Category Archives: Random tidbits

The remoulade of the damned

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Bacon also resides within the lugubrious center, though not much bacon (no doubt trying to keep the sandwich at a trim 540 calories, of which 520 are from fat, I’m sure).  There’s also a “secret sauce” which seems to consist of mustard, mayo, Elmer’s Glue, and death.  The remoulade of the damned, essentially.

– Dan Szymborski, Perpetual Post (some language NSFW).

Dan and I wrote a joint review of the Double Down for Perpetual Post this week. My half is pretty similar to the one I posted here a couple weeks ago (except with saltier language) because, admittedly, I have not eaten another Double Down since. I mostly just wanted to title a post “the remoulade of the damned.”

What hath Colonel Sanders wrought?

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I did it. I went to KFC and ordered the Double Down on this, the evening of its national debut.

Holy moly.

The Double Down, if you haven’t heard, is a sandwich made with fried chicken instead of bread. It’s got pepper-jack cheese, bacon and special sauce in the middle. The special sauce is predictably orange and pretty obviously mayonnaise-based.

The real winner here, once again, is the United States of America. This is how we rear back and spit in Jamie Oliver’s smug face.

As for the product: The first thing you notice is how damn heavy the thing is. Thing must weigh a pound. It was my local KFC/Taco Bell combo joint, and I foolishly ordered a Volcano Taco as well, not knowing the size of the Double Down.

Damned if I didn’t give that taco away.

I gave a taco away. A hot, crunchy, spicy Volcano Taco, and I couldn’t eat it. The Double Down is greasy, fellas. I’ve got something of an iron stomach, but the Double Down is give-a-taco-away greasy.

Not sure if you would’ve figured that from the whole “two pieces of fried chicken with cheese, bacon and mayonnaise” thing if I didn’t spell it out for you. But yeah, greasy.

Greasy and totally delicious. I probably took 10 years off my life tonight, and I’m not certain it wasn’t worth it. It tastes like, well, two pieces of fried chicken with cheese and bacon inside. I’m not sure how I could describe it that could make it sound better than that. It tastes like what it is, and what it is, frankly, is awesome.

That’s a tasty sandwich, if we’re calling that a sandwich.

That’s a tasty tribute to culinary absurdity.

Will I order one again? I doubt it. It’s not something I’d want to eat while driving, for one thing, so it didn’t seem appropriate for drive-thru ordering, plus I like variety, and the Double Down pretty much prevents you from ordering anything else at KFC or the adjoining Taco Bell while you’re there.

#Follow Friday

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I just spent several minutes sitting at my desk, giggling out loud like a crazy person because I stumbled onto the @theRealPFChangs twitter account.

Fake celebrity and historical person Twitter accounts have been popular since the dawn of Twitter, to varying degrees of hilarity.

But this is the first I’ve heard of a fake corporate Twitter account, and obviously going the casual-dining establishment route — particularly P.F. Chang’s — is amazing. Kudos, whoever you are.

I’m sure the choice was inspired at least in part by the fact that the restaurant chain already has a particularly active Twitter account, which the fake one urged users to unfollow with its first Tweet:

Hi everyone. This is the REAL PF Changs Twitter account. Unfollow @pfchangs immediately.

Though each of the four updates since has been chuckle-worthy on its own, it is the overarching meta-joke — a fake corporate Twitter account set up to accuse a real corporate Twitter account of being a fake corporate Twitter account —  that gets me. And whoever’s running this one is executing it well.

Enjoy this until they get slapped with the inevitable cease-and-desist.

Nathan’s Pretzel Dog < Biscuitdog

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Sorry about the utter lack of posts this afternoon. I’m at Citi collecting some material for The Baseball Show and enduring more Internet difficulties.

Because I couldn’t get online until just now, I set out to enjoy my first Nathan’s Pretzel Dog, which I weighed in on a few weeks ago.

It was surprisingly hard to find — I went to three stands that sold Nathan’s Hot Dogs before I found one that sold Nathan’s Pretzel Dogs. It was on the Field level, just to the first-base side of the Jackie Robinson Rotunda, at a stand called “Hot Dogs.”

The product itself is good, but not all I hoped it would be. To be fair, probably nothing could live up to the expectations I set for the combination of pretzel and hot dog. I powered through it without thinking to take a picture, so you’ll have to just picture it in your head.

Probably better that way, anyway. It really doesn’t look as great in real life as it did in my mind. There were no beams of light emanating from it or anything, and it wasn’t presented to me accompanied by triumphant classical music. Just a hot dog wrapped in a pretzel.

It tasted like that, too. And I love both those things, so I thought it was good. No synergy, though. Nothing popped, you know?

It did remind me, though, of one of my great culinary experiments of yesteryear. Back before I moved to the suburbs and secured myself a backyard in which to grill stuff, I had to invent foodstuffs in various tiny Brooklyn apartments.

