Rants & Raves -

by snebbu

Burns My Bacon: Whipped Cream at Mickey D's

Public Service Announcement: The Shamrock Shake is back!

While other stores stock up on Easter Candy and the new summer line, McDonald”s is proactively celebrating a true holiday: St. Patty”s Day. Other than Irish Car Bombs, there is nothing better than a Shamrock Shake on a not-so-near-Spring day. Just one thing:make sure you tell them you don”t want whipped cream on it. Or the damn cherry…

Sure, I like whipped cream, but not when it replaces one fourth of the shake! Oh yeah, and they put a cherry on top. If I wanted a sundae, I”d order a sundae (somewhere else). But guess what? I want a mint shake with green food coloring in it, Det er SkillOnNet som leverer spillene til EU casino online , en aktor som er anerkjent for nedlastbare casino online er. and I want it filled to the top, damnit. Only for less than one month a year do I get to drink green, minty, creamy, fatty goodness. I don”t want whipped cream to clog up my red and yellow striped straw—that narrow tunnel is reserved only for my shake.

I know, I know, this is not something new. I got screwed over last year. So this year, I got smart and told them, “no whip, asshole.” What did I get? Three-fourths of a cup of a Shamrock Shake (that will teach you for trying to be fancy with your clear plastic cup, “McCafe.”) I went via the drive-through and didn”t notice the damage done until it was too late. Don”t let this happen to you. Check it before you take your first big SUCK through the straw. We deserve better. My Irish car bomb better be f”ing awesome this year…

by cyborg

Non-Crappy Museum Food: It Exists!

This pretty much sums up the way I feel about Ceviche:

– Knock Knock

– “Who’s there?”

– “Ceviche”

– “WHY are you still wearing pants?!”

I did a lot of ES reading before I gathered up the courage to confess my love to it, and my mild obsession lead me to learn that a couple of ES peeps reside in DC and I’m guessing a good amount of readers too. It just so happens that in an attempt to find employment as a recent graduate, I went to DC a few weeks back in a quest for a job. However, what I found was even better; one hell of a ceviche.

A friend encouraged me to go to the National Museum of the American Indian, both for the rad exhibits and the food and OH LORD am I glad I went! The collections were impressive but I’m not going to lie—I spent the majority of the time drooling over the food at the cafeteria (does that make me a terrible person?)

in Fish / Food Travel / Rants & Raves 1 comments

by Emily

ReviewerCard: Douchiest Blog Trend Ever?

Sometimes I’m embarrassed to tell people I am a food blogger.

Weird, right? I mean, clearly there’s no inherent shame in it. I love to write, I love social media, and I absolutely love cooking, developing recipes, and going out to eat. It’s natural that these interests would drive me to share my culinary experiences on the Internet. I’ve been lucky to be incorporated into Endless Simmer—the writers here are personable, hilarious, and truthful (to the point of offending people with our various opinionated stances and language, which I think is funny). What we are not is unethical, entitled or pretentious. I will just as happily proclaim my love for Taco Bell as I will for rare farmers market produce. We’re not too cool for anything here and we love to make fun of ourselves.

If I receive a product to review, I mention in my post that I received it to review. If I go to a new restaurant I plan on writing about, I do NOT heavy-handedly announce to my server that “I’M A FOOD BLOGGER” and make a big deal of setting up my laptop and camera while whining about wanting perfect service and free dessert and better lighting so I can take a million artsy photos of my glass of wine. I pay for everything and I don’t try to namedrop my blog to every staff member within earshot. Let’s keep it real: writing about novelty hot dogs on the internet should not be cause for restaurants to grovel at my feet.

Not everyone shares my sentiment, though. While there are plenty of wonderful food writers and reviewers on the internet, as you know there’s also a disturbing amount of self-important buffoons. These days, every hack with a free Yelp account thinks they’re the next Ruth Reichl, when in truth they are anything but. Which is why I hate, hate, HATE the idea of this ridiculous ReviewerCard.

Here’s the backstory behind the creator of this completely superfluous new “membership card and community”:

in Rants & Raves 4 comments

by unsightly

Tricks of the Trade: Vanilla Bean Powdered Sugar

My favorite vanilla to use when baking is from Penzeys. On top of having the best flavor of any vanilla I’ve used, I get the added bonus of an actual vanilla bean in the bottle. When the bottle runs out, I take the bean out and let it dry on parchment paper. I then pulse it with granulated sugar to make vanilla bean powdered sugar. The pods themselves have a ton of vanilla flavor, and there are still a good amount of vanilla seeds in the pods as well, creating a heavily vanilla-scented sugar, perfect for dusting on your french toast or adding to buttercream frosting.

You can also blend in coffee beans, lemon or orange zest, a pinch of cinnamon, etc. to add an extra layer of flavor to the sugar.

in Rants & Raves 0 comments

by BS

Burns My Bacon: What the Frisee?

Am I the only one who thinks there is no worse food crime than being served a salad—or worse, a piece of meat—and having it arrive topped with mounds of frisee? What is the deal with this stuff? It tastes like shoving a handful of dried-out grass into your mouth, yet somehow it keeps showing up on more and more menus. And instead of hiding it underneath something tasty, chefs seem to want to build piles and piles of it on top of a dish, as if we might enjoy digging through this crap to get to the real food.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m no salad-hater, but as far as I’m concerned, this blander-than-bland weed makes iceberg look like hen-of-the-woods.

Are you with me?

(Photo: Stu Spivack)

in Rants & Raves / Veggie 4 comments

by BS

Burns My Bacon: Anarchy for the Elite

New rule: You can’t put “anarchy” in the name of your food product…

in Bacon / Rants & Raves 2 comments

by Katt Kasper

Hungry for More

I’ve got some good news and some bad news. First, the good news; according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), in the highly coveted world competition among developed countries to see which nation is the most obese, the world-class leader is once again (drum roll please),….the United States of America! Our entire country is 30.6 percent obese, which just crushes second place Mexico, trailing us at a paltry 24.2 percent. Mexico is 4 to 5 percent fatter than they were last year and they still couldn’t keep up with us! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!

Now for the bad news; even though there are 1.6 billion overweight and obese people in the entire world, we’re only number one in obese individuals–not overweight ones. There is a difference between overweight and obese. To be overweight you must have a Body Mass Index over 25. To be considered obese your BMI has to be over 30 and morbid obesity is over 40. The rest of the world can’t match our BMIs over 30 and 40, but when it comes to the over 25 BMI group–the merely ‘overweight’–we come in a pathetic ninth place.

I know. It’s a hard pill to swallow. Even if you wrap it in bacon and pour sugar on it. Only 74.1 percent of our nation is overweight compared to 94.5 percent of the country of Nauru, which is the world’s smallest island nation with a population under 100,000. Man, they smoked us! How can their Mango Papaya Sherbet and Coconut Crusted Fish compete with our Krispy Kremes and Quarter Pounders?

in Rants & Raves / Trends 0 comments