Seasonal eating in the fall means apples, pears, butternut squash, harvest ales. And of course Monster Cereals.
One can find Count Chocula throughout the year. Chocolate is an easy sell to kids any time of year, and vampires are timeless. Ask my wife…she’ll tell you how awesome sparkly vampires are. They bring out the tween in her. She already has her opening night ticket to a showing of the next Twilight movie. At midnight. On a weeknight. More than a month from now.
For shame.
The berry-flavored minor Monster Cereals, however, are only available around Halloween. You want a Boo Berry or Franken Berry fix? Wait till October. Sadly there’s no hope for fans of generic “fruit” flavored cereals as the short-lived Fruity Yummy Mummy was put back in the grave more than a decade ago. Fruit Brute–the Mummy’s similarly flavored predecessor–disappeared in the early 80s. Had Mrs. B been allowed to eat sugary cereals as a kid, she’d have been all over the werewolf cartoon Brute. Because if there’s one thing she likes better than brooding vampires it’s muscle-bound werewolves. Team Jacob! YEAH!
Me? I’m Team Boo Berry.
To mark the changing of the seasons, I present you with perhaps my greatest culinary creation: Monster Mash, a mix of Boo Berry and Franken Berry.
Texas, I thought, was a straightforward BBQ decision. Texas means beef which means brisket. Easy peasy, sneezy. Brisket for the Steelers/Texans.
Whoa. Not so fast. Being a giant state, BBQ gets complex in the Lone Star State. It’s directional BBQ, with unique styles stemming from all compass points, save the BBQ-barren North. From Mexican-influenced barbacoa in the South to mesquite heavy direct-cooked meats in the West, there’s a world of ‘que to choose from. What most folks think of when they think Texas BBQ is from the heart of Texas, where the stars at night are big and bright and the unsauced brisket is sliced and served with a stack of white bread on the side.
(Gratuitous Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure interlude…)
Houston, home of the Texans, fits squarely in East Texas, where the brisket is chopped, not sliced, and served on a bun with sauce. This, friends, sounds perfect. Let’s do it.
Much like the Steelers’ offensive offensive line, I kinda took the week off this week. The days-long deluge we experienced washed out any hopes of smoking brisket. You need a good 8 hours to smoke a brisket right and I’ll be damned if I was going to slog through the rain every hour on Saturday to add hickory chips and fresh charcoal. Steelers don’t want to block. I don’t want to get soaked. Deal? Deal.
Thankfully Market District smokes a good brisket with a thick fat cap, crispy black ends, and deep pink smoke ring. Tender, moist, and just a touch bitterness from the charred crust when the whole lot was chopped up East Texas-style and sauced with the Bulls-Eye Texas BBQ sauce, smoky-spicy-sweet. It made a tasty, warm, comforting sandwich on a cold, dreary, pathetic Steelers football Sunday.
Flanking the sandwich was a heaping pile of Texas potato salad: potato with a ranch-sized list of add-ins including red pepper, onion, hard-boiled egg, and pickle relish.
To drink: the official beer of Texas…Shiner Bock. Bubbly and sweet, a rather mindless beverage.
Though the outcome of the game was less than appealing, what we had on our plates was quite delicious.
Sadly next week will be a bye week…for me, not the Steelers. I’ll be unable to cook up Tennessee-style BBQ and watch the game, but I’ll be returning on October 16th for the Jacksonville game. Any ideas on what Jacksonvillians eat? And please somebody tell me that I can find a beer other than Land Shark brewed in or around Jacksonville…
Back in 1994, when Penn State got robbed of a #1 ranking by sentimental voters who thought Nebraska’s Tom Osbourne deserved a lifetime achievement national championship over perhaps the greatest offensive college football team of all time, I lived the mundane life of a college freshman. Class when I could drag myself out of bed, bland dining hall meals, hours of static-y television–Beavis & Butthead, Cops, and Jerry Springer–on a TV with rabbit ears. This sort of thing.
And then there was Penn State quarterback Kerry Collins. Heisman finalist, first-round draft pick, ladies man. On the verge of making millions of dollars, living the life all college freshman guys dream of. One evening I sat at a table in Pattee Library drearily working through calculus problems while at the next table Kerry Collins was swarmed by very attractive coeds eager to help him get his work done.
So it’s a bit of a shock seeing Kerry Collins, looking like a bored 50-year-old man, running a vanilla offense in perhaps the most mundane of all cities in America: Indianapolis.
