If you’re going to be making beans and cornbread and greens…
And you get good bacon and render it down for the drippings for use in all three…
And you get eggs that were just under a chicken a few hours before…
Make sure your milk isn’t rancid.
BEFORE you bake the cornbread.
If you have never been to Vino Vixens on Powell and 26th, you have *no* idea.
Okay, I had no idea until this afternoon when I showed up for a NaNoWriMo write-in. BUT STILL!
Happy hour every day between 4-6. Very, very, ridiculously reasonable by the glass prices. The house white and red rotates. Small but really broad selection, and this is the child of Napa talking. A comfortable and relaxed space with many couches, and outlets, and wifi.
Very knowlegable staff who are about as far from snobby as Australia is from Champagne. Pool, if you like that thing. They sell some nibbly cheese and sausage, but YOU CAN BRING IN YOUR OWN FOOD.
Ports. Bubblies. A tiny but very intruiging beer selection.
Yes, I went to a wine bar and drank beer. Yes, I’m That Beer Douche. In my defense, it was a Dogshead 90 Minute IPA, which was AWESOME. I’m now sipping on a glass of 14 Hands cabernet, which I have had before, but it’s kind of hard to find and now I know they carry it for sale by the bottle, well, YUM.
I’m thinking about running across the street to Hopworks and ordering the chicken strips to go, and bringing it over here. I bet it’s a thousand times less crowded here than it is over there. BECAUSE YOU CAN BRING YOUR OWN FOOD. I cannot emphasize the total awesomosity of this enough.
I’m moving. Have some food-related comics to keep you amused.
Torg and Zoe work to discover if Garlic Butter is the Ultimate Food.
And then, Riff and Torg battle it out over whether Garlic Butter beats Battered and Deep Fried.
Sorry, guys, they already determined that bacon and chocolate are not the ultimate foods.
OMG FLEEE TEH CHILDHOOD DIABEETUS! The media says it, ergo it is true, yo. Fat kids equal diabetic kids, right?
Right?
Junk Food Science is written by Sandy Szwarc. She has all these letters (BSN, RN, CCP) after her name, which means she is An Expert.
Her post A costly truism that’s not true— obesity has led to an epidemic of type 2 diabetes in young people is a must-read.
But I know you people. You don’t click through. Even when I threaten you. *sigh*
Excerpt-y!
The journal’s [Pediatrics] peer-review process also failed to do a simple fact check of the data on the actual incidence of type 2 diabetes among American young people. As was covered in detail here, several large population studies have been done since 1988 on randomized samplings nationally representative of the population of young people, monitoring the trend of type 2 diabetes. These include the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) conducted by the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, and five other large population-based studies that have followed children and teens, all of which have also measured type 2 diabetes by actual blood tests.
All of these large population studies have consistently shown that rates of type 2 diabetes among children and adolescents at the population level have remained unchanged. There is no epidemic of childhood diabetes. In fact, type 2 diabetes remains extremely rare among pediatric populations.
Or at least that’s what I was informed when I came up with this recipe last night and then said I couldn’t do a beta test until after I get paid on Friday.
Smores Crispy Treats
Untested recipe. Attempt at your own risk.
1/4 cup butter or margarine
1 10 oz bag mini marshmallows
5 cups crisp rice cereal
1 cup coarsley crushed graham crackers (aim for crumbles about the same size as the crisp rice)
2 cups chocolate chips
Melt butter or margarine in a freakin’ huge saucepan over medium heat. Toss in the mini marshmallows and stir stir stir until it’s a huge gloopy mess. Remove from heat and dump in the rest of the ingredients into the freakin’ huge saucepan. Stir until it’s all incorporated. Press into a buttered casserole dish and let set, preferably overnight.
The radio silence the last few days has been due entirely to my Best Friend in the Whole Wide World who up and got himself MARRIED this weekend!
And here’s a picture of the happy couple. And the cake. Which was tasty.
This is not a meal for the faint of heart. It was inspired by the pierogi at the Polish Festival. The kielbasa is from the Polish Festival, actually, purchased from the nice grandmamas already frozen.
Killer Colcannon
Makes 8 servings
4 huge Russett potatoes. About 5 lbs total.
4 cups kale, ribbed and cut into bite-sized bits.
