Category Archives: Random tidbits

Twitter Q&A

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A little too harried today to craft anything cohesive, so here’s a Twitter Q&A.

It’s Ochoa. Butch Huskey epitomizes many things, among them the general meaninglessness of Spring Training stats, what a 245-pound man can do to catchers when plowing into them at full speed, and baseball’s rich tradition of great names. But since Huskey enjoyed a couple of reasonably productive seasons as a Met, it’s hard to call him an utter failure as a prospect.

For whatever reason — perhaps because the Mets acquired him in the Bobby Bonilla trade — it seemed like Ochoa came up to a lot more hype than Huskey did. In fact, I remember that Ochoa was the first player I had ever heard referred to as a “five-tool guy,” which was about the most hilarious thing my 14-year-old mind could process.

Soon after the Mets called Ochoa up, I went to a game with my brother and a couple of his friends. We managed to sneak down to the field level in right field, where we proceeded to commend Ochoa for every single thing he did in the game, proclaiming everything as examples of his tools. He took a couple steps toward first base from right field on an infield groundout, and I yelled something about backing up first base from right field being the elusive sixth tool. Stuff like that, all game long.

Eventually Ochoa acknowledged us, and we went absolutely ape. But from there it was all downhill for Ochoa as a Met. Until right now, I had forgotten that he ever put up productive seasons with the Reds and Brewers after leaving Flushing. He did finish fifth in the NL in outfield assists in 2001, strong evidence of at least one tool.

I don’t drink very often. I know so little about beers that if there’s nothing I recognize on a bar’s tap list I usually panic and wind up with something that tastes like fermented tar, which I sip politely until it’s about 3/4 done then leave it and walk to some other part of the bar hoping it doesn’t follow me.

When I do drink, it’s usually bourbon. And I know plenty of people will judge the hell out of me for saying this, but I rarely drink my bourbon straight. At bars I usually order it with seltzer, and at home I mix it with unsweetened green tea and a little lemonade (about three parts green tea, one part bourbon, one part lemonade). That’s the Ted Berg — order it by name, then explain it to the bartender. I’d like for this to catch on.

I also like a good frozen rum drink, where appropriate.

Yikes, that’s a tough one. I’m trying to imagine life without my pinkie fingers, and it’s not great. I don’t use my left pinkie as often as I should while playing the guitar, but I still definitely need it for that. And obviously both pinkies are very necessary for typing with any rapidity. Plus — and not to be Debbie Downer here — I’ve got the MS, so my dexterity is at times already limited, and I don’t know how much more of that I want to give up.

I guess there’s an underlying question of vanity here: Would everyone know I had given up two pinkies for a pair of Mets championships? Like would that be something celebrated at the parade — here’s this guy who for some reason had to give up his fingers for this! — or would I just be some eight-fingered fan in the crowd?

Either way I think the answer is no. Maybe that means I’m not committed enough, but I’d say it’s just optimism. I’m confident enough that the Mets will eventually win a World Series or two that I’m not willing to part ways with my fingers to guarantee it.

Toes I’d do in a second. Especially if it came with the promise that headlines after the fact referred to the Mets’ victory as “digitally enhanced.” I don’t think we make enough digit/digital jokes in general.

It’s happening

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Popeye’s has created a new batch of fried chicken nuggets that feature a spoon-like curvature to them to make it easier to scoop up dipping sauce. This fast food innovation is dubbed “Dip’n Chick’n.”

This is a really good idea because I’ve often found that traditional sauce delivery methods are much too slow. You have to open up the sauce cup and dip your nugget in, and then you only get a light slathering of sauce. Now each nugget becomes its own sauce trough, allowing me to ladle on the flavor down my gullet with speed and alacrity.

– Ben Popken, Consumerist.com.

Oh hell yes. Your move, every other fast-food fried-chicken place.

Scoop-shaped Tostitos make a hell of a lot of sense to me, but I had never before considered the need for scoop-shaped fried chicken.

The only trouble I ever have getting the appropriate amount of sauce on my chicken tenders is when the sauce comes in a container too narrow for the tender. Usually a situation like that can be rectified by dipping the chicken at a different angle, but before that happens I get so frustrated that I just clench the chicken tender in my fist and smash the little cup into oblivion.

Either way, though, you’d think it would be easier to alter the size of the sauce container than the shape of the chicken itself. But then you and I lack vision.

