Month: June 2005

fuckin hot


is the only way to describe it. the last few days, regardless of what city i have been in (chicago, ithaca, boston), it is just too fuckin hot and humid to move, let alone eat. today it is so bad (and really, today is better than most of the days have been) i am hiding out in the basement, and ate sun chips dipped in a mixture of cottage cheese and cilantro salad dressing. the picture is of the new blue flavor of gatorade i have been subsisting on, in a pale green glass that at least looks refreshingly cool. feh. i hate humid heat.

good salmon cakes

latest version of my salmon cake improvisation came out pretty good, so i guess i better write it down.
packet of salmon
1/4 red pepper, minced
few parsley leaves, minced
green onion, minced
teaspoon or so Old Bay seasoning
teaspoon or so Tamazula hot sauce
3 tbsp miracle whip (lower fat version is just fine)
1 egg
1/4 cup dry breadcrumbs
ground black pepper
Mix all together well, then form into 4 balls. Roll in more breadcrumbs mixed with more Old Bay seasoning. Mist olive oil into nonstick pan, heat to medium, and fry — spray the patties with some oil, too, and spray the pan again whenever you flip. These end up not as fabulously golden as if you fried them in 1/8″ of oil, but much less fat going down the gullet makes it easier to handle a couple of dry breadcrumbs in an otherwise delightfully crunchy crust. Summer’s coming, y’all, and some of us have been eating a little too much cheese. And bacon. And beer. And bread. *grin* Oooh, and I had these with the last of parents’ asparagus and the first of my garden’s baby arugula. Yummy.

connah stowah

Sorry, just a little Bawstinonics slipped out. So the corner store near my house has a wide selection of Polish groceries (soup mixes, juices, cookies, etc.) along with locally made tortillas and Mexican staples. Psyche! I got some black currant nectar, and a carrot/apple/strawberry juice. They also have Vitner’s chips, in most but not all of the worthwhile flavors. Heh.

road trip notes

so in a whirlwind of activity, we packed the car full of stuff and headed west the Thursday before Memorial Day. we stopped at the foodnerd homestead to say hi to my mom, drop off white-cream donuts for dad, and acquire a bag of fresh asparagus from the family patch, and then drove straight through until 1:30am, with a few stops for ingestion & elimination along the way. We hit the road again at 8am, and pulled up in front of my apartment just before 3pm — and managed to unload all the aforementioned stuff before the rain came.
A few highlights:
– i’m pretty sure we saw a bald eagle flying overhead somewhere in Ohio.
– Hardee’s fried chicken is surprisingly good, considering.
– virtually all the cornfields we saw were fallow, full of last year’s brown stubble. what’s up with that? why wouldn’t they be full of growing green by now?
– the Comfort Inn at Barkeyville, PA has really good free waffles, along with free wireless and soft beds. Who’da thunk it?
– we saw a lot of Ohio’s finest along the way, but not even a glimpse of Indiana’s finest. Weird.
– my mom packed us a crazy picnic of cheese and nuts and deviled eggs and animal crackers, and a showstopping platter of prosciutto-wrapped canteloupe. Awesome.
– wendy’s now lets you have salad instead of fries in your burger meal. kinda cool, really.
– Dairy Queen kicks ass.

foodnerd challenge #1: cream of chicken soup – DELAYED

Well, May has come and gone, I have been out of my mind busy the last three weeks, and it appears that our only serious competitor, Dr. Biggles, has been about the same, so we have no soup recipes. I have the cookbook prize in my possession, so the contest will happen someday, but perhaps the thing to do is table it until soup season resumes in the autumn. Perhaps by then we may have a little time to ourselves to tinker with creamy chickeny concoctions for the general betterment of mankind. Tune in next October.