Category Archives: Food & Beverage

Thursday Debris

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Distinctly cool today. We’re in for a run of cool days — enough to use the heater. A bit of fall too soon, but there will be some more warm days before there aren’t any more until next year.

The local skunk population seems to be way up. I smell them often when driving along. At night, I’ve seen a few live skunks scurrying down the street – the first time that’s ever happened since I moved to the northwest suburbs over a decade ago. By day, I see dead skunks on the road.

Not long ago, early one evening, I went out the front door and there on the driveway was the distinct black-and-white of a skunk. I stopped instantly. It stopped too. I figured it would do what most animals do in the face of a larger animal – get away. Advance on the animal, get sprayed. Otherwise, not. I was right, it hurried away.

A headline spotted today, via Google News: “Islamists Are Not Our Friends.” An Op-Ed in the NYT. Glad you cleared that up, headline writer. I would drag out Captain Obvious, but that seems a little adolescent, as many Internet memes are. Why is he a captain, anyway? Patterned after Captain America and the even greater Captain Canuck, I suppose, but isn’t –man the common suffix for a superhero, even a satirical one? Greater minds than mine will have to sort these questions out.

Another head: “DC teacher has sixth-graders compare George Bush to Adolf Hitler.” That from Fox, which is probably trying to highlight the shocking things that public school teachers do, especially if they have the temerity to belong to a union. But then again, you can compare the two (and I’m assuming they mean the younger Bush, but it doesn’t matter). Conclusion of such a comparison: Bush wasn’t much like Hitler. No major American politician has been, is, or can be. Well, maybe Huey Long had a bit of der Führer in him, but we’ll never know for sure.

From Newser, which seems to be a Weird News site: “Waitress Hits Lottery, Won’t Quit Job.” Why is that news? Is that supposed to be salt-of-the-earth admirable in some way? Or just the mark of a shriveled imagination? It just begs for an Onion satire. They’ve probably already done it: “Waitress Hits Lottery, Says Take This Job and Shove It.”

Product Thursday, example 1: Vigo Black Beans & Rice. In the convenient 8 oz. package, “completely seasoned & easy to prepare,” as the package says. Also: an Authentic Cuban Recipe. For a thing you cook in boiling water for a while – and that’s pretty much all there is to it – Vigo Black Beans & Rice is pretty tasty. Everyone liked it. Now if I could only remember where I bought it.

Example 2: Pirate’s Booty. Yuriko, impressed by a sample being given away, bought a bag of the white cheddar snacks. Shrug. Coincidentally, Lileks had a comment about the bag this week: “I have always hated this guy. Partly for the way he’s drawn. Partly for the fact that the food within is overpriced and insubstantial. But mostly for THAR BE GOOD, which he says on the larger packages. It just bothers me.”

The cartoon pirate on the bag does look like a Hanna-Barbera reject, but the stereotypical pirate verbiage doesn’t bother me particularly. After all, Talk Like a Pirate Day is coming up soon (next Friday). Like National Gorilla Suit Day, it comes but once a year.

Speaking of the Hanna-Barbera cartoon factory, I saw the introduction to the original Space Ghost the other day, probably for the first time in well over 40 years. Why? One of those things that happens when you’ve got a lot of other, more important things to do. One thing struck me about it. Space Ghost sure seemed to fight a lot of man-sized insectoid creatures.

There Ain’t no Coupe de Ville Hiding at the Bottom of a Cracker Jack Box

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I never was much for Cracker Jacks. Maybe because it was marketed as the kind of thing adults thought kids should like. Or maybe that it seemed fossilized in another time even 40 years ago, though simply being old usually doesn’t put me off a thing. Mainly, though, it’s that molasses taste.

A box of Cracker Jacks made its way into the house recently. I think one of Ann’s friends brought it over. At least it still looks like a box of Cracker Jacks should, complete with mascot Sailor Jack and his dog Bingo. The candy is, of course, part of Chicago history, though it hasn’t been owned locally in quite a while, unlike that other Gilded Age favorite, the Tootsie Roll.