1/2 c butter (yes, one whole stick of butter)
1lb paneer (farmer’s cheese)
1 T salt
1 T pepper
Cut the potatoes into similarly-sized chunks (I leave the skins on), toss in a large pot of water, ensuring the water covers all the potato chunks. Bring to a roiling boil. Reduce heat and cook for about 20 minutes, or until the potatoes fall apart fairly easily when poked with a fork. Toss the kale in at this time, cover, and remove the pot from the heat. Wait about five minutes.
I suggest while you’re waiting, you put a bowl or some other heatproof container under your colander. Because after 5 minutes you are going to dump the potatoes and kale into the colander to drain, and you need to reserve about a cup of the cooking liquid. It’ll be faintly green, and that means it’s good for you! Vitamins are our friends.
Put the pot back on the burner and turn it to really, really low. Melt the butter completely, then crumble the paneer into the pot. You don’t want to melt the paneer, so don’t wait for that. Add the salt, the pepper, the potatoes, and the kale. Start mashin’!
Add the reserved cooking water slowly, no more than a quarter of a cup at a time, until you reach desired consistency. Serve with whatever you darn well feel like.
I love me a zucchini, yes I do.
But you know what else I love? The big old barrel of winter squash appearing at New Seasons.
Soon, my pretties. Soon you will be whapped in half, gutted, and roasted in the oven with buttah!
I also picked up a couple of whole chicken legs and made chicken soup with extra garlic, onion, and kale. For starch I tossed in a cup of my grain mix. I’m not feeling well, so I’m hoping this will jump-start my immune system.
Confound it! I should have added ginger. It would have been good.
My Best Friend in the Whole Wide World took me out to dinner for my birthday. I got to pick, so I picked Rogue Brewing.
There is a reason. When I had my unexpected and inexplicable houseguests last month, they *had* to go to Rogue. And they drug me along. And Herself had a Rogue Spruce Gin martini, and I had a sip.
Let us preface this with: I hate gin. Hate, hate, hate, take away my Anglican credentials, hate.
I have been CRAVING that gin since that day. It’s so mellow, and almost melon-y, and… yum.
I got there an hour earlier than my BFitWWW and had a martini and watched some dumbheads sitting in Rogue ordering St. Pauli Girl.
Oh, the new batch of Double Dead Guy is out. The daily taster was of it, and it was… okay. If you like Dead Guy, you’d probably like it. I’m not terribly fond of Dead Guy (I’ll drink it, but I won’t seek it out), so I’m not the best person to judge.
Then my BFitWWW showed up and told the very nice waitress it was my birthday. She’s very nice because she said they do not sing. I like my birthday. I like the fact I have survived another year (there have been times when it seemed unlikely I would, in fact, see another year. I’ve learned the hard way to be greatful for wrinkles and grey hairs). I do not like being the center of attention of a large group of people. And I really don’t like being subjected to amateurs attempting to ’sing’.
The very nice waitress, instead, brought me a freakin’ STEIN of beer and said, “Happy Birthday!”. I don’t know how much was in that thing, but it was freakin’ HUGE! I’d ordered the Hazelnut Brown, which is very tasty, has almost a cream soda finish. Yum.
BFitWWW had the pulled pork sandwich. I had the normal cheeseburger (as opposed to the “American Kobe” burger). The french fries were awesome. And I drank the whole, it had to be over a litre of beer. Jeebus.
It’s a decent brewpub space. There’s a detached bar I haven’t been into, and lots of tables outside (with people sweating into their beer yesterday). It’s air conditioned inside, seems to retain the cool pretty well even with the big picture windows. Oh, and the ladies room is Barley, the men’s room is Hops. Just so you knows. When you go. Because you should go. Get some of the hazelnut brown bread, it’s sooo tasty.
All around, it was a good birthday. 
Oh! I also got hit on!
First, a little disclaimer: To the person who got to my blog by searching “How to give someone food poisoning”– seriously, dude, whatever you’re thinking… don’t.
Hanyoldways, Serious Eats informs me that the Corn Council or something has started putting out TV ads about how fantastic High Fructose Corn Syrup is!.
Yeah, hi, no. I’m not a doctor. I don’t play one on teevee. I do know that when I eat HFCS, I tend to go WHEEEHEEHEEEEEE! *splat*ded*. And HFCS is so hard to avoid. I bought some brats last night because I got too lazy to mix my own sausage (yes, I’ve been mixing my own sausage lately using ground pork) and it wasn’t until I got home and cooked and ate the damn things I noticed that the third ingredient? HFCS.
WHAT THE HELL, CORN COUNCIL?! Sausage does not need sweetner, yo.
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