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it’s not a long list, but this Kid Sister video is currently at the top. Big ups to Super Dawg!
On Sunday, Shawn and I had several hours free, and a unbelievably beautiful day on or hands so we decided to make the 30 minute drive to Whiting Indiana’s Pierogi Fest for some stuffed dough goodness. I have had my share of small town midwestern festival goodness, but was really in for a surprise when I stepped onto the main drag at perogi fest.
Meet Mr. Pierogi! The Whiting Indiana Pierogi Fest official Spokes-pastry.
No Shit.
Are you kidding me? This festival was out of control. And everyone was so happy! The perogi guy was running around high-fiving everyone, there was a guy dressed as a stuffed cabbage roll running a found being grumpy and hot…
Insanity. It was really A DREAM COME TRUE. I had never seen so many folks happy about pierogies and summer fun since the now defunct 185th street festival days back in Cleveland. The Whiting Pierogi fest has been on for 16 or so years and is 90% focused on Pierogi, and 10% focused on Polka. To that end, and to add to the ever growing list of costumed characters running amuck at the festival, there is even a lady named Polka- hontas who is the festival’s official polka ambassador/ mistress.
That being said, the reason we came here was pierogi. And we had a lot to pick from, and many many lines to wade through to get to them. Which was not nearly as bad as one would think,other than the occasional asshole with a stroller every one we encountered was happy and incredibly polite. I sneezed three times while i was there and EVERY SINGLE TIME someone said “bless you.” Impressive. We waded through the immense and incredibly polite crowd, and found at the far end of the fest Kasia’s pierogi booth selling pierogi for basically a buck a piece.
The selection was pretty standard, beef, beef and cheese, sausage, potato, bacon cheese and potato, spinach, cheese and jalapeno, sauerkraut, sauerkraut and mushroom… Shawn did a survey of seven. I did the same, but only the meatless options.
Pretty standard serving size, coupled with the ubiquitous condiment of choice.This stand also offered the classic applesauce and not so classic pico de gallo, but we decided to keep it classic and creamy.
All in all delicious. It’s pretty hard to fuck up a pierogi, and it’s equally hard to reinvent the pierogi, not without risking pretentiousness. I would say these did the genre proud, but no points for invention. But to be fair that is not the point here, the point is to eat starchy stuff and get down to polka, and that kind of stuff never goes out of style.
To end here’s a little video treat of the annual pierogi toss.
So, this afternoon after a thrilling Fish and Chips Lunch, complete with Bloody Marys at Duke of Perth , Shawn not so subtly hinted that he wanted a sweet cold treat to round out his fried food fullness. So I hopped out of the car and headed to the store with the intention of picking up some frozen snickers bars. Alas there were none. HOWEVER, lo and behold I found there in the freezer, Q-bees (pronounced cube-eez)!
Which are Rice Krispie (style) Treats filled with ice cream, and available in three flavors each with their own name and anthropomorphic idiosyncrasies. Dave, the chocolate tree hugger and outdoors man, Esquivel the vanilla extreme sports enthusiast, and Suzy Cube, the ubiquitous strawberry girl flavor. After searching around, and coming up with little to nothing about them on the internet, I did find out that this company is trying new marketing stuff this year, and has since developed new looks for each of the different flavors, hats, lady faces, up dos, and each of them also have twitter pages where you can read along as they bicker Twitter style. SO BIZARRE. Nothing makes me want to eat a vanilla treat like reading a transcript of it making fun of the strawberry treat’s obsession with wearing pink outfits while the chocolate flavor insists every one “chillax.” Anyway, I picked up a pack of the vanilla, as these were this was the only flavor available at the Dominick’s near me.
Here, Shawn considers the cube and then devours it.
So the long and short is, this is a nice little cube of ice cream with a crispy sweet out side, but it really didn’t hold up to the excitement my brain and stomach created while the helped me imagineer a Rice Crispy Treat pregnant with vanilla ice cream. It was weird. Now I almost forgot to mention that this treat is all natural. The whole thing is kosher, vegetarian, and the cream is from cows that are growth hormone free. Which could go either way really, they could be the less than delicious, and sort of “fat free” or “diet” tasting, or they could be extra good rich “handmade” tasting. Sadly after much debate, we decided that there was something sorta Boca about the taste, being totally slammable, but not as good as the bad for you real deal.
And there you have it kids, tasty, good for you, almost entirely guilt free, but not as interesting as advertised.
