other condiments.
You can vary the cheese, obviously–smoked Gouda makes a nifty flavor change, and I’m a firm believer that you should make as much room in your life for different varieties of cheese as you can. Using brie as a spreading cheese on sandwiches? That’s great stuff!
I suppose you could even use different eggs from different birds, though I’ve never gone that far. The bread is the biggest option for changing things up. A good hearty bun is great, and biscuits are classic. Good old bread is great, too…but don’t stop there! Making waffles? Make a couple extra, cut them into segments, and use the waffles as the casing for your breakfast sandwich. The sky is the limit, folks.
And if you’re wondering what’s on the sandwich pictured at the top of this post? From bottom to top: Provolone*, a sausage patty**, egg***, Canadian ham****, and hot pepper jelly*****! Mine is on white bread; The Wife’s was on gluten-free bread.
*Never put a protein that has a lot of internal juices directly on the bottom bread. A fatty layer is best. In this case, cheese. On a burger, the bottom bun is where I spread mayo.
**We buy our breakfast sausage from Hanzlian’s, a local sausage maker whose products we love.
***Only one egg this time, what with all the other proteins.
****I’m not sure if there’s a difference between “Canadian ham”, as this is packaged, and “Canadian bacon”. Canadian bacon is good stuff. As a kid I used to get pouty when my parents would order it on pizza, which was an incorrect position to take. Get over it, Young Me!
*****Hot pepper jelly is my new “secret weapon” condiment. I adore the stuff, and it probably deserves a post of its own.
I know you don’t think you need to watch a foul-mouthed Australian guy do a tutorial and how to make a burger with pineapple on it, but really, how good are you at assessing your needs, actually? That’s what I thought.
Here’s the foul-mouthed Australian guy cooking a burger with pineapple on it.
Way back in prehistory, we–that is, The Wife and I–decided that our love of popcorn needed to be treated more seriously, so we took our leave of the microwave popcorn that had been our main means of popcorn consumption for years and years. So it was that a little more than 12 years ago, we bought a corn popper and returned to the popcorn recipe of yore: corn, oil, salt, and butter. And it was good!
Until last year when the bowl for our popper broke. It had been sporting a crack for a while, a crack which slowly lengthened until it rendered the bowl unusable. We looked online for a replacement bowl, and while we did find them, they were almost the cost of a new popper. Now, a new popper wouldn’t really cost much at all–around $30 or $40, probably–but at this point I got even more analogue in my approach to popcorn. Why get a big unitasker appliance for something I could make using stuff I already owned?
For this attitude, I blame Alton Brown. Here he is, demonstrating his popcorn method in a video he made at the beginning of the pandemic. (Aside: I loved the “Pantry Raid” videos he made in 2020 and I wish he’d do more. Brown seems to tire quickly of specific formats and projects, though.) I’ve basically adapted Brown’s method to my needs, using not a steel mixing bowl but my wok.
I put in a few tablespoons of peanut oil, and then three-quarters of a cup of corn…
Then, on goes the lid and I give the whole works a shake or two every little bit or so, maybe twenty or thirty seconds. (Oh, medium heat.) Gradually the heat builds up and the popping starts!
And…the result!
(Those last two images are videos. I haven’t figured out how to embed video content from Flickr yet, so bear with me.)
The wok’s shape does the same thing as Mr. Brown’s mixing bowl: as the corn pops the popped pieces move off to the sides, while the heat concentrates on the kernels at the bottom. Brown would probably say that this method doesn’t allow enough steam to escape from the wok during popping, but I’ve honestly never really seen steam as an impediment to yummy popcorn.
Unlike Brown, who doesn’t like adding fat at the end of the popping process, I am a big fan of melted butter. I probably put too much butter on the popcorn, but…nah. “Too much butter” does not compute. Add a few generous shakes of sea salt (in his Good Eats episode on popcorn, the method of which the newer video is a refinement, Brown says at one point, “Few things you can put in your mouth are more disappointing than saltless popcorn”), and we’re ready for snacking!
