I took a trip to Cabela’s today to look for hiking pants for my daughter before we head to Belize. No luck. We did have a chance to eat elk burgers, though, and then I found this, and thought, heck, yeah, I have to try that.

It recommends 2 pounds of ground beef, venison, turkey, moose, elk, or pork. I interprtehh”kd the “or” as “and,” and in the absence of any wild game mixed a pound each of ground beef and pork together. Together they make excellent meatballs for spaghetti, and salami, spaghetti, it’s all Italian so it has to work, right?

The directions also suggest “adding olive, peppers or other ingredients.” Will do! Scrounging in the fridge I found olives, and capers seemed like a must-do (capers are always a must-do in our house), and sun-dried tomatoes seemed like a good idea, too, but before I found those I scrounged out some sun-dried tomato pesto, and a light bulb went on in my head (but not in my fridge, which has been light bulbless for years, making scrounging more adventurous) that said “even better!”

Everything mixed together with the spices from the packet, and then I hit a small stumbling block–I don’t have a proper baking rack. Well, if this works out well, I’ll get one next time, and meanwhile I’ll just cook it on the big rack in the oven (hoping the meat doesn’t break up and fall through).

Results! That is some seriously strong salami. I like it, but I couldn’t eat more than a sandwich of it at a time. The kids like it, but my wife doesn’t. It’s obviously not going to get eaten quickly, though, so I put half in the freezer for later use. And maybe we’ll have salami sandwiches for dinner sometime this week.

Overall, even if it doesn’t all get eaten, it was worth the ten dollars or so to have actually made my own salami once. And with the spice ingredients listed on the package, I could try mixing my own spices sometime if I want to delve deeper into salami-making.

Lain likes bananas. Only so much, though. She enjoys so much of a banana, then she really enjoys giving the rest to the dog and watching us scramble to prevent that from happening.

She likes apples. Only so much, though. She enjoys the first ten bites, and then she enjoys getting another apple.

The end result of all of this being I end up eating a lot more fruit than I used to.

She likes eggs sometimes. Other times, she does not want eggs and is offended at the very notion that I would try to put them in her mouth.

The end result of that being that I eat a fair amount of eggs, too. Smoke’em if you got’em, I guess.

I have a tendency to be ignorant on basic rules of etiquette. There are some things, though, that strike me as so obvious that even I understand them.

Let’s say that someone who moved away a long while back is coming in town. You’re talking about having dinner together. Where do you eat?

To me, the correct answer is “Within reason, anywhere they want to eat.” Especially if there is a strong preference involved.

Whenever I return to Dixie, I almost always have a hit list of places I want to eat. I don’t necessarily expect to hit all of them, mind you, but I like to fill as many open meals with these places as possible.

I used to run into this with my father a lot. One of the hardest things about leaving my pocket of the South, at least in terms of food, was actually a regional fast food joint, which I will call Happy Burger. Their breakfasts are especially good. More than that, I have so many fond memories of the place from when I was growing up. Yet over and over again, when I would come home and Dad and I would do our breakfast, he would agitate going to Denny’s.

Back in the day, we almost never went to Denny’s. Happy Burger was cheaper. But he figured that since my being at home was a special treat, we should go eat at Denny’s because it’s nicer. It actually took a long time to be able to articulate why I wanted to go to Happy Burger.

I visited a friend in the southwest, who just absolutely insisted that I needed to go try out this pho place. Except having lived there for a while, I already knew exactly where I wanted to eat. My list of places to eat was already long, and I was more anxious to return to food that I knew that I loved and couldn’t get than to – best case scenario – find some new outstanding place I wouldn’t be able to eat at again except in competition with every other restaurant in the city I love during rare return visits. We ate pho. It was okay. I don’t really like pho.

It happened again this last trip. Where the decision was between McDonald’s or Happy Burger. My attempts to explain that we can eat at McDonald’s any time and I wouldn’t have a chance at eating at Happy Burger for another four months was outvoted because McDonald’s has a special deal on free coffee and was six minutes out of our way.

Once I resigned myself to the fact that I’d lost, I let my mother-in-law know that we could save about four minutes by going on a slightly different route. This information went ignored, because the longer route would get us there just as surely as the new route would.

