Combs Spouts Off

"It's my opinion and it's very true."

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Posts Tagged ‘food’

Mmm, doughnuts

Posted by Richard on June 3, 2016

Today is National Doughnut Day. Did you remember to stop by Krispy Kreme and get your free doughnut?

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Best BBQ smoker ever

Posted by Richard on September 20, 2014

Awesome, just awesome. I wonder if they throw a pinch of cordite on the coals to add that authentic aroma.

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National Doughnut Day

Posted by Richard on June 3, 2010

The first Friday in June is National Doughnut Day, and that means you can probably score a free doughnut at your local doughnut shop or a national chain outlet (like Krispy Kreme or Dunkin' Doughnuts). But don't overdo it, running from one location to another to score all you can. Remember, doughnuts will kill you — they're on more than one list of top ten unhealthiest foods.

 

 

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Multi-bird magnificence in Britain

Posted by Richard on December 18, 2007

I thought the turducken was pretty special — it's a duck breast inside a chicken inside a turkey, with layers of stuffing in between. But there are people in Britain who make the turducken look like a dish for ascetics! 

Perry de Havilland calls the multi-bird roast concept a "splendiferous expression of the manifest superiority of western civilisation," and he has information (and hilarious commentary) about those pushing the envelope and those who disapprove.

Check out the comments, too. Someone there claims to have had bacon-wrapped Tofurkey for Thanksgiving, and insists it was "quite good." I love the concept. 

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Driving to save the planet

Posted by Richard on August 7, 2007

Do you walk or ride your bike to work or to the store? According to a leading British environmentalist and Green Party candidate for parliament, you're destroying the planet! If you really care about the environment, you ought to get in your car and drive:

Food production is now so energy-intensive that more carbon is emitted providing a person with enough calories to walk to the shops than a car would emit over the same distance. The climate could benefit if people avoided exercise, ate less and became couch potatoes. Provided, of course, they remembered to switch off the TV rather than leaving it on standby.

The sums were done by Chris Goodall, campaigning author of How to Live a Low-Carbon Life, based on the greenhouse gases created by intensive beef production. "Driving a typical UK car for 3 miles [4.8km] adds about 0.9 kg [2lb] of CO2 to the atmosphere," he said, a calculation based on the Government's official fuel emission figures. "If you walked instead, it would use about 180 calories. You'd need about 100g of beef to replace those calories, resulting in 3.6kg of emissions, or four times as much as driving.

"The troubling fact is that taking a lot of exercise and then eating a bit more food is not good for the global atmosphere. Eating less and driving to save energy would be better."

Don't go feeling smug if you're a vegetarian. Beef cattle are especially bad for the planet, according the Gaia-worshippers (although they'd change their tune if everyone gave up meat eating and cattle became an endangered species). But if you eat beans instead of beef, you're just shifting the methane production, right?

According to Goodall and other environmentalists, meat is only a small part of the "problem." There's all the shipping of produce, food processing, packaging, refrigeration, etc. Together, they mean that the food industry is responsible for a sixth of your "carbon footprint." Naturally, Goodall has a solution — we just need to go back to a pre-industrial lifestyle based on subsistence farming:

"Don't buy anything from the supermarket," Mr Goodall said, "or anything that's travelled too far."

And for crying out loud, get off that treadmill and go watch some TV! Oh, screw it. When you're growing all your own food and weaving all your own clothing (can't fly it in from China!), you'll be working sunup to sundown and won't have time for TV anyway.

 

 

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Cooking for engineers

Posted by Richard on June 20, 2007

This past weekend, I bought some fresh Copper River salmon and was searching for an interesting recipe. I ran across this one. I didn't use it (decided just to bake it with a little dill, pepper, and butter on top; delicious), but I've bookmarked the Cooking for Engineers site.

If you're an engineer, or think like an engineer (all analytical and such), and you like to cook, this is the site for you. The recipes I've looked at sound good and are very clearly presented, with lots of pictures. There are also lots of articles with thorough descriptions of various cooking techniques, kitchen equipment, ingredients, etc. Check it out.