Mr. Brown likes to put the salt in with the corn during popping, which I have tried, but I’ve never been in love with the results, so I don’t do this. I also haven’t tried his sprinkle-on seasonings like nutritional yeast, furikake, or sprinkly cheese. I do want to try popping the corn in ghee, because I’m curious about the result. I’ve never done anything with ghee before, though. I’ve also popped corn in coconut oil, and that does lend a bit of decadent mouthfeel to the proceedings.
If you’re wondering what kind of popcorn I use, I’m not brand-loyal, in all honesty. I’ll buy the store brand, or Jolly-Time. I also like to get different varieties from the local farmers markets, though those kinds of popcorn can be a bit more temperamental in the popping, resulting in more unpopped kernels and smaller popcorn bits.
Yes, I tried it.
Yes, I liked it.
It didn’t change my life or anything, and I’ll probably get some more of it at some point, but I don’t consider this stuff essential. I don’t much know how to describe the flavor, but there’s an odd strange fruity sweetness that isn’t there in “regular” Coke. Where the Coca Cola people got the idea that this is what space tastes like, I will never know. To me it’s just a neat new flavor for cola.
I had the Zero Sugar version, because filling myself with sugar via soda doesn’t seem wise these days, and besides, soda companies are really doing impressive things with the “zero sugar” thing nowadays anyway. The days of “diet” sodas having that unpleasantly weird metallic taste (which I’ll admit I loved in Diet Pepsi) seem to be over, as the Zero Sugar entries get more and more impressive. Sunkist Zero Sugar orange soda? That stuff is a gamechanger.
In the case of Space Coke (I only call it Space Coke, sorry, Coke, I know that “Starlight” is a pretty and poetic name, but it’s Space Coke), I suspect that I would find the full-sugar version ridiculously sweet. This also possibly tamps down the “space” flavor, which I’ve heard described as “cotton candy in a cola can”, which doesn’t sound appetizing, does it? But I liked this stuff.
I would suggest taking my recommendation with a grain of salt, though. I am, after all, one of approximately nineteen people who in 2004 actually liked Holiday Spice Pepsi.
Raise your hand if you grew up in a town with terrible pizza.
[raises hand]
OK, good. I’m not alone. But more on that later.
Today is apparently National Pizza Day. I have no idea why today is National Pizza Day, but I do not generally question such things. But at least I can honor the occasion by dining on some pizza!
That’s leftover frozen pizza that I’ve reheated, actually. But no, this is not a bad thing! Frozen pizza has come a long, long, long way since the days of the really cheap crusts that tasted vaguely (or not so vaguely) of the cardboard box. This is actually a new brand to me, by a company called the Motor City Pizza Company. Every few weeks at home we have Frozen Pizza Nite for dinner, whereupon I buy a gluten-free pizza for The Wife (she is partial to the Freschetta brand), and I buy something for myself. I don’t have a favorite, which is nice for some pizza exploration each time out.
This last one was apparently a Detroit-style pizza, which means that it’s oblong rather than circular, the crust is thick and chewy (not unlike Buffalo-style pizza, in all honesty!), and the cheese (Wisconsin brick cheese) is spread all the way to the edge, so that it melts and scorches a bit around the edges, giving the outer crust a cheesy, carbonized crunch. I don’t know how well this particular frozen pizza holds up as an example of Detroit-style pizza, but I did like this brand and I would buy it again.
(Pro tip: When reheating leftover pizza, don’t use the oven OR the microwave. Use a frying pan, on the stove, on medium to medium-low heat. Put a lid on it to get the cheese melty again, while the pan re-crisps the crust.)
Generally speaking, pizza might be the single food I’ve eaten more than any other (maybe second after sandwiches), and I suspect I’m far from alone in this. Americans tend to be nuts about pizza. What’s one of the first question anybody asks in this country when they relocate to a new city? “Where’s the good pizza around here?” Pizza is so huge that it’s simply not acceptable that celiacs live a pizzaless existence, hence the existence of many gluten-free pizzas.
I don’t remember a time of my life that was Before Pizza. In our oddly-nomadic life in my first ten years, during which we moved each year, we had a favorite pizza place in each town. Pizza Caboose was a run train-themed pizza place in the Portland area (some locations had an actual caboose inside, which you could sit in as long as the whole thing wasn’t rented out for a party), and there was another place (now gone) called the Organ Grinder, which was a trip in itself. These places, I remember liking very much, even if I, as the youngest member of the family, rarely got to pick the pizza toppings, so I had to deal with sliced tomatoes and mushrooms and having Dad admonish me for trying to pick the pepperoni off the freshly-served pizza.