I didn’t eat any Cracker Jacks this time, but I did find the “prize.” An Arizona Diamondbacks sticker. I’ve read that there’s also some kind of code for some kind of app, but I couldn’t find that. Really, Frito-Lay? You can’t spring for two- or three-tenths of a cent for a little plastic toy made in Guangdong Province?

The International Pizza Doctrine

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Seeing the Perseid Meteor Shower’s always been problematic here in the Chicago suburbs, where the sky is usually washed out at night, but this year especially so. It’s been overcast most of the time since Sunday. And usually cool today – I think we spent the day in the 60s F.

No matter. The place to be for the Perseids is somewhere in the Rockies. I might make it one of these days. At least Google doodled the subject today (and it appeared about 48 hours earlier on the Japanese version of the search engine, which sometimes has doodles the English version never sees).

Recently Lilly discovered that I’d eaten one of the larger slices of pizza left by her friends the other day in our garage refrigerator, and she made some complaint. I cited the International Pizza Doctrine to her. Later, I Googled that phrase to get the exact wording, and was shocked when no such thing readily came up, even when adding “Sam Hurt” and “Eyebeam” to the mix. So I did the only thing a reasonable person would, and thumbed through my Eyebeam books until I found it.

From Eenie, Meenie, Minie, Tweed, p. 59, a strip first published September 24, 1983: “Leftover pizza, like fish in the stream or birds in the sky, is not susceptible to ownership.” (Ratliff quotes it; Eyebeam adds, “Engraved on the refrigerators of mankind throughout history.”)

Someone needs to mention the International Pizza Doctrine online, so here it is, maybe to last as long as the server farms of Silicon Valley glow hot with gooey petabytes.

One more thing: I’ve taken to calling Lilly’s usual group of friends “your hoodlum friends.” It’s an homage to the Coasters, of course, since her friends are about as hoodlum as after dinner mints.

Road Eats ’14

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Serendipity is your friend on the road, but you have to be open to it. After spending some time at the Wichita Public Library’s main branch in downtown Wichita on July 14, we headed west on Douglas Ave., the way we’d come into downtown. We wanted lunch, and I thought I’d seen something interesting coming in. But I couldn’t remember exactly what. Then I saw Nu Way Crumbly Burgers.

Crumbly Burgers, yumClearly my kind of place. It’s a small Wichita chain. “The Nu Way tradition began on July 4th, 1930, at the same location we still call our ‘original’ home at 1416 West Douglas,” the Crumbly web site tells us. “It all started when Tom McEvoy… moved from Iowa to Wichita and built the first Nu Way. The dedication and absolute commitment to quality Tom began can still be tasted today as we carry on his reputation.

“We still make Nu Ways with the exact same recipe using our patented cookers and we still make our world famous Root Beer daily along with our homemade Onion Rings.”

Crumbly burgers are loose-meat sandwiches and root beer is, well, root beer, and we had both (Ann’s was a float), sitting at the counter. Considering that it was mid-afternoon on a Monday, the place was busy. For good reason. Those crumbly burgers might crumble, and you have to position your wrapping to catch those loose odds of meat, but they were satisfying. The frosty chilled root beer hit the spot exactly.

Nu Way harkens back to the ’30s. In Dallas, Keller’s evokes the 1950s, I think. But not the ’50s of televised nostalgia – we saw a lot of that in the ’70s – but just an ordinary burger-and-shakes joint that’s simply never been updated. Jay calls it Jake’s, since that used to be its name, but there was some kind of family ownership split or something. We went to the one on Garland Rd., but there are a few others, including one that’s supposed to be a drive-in. Anyway, the Garland location serves tasty burgers, fries and shakes, ordered and picked up at the front counter.

