Posts Tagged Under ‘Food’

Peanut Butter: Hero Food

I’m sitting here reading about PHP exception handling when the idea strikes me: some peanut-butter toast would hit the spot like some sort of proverbial spot-hitting device. That got me thinking about why peanut butter is an amazing product.

Peanut butter tastes great. You can rock peanut butter with lots of things: chocolate, jelly, Nutella, bread, celery, apples, Thai food, cookies and lots of other stuff. Maybe I’m expanding on the Thai food part, but they use crushed-up peanut paste with oil in their cooking, so that’s close enough for me.

Peanut butter has phat mouth feel. Mouth feel is the term for how food feels all up in your craw, and peanut butter is great. You don’t have to chew it, but it still hangs out for a while, as if to say, “What’s up, mouth. Let’s get to know one another.”

Peanut butter is good for messing with your dog. If you put peanut butter in one of those Kong toys, it will blow your dog’s mind. He looks like a freaking idiot trying to lick peanut butter out of a rubber ball for 19 hours, but the mutt loves it!

Peanuts are a friend of the environment. They’re natural — granted, Jif or Skippy not quite so much — and you can grow hella peanuts on just a little land. That means more efficiency and fewer animals getting faded for protein. Sadly there is no such thing as peanut bacon just yet, but scientists are probably working on it. Speaking of that,

Peanut butter is associated with George Washington Carver. Wikipedia says he did not actually invent peanut butter as we know it, but he did do lots of work with it. Plus, the dude made gasoline and nitroglycerin substitutes out of peanuts. His name always seemed to come up in school, and I admired him for his devotion to that greatest of foods. Now if someone just steps up to his legacy and invents bacon from peanuts, we’re in good shape.

There you have it: peanut butter.

I Come to Praise the Irish-Food Quarter-Aisle

Erin Go Bragh, dudes.

It being St. Patrick’s Day — at least in one hour — I’d like all of you still living in NYC to take a moment at your local grocery establishment and appreciate the 1/4 of an aisle devoted to feeding the Irish immigrant masses, those still moving to New York after all these centuries. It’s one of the things you don’t really get here in D.C. — the last one I saw was when I went to visit Boston a few weeks back — and it’s much missed by your correspondent. Having lived in Queens, where there’s an immigrant community for every nationality known to man, I’ve gotten to know and love the Irish-food section while perusing the aisles of Sunnyside, Astoria and Woodside.

You’ll know you’ve found the aisle when you see Barry’s Tea, in the familiar red box at the top of the section. It’s meant to be drunk in the Irish style, meaning strong enough that you mistake it for coffee. Also known as “the bomb”. Next to that they’ll keep the breakfast theme going with some McCann’s Irish Oatmeal. They should probably change the name from “steel cut” to “oat gravel”. For real, it’s stony. For those who like their biscuits named for what happens after you eat them, we have my grandma’s favorite Digestives tea cookies from Burton’s. It all finishes off with some Chivers jam and Fruitfield Orange Marmalade. We in America eat normal fruit preserves like grapes, peaches or strawberries, but in Ireland they like to invent weird fruits like “gooseberry”, “bramble” and “lemon curd” (?), pack them in sugar and sell them to toast fans who don’t know better. Watch out for these, they’re strange.

Under your breakfast stuff comes the Knorr and Erin soup. I’m down with Irish potato, but a little wary of the brown tomato. You can top your soup off with some HP Curry Sauce or maybe some Bisto White-Sauce Granules — what discerning eater doesn’t love granules? Also a winner is Chef brown sauce, which comes in a handy 2.5 liter (or “litre”) container for those times when you need to dip 200 dozen french fries (or “chips”) at once.

Below the Cadbury chocolates, the beauty of which I have already described, you have the junk food — a personal favorite. We all enjoy Tayto cheese ‘n onion crisps, but the real pleasure is washing it down with a cool, sugary glass of Club orange. This stuff is definitely the best-tasting orange pop in the universe, but I will concur with my friend John who said it probably shouldn’t be drunk out of the bottle, lest the world’s most well-fed bacteria colony grow in its incredibly high-fructose medium. Club lemon and Club rock shandy (again, ?) are a little disappointing, but you won’t go wrong with pop made from real orange juice. Fizzy orange: favorite of both me and my bro.

On another Irish food note, the one thing missing from the Irish food aisle is the best Irish food of all, the breakfast bangers. You have to special order them in the U.S., but they make a great gift for your family porkosseur this March.

To end on another Queens food note, the poultry market in Flushing, across the street from the U-Haul, is the proud home of the worst smell in the world. That is all.

The Cacao Craze

Yesterday while housesitting for a friend, the wife and I finished off a hearty dinner. (For those both wondering and not wondering, I dropped culinary skillz to the tune of mussels in white-wine and garlic broth accompanied by a toasted baguette, fresh green beans in lemon-parsley butter and rosemary roasted potatoes. Fools better recognize.) While coming down from my mollusk-induced high, I opted for a piece of chocolate for dessert. I curiously noted the chocolate’s label: “65% Cacao”.

Trendspotting time, homes.

Chocolate companies are repping this cacao trend to the fullest. Take a look at some of the yuppie high-end chocolates next time you’re at the grocery store, and you’ll inevitably notice more percentage rates than a savings and loan.

