Foods for those that just don't care anymore

[unclevlad]

Remember when Food Network ran the Next Food Network Chef series?  The episodes Lau has now, like the chicken with fried rice soup, are close to series-level quality...editing, flow, delivery.  If you saw NFNC, even the final competition episodes tend to show more roughness...but man, go back to the EARLY ones, and they're *awful* at times.  It's not at all surprising;  the camera, the timing, intermixing talking and performing cooking tasks...that's something that takes work.  

[Logan D. Hurricanes]

[Cygnia]

Prego no Pao (Portuguese steak sandwich)

[Cygnia]

 

[Cygnia]

 

[tkdguy]

Here are the best pastas in the SF Bay Area according to the Chronicle.

 

Edit: I should include the wine pairings for that list.

[Logan D. Hurricanes]

Dang it, I want Emo Wendy's over here!

[unclevlad]

27 minutes ago, Logan D. Hurricanes said:

Dang it, I want Emo Wendy's over here!

 

Right.

 

Who's up to do an intervention?  We need to save him before it's too late!!!

 

1 hour ago, tkdguy said:

Here are the best pastas in the SF Bay Area according to the Chronicle.

 

Edit: I should include the wine pairings for that list.

 

yummmmmmmmmmmm   I do miss pasta.  

Those wine pairings make a lot more sense than most I've seen.  For equal time...beer matches I'd try.

Tomato sauces:  red ales, Octoberfest/mairzens.  Some pale ales...flavor profile matters here.  Piney is gonna clash.  Smoked beer.

Cheese sauces:  pale ales to IPAs.  The richer the cheese, the bigger you can go.  BLUE cheese sauces are an exception here, I'd stay lighter.  

Pesto/veggie:  nothing too big.  No dry-hop IPAs/DIPAs, most dark beers (even Guinness or Negra Modelo) don't have the right profiles, but otherwise...lighter pales, decent lagers, mairzens, fresh-hopped that isn't real big...

 

[Logan D. Hurricanes]

19 hours ago, unclevlad said:

Right.

 

Who's up to do an intervention?  We need to save him before it's too late!!!

 

[L. Marcus]

Disintegration is the best album ever.

[Cygnia]

 

[Cygnia]

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/conchas-and-melonpan?utm_medium=gastro-page&utm_source=facebook

[Logan D. Hurricanes]

Hidden Valley and Van Leeuwen Release Ranch Ice Cream at Walmart

 

[unclevlad]

From the story....

 

Quote

The smell is initially off-putting — who's expecting onion in their ice cream after all? But our testers, even those who don't love ranch in its traditional form, agreed the taste was better than we expected.

 

Damnation by faint praise, I'd say...

[Cancer]

<barf emoticon>

[Cygnia]

 

[Cancer]

<snark> Because there isn't enough bleep bacon for everyone to have what they really want for breakfast! </snark>

[unclevlad]

Man does not live by bacon alone.

There's onions to be included.  Sometimes mushrooms, sometimes fine-diced bell pepper or mini sweet peppers.  Not so much chile peppers for me, I find their flavors too strong.  Blend into 2-3 beaten eggs, toss into a preheated pan, top with grated cheese, toss into a 350 degree oven.  (Oh, everything but the eggs got cooked in advance.  Which also makes for a pretty fast breakfast.)

 

A nasty, dirty fact about most fruit juices...they're sugar bombs.  Even fresh orange or apple juice...yeah, I grew up on the frozen stuff just like everyone else, but decent fresh, not from concentrate, is VASTLY better...but pop quiz.  What has more sugar, a 12 oz. Coke, or 12 ounces of OJ?

It's the OJ.  And apple juice is slightly higher than OJ.  Note that this is often *on top of* the sugar bomb cereal, or pancakes with syrup, or even just a couple slices of toasted Wonder Bread.  

 

When I *had to* slash my sugar/carb intake, at first I was going, well, OK, fruit juices.  NOPE.  Or yogurt...yes and no.  Some are fine, but most aren't.  A decent brand's plain yogurt...ok.  Their vanilla?  Nope.  Those were probably the 2 central food items that taught me to READ THE LABEL!!  Anyone should recognize to eliminate the obvious stuff.  Far too many fail to realize there's very little difference between carbs and sugars...because carbs break down to sugars.  They should but they don't.  But there's also the more insidious things like the fruit juices.

