Archive for the ‘Food’ Category

Happy Pi Day, everyone!

Thursday, March 14th, 2024

America’s Test Kitchen recipe for Key Lime pie (archived).

The Pi search page.

If you live in Austin or Houston, or are in town for South by So What, Tumble 22 has a really really good chocolate cream pie.

Obit watch: February 14, 2024.

Wednesday, February 14th, 2024

William Post, one of nature’s noblemen.

Mr. Post was the creator of the Pop-Tart.

Post did numerous interviews about his invention during his lifetime and every time he said the credit was shared.
“Bill would say, ‘I assembled an amazing team that developed Kellogg’s concept of a shelf-stable toaster pastry into a fine product that we could bring to market in the span of just four months,’,” his death notice states.

NYT (archived).

Obit watch: February 13, 2024.

Tuesday, February 13th, 2024

Capt. Larry L. Taylor (United States Army – ret.) passed away on January 28th.

I wrote about Capt. Taylor back in September, when he received the Medal of Honor. Capt. Taylor is the guy who flew four men out of a hot LZ, with them hanging onto the sides of his Huey Cobra helicopter.

Bob Edwards, NPR guy. There was a time when I woke up to Bob Edwards in the morning…

Also among the dead Bobs: Bob Moore, founder of Bob’s Red Mill. I’ve bought and used specialty products from Bob’s, though I never met Bob. 94 is a pretty good run.

David Bouley, prominent NYC chef.

Kelvin Kiptum, marathon runner. He was 24 and died in a car accident in Kenya.

This seems particularly sad. He set the men’s marathon record in Chicago last year: 2:00:35.

It was only his third marathon.

With hundreds of Kenyans having been barred from the sport in the past decade because of doping violations, his record drew not only wonderment, but also scrutiny. “My secret is training,” Kiptum, who was never accused of doping and had no drug suspensions, told reporters last fall. “Not any other thing.”

Many people think he had a shot at running a marathon in under two hours, which is sort of the Holy Grail of marathon running. He actually ran one in Vienna (in 2019) at 1:59:40, but that didn’t count as a record for reasons. He had said he was going to try to break the two-hour mark in Rotterdam in April.

Obit watch: January 17, 2024.

Wednesday, January 17th, 2024

Professor Peter Schickele, of the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople.

Damn it.

I was a big fan of Prof. Schickele and his interpretations of P.D.Q. Bach when I was younger. I still am, but I was when I was younger too. (If it’s been a while since I bought a PDQ Bach album, well, it’s been a minute since I bought any albums.)

Fun fact: he stole Philip Glass’s woman. (Well, okay, only sort of. You’ll have to read the obit for the full story. And that is supposedly a NYT “gift” link: please let me know if you have a problem.)

Under his own name, Mr. Schickele (pronounced SHICK-uh-lee) composed more than 100 symphonic, choral, solo instrumental and chamber works, first heard on concert stages in the 1950s and later commissioned by some of the world’s leading orchestras, soloists and chamber ensembles. He also wrote film scores and musical numbers for Broadway.

Worth noting: he wrote the score for “Silent Running”.

Crucially, there was the music, which betrayed a deeply cerebral silliness that was no less silly for being cerebral. Mr. Schickele was such a keen compositional impersonator that the mock-Mozartean music he wrote in P.D.Q.’s name sounded exactly like Mozart — or like what Mozart would have sounded like if Salieri had slipped him a tab or two of LSD.
Designed to be appreciated by novices and cognoscenti alike, P.D.Q.’s music is rife with inside jokes and broken taboos: unmoored melodies that range painfully through a panoply of keys; unstable harmonies begging for resolutions that never come; variations that have nothing whatever to do with their themes. It is the aural equivalent of the elaborate staircases in M.C. Escher engravings that don’t actually lead anywhere.

True story: once upon a time, I had just bought the new Schickele recording of a recently discovered P.D.Q. Bach work. Lawrence and I were sitting around our apartment listening to it when a friend came over for a visit. Said friend was (like us) a big fan of Glass and other minimalist composers. So we told our friend we had a new Philip Glass recording, and we wanted to play the first track for him.

He was fooled. Right up to the point where the slide whistle came in.

