Previewing Giants-Saints with John Fennelly
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Bold Flavors Snack of the Week
This was an inspired one, I think.
Inspired, I should say, by our man Catsmeat, who recommended something he made called a “doughboy” months ago, and by various recent discussions of savory pastries. But also inspired in the same way we say great performances are inspired, as if granted to the actors by some transcendent force that for some reason focuses its divine efforts on pleasing indie-film audiences and art critics.
Anyway, if I was the medium for inspiration in this case, the source was certainly a fridge full of leftovers combined with my wife’s insistence that I put some of them to use before they went bad. And they never went bad. They went well. So, so well.
Presenting: The Chili Doughboy:
Here’s how it went down:
1) Make chili. Serve with cheddar and monterey jack shredded cheese blend, sour cream, and tortilla chips. Enjoy chili with your wife’s family. Receive lots of compliments on chili, because the chili is delicious. Save remaining chili in tupperware in fridge. Also save remaining cheese, sour cream and chips.
2) Plan to make pizza. Buy small ball of pizza dough from local pizzeria. Scrap plans to make pizza. Something else came up.
3) A couple of days later, remove pizza dough from fridge and bring to room temperature. Using kitchen shears, cut pizza dough into quarters. Pre-heat oven to 400-degrees.
4) Stretch out one of the pieces of dough until it is roughly eight inches in diameter and lay it flat. You don’t want the dough to be NY-pizza-style thin.
5) Grab some of that shredded cheese — remember the cheese? — and spread it in the center of the dough, creating a little cheese-bed. I didn’t try it any other way, but I suspect this is important: You’re going to (SPOILER ALERT) put chili on top of the cheese, and I worry that if you put the chili right on top of the dough, the grease from the chili might seep through and jeopardize the structural integrity of the entire thing. The cheese is there to protect against that. It is also delicious cheese.
6) Put chili on top of the cheese. I used about two scoops, using a tablespoon. But not two measured tablespoons — I was just using a regular old tablespoon, like from my silverware drawer, and they were big heaping spoonfuls. Eyeball it. Use whatever you think looks like the right amount of chili for that amount of dough. This isn’t rocket science.
7) OPTIONAL: Crumble a couple of tortilla chips on top of the chili. I say “optional” here because I did it, but in truth it’s completely unnecessary. I was hoping I’d capture some of the magic of Taco Bell’s Crunchy Red Strips, but… well, more on that to follow.
8) Wrap that mother up. Brush with a little bit of olive oil, and dust with salt and chili powder. Repeat if you want more than one.
9) Bake at 400 degrees for 15 minutes, or until the top is lightly browned. You know what cooked things look like. Let cool — these things are hot. You might want to poke a hole in the top with the fork to let some of the steam escape.
10) Eat the Chili Doughboy. I mixed sour cream with sriracha to use as a dip, but it turned out the sriracha part was probably unnecessary. The chili itself was spicy enough that I really didn’t need any more heat. Just the sour cream would have been fine.
Turns out the Chili Doughboy is amazing. And despite all those steps, really easy to make — provided you already have leftover chili. It’s the bread-bowl approach to chili, without even the need for finding a worthy bread bowl (which is always way harder than it feels like it should be). Plus the pizza dough is fresh baked and piping hot, and just a touch sweet, which makes for a nice complement to a spicy chili.
The crumbled tortilla chips did nothing for this. They got lost in the mix with all the other flavors and textures, and I suspect they got sogged down by the chili in the cooking process and didn’t have the crunchifying effect I was hoping for. No matter. What I failed to consider was that the top part of the dough had a nice crust to it, which provided all the crunch this thing needed.
When I next make these — and I’m going to make them again, probably within the next few days because I still have some chili and some dough — I’m going to try making them a bit smaller, closer to appetizer-sized. I think I’m on to something here, you guys.