[Cygnia]

I remember the "Adam Ruins Everything" segments on orange juice and bacon.  Very enlightening.

[Cygnia]

Should I Add Feta to Chocolate Cookies? Should I?

 

[Logan D. Hurricanes]

[unclevlad]

3 hours ago, Cygnia said:

Should I Add Feta to Chocolate Cookies? Should I?

 

 

 

TL;DR --

 

Quote

The verdict? Feta definitely adds a salty component to sweet cookies, much like miso in these from our deputy food editor Hana Asbrink. But ultimately, feta is still too mild to stand up to punchy dark chocolate, and it doesn’t bring much textural contrast since the cheese is soft. While I don’t think I’ll be adding them to the regular rotation, I have admittedly eaten three of them in the past hour. I have to hand it to Gelen—she knows how to make a wild card that I simply must try.

 

I kinda get the notion;  another ingredient is sour cream, which actually isn't a bad complement.  (The dough calls for 200g of flour, 250 g total of sugars [brown and white], 100 g of 70-80% dark choc, and 25 g of dutch process cocoa powder, so we're talking fairly sweet and VERY punchy on the chocolate.  Oh, and 1 1/2 sticks of butter...browned.  Yeah, this is a freaking RICH cookie, so cutting it with something tart is probably a good idea.)

 

But...I go with Logan.  Nope.  

[Cygnia]

*facepalms in Gen-X*

SunnyD Just Dropped A New Alcoholic Beverage—And '90s Kids Are About To Get Wasted

[unclevlad]

A co-worker of mine, back in the day, used to make his own version.  He started with sugar water and Turbo Yeast, which is a distiller's yeast.  It can produce, according to their web site, 20% alcohol in 5-6 days.  From there you cut it with whatever...which wouldn't be much in the way of real fruit juice because 5% alcohol won't keep it stable.  So this goes back to Cygnia's Adam Ruins Orange Juice...natural flavors added.  

 

But hey, that's what they did with SunnyD in the first place.  Never drank the stuff regularly...probably *occasionally* on a plane?  Or some other time where a quick cup-size pack made sense.  

 

This was a huge growth market for a while, with everyone and their cousin hopping on, so it's not all that surprising...or, really, that much of a change in the overall composition, I suspect.  I suppose they're trying to play off the nostalgia kick, but I'd question whether that'll work.  If you were 10 in '93, you're 40 now.  From WineBusiness.com:

 

Quote

Something that may not be obvious from the marketing is that hard seltzers skew to a female audience, Miller said. And they definitely skew younger: while 59% of consumers ages 21-34 on the Nielsen household panel say they drink hard seltzer at least occasionally, that number drops to 47% of consumers age 35 to 54 and only 20% of consumers age 55+.

 

They also have to achieve market penetration against the market leaders, which is hard to do.  Truly and White Claw have about 70% of the market.  Truly is owned by Boston Brewing, the makers of Sam Adams;  White Claw, by the company that also makes Mike's.  Size is HUGE...because the big guys have direct lines to the distributors, and the distributors often *completely* control the content of the beer coolers in non-specialty stores.  (When Goose Island was bought by AB InBev a decade ago, for a while they suddenly got most of a cooler door's worth of shelf space...because now they were part of a mega-corp's brand portfolio, and thus distribution network.)  In case you didn't know:  beer distributors are quasi-monopolies.  AB InBev is only sold by 1 distributor per area, same with MolsonCoors, same with....  And that covers their entire brand portfolio.

[Cancer]

26 minutes ago, unclevlad said:

...  In case you didn't know:  beer distributors are quasi-monopolies.  AB InBev is only sold by 1 distributor per area, same with MolsonCoors, same with....  And that covers their entire brand portfolio.

 

I did know this, and between that knowledge and a strong preference for craft brews anyway, I more or less always buy beers made locally.  I'm not a big beer consumer in any case, though.