For those who aren’t Pennsylvanian — read “awesome” — and haven’t done Hershey’s Chocolate World (be warned that the link features loud and annoying music), the cacao tree — native to Mesoamerica and an important part of the Columbian exchange — produces the beans that are processed into cocoa and, subsequently, chocolate. If chocolate is steel, cacao is the iron ore. (I guess that means adding milk is the Bessemer process and Switzerland is the Monongahela Valley.)

As a dude who likes to get his occasional chocolate on, I think I am qualified to state that good chocolate, like any good food, does happen solely by cramming your product with as much of one ingredient as you can. It is instead about balance: cacao is one part, but how well do you balance it with sugar, milk and other ingredients? That is key.

The cacao-percentage thing then is sly marketing: a way for one chocolate company to artificially quantify that its product is better than the competitor. I don’t know if this strategy is native to the U.S. chocolate market, but it does seem like a peculiarly American way to advertise food. Add in the oft-discussed health benefits of dark chocolate — easily confused with its tastier milk-enhanced variant, and who doesn’t like to exaggerate the healthiness of something that tastes great? — and you have the perfect status-symbol storm.

I think most of us are smart enough not to buy chocolate based on it having some higher numerical value, but I’m sure there are people who do so. To those people, I say, yo: buy the best-tasting kind, because higher cacao != consistently awesome.

This chocolate, on the other hand, always == awesome.

Collard Greens Recipe

If awesome was a flavor, it would be this. It doesn’t have the ham hocks or fatback that you find in the greens at Southern restaurants, but it tastes just as great and is healthier.

1 lb. collard greens, cut up and washed
14 oz. (1 can) chicken stock
1 1/2 cups water
1 1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp sugar
3 tsp olive oil
Hot sauce to taste

Put it all in a big covered pot. Boil it for 30 minutes. Stir it now and then. Grub it and thank me. (Technically you should thank the people who printed this on the bag of greens I bought, but that’s just semantics.)

Oh, and if you end up throwing away any greens — you should do this with any yellow or wilted parts — be sure to put them out in the garage or something, because those things stink really bad after a day in the trash.

For real, they smell gross.

Living Up To Stereotypes

I’m off to Indiana for Thanksgiving, and like a good stereotype, I look forward again this year to eating potatoes. I will not be consuming a six-pack of beer to make it the Irish seven-course meal, and for the record, the one about the two dudes, the genie and the sea of Guinness is a far better ethnic slur anyway.

Happy Thanksgiving to all my family, friends and the rest of yinz out there in web land.

Big Ups to Things

• Big ups to my friends at PandaSmash.com for doing a cool job cutting on the web’s video sites. Right here. I personally would like to see more of Emo Sam, potentially a spinoff series. Hey, it worked for Rhoda.
• Big ups to A-Z Guitar Tabs for having such a complete archive. You think of a song, it’s up on there. Now I need a site to keep me motivated to learn to play. Or I can just wait 15 years for guitar-teaching neural implants and keep playing Guitar Hero II in the meantime. Sweet.
• Big ups to Rock Creek Park. Pretty cool woods and forest stuff to do in the middle of DC.
• Big ups to Morningstar Farms Grillers Original. Cooked in the pan with a little bit of olive oil and topped with some A1, these are sometimes higher than real burgers on the taste scale.
• Big ups to sunblock. Irish people in sunny climates thank yinz guys for keeping us out of lobster territory. Less ups to being pale as hell in the first place, though.
• Also, big ups to lobsters. You are delicious.

I’m out.

Chicken Nugget: An Emblem of Freedom

Even though I don’t eat much meat anymore thanks to my quasi-veg diet, nothing stirs the passions of my stomach quite like those brown, finely breaded morsels of undetermined poultry origin.

You hook us young, oh nugget. From those early years when mom and dad would head out to a night on the town, leaving the babysitter to whip up some chicken nuggets with Kraft macaroni and cheese, we learnt the appeal of your oven-baked ways. (Or occasionally deep-fried!) You called to us from the Golden Arches, that two-letter prefix somehow conveying a sense of a more refined, enlightened chicken nugget, particularly when engulfed in your transformative chamber of high-fructose-corn-syrup-laden barbecue sauce. (Or occasionally sweet and sour!)

But aging in the world of chicken nuggets was no case of putting away childish things. On the contrary, you held total sway over the Woody High cafeteria, when nugget day was the best of the school lunch rotation, even lording it over the nachos. Wikipedia tells the unknowing hearts that your secret goodness is primarily chicken skin and reconstituted meat slurry, but to us, you’ve always been love in breaded form. Sure, your cousin the chicken strip has taken dominance of the handheld boneless chicken market, but we all know that’s just a veneer of clever, “wholesome food” marketing that only plays off of your undying appeal.

Whether sodden with hot sauce (my personal favorite), sticky with honey or zinged with ketchup, you, chicken nugget, remain the king of the cafeteria. I salute you, product of 1950s food innovation, when it was only our faith in God and reconstituted meat slurry that kept the free world afloat in a world of atheist, borscht-swilling communists. You are an emblem of freedom and the unvarnished appeal of stuff that simply tastes awesome.

Well played, sir, well played.

Things Not To Do, Part I

Public service:

Don’t get a small cut your finger in the morning, then pour hot sauce on it at lunch. I’m impressed that it continues to sting after a good 10 minutes.

Just so yinz know.