Via Corey.

Make me a sandwich

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This site has long understood that sandwiches always taste better when someone else makes them. It turns out there’s science behind this:

When you make your own sandwich, you anticipate its taste as you’re working on it. And when you think of a particular food for a while, you become less hungry for it later. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, for example, found that imagining eating M&Ms makes you eat fewer of them. It’s a kind of specific satiation, just as most people find room for dessert when they couldn’t have another bite of their steak. The sandwich that another person prepares is not “preconsumed” in the same way.

Via Tommy Bennett.

Bold Flavors Snack of the Week

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This one might be a little involved for a normal Sunday of focused football watching. But it is nonetheless bold. Also, because I now have about seven pounds of pulled pork, I haven’t eaten much else since I made it so I’m not sure I’ve had any other snacks of note.

This is a pulled-pork sandwich with pickles and peppers:

I’ve made pulled pork before, but I think I got a lot closer to perfection this time. I got a line on some awesome Duroc pork through our man Alex Belth. Here’s what you need:

A pork butt (or Boston butt), preferably awesome
Barbecue rub*
Yellow mustard
White vinegar
Cranberry juice
Butter
Sugar
Salt
Olive oil
Aluminum foil
Pickles
Peppers
Barbecue sauce
Potato rolls
A smoker, and whatever fuel and wood your smoker needs

*- I use a rub of my own devising based on a combination of suggestions I’ve seen in cookbooks. It consists of (in descending order of amount) paprika, black pepper, salt, chili powder, cumin, garlic powder, onion powder, and cayenne pepper. I don’t remember the exact proportions I used. Basically you can just open up your spice cabinet and start dumping a bunch of stuff in a bowl and it’ll probably be alright. Google “Barbecue rub” and you’ll find a ton of recipes. Just expect to use a lot of paprika.

Also: I have this hilarious meat syringe with which I injected the pork before smoking it. I don’t think it’s necessary. If you don’t have one of those, you won’t need the butter, sugar and salt and you can skip Step 2 below.

Remember to wash your hands and utensils thoroughly after they touch raw pork. I shouldn’t have to remind you of that but now you can’t sue me if you get trichinosis.

1) Roughly 4-8 hours before you want to start smoking, take the pork butt out of its bag. Pour vinegar over it, and work the vinegar into the pork with your hands a little. Coat the entire butt with a generous amount of yellow mustard. Liberally pour rub all over the butt — really cover that sucker because that rub’s going to be smoky and delicious in like 20 hours. Pat the rub onto the butt, giggling because of how often the recipe says “butt.” Then cover your butt and refrigerate.

2) About a half-hour before you smoke the butt (ha!), melt about a half a stick of butter in a small saucepan over low heat. Add 1/2 cup of cranberry juice, a tablespoon of salt and a tablespoon of sugar and stir until they’re dissolved. Let the mixture cool a bit, then inject it into the pork right before it goes on the smoker.

3) When the smoker is about 220-degrees Fahrenheit, put in the pork with the fatty side up. Find some way to entertain yourself because waiting for pork to smoke can be agonizing.

4) Combine about 2/3 a cup of cranberry juice and 1/3 a cup of olive oil in a bowl. Or if you don’t want extra dishes to clean, just drink a small bottle of cranberry juice down to the label and fill it back up with olive oil, like you did in high school when you made a brass monkey because you liked the Beastie Boys so much. Only do not drink the cranberry juice/olive oil mixture. Also: Do not drink brass monkeys. They’re gross.

5) Every now and then, check the thermometer on the smoker to make sure it’s around 220. If it’s not, do what you need to do to get it back there. Not a big deal if it goes above for a while or below for a while as long as the smoker’s between about 200 and 300 degrees.

6) After about four hours, lightly coat the pork with the cranberry juice/olive oil mixture. I use a spray bottle for this step, but you could use a barbecue mop or a silicone pastry brush if you don’t have that. If you don’t have any of those things, I don’t know, brother. You’re up the creek I guess.

7) When the pork’s internal temperature gets to about 165 degrees (mine took about eight hours to get there), pull it off the smoker and wrap it in aluminum foil. Put it back in the smoker for four more hours.

8) Remove the pork, unwrap it and let it cool for at least a half hour. It’s still going to be pretty damn hot inside, but by this point there’s just no way that’s going to stop you from turning the pork into a sandwich.

