Recent IKEA meatball news hit me hard. I’ve been a fan since the first time I’ve tried them years ago. And even though I stopped buying IKEA meatballs when my kid decided to stop eating pork, it’s still pretty sad. Not that I care about eating horse meat, I am sure I unknowingly ate it more than once during my lifetime. If anything, this proves my long-held belief that we get too much information about the food we eat, with all the ingredient lists and nutrition tables. What we don’t know doesn’t hurt us.
This caricature is by Sergei Yelkin – a Russian cartoonist whose blog I’ve been following for years. I just translated the labels to share with the English-speaking audience. If you would like to see the original Russian version, please click here.
This set of ads is about home appliances and electronics from the time when TV’s had legs but no colors, cameras used film and keyboards connected to paper.
When my Mom asked me what I am doing on Saturday night and I replied that I was baking pumpkin rolls, she thought it was a sad way to spend a night off. In reality, baking with real pumpkin is lot like having sex: there is a lot of foreplay and then there is an intense but short-lived moment of pleasure, followed by desire to do it again and a feeling of being too worn out to start over. As a matter of fact, I feel completely beat and sleepy after wrestling with this for nearly 3 hours, my kitchen is a mess and if I had a cigarette I would’ve lit it up just about now.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMdMDW_C_nk
I think the second most vicious food crime against the American people after the invention of the sliced bread was the proliferation of canned pumpkin. Nearly every American family buys one or more pumpkins every year, pokes some holes in them and leaves them out to rot on the front porch, just to turn around and go to the grocery store to procure baby-stool-like substance, both in color and consistency, to use in various disgusting recipes. The sad thing is that this stuff really doesn’t taste like pumpkin but since no one knows what the real pumpkin tastes like, everyone identifies it as a pumpkin taste. Well, it’s not. Pumpkin is normally bright orange and sweet-tasting, not medium brown and spiced. Some information on edible pumpkins can be found here and here.
Some notes on the pumpkin handling: it’s not easy. You have to have a decent knife and be careful not to hurt yourself. Don’t pour blood all over your keyboard typing me an angry letter, because I warned you. After trying to separate the flesh from the skin cantaloupe-style I had much better luck turning it over and just peeling the skin off. I also found out that shredding the pumpkin with a grater is a long and tedious process much better handled by a food processor. Other than that you don’t have any excuse to trade a sweet pumpkin orgasm for a can of brown crap.
For this recipe you’ll need:
5 egg yolks;
1 3/4 sticks of margarine or butter;
1.5 cups of sugar;
5 tbsp of non-fragrant oil i.e. – corn oil;
1 8oz package of sour cream;
1 tsp vanilla;
1/2 tsp of baking soda and some vinegar;
5+ cups of all-purpose flour;
pinch of salt;
1 average pie pumpkin shredded and a little bit of sugar to sweeten;
Melt the margarine and combine with egg yolks, sour cream, vanilla, sugar and oil. Over the flour place 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda in a larger spoon and pour a small amount of vinegar so it reacts. Make sure that all of the soda is gone in the reaction and combine the flour with liquid mixture. Add salt. Start lightly kneading the dough adding flour as needed until the oily sheen is gone and the dough springs back if you push it with the finger. Cut into six parts. Roll out each part into elliptical shape, add sweetened pumpkin and roll over several times. When adding pumpkin, squeeze it lightly to leave most of the juice out. Bake at 350F for 30-50 minutes until golden brown.
*Note: this is what I wrote down when my Mom gave me the recipe. Since it didn’t come out the way I expected, I took a roll to her for troubleshooting. Apparently I was kneading too hard and didn’t add enough flour. As you can see, my dough was still shiny but I was afraid I used too much flour and lost patience. My Mom confirmed that the recipe was correct and in my defense it tastes great, just slightly heavier than I expected since it didn’t roll out thin enough. Try at your own risk. I am pretty sure that my Mom doesn’t own measuring spoons or cups, so I was using regular drinking cups and table spoons for this recipe.
The important thing is that the great pumpkin taste I remembered from my childhood was there and that’s what I wanted to achieve in the first place.
If you are feeling lonely on a Saturday night, get yourself a pumpkin, it will wear you out but you will feel good about it in the morning.
It may be hard to believe but on a rare occasion I make myself feel like a rich man and spend more than five dollars on a lunch. So this post is written by the “big spender” me, not the “normal” me who usually pays for drinks with a pocketful of nickels and dimes. Today’s lunch tab at the new Farmhouse restaurant was $12.02 – definitely pushing the limits of my generosity, but that was the price to pay for a lunch with the prominent local blogger and beer consultant to the stars – Bull.E.Vard who is not accustomed to my usual cheap eats.
The Farmhouse Restaurant is located in the former Delaware Cafe space in the City Market area.
It’s a great location with a roomy outdoor seating area, where we had no problem finding a table. Inside the restaurant decor features exposed brick and various farm touches, like tables made out of an old door, lanterns and waitresses in cowboy boots. Before the restaurant opened for business there was a buzz among the annoying “foodie” community about the new local farm-to-table trend in the restaurant business and other such nonsense. All of this does nothing for me, except maybe waitresses in cowboy boots; the one who was serving our table was the highlight of the hour, and she didn’t charge me for the salad (sorry that was the “cheapskate” me commenting here). Unfortunately my old habit is to tune out people’s names so I can’t recommend her that way, but you will know who I am talking about when you walk in.
The reason we even thought about the Farmhouse was the unusual “Chicken Fried Duck, Sweet and Hot Pepper Relish, Arugula, Egg Bun: $8.00”; this must be the duck season on the farm or something.(that and the phrase:”All Sandwiches Comes with Fries & Pickled Vegetables” which somehow made me think of “all your base are belong to us“).
The sandwich arrived quickly, with the salad (by mistake) and “chilled potato leek soup” on the side.
A duck breast in a crispy fried coating with some relish on top was bigger than the bun.
It was pretty tasty,although it didn’t taste very ducky. If I didn’t say duck on the menu, I probably wouldn’t have noticed, but to be fair I haven’t had duck in years, so I may not remember what it tastes like in the first place. Not tasty enough for a 45-mile round-trip, but still not bad. Potato-soup was average. As another “farm” touch the drinking water was dispensed in the empty wine bottles. I am sure someone will write about great farm-like atmosphere “just like at grandma’s”. All I remember from living at my Grandma’s is the outhouse, I bet that would really enhance the atmosphere in every sense of that word.
Anyway, I liked the restaurant,the food and especially the waitress. In my opinion the place is sorely missing the alcohol, although it just opened so that may be forthcoming; I didn’t feel like inundating the people who work there with unnecessary questions. Speaking of annoying, my conversation with Bull E.Vard centered around the trend of self-obsessed foodies taking all the fun out of dining (just like social-media spammers are killing it for the rest of us). Luckily in this area there are many bloggers covering all things food from cheap to disgusting and from ethnic to traditional, all with the necessary detail and honest opinions. I am generally not interested in the Chef’s name or a paragraph-long name of a sandwich; I am very interested in how it tasted, wait times, general attitude and waitresses’ names.
With that said, I am now going back to my normal spending pattern until the piggy bank I broke today is glued back together and filled with change.
