O Nom Nom Nom A

So, what’s on the plate for our new president’s lunch? A host of game birds, hot dogs for the little ones (am I the only one who sees Biden sneaking a dog?) , and a massive sigh of relief for all that are involved, including of course the caterers:
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/20/a-mission-to-serve-lunch-in-the-capitol/

Don’t Know your Kobayashi from your Kobe

It’s time for summer, beaches, and shoving processed meat tubes down your throat. There is a fun article on the famous Coney Island hot dog eating competition on ABC online. It sets up Kobayashi, the 128 pounds Japanese dude, against the 210 pound American that broke his long winning streak last year. It also has the drama of moving the contest from 12 minutes to 10, after finding the original contest pamphlet from the early 1900s put the time limit at 10.

I love competitive eating and how freakin’ intense these guys are about it. One of the best phrases in the article is ” The diminutive 30-year-old Kobayashi – a legend on the surprisingly serious competitive eating circuit-….” That pretty much sums it up, especially if you remember some crappy FOX show where they had a hotdog eating contest of Kobayashi VS a Kodiak Bear. I think the same show answered the age old question how many midgets it took to push a 747 around.

On Omelets and Life

Today was a rough start for me. I woke up feeling rather stupid after having drank way more than I should’ve, and had a horrible headache. Even after chugging a Propel fitness water, I felt like poo. “Store…”, I squeaked to my boyfriend, “We have to go to the store. I need Aleve…”

Yarr…and the octodog was too much for me…

…that’s where I got me peg leg…

Are your children JUST NOT HAPPY with plain hot dogs? Then you should obviously get the Octodog, the “Fun, simple and safer (?) way to turn ordinary hot dogs into exciting to cook and super fun to eat octodogs”. Sure, it’s phallic. But so are half of foods. I’m considering getting one of these just to suprise/horrify/amaze everyone around me…but, as a friend just said, “I’ll only be giving my children flat sandwiches”.

Comsmopolitan KitKats: Flavors from Japan

Jess: Just when you think you really know everything about Kit-Kats, a product from Japan sets your opinions reeling. At Mitsuwa Marketplace we discovered these Kit-Kats in green tea and caramel flavoring. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they weren’t worth the four dollars we paid for them. When opening the caramel Kit-Kat’s package, you got a definate and lovely smell of caramel. Like caramel delicious enough to make you into an enraged ape diving for the Kit-Kat like it was some sublime banana. Unfortunately, the caramel Kit-Kat is a tease. It lied to us–to me. There was almost no caramel flavor.

The green tea one was even more of a rip off, at four dollars and no green tea flavor. At least they were beautiful, as James Houde’s photos let us see. At least.

 

The Beer With A Golden Ticket

James: The other week super-awesome-mega self proclaimed Irish Yankee drinking band Ceann was making a rare tour stop in NJ, at my freakin college. I was so pumped, I really love these guys and their music. With songs like ‘Pabst Blue Ribbon’ containing lyrics like “Get ready for the show stopper/We’ll sing along with Dennis Hopper/Heineken, man fuck that shit, Pabst Blue Ribbon is the beer that keeps on Giving/For Such a modest price you get a beer you drink twice.”

Needless to say, I was ready to drink my fill of Pabst and then some. I went to two local liquor stores to score the beer of steel works and scenesters but came up empty. At the second store, I saw what I figured would be close enough: Golden Anniversary Beer. Pabst got a blue ribbon in 18xx, Golden Anniversary got a golden medal in 1987. Both cost like $5 a twelve pack. It was on.

I wish it was off. I can honestly say, this is the worst beer I have ever purchased. It tasted like water with beer and tin can flavorings, and probably was left over from the originally award winning 1987 batch stored in old diesel drums. Trying to choke them down at a party, a man known to wear and sleep in the same clothes for a week exclaimed that it was the worst beer he had ever tasted. It’s really that bad. (The only thing keeping it from being the worst beer that I’ve ever tasted is because I brew my own and did an experiment involving 10 pounds of malt and distillers yeast. It was so foul no known human could finish even one.)

Jess: I had our usual “taster’s shotglass” of this stuff, and I have to say that Golden Magic Ticket beer is probably the worst beer I have ever had. I have quaffed the likes of natty, of bud, of god knows what else during my tenure at college but this stuff tastes like yak urine and not in the good way. If there is a good way. I hate to be crass here but I’m pretty sure this beer actually causes every single problem in the entire world just by existing. Little kid with a hole in his shoe in India? Golden Anniversary Beer. Bee population plummeting? Golden Anniversary Beer. I really, really, REALLY tried to pretend it was drinkable, but I couldn’t get past one sip. At college events they should provide this if they don’t want us getting drunk. Seriously.

Bottom Line: Buying Golden Anniversary Beer leads to sad dissapointment and that crunched up “That is awful” look. $5.99 for a twelve pack.

East Tokyo Hibachi and Sushi Review

This review originally appeared in the Ramapo News, March 20 2008

Jess: Poor college kids. Half price sushi, what could go wrong? A lot could go wrong. Things you couldn’t imagine could go wrong. The things I’ve seen gone wrong with raw fish. At East Tokyo Hibachi and Sushi’s half price sushi night nothing actually went wrong. It was all delicious, cheap, nutritious, and—dare I say—fun? Every Thursday at East Tokyo, there is a special menu of selected half priced rolls and sushi.

You eat THAT?!– Anthropology and Food

Today as I was walking over to my computer lab job at college, I noticed a small crowd around some picnic tables. On these tables was a strange variety of food, so I had to stop and check it out. As it turns out it was a new club doing their first event–the Anthropolgy Club presenting “You eat THAT?!”, an event which allowed students to bring the interesting things they eat.

Bananas and Honey. Tasty, but not too weird. “Spanish Rice” made “Irish Style” with canned tomato soup and ground beef. Ehh… Kimchi, not so bad. Unless it’s astronaut Kimchi. An after dinner ‘mint’, Indian style, which essentially tasted the way you’d expect Indian Fabio to taste–warm, romantic, perfumy, and a little bit hard to take seriously. Mealworms…I didn’t try the mealworms to be honest. Jalapeño hummus from a girl who “doesn’t like weird food”. I think had she brought in plain mashed potatoes she would’ve been considered similarly weird in her boringness. There was also a student who gleefully explained that she “loved eating raw cookie dough dipped in marshmallow fluff on the couch”. I actually thought the name of the event in my head–”You eat THAT?!” (No offense. I eat apples and cheese, combined, and call it “chapples”. It makes my boyfriend furious when i eat chapples.)

There was something very nice about gathering with people I’ve never met and enjoying their company around food from their homes and their families, especially foods they might be embarrassed about eating in public. I was a little disappointed, as when I looked up the advertising that I’d seen for the event it had a photo of a durian.

What, nobody was brave enough?

Kimchi IN SPACE

Just found this article through Wikipedia, and found it really interesting that now, in addition to astronaut ice cream, there is astronaut kimchi. As the article says,

“If a Korean goes to space, kimchi must go there, too,” said Kim Sung Soo, a Korea Food Research Institute scientist. “Without kimchi, Koreans feel flabby. Kimchi first came to our mind when we began discussing what Korean food should go into space.”