A Dog Responds to the Food Prices

The dog Biscuitgoat has not only taken over the blog, she's taking letters from readers.

Dear BiscuitGoat,

My dog Max has become a fan of yours, so I was hoping you could use your influence to help me out. With the economy being what it is, we've had to scale back on our spending, and I've switched Max over to another, cheaper brand of dog food. Now Max is mad at me and has gone on a hunger strike. Can you please explain to him the realities of today's food prices?

Yours, Cheap Pack in Chesapeake

Dear Cheap,

Times are indeed tight. And alas, being the lowest members of the pack, it is always the poor fate of us dogs to be affected first when conditions change. It's always our stuff that gets skimped on first. We don't get new toys. We get groomed by amateurs. They cancel our subscription to Dog Fancy.

But dogs are understanding, and we could take all this, without complaint, if that's what it takes to keep the pack together. It's a little harder to take crappy, stale, tasteless, probably poisoned with industrial chemicals from China, dog food. Maybe all dog food looks the same to you, but I assure, it is not. There is some brands of dog food that I have starved rather than eaten, and then there are some brands that buy their ingredients from unregulated and possibly contaminated Chinese sources. Remember that pet food recall less than a year ago?

Fortunately, my pack feeds me Bil-Jac, a local pet food company that uses only fresh, quality real meat and chicken from local producers. It's really quite delicious - in fact all the dogs that visit try to eat my food. Because I have managed to look particularly sad and pathetic lately, they have not only fed me the dry Bil-Jac, but the frozen Bil-Jac, which is so fresh that you have keep it in the fridge. Which is really good.

In other words, some things are worth paying more for. Cheap food, including cheap dog food, are cheap for a reason, and sometimes comes at a serious cost later on.

Dogs are not especially picky eaters (I myself will eat many things my pack considers absolutely inedible) so if Max isn't eating, you can bet that dog food is probably all kinds of nasty. I say find other ways to cut back and pay for some acceptable dog food. Plus, I suspect Max is also mad because he's the only one being asked to sacrifice. Are you still getting fancy double tall fancy mochas in this age of uncertainty? (And don't tell me you deserve the treat because of all your stress. Puh-leeze. You don't know stress until you've been chased around the house by a Dyson vacuum cleaner attempting to suck up your soul.) Still going on big vacations (which you don't take us along to)? Then consider budgeting there instead.

Anyway, good dog food is not that much more expensive. What the current economic crunch should teach you is not to cut back indiscriminately, but that one should prioritize their money and focus on what's really important. For me, that would be tasty, healthy food.

A Dog Betrayed

I thought we were a happy pack. I did. Sure, we had our occasional disagreements - did I have to come in right now? you don't want that last piece of bagel do you? - but all in all, I was content and I thought they were content as well. Sure they left all day long, but they always came back eventually.

And then one night they came later than usual. They did this sometimes. Maybe they worked late. I didn't think anything of it. But then ... I got a whiff of something. Something different. Something like ... ham. Really good ham.

I looked more closely. They were dressed particularly well. They seemed suspiciously pleased with themselves. And yes, on closer smelling, it was definitely the scent of ham. Expensive ham.

I tried to ask them where they'd been. As usual, they wouldn't tell me. I pretended that nothing was amiss, but I suspected something. Maybe it was nothing. I should trust them. I wanted to trust them ... but I had to know for sure. So I'm not proud of it, but I looked at their cell phone records. And that's where I found the pictures. Incriminating pictures that left no doubt about what they had done.

They had spent the evening with some Lolita.







I should have left it alone, but I had to know more - all the sordid details. So I listened in on their little private conversations they have between the two of them.

Ladygoat's butternut squash ravioli was delicious, but paled in comparison to Foodgoat's sea scallops, which were tender and luscious and flavorful. They went wonderfully with a side of rich creamy polenta. Even the bread sticks - much like big soft pretzels - were very good.

But the highlight of the evening was starting with the "Big Board for Two", a sampler of cured meats that included salami (made in house), sopressata, and three different kinds of prosciutto, along with pickled fennel and a sweet apple salsa-like thing. Served on a wooden cutting board, it was like a sushi plate, but of meat - each item was bite-sized, flavor-packed, and perfectly complementary in flavor.