Bun ‘n’ Barrel is on the Austin Highway in San Antonio. Points for actually having two apostrophes. It’s been there since I can remember (it was founded in 1950, so that makes sense). The last time I went might have been in the late ’70s. It doesn’t seem to have changed too much with time, though there’s been a few recent renovations, such as the addition of a little nostalgia-oriented decor. They’re also happy that what’s-his-name on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives showed up to do a segment a few years ago.

Bun 'n' BarrelThere’s a barrel on the roof, but I had a hard time getting a good shot of it. Also, it was over 90 F that day, and I didn’t want to loll around outside. Instead, I snapped the painted concrete  barrel out in the back parking lot.

Bun n BarrelI got the wrong thing: a ham plate. It wasn’t bad, but it was exactly like ham I can get at a grocery store. Probably the barbecue or a burger would have been a better choice.

Threadgills in Austin isn’t a classic road-food diner or a greasy spoon, but it makes a mighty chicken fried steak. Be sure to have it with mashed potatoes and fired okra. Its nostalgia is late ’60s, early ’70s. For instance, I saw that the Jerry Garcia Fest will be at the restaurant’s beer garden this weekend. We went to the one in South Austin, one of two locations. The current restaurants are descended from a beer joint that opened as soon as Prohibition ended, with a musical heyday 40 or 50 years ago.

Finally, if you’re southbound on I-35 north of DFW and you take the very first exit after crossing into Texas, and then gas up at the gas station there, you will also see this.

Fried Pies!Among roadside eatery names, that’s high concept. Through much of southern Oklahoma, I’d seen fried pies advertised, like you can see pasties advertised in the UP. I decided it was time to investigate. It was arrayed like a doughnut shop, except replete with fried pies – bigger than the ones you buy in the grocery store, if you’re in the mood for high-calorie, barely mediocre treats. I bought a chocolate pie and a coconut one, and Ann and I split both. They were a lot better than any factory-make ones at a grocery store.

Marzipan Day

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Lübeck, June 28, 1983

Breakfast with Karen and Cindy, then boarded a bus for Lübeck. Nice ride up, lots of greenery, and as we approached, a view of the seven spires of Lübeck. Before we entered the city center (Zentrum) we stopped at a wide place in the road and disembarked. Three busloads of tourists, crowding around to take a look — from a distance, behind a large sign warning us to proceed no further — at a mean-looking fence and a grim guard tower, looking just like one you’d see over a prison wall. InterGerman Border, June 1983We’d come to the border with the DDR. We were told that there are guard towers like the one we saw every 500 meters along the intra-German border. [I forget who took this picture of Steve, me, and Rich.]

The first place we went to in the Zentrum was Marienkirche, St. Mary’s, an enormous, ornate, brickwork Lutheran church. It burned down during the war, but has been restored to what I assume was former glory. In one corner of the church, the bells that used to hang above lie broken on the floor, left as a memorial to the destruction. The story is that as the church burned, the bells rang and rang, moved by the rising heat, until they crashed to the floor. It’s a very effective memorial.

The church’s astronomical clock is an ornate marvel too, also rebuilt after the original was destroyed. It shows the hour and minute, of course, but also shows planetary positions, phases of the sun and moon, and signs of the zodiac. The town hall (Rathaus) was also well worth seeing.

Later we visited a large store specializing in marzipan. I’d never had marzipan before, never heard of it until I read about it in a guidebook. [I don’t know the name of the shop, but I suspect it was the renowned Café Niederegger in the Zentrum, which has a shop for the confections.] The variety of marzipan shapes you can buy is astonishing: large and small items, bricks and loafs, figurines and abstractions.

At 2:15 the bus took us to Travemünde, on the mouth of the River Trave and looking out onto the Baltic Sea. I sat with Bob, who lives in the Philippines, and Crystal from North Dakota, in a café as we drank coffee, tea, and chocolate, a watched the weather change with astonishing speed, from sunny to cloudy to rainy to sunny again, with the clouds always driven across the sky by strong winds we couldn’t feel closer to the ground.