Recapping Jets-Bills with Brian Bassett
Zombie SABR
To figure it out, we grabbed a stopwatch and went through both seasons to find out what percentage of each had hot zombie action. We started the timer whenever a zombie scene started up, and kept it going until the scene either ended or it started getting distracted by intra-refugee squabbling. And it turns out we weren’t imagining a net loss of undeaddery: There have been fewer zombies this year. In total, the six-episode season one had roughly 47 minutes total of zombie action in 292 minutes of episode run time, which means that they accounted for 16 percent of the season. Meanwhile, this first half of season two (seven episodes) had 40.5 zombie minutes in 319 minutes of run time, which is 12.7 percent.
– Alexandra Martell, NYMag.com.
That is some good zombie SABR right there. I’d be interested in expanding that research, too — it felt like way more of the first season of The Walking Dead occurred under threat of imminent zombie attack, whereas most of the second season has happened at this stupid farm that is for some reason invisible to zombies and/or unbound by all the rules for keeping zombies at bay that were carefully laid out in the first season.
Most notably: Are the zombies no longer attracted to loud noises? Because though the (SPOILER ALERT) climactic zombie massacre at the end of the mid-season finale last night was pretty awesome, I was led to believe that much gunfire would draw the attention of every zombie in a 10-mile radius. But this season they’re going out in the woods taking target practice like it’s no big deal, even though we know there are zombies in those woods. What gives?
When you outline a zombie scenario, you set up your own list of rules: The Walking Dead’s zombies aren’t smart or fast, but they’re persistent, they can survive on non-human meat, and they’re attracted to the sounds and smells made by living people. Once that general set of rules no longer seems to apply, it sort of trivializes the whole thing and the show just becomes a silly soap opera about terrible actors who whisper really loudly.
Also, why don’t they get more crossbows? I guess it’s pointless now that the loud-noise thing doesn’t matter anymore, but for a while when it did matter, they only had one crossbow, and the crossbow-wielding dude was by far the most badass and valuable zombie-killer. They’re in the south; there’s got to be a sporting goods store around somewhere. You have to figure these people with the wherewithal to survive the zombie apocalypse can get their hands on another crossbow or at least a slingshot or something.
For obvious reasons you want to minimize your close-range hand-to-hand combat with infectious zombies. There are so many ways to do that besides just sort of hoping you can stab them or bludgeon them with something before you get desperate and shoot them.
Mostly, though, the show has gotten stupid in its second season because it has spent almost the entire time focusing on the characters and I could hardly care less about them.
Even when it became clear that the creators of Lost had no real plan and were grasping at nebulous mystical ideas, I still wanted good endings for most of the characters. If on the next episode of The Walking Dead, every single character besides Darryl and Glenn became a zombie, and the rest of the show was just Darryl and Glenn eluding zombies and sometimes killing them with crossbows, that’d be fine by me. And even Glenn seems like he might be getting lame.
Just a whole show about Darryl crossbowing zombies and eating squirrels would be better than seeing Andrea rebel against Dale’s misguided parental efforts to keep her away from the self-destructive Shane. T-Dog seems like he might be OK but he doesn’t get enough screentime anymore for us to know.
Lastly — and this is just a nitpick, I realize: When they’re talking about bad stuff that happened in the past, why do they only refer to the stuff that has happened on screen? Like, “Oh, those zombies killed Amy!” It’s the zombie apocalypse, bro. That dude in the CDC called it humanity’s extinction event. Pretty much everyone you ever knew and loved is dead or a zombie. Why do you keep harping on that girl who spent five minutes in a boat with Andrea in one episode of Season 1?
Point is, the show kind of sucks now. I’m going to keep watching, because I’m a sucker like that. But I’m going to do so begrudgingly, and just so I can keep saying how stupid it is. WHY IS THIS SHOW ABOUT ZOMBIES SO UNREALISTIC?
CFL banquet turns into old-man fight
In what ranks as one of the most bizarre episodes in the proud history of the Canadian Football League alumni luncheon, former Cal quarterback and head coach Joe Kapp, 73, got into a fight with old nemesis Angelo Mosca, 73, in Vancouver, British Columbia, on Friday.
The fight had it all: fisticuffs, a swinging cane and, of course, flowers.
– Mike Wolcott, S.F. Chronicle.
