Tag Food
Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner!
Candy’d out from last night? I am. Charlotte made a pretty good haul last night, but when we got home the first thing we did was to sort out all the candy she doesn’t like, which Bridget and I then split between us. My share of the loot: half a Butterfinger, one Reese’s peanut butter cup, one fun-sized bag of Reece’s Pieces, one fun-size bag of peanut M&Ms, two fun-size 3 Musketeers, and a fun-size Snickers (you can probably deduce that Charlotte does not like anything with peanuts). And I ate every last piece. Which is not smart at all, but there you have it.
I could probably go for a chicken dinner tonight, but not a Chicken Dinner Candy Bar. Yes, it was a real thing. As it happens, the Chicken Dinner actually had nothing to do with chicken dinner; it was your standard 10-cent chocolate bar. But the marketing wisdom of the era (the 1920s) held that making candy sound like a substantial meal was a great way to sell it. And that wisdom was apparently on point, because Chicken Dinner sold well, and the signs were a common roadside occurrence.
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Take THAT, Poppy Bush!
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Dig Them Taters
From the latest issue of Smithsonian Magazine: How The Potato Changed The World.
It reads like an episode of James Burke’s “Connections”, because the advent of potato farming in Europe led to the need for artificial fertilizers to replenish soil and international squabbles over Peru’s guano islands, and then also led to the development of chemical pesticides in response to the potato blight and potato beetle infestations. The blight, of course, led to the disastrous potato famines that depopulated Ireland in the 1840s and drove millions of Irish to emigrate to the United States. Great article.
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Quik-er
It’s not just chocolate milk powder…it’s caffeinated chocolate milk powder…IN A STRAW.
Would go well with these caffeinated cookies, dont’cha think?
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So Much For The Double Entendre
If you’ve ever watched Nigella Lawson’s cooking show, you know that most of it is a very barely disguised series of sexual innuendoes. Well, this video does away with the pretense altogether:
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Brought To You By The Ketchup Advisory Board
Second time this week that Heinz Foods gets a mention here: earlier this year, they introduced their redesigned “dip and squeeze” disposable ketchup packets that will be replacing those little foil packets you get by the handful at fast food restaurants. They publicly announced the design back in early 2010 , but this Wall Street Journal article says that they have been working on the design since 2006 and were close to releasing one version in 2008, only to pull it at the last minute. The article has several other interesting tidbits, so give it a look. Given that the retail version of the product only has 10 of the packets per box, I’m guessing the days of grabbing 40-50 ketchups for free at the burger joint are about to come to a crashing halt. No more starving student “tomato soup”, I guess.
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The Occasional Food Post – September 2, 2011
How many times have you watched a cooking show or read a recipe that involved adding some amount of alcohol to a dish where the assertion was made that “all the alcohol cooks out of the dish”? It’s one of those bits of cooking lore that has gone unquestioned forever (not unlike the “searing locks in the juices” wisdom that made our instructor at cooking school go mental), but apparently it hasn’t ever been tested very well. At least, that’s what the folks at O Chef.com discovered when they looked at the literature, so they decided to do a little empirical experimentation. What they found is just the opposite of conventional wisdom: MOST of the alcohol remains in cooked dishes unless they simmer for at least TWO HOURS. And that includes dishes that are flambeéd. Short cooking times will take the harsh taste out of the alcohol, but that’s about it.
And speaking of well-worn shibboleths (don’t you just LOVE the word “shibboleth”? I do.), we are all used to the “fact” that the total caloric intake for an adult is 2000 calories per day. This recent post on The Atlantic’s food blog looks at how the FDA came up with that 2000-calorie threshold in the first place. Turns out that 2000 calories really ISN’T the right threshold for most people; depending on body size and other variables, men should consume as much as 3000 calories per day and women as much as 2200 calories. The 2000 figure came from averaging out and rounding down the numbers. You can determine your own ideal caloric intake amount by visiting this page from the British medical journal The Lancet and using their simulator software (you’ll need to have the appropriate Java plug-in in your browser for it to work).
Okay, just one more bit of food science and lore. Scientists have only recently discovered that sugar does not melt when you heat it…it decomposes. They discovered this almost by accident. Scientists long knew that the melting point of sucrose was not consistently the same, but did not know why. So, when some researchers looked at it more closely, they discovered that the variable melting point was due to the sucrose decomposing into different component compounds depending on the rate of heating. What this means is that companies that make processed foods which contain sugar (which, frankly, is pretty much all of them) can change all sorts of characteristics in their products from flavor to texture to storage stability by altering the sugar.
Late summer in New England means it’s finally prime time for local tomatoes, and I’ve already got plans to make my annual batch of slow-roasted tomato sauce, but if you have a surplus of tomatoes (but seriously, can you EVER have a surplus of fresh tomatoes in the late summer?), TV chef Mary Ann Esposito had some suggestions at the Huffington Post recently. I’m also thinking about making a tomato tart — if you have a recipe for one that you like, please pass it along.
If you are a New Englander like me, I am reasonably sure you know what I mean when I say “Greek pizza”. It’s a style of pizza that is very common in this part of the country, where a lot of local pizza-sandwich shops are owned and operated by Greek families. New England Greek pizza is typified by a thicker crust made with a very “short” dough (a dough that has a lot of fat, usually olive oil, in it), very light sauce, and a thick layer of cheese that almost always includes cheddar. I have read that most of the Greek-owned pizza joints in this region use the name “House Of Pizza”, which is how you can figure out where to go to get one…I don’t know how generally true that is, but practically every place I know that has “House of Pizza” in the name from Maine to Massachusetts is Greek. J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, resident expert at Serious Eats.com recently wrote about New England Greek pizza and using his best Cooks Illustrated training came up with a method for making it at home. Kenji is actually a little harsh on this style of pizza, I think, but it definitely isn’t the cracker-thin wood-oven artisanal pie that pizza purists love these days. I find that every once in a while I really want a Greek pizza, so I was tickled when we discovered a place right around the corner from our house that makes an especially good one; freshness is critical to this style of pizza, and the proximity of this pizza joint means I can get one home almost immediately after it comes out of the oven. MMmmm…
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The Occasional Food Post – July 22, 2011
A little too en pointe for me: bear-paw meat shredders What’s next, narwhal kebab skewers?
Just in case our fortunes ever look up again, I’m noting this link for that day when I get to go back to Paris: The Best Patisseries in Paris (be patient if you click, it’s rather slow to load)
Paris may be far, far off for me, but the next time I’m in New York, I seriously want to check out some of these dumpling shops in Chinatown.
The National Archives recently opened this exhibit about the government’s effect on the diet of Americans throughout our history. I’ve only ever been to Washington once, but maybe our friend Tony can check it out the next time he’s there and report back.
Speaking of Washington, Jesse Rhodes, one of the food bloggers for Smithsonian Magazine, reports that the Rickey, a summery cocktail originally made with bourbon but now more commonly made with gin, was recently declared the “Official Drink” of Washington D.C.. Here in the Boston area, we are big fans of the non-alcoholic raspberry lime rickey, as perfected by the late, lamented Brigham’s Ice Cream, but I’m envisioning sipping one of these this evening.
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And Now This…
Ladies and gentlemen, for your dining enjoyment, the Dancing Squid Bowl…