“There’s a lot of good roadkill that goes to waste currently. We’re just looking for something good for Montana so they can use the meat,” State Representative Steve Lavin (R-Kalispell) told the New York Daily News. The Montana House of Representatives passed the legislation 95-3, and the bill now heads to the kitchen State Senate.
Groundhogs (aka woodchucks, whistlepigs, and marmots) are insecto-vegetarians and confirmed locavores. If you plan to plant this spring, harvest those hairy beasts now. Celebrate Groundhog Day with critter cuisine.
Oh no! Despite reading Turkey Torching Tips for Guysyou have a great big, fully cooked, deep-fried Thanksgiving turkey on your hands. You examine it minutely and discover there’s no little red zip tab to open so you can take out slices. What now?
That’s some big old avian cadaver you got there, buddy. There’s only one manly way to divvy it up. That’s right: chainsaw.
The National Fire Protection Association claims “turkey fryers that use oil, as currently designed, are not suitable for acceptably safe use by even a well-informed and careful consumer.” Wimps! Thursday is Thanksgiving, when we give thanks for college football and a four-day weekend. That’s when Real American Men generate Code Orange air quality by incinerating poultry on the patio.
Any pantywaist can cook on those SUV-sized natural gas, propane, electric, or gelignite-powered barbecue grills with all those fancy features (good subwoofers can help spread sauce evenly, though). Nah, let’s get ready to deep-fry some turkey. Here’s how:
1. Put Fire Department on Speed-Dial. Keep your cell phone in your welding apron pocket. It is unwise to enter a flaming residence to use the telephone.
2. Purchase more equipment. You can never have enough Real Guy outdoor cooking gear. Buy some new stuff at Home Depot first. Forget about those electronic gizmos at Leading Edge, you can never read their LCD screens outdoors anyway. Williams-Sonoma? Isn’t that the California wine the wife likes?
3. Don’t forget the turkey. It should be big enough to bother messing with. Double-check to make sure you are not buying a goat or lamb.
4. Check interior compartment of poultry (note: light does not go on automatically; use your Maglite). Any paper-wrapped parcels inside do not contain Surprise Creme Filling. Remove; give to wife or cat. If the bird is frozen, use your Benz-0-Matic torch judiciously or the meat will be dry. At this point you may marinate the turkey in any fluid mixture as long as it contains beer.
Today is the 100th anniversary of TV chef Julia Child’s birth, and it’s like food fans have been whipped into a frothy frenzy by balloon whisks. They’ve served up a music video (above), a Google Doodle, restaurant celebrations, and events at the Smithsonian, where Julia’s kitchen is now installed. Bon appétit, et joyeux anniversaire Julia!
Hungry, but Domino’s is closed? Three words: Pizza vending machines. They’re coming.
“Let’s Pizza machines say they’re a cut above factory farmed pizzas. Here’s the fresh factor: After customers pay, they begin by selecting one of four kinds of pizza available. Inside, a machine mixes flour and water together and kneads it into dough, which is then rolled flat. After toppings are added, the pizza is cooked in an infrared oven and dispensed in a take-home box. Voila, your very own 10.5-inch pie in under three minutes.”
– “Pizza Vending Machines Coming to U.S.,” Nic Halverson, DiscoveryNews
“… the linear or helical hand motions commonly used by pizza chefs … for single tosses maximize energy efficiency and the dough’s airborne rotational speed; on the other hand, the semielliptical hand motions used for multiple tosses make it easier to maintain dough rotation at the maximum speed.”
“Rotating bouncing disks, tossing pizza dough, and the behavior of ultrasonic motors,” KC Liu, J. Friend, L. Yeo, Physical Review E: Statistical, Nonlinear, and Soft Matter Physics, in “The physics of tossing pizza dough,” Discover Magazine Discoblog
Image (“And God Created Pizza, after the Bible Moralisée, ca. 1250″) by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com
Comments are welcome if they are on-topic, substantive, concise, and not boring or obscene. Comments may be edited for clarity and length.
This weekend will fatten U.S. meat sales and heat up the economy. Citizens who do not eat meat grill veggies; religious Jews grill kosher meat. It might be said that burger burning, bargain-hunting Americans are celebrating the values our fallen heroes were defending, but only if gluttony and consumerism are mistaken for expressions of freedom.
Image by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com [Note: I imagined this outrageous grill a few years ago; now someone is selling it].
Comments are welcome if they are on-topic, substantive, concise, and not boring or obscene. Comments may be edited for clarity and length
Last night, the 5th of May, millions of people commemorated the Mexican victory at the Battle of Puebla (1862) with volleys of shots — of tequila — bravura barrages of beer, and murderous margaritas. Unsurprisingly, this morning finds heads held hostage and stomachs seared from nacho napalm. Today’s Spanish vocabulary lesson: crudomeans ” hangover.”
If you celebrated Cinco de Mayo with cerveza, celebrate Seis de Mayo this morning with el desayuno de los campeones, the Breakfast of Champions. The traditional Mexican hangover cure ismenudo – tripe soup or stew.
Some years ago, correspondent Mickey Weems PhD was improving his Spanish and Zapotec, conducting anthropological foodways fieldwork, and supplementing his meager adjunct faculty wages by working at a Chipotle Mexican Grill in Columbus, Ohio. He also cooked up a tasty Spanglish writing style:
“One domingo a couple of semanas passadas, Ashley and Papi Tigre made chilaquile, a dish made with corn chips cooked in salsa and served with huevos, pollo, sour cream and guacamole. The chilaquile was caliente but too good to pass up. I now understand the purpose of sour cream, arroz, and guac in the scheme of Mexican cuisine: they calm the fuego.”
New York Times “Minimalist” Mark Bittman, who gives a recipe for chilaquiles inHow to Cook Everything Vegetarian, once caused a food fascist furor by using the term “taco chips” in a Travel Section piece about Mexico City. Variations of this dish, with and without meat, are popular throughout North America, and monolingual Norteamericanos call it “Mexican lasagna,” “Tortilla Casserole,” and ”Frito Pie.”
Regional, seasonal, and personal variations abound; cooks whip up what they like with what they’ve got. The word chilaquiles may have achieved a metaphorical meaning in U.S. Spanglish reminiscent of the Yiddish trope using tzimmes, the Jewish casserole dish, to mean ”big deal” or “big production.”
So if somebody calls tostadas “taco chips,” don’t make a big tzimmes, carnales.