Apparently these fellows have had bad blood since a dirty hit in a Grey Cup game in 1963. Anyway, the video (embedded below) reveals this to be a pretty serious old-man fight.
My dad’s maternal grandfather was something of an old-man fighter himself, a Scottish soccer hooligan long before that Saturday Night Live sketch ever came out. My dad grew up near a model-train store called “Mulroney’s Trainland,” run by an old Irish guy named Mulroney.
One day, my dad told his mother that he was taking his younger brother down to Trainland. She told him she didn’t think that was such a good idea. “Your grandfather punched out Mulroney outside the bar Friday night,” she said.
Oh and another old-man fighting story: One time a distinguished architect told an architecture class I took about a physical altercation between extremely old-man Frank Lloyd Wright and much-younger Philip Johnson at some architecture conference in the 50s.
Apparently Wright walked in, spotted Johnson and said, “Little Philip Johnson, all grown up and building houses out of doors” — which is a serious architect burn. Johnson got all up in Frank Lloyd Wright’s grill, so Wright went to work on his legs with a cane.
Anyway, here’s that video:
Am I taking crazy pills?
All during the Jets-Bills’ game yesterday and now again around the Internet on Monday morning I keep reading about how Gang Green’s run game didn’t show up. Huh? I’m looking at the box score, and it says the Jets ran the ball 23 times for 138 yards — six yards per carry.
That’s far and away the Jets’ best single-game per-carry average on the season, which makes sense given the way their offensive line was manhandling the Bills’ defensive front. All game long Mark Sanchez, despite plenty of time to throw, is dangerously mixing aggressiveness with inaccuracy. And yet the Jets still pass the ball nearly twice as often as they run it.
So much for ground and pound, eh?
Whatever. They won the game. It shouldn’t have been nearly so exciting, though. And it’s frustrating because when the line’s playing as well as it did yesterday, in Shonn Greene and Joe McKnight you can start to see the vague suggestion of an awesome and very potent thunder-and-lightning type backfield platoon that could combine with the Jets’ defense to chew up game clock and win lots of football games.
Only then, just when you think it’s about to start happening, for some reason Sanchez is lined up in the shotgun with an empty backfield.
I know Brian Schottenheimer has become sort of a great Jets-fan bugaboo, and I’m participating. He’s far from the team’s only problem. Until the last drive, Sanchez played terribly yesterday. His touchdown-heavy statline bails him out, but it was not a good game.
What I’m thankful for
It’s Thanksgiving, as you probably know. And I am of course thankful for all the awesome things I should be thankful for: My friends and family, my job, the food I’m about to eat, shelter, indoor plumbing, football, etc.
But in addition to those staples, here are three things I’m thankful for this year:
Change I can believe in: Fans are understandably down on the Mets. They’re coming off their third straight losing season, their owners are mired in a very public financial mess, and they might be on the brink of losing to free agency one of the brightest stars the franchise has produced in decades. And that all sucks.
But it’s comforting to know — or to be able to believe, at least — that the Mets’ current front office seems both capable of and dedicated to making the best possible baseball decisions to turn the club into a regular winner. It’s going to take time, of course. And I understand if you don’t believe me — the current front office has been so hamstrung by the decisions of the last one that it hasn’t yet had a lot of flexibility to show what it will do with what should be a big-market payroll. That’s a discussion for another day, though.
Point is, I haven’t yet lost faith in Sandy Alderson and the SABRos, and for that I’m thankful. Maybe there’s some blinders-on optimism in play here, but that’s fine by me: It’s nice to enjoy a sunny outlook about your favorite team’s future for once, and I’ll seize this opportunity as long as I can. If and when they start making short-sighted, reactionary, terrible moves, I’ll lament them. For now, I’m going to celebrate that somewhere in the eye of the ferocious hellstorm of nonsense whirling around the team stand (or appear to stand) a couple of calm, reasonable dudes making shrewd decisions geared toward building a perennial contender.
Banh mi sandwiches: How great are banh mi sandwiches? I’ve had three since I moved back to the city. They’re not readily available in Westchester — or at least not that I could find. So I’ve set out on a quest to find a Hall of Fame-caliber banh mi, and I’m not going to stop until you read that glowing review here on this site.