One such invention was Biscuitdog, which is exactly what it sounds like, except it’s not a dog biscuit. Oh, and I threw some bacon and cheese in there, too, because I’m like that.

It’s a hot dog, wrapped in bacon, covered in cheese, wrapped in a biscuit and baked. It tasted like a biscuit-wrapped-pork-wrapped beef miracle, and it looked like this:

Does that look a little too biscuity? Trick question: There’s no such thing as too biscuity. Also, I’ll thank you not to question Biscuitdog.

Former roommate Mike didn’t. Look at him tear into that sucker:

Well now I want Biscuitdog, or at least a biscuit.

At least I have the best Mets lineup we’ve seen so far this young season to tide me over. Angel Pagan and Ruben Tejada in the same game? Good night to be here. Beautiful night for baseball, too.

Finally

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I’m busy today, so in lieu of more content, enjoy this series of parody commercials from Mr. Show.

I’m pretty sure these came out in reaction to Hellman’s Dijonnaise, a product that combined mustard and mayonnaise in precisely the way demonstrated above, save the stripes. For a while, I’m pretty sure Dijonnaise was the only mustard you could get a Shea Stadium, which really sucked if you didn’t like mayonnaise.

Incidentally, Boar’s Head Pepperhouse Gourmaise is delicious, and should be excepted from any conversations making fun of mayonnaise/mustard hybrid products.

Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds

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I made bacon yesterday.

Not in any sort of figurative sense, either. I quite literally made bacon.

I don’t want to get too bogged down in the details because I basically followed this guy’s recipe, with a little help from this guy’s recipe, and so there’s already plenty of details online about how to cure and smoke bacon. It goes like this:

1) Acquire pork belly. This was by far the hardest part. I could only find one place in Westchester that had any — a Latin market in White Plains. I was hoping for a five-pound slab, but he only had a couple two-pound pieces left, but whatever, bacon is bacon, so I took ’em.

Then you rub salt and brown sugar on the pork belly:

Then you stick it in plastic bags in the fridge for a week to let it cure. The salt draws moisture out of the pork. Osmosis. This is exciting because it’s like a delicious science project.

After a week, you rinse the pork belly and smoke the pork belly for a few hours. I used hickory, because that’s the standard in bacon-smoking. A lot of people say, “oh, use applewood” because you hear “applewood-smoked bacon” a lot. But I’m pretty sure you only note “applewood-smoked bacon” because it sounds fancy when it comes from Wendy’s, and because noting that it’s applewood-smoked is distinguishing it from most bacon, which is hickory smoked. And since this is my first foray into smoking bacon, I figured I’d use old reliable hickory.

Three hours of low-heat smoking later, we have bacon. Sort of.

You know how bacon comes with the disclaimer that it’s only partially cooked? That’s the case here, as well. So it’s a little disappointing, because you can’t just rip into it right off the smoker and start eating delicious bacon. Also, that’s actual pigskin on the top there, so you’ve got to slice that off before you slice up the bacon for cooking.

And then, fear. Since I didn’t use saltpeter, the bacon doesn’t have its familiar pink color once I start slicing into it, and I grow concerned that I’ve just made straight-up hickory-smoked pork somehow. Which would still be cool, you know, but not bacon:

But I had no reason to worry. It’s bacon, alright. Shorter than most bacon, due to the size of the slab. And I burned it a little the first time cooking it — probably because, since I have no meat slicer, I had to slice it a bit thicker than regular store-bought bacon and it screwed with my bacon-cooking mojo — but it was still pretty obviously bacon:

As for the taste? Delicious, of course. It’s bacon. The best bacon I’ve ever had? No, probably not. But really good bacon regardless. Better than run-of-the-mill bacon, even (as if such a thing exists!).

It’s a bit salty even for bacon, and I think next time I’ll use a little more brown sugar to cut the salt more, or experiment with maple syrup. But no matter. What’s important is that I’ve moved from purely a consumer of bacon to a consumer and producer of bacon. I have lessened, by some tiny degree, the size of my bacon footprint.

According to this article, the average American, as of 2007, ate 17.9 pounds of bacon a year. That’s nuts. I initially figured I eat more bacon than the average American, but playing with rough estimates in my head, I really don’t think there’s any way I eat more than 1.5 pounds of bacon a month. And I really f@#$ing love bacon.

That means, especially when you factor in vegetarians and health-nuts and all the people who bring the average way down, there must be people who just eat bacon all the time. Like I mean really all the time. Like people who spend every waking hour eating bacon, driving up our national bacon-consumption rates. And bully for you, bacon eaters. I have nothing but respect for the choices you’ve made.

I will eat more than 1.5 pounds of bacon this month, I am certain, and so my efforts to cut into my bacon deficit will be mitigated by all this bacon I just made available to me.