I was lucky enough to see him in performance…

In his early, supple years, he often slid down a rope suspended from the first balcony; on at least one occasion he ran down the aisle, vast suitcase in hand, as if delayed at the airport; on another he entered, pursued by a gorilla.

…when he could still climb down a rope.

“They were playing a record in the store,” Mr. Schickele recalled in a 1997 interview for the NPR program “All Things Considered.” “It was a sappy love song. And being a 9-year-old, there’s nothing worse, of course. But all of a sudden, after the last note of the song, there were these two pistol shots.”
That song, he learned, was Mr. Jones’s “A Serenade to a Jerk.”
“I’ve always felt that those pistol shots changed my life,” Mr. Schickele continued. “That was the beginning of it all for me.”

Prof. Schickele also gave me a quote I have been known to use from time to time:

“Truth is just truth – you can’t have opinions about truth.”

John Brotherton, owner and pitmaster at Brotherton’s Black Iron Barbecue. The Saturday Dining Conspiracy has been there twice, and eaten there once. That’s not a shot at Mr. Brotherton, just a statement of reality. When you run a really good barbecue restaurant (which Brotherton’s is), your customers run the risk of the barbecue selling out before they get there.

Dejan Milojević, assistant coach for the Golden State Warriors. He was 46.

Lynne Marta, actress. Other credits include “The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo”, “The F.B.I.”, and “Then Came Bronson”.

Some followups: Tom Shales in the NYT. And an appreciation of him by one of the NYT writers.

Nice obit for Terry Bisson by Michael Swanwick.

Michael Swanwick also has a touching piece up about his friend of 50 years, Tom Purdom, which I encourage you to go read.

Trip report: Tulsa, OK.

Thursday, November 16th, 2023

So Mike the Musicologist and I went back to Tulsa for the Wanenmacher’s Tulsa Arms Show again last week. Left Wednesday, got back this past Monday night.

I don’t want to say it was a bad trip: it wasn’t, but it did seem kind of ill-fated from the start. No broken friendships, no car damage (though MtM did get a little love tap from behind on a San Antonio freeway – no harm done), no lost money, no hotel problems.

But I took the Tuesday off to pack, and instead of things going smoothly, it was a parade of petty annoyances, including a dryer that broke while I was doing laundry. (The laundromat on Hudson Bend near Lakeway is the grungiest one I’ve ever seen in my life.)

Then, once we got to Tulsa, I felt a little off my feed much of the trip. It seemed like I was having constant mild allergic reactions to something: watery nose, itchy skin, scratchy throat, etc. It was low level and didn’t keep me from enjoying myself, but it was enough to bother me.

(We’ve taken to getting a VRBO when we go, instead of a hotel room. That generally works out okay, though MtM often has criticism of the interior design of the homes we get.)

I didn’t buy any guns at the show. I did find a few I liked, including a S&W Model 53 with the 8 3/8″ barrel. But the seller wanted $2,300, which was more than I was willing to pay. I planned to go back before the show ended on Sunday and see if he’d take a lower offer, but when we got there at 2 PM (show closes at 4 PM on Sunday) he’d already packed up and left. I saw a few other attractive guns (a Mannlicher stocked CZ .22 Hornet, a couple of Miroku clones of the Winchester 52 Sporter) but I was so worn out by that point I couldn’t muster the energy to go back for any of them. Plus they would have been consolation prizes, plus these shouldn’t be hard to find on GunBroker.

It seemed like the show had changed a little since Joe Wanenmacher’s death. I felt like there was more non-gun related junk (candy, jerky, toys, etc.) than there was previously. I personally didn’t hear any vendors complaining, but MtM told me he did. At least the “no scentsy” policy is still in effect.

I did pick up some books at the show which I will be cataloging. Additionally, while we were running around in the days before the show, MtM and I found what seems to be the only used bookstore in Tulsa: Gardner’s Used Books. It is a big sprawling place. I wasn’t expecting much…

…and I walked out with a large box totaling $110 (after a 20% discount for spending over $100) of old gun books and gun magazines. Including some old Gun Digest volumes for the ongoing project (the two earliest being 1960 and 1962: the 1962 one has a particularly cool illustration of a .22 Jet on the cover. That’ll make a good prop when I find one.) and a bunch of American Handgunner annuals and other ephemera. I’m probably not going to catalog all of the box individually, but I may highlight a few specific things I find interesting.

