Eat at Joe's!

Super Bowl Food

Here at Eat at Joe's!, we try to keep the focus on food.  But you never know where that'll lead us.  For instance, no less an authority than the USDA, in an article on food safety, says Super Bowl Sunday is "the second highest day of food consumption in the United States after Thanksgiving."

It's probably true.  I remember once working a cold dark night during a trainee stint at the Northgate Abattoir (I flunked out, BTW).  I was walking home to my downtown Durham garret when I noticed something odd.  It took me a minute to figure it out, but almost every house had something going on in the living room.  The telltale flickering TV light finally led me to understanding.  Everyone was watching the Super Bowl.  Everyone.  I felt witness to a nationwide cultural phenomenon, one where I could have walked up to any random house, knocked, and gotten a quizzical look until I asked, "Sorry to bother y'all, but what's the score?"  And that question would have made it all right. 

Well, maybe not, but the evening stuck with me.  So I shouldn't have been surprised by the Super Bowl food consumption datum, but I was.  I've even been to Super Bowl parties where I've been told "oh, we just want to watch the commercials."  It's a freaking de facto U.S. holiday, a nationwide equivalent of the ACC men's basketball tournament.  But still... 2nd?  Maybe 3rd, depending on how you parse the sentence?  Bigger than Christmas?  WTF? 

But... I have a resource.  I have my Gentle Readers.  Perhaps you can help me puzzle this out.  Do you have people over for Super Bowl Sunday?  Do you cook a bunch of food?  Do you go out?  What do you, food-wise? 

Inquiring Joes would like to know.  ;)

Edit: I've put a poll in the sidebar.  It's also going on the polls page. 

Caesar, Bloody Caesar

To the left: a Caesar, also known as a "Bloody Caesar" (recipe).  It's a lot like a Bloody Mary, to be up-front about it.  If you're hardcore, you can use clams or your own clam juice.  Otherwise you'll need to buy some Clamato or equivalent. You'll also need some vodka.  Worcestershire sauce is nice, and you can spice the drink up as much as you want with added horseradish, hot sauce, or the like.  The glass is traditionally rimmed by wiping it with the lime and dipping in celery salt.  I used my much less expensive celery seeds and my own salt.  You can also adjust the acidity of the drink with additional lime or lemon juice. 

Garnish:  I wish I could figure out some way to garnish this thing with capers, because I think that would taste really good.  But if you don't feel like garnishing with the depicted celery or lime, use some olives (boring, but I like olives, and people often have those hidden away somewhere), a shrimp or three (oooh, fancy!), or perhaps some bacon.  :)

If you have a designated driver, click the pic for a super-sized drink.  The picture would have looked better had I not taken a sip first though. 

Edit: Read an explanation of why the Caesar is the "National Drink of Canada," along with why non-Hispanics in the U.S. don't drink Clamato (may take a bit to load). 

(Apologies to U2 for the title.  And thanks, ak!)

It's Bacon!

OK, so maybe there is enough, um, material out there for the pork barrel:  Ladylinoleum of Monster Crochet made this fashionable bacon stole by crocheting at least 10 different colors of yarn into one piece of warm, bacon-y goodness.  She gives more information about how she did it on her post. 

If you wear this out, I suggest dabbing a tiny bit of Eau de Liquid Smoke on your wrists and neck.  :)

(Via Phil, via Pencil Roving.) 

I See They Haven't Deep-Fried It Yet

While I haven't made this yet, it's exactly the kind of crazy crap I'd try:

Take Bacon.  Add Sausage.  Blog.

Yeah, I'm a little jealous.  OTOH, I think no one, including even me, has attempted the glory of SausHamOn© yet.  :)  Keep me posted.  ;)

Direct link: the Bacon Explosion.

(BTW, I should really put this on the pork barrel.  But while I've stopped posting there, I really haven't had the heart to pull the plug there yet either.  And thanks to DJEJ for sending me the link: you folks still rock, even while I'm a posting $u×0r.)

It's Nuts II

FDA: Peanut processor found salmonella, shipped anyway

BTW, the (PDF) recall list is up to 29 pages.

Gee, I Thought Mercury Was Nutritious (Not)

I assume some of you have seen these dumb-a$$ commercials:

(Thanks to MZ for the video.)

Well, here's one rebuttal:

Studies find mercury in much U.S. corn syrup

One of my favorite things from the Reuters article: Big Phood attacked the research as "outdated."  So how long was Big Phood aware they were feeding us mercury before they fixed the problem, and why didn't they say anything at the time? 

Is That a Declarative Statement or a Command Form?

see more pwn and owned pictures

Edit: BTW, "Sask Pork" is apparently the Saskatchewan Pork Development Board.

It's Nuts

For those of you interested in the current (January 2009) recall of peanut products... well, it's tough, according to the NYT:

List of Tainted Peanut Butter Items Points to Complexity of Food Production

Um, yeah.  It's tough.