Today, i was eating one of my favorite snacks, Flamin’ Hint of Lime Cheetos, and saw a little blurb on the bag asking “What can you do with 28 Cheetos” which is the approximate size of one serving. So i looked on their web site and was invited into a whole world of amazing things people do with 28 Cheetos.
It was there that I discovered Eclectic Asylum, who does all of these photo-realistic drawings and paintings out of food and lipstick and all kinds of stuff. One of my favorites is “Speed Painting on velvet with crumbled Cheetos.”
and this one of Conan O’Brien
NUTZ!!!
Cheetos is not all this guy does, check out this amazing portrait of Morgan Spurlock from Supersize Me, made with ketchup and fries!!!
This is a little love note to all the dumpster diving, freegan, gray water using kids out there, doing their stinky shameless best to use up all of the crap businesses throw out everyday. This takes a special sort of diligence and commitment to ideals to proudly and prosperously live off of other peoples less than perfect garbage. And it takes balls to have a bake sale, and make all of the pastries out of dumpster dived food..
but it takes extra big balls to make dumpster dived pastries in the shape of cat shit, and laugh and take peoples money in exchange for them.
The recipe for these is just a chocolate no bake cookie, rolled into a log shape, and then rolled in granulated sugar. Besides being delicious , these prove that basically anything can be a turd if it’s brown and you roll it into a log shape. These were a lovely treat after a night of videos and beer, and all of the proceeds went to Odd Obsessions Video, which is an independently owned video store that operates like a co-op, being run almost entirely by volunteers, and specializing in weird, out of print , and cult favorites. Check them out today!
Right before i left for Brooklyn and my ensuing duties there, I wanted to do some real fun stuff before I lost all the space I could claim as “mine” for the following months. And really what better way is there to claim a space a home than to grow edible fungus? Let me tell you folks, there isn’t one. Fuck your interior improvement and couch re-upholstering projects sir, grow some mushrooms in your house and a bottomless well spring of home-ownership with bound forth from your bosom like never before.
First i went to youtube and watched shroom videos. really good and really entertaining….
these are about growing all kinds of mushrooms…
and these are about taking magic mushrooms…
At any rate i grew some edible non-hallucinogenic mushrooms from a kit i bought off of a website called fungi perfecti which sells kits for growing a slew of edible mushrooms. I chose the bearded tooth mushroom because it yields softball sized balls of little tiny white icicles. Also i chose it because it is supposed to taste like lobster, which is so luxurious i just had to get it. This mushroom is also know as lion’s mane, but i prefer the idea of a “bearded tooth” so i am going to call it that.The kit its self is basically a bag of hardwood sawdust and wood chips that have been innouclated with spores. Exposing them to air signals to the spores it’s time to fruit. When you get the bag all you have to do is cut some holes for the mushrooms to grow through, and then mist the whole bag 2 or 3 times a day.
Here are photos of the kit and the bearded tooth’s growth over the course of 6 weeks.
This is the bag as it came to me, on top are some fruits from the mushroom, i hat to scrape these off to start the spores to fruiting again.
Here in this very fuzzy photo, you can see the spores starting to cover the interior of the bag. in a while they will begin to push out from the bag and grow these mushroom clusters.
This is after about six weeks of care, the spores aren’t very big, but you can get the idea. Also, for the purposes of eating, you have to get them while they are young to get the maximum tenderness and flavor form them. If they are left to grow big they my stop growing and start to brown on top, which is a sign they are old bitter tasting.
It was at this point that i made my first harvest.
and here it is all fried up with garlic and butter and green onion.
In conclusion, this does taste vaguely fishy, and kind of lobstery, and on the flavor front in general it is pretty amazing. On the growing stuff front this was a sucess, but was it worth 50 bucks for shipping + a kit? Maybe… given that dried Bearded Tooth mushrooms go for 8 dollars an ounce some places, it’s a pretty good return on my investment. PLUS you can use the substrate to innouclate logs or other matter like coffee grounds and keep growing mushroom as long as you have the intrest to do so. COOL!
makin butter
I was looking for fun places to eat on one of my favorite websites, Chowhound.com, and I had never noticed how well built and jam packed that site is. Lots and lots of fun cooking tips in video form. Everything from the “no duh” to the “no way”. One of them was a really basic but totally amazing thing… making butter from heavy whipping cream.