9) Grab a handful of pork and pull it off the butt, then pull it into smaller pieces. You want to get a good mix of the lighter, interior meat and the outside stuff with the rub on the edge. When you have enough for however many sandwiches you need, stop. You can deal with pulling the rest of the pork later.

10) Construct a sandwich with the pork, barbecue sauce, pickles and peppers on the potato roll. I used a Carolina-style mustard-based barbecue sauce, but I’m not the type to tell you any one barbecue sauce must be used with any one barbecue meat. I used Mariachi peppers because they’re what I have and they’re delicious. They’re spicy and sweet, so if you can find a pepper like that I’d recommend it.

11) Eat the sandwich while you try to think of other ways to use all the remaining pork.

This might have been the best sandwich I’ve ever constructed at home. The pork was smoky and juicy, the barbecue sauce sweet and tangy, the peppers crisp and spicy, and the pickles were pickles. Oh and the roll itself is soft and sweet, a perfect complement to all the stuff that’s going on here.

 

Keep skinning that chicken

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By using chicken skin for its texture and powerful flavor in all sorts of dishes, chefs are legitimizing what used to be a guilty pleasure, whether they call it gribenes, yakitori kawa or cracklings.

There is no more-committed evangelist than Sean Brock, executive chef of Husk and McCrady’s in Charleston, S.C. If it can be done in the kitchen, Mr. Brock has done it to chicken skin: He marinates it in buttermilk, then smokes and deep fries for a crunchy appetizer served with hot sauce and honey.

– Sarah DiGregorio, N.Y. Times.

OK, does anyone know where I can get my hands on some chicken skin without actually pulling the skin off chicken (and thus later having to cook and eat pathetically skin-free chicken)? Because smoked, deep-fried chicken skin with hot sauce and honey is practically begging to be a Bold Flavors Snack of the Week.

Doritos poured out for Arch West

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When Arch West, the man credited with inventing Doritos, is buried on Oct. 1, he will be joined by a sprinkling of the bright orange chips that have become a cheesy, tangy, American institution.

His daughter, Jana Hacker of Allen, Texas, told the Dallas Morning News that the family plans on “tossing Doritos chips in before they put the dirt over the urn.”

West, who was 97 when he died of natural causes last week, was a former Frito-Lay executive. He reportedly came up with the idea of Doritos when he was on vacation with his family in Mexico and came upon a snack shack selling fried tortilla chips.

– Deborah Netburn, L.A. Times.

The lead is buried here. The man who invented Doritos lived to 97. Again: The man who invented Doritos lived to 97.

As for his particular burial plans: Who among us hasn’t been buried under Doritos in his darkest hour?

Hat tip to Bill and Daniel.

This exists: The West Virginia roadkill cook-off

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“With all the twisty, turny roads up here in the mountains, there’s a lot of roadkill,” she told msnbc.com.

Fortunately for the squeamish, the festival doesn’t require that the dishes on display be made with actual roadkill. According to the official rules, “most of the judges would prefer that it didn’t.” Instead, dishes must be based on any animal commonly found by the side of the road.

As a result, competitors have served up everything from local casualties — raccoons, possum and deer — to more exotic fender fare, including armadillo, alligator and buffalo.

– Rob Lovitt, MSNBC.com.

Please someone hire me to go cover next year’s West Virginia road-kill cook off. I promise you won’t be disappointed.

Bold Flavors Snack of the Week

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I’m going to be honest: I intended this new weekly feature to be part of a weekly fantasy football post. The idea was to chart the guys most frequently named “great plays” by various fantasy gurus, then come back on Monday or Tuesday to see if there’s any consistency to fantasy football guruism.

But really the whole thing would’ve just been an excuse to post a photo and description of something I ate while watching football the week before, the Bold Flavors Snack of the Week — named of course in loving tribute to the @DadBoner Twitter account.

I decided I don’t want to spin the fantasy spin into some sort of meta fantasy web, so here’s the snack alone.

These are bacon-wrapped cream cheese-stuffed jalapenos:

Many variations of these can be found in barbecue cookbooks, often under the name “Dragon Turds.” Supposedly pitmasters prepare them, throw them on the smoker and eat them while they’re waiting for their meat to finish.

Though I actually had my smoker going on Sunday, I made these in the toaster oven (I was hungry and knew they’d cook a lot quicker that way). Very easy to do.

