Category Archives: Uncategorized

Q: What do you do when you go to the beach and forget your picnic lunch?
A: You eat the sand, which is there.

Humor me.

Q:What did the yogi say to the hotdog vendor?
A: Make me one with everything.

Gimme a B, Gimme an E, Gimme an E, Gimme an R!!

Whattaya Got!

Official pop of the summer season. As they say in Wisconsin, 9 months of winter and 3 months of bad sledding. (Let’s not think about how globe warming is gonna change our vernacular.)

The New York Times is burping Sprecher’s praises.

So luscious with a sandwich.

Dog n Suds was a drive-in I liked when I was a kid. Hot dogs and root beer delivered by a car hop. Does make my tongue feel soapy to think of it, but the name is a good one.

And from a childhood preceding mine, a story from my mother:

Root Beer Blast

Having been born to young, working-class parents two years before the Great Depression descended in 1929, as I grew up I was very familiar with the philosophy of “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, do without”, necessary during that time.

The root beer EXPLODED and coated every surface, including ourselves (and my mother in her good clothes). Boy was my mother mad and I don’t remember if my parents got to church that night.

Pull up a chaise.

The Sublime Miss M turned me on to this story.
Europe’s Best Sandwiches

T+L travels from Berlin to Madrid to deliver the Continent’s quintessential bites.

And while doing so they employ ooh-la-la bons mots comme ça:
cushiony
brittle
rosy
bubbly
springy
fanciful
buttery
airy
brio

Travel! Leisure! Sandwiches! Oooh la la! La sandwich!

Hap Hap Happy Independence Day! 2008 is gonna be spectacular! Come h-e-double-toothpicks or high water, I’m countin’ on it. Celebrate and Commemorate in a Dy-No-Mite Dog Way!!!

I sure do miss Doug Michels‘ mail. Woulda never met him had I not been wearing zebra-striped, hip-hugging, bell-bottomed lycra pants, that I’d made myself. Those things were eye-catching. Where could they be now? All I can find are skull and crossbone tights with fringe running down the sides. They’ll do in a pinch, I spose, although the others were funnier. Ridiculous pants. You haven’t lived until you have spent time in public wearing ridiculous pants.

(Look, it’s film! How retro.)

The only time I ever made them – sealing the jars to be put up for the winter – I ate every last pickle before the week was out. Can’t resist a pickle.

What is this?

This is a rich sardine.

Not too long ago I had a sardine sandwich. At a restaurant. It was a very nice restaurant in Williamsburg, New York, the Roebling Tea Room. The Roebling Tea Room is a sensible place – sensibly excellent bread, sensibly savvy wine and beer list, sensibly comfort-worn – and not at all fussy, as the name implies.

Finding typically maligned foods such as sardines and liverwurst on a menu ups the mercury on my thermometer, so I warmed to the place instantly. Honestly, sardines are so rarely served around here, I had to have them. Anything that is delectable straight out of the can is improved upon immensely with simplicity. The sardines on my sandwich shared their buttered bread with radishes and eggs. Old fashioned modernity. Uh huh.

Foraging for fish? Fish in a tin? Look! For the Cupboard, Fish in Tins, Just Waiting for a Fork. These are the folks who bring it: Cole’s

The Times does not have a corner on the cravin’-dines market. The Washington Post has a hankering for Cole’s sardines, too.

I feel friendly towards sardines. They are tin can pals. All you need is a bit of bread, any old bread. There are nice ones out there, just looking for a good home. They aren’t noisy, won’t wreck your furniture, and they don’t take up much area in the pantry. The tins click into a satisfying stack on their deeply grooved edge.

Photo by Mike at ComicsDC

Bologna and Bonanza, are those words not interchangeable??

It’s a Bologna Bonanza!

It’s a Bonanza Bologna!

See, looks swell either way.

Don’t know about you, but my global positioning system has Biscuitville in flashing lights. 

Heard from a reliable, bologna-loving source that a bologna biscuit is not all that. I admit, the bologna seems not salty enough to carry the biscuit burden. And I have to wonder, do you spread it with Country Crock and grape jelly? Took a little drive from the east coast to Texas on my own, stopping along the way on backroads for meals. Spent a lot of time pondering the application of Country Crock and grape jelly until finally I broke down and asked the waitress. “You put it on your sausage biscuit, honey,” she said.

Aha. You got yer fat, yer salt, yer sweet, and your bread to carry it. A perfect union of flavors. Lick the napkin for umani.

Photo by Mike at ComicsDC

Summer eating for me as a child meant flicking canned peas from the macaroni salad into my lap, lowering my knees to drop the peas to the deck, where I could toe them through the cracks to the patio below.

And peanut butter books for the squirrels. Take a stiff piece of paper, about 3 x 6, fold it in half, use a pen to give it an eyecatching title such as Nut Tales, spread the inside with peanut butter and hold it out, silently, to a squirrel.  Our midwestern squirrels were tamish, so they would snatch up a book quick as a wink, then perch and “read”, within plain sight. I tried it here once. Crazy city squirrels grabbed their books and raced up to the far reaches of the trees. Apparently urban squirrels prefer to read in seclusion.

“Would you like something to read?”
Dylan Thomas

No mention of peanut butter books on peanutbutterboy‘s blog although there is a very terrifying Baked Peanut Butter Corn Dog and other atrocities. One can assume it is very bad manners indeed to blogbash, particularly since I live in a glass house, being in love with the Hoctodog, a true sausage atrocity.

While I can get hot under the collar over a hotdog, I don’t feel strongly about peanut butter until it is gilding a banana. Under those circumstances….

No no no.

Mais oui.