Burt Likko pointed me to a really interesting article on rotisserie chickens and why they’re so relatively inexpensive:

Though supermarkets are loath to admit as much, likely for fear of turning off the squeamish, the former CEO of Trader Joe’s cheerfully confirmed in a recent interview that meat and produce are recycled into prepared foods. And the vendor of one of the leading commercial rotisserie ovens offers, as a complement to its wares, “culinary support” that, among other things, aims to “develop programs to minimize food shrinkage and waste” and “improve production planning to optimize the amount of fresh food that is available during both peak and down times.”

Rotisserie chickens aren’t even the end of the line. When unsold, fresh meats, fruits and veggies that have passed their sell-by points can be “cooked up for in-store deli and salad counters before they spoil,” per no less a source than a consultant to the supermarket industry.

We’ve become big fans. I bring home one more than half of the time I go to Walmart, in part because theirs are better than the other place I shop at. It provides for at least a couple of meals, just you can tear it up and put it in other things to add a little more meat. My preferred brands of turkey chili, for example, are pretty light on the meat. Also, soup. You can put some in beans and make a pretty good little contraption.

Even better than the rotisserie chicken is the rotisserie turkey breast. That’s straight meat with a whole lot of different things you can do with it. In addition to breaking my mouth and bowels, my recent illness broke my heart. I had just purchased a whole lot of turkey breast before I got sick. But I couldn’t eat it (or anything). I was afraid that it would go bad.

My favorite thing to do with the turkey is to cut it in slices and make the perfect sandwich. The perfect sandwich, to my mind, is a turkey, cheddar, and mayo sandwich on white bread. I have no idea why I like it so much, but it’s the perfect combination of everything. The tastes just bounce off one another in yummy goodness. And I’m not much of a sandwich person. It was one of my favorite parts of Thanksgiving.

Unfortunately, even when I moved on from my distaste of eating anything, I still couldn’t eat mayo. Which meant that I had to do something else with the turkey. Clancy went shopping and got some southwestern mustard, which is a substitute. But instead of yummy perfection, it tasted like… turkey, cheddar, bread, and southwestern mustard. The magic was gone.

Chocolate milk was on my shopping list last week. I’ve never been a big chocolate milk person, but when appraising my cereal options, I determined that if I took the healthiest, most sugarless cereal out there and added chocolate milk, not only was it edible but I ended up ahead sugar-wise than if I take the next healthiest option with skim milk.

When I got to the milk aisle, though, I saw something bizarre: Green milk. For St. Paddy’s Day, of course. Vanilla flavored. It looked grotesque. Green milk? Who the hell would drink green milk? Not that there is anything wrong with green beverages. Many of my favorite beverages are green. But the green milk just looked… really weird. I tried, and failed, to imagine what cereal would look like in it.

So of course I bought some.

The results are below. Taste-wise, it wasn’t as good as the chocolate milk but still not too bad. I can’t tell if my mediocre impression of the taste is more related to the fact that milk and vanilla don’t seem to go together, or my own inability to process milk coming in a green color.

Michael McIntyre explains what people with kids don’t know:

Once upon a time, if I wanted to go out for a sandwich, I would say “I would like to go out for a sandwich” and I would go out and get one. Now, if I want to go out for a sandwich, I say “I would like to go out for a sandwich. I think I will, within the next few days, go out and get one.”

I am not a big fan of pieces that start off with the notion that “You just don’t understand my life!” even in a comedic context. That said, I did get a good laugh and it touches on one of the most striking things about parenthood that I didn’t expect. I expected inconvenience on some levels. Having kids means that it becomes harder to travel, go to sporting events, and so on. What I wasn’t fully prepared for is how much more complicated it makes every day tasks. The things I used to be able to just do that I now have rather tight windows for and require substantial preparation.

Before, when I wanted to go shopping, I went shopping. Then I had to figure out how to shop with the baby, which was particularly hard for a while though now that’s become easier since she can sit in the little shopping cart seat (and greatly enjoys the experience). Going out to eat is different. I had a hankering for IHOP the other day, after reading Curious George Makes Pancakes, and I had to figure out exactly how I would go to IHOP. I went, told the waitress what I wanted and that I wanted to go ahead and pay for it and wanted to-go packaging in case the baby became irate and I needed to leave in a hurry (turned out that I didn’t).