My Charcoal Chimney Starter

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On Saturday, I grilled in the back yard for a few old friends. Just ahead of the event, I bought a remarkable bit of fire-starting technology. Simple, but effective. It’s a device that ignites charcoal without the need for lighter fluid or even kindling wood. Naturally, it took me a while to find the damn thing, because I didn’t know what it was called (hardware stores are a marvel, but that’s a problem with them).

It’s a charcoal chimney starter. No doubt something along these lines was known to people as soon as metallurgy was discovered and the burning properties of wood charcoal were appreciated. Long ago, that is. For only about $15, I acquired a stainless steel cylinder, about a foot high and 7½ inches in diameter, with a row of inch-high slots around the bottom of the cylinder. Let’s see: the volume of a cylinder is V = hπr2, so that would be nearly 400 cubic inches. Enough space, as it turned out, to light enough charcoal to cook the evening meal.

Inside is a simple array of rods that divide the cylinder into a larger upper chamber and a smaller lower one, but air (and importantly, heat) can pass between the chambers easily. There are no covers or lids to it, but the cylinder does have a handle attached to its outside.

First, line the lower chamber with paper – newspaper in my case. Next, fill the upper chamber with charcoal. Then light the paper through the slots at the bottom. After the paper starts burning, leave it alone. The remarkable thing is that the paper will ignite the lower charcoal, with which in turn ignite the charcoal above it, until all of the charcoal is glowing hot. I suppose it works because the heat is contained and, since heat rises, it ignites the fuel above it. All together, the process takes about 30 minutes. Once the charcoal is hot, pick the cylinder up by the handle and turn it over to put the coals in the grill.

The hard part in all this was finding out what it’s called. I’d seen one used a few years ago, but that wasn’t much help, and I looked in vain in the grilling equipment sector of a big box store among many MeatMan 2000 UberGrills large enough to cook for a small army; say the Swiss Guard. So I did things the modern way, Googling “grill without lighter fluid” and the like, and before long, found a lot of videos like this.

Since I did this on Friday, it was then a matter of ordering one online for pickup in a store on Saturday morning. For mysterious reasons, the store cancelled my order right after I made it, and I didn’t notice the email telling me that, so it wasn’t waiting for me when I got there. But they had them in stock, so after some delay, the staff found one for me.

The surprise wasn’t that some high-tech system failed me in a minor way. The remarkable thing is that when I got the charcoal chimney starter home, it worked exactly as expected.  No inscrutable instructions; no auxiliary parts that you need to make it work but which you don’t have; no important steps in the operation of the device that everyone assumes you already know, and so no one tells you about. Life might be dull if everything were this easy, but some things should be this easy.

Birthday Eats

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This year for my birthday I had curry duck at a northwest suburban Thai restaurant. Or, as the menu put it: “Boneless roast duck simmered in Thai spices, red curry, coconut milk, red peppers, green peppers, onions, grapes and fresh basil leaves.” Excellent choice, it was. I didn’t do the modern thing and point a camera at the savory concoction. I did the old-fashioned thing and ate it.

The cake this year was German Chocolate Cake. According to this list, at least, June 11 – close enough – is German Chocolate Cake Day, which I never knew until I looked into the question of just where German Chocolate Cake was created.

As luck would have it, Snopes weighs in on that subject, asserting that it’s in fact an American creation, and popularized only since the 1950s. Something like chop suey not really being Chinese, but who eats chop suey anyway? Or chili con carne in fact being norteamericano.

53rd birthday baked goodWe picked up the cake at a local bakery, and it proved as sweet and gooey as it needed to be. Note the candles. Lilly put them on, using all those we had handy. No one seriously suggested we load the thing with 53 little candles.

