My favorite part is how the Canadian paper made sure to get “America” into the headline as an ever-so-subtle dig at our fatness. Yeah, we’re fat as hell, but what are you going to do about it? Try and fail to buy back an NHL team from our ice-free desert?
It’s a proven fact that I am a fiend for chicken nuggets. Chicken strips are also just as awesome. Put some chicken into a hand-friendly format, get rid of the bones to save me the hassle, coat it in breading of some sort and I am right up in it with a bottle of hot sauce.
But as a young dude, I want to keep fit and look good for the lady. (Lady there is singular these days, being married and all.) So I hooked up this simple recipe for nuggets that are relatively good food and aren’t processed as all hell, with all the fun chemicals and fatness that come with that. Here you go:
Healthy Chicken Nuggets
1 lb. boneless chicken parts – thighs or breasts
1 1/2 cups bread crumbs
1 1/2 tbsp Tony Chachere’s Creole seasoning – you can also just use salt to taste
2 dashes chili powder
1 or more dashes cayenne pepper
Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. Slice the chicken up into pieces roughly 1 1/2 to 2 inches square. Put the breadcrumbs, salt/Creole stuff, chili powder and cayenne into a bowl and stir it all up with your fingers. Take the chicken pieces and roll ‘em around in the breadcrumbs until you got them good and coated on all sides and in all the crevasses. Spray down a cookie sheet with some cooking spray and arrange all the pieces evenly.
Put the sheet into the oven for 12 minutes. Take it out and turn over each piece with tongs. Put it back in for another 8 minutes and you’re done. Makes ~ 2 servings.
Eat them with some hot sauce, ketchup, BBQ or Maggi Hot and Sweet from the local Indian grocer. The latter comes with mad recommendations from me. And I just made myself hungry again.
As a kid, the only person I knew who ate Grape Nuts was my grandpa. Looking up at the white box on the top of his fridge, I always wondered what the hell a Grape Nut was, and to this day I still don’t really know. But I will say that they make an excellent breakfast food, particularly mixed with raisins (a.k.a. actual grapes). Favorite part of this story: “It tends to break your teeth sometimes.”
Though I was busy finishing up Winter A for the past week, it doesn’t mean I haven’t kept up with the world. (Sage RSS sidebar = a favorite of mine.) So here’s a burst of opinion:
My newest senator Roland Burris grows more as an embarrassment each day, but what’s even more embarrassing is the way the Senate was originally going to block his appointment, yet instead completely rolled over and let this dude sit with the nation’s foremost legislative body. Lame. And now proven so!
Next topic of choice is Rick Santelli, a reporter for CNBC who went on a tear about subsidizing foreclosable homes via the stimulus package:
I was reading this NY Times Opinionator roundup of people’s take on the matter, and naturally there’s absolutist sentiment on either side: either the nation is only angry at people who took out bigger mortgages than they could afford and put the country in this predicament, or they are solely angry at the traders and capitalist machinery that went beyond common business sense and put the country in this predicament.
First off, nobody outside the financial community watches CNBC in the first place, so this is hardly cause to nominate the reporter for president. (For real, I mean there’s hyperbole, and then there’s hyperbole.) Secondly, those traders in the video do seem to be completely ignoring their and their bosses’ own role in the mess, but I think if the country’s angry at anybody, it’s angry at both groups. Plus, the thing that both have in common is a desire to live beyond their means outside the bounds of rationality, so you’re really talking about two sides of the same coin.
“I think they’ve always been a good value to consumers,” Ettinger said of brands like Spam, Dinty Moore stews and Hormel Chili, which all grew in the quarter ending in January. “Our company really prides itself on being a leader in value-added meals that feature meat.”
Goofy b-school terms are often running through my head while I eat meals, so I’m proud to now put the rest of you in the same predicament.
I do miss December in New York. As much as the city often drove me up the wall, Christmastime was always a highlight.
I hope everyone’s Christmas is full of good times and tasty treats. Since this is a holy day, in the spirit of Benjamin Franklin’s adage that “Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy,” I recommend a glass of this Chicago Christmas treat when you get a chance:
My friend Bill sent me a link to BaconToday.com, which I now know as the Internet’s finest source of bacon information. (Seriously, that is a professional-looking site, particularly for one devoted solely to bacon. Nice job by 500 Yards Media, whoever they are.) The specific link he sent was this page on bacon cinnamon rolls, which is perhaps the greatest food idea I’ve come across in the past ten years. I remain forever grateful to Bacon Today.
Also, now that I’m living on my own in Ann Arbor, I can once again eat kipper snacks. These are some of the foulest-smelling foods ever put in a can, and as such The Wife is quite vocal in her desire that I not eat them in the house. But man, are they good. Once you fork off the slimy herring skin, the smoke flavor really does render them the bacon of the sea.
Weird Northern European foods: a staple of goodness.
It’s been a mostly post-free summer for this website, but life is good right now, so I’ve been living it instead of blogging it.
It’s just a few short weeks now until I quit my job, go on a quick vacation and then move up to Ann Arbor for b-school. While going to Michigan is bound to be fun and rewarding, at the moment it feels sad as an indicator that the summer situation will come to an end. A quick list of just what will be ending:
I work from home in Chicago, giving me an extra two hours of the day that would have otherwise been spent commuting. Sure, I miss the social interaction of the office and the chance to catch up on my train-bound reading, but dropping my daily commute down to the 22 seconds it takes to roll out of bed and walk down to my computer is a phat tradeoff. Admittedly it has had some deleterious effects on personal grooming, but funk doesn’t travel through phone lines.
The Wife is busy studying for the bar, but the plus side of that is that she doesn’t have classes (except recently ended half-day BarBri lectures) so we get all day to be the obnoxious married couple that enjoys each other’s company. And I do usually shower at her prompting. Word.
I have a pile of friends living here the likes of which I haven’t had since being in New York. Oddly enough, several of those friends have moved here too. Flip-cup and late-night taco stands just weren’t the same without the homies.
Our condo is totally sweet-ass. That’s really the only compound adjective to describe it.
Chicago. Summer. It’s the bomb. This summer has featured July 4th fireworks from the 70th floor of the Sears Tower, running along the lake, getting my lift on again, the discovery of my all-time favorite barbershop, relatively cool weather, plenty of socializing, and madd Italian beef sandwiches and Chicago dogs.
Ann Arbor right now represents the following: not getting paid to work in my pajamas, a wife living 250 miles away, confusion over football loyalties, and a paucity of Italian beef. That’s overly harsh and I really do think it’s going to be lots of fun, plus I hear Zingerman’s sandwiches are quite tasty, but UMich won’t be fun the same way that this summer has been.
They say you don’t know what you have until it’s gone, but I’m well aware that I have a shitload and I sure as hell am enjoying it. Here’s hoping the rest of you peeps are enjoying yours as well.
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.
My friend Bill sent me a link to 
