Category Archives: Uncategorized

Drinking pickle juice will make you giddy. Licking a stick of frozen pickle juice? Simply slows the effect. Wanna try it? Pickle Sickle is moving 20,000 a month, largely via internet sales.

From jar-swigging to pickle juice cubes-on-a-stick, read it all here. I think they should go for a clean sweep with Koolickles . Take over the world.

Heading to the kitchen now to churn a batch of Applewood Smoked Ham Ice Cream with Virgin Pine Cheddar Blue Bits.

Photo by Renee Comet

Styling by Lisa Cherkasky

This is an almond butter sandwich, a recipe I created for the Almond Board when I was doing a little spokesperson stuff for them. The recipe had a sexier name, but that slips my mind at the moment. I forget to eat almond butter, but prefer it to peanut butter sometimes, especially if you add something green and crunchy. Versatile stuff, it is.

Gee Whiz, Cheesesteak Isn’t Philly’s Best Sub

Two times round on the Milwaukee frozen custard today. Bookending Klement’s bratwurst. It was a perfect afternoon for ice cream – warm enough to want it, cold enough to let you lick lackadaisically. No need to sweep the skirt for drips.

“What’s that warm, sauer, smells-of-home vapor floating up the street?”, we were thinking on our approach to the Dairy Godmother in Del Ray. Well, whaddya know, Brat Night’s been moved to Sunday this month. Well, dang. Custard now? Custard later? Spin the logic dial and you get… both!

The Dairy Godmother is charming and Liz, who owns it, is clever. Brat nights, sheepshead nights, accordions, polka on the juke box, superlative custard, homemade marshmallows and dog ice cream…. We’ve been there in our pajamas, lured by the promise of free hot chocolate with raspberry marshmallows.

Riffing on the enchantment of dairy godmothers, the juke box is loaded with Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ I Put a Spell on You, Santana’s Black Magic Woman and other evocative and alluring selections. The keys worn most pale are, naturally, those that spin Richie Gomulken, Eddie Blazonczyk and other godfathers of polka.

Folks poured out onto the street on our return visit. The wait for a brat, I kid you knat, was over an hour.

Amusing wait.

Avec Sprecker. Current selection includes impulse purchase rootbeer flavored lipbalm. I bought two. They are small.

Here is Liz pausing in the midst of chaos atop her million dollar custard maker.

Liz knows her way around a potato, turning piles of sweet spuds into green onion-laced potato salad. Thank your lucky stars, it is neither sweet nor gloopy. Meat or no meat. Very nice. The sauerkraut is caramelly-brown, velvety-tender and elevates cabbage to a height previously unthinkable.

Brats don’t float.

It was wild. Waves and waves of bratwursted crowds, shortage of tables. Run for your lives!!!

Racing sausages? Yes, racing sausages.

I love this site for their choice of numbers: Plan 59/ The Museum of Midcentury Illustration

The nine is so relaxed and curvy, the five still getting there. She needs a little drink and a few soothing words.

I grew up behind 59 in the era of this ad. Our house number – as you see it, it is – was house specific. Our house. The number(s) are beautiful and clean. Gorgeous as the Hunt’s labels. Simply “Hunts”. You can read it without taxing your eyes or your brain. It is all you need. This house goes up in smoke I’m gonna grab my kid, my dog and 59.

The “Refrigeraider” doesn’t know that midnight snacks have been outlawed in these times. Not good for you, they say. Just another nail in the coffin of pleasure. In that I am an outlaw. Food tastes so good surrounded by the cloak of darkness, when time is still and each tick of the clock is followed by a pause. A pause to chew and ponder. I do my best thinking midnight snack in hand.

If my memory serves, there was a man, a small-town, midwestern man, a husband and family man, whose wife – he was a neighbor and I heard this when I was a kid – found him sitting at the kitchen table in the middle of the night, stick of butter in one hand, quart of whipping cream in the other. Taking a bite and a swig, a bite and a swig. Always thought this would be the way I would go off the deep end in the dairy state too, had I stayed. She had him committed.

Stream of consciousness flows free around midnight in the light of a 25 watt bulb. Plans come to mind. Wild plans.

If it’s worth caring about, it’s worth carrying, and if it’s worth carrying, ya need something to carry it IN. Something cute. It it don’t fit, force it. My motto. Food these days. Not cut for a Chow Wagon. Sartorially unsuitable. You’ll have to make a painful choice cause that artisanal stuff is not (hate this word) baggie shaped.

Now I remember a funny old (non)joke joke.

Question: Do you walk to school or carry your lunch? (Delivery tip – do not pause while reading.)

