Dark meat

That's the whole premise of this blog in two words. Dark meat is better eating and dark meat is better for you. Dark meat is also more expensive to produce. Which explains why it’s widely advertised to be fattening and nasty-tasting. Ads for McNuggets that tout their “all white meat” constitution as if it were an advantage are a lovely example of the big lie. Bigbreasted turkeys, too, are easy to make, and if you can convince the buying public that the breast is best, you can sell a ball of cheap dry fluff as a ball of butter. Agribusiness would like us all to adopt a trough mentality; they would like to feed us the same way they feed the animals they breed to feed us–biggest bang for littlest buck. That's your butterball: trough slurry. Chow.

Take a trip to Walmart and you can check out the success of the “feed people like livestock” plan so far. (There must be someplace other than WalMart to see people so fat they can’t walk, but WalMart is probably the closest.)

This must not stand. It may be looking a lot like Animal Farm around the ol’ homeland of late, but even so, we are not livestock. People do not eat chow.

We should all eat as well as we possibly can tomorrow, so that our thanks will be genuine.

another mayo triumph

Oh, I wander and stray and have wild adventures with other condiments, but I always come back to mayonnaise. What better way to use the eggs you're getting from the backyard flock in your life?

I finally quit messing around and used the Cuisinart like Julia Child CLEARLY SAID I SHOULD about A THOUSAND YEARS AGO. And I used almond oil, not olive oil. The problem with olive oil I examined in an earlier post: it has too strong an olive tang: it overwhelms your mayonnaise.

Since I was planning to use this stuff as salad dressing, I quit mixing in oil when it got the right consistency. My plan is to use the resultant "salad cream" as a base for a variety of delicious dressings. As is, it tastes exactly like the store mayonnaise that has the royal blue lid and used to have lemons on the label before they changed the label and now it's all white space with like a red onion and some other mess on it. (Mistake! Contact the Obama campaign, you mayo morons: maybe now that he's won they can loan out the outerspace genius agitprop savant who came up with the sun sign. That's the only way you can bail your mayonnaise out now that you've wrecked it on the NewCoke rocks.) My mayo is maybe a tiny bit better than that stuff, but I haven't tasted the two of them right together, and my slight preference for mine may be psychological, because I know it's made with almond oil not soybean oil.

Because it's willing to taste like traditional store mayo, my almond-oil mayo base is perfect just as it is for when I make a bacon lettuce and tomato salad; obviously a garlic-ey aioli would be Wrong For America in that situation. When I want aioli, though, I just throw whatever I haven't used on the BLT salad back in the cuisinart with a pressed clove of garlic. When I want thousand island (which is never), I whizz it up with some ketchup. When I want "ranch" (also never), I throw in whatever they put in "ranch." Ramen noodle flavor pacs?

Woooooo! I am so golden right now!

Unless I'm not.

Because maybe it's at the accessorizing stage when trouble enters paradise because maybe it curdles?

But all that trauma is in the future, though: for now, the potential mayo problems that had me crippled with fear (curdling, tasting like olive diesel, being an off-putting green color, being a pain in the ass to try to make) are vanquished. And that makes this? Another mayo triumph.

Get hooked up, part III

I get eggs from a individual at my workplace whose family keeps chickens. This keeps me out of the grocery store. Know what else? If I didn't get eggs there, I got two, three other places I could get local eggs, aw yeah. I just use this source 'cause it's the most convenient, mmmhmm. And plus two of the chickens from whose cloacas (cloacae?) my eggs issue (I hope you'll pardon the appallingly graphic sentence we're immersed in right now) come from a friend's former backyard flock. Well, they comprised her backyard flock. She couldn't maintain her backyard flock anymore, so I told her about another, larger flock they could join and still keep their street cred, you know, still be backyard flock birds from around the way, noamsain? So since I'm so dang hooked up I was able to hook up my friend and that increases my own hookedupness by two chickens, a'ight, two chickens, noamsain?

Sometimes it helps to talk like that guy in Slingblade who says "mmmmmhmmmm," and sometimes it helps to talk like the guy on Trailer Park Boys who says "noamsain?" These kinds of little tricks can really help loosen you up when you're blogging. Never say I didn't have good tips in this blog. Okay, never say that.

Yours respectfully,

Nom, nom, nom!