One of the other days we took to visit the U.S. Marshals Museum in Fort Smith, Arkansas. (That’s only about two hours from Tulsa.) The museum just opened in July, and, while it was a nice place to visit and we had a lot of fun, it feels kind of big for the number of exhibits they have. I’m kind of hoping that they plan to bring in even more stuff, and next time when we drag a friend there, it’ll feel a bit more fleshed out.

We had good meals at:

  • Siegi’s Sausage Factory, our traditional haunt.
  • Biga, a nice Italian place. It felt a little odd to me. Not in the bad sense, but it felt very much like a family owned and run place that was at least a couple of generations old…with waitstaff that looked very young to me, like college kids…but acted like professionals. Highly recommended.
  • Prhyme, a downtown steakhouse. I admit, I was a little put off by the spelling of the name, but MtM talked me into it, and I was glad. I wasn’t feeling up to a big steak, so I ordered French Onion soup and what turned out to be a massive charcuterie board that Mike had to help me finish. It was all very very good. And speaking of professional waitstaff, ask for Hannah if you go.
  • The Big Biscuit, a chain, but a nice breakfast and lunch place. In spite of the name, they also have pancakes, french toast, and other normal breakfast fare. We could use one of these out in my part of town. Just sayin’.

We had dinner Saturday night with one of my Association friends at a Billy Sims BBQ. The ‘cue was good, but the experience was odd. We actually thought they were closed when we pulled up around 7:30. It wasn’t closed, but they had turned off half the lights in the restaurant so it looked that way from the outside. That left the other half in sort of a semi-dark state, which was mildly annoying but didn’t upset our digestion or our conversation too much.

We also had lunch at a diner type joint in the same center as the Billy Sims, but I can’t remember the name of it for the life of me. If MtM texts it over to me, I’ll update here. (Update 11/17: MtM informs me that it was Ron’s Hamburgers & Chili, which seems to be a regional chain.)

Next trip to Tulsa for Wanenmacher’s is tentatively scheduled for April of 2025. I’m hoping I can drag along recruit a couple more friends to join us on that trip. However, the 2024 S&WCA Symposium is there next June, so I will be going back for that (good Lord willing and the creek don’t rise).

Obit watch: October 18, 2023.

Wednesday, October 18th, 2023

Dr. James Irving Wimsatt, professor emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin, passed away Sunday morning, He was 96.

Dr. Wimsatt was a personal friend of mine, and of many other readers of this blog. I met him through his son, Andrew.

He was a great guy. I always felt intimidated by him: I described him to someone (no disrespect intended, Andrew) as “scary smart and tough as a bus station steak”. He was walking several miles a day on a regular basis well into his 90s. And he remained in full possession of his facilities pretty much right up until his death (though he’d been in and out of hospitals and rehab).

I thought this was kind of a neat entry from encyclopedia.com:

In Chaucer and His French Contemporaries: Natural Music in the Fourteenth Century, Wimsatt provides a wide range of information and analysis that treats comprehensively Chaucer’s reciprocal relationships with fourteenth-century French poetry and poetic theory. In addition to considering the works of Chaucer, Wimsatt addresses the efforts of such poets as Guillaume de Machaut, Jean de le Mote, Froissart, Oton de Granson, and Eustache Deschamps, writers who have previously been dismissed as mundane or not worth literary examination. However, Wimsatt considers them all viable poets and pays close attention to their lyric styles in particular. He also looks at the climate of the culture at the time and how this affected the themes of these writers’ works and any overlap in ideas. Jane H.M. Taylor, writing for the Review of English Studies, remarked that “Wimsatt’s breadth of knowledge is remarkable; his contribution to Chaucer studies is valuable, and indeed, on the rather neglected Oton de Granson and Eustache Deschamps, he offers insights which French scholars too might well find worthwhile.” Ardis Butterfield, in a review for Medium Aevum, dubbed the book “a substantial and reliable guide to Chaucer’s connections with fourteenth-century France.”