Good things to eat for your birthday, but still not as good as when I turned 21. My college friend Dan was taking a class that summer called Economy Botany, taught by one Dr. Channel, which I should have taken myself, but didn’t. Dr. Channel had invited Dan, and a girl named Rona, to his large house near campus for dinner. Dan asked me to come along, or maybe asked a number of us to come, but only I could. It was a coincidence that it was my birthday; I don’t think Dan knew till I mentioned it late in the evening.

“Dr. Channel served a multi-course, skillfully made meal,” I wrote. “We ate hors d’oeuvre – shrimp, vegetables, various dips – a special Georgia onion, baked, and a massive cheesy meaty spicy thick pizza, made from scratch by the professor, including herbs on top fresh from his sprawling garden, a part of his lush back yard that runs off in all directions. We ate under a bower near the garden, and finished off the meal with a wonderful pistachio pie.”

What did I do to deserve that meal? Right place, right time, I guess. The special Georgia onion, I know now, was a Vidalia. Dr. Channel had baked it in aluminum foil, I think. I never knew an onion could be so sweet.

Johnson’s Door County Fish

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This quote came to my attention recently: “Chicago is the city of the steak house, of deep-dish pizza, the Italian beef sandwich that requires three hands to manipulate and eleven small paper napkins to mop yourself up with afterwards.” – Joseph Epstein, Literary Education and Other Essays.

Yep. Been there, eaten all those things. But they weren’t on offer recently at Johnson’s Door County Fish in west suburban Lombard, Ill. In fact, a hand-written sign at the counter at Johnson’s told us the sad fact that the restaurant had no Lake Superior whitefish for sale that day. Sad news, since whitefish is a wonderful gift from the 2,800 cubic miles of Gitche Gumee to us omnivorous land-dwellers.

I’d been to Johnson’s once before. I’d seen it written up in the Tribune, and soon after needed to be in the vicinity, which isn’t very often, so I decided to give it a go (here’s a more recent mention in the paper, about its fish sandwiches). As unpretentious fish joints go, it’s first rate. Not the best lake fish I’d ever had – Bayfield, Wis., had that, but pretty good. That was seven or eight years ago, maybe. I remember taking Ann with me, and she was still a toddler.

The place looks about the same. Brown woods, a lot of windows, worn booths, and some fish ornamentation, such as a scene of fanciful schools of purple fish painted on the wall in 20th-century restaurant vernacular style. Also, a there’s navigation map of northern Lake Michigan posted on the wall, along with blown-up b&w images of Great Lakes fishermen and their equipment.

I had the walleye plate and Yuriko had the cod plate. The presentation isn’t anything special. In fact, it looks like the fried fish you might get at one of the lower-rung fast-food places. But the fish is tasty, much better than it looks.

Another hand-lettered sign explained that the restaurant is for sale. Apparently the owners are in their 80s, and want to sell. I’m not in the market for a fish restaurant, but I hope someone takes it over and maintains it as an independent, low-cost fish joint here in the Midwest.

New Product Monday

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The rains lately have been tropical-like, without the high heat. The days start warm or warmish, and then the rains come in short, intense downpours. Enough to water the plants and dampen the deckchairs. Afterward, it’s clear and warm again.

I don’t follow the snack-food industry as anything but a consumer, so I didn’t know that Nabisco, as well as Ritz, are brands of Mondelēz International. Mondelēz, eh? A Brazilian behemoth come to North America to buy our brands? A Taiwanese confectioner who picked that name to throw us off? A massive Turkish purveyor of sweets that got its big break when Atatürk expressed admiration for its tulumba and walnut sujuk?

No, Mondelēz company HQ is in Deerfield, Ill., and according to some sources, operates the world’s largest bakery, a whopping 1.8 million-square-foot Nabisco facility in Chicago. Recently we’ve been buying Ritz Toasted Chips because damn, they’re good. They bear the Nabisco logo, complete with the oval and the crux gemina (or antennae?). Everyone likes them, which is no small thing in this house. They’re small, crisp crackers, and exceptionally tasty.