I don’t have the same struggles referred to in the routine. Not yet, anyway. The baby doesn’t have shoes (which makes me feel a little trailer-parky, but oh well) so I don’t need to worry about those. She does love to take off her socks, so I have to scrounge those up at the last minute. But that’s a different bird. The things that get in my way are nap and food windows. I am trying like heck to keep the baby on a consistent schedule with three hour windows. Typically, ideally, that means that she wakes up from a nap (or overnight sleep) and after one hour she gets milk and after another hour she gets solids, and an hour after that she gets back to sleep. I cannot do much stimulating right before she goes to sleep. If shopping is going to take more than an hour, I have to figure out how to make sure that she doesn’t get hungry in the middle of it. The ideal time is right after she wakes up (I can more easily put off both meals than one or the other) but she usually wakes up when I am right in the middle of something. I have comparatively little flexibility as far as nap times go because we try to fit two of those in per day, they can last up to a couple of hours, and she needs about three hours between them to be able to nap again. That I don’t know how long they’re going to last is why I am often in the middle of something when she wakes up.

This isn’t a pity-post because I enjoy fatherhood and it is a part of the road to making me a better person. It also gives me a greater appreciation of those things that I took for granted. Sandwiches don’t get much better than the ones you have to plan for a day or two in advance.

Before I’d had my morning nicotine and caffeine, I prepared my drink. Usually this consists of mixing Mountain Something (generic brand mountain dew) with sugar-free coolade. The latter is in a vacated water jug that is the same size and dimension as a jug of milk. So, as the title suggests, I got the wrong jug. I realized my error before too much milk made it in.

Rather than toss the contents of the contraption (at this point, Mountain Shoutin’ and milk), I went ahead and added the coolade.

I cannot taste the (skim) milk. Something seems to taste just a bit off, but honestly that may just be my imagination. It certainly doesn’t taste like milk, skim or otherwise.

The problem is that it just looks gross. The milk didn’t fully integrate with the contents of the drink. Because it’s carbonated, I can’t really shake it to try to get it to mix. Maybe it’s not chemically possible for that to happen (I forgot just about everything I learned from chemistry class). I’m not sure. Whatever the case, though, the usual orange-green color is roughly the same, except with these little white clouds.

This should not inhibit my enjoyment as much as it does. But it’s weird to drink something that looks so weird, whether I can taste the milk or not.

At least, not for ex-smokers and quit-smoking weight gain:

Here’s an article on the subject.

Benquo discusses an attempt to make a hot pepper less than hot:

The story goes something like this. A Mexican restaurant somewhere in the central US makes and serves a salsa using the original, spicy Jalapeño pepper. A lot of people try it. Many of these people do not like spicy food at all. Maybe they are unusually sensitive to capsaicin. Maybe their bodies do not release the usual endorphins in response to spice. Maybe they just aren’t used to it. Regardless, there are people who do not like it, who ask for something milder. But they still want a salsa made with Jalapeños. This is the thing that puzzles me, and I’ll come back to it later, but for now we’ll accept this as a given: they do not like spicy food, but they want to eat a salsa – a mild, unspicy salsa – with Jalapeños.

So the restaurant has a few options. They can refuse to accommodate their customers, and either teach them to appreciate spice, or lose their business. They can make the salsa milder by putting less Jalapeño in it. They can try to sell the customers something different than what they asked for. Or, they can do the least convenient possible thing, and try to change the constitution of the Jalapeño pepper itself. Naturally, they do the least convenient possible thing, and demand a hot pepper that is not hot.

It would be interesting to see if bell peppers were used in in replacement of jalapenos if a non-foodie like me would be able to tell the difference. Perhaps not, though I am less sure than he (she?) is.

As someone with diminished tastebuds, I crave spice. As much as possible, this side of the ghost pepper. So a part of me would be quite bummed if they ever do create a non-spicy pepper. (I’m surprised it’s that difficult. Isn’t it mostly like the jalapeno version of the seedless watermelon?) That was one of my huge complaints about Arapaho cuisine, they didn’t believe in spicing things up.

On the other hand, it’s easier for me to add spiciness than it is for someone else to remove it. Give me a bottle of Sriracha or whatever and I can make it to how I like it. On the other hand, I whine bitterly when I am forced into alchemy. I like it when I get it exactly as I want it and don’t have to worry about it.

I do wonder – particularly in Benquo is right about bell peppers being an identical non-spicy substitute – if it does say something about our culture or perhaps humanity in general . I mean, there is a certain familiarity with the notion of not wanting to be considered so weak as to have the jalapeno removed or replaced with bell peppers, and yet not wanting to admit to it for self-esteem purposes or somesuch.