Now I’m certain that Indy folks love their home and that there are plenty of great things about the cleverly named Indiana city. For example, John Dillinger was from Indianapolis. Very cool. Marc Summers of Double Dare fame? From Indianapolis, though I’m not sure he’d admit to such: an obsessive-compulsive can’t be too excited about being from one America’s worst cities for bedbug infestation. Bedbugs are much worse than getting slimed.
As an outsider, though, Indianapolis is the picture of mid-America sameness. Reminds me of Wayne and Garth’s take on Delaware:
Hi, I’m in Indianapolis. No defining culture, little in the way of food traditions. This is the city that brought forth Jared from those Subway commercials. Doesn’t get much more bland, boring, and staid than that, does it? Oh yes, it does. Orville Redenbacher hailed from Brazil, Indiana, a mere 60 miles from Indianapolis. And of course there’s Peyton Manning…
This left me struggling to figure out what to eat for the Steelers/Colts match-up. Subway and popcorn? No thanks.
Sources, including a cousin currently embedded with the Indianapolites, tell me of pork tenderloin sandwiches served at restaurants across the city. And corn. Indiana is the nation’s fifth largest producer of corn, growing just shy of a billion bushels of the commodity crop every year.
With that in mind, here’s what we ate in advance of the Sunday night game:
Cut a pork tenderloin into four pieces, then pound each piece out until it’s super thin and laughingly large. Run each piece through cornstarch (or flour), then egg/milk, then cornmeal. Pan-fry in oil/butter. Slap it on a bun and top it as you see fit. Swiss cheese and Tabasco mayo for this guy.
To drink? No chance I’d find Indiana beer, so I kept up the corn theme with a shot of moonshin…errrrr…corn whiskey. From a mason jar.
And for dessert, the official state pie of Indiana: Hoosier sugar cream pie.
A revelation. Heavy cream, milk, sugar, brown sugar, flour, vanilla, cinnamon. Store-bought pie crust. Two minutes to put together, 1 hour to bake. The top is crackly, the inside like butterscotch pudding. It’s going onto the (very) short list of desserts I make, along with Paula Deen’s buttermilk pie and a dark, dusky ginger cake.
The result of the game? I found out the good news of the Steelers’ exciting victory online this morning because somebody was too tired to stay up. Corn whiskey and a hot kitchen make a man sleepy. The guy who fell asleep in the third quarter remains more mundane and boring than both the entire city of Indianapolis and a concussed, almost washed-up quarterback who writes country music.
According to the internet, there’s no typical “Seattle” food. Some say it is a lack of a defining ethnic population. Others (read: me) think it has something to with a lack of collective focus caused by incessant cloud cover, flannel-induced confusion, and over-roasted coffee poisoning.
Instead, Seattle-ites enjoy an ingredient-driven cuisine where local and easily accessible foods rule the plate. Think of stuff you’d find on the coast or in the mountains: seafood, berries, tree fruits. Prepare them to highlight their innate nature and you’ve got what I guess is Seattle cuisine. My take for the Seahawks’ visit to our fair ‘burgh on Sunday:
I defrosted the world’s smallest side of wild salmon–not even a full pound–and roasted it simply with shallot butter and lemon. Ten minutes at 450 was all this needed…it was skinnier than Dennis Dixon’s arms. Any reasonably sized side would take closer to 15 minutes. A Casey Hampton-sized side might take an hour. Katie declared the preparation a hit; even better than smoked salmon, she says. Keep this preparation in mind next time you need a quick fish fix.
Though all things apple would seem to be verboten in the land of Bill Gates, apples are indeed a Washington state specialty. Upwards of 50% of the apples grown in the United States originate there. Of course we’ve learned that the best fruit around comes not from Washington state, but from Washington County, Pennsylvania. Therefore, we had apples–eaten simply out of hand–from our favorite orchardist, Frank from Paul’s Orchard.
To drink, Redhook Brewery’s IPA, the only beer I could find with roots in Seattle. Sadly, I learned post-consumption that ABInBev owns a 32.2% share of the Redhook, thus violating my ban on ABInBev/MillerCoors products in our home. The IPA was very drinkable, if undistinguished. Mildly assertive hops. The apples played nicely by adding a hit of sweetness to the muted malts.
Know who else played nicely? The Steelers. Much improved over last week’s showing.
