Nibbles

SatC + J&J = Audrey!

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It’s not exactly news that our entertainment, these days, comes from more than just movies and television. On the personal-sized screen of our laptops we’re able to access all manner of information–both professional and just plain fun. What you might not know, though, is that there are plenty of people creating shows–called webisodes–geared directly for that super-small screen.

WIGS (http://www.youtube.com/wigs), launched earlier this year, creates scripted dramas with strong, female leads. All of their series can be found on their YouTube channel. Today, October 29, a new series begins starring Kim Shaw (How I Met Your Mother, She’s Out of My League), who plays a Carrie Bradshaw-esque character, Audrey, whose more interested in food that shoes, or anything else for that matter! Think Sex and the City meets Julie & Julia. WIGS describes their style of show as provocative and edgy, so expect some harsher language and adult situations.

You can watch the first episode of Audrey here.

While browsing  the channel, though, I came across this behind-the-scenes feature that showcases the work of Speedy, the Craft Services guy on the set of Audrey.

(Direct link for the feed readers: Audrey–Behind the Scenes: “Speedy” Craft Services)

Accidental Bananas

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Who knew you could grow bananas in the Florida Panhandle?

Both houses Todd and I have shared, so far, have had banana trees somewhere on the premises, but they’ve never bloomed and I thought I’d read or heard something them being purely ornamental in all but the most tropical of locations.

Imagine my surprise, then, when the new neighbors joked that we’d need to trade bananas for lemons (their home has a massive lemon tree at the side–did you know lemon trees have thorns?) and there they were, little green bananas hanging down in several places in our little rain forest just off the porch.

From what I can tell, once the individual “hands” have filled out and have turned slightly more yellow-green than pure green (and definitely before the first frost) its time to cut them down and hang them someplace cool. Which will probably be the garage. And, then, once they’ve all been harvested it’ll be time to cut down the stalks that flowered this year, as they only produce once (but the little shoots that pop up just as the old ones die could).

I’ll be sure to keep you posted if we actually get any edible bananas from this year’s “crop.” Since I had nothing to do with their planting, and they seem pretty self-sufficient to have gotten this far, I hope my notorious black thumb won’t prove their downfall, now that I’ve noticed them!

Take a Bite Of: BJ’s Grill

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Earlier this month Todd and I found ourselves in small-town Mississippi, Louisville to be exact, for a one-day comics show and we were looking for someplace nice and local for supper Friday night. We thought we’d found a likely candidate, searching online, in the Red Onion Restaurant and headed that way only to find out it was only open on Saturdays and Sundays–oops!

Figuring food couldn’t be that hard to find on a Friday night, we headed back towards our hotel via Church Street and happened upon BJ’s Grill which had two things going for it from the get-go: it was open, and there were a number of cars parked around it. Let’s go!

BJ’s specializes in American cuisine and has a small, down-home feel with plenty of country-kitsch tchotchkes on the walls and a simple, 4-page laminated menu.

Their claim to fame, as far as we could tell, seems to be their potatoes: plate-sized baked potatoes, quartered lengthwise and smothered in your choice of meat with various other toppings available. I ordered the Philly Cheesesteak Potato while Todd went with the Country Fried Steak. We both opted out of the salad bar, but I gave into temptation and ordered some of their Fried Pickles, too.

The pickles had a nice, light breading on them and were not overly greasy–something you do have to watch out for. They also had a great flavor. The potato was interesting: the topping of minute steak, onions, peppers, and cheese was tasty (though the bell peppers were still very crisp), but the potato itself was way under-seasoned and, therefore, had no flavor of its own. A liberal addition of salt helped that, though.

Todd’s country-fried steak was tasty, he said, but we were both surprised that the gravy that came on it was brown, not the usual white pepper or sawmill gravy. The baked beans he selected as his side were very good, though. As for the onion rings he orders, these were more like onion petals, but they were–like the pickles–fried nice and light and with a very nice flavor.

I was pretty full but Todd has saved room for dessert and the dessert of the day was Caramel Cobbler a la mode.

A very loose cobbler–as you might expect with the main ingredient being caramel and not something heartier–it was super-sweet but the vanilla ice cream served to cut it a bit. I only had a couple of small tastes, but if you had a serious sweet-tooth attack, this would definitely cure it.

The service at BJs Grill was solicitous without hovering, the owners seemed to know their regulars and were chatty with us outsiders, too. If you find yourself in Louisville, MS, and in the mood for a good, solid meal at a decent price (our bill came to $27 and change), BJs would be worth a stop. Bring cash, though, as they do not accept credit cards of any kind.

 

Pretzel Success, Chemistry Fail

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As I mentioned last week, I finally gave in to my intentions of making pretzel bread over the weekend and, let me tell you, it’s definitely too easy to make. As in, I could make a batch every weekend without allotting much time and that’s dangerous.

But before I get into the specifics, I need to tell you how this whole thing got started.

On one of the digital scrapbooking forums I frequent, there was a thread about football foods, and a picture was posted of some doughnut-hole acorns made by dipping the top of a doughnut hole into Nutella, and then rolling them in chopped nuts or chocolate sprinkles. Finished off with a pretzel stick stem, they do sorta look like tasty acorns.

I thought, I can do that!

But I also wondered what sort of savory applications this illusion food technique could apply to. Someone suggested mini-corndogs, so that was a definite option, but I thought if I made mini pretzel rolls, dipped them in a cheese & mustard dip (I was thinking more like a fondue, but it turns out there’s a standard pretzel dip that more than fits the bill), and then rolled the tops in crumbled bacon, it’d be quite a hearty snack for that weekend’s game.

So of course I did all three.