(But really, isn’t it a pizza law that you pick off one slice of pepperoni from the fresh pizza? How many things in life are better than that first, and only, piece of pepperoni, picked from the top of the still-bubbling pie, dripping hot grease and pulling along with it a fine tendril of molten cheese?)
Another joint I remember, from the year we lived in LaCrosse, Wisconsin, was Rocky Rococo’s. This place served up slices of deep-crusted goodness. I also remember a couple of other pizza joints in LaCrosse…one of them had barber chairs that kids could play in while waiting for food (maybe this was actually Rocky Rococo’s? I dunno) and another was a bar/restaurant in LaCrosse’s downtown section, whose name I don’t recall but I do recall their pizza being very well-endowed in the cheese department.
And then there was Olean, my hometown of roughly twenty years.
Olean, bless its heart, was not a place for great pizza. I know that some of the locals down there will quibble with this assessment, but I cannot tell a lie. One local joint, located in the mall there, is absolutely beloved, but it’s really on par with Sbarro, and it serves the same kind of product (the cheap thin NYC-style slice that you can fold). It wasn’t bad, but I never once pined for it the way many there do. Another joint served slices of square pizza cut from sheet pans, and each slice had two pepperoni slices on it. That’s it: two. This place was also beloved. I never understood why.
There were a few other mom-and-pop joints that came and went, but generally, Olean was not really a place to get great pizza. Maybe its pizza scene has improved since I moved away–it’s been more than twenty years now, after all–but at the time, well…a case can be made that Pizza Hut really was the best game in town. (And honestly, as much as I might say about working at Pizza Hut, I do still believe that their product, at least back then, was perfectly respectable, at least for a corporate “Every pizza must be the same!” joint.)
One special mention must be made of a pizza place in Pittsburgh, the city of my birth: Vincent’s Pizza Park is the home of some amazing pizzas, but they’re rather idiosyncratic. They are big, heavy, loaded with grease, and the crust goes for miles. I mean, look at these:
That’s some amazing pizza–I have never been able to find Italian sausage on a pizza that had quite the same bite as the stuff that Vincent’s uses–but when you’re eating it, you might well flash back to that episode of The Simpsons when during breakfast Bart is complaining of chest pains while Homer orders him to butter his bacon.
(Vincent’s was also apparently a bit less well-maintained, in earlier days when sanitary standards were a bit more lax than they are nowadays. My father loved telling the story of how once he was at Vincent’s when my parents were relatively newly wed, in the early 1960s, and he called home from the pay phone to tell Mom he was going to be a while because some poor guy had gotten locked in the bathroom and was shrieking to be released from whatever eldritch terror dwelt within. Dad had to see that one play out.)
What are my pizza preferences? I mean, everybody has a preference, right? My favorite right now would almost certainly be Imperial Pizza in South Buffalo, a joint that is rightfully legendary. It breaks my heart that The Wife can’t eat their product anymore. Curse you, Gluten Gods! But Imperial’s crust is that wonderful thick pillowy Buffalo crust, topped with a sweetish sauce and piled with cheese and whatever your toppings are. Each year at Christmas I treat myself and a couple of coworkers to pizza and wings from Imperial, and given the opportunity to have pizza from any place right now, I’d likely choose Imperial.
Or Cappelli’s…they may an amazing chicken finger pizza that tastes like pizza and wings all in one dish…and their crust, a bit thinner than the standard Buffalo crust, is ideally suited for one of my favorite topping combos, Italian sausage and banana peppers.
But more generally? I really do love all kinds of pizza. The New York City thin crust experience really is special, and I love it to death. But I am equally fond, if not moreso, of the Chicago deep-dish experience, in which a buttery and flaky crust contains multitudes in terms of tomatoes, cheese, and who knows what else. And everything in between! Buffalo pizza, Detroit pizza, and from my little experience with it, that super-thin crust stuff they make in St. Louis.