Next week is tricky from a cooking perspective: Pittsburgh plays the Indianapolis Colts. Early research calls for pork tenderloin sandwiches. Any assistance on regionally appropriate foods/beverages for Indy are greatly appreciated.
Congratulations to Julia Greer, whose name was drawn as the winner of the two tickets to the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank’s Taste of the Waterfront event this Thursday. Thanks to all who commented for your participation and for learning a little bit more about hunger resources in your neighborhood. A special thanks to my sister, Aunt Kristen, and reader Caroline Colbert for kind and generous donations to match mine. Thanks to them–and to those who commented–a few people will be a little bit less hungry for a few days.
Still half a month to go in Hunger Action Month. Let’s keep up our efforts and continue to find ways to help those in need.
The cannibals of old, we’re told, ate the flesh of their victims to attain power and good fortune. It was believed that consuming the body of a conquered foe would transfer the vitality and strength of the vanquished to the eater.
Even when looking at it from a completely non-cultural-relativist perspective, this doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Dude gets killed because he’s a not a good fighter, so if I eat his dead flesh–dead, the exact opposite of vital–I’ll be as strong as he was? Which isn’t as strong as me, apparently, so this whole thing is a bit counterintuitive, no? There’s a reason that cannibals aren’t around anymore. Their tactics don’t work. Note to any cannibal-leaning readers: cut back on the brain-wasting prions in your human flesh diet. It isn’t good for your judgement.
My first foray into football cannibalism–wherein I will eat a dish native to the city from which the Steelers’ weekly foe hails–was as ill-fated as the Donner Party or my 5th grade Oregon Trail team, of which I was the failed wagon train leader. Like the Donner’s, we got stuck in the mountains towards the end of the role-playing game and presumably all died when I missed the critical fifteen-foot shot of a quarter into the garbage can.
The Baltimore food we ate during the game was quite tasty, much as some commenters have noted about human flesh. New York Times reporter William Buehler Seabrook said the human steak and roast–wherever those come from–tasted of good veal . The outcome of the game, however, was as pleasant as a bout of kuru. The Steelers certainly played like they had some prions eating away at their brains.
The simple selection for a Baltimore-centric dish would have been crabs. Steamed blue crabs, crab cakes, something of that nature. With two at-times picky kids, whose decisions about what they’ll eat are whimsical, this was out of the question. Thankfully wikipedia told me about Baltimore’s chicken box.
Chicken wings with some sort of fries on the side, served in a box. No kid, except perhaps my goofy Luke, can say no to that.
Not wanting to bust out the Fry Daddy, I went roasted all the way around: two dozen meaty chicken wings from Salem’s on one tray and a few potatoes cut into wedges, tossed with olive oil & thyme on another. Into a 425-degree oven for let’s call it 35-40 minutes. Done when everything is crispy and well-browned. Serve it up in a box…a plastic one here, because we still have these left over from Katie’s first birthday party (which was 5 years ago).
To give it even (Balti)more flair, the whole lot got sprinkled with Penzey’s Chesapeake Bay Seasoning–a more complex take on Old Bay.
To drink? Could have gone with a “half and half” (lemonade/iced tea), but instead we polished off the last two bottles of Baltimore’s Heavy Seas beer that I had in my beer stash in the basement. Black Cannon, a malty sweet black IPA for this guy, and a simple, true-to-style Pale Ale for my lovely wife.
To summarize: chicken box, good; Steelers game: brain-wastingly bad.
Next week: Seattle visits Pittsburgh and I make salmon. Any recommendations on Seattle beer? Or should I go with Washington State wine?
(Bear with me for a minute with this little story…there’s a giveaway at the end.)
Last night I drove down the scariest road in the world. Curry Hollow Road.
Not the regular Curry Hollow Road that goes past Jefferson Cemetery. This Curry Hollow Road is a sharp turn off Lebanon Church Road (“Pittsburgh…just minutes from the mall!”) just past the Allegheny County Airport. It’s long and winding, pockmarked and scarred. The forest encroaches on sections of the road, squeezing it down to nary a car’s width. I was driving down this two-mile stretch at the height of rush hour and saw no other cars. And then halfway down into the valley below you come across this tunnel:
Nothing good has ever happened in that tunnel. Dark, dank, strewn with trash. A broken mattress sits at one end, a smashed raccoon in the middle of the road. I was seriously afraid that a drifter might jump out from the darkness and kill me.
