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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!