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A fine farewell for Sam Arnold

Posted by Richard on June 30, 2006

They said goodbye to restaurateur Sam Arnold on Wednesday, which would have been his 80th birthday. Apparently, it was quite a farewell, and I wish I could have been there. Fortunately, the Rocky Mountain News’ James B. Meadow was there, and his story does a simply marvelous job of conveying the joy and the sadness — and, most importantly, of giving you a sense of the specialness of Arnold:

In the golden light floating through the chapel’s stained-glass windows, with notes from a banjo, guitars, mandolin and autoharp spiraling together, 500 people sang and gently mourned the death of a man who was bigger than life.
….

Arnold, who died in Scottsdale, Ariz., of heart failure on June 7, was a restaurateur and a raconteur, an Easterner fascinated with the West; someone who embraced buffalo tongue, chicken feet and peanut butter-stuffed jalapeños as ambrosia, thought a tomahawk was the best way to open a bottle of champagne; and invoked the exclamation "Waugh!" at his Fort restaurant with the same fervor and frequency that a congregation of true believers invokes "Amen."

"Waugh," according to Arnold’s daughter, is a Lakota exclamation that translates loosely as, "right on!"

In trying to sum up at least part of him, Pete Meersman, executive director of the Colorado Restaurant Association, plucked words such as storyteller, mentor, media relations expert, cookbook author, bear tamer and tomahawk thrower before lowering his voice and closing with legend.

Read the whole thing. Even if you know nothing of Arnold, I think you’ll appreciate the article — the stories and anecdotes, the account of the service, and the sense of this truly original man that shines through it.

Perhaps, when you’re finished, you’ll join me in thanking James B. Meadow for writing such a fine, fine story. And offer both him and the late Sam’l P. Arnold a hearty "waugh!"
 

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Sam Arnold, R.I.P.

Posted by Richard on June 9, 2006

I was saddened to hear that Sam Arnold died Thursday. He was the founder and co-owner (with his daughter Holly) of The Fort Restaurant in nearby Morrison, CO. The Fort is an authentic recreation of Bent’s Fort, a trading post from the 1830s, and a wonderful dining experience in a stunning setting.

The Fort specializes in "food and drink of the Early West," and I’ve enjoyed some truly wonderful meals there. On a couple of holiday occasions, we had dinner with Sam and Holly — well, not with them, exactly; we were seated at a table adjacent to the Arnold party’s. They were friendly, cheerful, and thoroughly nice people.

My sympathies to the family and friends of Sam and to the staff at The Fort.
 

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Van der Leun on America, childhood, and cookies

Posted by Richard on April 13, 2006

I’m in awe — simply in awe — of Gerard Van der Leun. I strongly recommended his Watcher’s Council winner, On the Return of History, the other day. Today, I urge you to go and savor a very different, but equally worthy, post of his entitled Higher Education and the Holy Cookie. It’s an elegiac, evocative, and charming essay about childhood and growing up, sibling rivalry, parental love, and the development of character.

It ends with an important lesson and a cookie recipe. It begins thus:

SO ISOLATIONIST IS AMERICA that when confronted with questions of great pith and moment, we immediately turn to questions of great and persistent triviality. In some ways this underscores the bedrock of the country’s greatness. No other country in history, nor any other country you can imagine, has the capacity to win a pocket war on the other side of the globe, play patty-cake with global terrorism, launch a fierce and bitter cultural and political argument at home, pull the global economy upward like The Little Engine That Could chanting "I think I can, I think I can," all while driving a couple radio-controlled web cams across the surface of Mars just to get some snapshots of rocks. Then we all go out to the Food Court, select from any one of the world’s six leading cuisines and try to remember both where we parked and in which one of the family’s seven vehicles we came in.

After that we turn our attention, not to whether or not we shall bomb Iran (We had an election and chose a President based on who we thought would do what needs to be done, remember? ), but on … the much more important and utterly American question: "Just what is the finest chocolate chip cookie in the known universe?"

From that marvelous beginning (damn, I wish I could write like that), it just gets better and better. Go. Read. Treasure. If you have the time, browse around the place. The man can write. And think.

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