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This is the turkey I roasted for Thanksgiving. This year I celebrated T-Day with a bunch of my Cleveland-based friends who live in New York. I hosted at my apartment. Here is my good friend and roommate Zachariah carving the turkey. He looks like he’s doing a great job!
The turkey I made this year was an herb-mustard roasted turkey with a sourdough pretzel stuffing. I brined the turkey overnight in salt and sugar water, and made an herb mustard butter to rub down the turkey and baste with. The herb mustard butter contained 1.5 stixxx of butter, 2 huge tablespoons of dijon mustard, a giant handful of fresh finely chopped flat-leaf parsely, green onions, and thyme, and salt, pepper and honey. This is the stuff that is sludged all over the turkey in the photo above. Below are some photos of its preparation:
The stuffing is made like normal stuffing, except instead of croutons, I used sourdough dough pretzel “nibblerz”. Plus, no additional salt is needed to season the stuffing because pretzel’s have built-in salt. It’s good!!
The real beauty of a “friends’” Thanksgiving is that it’s like a high-end pot luck dinner. It’s not really a ton of work for the host because everyone brings something. As a result, there’s always way too much food, there’s always a ton of carb-heavy dishes, and oh yeah, sooooooooo much alcohol (8 cases of beer, 1 bottle of whiskey, one giant bottle of vodka, one little bottle of scotch, 2 bottles of champagne, 2 bottles of white wine, 4 bottles of red wine, and a big stock pot of hot 151 apple cider, HOLY SHIT WTF).
For dinner, we had FOUR varieties of stuffing (pretzel stuffing, bacon stuffing, cornbread stuffing, vegetarian stuffing with pine nuts), 3 pies (pecan, pumpkin, blueberry), pumpkin risotto, mashed spiced sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese, meat and veggie gravy, roasted root vegetable medley, 2 fresh cranberry sauces (jalapeno and orange), and I don’t remember anything else.
Before dinner, we had wonderful snacks as well. Shawn Lovejoy brought over a wonderful cheese plate with very fine cheeses, Jed brought over a shrimp cocktail as well as some beet goat cheese croissant wheels.
Thanksgiving was fun!
Now about this HOT DOG. I was actually reminded of this hot dog upon uploading these thanksgiving photos onto my computer, because these hot dog photos were still on my digital camera’s memory card. This was actually one of the best hot dogs I’ve ever eaten. It was in Los Angeles right outside of The Smell at like 3 am. There were these beautiful Latino ladies grilling hot dogs on an aluminum foil covered shopping cart.
Let me tell you about these hot dogs. First of all the hot dog itself was twice the size of a normal hot dog. It was topped with perfectly grilled onions, bacon, mayonnaise and poblano peppers. Some dude came up to me before I bought my hot dog and said to me, “This is the BEST hot dog you will ever eat. I am not related to these women, and I am telling you this! This is the BEST hot dog you will ever eat!!” He was right! Everything about it was awesome.
Afterwards, Molly twirled baton. The End!!!!
I have just arrived in South Carolina for I and my Grandmother’s annual trek to Ma Duke’s(Murphy) house for THANKSGIVING! After a very long set of flights coming in and out of Memphis, and for me a bus to Cleveland, we managed to land unharmed and in good spirits. No sooner do I set my bag down than my mother asks me what I would like to drink. Ah, it’s good to be home. In the short list of choices she rattles off; “Cabernet, Heineken, iced tea flavored vodka..” “What did you say?” I call from the other room. “Iced tea flavored vodka! DO YOU WANT SOME?” Indeed I do. Indeed I do. Lets talk about FireFly Vodka kids. Made in a barn right here in old South Cac-a-Lacky, in an area called Wadmalaw Island, there is a small independent distillery on 
the area’s only locally owned and completely self made wineries. The company is pretty new to vodka production so they only do two kinds right now, the tea one, and then there is a muscadine wine infused one that is described as perfect for “smooth sippin’.” The tea one is actually part of a growing movement of tea flavored booze. I had no idea this existed.
Now, I am not always up on trendy boozin’. I feel as though I am EXTRA out of the loop on this one. However there was this time almost five years ago now, when Dana Hardy , Jed holtz, Courtenay Finn and I went on an excursion to the south for nothing but Road Flavored Excitement, and we discovered sumthing even more southern. At sum point we came across an energy drink that was riding at the distinctly lower area of the fresh tsunami of energy drinks coming out at that time called “Sum Poosie.”
This drink is dumb. As well as being distributed by a company called Hoosier Energy Drinks Inc. It also came marketed with a slew of pussy, not Poosie, themed drinks to be made with said beverage. The list includes “wet poosie”, “creamed poosie”, “buttered-n-hot poosie”, and my personal fav the “poosie bomb.” When it comes down to it the only real reason this shit is selling like hotcakes is so people can yell, “can I get some pussy over here?” and not get a fucking slap in the grill. And honestly who DOESN’T need that? Am I right Ladies? HuH?