The drive from my humble abode in South Fayette all the way down to Duquesne–the town on the Mon, not the University–was quite well worth it, despite my moments of terror getting there. You see, Thursday night was the first “blogmob” at the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank, an outreach to local bloggers and social media types to educate us about the great work that the Food Bank does.
We toured the facility and talked about ways we can help fight hunger in our region. We learned about the Pittsburgh Tote Bag Project, whose goal is to collect reusable tote bags for clients of local food pantries and food banks. And we saw first-hand why the Food Bank and the Tote Bag Project are so important while observing the distribution of fresh produce and supplemental canned goods to the 400+ families who lined up for the monthly Produce to People program–one of 14 such monthly distributions throughout Allegheny and some of the other 11 counties served by the GPCFB.
Some came adequately equipped with wagons or carts to carry the sacks of carrots, potatoes, peppers and assorted canned goods that were distributed. But others had flimsy plastic bags or no bags at all. We’re not talking strapping young bucks hauling food to their cars…more than 10% of those served by the Food Bank are elderly and many are handicapped. Fully 30% of those served are under the age of 18. Providing sturdy bags can ease the burden on already overburdened folks.
It was a humbling experience. The hard work and commitment of the employees and volunteers. The humility and grace of those receiving food. The kids and the elderly, the people who could barely walk standing in line to get their hands on something that I take completely for granted.
I’m much more thankful today for all of my blessings, and I’m much more committed to finding ways I can help.
And so this giveaway…at the end of the evening at the Food Bank, my name was drawn as the winner of two tickets to next Thursday’s Taste of the Waterfront food and wine event. Mrs. B and I can’t attend so I’m giving you a chance to go on my behalf…just please behave yourself if you win; I don’t need my marginally good name besmirched.
How to enter, you ask? Go to the Food Assistance Directory on the GPCFB’s website (http://www.pittsburghfoodbank.org/gethelp/) and find out where your local food pantry is by entering your zip code. Then comment below with the name of your local food pantry.
I’ll randomly select the winner of the two tickets on Tuesday, September 13 at 3pm. Be sure to comment with a valid email address so I can contact you if you win. One entry per person, por favor.
To entice you further, I’ll donate one can of food (up to fifty cans) to the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank for every comment on this post before the Tuesday deadline for entry. Get commenting and I’ll get donating.
Just about any time I leave my basement to venture into the world–a somewhat rare occurance, mind you–I end up driving past Bethany Presbyterian Church right off the Bridgeville exit of 79. It’s on the slow route to my office (on those even more rare occasions when I don’t work from home). I pass it on my way to the Bridgeville Farmers Market on Tuesday evenings…a sparsely attended market that has a few worthwhile vendors. We used to get food quite often from a pizza shop next door, though the shop isn’t worth mentioning based on our most recent interactions with them.
I was right across the street from Bethany a week ago when I stopped at Burgh’s Pizza and Wings for a solo dinner at the bar on a Sunday evening (and where they have insanely inexpensive growler fills if you are so inclined to take draft beer home with you).
La Bella Bean, the coffee shop across the street from Bethany, is where I used to stop multiple times each week when Mrs. B was pregnant with both kids. Not drinking caffeine, she still craved a warm beverage fix. Steamed milk fit the bill, and the folks behind the counter soon knew to get the steam going when I walked in the door.
Why all this Bethany Presbyterian talk? All those times I’ve eaten within eyeshot of the church, I had no idea it housed the neighborhood food pantry. It serves my neighbors not just in South Fayette and Bridgeville, but also in Upper St. Clair.
Upper St. Clair. There are people in that most posh of suburbs who need a hand with food. Despite what we might want to convince ourselves, hunger really knows no boundaries; as another local food blogger* eloquently states it, hunger is a first-world problem. People lose jobs. Get sick. Maybe make a mistake. It could happen to any of us at any time no matter where we live or how immune we think we might be.
The world if full of foolish things. Politicians. Juggalos. Pitt football fans. Turkey bacon. “Lite” beer. Me.
The most foolish thing of all, though, might just be that there are hungry people in our neighborhoods. Seriously. One out of every seven Pennsylvanians deals with hunger or food insecurity. That blows my mind.
