I’d long thought that there was no possible circumstance under which chocolate could taste like crap, but I have just been proven wrong by the person who put a single red M&M into the Skittles at the Bulk section. Lord, that was one nasty flavor combo. Time to rinse it out with some rum.
Peetsa
Ah, geez, it turns out that Matthew Yglesias is one of those people. You really have to feel sorry for New York pizza fanatics, living in a country with so many great styles of pizza and being able to enjoy none of it because they so obstinately cling to a faulty notion of “real pizza”.
Oh well, that leaves more pizza for me!
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Buffalo, conquering the world!
Gregg Easterbrook, who can be right once in a while, on Buffalo pizza:
TMQ lamented that it longs to savor Chicago deep-dish pizza; those objects in the grocer’s freezer just don’t do it, and restaurant chains that advertise “Chicago-style” pizza seem to mean East Chicago, Ind. Jeff Roberts of Columbus, Ohio, reported that Giordano’s, the current mecca of deep-dish pizza, now ships its pies overnight. The new pizza sensation that’s waiting to happen is Buffalo pizza, which is roughly a cross between Chicago style and the Greenwich Village style of “foldable” pizza preferred in New York City. An out-of-the-way place called Bocce Club in the Buffalo suburbs makes the best Buffalo-style pizza and also ships overnight. Taste-makers, this form of pizza needs to be discovered.
I’ve long thought that people ’round these parts are too hard on Buffalo pizza. Let its praises be sung!
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A Quiz!
I knicked this from Still Life with Soup Can. I don’t remember doing this one before, so here it is. It’s about…food!
1. How do you like your eggs? Scrambled, with cheese or without, with a liberal sprinkling of black pepper and hot sauce. Or as an omelet with many, many kinds of fillings.
2. How do you take your coffee/tea? Black with quite a bit of sugar. I’ll use a creamer now and again as a change of pace, but mostly, I subscribe to the wonderful Turkish proverb: Coffee should be black as Hell, strong as Death, and sweet as Love. (I’ve never tried real Turkish coffee, though.)
3. Favorite breakfast food? My love of pancakes and waffles knows no bounds, but at a restaurant I’m likely to order some kind of combo plate with eggs, meat, and toast. These days, though, my main breakfast meal tends to be a bowl of frosted shredded wheat, topped with blueberries (fresh if possible and not expensive, frozen otherwise), with a glass of orange juice.
4. Peanut butter – smooth or crunchy? Smooth, because that’s the preference of the WomenFolk of Casa Jaquandor. I personally have no great preference either way.
5. What kind of dressing on your salad? My favorite is poppyseed dressing. For some reason, in restaurants I reflexively order ranch, even though it’s boring. At home, I’m switching to extra virgin olive oil mixed with balsamic vinegar. Eventually I’ll start doing things like making my own vinaigrettes.
6. Coke or Pepsi? Usually Pepsi, but I like Coke too. I wish I could get Passover Coke in these parts (although in truth I haven’t tried any of the stores in the Jewish neighborhoods of Buffalo). I’ve pretty much stopped drinking diet pop, because I’m told the chemicals in them are all kinds of bad. Have I researched this matter myself? Of course not. Because I just do what I’m told, that’s why.
7. You’re feeling lazy, what do you make? A couple hot dogs, or maybe a bowl of Ramen.
8. You’re feeling really lazy. What kind of pizza do you order? Italian sausage and onions. Or pepperoni and banana peppers. Or ham and mushrooms on a white crust. (By the way: Chicago pizza is pizza. Deal with it, you NYC-style pizza crybabies!)
9. You feel like cooking. What do you make? Depends on my mood, really. If I’m feeling ambitious, I make a mean Pastitsio (just made one last week, as a matter of fact). I do good fried chicken, although I do that maybe once a year. My mac-and-cheese is good.
10. Do any foods bring back good memories? Ramen noodles, which I ate from a very early age — especially if I have any rye crisp bread to butter and then dip in the Ramen broth. Spanish rice and corn bread is a stand-by dish from when The Wife and I were first dating. And, of course, a roasted turkey.
11. Do any foods bring back bad memories? Hmmmm…can’t think of any off the top of my head.
12. Do any foods remind you of someone? Spanish rice. See above. And ditto the also afore-mentioned Ramen with rye crisp; that reminds me of my father.
13. Is there a food you refuse to eat? Broccoli. I consider anyone who claims to genuinely like the flavor of broccoli to be delusional.