The good news:  You should currently be able to walk into a grocery store and buy a jar of peanut butter without worry: "The current recall does not include jars of peanut butter sold to consumers" is how the Houston Chronicle puts it.  The recall is just for products containing ingredients from the Peanut Corporation of America, which makes products for the food industry and institutional users.  By the way, PCA's WWW site is pretty much impenetrable past the front page at the moment.  But you can browse the archive for it at the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.  Click on a date and go.

The bad news:  Either look directly at the dauntingly long (over 100 items, not counting the non-consumer-oriented ones) list of products currently shown as recalled by the FDA (PDF alert, 9 pages currently) or search or browse it through their interface.  You can also read the FDA's separate information page on the incident.  There's a lot of stuff, from cookies and candy (OK, makes sense) to a lot of pre-packaged foods (um...) to ice cream, nutrition bars, and pet food (WTF?).  In other words, there's a lot of peanut butter out there.  Any one product put in front of you might make you think "OK, that makes sense," but the entirety of it is a lot.  I suggest looking at the PDF above and going down the first few columns until you see something that you recognize.

Action and Secrecy in China

Death sentences given in Chinese milk scandal

On the one hand, I'm glad that China seems to be taking adulteration of the food supply seriously.  On the other....  With the trials (like other things in China) being hidden so much from view, it's hard to get a real sense of what's going on.  Were the executed actually at fault?  What else was going on? 

I guess the real bar to be crossed is for the adulteration to stop.  With as much of that as has happened, and as opaque as Chinese society seems to be (at least to me), it's going to be hard for me to feel any trust for a while.  

The Presidential Sweet

Here at Eat at Joe's!, we're all about the inauguration.  So that's why we're bringing you: 

Cake Wrecks: The Presidential Sweet

Crap

You know what happens when your computer dies and it takes a while to get caught up?  Well, stuff like this happens and you totally miss it. 

Damn. 

Sorry, guys. 

What We Really Eat

I guess I should start posting again sometime, right?  Right. 

---

I think a lot of what I post about food, and maybe what others post about food too, is sanitized.  When you stop by that fast food place again or come home and heat up some leftovers, in some sense that isn't worthy of mention, right?   Or do you all just eat lovingly home-cooked meals and expensive dinners at the finest restaurants?  I know that's exactly what I'm like.  ;)  Or at least want to be.  

On the other hand, in terms of blogging, I remember a cartoon from Life in Hell where Binky was writing diary entries that looked like "Went to work.  Came home.  Ate microwaved burrito.  Wrote in journal."  Uh... no.  Bo-ring.  

So, what do we really eat, and what do we blog? 

---

Last night, I'd been invited to eat out at a chain Mexican place.  A little before I started to get ready, I found out the dinner had been called off, leaving me with a taste for something I didn't have the foodstuffs for. So....

I sauteed an onion, and started a cheese sauce on another burner.  The cheese sauce got the last of some cheddar, some swiss, and a couple slices of american I had lying around.  The sauce partially broke for some reason, or maybe it was just that these cheeses I've never had any problem adding to sauces like that suddenly decided not to melt into this sauce properly.  

When the onion was translucent, I threw in a pound of frozen ground beef from Brinkley Farms (man, that stuff is nice and beefy tasting -- much more so than when I buy typical grocery store ground beef).   When the beef was browned off and combined thoroughly with the onions, I dumped it in the cheese sauce, and added salt, a little Texas Pete, and maybe some pepper.  

Then I got out a bag of tortilla chips and some jarred salsa.  Voila: dinner.  

Result: really filling and satisfying in a coarse kind of way.  Still took me well over a half-hour to make (partly because the ground beef was frozen).  But it turned out that the cheese sauce texture problem really didn't matter when I tossed in all that other stuff.  

---

I think my motivation here is that I want to post some about things I regularly eat when I don't have time or energy to cook more complicated meals.  (Not that I've ever made the above meat 'n' cheez glop before, but whatever.)  

As usual, we'll see what happens.  :)

Feed Restored

Syndication / RSS / Atom / web feed / whatever you want to call it is restored.  Sorry about the problem. 

"Save the liver!"

I can't imagine anyone reading this blog hasn't seen this before, but... well, I got a laugh out of it yet again:

Edit: The transcript. 

I Knew That DPAC Would Come In Handy

Anthony Bourdain will be at the Durham Performing Arts Center on Thursday, 19 February.  Win tickets from the N&O, and go for free.   Otherwise it's $41. 

More Filler

I recently saw some pictures of other folks' cookbook collections.  So...why the hell not. (Click to try to read spines in teenie-weenie eyestrain-o-vision.)

Local Beer News

Sean Wilson makes it into the N&O. 

Insert Food Here

Those of you not familiar with the local blog (insert title here) might want to start reading it: the blogger recently got back from a trip to Vietnam, and has been blogging about his food experiences there. 

Enjoy. 

Christmas Presents!

Someone knows the way to Joe's heart:

It'll get better

I know my fans must be pissed at the low posting volume these days, but I'm both ill and trying to move.  It's yucky.  Wish me luck.