You need:

Bacon (I used pepper bacon because I’m like that)
Cream cheese, softened
Jalapenos
Toothpicks (IMPORTANT!)

I tried making these a couple weeks ago with cheddar cheese and without toothpicks and everything went haywire. The bacon unwrapped from the peppers and the cheese melted out everywhere, so I just wound up with bacon-wrapped jalapenos not really stuffed with anything. So they were still amazing, but not as good as the ones pictured.

To make them:

1) Preheat the toaster oven (or regular oven, I guess) to 400-degrees (Fahrenheit. This is America, dammit).

2) Cut off the stems from the jalapenos and slice them down one side. Remove the seeds and pith. Wear gloves if you plan on touching your eyes anytime within the next 10 hours. Or don’t wear gloves and suffer through the agony of taking your contacts out with your eyes on fire, which is what I do because who has gloves?

3) Spoon cream cheese into the jalapenos. I used about a heaping teaspoon of cream cheese per jalapeno, but I’m working with pretty small jalapenos. Fill those bastards up, you’re going to want that cream cheese.

4) Wrap the jalapenos in bacon and secure with a toothpick. I used about half a slice of bacon per jalapeno, taking special care to cover the top of the jalapenos where the cheese is most likely to spill out.

5) Lay the jalapenos on a toaster oven tray and bake until the bacon looks delicious.

6) Remove jalapenos from tray and make some perfunctory effort to let them cool before eating them, then get impatient and bite into one like a minute later even though you know molten cream cheese will scald your mouth.

They’re delicious. I only made five because I only had five jalapenos, plus because I’d prefer not to die. But five was pretty much as many jalapenos as I can eat. These things are spicy, fellas.

 

From the Wikipedia: Graham Cracker

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I was enjoying some graham crackers last night and got to thinking, “man, if graham crackers are called that because they’re made with graham flour, and graham crackers are delicious, why don’t we have more stuff made with graham flour? Where’s the graham cake and graham cookies?”

So I consulted the Wikipedia, only to find that the history of the graham cracker was way more interesting than I expected.

From the Wikipedia: Graham cracker.

Graham crackers were invented in 1829 in Bound Brook, New Jersey, by a Presbyterian minister and early dietary reformer named Sylvester Graham. Graham accurately argued that white bread from commercial bakeries, growing in popularity at the time, contained unhealthy additives and lacked the nutritious value of bread made from whole-grain flour.

Only Graham had more in mind than helping Americans enjoy the cardiac and gastroenterological benefits of a high-fiber diet. He believed that healthier lifestyles would cleanse his congregants of lustful thoughts, and in particular quell one indecent but ever-popular habit he referred to as “self-abuse.”

So to stop people from touching themselves, Graham began producing flour that incorporated course-ground wheat germ and bran in addition to the fine-ground endosperm of white flour. From this he created graham crackers — originally marketed as “Dr. Graham’s Honey Biskits” — to be a staple of his eponymous diet.

Graham’s followers, called Grahamites, reaped the rewards of frequent bathing and the daily brushing of teeth — neither yet a common custom in the early 19th century — believing uncleanliness to be a source of impure thoughts. Per the Wikipedia, Graham “felt that all excitement was unhealthful, and spices were among the prohibited ingredients in his diet.” The Graham diet grew popular enough that it became mandated at Oberlin College, where a professor was fired for bringing contraband pepper to faculty meals.

The Grahamites ate tons of graham crackers and tried to suppress carnal urges until Graham himself died at age 57 in 1851. But Reverend Graham’s beliefs later caught on with the brothers Kellogg, who invented Corn Flakes in the 1890s in part because they thought their cereal would help extinguish sexual desire.

Yes, if you’re playing at home: Both graham crackers and Kellogg’s cereal are named for people who thought they could end the masturbation epidemic with bland foods.

Of course, the delicious graham crackers we enjoy today would have the Reverend Graham spinning in his grave (while taking care not to arouse himself in the process). Most mass-marketed graham crackers are made with far more sugar-type stuff and far less whole-wheat flour than the originals. Many do not use graham flour at all, which answers my graham-flour question that started the Wikipedia tangent.

And today the Internet delivers all sorts of vile and debased porn instantly to every corner of the country, and we coat graham crackers with an impious amount of sugar to serve them as breakfast cereal and crush them up to use as crusts for sinfully rich cheesecake. Because this is America, bro.