Now some people who grew up on ‘the farm’ or just had some cool teacher along the way have done this before, but lots of people like me have heard that this is possible, but have never done this. Well, I am here to tell you kids that it is possible. All you need is some room temp heavy whipping cream, a good size jar with a tight fitting lid, some elbow grease, and 30 minutes of your precious time, and you’ve got yourself a big wad of unsalted creamy butter!
10 minutes into shaking
10 minutes in it’s basically unsweetened whipcream.
after 30+ minutes of shaking
and after 30 or so minutes… BUTTER!
and a bonus…
buttermilk
Buttermilk!
Churning physically agitates the cream until it ruptures the fragile membranes surrounding the milk fat. Once broken, the fat droplets can join with each other and form clumps of fat, or butter grains.
As churning continues, larger clusters of fat collect until they begin to form a network with the air bubbles that are generated by the churning; this traps the liquid and produces a foam. As the fat clumps increase in size, there are also fewer to enclose the air cells. So the bubbles pop, run together, and the foam begins to leak. (per the wikipedia “butter churning” entry)
Basically what happens is you shake the cream so hard, it separates into the fatty stuff and the milky stuff, butter(fat) and butter milk (the rest). SO COOL.
Make some butter today!
So online I stumbled upon Dr. Carl Winter’s website Food Safety Music. This guy is great! Essentially he does food safety themed covers a-la Weird Al.
The Elvis of Ecoli
With songs like “Who Left The Food Out”, “Fifty Ways to Eat Your Oysters”, and my personal favorite ” I Will Survive”, where he basically breaks up with salmonella, this guy is a real class act.
Hey kids it’s that time of year, Fall is here. Time to begrudgingly pull out sweaters and scarves. Time for every store to start putting out Christmas decorations, because Halloween is less than a month away. And thanks to that much poo poo-ed tradition of capitalist holiday enthusiasm, one of my favorite candies has been out on the shelves for months, and that means lots and lots of opportunity for gorging on CANDY CORN!
A study back in 2001 found that annual production that year was 20 million pounds, which is approximately 8.3 billion kernels!! Which is crazy considering how few people i know are as koo-koo for them as i am. When the candy debuted in the 1900′s its process was so revolutionary that people went ga-ga, but at that time production was done entirely by hand, from the production of the cornstarch molds to the hand pouring of the 45 pound ladles of steaming sugary goodness… all by hand. This was back in the day when every factory job was crazy dangerous, even candy corn production. “how did your grampa die again?” “Oh he was killed by a giant ladle of the orange color in candy corn.” “oh man, that’s tough.”
Eat it!
This week Shawn the BF and I went to support my pal Melissa from Pastries Not Potatoes in the 4ourth installment of Iron Cupcake: Chicago!
sugar sculptures
first a bit of history: Iron cupcake is a fun time. It is headed up by Colleen of Beautiful Cakes who put the whole thing together. But there is a whole bunch of bakers and chefs who have been doing the “cupcake as a genre” thing for a while. The contest was actually started in Milwaukee by the Milwaukee Cupcake Queen and her pal when they decided to challenge each other to a bakers duel. The gauntlet was thrown by the pal then known as the Unknown Baker; as is covered here on the blog prehumously named No One Puts Cupcake In a Corner. Things started when said baker presented the Queen with a Marlboro Cowboy Coffee Cream Cupcake With Starbucks liquor chaser. So rowdy! This dude steeped tobacco and then made a batter with it. So then the heat was on, and iron Cupcake Milwaukee was born, then Iron Cupcake: Earth, then spin offs including Iron Cupcake :Chicago.
The challenges so far:
Iron cupcake Chicago has been ramping up. The first challenges were pretty tame, including citrus and something else. But the last two themes were actually interesting because of the open-end-ed-ness of them. Savory, which provided the obligatory bacon cupcakes. and most recently candy. This is the one i attended.
Ok! Let me start by saying all of the cupcakes were very tasty, but some were better than others, AND only two of the contestants were actual chefs, most of these ladies were just badass moms and grandmoms looking for kicks and bragging rights.
Entries included, M&M’s (which were sort of boring),
Mounds (which were definitely boring)
Candy corn which was good, but had a strange aftertaste not unlike eating actual candy corn.
there were two snickers entries… and like highlander their can be only one, and it was true!
snickers2
actually the lady with the superior snickers called them SINkers, and they involved a hollow cupcake, filled with snickers filling, and topped with a ring of caramel creme. these ROCKED US.