Pizza is so amazingly versatile that I can’t imagine ever tiring of it, or getting militant about one particular variety of it. Pizza is large. Pizza contains multitudes. You can make breakfast pizza, you can make white pizza, you can make any variation of the “traditional” pizza you can think of, you can make dessert pizza. Pizza makes life better, and we owe eternal gratitude to whichever ancestors it was who made a flatbread and then started putting stuff on it.
And then to those who made beer to wash it down with, and wings to pair with it.
Happy National Pizza Day, everyone!
A culinary note from this year’s Thanksgiving:
My favorite Thanksgiving dish has always been the stuffing. Always, always, always. My ranking goes stuffing, corn, rolls/biscuits, turkey. (I am not a mashed potatoes fan, but that’s not the point here.) My mother’s homemade stuffing, the stuff I grew up with, had a similar flavor to Stove-Top, but being homemade, it was so much better: real bread allowed to go stale for a day or two, then torn up into big chunks and seasoned with salt, pepper, sage, poultry seasoning, and maybe something else. Diced onions and celery rounded it out. I love this stuffing.
Cut to my college years, especially my last couple of years, when our Thanksgiving breaks were shortened to a single four-day weekend. This made it unfeasible for me to go home at Thanksgiving (remember, I went to college in Iowa, 800 miles away). Luckily, by junior year I was dating The Girlfriend (later The Wife), so I went with her to Thanksgiving with her relatives somewhere else in Iowa. We ended up having dinner with one set of aunts and uncles, who did the “Get up at 2am and put the 30lb turkey in the oven” thing, so dinner was served at noon. This, in itself, struck me as odd: my family always ate dinner at dinnertime, maybe on the early side, but still, it was a late-in-the-day meal.
This was my first Thanksgiving dinner not cooked by my mother in any way. There were side dishes I’d never seen before (Ambrosia? Wazzat?), and then there was the stuffing, which they called “dressing”. It was nothing at all like my mother’s, being almost more of a bread pudding than what I knew. And it had fruit in it! There were raisins in the stuffing, which they didn’t even call stuffing! What world was I in!
A week or so later I’m talking to Mom on the phone, partially about my Thanksgiving dinner, and I get to the stuffing: “There were raisins in it!” And Mom chuckles and lets out a little secret: her recipe calls for raisins, too, only she started omitting them way back when, on the basis of my father’s at-the-time distaste for raisins. She threatened to put them back in the stuffing for years, but she never did.
Until yesterday.
I finally got to taste my mother’s stuffing with the raisins, and I can report that I wish she’d put her foot down years ago. The raisins add a bit of sweetness to the dish that perfectly offsets the savory spices and the salt. I should have expected this, given how I’ve come to really love the offsetting nature of sweet and savory in the same dish over the last bunch of years, but those raisins were a revelation. So, better late than never!
As for my father, he’s come around on raisins in the last few years. Tastes change! It’s happened to me, too: when I was a kid, you couldn’t pay me to touch a mushroom or a squash, but now I love both. I doubt I’ll ever get there on broccoli, though.
Long live the raisins in the stuffing!
(But keep the ambrosia salad. That’s a hard “no” from me.)
(The title of this post comes from one of the great SNL sketches of all time. Rest in power, Chadwick Boseman!)
The “whole thing” being a pork tenderloin sandwich at Frank Gourmet Hot Dogs, a favorite joint of ours. Luckily for us, Frank is located in one of the northern suburbs of Buffalo, a good 35-minute drive away, which means that we don’t get there all that often. This is bad for our love of good food. This is good for our love of good cardiovascular health.
I never had a pork tenderloin sandwich until my college years. These are a Midwestern thing, so that was the time for having them. I loved them almost immediately, these wide patties of pork, pounded flat and breaded and fried and served on a bun that’s too small so a lot of the pork overhangs the sandwich.
The folks at Frank take that last part to extremes. I was probably halfway to being full by the time I had even eaten my way to the bread part of this sandwich. Then I still had the entire sandwich portion of the sandwich to contend with. Oh, and fries.
This was at lunchtime on Saturday. Part of me is still full.
Readers may recall that earlier today I discussed how to make a pot of chili.
I have now completed the pot of chili. The Wife made cornbread to go with it (because cornbread is the thing that goes with chili), and thus we dined!
Thank you for your attention.