Things You Should be Doing With Your Food: Ish 1

This is an experimental post that I'd like to make an ongoing series in this blog, so lets start with an intro.

Adam is a hardcore line cook. Like... this dude lives to cook. Talks about food, cooking, his jobs, his chef... constantly. I am a hardcore fan of food, especially greasy American food. It's fine. You can call me a naive chump with bad taste, but I don't care because it seriously rules. I still like everything else. But "American" food and "bar" food is cheap and it's just good old comfort food. Besides, if you don't like this kind of food then you're doing it wrong, and that's why I'm here. It's all about excess! ...but all things in moderation, right? Anyway, back to Adam. He and I like to go on food adventures, and sometimes I get other people involved. On these adventures we take ideas that we've been brewing in our brains of how we can improve people's food experiences or cook something crazy excessive and gluttonous to come up with a new unheard of celebration of all things delicious and flavorfully hedonistic.

Here's an example, which while not our best, it's been our longest brewing idea that has yet to be put into action. It's called the Big Beef and Baconator... Big Baconator and Cheddar... or something like that. The idea is you get a Big Beef and Cheddar from Arby's then you run over to Wendy's and get a baconator... and put them two sum'bitches together to make a new excessively large but delicious sandwich. Get the idea? The deal is, it's not necessarily about the quality of the ingredients or sophistication of the cuisine. It's all about indulging in comfort food and excess and creating something new and tasty. So now that you understand how it works, let me tell you about today's creation... and wow... Good god.... It's one of the best things I've ever eaten. So without further ado:

"Josh and Adam's Breakfast Burger Bonanza"
(Are you ready for this?)

BAM!

So what do we got going on here?! Let's talk about it from bottom to top for starters:

-Not one, but TWO hamburger patties with American Cheese
-4 strips of bacon
-1 fried egg (Medium)
-Half a strip of Goetta (I'll get to this later for you non-Cincinnati people out there)
-Half a pancake with syrup (Only Adam did this. I felt it compromised the integrity of everything else that was going on)
-Lettuce, onion, tomato
-Sesame seed bun

So now that you've seen the ingredients lets get some back story. The Blue Jay Restaurant is pretty much the greatest diner in the world. Hands down no questions asked. There used to be this place in my hometown called the Huddle that we would always beg our mom to take us to for pancakes and such, well that place is like prison food wrapped in nursing home leftovers compared to Blue Jay. It's the perfect hole in the wall with bad coffee, the same three or four waitresses working every day, open kitchen, and the same guy sitting at the counter reading the paper or some shit like that every day. And the food is cooked absolutely perfect every time (you might hear me mention that again. It's important). Adam and myself along with a few others have a habit of going there whenever we're good and hungover and he and I got into the habit of ordering the same thing every time even though their menu is pretty diverse and everything looks amazing coming out of the kitchen. We get two eggs (easy), goetta, black cofee, and toast because it's just too damn hard to get anything else. Their eggs are just so perfectly cooked that it took me a long time to stray away from them and try a burger.

I stopped in for lunch there with my sister about a week or two ago and I tried the burger, she stuck with the two eggs and goetta (which I of course had recommended and besides, she'd never had goetta). Before I go on let's talk about Goetta.

Goetta is "poor people" food to Germans, so naturally Cincinnati is the only place in the world where it's still popular. The idea is you mix your ground beef with oats so that it makes more to go around, hence the poor people appeal. But that's not all, you also get some onion mixed in there and just enough other spices that when you combine it with a plain ground beef patty that's been covered in cheese the flavors of the goetta pop their head out every once in a while in between mouth fulls of cheese and juicy beef... but more on that later. (I just have too much to say about this awesomness!)

So we're back to lunch with my sister and I'm staring at this burger of mine and her eggs and goetta. Typical of Blue Jay, the burger as plain and simply as it was presented, was abosulutely perfect. These are the moments where great moments in "things you should be doing with your food" are made. Why in the hell do I need to choose between burger and eggs? Lunch and breakast? I immediately called Adam and we had a mission on our hands.

Today we were both pretty good and hungover, so we figured this burgers time had come. Now at the time of conception this was merely a single patty with american cheese, goetta, and a fried egg well done. But Adam has a way of talking me into things and taking them to the level where they truly belong. It would be quite lackluster to leave our burger as it was when a second patty and bacon are an option. So we placed the order; two double cheeseburgers, one order of two eggs and goetta, and Adam threw in the pancake... meh, what the hell? And then anticipation builds and builds. I spent the next several minutes salivatin', fidgetatin', and fixinatin' to git my hands on that bad boy! Few people thought it'd ever be possible for a dude to be so anxious over a sandwich, but I went there, and ya'll just have to deal with it. And then they came... we each took our egg and put it on the burger... we each took our half of the goetta and put it on the burger...