Corndog, Doughnut, and Pretzel Acorns

(sorry about the glare, I was going for easy clean-up and the foil didn’t play nice with the camera)

Rather than re-post other people’s recipes, here are the 2 I used for the homemade portions of this project:

Bretzel Rolls (Bavarian Pretzel Sandwich Rolls) from food.com

Cheese and Mustard Dipping Sauce from countryliving.com

Both of these recipes are simple and straight-forward. I made the pretzel rolls as directed but I divided each of the 12 pieces of dough into 3, for 36 mini rolls. I did change one other part of the pretzel recipe, and that’s where the other half of my title comes in…

Pretzel bread isn’t really that different from any other yeast bread, it’s how they’re cooked that make them pretzels. Like bagels, the pretzels are first poached or par-boiled before baking to give them the chewy exterior. Unlike bagels, however, the water for poaching pretzels gets baking soda added to it, which gives it that distinctive flavor.

I decided, however, that using plain water was boring. Why not use something a little more flavorful, I thought, so for the 2 quarts of poaching liquid, I started off with 12 oz of beer, then made up the rest with water. Sure, once the liquids came to a boil it foamed up a bit (unanticipated consequence number 1), but that was easy to deal with.

It was when I had to add the baking soda to the boiling liquid that I discovered unanticipated consequence number 2.

Who remembers their science classes on combining vinegar and baking soda to make a volcano? The acid in the vinegar reacts with sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) to create carbon dioxide (and some other things), i.e. bubbles. Did you know that beer also contains an acid? Alpha acids, to be specific, found in the hop plants.

Yes, In the midst of making bagels, I made a beer-cano, too.

Alas, there are no pictures of this debacle as I was too busy trying to get the spewing pot from the stove to the sink. In fact, I’m lucky there are pictures of any of the process as my camera was on the counter between points A and B–I’m still cleaning off bits of baking soda out of the lens, but the camera appears to have escaped otherwise unharmed.

And speaking of unharmed, turns out baking soda can be used to treat burns. Which might account for the fact that two fingers on my left hand got doused in boiling, bubbling over water/beer/soda mixtures and only got a little red and puffy, didn’t blister, and were totally fine by the time I went to bed. So I suppose you could call that 2 crises averted, though I could have avoided the whole thing if I’d just given half a thought to the chemical make-up of what I was doing!

At any rate, the pretzels eventually got their dunking in the bicarb’ed water (with remnants of beer) and then baked to a golden brown.

Pretzel Rolls fresh from the oven

They were delicious. So delicious I was a little concerned I was going to eat them all before I could transform them into their acorn disguises!

Enough survived my carb-lust, however, and they made excellent appetizers for Sunday’s game, even if they weren’t as acorn-y as the mini-corndog versions.

MiniCorndog Acorns

mini corndogs, dipped in mustard-cheese dip, and rolled in crushed pretzel sticks

Pretzel Acorns

pretzel bread, dipped in mustard-cheese dip, and rolled in crumbled bacon

Doughnut-hole acorns

doughnut holes, dipped in Nutella, and rolled in chocolate sprinkles

I’d heated the Nutella spread on the stove before starting to dip the doughnut holes, but even then it got clumpy and lumpy pretty quick as the glaze from the doughnuts got mixed in. Unglazed or cake-style doughnut holes might hold up a bit better to this treatment.

And, then, from the just-because-it’s-there file:

doughnut acorns with nutella and bacon

I had leftover bacon crumbles and figured what the hell, right? When first dipped, though, the Nutella totally overpowered the bacon, but once they’d had a chance to sit out for a bit, the flavors equalized and it wasn’t half bad. Not something I’d be seeking out in the future, but I can see why some people are all over the bacon and chocolate craze.

 

Nibble on This: Nora Ephron on Carbs

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I’ve had this one in my tickle file for a couple months, now, ever since NPR re-ran an interview with Nora Ephron after her death in June from pneumonia, a complication of her leukemia.

Screenwriter, Producer and Director, she’s had a hand in many of the movies that shaped my teens and twenties and, of course, served all three roles with the lovely Julie and Julia.

From that 2006 interview on Fresh Air, this particular portion snagged me enough that I sat at my desk and did the old-fashioned play-pause-type-rewind routine just to get it all down:

This is just a crap shoot. This is a lottery. Who knows? So I feel–I don’t think about the next 20 years, I think about today. So, today, I’ve already been to a bakery. This is the thing that I’m obsessed with is carbohydrates. I feel that I’m now living in an age where there’s the best bread we have ever had in the history of the world, there has never been more bread that is good out there. So it seems to me a shame not to eat some of it. Even if, and this is one of the terrible dilemmas of old age, you know, do you save all your money as if you’re gonna live til you’re 90, or do you spend it all because you might die tomorrow? Do you diet like a fanatic in the hopes that it’s gonna buy you a couple of extra years, or is it going to have nothing to do–are you gonna be hit by a bus and your last thought will be ‘I shoulda had that doughnut.’ And it’s very confusing to know what to do, but I’m coming down on the doughnut side. So I feel that, you know, that’s one of the things–I’m not so into 20 years, I’m kinda into is this meal I’m having something I really want to have? And if someone says to me ‘let’s go somewhere that’s not good’ I say ‘let’s not, let’s not, because I have a finite number of meals ahead of me and they are all gonna be good. They’re just gonna be good. That’s the truth.

I’d have to come down on the side of the doughnut, too. Or, in my case, lately, soft pretzel bread. I made some this weekend that was divine while being absolutely comedic in the making–kind of fitting for this quote in it’s own way. I’ll tell you all about it, I promise (next week), but for now, I’m going to enjoy a bit of wonderful, homemade bread and put on a fun movie to finish out my Sunday evening.