But I will give some of this bacon away, too. For the first time in my life, I will give back to the world some tiny fraction of all the bacon I have taken from it.

Finally, I have joined the ranks of the baconmakers.

Best work day ever?

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Not really, but it’s close.

I’m heading to Citi Field today for the Mets’ second-annual “Taste of the Citi” event, during which they provide samples of all the food they will serve at Citi Field during the season.

It is spectacular.

The video segment we’re filming should be ready early next week sometime, at which point I’ll post it here. I’ve posted last year’s video below. Lawrence, the NYC Food Guy, is back with us for a second go-round. I’ll have a lot less hair this time.

Why are they sending me back to do a very similar video segment a second time? I don’t know, and I’m not asking questions. Free Shackburgers, that’s what I’m saying. And with no lines.


The legend of Mike Ryan

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The Mets were off today and I promised not to write about Alex Cora any more, so here’s a random story:

A grisly 1950 Long Island Rail Road crash cost Rockville Centre, N.Y. its best shot at a single transcendent local legend. The head-on collision, which killed 32 commuters, so spooked Sandy Koufax’s parents that they scooped up the young southpaw and moved him back to Brooklyn, rendering his four-year stint in the village little more than a footnote in the town’s history.

But the accident prompted the LIRR to elevate the rails in Rockville Centre, and ultimately led to the creation of a more fleeting local legend, nearly half a century later.

Mike Ryan didn’t go to my elementary school and he wasn’t in my grade — he was a class ahead of me. But I knew all about him, because every kid in the town did. In every schoolyard, hours were passed recounting tales of his athletic grandeur, like we were old men in a barber shop, only we were 12. It only makes sense if you saw the kid play.

By sixth grade, every kid in town had his own story about the time he got a hit off Mike Ryan. Braggarts said they lined a triple into the gap, or something similarly unlikely. Funny kids like me said they closed their eyes and stuck the bat out and looped a single over the shortstop’s head.

None of them were true. I’m almost certain that Mike Ryan never allowed a hit in his entire Little League pitching career. He may have walked a few batters or occasionally beaned some unfortunate soul, but there’s no way anyone ever made solid contact with his fastball.

And for a 12-year-old who couldn’t have been playing competitive sports for more than a few years, he certainly had a lot of Paul Bunyan myths around him.

I’m pretty sure the legends were perpetuated by the fact that half the kids didn’t even show up when they found out they were slated to face Mike Ryan’s team, for fear they might actually have to bat against him, or d him up in basketball.

One story held that he dunked in a CYO basketball game in sixth grade. Sounds crazy, I know. But we believed it.

The other centered on those tracks.

Rockville Centre has a few Little League fields, but the nicest — the showcase, where the annual Long Island regional finals were held — is Hickey Field, right off Sunrise Highway.

The now-elevated LIRR tracks run along a concrete trestle until just behind Hickey’s left field fence, where the trestle runs into a dirt hill that supports the tracks at the elevated level until they emerge again a few hundred yards down the road in Baldwin.

And though no one ever could provide a first-hand account, the greatest and most persistent Mike Ryan legend held that he put one over the train tracks at Hickey, a shot I’d estimate at easily, I don’t know, 320 feet? 330? Too far for a 12-year-old, for sure.

Ryan’s Achilles heel was that, in addition to being a great athlete, he was about the nicest guy in the world, plus girls thought he was beautiful. By the time high school rolled around, I guess he realized he found the comforts of women and weed a lot more fun than the pressures of being everyone’s local hero, and so never did much to make the most of his absurd talents.

They were still enough to land him a spot deep in the varsity basketball team’s rotation in his senior year, though. And once, late in a blowout, he got an open look on a breakaway and threw one down. The place erupted.

“He’s still got it!” someone yelled.

Later, when a few of my friends and I were back from college putting around for the summer, we went to Hickey Field to play home-run derby on the short fences there.

My buddies are a pretty strong lot, and the longest shots were hit up the hill near the tracks and just about to the tracks, but never quite over the tracks. So we joked about how we used to believe Mike Ryan actually hit one over the train tracks in Little League.

As we did, one of the town’s orange parks and recreation trucks pulled up. We assumed we were getting kicked off the field. My friends started collecting the baseballs as I started walking over to the pickup, planning to give the guy bluster about how we weren’t doing anything wrong.

The truck door opened and Mike Ryan got out, hair unkempt and eyes bloodshot, a bit tanner and thinner than we’d last seen him.

“Mind if I take a few cuts?”

For a local legend?

“Not at all.”

But it wasn’t a few cuts.

I swear this on my life: My buddy lobbed one in, and the very first pitch Ryan saw, he drilled over the tracks.

“Oh… sorry about your ball.”

Nice guy, like I said.

And as he ambled back into the truck, retiring forever into local lore, my buddy, from the mound, spoke up:

“He’s still got it!”