14. What was your favorite food as a child? Totino’s frozen pizza.
15. Is there a food that you hated as a child but now like? I’m coming to enjoy mushrooms, although not to the point of eating them by themselves, or having stuffed mushrooms as an appetizer. But I do like them in stuff, like on a pizza. That used to be a dealbreaker for me, but now, I’ll cheerfully eat a pizza with shrooms on it. Oh, and squash.
16. Is there a food that you liked as a child but now hate? Not hate, per se, but there’s stuff that while I don’t dislike it I genuinely wonder what I thought the fuss was — like those dirt-cheap frozen pot pies, for instance. For a frozen pot pie, Pepperidge Farm or Marie Callender’s make much better ones; and really, if I’m really hungry for pot pie, I’ll make one myself.
From my college years, though? I can’t fathom how I went for a year consuming Easy Cheese on a regular basis. Ewwwwwww.
17. Favorite fruit and vegetable: Blueberries; Green peppers.
18. Favorite junk food: Chips of just about any kind (except that horrible “Dill Pickle” flavor), chocolate chip cookies, ice cream.
19. Favorite between meal snack: These days? A couple ounces of mixed nuts, or a cup of yogurt, or a granola bar.
20. Do you have any weird food habits? With chicken wings, I tend to eat the “drummies” before I eat the “wing” section. When we make any kind of baked pasta dish, I have to get a serving from the edge of the pan, where that crusty goo forms. And whenever we get pizza, I start eating it with a knife and fork, until I eventually decide to just pick it up like you’re supposed to do.
21. You’re on a diet. What food(s) do you fill up on? I don’t do diets; rather, I try to build new eating habits. I love peanut butter spread on celery, though.
22. You’re off your diet. Now what would you like? Everything!
23. How spicy do you order Indian/Thai? I don’t order Indian or Thai. Why? Because I never make it a priority to get off my arse and go sample Indian and Thai. I admit that this is a serious flaw in my food education.
24. Can I get you a drink? Yeungling lager; or Blue Moon pumpkin ale; or Sam Adams Cherry Wheat; or a rum-and-coke but only if it’s Captain Morgan; vanilla rum and root beer.
25. Red wine or white? Red. Especially if it’s Port — I love Port.
26. Favorite dessert? Ice cream. Or cake. Or both.
27. The perfect nightcap? A cup of herbal tea with honey.
Hmmm…for some reason I’m hungry now.
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An odd question
Where there’s swill, there’s a way
That may be the worst pun I’ve ever used in a blog post title, but anyway, I just happened across a website called Swillparty.com, which turns out to be a Buffalo/WNY site devoted to social wine tasting. Apparently SWILL is an acronym, standing for “Several Wine Imbibers Liking Libations”.
They’ve got a wine blog (already bookmarked for the next update of the blogroll), and they’ve even come up with a nifty-looking kit for getting your own wine-tasting parties together, along with several other items of merchandise. So, if you’re local and you’re looking for wine-tasting stuff, keep your money local and buy from them. And if you’re not local, buy from them anyway, because your locality doesn’t need the money as much as Western New York does! I’m not quite the wine drinker I used to be — beer, rum (Spum! Vrum!), and Southern Comfort are my poisons of choice these days, although I do enjoy wine and I’ve got a half-bottle (or whatever the technical term is for a 375-ml bottle) of Sauternes that I’m keeping for consumption when I make my first professional fiction sale. (Although at the rate I’m going, that bottle will be too valuable to drink when that day comes….)
I found this site, incidentally, by exercising an old online pseudo-hobby of mine, namely, Googling names of people I’ve gone to school with. Turns out that the founding SWILLer, Anne Conroy-Baiter, is one of those old friends with whom I lost touch years ago. (It also turns out that she’s apparently quite the watercolorist, which is something I don’t recall knowing about her at all from high school. I could really learn to like this Interweb thingie!
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You [beep] donkey!!!
Anyone else out there love Hell’s Kitchen as much as I do? I think that show is unbelievably hilarious — the blend of The Apprentice with a cooking show is terrific, especially since Chef Gordon Ramsay seemingly alternates between exactly three moods: calm and playful when he’s being a “civilian”, mild haughty disdain when he’s being a chef, and — most amusingly — over-the-top, profanity-laced rage when he’s being the chef.
Interestingly, I don’t think the show would play so well if we were hearing Ramsay’s unexpurgated curse words, epithets, expletives, and use of “f***” as punctuation. The censoring beep actually seems to make things funnier, when he’ll utter a sentence that includes four or five beeps.
Anyway, here’s a long video of highlights from Season Two of HK, with some very funny stuff (like his immortal “You donkey!”, when the inept Giacomo can’t figure out that the oven isn’t working because he turned the gas off). My favorite Gordon Ramsay moment, however, comes at the beginning of this short video, when he gets so worked up that his voice actually breaks on the word “nonstick”.