He wasn’t just a Chaucerian, though my understanding is he was a damn good one. He also wrote a lot about other poets. Dr. Wimsatt was kind enough, at one point, to give me a copy of his Hopkins’s Poetics of Speech Sound. I haven’t read it yet, being backlogged, but I wish I had before he passed.

He also served honorably in the US Navy. And he was a pretty regular member of the Saturday Dining Conspiracy.

“He that loveth God will do diligence to please God by his works, and abandon himself, with all his might, well for to do.”
–Geoffrey “Big Geoff” Chaucer

I believe that Dr. Wimsatt did indeed please God by his works, and he’s up there laughing with all those other English professors of that generation.

(Crossposed to the Logbook of the Saturday Dining Conspiracy.)

Obit watch: October 15, 2023.

Sunday, October 15th, 2023

I’m aware of Suzanne Somers, but all the obits I’ve seen so far have been preliminary. I think I’ll wait until tomorrow on this one.

Piper Laurie. THR.

Other credits include two episodes of the 1985-1986 “Twilight Zone” revival, “The Bunker”, “The Eleventh Hour” and “Breaking Point” (both of which I was just recently reading about, and which I would love to see on home video), and three episodes of “St. Elsewhere”.

Colette Rossant, cookbook author and popularizer of French food. She may have been a bit obscure for most of you: I know of her because she was a great friend of Calvin Trillin, and he wrote about her multiple times in “The Tummy Trilogy”.

In a 1981 article in The Times with the headline “The Inspirations of a Global Cook,” Craig Claiborne, the newspaper’s august food critic, wrote that he “found it impossible to refuse an invitation to a Rossant meal, which turned out to be a feast,” including a blend of fresh and smoked salmon christened with rillettes of fish as an appetizer, a roast of veal “cooked to a savory state in milk” and other delicacies.
Mr. Claiborne noted that Mr. Trillin, the celebrated author, humorist and food writer, had once written that whenever he was invited to dine at Ms. Rossant’s, his wife, Alice, was “forced to grab me by the jacket two or three times to keep me from breaking into a steady, uncharacteristic trot.”

Tommy Gambino, of Gambino family fame.

He was the nephew of “Big Paul” Castellano, who succeeded Carlo as the head of the family but was rubbed out in 1985 on the orders of eventual Gambino godfather John Gotti.
Tommy Gambino arrived at Sparks Steakhouse on East 46th Street just moments after Castellano and his driver, Tommy Bilotti, were gunned down outside the eatery.
Tommy Gambino, once described as the a “quintessential Mafia prince of New York City,” was convicted in 1993 of two counts of racketeering and racketeering conspiracy for controlling gambling and loan sharking operations in Connecticut.
He served in federal prison from 1996 to 2000.
The prosecution’s evidence in his trial included secretly recorded conversations with Mafia turncoat Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano.

Pho pas.

Saturday, October 14th, 2023

State Fair time has rolled around again. And I have been negligent in covering this year’s offerings.

Various people have sent me links to stories, so it isn’t anyone’s fault but mine. I think I’ve just been too busy naval gazing.

Anyway, by way of the paper of record, I have learned that there’s a scandal at the State Fair.

Ms. Le, a vendor at the fair, is being accused of stealing their deep-fried pho recipe.

Yes, you read that correctly. You are not having a stroke. “Deep-fried pho”.

The version at the state fair, which costs $24, is deep-fried and the size of a salami. The hulking phorrito at Cris and John, a Vietnamese Mexican restaurant, is pan-fried, as stocky as a cocktail shaker and starts at $10. Each is served with broth as a dipping sauce, though Ms. Le’s is a light, aromatic infusion, while the phorrito’s accouterment is somewhere between traditional pho broth and birria consomé.

It’s a little more complicated, though: Cris and John were offered a slot at the fair, but they would have had to close on Saturday (that seems like a non-starter), and Ms. Le apparently offered to work with them before the fair. However, Ms. Le also says she’s been working on deep-fried pho since 2011.

Mr. Pham and Ms. Mendez, who recalled painful criticism of their third-culture fusion cuisine when they opened their restaurant in 2017, are the first to relinquish credit for the phorrito. They based their version on one sold by the Los Angeles restaurant Komodo.

