Tag Archives: food

Mustard! Mustard! Mustard!

I made myself a ham and cheese sandwich with a healthy dose of Bookbinder’s Whole-Grain Mustard. This mustard is my favorite intersection between “great mustard” and “easy to find.” It’s great on a sandwich, it’s great in a marinade, and I usually mix it with a little olive oil and use it as a dressing for green beans.

It prompted me to write this Tweet:


In retrospect, I think Bookbinder’s is like a $5-$6 mustard at my local store. But the principle is the same. You can’t afford to buy a $72,000 Audi instead of a $24,000 Toyota. But chances are that you can afford the fancy kind of mustard and the difference in flavor between a good one and a standard brown or yellow one is amazing.

A couple of people replied with the names of their favorite mustards, and then I encouraged everyone else to chime in. I feel as though it’s now my civic duty to record for posterity this list of Mustards that Someone Felt Worthy of Recommending. Here are the five that caught my eye (ones I sure intend to try):

  • Raye’s Mustards. Handmade (“Since 1900”) in Maine. A wide line that includes beer mustard, wine mustard, and cranberry mustard.
  • Maille. Holy cats these look like fancy-shmancy mustards. They’re not all $43 a jar but oh my god there’s mustard that’s $43 a jar! But this one got many recommendations and after looking at the selection…my curiosity is piqued. This is maybe the Bugatti Veyron of mustards and even so: hey, I got $43.
  • Düsseldorfer Löwensenf. They’re Germans and they’ve been making mustard for a mighty long time. Also some interesting flavor varieties here.
  • Kosciusko Spicy Brown. It seems like a straightforward, non-fussy but excellent mustard. And although the name doesn’t even have even one umlaut, let alone two, there’s something about it that creates a sense of confidence.
  • Sir Kensington’s Spicy Brown. Well, okay: you can’t possibly get a less ethnic brandname than “Sir Kensington.” But it’s well-spoken-of.

And these are all winners! Because each was so well-liked that someone chose to recommend it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 


 

Balancing my diet

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For my Thanksgiving dinner last week, I bought a pumpkin pie and a can of aerosol whipped cream. Because pumpkin pie is my favorite. And I’m not going to denigrate fans of Cool Whip, but come on…Reddi Wip is the Jiffy Pop of the dessert table. 

I ran out of pie before I ran out of Reddi Wip. So last night, I bought another small pumpkin pie. Because “waste not want not,” right?

But now I have three quarters of a pie, and I’m out of Reddi Wip. So, if I don’t want to waste the pie, I probably have to go buy more Reddi Whip, don’t I? 

I believe I’m trapped in what is known as a “Delicious Circle.”

Stupid lousy Food Network…

Baked Chicken, plated somewhat artfully.

Today’s been a pretty busy workday. I didn’t have time to make a big production of dinner. I just rubbed some olive oil and seasonings onto a chicken breast, sealed it in a foil pouch, and tossed it into the oven for twenty minutes…like I’ve done a thousand times.

But I’ve been watching a lot of Food Network shows recently. So when it was nearly time to pull the chicken out of the oven, I found myself squirting barbecue sauce into a soup spoon and then giving it a swoosh around the plate.

And when the chicken was done, I found myself slicing it into two pieces and arranging them artfully.

Stupid lousy fricking Food Network…

(Photo taken with my iPhone 4, with assistance from my video lighting rig…still in place after recording MacBreak Weekly an hour earlier).

Cracking The Code

Another Sunday, another office day. There’s a certain point when I pack myself a digital lunch bag and relocate to someplace very public to continue my work.

Nearby, I have The Bagel Place With The Free WiFi. I reckon that a wheat bagel and a can of soda buys me at least two hours of guilt-free office time. If I’m going to make it a full four, I either order a full lunch or just stick a couple of bucks into the tip jar. The employees have been told by the shop’s absentee owner “Remember, people with laptops aren’t allowed to stay unless they’re buying things.” I choose to buy the good will of the poorly-paid hourly wage-earners.

It’s a good system and it seems to work very well for all parties.

The BPwtFW closes at 6. If I’m not done working, but I’m not ready to go home yet, I’ll move on to the Panera Bread up the street. Their prices are fairly atrocious, but I make it all back on the free soda refills.

At the moment, I’m set up at the Chipotle (way) up the street. The staff is friendly. The food is cheap, healthy, and tasty. The soda spills carelessly from an ever-replenishing font, just like Wonka’s chocolate waterfall.

I limit myself to just iPad work here, though. The joint has only enough tables to handle normal eat-and-go customer traffic. Setting up a virtual office — complete with MiFi base station — seems like a showboaty and ungrateful gesture. It gets the job done, though: I can finish editing a piece that I copied into my Dropbox from home, or get to the end of the chapter of the book I’m reading, or relentlessly refresh a bunch of news pages in hopes that I’ll find one more thing that I need to research or follow up on before regretfully pulling up stakes, getting one last soda refill, and finally heading home.

Alien field operatives are sent to this planet with what seems like a very simple mission. It doesn’t take long before the new agent understands why there’s such a rapid burnout rate for Sol-3 field agents, or why the veteran agent he relieved had such a harrowed look on his face.

“Understanding the Humans” is a deceptively complex goal. We’re a maddeningly confusing and contradictory species.

My advice to these aliens: focus on just one thing. If you can figure out the human need to occasionally be all alone but surrounded by people, you’ll understand everything there is to know about us.