I spent some time with the ingredient panel, trying to figure out what is it that makes them so good. My guess: sugar. And yet, they aren’t sweet. Still, sugar is the fourth ingredient, following flour, soybean oil, and cornstarch. Salt is three more places down the list, though the taste seems more salty than sweet, though not that salty. Must be the balance of sugar, salt and some of the other substances that whip the taste into being. Anyway, it’s a home run for the Mondelēz food technologists, test-kitchen managers, tasters, and so on.

Sorry to say that Santa Cruz ORGANIC lemonade – the label practically screams that at you – is only fair. Coming in a convenient quart-bottle, it’s neither very sweet nor tart, and I think lemonade should tend toward one or the other. I prefer a tart mix myself. It isn’t bad, but it’s more watery than it should be.

The bottle does assure us, however, that Santa Cruz National, which is based in Chico, Calif., is a Green-e certified company that buys enough renewable energy each year to cover its production needs, and “we recycle more than 95% of our waste.” Well, dandy. Now make better lemonade.

Corsicana

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Everything about this picture says Texas: the Collin Street Bakery sign, marking a famed Texas bakery; the Texas flags; the HEB grocery store; the pickup truck driving by; the onion domes off in the distance. Onion domes?

Texas4.25.14 001First a little background. On April 24, 2014, Jay and I drove south on I-45, the main road from Dallas to Houston. About 50 miles south of Dallas is Corsicana, seat of Navarro County, and home of the Collin Street Bakery. I’ve been eating its fruitcakes on and off for years, mostly by mail order, but in 1996 (I think) I passed through town and visited the bakery store.

As the web site notes: “The DeLuxe Texas Fruitcake or Pecan Cake you order today is still baked true to the old-world recipe brought to Corsicana, Texas from Wiesbaden, Germany in 1896 by master baker Gus Weidmann. He and his partner, Tom McElwee, built a lively business in turn-of-the-century Corsicana which included an elegant hotel on the top floor of the bakery.”

The hotel is gone, but you can still buy baked goods at the bakery store, including the signature fruitcake. We bought one to take to our mother, plus some smaller items for more immediate snacking. From the parking lot, we noticed those nearby onion domes, and being curious about onion domes in small-town Texas, we went over for a look. After all, how often do you see Moorish Revival buildings in small-town Texas? Probably more often than I’d think, but anywhere there one was.

It’s the Temple Beth-El, a former synagogue on 15th St. in Corsicana.  A shot from across the street is here; it’s a handsome building.

Like the Collin Street Bakery, Temple Beth-El too dates from the late 19th century. The Jewish community of Corsicana isn’t what it used to be – they probably went to Dallas, like everyone else – so in more recent years, the building’s been a community center overseen by the Navarro County Historical Society.

Now fully in a look-see mood, Jay and I went over to the Navarro County Courthouse grounds. Navarro himself was there. A statue of Jose Antonio Navarro, that is.

The Smithsonian tells us that “the sculpture was commissioned by the Texas Centennial Commission to honor Jose Antonio Navarro (1795-1871), a native Texan lawyer, merchant, and rancher who founded Navarro County and co-created the Republic of Texas. Navarro named the County seat Corsicana after his father’s birthplace, Corsica. While on an expedition to Sante Fe, Navarro was captured by Mexican soldiers and given a life sentence for treason. He escaped in 1845 and upon his return to Texas was elected as a delegate to the Convention which approved the annexation of Texas and drafted the Constitution.”

Nearby Navarro stands “The Call to Arms,” a Confederate memorial. It’s a little unusual, not being a soldier standing at attention or the like.

The statue’s plaque says that it was erected in 1907 by the Navarro Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy “to commemorate the valor and heroism of our Confederate soldiers. It is not in the power of mortals to command success. The Confederate soldier did more – he deserved it.”

History’s written by the victors, indeed.