Also: gratuitous photo of “cheesecake swaddled in chocolate and Biscoff cookie crumbs”. On a stick. Of course.

Obit watch: October 12, 2023.

Thursday, October 12th, 2023

Walt Garrison, legendary Dallas Cowboy, rodeo competetor, and Skoal endorser.

His best season was 1971, where he scored 10 touchdowns and had 1,174 total yards, and it was capped off by a 24-3 Super Bowl victory over Miami. He was named to the Pro Bowl that season.
A knee injury Garrison suffered while steer wrestling in 1975 ultimately ended his NFL career. He retired from Dallas as the third-leading rusher and fourth-leading receiver in team history.

Phyllis Coates, actress. Other credits include three appearances on “Perry Mason”, “Midnight Caller”, “The Untouchables”, and “Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman”.

Jeff Burr, director. IMDB. (Hattip: Lawrence.)

Michael Chiarello, celebrity chef.

Rudolph Isley, of the Isley Brothers.

Rudolph left the Isley Brothers in 1989 to pursue becoming a Christian minister. However, he has often reunited with his brothers over the years, including when they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992, an honor that was presented to them by Little Richard.

We have a new winner!

Tuesday, October 3rd, 2023

That is, a new winner of the highly un-coveted Saturday Dining Conspiracy “Die In a Fire” award.

Yes, I am pretty peeved right now. Yes, I am using the power of my blogs to work on a grudge: but if you can’t do that on your blog, what’s the point of having one?

I used to (sort of) like Mod Pizza. We have better local pizza places, but sometimes it was just nice to be able to get a small personal pizza with exactly the kind and variety of toppings I wanted.

There’s one within easy driving distance from the house out here in the hinterlands. Mom was craving pizza, and I thought a small pizza sounded good myself. So I placed an online order.

Below is the feedback I left Mod Pizza corporate on their website. I’ve left out the original order number (referenced in the email) because it wouldn’t mean anything to anyone except corporate.

——————

I placed this order at 3:30 PM for pickup at 4:15 PM. When I got to the store (around 4:10 PM) I gave the employee my name. He wasn’t clear about what was going on. I waited about 30 minutes for my food.

Finally, one of the other employees informed me that the store had CANCELLED MY ORDER (my because “they didn’t have enough people to make it”. I counted four employees in the store at the time.

I was further told that if I wanted my food I would have to place my order all over again, while I was in the store waiting, because they had enough people (in the store with no other customers) to make it now. No offer to place the order themselves based on my original receipt, just “you have to do it all over again”. That’s ridiculous.

I left and went to another local pizza place. I will NEVER EVER order from ANY Mod Pizza ever again. Especially this one, as this is the second time in a row they have messed up a pickup order.

Y’all need to shut this location down, as it is doing real harm to your brand.

——————–

I should add to this: the Mod Pizza claims to have refunded my card for the order I placed, but I see no evidence of that in my account yet.

(Crossposted to the Logbook of the Saturday Dining Conspiracy.)

Edited to add 10/4: I did get a refund credited to my card this morning, just for the record.

Trip report: Virginia Beach/Norfolk, VA.

Thursday, August 10th, 2023

It can be told now: I was in the Virginia Beach and Norfolk, Virginia area Thursday of last week through Tuesday of this week. I kept this under my hat for security reasons.

If it seems like an odd place to travel on a vacation, it sort of wasn’t a vacation: my mother and I went up for the funeral of my late uncle Kenneth Eberhart, who lived in Virginia Beach for many years.

I’m not sure I want to talk more about that now, but I probably will when Veterans Day comes around. And I’m a firm believer in putting the “fun” back into “funeral”. So let’s talk about some other stuff.

I only visited one gun store on the trip, because I only had time to visit one. I picked Bob’s Gun Shop because their web site says they’ve been open since 1945, and they buy and sell guns. The folks at Bob’s were very nice, and I’m glad I picked that store. It’s a big store – three floors, with a pistol range on the top floor. But I didn’t buy anything.

I visited two used bookstores. Smith Discount Books was the best of the two, but I only bought one small gun book there. That will be in the roundup at some point.

My one regret is that I ran out of time before I could visit the Military Aviation Museum. If I had been there for just one more day…

We had a lot of really good meals. I had two conditions for this trip:

  1. I was going to eat as much seafood as I could.
  2. No damn cafeterias.

(Me? Grinding an axe?)

