food

Last month, I regaled you with the many things that happen when you’re part of a ‘Beer of the Month’ club, the least of which is that you become very, very popular and make a whole bunch of people pretty happy. I’m not even a beer drinker and I’m pondering joining for a longer haul just so I feel liked and have something to make people loosen up during Rock Band.

This month, we explore the wonders of BBQ sauce. I’ve commented before that I’ve always had this long-standing dream of having a kitchen that I could use to display a vast array of delicious and dangerous hot sauces and their crazy (and often R-rated) labels. Parallel to that runs my mini-dream of having a fridge door stocked with BBQ sauces, because hell, I am a completely unrepentant meat eater. Somehow, I’ve still managed to snare a fair list of vegetarian girlfriends.

My proclivity towards meat is something of legend. It’s not too many people who can become synonymous with ‘bacon’, but on more than one occasion, I’ve been forwarded various bacon sales and links from friends, because I’m just THAT GUY. The bacon guy.

So, as a kitchen collector and aspiring chef, it’s always great to have something new to put on meat. A1 can only take you so far, Ponzu sauce only works sometimes, and other typical shelf brands never seem to take me that far. This is where the Amazing BBQ Sauce of the Month Club comes in.

Among the variety of different club options, spanning different lengths of time and spaces between deliveries, each plan will get you two different bottles of premium BBQ sauce per delivery. Two bottles is a really healthy amount and definitely enough to fulfill the needs of a barbecue party or two. I’d like to meet the man who can use up 2 bottles of BBQ sauce a month… though I wouldn’t want to get too close. That man’s not long for this world.

This month’s varieties included ‘The BBQ Shack Southern Flavor Barbecue Sauce‘ and, appropriately, ‘Charlie’s Hard Times Honey Mustard Barbecue Sauce’, to very distinct choices. Obviously, Charlie wins the ‘awesome label’ prize – which is no surprise, since the company also makes ‘Satan’s Blood’ and ‘Toxic Waste’ hot sauces.

The two bottles come safely packaged, and as summer finally approaches, it’s probably the perfect gift for anyone with a back patio. While I don’t know if I’ll be firing up a mini-grill on the concrete slab behind my rental house this summer, the results from the Foreman Grill in the kitchen were superb. Of course I had to taste test!

High recommendations all around, and for a price less than $10 per gourmet bottle, including shipping. Swing by their website to see all that they have to offer!

Paper or plastic? Butter or margarine? Sugar or corn syrup? What do these questions have to do with collecting?

It’s a new year and that usually means New Year’s resolutions — most of which are based upon those best behaviors for healthy & green living.

I’m no doctor, no scientist either; but I do know that most professionals trained to know or study such things seem to agree that moderation is key and that eating the most natural foods (as opposed to the synthetic, chemical or processed alternatives) is preferable for good health.

One of the best ways to eat healthier is to actually make your own food. No, microwaving a frozen pot pie is not cooking. No, macs & cheese from a box isn’t cooking. No, toasting a frozen pizza on that pizza-cooking-thing isn’t cooking… and making a pizza from scratch doesn’t start with a Boboli crust and a jar of Ragu either. Real cooking means starting with real foods. A shocking concept, hmm?

So how does a person go about making a pizza or anything else from scratch?

Start with a cookbook. Crack it open, and follow the directions.

And if you want to really avoid those over-processed, synthetic or altered food products, get vintage cookbooks. (Those retro cookbooks are, literally, full of bologna!) Vintage cookbooks only list ingredients from the good old days when food was food not a “food product.” In fact, when you take your list of ingredients from your vintage recipe to the store, you may find yourself walking down completely foreign isles. Which is rather the entire point, if you’re trying to have better eating habits, right?

As for which is better, baking with &/or eating butter or margarine, sugar or corn syrup, I think you’ll quickly find that the more natural foods (butter and sugar) are better for you — in moderation, of course. And as they taste better, you may find moderation is more possible, your new diet more pleasurable. But hey, as always, consult with your doctor; I’m just a kooky collector.

As for the paper or plastic question, the best answer is actually option C: a reusable canvas tote. But, if you’re like our family (unwilling to spend some serious cash on canvas totes for bulk buying), get the bags that you’ll reuse rather than just toss. Maybe you need to ask your doctor about that too (they seem to like to approve things).

One thing I do know; collecting is a fabulous way of recycling and keeping things away from landfills, so collecting old cookbooks is a fabulous way to go green. And at thrift store prices, you’ll save plenty of green too. You’ll need it with all those trips to the doctor’s office for advice.

I’m not much of a chef. Who has time to learn the art of fine cuisine between staving off the impending Cthulhu invasion and setting new world records in Tetris? These are important things, and I’ll be damned if a little lobster thermidor is going to come between me and selflessly aiding the futile perpetuation of our little space rock for another depressing day. You can thank me later.

Despite my general inability to prepare a lavish repast, I find myself attracted to all manner of food and cookbooks. I’m an unmitigated sushi devourer, a beef jerky aficionado and am entranced by all manner of things edible (and unfortunately, limited to the exceptionally affordable) – but more than anything else, I take delight in those magical cookbooks produced between the development of low-cost color printing technology and 1983. It was an era before the delicate art of food photography was mastered, before printed colors expressed their true vibrance… and where every photographed food item already appears to be partially digested.

Many of the foodstuffs featured in these cookbooks were being prepared before I was born and no longer really exist in these same forms today, which is something I thank the maker for daily. With recipes involving liberal helpings of clear gelatin to glue various foods together into a fancy shaped mold, reading these cookbooks is like looking through a window in time, back to an age where food wasn’t really meant to be eaten, just feared and regretted, and possibly used as implements of torture. At least that’s what I assume from looking at these images. Anthropologically, these suggest that there was a time when humans really enjoyed eating hard boiled egg slices on every conceivable thing, and ‘chicken peach salad with sliced almonds’ wasn’t only something that you said out loud to induce vomiting. It existed, in one of my recipe books, and it’s coming to get you.

There was no compunction about calling foods what they were either, no matter how literal the description might have been. ‘Creamy fruited bagels’ COULD have been called something else – just throw a random state name in there, like ‘bagels Minnesota’, and you have something far less unappealing, and which doesn’t suggest that fruit is something that you could violently impose upon something else. ‘Soupy burgers’? Perhaps this was all part of Darwin’s idea of natural selection. If you could survive Cyndee Kanenberg’s 1978 ‘Guide to Microwave Cookbook’, you were probably immortal and would be allowed to pass your superior genes on into the next generation. Especially after facing down the ‘lamprey egg-sac smeared asparagus spears on hot dog buns… sitting in pools of oil’ on page 42. I made that name up, but it’s based entirely on the provided photograph, seen at left.
There’s no real attraction to any cookbook that’s well photographed and hunger-inducing, no amusement with Mario Batali or Jamie Oliver (though my interest in Rachael Ray isn’t really culinarily motivated). Boxes full of nigh-unusable cookbooks spell out a dirge to the bygone days of ‘hot tuna and bologna soup’, quietly asking to be opened up and read from again, like magical tomes full of incantations with the power to conjure up the most unholy of beings – which isn’t far from the truth.