Think of all of the excess food we mindlessly eat, all the leftovers we throw away, all the “well, I really don’t need that but it sounds good to me right now” snacks we buy. Most of us don’t think twice about upsizing or splurging or gorging, and mind you, that’s a-ok with me. I don’t judge. That’s the reality of how our society approaches food. Meanwhile, some of our neighbors–and most heartbreakingly, our neighbor’s kids–aren’t sure if they’ll even get breakfast tomorrow.
Now lest you think I’m saying we shouldn’t enjoy our food or that we should live on rice and beans, remember who is writing this…about 80% of my day is spent thinking about food, preparing food, or eating food. Oftentimes it’s unnecessary food. The extra 20 pounds I’m carrying around attests to that.
But what if we all just thought a little bit more about the food we were buying and found a few ways to save $5 or $10 each month that we could donate to local food banks? The proverbial one less latte–or beer, in my case–a week. A month without ice cream, perhaps. Skip a meal every once in awhile to see what it’s like to be a little hungry.
September is Hunger Action Month. The Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank has posted 30 ways to take action to fight hunger in our community over the next 30 days*. Please join me in taking part in some of these great ways to help those around us. I’ll be posting occasionally this month to share what I’m doing. Feel free to comment with other ways we can together provide just a little more food security and comfort for our neighbors. Maybe we can put a little dent in the foolishness of hunger.
One of my sisters and frequent blog commenter KR wrote an essay in elementary school entitled “A cheese I do not like.” It was about feta cheese. KR is a smart woman. I’d say she’s my smartest sister, but I fear the backlash from my more violent kin. Last time I got Aunt Kristen angry she bull whipped me with a rubber snake. Sister Beth’s brutality is legendary. Interesting that the coarser siblings were both born in Ohio, whilst KR and I were born in Pittsburgh, no?
Despite her Pittsburgh-bred intelligence, KR’s cheese manifesto hinged on a flawed argument. She incorrectly viewed feta as a monolithic cheese subject to an up/down vote by a youthful palate. Understandably, of course, because back when she was in elementary school–she’s really, really old–the only feta available in these parts was the feta that most people think of: briny, tangy Greek sheep’s milk cheese. And technically speaking, her definition is in line with the decade-old EU declaration that feta cheese is a protected designation of origin product…only cheeses made in a certain way from a certain milk in certain areas can legally be called “feta.”
Of course “legal” and KR aren’t words that always go together. This is the sister who once had her friend ride on the hood of our Dodge Omni, then ran said friend over after an abrupt stop. She provided me with my first underage adult beverages. KR was the driver when I pelted neighborhood kids with excess hush puppies from Long John Silver’s out the sunroof of our dad’s company car.
So despite her fleeting moment of legal clarity around the definition of feta, the fact is that feta comes in a number of distinct varieties. Mind you, all are white, somewhat crumbly brined cheeses. Most originate from the same general area: Greece and the Balkans. Some are mild, others intensely sour. Textures vary. How do I know this? I’ve visited Stamoolis Brothers in the Strip. Here you’ll find no fewer than a half-dozen takes on the theme of feta: Greek sheep milk, Greek goat milk, barrel aged, French, Macedonian, Bulgarian and this:
Now if you know anything about the history of the Balkans, this cheese should strike you as ill-conceived. Words you typically see after “Serbian/Croatian”? War. Violence. Ethnic cleansing.
Cheese? Not so much.
The last time Serbs and Croatians got along well was in the early 1990s when Vlade Divac and Drazen Petrovic were shaking up the basketball world as members of the about-to-be-dissolved Yugoslavian national team. Side note: check out the really excellent ESPN 30 for 30 “Once Brothers” documentary for more about Vlade and Drazen. It’s really quite depressing.
Intrigued by both the price and the political implications of Serbian/Croatian feta, I bought a block to use as a salty counterpoint to sweet cherry tomatoes on homemade pizza. This feta is extremely crumbly, yielding small pieces when gently poked and prodded. I could probably build a robust geopolitical metaphor out of this cheese. I won’t, though, because it’s just cheese. Besides, if I tried I’m sure I’d get lots of details and intricacies wrong, which would lead to a dressing down from some of my Serbian acquaintances.
Serbs are tough. They drink slivovic straight up and don’t bat an eye. I’m not messing with the Serbs.
Suffice it to say, Serbian/Croatian feta is a tasty change of pace from standard issue Greek feta. It’ll be a welcome addition to the lamb burgers I’m making tonight for dinner. KR might even like this cheese…it’s more mild than the version she wrote her diatribe against.