Lunch Box Museum
The River Market Antiques and Art Center
3226 Hamilton Rd.
Columbus GA 31904

Operated by Allen and Bonnie Woodall.
Tel/Fax: 706-322-0516

A collection of over 3,500 colorful metal school children’s lunch boxes, starting with the Hopalong Cassidy model of 1951. All are now out of production, but are here available for purchase.

Admission Info: daily: Monday – Saturday, 9 am – 6 pm; Sunday, 12 – 6 pm

Founded by Allen M. Woodall, Jr., co-author of the leading collectors’ guide to metal lunch boxes. A major part of the collection was originally owned by Dr. Robert Carr.

Sincere gratitude to my mother for researching and assembling museum information. For more, lots and lots more, see Food History News.

Look here on VinylPulse for Pocket Pork Roll Call. Monster Pork. Yowza.

Stopping now cause I have exhausted this week’s paren quota.

The BLT ring was created as a collaboration between jewelry designer Carrie Weston and The Grateful Palate, the pork connoisseurs behind the Bacon of the Month Club. They stack on your slender digit and look fab! Oooooh!!!!

Hot dog cuff links for your Freedom cuffs.

Tubular foods pendant.

Hamburger rings. Mix and match with the BLT. Bacon burger anyone?

These trinkets make me ache for the thrill of purchase. Or better yet, the thrill of reception.

The Banh Mi of My Dreams

Click on the link to read Walter Nichols adoring banh mi story in the Washington Post from February 6. He chews and reminisces thusly,

At Nhu Lan, a one-table Vietnamese sandwich shop in a Falls Church, I take a bite of a “special combination” banh mi thit nguoi, which translates as “bread with meat cold cuts.” As I taste the pork liver pate, ham, cilantro and pickled radish, I close my eyes and I’m cruising the Mekong Delta at dawn in a funky long boat, as I did a dozen years ago, just south of the city of Can Tho.

I may live in the concrete lawn of Northern Virginia, but we do brag the 5th largest concentration of Vietnamese and Vietnamese Americans in the US. 37,000 or so. When I take a bite of “special combination” I close my eyes and am cruising urban-suburban America, an exotic voyage unto itself. Long stretches of shopsigns nearby where I cannot read a word. Roll down the window, turn your nose toward the wind and sniff hard.

When the French brought sandwiches to Vietnam they did right. Shoulda quit while they were ahead.

See my post about Song Que, first rate banh mi shop, here.

In the freezer case. Blech.

Conveniently repulsive.

The copy reads “Stop rummaging through the fridge for dinner. Start savoring it.” And what is so wrong with rummaging?!? That’s how you locate the good stuff. How else would I put my hands on those delicious odd scraps?

At the bottom, “Every dinner should feel this good.” Feel. Did they say feel? This pseudo-panini might make a good handwarmer.

And this copy reads, “People everywhere are talking about Smucker’s Uncrustables Sandwiches, and loving the taste. We think you’ll agree. Pick up a box in the freezer aisle…”

Since when do peanut butter and jelly sandwiches need to be simplified?

Yes, the taste probably does speak for itself. It shouts,

“DO NOT EAT ME!”

Bottle Rockets fans know sandwiches. They do. Reading their words I was sandwich-struck. The scales fell away and my eyes turned to mayo whites circling green-olive-slice pupils.

Recently the resurfacing sandwich thread on the Bottlerockets message board lauded Culver’s

preferred by some to Kopp’s, a beloved Milwaukee burger and custard bastion. When driving around Wisconsin with my mother she is constantly at my elbow, finagling a Culver’s lunch. Culver’s is a chain, doncha know. A chain of love. Custard love.

Sonofdad started the Culver’s thing:

I love Culver’s in Wisconsin. I know it’s a chain but I really like it. It’s better than Kopp’s. The Butter Burger, best hangover food EVER. The burgers are bigger than the buns. Yummy!

Amazing Bob:

I’m always up for a Rueben or a Pork Tenderloin from Culvers….not forgetting the cheese curds either…mmmmm.

Bharroun:

I could literally eat their Walleye sandwiches morning, noon & night.

Bharroun headed out for recon:

Did the Culver’s thing for lunch yesterday. Unfortunately, the Walleye fillet was smaller than previous years, and had a noticeably “river” taste about it.

The cheese curds, were, however, spectacular. As was the frozen custard.

They have Chicken Fried Steak on the menu now – that will be my choice next time around.

Chicken Fried Steak?!? A ha, Culver’s has outposts in Texas. The Walleye Sandwich is apparently a seasonal special. It has been theorized that it surfaces for Lent. I want some. May have to swear off east coast living for Lent in order to get it.