There’s a combination of flavors and textures in the banh mi that’s not found in most sandwiches traditionally produced by Western cultures. It’s the exquisite product of cultural interchange: Southeast Asian flavors with delicious, crusty French bread, and you just know if you trace back the history there’s all sorts of unspeakable colonial awfulness involved (kind of like Thanksgiving, really) but if you’re staring at the sandwich you can overlook it all for a second and revel in the years-later byproduct of imperialism.
Whoa, that got heavy. I want to go back to talking about the sandwich: The taste of a good banh mi floats around your mouth like a spicy, vinegary butterfly. It’s eminently filling, but somehow refreshing — a big, delicious sandwich that leaves you feeling like maybe you ate something healthy for once. I think that’s the cilantro. We should brush our teeth with cilantro. I’m also thankful for cilantro in general.
Beavis and Butthead: This is kind of a two-part thankfulness item. I’m thankful that Beavis and Butthead are back on TV because Beavis and Butthead are hilarious. I don’t know if you’ve caught any of the new episodes, but I find myself laughing nearly as hard and as often as I did when they ran the first time, back when I shared an age and general mindset with the show’s heroes.
I guess the thing is that Beavis and Butthead are kind of timeless: A couple of lazy dudes who love explosions and rock and hot women and who enjoy making fun of stuff that sucks. I hear that. And the new version of the show does a really good job sending up the various reality-TV fare airing on MTV these days, which makes sense: How could Beavis and Butthead watch music videos all day today if music videos almost never air anymore? Today’s version of the characters would be (and are) watching Jersey Shore, making fun of it as almost everyone who watches Jersey Shore does.
And that the show has remained funny upon its return gives me hope for the forthcoming fourth season of Arrested Development, which was announced last week. Since the first three-season run of that show was as close to perfect as anything I’ve ever seen on television, I’ve been a little nervous that the long-rumored movie or this newly announced fourth season could sully (in my opinion, at least) the show’s legacy. But if Mike Judge could pull off what appears to be a successful return, maybe Mitch Hurwitz and the folks responsible for Arrested Development will too.
Previewing Jets-Bills with Brian Bassett
Some Sanchez talk, some turducken talk.
Sandwiches as art
With Scanwiches I wanted to celebrate the remarkable qualities of one of my favorite foods, sandwiches. They’re these beautiful and personal objects that are easily forgotten or ignored. They have these architectural qualities, they’re constructed, not just made, that’s cool to me and I wanted to expose their intricacies.
I also love that they hold so many stories. Everybody eats food, and a lot of people eat sandwiches and for every sandwich there is some story.
Sandwiches like the hamburger tell us about the shaping of a nation. Individual sandwiches can jog a long-forgotten childhood memory like the smell of 3rd grade or that time we puked in the cafeteria in kindergarten. Deeply personal and important stories hide between those layers of bread.
– Jon Chonko.
This, so hard. The Scanwiches exhibit at JS55 just catapulted to the top of my list of things to see in New York in the coming weeks. I’ll certainly report back.
Via dpecs.
Matt Kemp badass
I’m going to go 50-50 next year. I’m telling you, y’all created a monster. I’m about to get back in the weight room super tough so I can be as strong as I was last year. … Forty-forty is tough, so 50-50 will be even tougher, but anything can happen. I have to set my limits high so I can try to get to them as much as I can. I’m going to try for 50-50, which has never been done. I’m serious. If I don’t [get there], it means I let y’all down and lied to you, and I don’t like being a liar. I know y’all are over there thinking I’m crazy, but hey, I’m trying to take it to another level.
– Matt Kemp.
Awesome. I’m not sure I’ve mentioned it in this space, but Kemp’s one of my favorite players in the league. I was pretty disappointed to hear about his contract extension because it dashed my dreams of the Mets’ signing him next offseason, even if I knew how unlikely that was to begin with. The absurd terms of the deal made it a little more palatable, but still. Man is Matt Kemp sweet.
Via Big League Stew.
Tedquarters 