And now we're at the part where we eat the sandwich. I'm sure you've probably all been thinking, "Dude you put eggs on a cheeseburger... there's no way that tasted good. There's way too much hype going on over this BS." You are all DEAD MO'FI'N WRONG!

The first bite brought a little bit of everything to the table, but not all at once... First the juiciness of the beef, followed by the creamy melting cheese, then came the crunch of lettuce and onion, the perfect texture of the egg white, and finally last, but definitely not least, everything was followed up with those spices in the goetta. It is unfair to humanity that few other people will think to do this. It was absoulutely perfect in every way... well except a few minor issues. We made the mistake of getting our eggs medium so when I took my first bite half the egg yoke burst out the back and onto my hand... But I mean hey, I'm sure Edison lit a few houses on fire before he had a bulb that worked right. It was all good though because, knowing all the yoke was going to continue spilling out the back I just pooled it all onto my plate and it made for an awesome dip for the burger.

Oh, and that's me destroying this bad boy over there by the way.

This was also my first experience with bacon at Blue Jay, and I can't say it enough... they cook everything perfectly! You're not going to find the fanciest food in the world there, but I gaurantee you anything you order will be cooked perfectly. Period. The bacon was just the right blend of chewy and crunchy. There was nothing burnt about it and nothing soggy about it. It was also so sweet that the flavor didn't get lost in everything else and it actually ended up being one of the highlights of the sandwich. So definitely do it with the bacon if you go for this thing. In fact the bacon was so good, that when we all finally finished eating and were wallowing in our meat hangovers at the booth I couldn't stop, I was grabbing bacon scraps and forcing them into my mouth for a good ten minutes after I finished my burger.

We followed the whole thing up with a discussion about church over a few cups of coffee at which point I came to the realization that the burger we'd just consumed was church enough for us. It had everything... flavor, satisfaction, friends, atmosphere, what have you. All's I'm saying is that if there is a god, that dude was present at that booth in Blue Jay, hand feeding delicious meat and eggs into our bellies.

So now that I've ranted and raved about how spectacular this whole experience was lets talk about the bad, because like I said earlier... This whole "club" or whatever you want to call it (us just being hungover mostly) is about excess, but all things in moderation at the same time... or something. It did indeed hurt, not to say it wasn't worth it, but that mammoth went to battle on me when we left. I was rocking the pink (Peptobismal for future reference) pretty hard before I went into work. But to nature's credit, my digestive system has been having an adverse reaction to eating eggs first thing after a night of drinking, which really sucks because it's one of my favorite things to do. On top of that, the whole thing ends up costing you about 8 or 9 bucks before tip and a drink (always tip your waitress 20% minimum you jerks!). Sure that doesn't sound like a lot, but we originally fell in love with Blue Jay because you could get such a satisfying meal for 4 or 5 bucks before a tip. Meh... these numbers matter when you're as broke as we all are. Oh and last but not least cholesterol, sodium, fat, blah blah blah. Shut up. But seriously... don't eat it too often. You'll die.

The Six Letter Word is KAREBARESTAIR

Well the gods are none too happy about me bitching about how much I hate winter so they've swooped in with something we here in the Midwest refer to as "the White Death". Apparently it snowed about five inches last night and I, having the day off today, didn't really notice until about 4:00 or 5:00 PM... by which time the freezing rain was coming down and now five hours later has still not stopped. Well shoot. I don't really have any food in my house and it looks like no one is going anywhere for a while. And of course, keeping my lazy ass in bed all day meant I didn't grap provisions. But I had this bowl of pulled pork which means I have an excuse to eat stuff with barbecue sauce for every meal for like three days, and there's nothing wrong with that.

But back to the white death, this instills an age old tradition in which everyone's work and school gets cancelled the night before so you buy a bunch of beer and drink till you can't feel the cold no more. So I really didn't have a plan or what today's blog was going to be about, but I knew I had to get it done before all that got too serious.

What I would like to talk to you about though is Malcolm McDowell. I mean, is this guy supposed to play the archetypical supervillain, man with the evil plan pulling the strings type guy in everything? I mean, you just kind of look at him and you say, "Yeah, that dude knows what the fuck is up... and it's nothing good."

For example here are all the McDowell roles I know of off the top of my head, at a glance...

Exhibit A - "Heroes" - Mr. Linderman - Character's role: "That dude knows what the fuck is up... and it's nothing good."



