Have you guys heard about twitter? It’s this really underground, cutting edge mode of communication. It’s possible you’ve seen it covered in a newspaper article or two. Or ten million.
All hype aside, ES is on Twitter and you should be too. Click here to follow us.
Oh, and we’re also on Facebook, in case you’re still living in the stone age.
I’m not a complicated man. I’ve discussed many of my food weaknesses here on the site. For the most part, they’ve been very specific…a particular dish from a particular restaurant or a traditional recipe made in an exact way. But there is a more generic food item that gets me salivating like Pavlov’s Pup as soon as I hear the words.
Buffalo wings.
Dangle the possibility of deep fried chicken wings tossed in hot sauce (side of blue cheese dressing, please), and I’ll pretty much travel to the ends of the earth. Funny…the one place I don’t travel is the owl-mascotted restaurant chain that’s located less than a mile from my house, because Mrs. TVFF doesn’t look kindly on that establishment. Anywhere else buffalo wings appear is a place I’m going.
So when my Twitter reader started BINGing with a tweet from the local bar McGillin’s Olde Ale House — plenty of atmosphere, good food and great local microbrews — mentioning a special offer of $.25 wings, I knew what I’d be doing that evening. McGillin’s may be the oldest continuously operating tavern in Philly (since 1860), but they’re au courant with a Twitter account. Wings, twitter – you got my number, McGillin’s.
OK, enough e-drool. On to the smörg…
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As much as I’m like *oooomigawd I LOVE the farmers’ market* or whatever, and I totally do love it, it sometimes overwhelms my judgment.
I love it too much. It’s like a freaking social for me. I’ve become BFF with one of the vendors, Jaci, who always makes fun of her farmer family and talks shit about picking vegetables. She’d never been more grateful than when she found out she was allergic to bees and therefore couldn’t harvest the crops with her uncle and grandfather.
And then there’s the market director, Rebbie. She’s tall and beautiful and may or may not have magenta hair on any given Saturday. Plus she’s nice as shit.
I also run into my neighbors and now fellow ES bloggers, Maids and Bliz.
There’s Mike, who I met when I interviewed him about his group DC Homebrewers, who has since quit his job to work full time for Tree and Leaf Farms. He now bags my ever changing order of greens (it was a mix of kale this week) and I’m not so secretly jealous that he’s out composting during the day while I’m staring at a computer screen.
Anyway, I’m so distracted by my market friends, and of course all of the food, that I always over buy. In my fridge right now I have too many herbs and veggies to deal with: asparagus, kale, squash, shelled peas (holy crap all you do is pull this little cord and open up the shell and then eat the peas like candy—so delish), and then there’s this other purple thing that starts with a “K” but I can’t remember the name of it. I will thank Jaci for that impulse buy. And then there’s sage, garlic chives and garlic scapes. Good christ.
Now this is not a bad thing, of course. I just need to find new and exciting ways to digest all of these veggies, especially on nights that I don’t feel like full-out cooking.
Jessica Seinfeld-esque sneak attack post jump.
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When life gives you lemons, you make…oh, but that’d be telling, now. You’ll have to wait!
You know we love our Top 10 lists here at Endless Simmer. So today we’re spreading the love around the web and shouting out the funniest food stories we’ve ever seen presented in list format: the very meta Top 10 Top 10 Food Lists:
10. Top 10 Songs With Sexually Suggestive Food Metaphors: From Tom Waits’ strawberry sundae surprise to MC Lyte’s hot peas and butter, the Frisky brings us the dirrrrtiest food songs of all time. Wait, I seriously thought that “peaches” song was just about peaches.
9. Top 10 Creepiest Fast Food Mascots: Remember that nasty Quizno’s rat/hamster thing? Seriously, what marketing exec OK’d that? And did you know Ronald McDonald used to be even weirder than he is now? Fanpop’s list will keep you up at night.
8. Top 10 Food and Drink Hacks: Lifehacker gets all Macgyver on your kitchen cabinet, with tips on how to build a fire from chocolate and Coke, freeze perfectly clear ice cubes, and open a beer bottle with one sheet of paper (seriously!)
7. Top 10 Sightings of Religious Figures in Food: That Virgin Mary is one hungry broad! Girl be showing up everywhere from grilled cheese to Cadbury’s. This list has her and her boy tracked.
6. Top 10 Uniquely ’80s Foods: Oh, hit me up with some Capri-Sun and California Raisins! Serious Eats has this nosh-talgic list, although I don’t know how they forgot Ecto Cooler.
Editor’s Note: LC has one heck of a project going on. She’s pledged to archive her family’s’ recipes, chicken scratched notes and all. And although she sent this post to me acknowledging, “I have been delinquent on many things, not least of which is my recipe project,” I know she secretly loves uncovering the depths of her ancestral cabinet. Here’s a continuation of LC’s family cookbook. And here’s her first entry into ES chronicling. Now enjoy round two. And ps, her mom is a trained chef – pay attention to the appendix.
I just watched Ratatouille and at one point the cold, cynical, snobby food critic is transported back to his childhood upon tasting the dish ratatouille. You can see his presumptuousness and pomposity fall away as he takes a bite of his childhood.
The dish I’m presenting you today, Chicken Almondzini, is not that kind of a dish. There’s no transcending. No passionate memory floods upon first taste. But it is quite delicious nonetheless.
Per my grandmother’s main criteria for dishes needing to feed armies, Chicken Almondzini will feed a lot of people. When my mom and I recreated it we didn’t plop it in a casserole dish—which would have made it more “home cooking-y”—for fear it would have also been dry as toast.
Our creation is in recipe form, which I know is contrary to ES philosophy, but feel free to make it to your taste. If you want to make it to my mom’s taste however, her exacting standards can be met by adhering to the following:
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Bobby Flay and the finalists of The Next Food Network Star.
At Toastmasters, they teach you not to start a speech without an opening joke, so:
Q: What do you get when you spell “Bobby Flay” backwards?
A: Tyler Florence.
Get it? Of course you do.
Like a lot of people, I have a love/hate relationship with Food Network. I adore the brainy didacticism of Good Eats, the goofy travelogue of Diners, Drive-Ins, & Dives, and the stoner vibe of Ace Of Cakes. On the other hand, five fingers: I cringe at the encroaching blight of cooking competition shows, wonder why so many people tune in to Food Network Challenge just to watch a cake fall over, and if I have to sit through one more factory tour on Unwrapped, I’m gonna hurt somebody.
This week, Endless Simmer was invited to sit in on a conference call with Bobby Flay; New York native, television chef, and host of the fifth season of The Next Food Network Star. A lot of people have a love/hate relationship with Flay. They admire his passion for cooking, drool over his baby-fat good looks, but still hoot when he loses on Throwdown. Like it or not, Flay has become, along with several other single-name chefs, the new face of a post-Emeril Food Network.
Fortunately, we were able to eke out a little insight into the man’s mindset towards his profession and what the world thinks of him:
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