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Candy. Sweet, sweet candy.
A few days ago, John Scalzi mentioned his preferred brand of red licorice, a brand called “Red Vines”. He also mentions his apparently strongly-held belief that Twizzlers are substantially inferior. Now, he’s mentioned Red Vines before, but I’ve never been able to judge them for myself, since I can never find them here…until now. It seems that Target stocks them (alongside the Twizzlers, of course).
Now, I refuse to accept the notion that Twizzlers suck. I actually enjoy their waxy texture — mmmmmm, wax — and I like the flavor just fine. That said, I must admit that Red Vines are also very pleasing. The individual pieces are larger than Twizzlers, with the spiral pattern on the outside more sharply defined and with the Red Vines’ surface visibly rougher than the smooth Twizzlers. Thus, the “mouth feel” of the Red Vines is very nice, and the flavor is likewise different from that of Twizzlers. (I have no idea what specific flavor the Red Vines are supposed to approximate, but I don’t think it matters anyway, since no cherry or strawberry or any other red fruit occurring in nature tastes like a Red Vine.)
Where Red Vines actually do stomp all over Twizzlers is in the thickness of the pieces. Twizzlers are skinnier, with the hole on the inside being substantially narrower than in the Red Vines. In fact, I’ve noticed in recent years that Twizzlers seem to be packed together so tightly in their packages these days that the longitudinal cavity within each individual Twizzler is virtually sealed shut. With Red Vines, however, you can bite off either end and then look through the resulting licorice tube and see out the other end. And why does this matter?
Because this means that Red Vines can be employed as a straw for drinking Pepsi.
(A while back, I was at Vidler’s in East Aurora and found some spearmint flavored licorice. I liked it. Everyone else in the family hated it. Oh well.)
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Meh….
This week has been a blend of busy and not-feeling-like-posting. So I haven’t been posting. Will that continue? Who knows?
Anyway, a few thoughts on various stuff:
:: Watched Raines last night, and I had one of those cases where I read a lot of middling-to-negative reviews of a thing, watch it, and wonder if they watched the same thing I did. I found Raines very enjoyable; Jeff Goldblum delivered a fairly understated performance (as compared to, say, Jurassic Park, in which he hammed it up) as Detective Raines, who has conversations with the murder victims whose murders he is investigating.
The commercials made this all sound rather Sixth Sense-ish, but it’s not — the show makes clear that Raines isn’t really talking to the dead, but hallucinating them, which makes the conversations with them interesting in that the dead can’t give him hints, seeing as how as they have no more information than he has at any given point in the investigation.
Anyway, I found the pilot nicely written, with a story that moved right along, and some good and snappy dialogue. Sure, the murder mystery is fairly pedestrian — nothing there that you wouldn’t have seen on any episode of, say, Rockford Files or Magnum PI, but I enjoyed the show anyway.
:: Lance Mannion asks who our favorite TV detectives are. Mine is Andy Sipowicz from NYPDBlue, whose character growth over the show’s run was always fascinating to behold. The show creaked quite a bit with age as it got older, but even so, I always loved ol’Andy.
:: My “guilty pleasure” TV cop? Why, Don Johnson’s Nash Bridges, of course! I just found that show ridiculously entertaining a lot of the time. The show went on probably at least a season too long, but it was a lot of fun for a while. (In fact, with its Friday 10:00 timeslot, it made a wonderful partner with Millennium.)
Of course, watching Jodi Lyn O’Keefe blossom on the show was always pleasant:
:: I will buy this. Shut up. Those movies had nice music, aside from all the pop stuff.
:: “But Bill Clinton did it too!” Yeah, right.
:: I’m often the one on various Interweb fora to interject into long threads devoted to complaining about some TV show or book or whatever along the lines of, “Geez, if you hate it so much, why do you watch it so much?” A grand example can often be found over at the FSM message boards, where one regular member is a religious fan (and I mean “religious” quite literally) of the original incarnation of Battlestar Galactica, so much so that he’ll denounce with appropriate fleckling of the monitor with spittle the various plot machinations of the current version of the show. I once asked, “Why the hell are you watching something you loathe so completely?”, and he replied, “So I can discuss it.” I just don’t get the impulse to keep dwelling on something that brings you displeasure.
So why do I keep reading For Better or For Worse, then? Hell, I dunno — but I guess it’s fun to see that plenty of folks are annoyed by it in the same way that I am. Here’s a perceptive comment as to the way April is being treated in the strip:
But April is the only one of them who has a valid excuse for acting like an adolescent.
