Bracket Busted? Not to worry. You can still get in on So Good’s Meat Madness tourney (which has been having a bit of a food blog feud of its own).
After yesterday’s lamb vs. ground beef nailbiter, today it’s on to the fowl region, where duck is working on an upset of #2 seed turkey.
Is there a more universal food product than the noodle? Are there any cuisines that don’t have some variation on this simple combination of a starch and a liquid?
I can’t imagine making anything that is as rewarding as fresh pasta. It simultaneously manages to be the easiest of items while also inviting a lifetime’s worth of practice, refinement and perfection.
This all came about on a recent weekend where I had more time on my hands for a meal than I thought. Although the plan was to make a dried pasta dish, the urge to roll out some fresh fettuccine quickly sent me searching for all that I would need: five eggs, three and a half cups of all purpose flour, my pasta roller and a copy of Molto Italiano…
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I’m not really much of a dessert person. By the time I have finished a meal I rarely have room for something sweet. I don’t bake, partly because I don’t like measuring out ingredients to precise quantities and I don’t have the patience. But at times, I do like to try my hand at something a little less taxing at the same time as producing something pretty tasty — I’m lazy like that.
A couple of months ago I was wasting away my work day by browsing my friends’ status messages on Facebook and I came across one of my friends who I went to school with in England, it read “KT is baking her famous £20 banoffee pie!”
OMG.
I was taken back to my favourite childhood dessert, banoffee pie. So amazing. So easy. But it can test your skill of making pastry, making caramel and keeping fruit from going a gooey brown colour.
Now, I know what you’re asking, what the hell is a banoffee pie?
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I can’t say I’ve had a chance to catch Showtime’s series The Tudors yet, but I can certainly get behind any show that advertises its season premiere with recipes for mulled wine and rosemary popovers. Somebody’s got our number! Plus, their sans-clothing subway ads are a welcome relief from snacklish.
The Tudors premieres this Sunday at 9pm – click on the banner to your right for premiere party food tips.
I don’t know if the rest of the country is as thickly blanketed in the newest Snickers marketing campaign as New York is, but I’ve been seeing these lame-o ads on every subway, taxi and billboard for the last month, and as a world-renowned expert in food punnery, I simply cannot stay silent any longer.
As loyal readers of Endless Simmer certainly know by now, your humble editors clearly enjoy a corny food pun now and again. But even the lowest form of humor has some standards.
There are good puns, which make you laugh out loud and applaud the punner’s cleverness. There are decent puns, which make you think a minute and then say, “Oh, I get it. Ha.” There are, of course, bad puns, which inevitably set off a chorus of hearty groans, but even these just have to be said sometimes.
And then there are Snickers puns:
Take night classes at chewniversity…Flash your snackstage pass…Get funky on the snaxophone…Take a field trip to the peanutarium…Go camping in the Snackorondacks.
I mean WTF? Not only are these not laugh-worthy, they’re not ha-worthy, and they’re not even groan-worthy! You just kind of look at them and go, “Oh. Why did I read that?”
Seriously, I am getting mad all over again just writing about this. The poor pun does not deserve to be abused like this! Someone got paid to come up with these phrases? They are so far from funny that they should never have been allowed to come out of a person’s mouth, much less written down and pasted all over town.
In fact, I’m so personally offended by the unfunny-ness of these ads, that I hereby declare a one-man boycott of Snickers bars, effective immediately. It might be difficult, but I believe I candy do it.
After a weekend of excess, I thought I’d finally check out a website my friend Anna sent me a bit ago. Here’s her initial email:
to: gansie, 80P
from: anna
subject: $$
So I was thrilled that our CC bill this month was 1/2 to a 1/3 less than previous months. Yah us!! Looking through the items they were mostly a lot of Harris Teeters, an El Rodeo, Parker & Otis, and you get the point. Them I’m at my desk today eating leftover pasta salad topped with chopped pork from Sunday when I hear this lady on WUNC talking about eating for $1 a day.
Now although that sounds tremendously impressive she also said her “normal” cost of eating is $80/month shopping at Whole Foods. I really need to read into her blog to see how she did that. I really have no interest in eating $1 worth of food per day. I also kind of want to see what she looks like.
— — —
So I checked out her site, Less Is Enough. I enjoyed her usage of Jiffy products, but I probably didn’t need to see photographic evidence of her receipts. Her restraint is pretty remarkable. She eats almost nothing. She keeps very little food at her house and shops basically daily to have just enough to eat for that day. It’s a vastly different relationship with food. I know I’d be miserable. I love my pantry. I love buying food. I love making food with eighteen different ingredients. So don’t worry kids, it’s nothing you’ll be seeing on ES. (I do love that fried egg in twice-baked potato, though.)
Pic: Less Is Enough
– Everyone loves “nuts.” EricW wants to make sure you all caught this follow-up. Not to be missed.
– In our first food blog feud, 48 percent of you say Scanwhich should stop whining. Britannia: Maybe “Scanwich” can take the left half of the sandwich and “Scanwiches” can take the right half. Problem solved.
– Keep those March Madness food analogies coming. JoeHoya: Dick Vitale = Bacos. He’s loud. He’s assertive. There’s something distinctly unnatural about him. He’s been around forever, and dammit, he’s EVERYWHERE. But he’s not for everyone – either you love him, in which case you think he makes every game-watching opportunity better, or you hate him, and his mere presence ruins the experience completely.
– Finally, wow am I glad I swallowed my pride and asked for your bad-egg-detecting techniques. ESers really came through on this one:
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