Exhibit B - "Some Shitty Movie my Roommate Found on Premium Cable (And the Inspiration for this Blog" - Bad Guy Who Lives in Olden Times Even Though it's Post Apocalyptic Today Times - Character's role: "That dude knows what the fuck is up... and it's nothing good."



Exhibit C - "Metalocalypse" - Vater Orlaag - Character's role: "That dude knows what the fuck is up... and it's nothing good."

Exhibit D - "A Clockwork Orange" - Alex - Character's role: "That dude knows what the fuck is up... and it's nothing good." ...I mean sort of.

Well, that's really all I got. I don't know about you, but if you ask me and this quickly emptying case of Keystone in my fridge I think that's game set and match for a case of typecasting. Boom!

The other point is that movie just ended and they played that crappy song by some band who I think is named Kasabian where the base line is like, "doomba-da-doomb" and then the vocals respond the same with "ahh- ahh- ah -ahhh- ah ah!" and everyone uses it for their crappy action sequence now-a-days. So the crappy movie is over, you now know that a guy from "Metalocalypse" was also the main character in "A Clockwork Orange", and it's only like 11:45 so I've got a lot more beer to take care of before the days out.

Oh and thanks to the snow and ice our satlite reception (that's right, who the hell gets satelite in the middle of the city?) is failing on us. Don't ever get satelite TV... Which reminds me, who on Earth convinced us that "digital" is synonmous with "better picture, better sound!"? That's for another day I guess...

Later dudes.

My Furnace Runs on Straight Cash

Who in the hell are these rich jerks who think they enjoy winter? I was listening to NPR yesterday because my iPod battery only lasts or about 45 minutes at a time and my car charger is broken and there was a promo on for some show about food with the host saying something like, "Most people hate the cold. I love winter time though because that means things like something-something soups and something-something elses rich in carbohydrates!" I envy the fact that this lady can afford to keep herself warm enough to actually enjoy all these things. What winter actually is to the rest of us is a constant chattering of teeth, shaking of knees, and dreaming of warmer times and places leaving you completely unable to focus on anything productive for four months out of every year.

Why all this hostility towards winter? Well, let's start with my electric bill and the heat in my house. Last month my bill was $299.90. I appreciate the fact that they made it ninety cents instead o ninety-nine... that would make the total slap in the face a bit too obvious. So that bill was for the electric we used in November I believe, before that our bill was a little less than half that amount. The only difference in our usage was that we turned our heater on, which is this one massive furnace in the basement with ducts coming off it that run through the house. You can see the fire blazing in the damn thing and it looks like dollar bills just burning off into oblivion... or at least it might as well be because that'd be cheaper and probably heat the house better. The other issue is that the heat ends up leaking out of those ducts before they make it to my bedroom and I just get cold air blown through the vents in my room. So I'm paying an extra $150 a month to air condition my room in the middle of the winter. That hardly seems like a good deal to me, so we tried turning the heat way down, it's just on enough to keep the pipes from freezing. I should also mention that my landlord came over twice and fixed the heat so it'd get to my room. It didn't work, but I'm sure he'll charge us for it before we move out because that's the kind of sleazy stuff landlords always seem to do

In exchange for trying to make our actual heat work I now have a space heater in my bedroom which makes a small pocket of the room comortable enough to sit in while wearing a bathrobe and some blankets. Since I mentioned the space heater let me use it to put the kind of cold we're dealing with her in perspective. The thing shows you the current room temperature while it's heating up and when I turned it on one morning after not using it the night before my room was 48 degrees. I think it was about 30 degrees outside, so you could essentially say the roof I'm paying hundreds of dollars a month to keep over my head pretty much just blocks the wind and holds my stuff... well shit, I don't have a lot of stuff and my car can do that!

But the moral of all this is that people who take fast showers are either dumb or among those rich D-Bags who enjoy winter because they can afford their heat and it works. I also reuse to believe that anyone can get themselves clean in less than 7 or 8 minutes tops. Like my previous room mate, this dude used to run a mile up to campus every day, work out, and run back and then he'd shower. Our bathroom was in between our rooms as in, there was my room, a door to the bathroom, and then on the other side of the bathroom was a door to his room... which was really weird because you could always hear what the other dude was up to through the bathroom because it was tiny. Anyway, he'd be in and out of the shower in two minutes after all that working out. It always made me kind of wonder about not only his hygeine, but also his life time experiences of being warm. I mean, I grew up with a dad who had a competition with the neighbors to see who could get the farthest into winter without turning their heat on... he always won. In those conditions you quickly learn to celebrate the precious time spent with hot water falling around you. They're like tiny little Christmases you can celebrate every day. Sure I've got to pay for the heated water that I'm running a little bit longer, but at least it's heat that I'm using. Who knows where all the heat from that fire in my basement that I'm spending $150 a month on is going...