Liz had a pretty good independent life going for herself, until she suddenly and mysteriously decided that she was homesick and couldn’t take it anymore. So she quit her job and asked her boyfriend — who had already moved for her once — to move again, and then she fled south like a scared rabbit and moved in with Mommy and Daddy at the first opportunity. And then she was surprised when her boyfriend turned out not to be so excited about the “follow Liz wherever her whim takes her” plan as she’d thought he would be.
Mike and his family had the fire, so they had a pretty good reason for moving in… but why are they still there? They’ve got plenty of money to find another apartment, even if they do decide that they want to start looking for a house sometime soon. But no, Mike complains that every apartment they see is too small, too far away, too expensive, too something; and he’s completely terrified of the idea of buying a house. So they stay on in his parents’ house, and stay, and stay…
In the meantime, April has been evicted from her room and is sleeping in the rec room — which is also the storage space for Mike and Dee’s extra stuff. Too many people are using too few showers in the house, and apparently the people who can drive — which is pretty much everyone except April and the little kids — can’t be bothered to go grocery shopping often enough. April has been shunted off to a corner while her theoretically-adult siblings clamor for their parents’ attention.
Meanwhile, their grandfather has had a stroke and April is the only one of the family who seems to visit him consistently and still treats him like a person and not a fixture.
As James notes, on the scale of things all of this isn’t that huge a problem… but it is hard for a sixteen-year-old girl. What I find disgusting about the situation is that consistently, every time that April tries to suggest that this is hard for her — every single time — she’s smacked down and told that other people have it worse than her, so shut the hell up. Mike the Literary Genius and Liz the Broken-Hearted are treated with kid gloves, because of course their problems are serious and weighty — but April? April’s problems aren’t worth worrying about. Go back and hide in the rec room, April; the grown-ups are talking.
It’s incredibly dismissive of her feelings, which justified or not are still her feelings. This is how you teach people that they are worthless and insignificant and that nothing they do matters. April may be a fictional character, but I’d still rather that she not learn that lesson.
And here’s a great post on why Anthony is evil and must be destroyed.
:: Tomorrow morning: pancakes, bitches! We weren’t successful last year, but we did get a nice consolation prize: Charlie’s Diner in East Aurora, which is just a great little breakfast joint in the classic tradition.
:: The NCAA Tournament: as always, “Meh.”
And so it goes.
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Squash! (part two)
A few weeks ago, The Wife made this for dinner:
A number of people have asked for the recipe, so here it is:
1. Obtain squash.
2. Stuff as pictured.
3. Cook.
4. Serve.
Easy as that!
OK, but seriously, here’s the recipe as described by The Wife. She got the main idea from a magazine she checked out of the library; it said to microwave the whole works after stuffing, but she went with cooking it in the oven.
INGREDIENTS:
2 medium acorn squash
1 pound bulk spicy pork sausage
.5 cup chopped onion
1. egg
2 tablespoons milk
1 cup fresh baby spinach, finely chopped
1.5 cups soft bread crumbs
.5 cup dried cranberriesCut the squash in half and remove the pulp and seeds; feed pulp and seeds to your enemies or your children. Season the squash with salt, pepper, and freshly squeezed orangutan blood (this ingredient is highly optional, as well as morally questionable), place the squash face-down in a baking dish, and roast at 375 degrees Fahrenheit. (Roasting at 375 degrees Kelvin will yield questionable results.) Roast for 30 minutes.
While roasting the squash, prepare the stuffing. First recite the following prayer to Obosidor, Etruscan God of Food:
O great Obosidor, slay my enemies
and decorate my doorstep with their
entrails!(Strange prayer to offer a God of Food, but that’s what the recipe says.)
Then crumble the sausage in a large skillet along with the onion and cook until the meat is no longer pink. (Here the recipe says to drain the fat. I always omit this instruction in recipes, which partly explains the waistline you see in the photos of me in the sidebar. Do according to your want.)
Meanwhile, in a large bowl, beat the egg and milk. (They had it coming, the lowlifes….) Stir in the spinach, bread crumbs, cranberries, and finally the sausage-and-onion mixture. Sprinkle with a liberal helping of moondust. (It won’t taste right without it.)
After the squash are finished roasting, turn them upward and stuff. (Use a spoon for this, as the squash will be friggin’ hot.) Return to the oven and continue to roast at 375 for twenty minutes or so.
Remove from oven before eating. (Trust me on this, folks.)
This goes well with a nice Chianti. Omit the fava beans.
At least, that’s how The Wife said she made it. I didn’t quite find all of that believable, but, you know….