One of Melissa’s entries was cany dots cupcakes, which were flat pieces of fondant topped with piped candy dots. I really enjoyed this. However, similar to the actual candy dots of yore, this was fun to eat, but not terribly tasty to eat. Mostly because of the fondant,because fondant tastes gross.
In the end, Melissa and the SINkers tied for best presentation, and the SINkers rightly won for best taste. It was really no contest on that front.
here is melissa right before the crowning.
mel and mom
BYE until next time!!
So, this weekend my new beau and I waited in the extremely long line that is the no questions asked norm at Hot Doug’s, one of Chicago’s premire encased meat specialists.
there's a line.. count on it
Now, we waited in line for at least 25 minutes, but for how long the line is there, it is always moving, and it’s generally regarded as “all part of the experience.” And it wasn’t all that bad, honestly. There were these kids in front of us in line, and they seemed to be trying their damnedest to live as though they were doing a summer stock performance of “Superbad.” But I digress. Dougs features a few standard dogs, many of which are named after celebs.For example: The Keira Knightly (formerly the Britney Spears) which is just a spicy hot dog. HA! get it? I think this is dumb, but I like dick, so the whole “spicy ladies” thing is just stupid to me.. but hey, with all the weiner in that place, I really have no room to complain. Anyway.. in addition to their basic dogs, which come with the works, and either steamed or grilled, they have their specials, which are nutz. Here is what was on special when we went:
Very Special Specials
I opted for “The Dog” from their standard menu, which is the classic Chicago hotdog. The first time I was introduce to the idea of the “chicago style” hot dog I saw it represented like this:
chicago's hot dog
and here is break down of what is illustrated here:
the real deal
“Sausage is German in origin and so is mustard 1, but buns are American—Germans would eat it with bread, but not a bun,” Kraig explains. “Sport peppers 2 are basically giardiniera, as is relish 3, which is Italian, while dill pickles 4 are German. Tomatoes 5and onions 6 are Mediterranean, so that’s Greek and Italian, and these came from guys that turned their produce carts into hot-dog carts on Maxwell. Chicago was a major producer of celery until the ’20s, and celery salt 7 became a substitute. The poppy-seed bun, which is Jewish and was introduced locally by Rosen’s bakery, didn’t appear until after World War II.”
(PS: this is taken from this excellent article from the chicago reader… get into it.)
Again I digress, I figured where better to experience my first Chicago Style Dog than from Chicago’s very own Encased Meat Emporium? SO , I got that and the Smoked Crayfish and Pork Sausage, topped with remoulade and goat cheese. Shawn opted for the B.L.T. and the Blue Cheese pork sausage (however his exact words when ordering were “I’ll have the pork sausage” which landed him with the Cherry Pork Sausage topped with a black-cherry cream sauce and satori-raspberry cheese relish.) We also ordered a large order of fries to split. This cost us a whopping 30 plus dollars for four hot-dogs! Which is sort of fine considering the quality of hand cased sausages and carefully crafted bun borne dishes we were about to enjoy.
the meal
Here is the order. For starters, the Chi-town Classic style dog is Unbelievable, there is so much going on, but it is so well crafted, it’s no wonder it is a staple here. It also helps that every one of the ingredients on this is picture perfect, right down to the neon relish. It is clear that they make this constantly, because it is almost mechanically perfect. The Smoked crayfish and pork sausage was also unnecessarily delicious. I had to take some of the goat cheese of for fear of gagging on all of the flavor, but i am not complaining. I am simply explaining how i survived the onslaught of taste that was this dog. Shawn’s choices were also good, although he was mildly disappointed in them for various reasons. One the reasons was that this was not exactly what he ordered, and therefor not what he was expecting to eat. The other that he found the B.L.T. to be simply underwhelming. I thought it was good, but unfortunately inferior to the crayfish and pork grandslam. The cherry dog was good, but it actually was so sweet it made me think what an amasing pastry it would make, rather than a bun based confection.
In closing allow me to say that in the race for the best encased meat, Hot Doug’s is a real weiner!
PS.. Eat a Weiner!
Just a lil’ dip in the blogosphere to tell you kids about something wonderful/boring. I recently discovered a candy called Kranky at my local Mexican grocery. Simply put Kranky is so simple, so gosh darn tasty and good-natured, the language barrier is the only thing I can think of for why the name of this candy is so dumb and sounds more like a warning than an enticement.
simple... sort of tasty...