I can't wait till four more months from now when I'm whining about how hot my house is. Seriously. Can not wait.

In the mean time I'm sitting here wearing pajama pants with jeans over them, a hooded sweatshirt, and a bath robe with my space heater on high about two feet away and it's tolerable as long as I don't leave my desk. I'm thinking I'm going to eat a bunch of pizza and wings by myself to celebrate comfort food since I watched a whole bunch of Man vs. Food last night and now I'm starving. Oh... and I'm dipping all of it mass ranch.

That reminds me, I've got a new food venture I'm going to try to go on in the next few days. I'll report back with my findings.

Later dudes.

Never Forget Ever!

All right, before I get down to anything today, first things first...



So now why did I present that to you? Well... because it's Mike Gravel unflinchingly staring into a camera for a minute and then throwing a single rock into a lake. That's one reason, but more importantly to make a point about how our media is just as disposable as our crappy sweat shop shoes we all wear... or some dumb pretentious crap like that. But finally, and most importantly, I'd forgotten about it completely as in the months since I'd last seen it, like I just said, our media consumption is so disposable that it had sank entirely into the obscurity sector of YouTube. The question is why... I mean, this video is perfect. Man stares at camera. Man throws rock. Man walks away. That's it. That's perfection.

Screw it. You guys just don't get it! It's FREAKING PERFECT.

But what I really meant to say is that what I really meant to do yesterday is introduce this silly blog project yesterday. Since I was all up in arms about the crappy TV I force myself to watch, I didn't really get around to it. Like I was saying yesterday I used to do this a lot. Actually I used to write a lot in general. I wrote about everything everywhere on everything. And I think that was good because I stopped for a long time and then I turned into a slobbering goon who was too lazy to wipe his chin, so then the slobber got everywhere and all my stuff started getting that weird "inside of a dude's mouth smell" on it, and that's just gross and I hate bad smells. So my New Year's resolution was to write more and play more music... I just started on both of those like two days ago. Going great right? I'm pretty sure now that since I've officially declared those two things as "New Years resolutions" that they're pretty much doomed to failure. Aww man...

The only reason I finally got off my ass and started doing this again is because I recently started reading Brendan Kelly's blog and the dude manages to write like four pages a day. That sum'bitch has a baby, some crappy job he's always ranting about that it sound like he spends more time at then I do mine, and a band that spends months at a time on the road, and did I mention a freakin' baby?! And the guy still manages to put down that much material. I thought, "Well screw this guy. I can do that." It's just too bad no one will read mine because my band isn't as popular is his, and his isn't even popular, like at all. But that's cool. I mean as long as I'm doing it, I think that's good enough.

And now you're wondering, "why in the hell was that so much more boring and uneventful than the last one?" Well, because in all honesty, that took too much work! Now I know why cable news sucks so bad... fact checking is too hard. But fear not, I've got lots of stuff that I hope will be entertaining on deck... things you could be doing with your food that you're not, social faux paus in the world of online gaming, adventures in retail, and I guess once in a while I'll make an effort to keep irresponsible media moguls in check.

Later dudes.

How to Lie Without Really Lying

Hello to all three or four of you who may read this at it's original location. As you may know or not care I used to have a blog on Xanga that I updated a lot... and then I stopped. Yup. It's gone now so deal with it dudes. My gabbings will be over here now. There were a few goodies on the old one, but for the most part it was random crap. I mean, no one really cares about how I was sad because some girl didn't like me my freshman year of college or dumb stuff like that. So it's gone and some of those "goodies" I mentioned are still on Facebook.

But that's not what we're here for. Let's get down to brass tacks. I'm excited about a new president. You're excited! Right? Yeah. I mean it's awesome. This dude rules. He's shutting down gitmo, freezing government wages, and putting his foot down on lobbying. And that's just the first forty-eight hours! But I can't be content with that. You see, once things start going too good, it's a rule of thumb that I have to dig deep to find who's still being a poop smear on our moral fabric and bringing the rest of us down so I can continue being pissed off. I run on being pissed off the way Bender on Futurama runs on booze.

It didn't take me long to find out who feels the need to shart all over our parade. Our good friends at Fox News are still playing their game... and they're really good at it. So for the days leading up to and following the inauguration I've been making a point to watch as much of them as possible, at a minimum I've at least been watching Bill-O. If this guy wasn't so dangerous with the tongue sword I would probably admire the hell out of him. I mean, the dude is made a living out of talking and he's "bossed up" as Johnny says. He kept telling me leading up to the inauguration that he'd be fair with Obama, but he would not give him a free pass. Okay. Fair enough. So what did end up happening?