This leads me back to the Sweet Tea Infused Vodka, which by comparison is a far less aggravating ad campaign. What does one make with sweet tea vodka? Among the list of things provided to the authors of “the drunk pirate” by a marketing guru from Obviouslee Marketing, there is the firefly fizz, and the frozen fruit fly and my vote for most awesome/unflinchingly southern, the spiked arnold palmer.
Oh.. and it tastes exactly like Iced tea. It’s kind of amazing. Go Git SUm!!!
Hey everybody, so I’ve been on tour with Girl Talk for the past couple weeks and sometimes I find time to eat, and then sometimes I remember to document it! I will share with you this evening the things that I have poorly documented and do my best to make up for the lack of photos with non-credited google image search imagery and then text!
I am going out of order, but this was a place we ate in Austin TX. It came highly recommended by Lord Grunge of Grand Buffet. Check out their MYSPACE. Lord Grunge is the one on the left!!
This place we went to is called IRON WORKS. It RULEZZ! The day before I went to Stubb’s BBQ with a couple friends and it was not as good as IRON WORKS, however, Stubb’s offers a GREAT spicy creamed spinach. Here are some photos of IRON WORKS.
We enjoyed this food immensely!! I pounded these ribs! I ordered the BEEF RIBS, which were as big as my forearms, and slow-cooked to perfection, with great smoky flavor. The hot sauce they had was also awesome, but the beef ribs were so awesome on their own that I did not even need the awesome hot sauce, even though normally, I will slather anything in hot sauce, especially if the hot sauce is good, and so is the food! Each dish is served with a scoop of eggy potato salad, baked beans, sliced bread n butter pickles, thickly sliced raw white onions, and a single slice of soft white bread–which can also be used as a napkin! Here are their doggie bag materials, which needless to say, were unneeded:
To wash it all down, Lord Grunge accompanied his meal with this lovely Merlot from the Sutter Home vineyard in California:
If you are in Austin, or going to Austin, please make sure to hit this place up. Really, it’s great.
NEXT, in Tucson AZ, we stayed at this really hip hotel called The Hotel Congress. Here is an image I found on Google Image Search of it:
This place was probably one of the coolest hotels we’ve stayed at so far on this tour, number one reason being that it is totally haunted. Google “blood room at the hotel congress.” I felt cold drafts all night while I was sleeping and thought a ghost was flying back and forth in my bedroom and got serious chills, it was awesome, but in a way where I was probably freaking out over nothing, which is cool sometimes too. I listened to classical music on an old wooden radio as big as a dorm-size refrigerator, with terrible reception except if I got really close to it, then the music was beautifully clear!!
Aside from that, the food at the restaurant in the hotel was very very good. One morning, JP and I got some breakfast together. This is my extravagant breakfast: Fried polenta with 2 eggs over medium on a bed of wilted spinach, drizzled with a chipotle crema, accompanied with a fabulous grilled pork tenderloin in a smoky pepper jelly. I cannot lie, this was awesome. The polenta was totally deep-fried and had the perfect texture of being crispy on the outside, and gritty moist and steamy on the inside.
JP had this lovely french toast with a side of bacon and eggs. I didn’t try his food, he ate it pretty quickly, but I’m sure it was quite delicious!! Besides, how can you screw up making french toast unless you were a big idiot!! JK.
So, if you’re in Tucson, the food here is good!!
One other thing, two weeks ago was my birthday! I was in New Orleans and in the morning, David Scheid, the tour manager and Chris Duffy and I went out for beignets at Cafe Du Monde for breakfast. I didn’t take photos, so I found this image on google image search:
All the beignets there look like this. As you can see, the powdered sugar to beignet ratio is arguably equal. When I put it in my mouth, I was forced to snort a lot of this sugar, which was a new experience for me! This is a hot, deep fried pillow of bubbly ecstasy. It didn’t hit me until later that Cafe du Monde is the brand of chicory coffee that my family has drank my whole life! Vietnamese people love this shit!!!
Later on that day we ate raw oysters and crawfish po’ boys at some dive place I don’t remember what it’s called, drank some fruity daiquiris that made my stomach hurt and got a hold of some MIRACLE FRUIT. Google it, it’s weird.
The stuff I ordered came packed in dry ice, and we all ate about two and it tasted like bitter intense! Then my mouth felt so crazy, I’m not sure in a positive way, more like pikachu farted in my mouth, and it was weird. Not sure I got the full effect, I will try this again when I’m less wasted. Here is a youtube video that JP made of our day in New Orleans:
Here are some other photos just for fun:
Bad Brilliance and Hearts of Darknesses hanging out at the Holiday Inn in Chapel Hill, NC.
Hiking in Asheville???? I think!! Things were really beautiful.
And last but not least, here is a scale replica of the Pentagon in milk chocolate. Lord Grunge bought this at a Costco in Baltimore. That’s all!!