All this shit is, is chocolate covered frosted flakes!!! Genius! To be honest, it isn’t all that good, but it’s among the better of the candies/treats from the Bimbo Bakery Co. Again.. WTF Mexico? BIMBO? Honestly, if is not meant to be a joke, than someone is asleep at the wheel.
other treats from Bimbo,
Clown Pops (chocolate-covered marshmallow pops decorated with a clown’s face); Monkey Treats (chocolate-covered peanuts); Bubulubu (ghost-shaped marshmallow/strawberry-flavored pectin jelly enrobed with chocolate); and Kranky (chocolate-covered corn flakes).
You can read all about their successes here.
Say what you will these people are smart as hell.
Way to go oddly named , super basic, Mexican candy company.
A few weeks after my birthday, a couple of my friends came into town, Scotty and Derrick (AKA Mullet Chad, AKA Mungee, AKA Derrick witch, AKA Nu Metal Craig). They are in a really great metal band called SKELETONWITCH; Derrick plays drums, and Scotty plays guitar. They also brought their friend Andrew with them, who owns a super awesome record store in Athens Ohio called, Haffas. Of course they didn’t come all the way to Chicago just to see me; they had a busy schedule of friends and events lined up around the block. The first big ticket item on their list was seeing CRADLE OF FILTH on Friday night. The next morning I had an unexpected (but not unwanted) day off, so I caught up with them at Scotty’s sister Stacy and our pal Moustache Derrick’s place around 11. I was just in time to see them shake off their hangovers and hitch a ride with them to Kuma’s Corner. As with many of Chicago’s institutions I had NEVER heard of it. It’s a pretty unassuming place at first glance; some wood paneling and some tee shirts, some ink drawings of leather-clad-blood-soaked-biker-chicks, the menu written on a chalk board above the grill. One look at the menu though and the truth is revealed. Kuma’s has all kinds of standard bar stuff: sandwiches and fries, some ribs an obligatory salad, etc. BUT the real excitement is their Metal themed burgers. There’s the MOTORHEAD, THE LAIR OF THE MINOTAUR, the CLUTCH (which has almost nothing but cheese on it) and the JUDAS PREIST (which has walnuts, blue cheese, cranberries etc… and is the GAYEST item on the menu while still being a burger).They even had a monthly special called the “Bleepin’ Blago-wich” which is: a burger topped with American cheese, yellow mustard, fried baloney and served on two grilled cheese sandwiches made with wonder bread (the price was negotiable).
I opted for the SLAYER, which is: a ½ pound burger served on a bed of fries, topped with chili, andouille sausage, jalapenos, cherry peppers, mozzarella cheese, and anger.
Did I finish it? Yes. Did I eat anything else that day? Yes. A pile of collard greens…five hours later.
All in all, the burger was good, and true to the name a real slayer. They also have some great local brews on tap, the one thing they don’t have is a SKELETON-WICH. To that end I have included what I think should, if not be immediately added to the menu, be run as a special the next time they play in Chi-town… the list of ingredients; ½ pound burger, white American cheese, whole wheat bun, jalapenos, weed, yellow rice doused with sriracha, the ketchup-ed blood of a virgin, and the souls of all those who don’t WORSHIP THE WITCH, and served with a Shirley Temple…because these boyz are classy.
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!!!
So, I made some pasta for lunch in roughly the same way that I always make it; chunky, thick, spicy and meaty. I actually know a wide range of people that make it in a similar fashion. Today I was thinking about it and pasta prima vera and the word “puttanesca” popped into my head. I think because I may have heard someone somewhere down the line call it that. Also I have this problem where certain words with a really excellent ring to them occasionally pop into my head. An example of this is ” Karen Neckyfarow”who is a girl I knew in high school who’s name has SUCH A FUCKING GOOD ring to it.
Karen, with her grama?
At any rate, this is besides the point, except to describe my wholehearted surprise in discovering that the pasta that I thought might be called “pasta alla puttanesca” was indeed called just that. Thank god for wikipedia, honestly. The name means ” pasta the way a whore would make it.” And apparently there is a bunch of debate over whether or not the name comes from the fact that it is spicy and sexy like a lady of ill repute or that is it fast and easy to make, muck like a whore, or that it is fast and easy to make between johns. Who can say. All I know is I make pasta like a whore.
Puttanesca
Thu Tran
misslisa
sandrachi
eggerelias
doanbuu
davekrofta
erikaneola
petervh
zachariahdurr
vinald
iancharnas
Christine Kelly
mistabee
jessicalangley