Obama barely made it through inauguration day before the Fox machine started in to make sure their unwaveringly rigid conservative fan base didn't get a chance... to give the guy a chance. Lets take a look at Bill's talking points from last night, the first show after the inauguration:

"How do we cover the new Obama administration? Good question and I have a clear answer. I am going to become Paul Revere."

Well that sounds admirable Bill. Paul Revere was that guy who rode around and told us if the British were coming or something right? Okay. So you'll let us know if bad stuff happens when it happens.... Go on.

"Right now you're in danger."

What!? I am!? TELL ME HOW!!!

"Your family is in danger! Your pet is danger!"

Not Mr. Snuggies! What is the danger?

So he goes on to list Bernie Madof, some other dude, and Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of G.E. as the cause of all the danger because they caused the collapse of our financial system or something. Okay. I get Madof, but what did the head of G.E. do?

"Immelt will get away with doing business with Iran and corrupting NBC and turning it into a far left enterprise."

And the irresponsibility begins... we haven't even gotten to the new President or his administration yet here. Lets take a look at what's going on behind the scenes here. G.E. isn't doing business with Iran anymore, or as Bill likes to put it "aiding in the killing of American troops." This attack and the others that Bill makes daily on his show are in no way based on facts. They're all part of an ongoing feud between he and GE, NBC, and Keith Olberman. I've been watching this thing play out on both Bill and Olberman's shows because I like to keep both sides of punditry in check as much as possible. The result is O'Reilly reporting "news" such as this as if it were fact and claiming that HE is the one not spinning anything and HE is the one who's sifting through all the muck to get you the truth. That is dangerous and irresponsible journalism at it's finest... letting your petty little squabble between yourself and another station and it's pundit lead to straight up lies about war crimes that you pass off as facts. For shame yo! I didn't even mean to discuss that issue, but re watching his Talking Points from last night got me all fired up. Lets see what else they're up to...

Dick Morris... Lets get to this guy, the first guest Bill invites onto his show after Obama's first full day in office. Lets see what he has to say...

"Obama's stimulus package is really a Trojan Horse... inside that Trojan horse is a whole bunch of measures that make us like France, not quite Sweden yet, but France."

Now if you ask me that's awesome. I've heard nothing but good things about Sweden, but this D-Bag meant for that to be a bad thing. The guy then goes on about how Obama is going to nationalize the banking system. Now, I never heard him say that, but I feel like that has happened before... Hmmm....

Either way, we started out within the first ten minutes of giving Obama a fair chance by having a guest on who makes uninterupted wild accusations about how Obama will ruin the banking system and the nation in which no one is working and everyone is trying to live off of welfare within his first hundred days... Okaaaay?

Whatever, it's all right, this Morris guy will ease up once he comes out and finds a man who opens his heart to let love in... Just look at that man... he needs a man to help him ease up.

But that's not all, he goes on to accuse everyone Obama's chosen for his cabinet of being corrupt with no facts or sources to cite whatsoever and Bill agrees because it's now "a one party system".

Again... Bill's giving Obama a fair trial here. He's waiting to see what he actually does before passing judgment. Those past few sentences were rife with sarcasm. You have to make people aware of these things when you're speaking in type form.

Also here's his line of the night as listed on his own website, "The far left is devoid of any humanity and would gleefully tear the USA apart if they could damage George W. Bush."

This is just getting too exhausting to go on. But the point is, this behavior is the norm of what I've seen from fox; if you didn't support the old president then you are unpatriotic, you hate America, and you're trying to tear it apart. And while I didn't get into all the guests I've seen on Fox lately who's only credentials have been that they wrote about or are making movies about or like to just plain flat out bitch about how the Obama only won because the "liberal media is in the tank for him" (you know how they list pundit's credentials under their names as to why you should care about what they say? Well one girl I saw on Bill's show telling us that the Times is in the tank for the 'far left', her only credentials were 'Has a Bachelors in Print Journalism'. That's right, having a bachelors... not even necessarily a job that you needed that bachelors for, makes you qualified to go on the air in front of millions and state your opinion as fact over at FOX) ...umm, I digressed there. Point is, in a mere 24 hour time-span Fox went in a complete 180 of their support the president or else stance to their new stance, "If you support the president then you have been drinking the 'Kool-Aid' (they say that a lot) and are a victim of the liberal media hype machine."

No Fox... I'm just paying attention and I too have, not only a bachelors in a form of journalism, but a couple jobs to boot, so I guess I'm more qualified to my opinion than your pundits are.