Among the places we dined that are worth writing about:

  • Hot Diggity Dogs BBQ, Virginia Beach. My aunt and uncle (who are taking care of my uncle’s estate) have been lunching there a lot, and we went twice. The dogs are pretty good. What makes it for us, though, is that the people who run the place are supremely nice. This is another one of those establishments about which I like to say: I want these people to have trouble sleeping at night…because of the rustle of $100 bills stuffed inside their mattress.
  • Mason’s Famous Lobster Rolls, 3273 Shore Drive, Virginia Beach. Yes, it is a chain. But lobster rolls by the shore sounded really good on Friday night, and Mason’s in Virginia Beach is about $8.50 cheaper than Garbo’s here. And Mason’s lobster rolls were every bit as good. I recommend ignoring all that crap about the “simple, honest traditions of the people who live there” unless you’re also a big fan of the timeless changeless ways of the Amish, too.
  • Legal Seafood, Town Center of Virginia Beach. Our original dinner plan for Saturday night fell through: the place we were planning to go was a combination of a circus, a dumpster fire, and a train wreck. I had been hesitant about going here because the online ratings were fairly low (though I’ve loved the Legal Seafoods in Massachusetts and Rhode Island) but I called, they didn’t have a wait, and…everyone raved about it for days afterward. And it was surprisingly uncrowded on a Saturday night in a busy shopping complex.
  • Chix on the Beach, Virginia Beach. Tends to fill up quick. Also a big drinking spot. But we got there early and managed to get seats for the eight of us. The seafood was pretty good, especially the she-crab soup. (I had the “Just Seafood” platter, with the soup as an appetizer. Why can’t I get she-crab soup in Austin? It isn’t like they don’t catch crabs down in Galveston.)
  • Bubba’s, Virginia Beach. Has nothing to do with the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company. Also has really good she-crab soup. I recommend the broiled seafood platter.
  • Pop’s Diner, Northampton. Pretty good breakfasts.

I’d like to thank the various family members who are handling Ken’s business and were there for the funeral. I’m not going to name them here for privacy reasons, but thank you, various family members.

Also, many thanks to the Gator Volksmarch Club (AVA-13). Ken was an avid volksmarcher, and many of his friends from the Gators were at the funeral. The club is holding a remembrance walk and picnic for him on October 7: details are here.

Found objects.

Wednesday, August 9th, 2023

One thing you can say about travel: it is good for blog content.

Some things I found while I was on the road. Why don’t we start off with my “You can call me Jimmy Lileks” mode.

My family sort of has a tradition of accumulating matchbooks. There were a lot of matchbooks where I was, many for restaurants that have gone out of business.

The significance of the “Cathedral Buffet” explained here.

I like ships. I like maritime history. I picked this out because I was curious about the history of the SS Mardi Gras.

Turns out, the SS Mardi Gras was the very first Carnival Cruise Lines ship.

RMS Empress of Canada was an ocean liner built in 1961 by Vickers-Armstrongs, Walker-on-Tyne, England, for Canadian Pacific Steamships Ltd. The liner sailed in the trans-Atlantic trade between Liverpool and Canada.

Ted Arison bought the ship in 1972, renamed it, and it went out for its first Carnival cruise on March 11, 1972. It sailed for Carnival until 1993, bounced around various other cruise lines, and was finally broken up for scrap in 2003.

I remember Billy Beer, even though I wasn’t of drinking age at the time. But I do not have any recollection of “J.R. Ewing’s Private Stock”. (It should come as no surprise to the Texas contingent among my readers that “Private Stock” was produced at the Pearl Brewery.)

Just for fun.

Also, just for fun, regional variations among snack flavors:

The Old Bay flavored cheese curls (there are also potato chips) are a little weird, but not that surprising to me. I recently bought some Old Bay flavored goldfish for the Saturday Dining Conspiracy’s collection of odd snacks.

“Roast Pork Sandwich” does seem a little odd to me.

Someone asked me what the difference between “tomato pie” and “deep dish pizza with no meat or cheese” was. This led me to look up “tomato pie”, and I wish I had not.