Category: Food

Circus Peanuts, Explained, Slightly

Tal forwarded me this Straight Dope column about circus peanuts. I do not like them. They are a disturbing texture and just plain taste bad.

Buried in the middle of the column is this:

“Over the years the best-selling item has been orange in color, banana in flavor, and peanut in shape.”

Banana flavor? I never would’ve identified it as that, being misled by the color and the shape. But now…yes, banana. I guess that’s what it is.

No wonder I dislike them. “Banana” is perhaps the worst of the artificial fruit flavors, with “lime” coming up not far behind.

Shoney’s or Bust

In a roundabout way, I just really amused myself and got a little trip down memory lane. Randomly, at the end of a post, Cook Eat Fret sent me to the following link:

Shoney‘s

Yeah, that Shoney’s. Now click the link. And once you’ve laughed, close the window. Otherwise the terrible music starts–complete with yokel-y whistling–and the pictures of the food start–and lord knows, you don’t want to scorch that onto your little eyeballs.

I’d laugh even harder, except: I kinda like Shoney’s. Or I used to, the last time I at there, which was probably at least half my lifetime ago (that’s 18 years, people–18 years! holy crapola).

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A Big Kiss in Lakewood, NJ

A few weekends ago, Peter and I went down to DelMarVa for crabs. On our way back, we took the slow way through New Jersey. We needed to stop for dinner, so we picked a town at random–Lakewood–where we’d stop.

Downtown Lakewood, it turns out, is entirely Mexican–except for the Hasidic owners of Gelbstein’s Furniture. I finally got an inkling of what it might feel like, as a non-Mexican American, to have your town demographics shift in just a decade.

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Apocalyptic Thinking

Last night at one of my freelance jobs, a woman I work with was musing on the current financial mess: “I figure, my family lived through the Depression. It wasn’t pretty–but they survived.”

Survival is key. But I worry that people today don’t have the same survival skills they did back in the 1930s. I mean, indoor plumbing was still pretty novel then. People still got blocks of ice delivered, in lieu of refrigerators.

We’ve gotten dangerously soft.

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Before, During, After

Our friend Katie had a significant birthday, which called for dinner. I haven’t been cooking much recently, at least not in a big way. It was very soothing to go through my cookbooks, make my lists, do all the mental tinkering, get the shopping done and get down to business.

First, though, the decks had to be cleared. Tragically, this meant the Spanish ham bone had to say good-bye. He’d been lingering in the freezer for more than a year, and much as I took satisfaction in having a little gauze-wrapped cloven hoof at eye level every time I went in to see if I had any more frozen bananas for smoothies…well, the time had come.

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The Last Bite

A few days ago I was enjoying my ad hoc lunch of fried egg, tomato chunks tossed around in hot butter and, in lieu of toast, big croutons fried up with some leftover pesto. I was reading the paper and not really paying a great deal of attention to what I was eating, except to occasionally pat myself on the back for essentially pulling a mighty fine lunch out of my ass (yummy as that sounds), and even think of putting it on a pretty plate.

But when I got near the end, the last four bites or so, I had to put down the paper and concentrate.

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