The prosciutto was made by La Quercia Artisan Cured Meats in Iowa, and while the Berkshire prosciutto and the spicy prosciutto picante were absolutely tasty, it was the smoked prosciutto, the Speck Americano, that blew them away. Smoked with applewood, this prosciutto was not just good - it was memorably good. It had a yumminess that was on a whole other scale of measurement. Slightly sweet, slightly smoky, complex and just really tasty.

You should have heard them go on and on, the shameless hussies. They know perfectly well how much I adore ham, how much I love prosciutto. And they go off and eat prosciutto - the very best prosciutto - without me.

It was of little consolation to find that they had never been there before, that it was their first time. They had planned it, you see, they had planned it for a long time. And they were planning on going again. Without me. Just because the food was delicious, the prices reasonable, and service impeccable.

Fur Job

The dog blogger BiscuitGoat continues her takeover of the Foodgoat blog ...

WARNING!!! Spoiler Alert!

If you watch, as I do, Battlestar Galactica (for I too like to ponder the fate of humanity) you know that one of the great mysteries yet to be revealed this season is WHO IS THE FINAL CYLON? The fans have been debating for months - but I, Biscuitgoat, knows who it is.

Furthermore, I am willing to reveal it. Beware, this is a tightly kept secret!











It's me! You weren't expected a Dog Cylon, were you? But then again, why shouldn't there be a Fur Job among the frakkin' toasters? There are dog robots even now, providing companionship to kids and elderly Japanese people, so it just stands to reason that dog Cylons should have been developed alongside the humanoid Cylons. As we have seen this season, the Cylons can experience the full range of feeling and love, so naturally one would expect that their first inclination would be get a wittle puppy wuppy.

And now that you have taken a good look at me ... you must realize that yes, you've seen my kind before. A dog that just looks ... dog-ish. No particular breed, just plain old stereotypical dog. Everywhere you go, you'll see the same dog model.

Therefore, I must be a Cylon.

Dog Bless America*

The dog blogger BiscuitGoat continues her takeover of the Foodgoat blog ...

I haven't paid much attention to politics in my life. But two years ago, after passing the test (with flying colors, I might add) I became a Canine Good Citizen, so I feel it's my duty to contribute to the democratic process as much as I am able. Seeing as I'm not 18 yet though (4 more years to go!), I can't vote, so blogging and influencing the voting public it is.

Furthermore, in this election, there are Important Issues facing American dogs today. Not the least of these is the fact that there are over one thousand MWDs (Military Working Dogs) stationed in Iraq.

So, I consider each of the presidential candidates. First, I look at their pet record.

Obama doesn't have a dog, and has no pet-owning record that I've been able to find. (FoxPetNets has repeating insidious rumors that Obama has a friend who once owned a squirrel but that's just mean-spirited gossip.) However, he did make a significant campaign promise: when the election is over, he promised his daughters they could have a dog, whether or not he wins. Usually one can't trust campaign promises, but Obama seems to have a calm assertive energy, and I believe him. Plus, the man has excellent taste in ham. (I'm partial to prosciutto myself.)

Clinton has a dog - a chocolate Lab named Seamus. Seamus was a gift from Hillary to Bill after their Lab, Buddy, was run over by a car. Buddy came after their cocker spaniel, Zeke, was also run over by a car. I'm not implying any impropriety, and no investigations have ever been called for. It's just ... it seems rather careless of them. Maybe it's unfair. But I wouldn't trust her to walk me down a busy street, so I can't very well trust her to run the country.

On the pet ownership issue, McCain, though, takes the cake. Right now he has Coco, a mutt (who he once saved from the brink of death with his quick action!), Sam, an English springer spaniel, two more dogs named Lucy and Desi, two turtles named Cuff and Link, Oreo the black and white cat, three parakeets, and 13 saltwater fish. His ferret, alas, recently died of cancer. In the past, they have also had two mini-Dobermans, two snakes, one rabbit, a hamster, a mouse, an iguana and a gecko.

This makes it hard for me not to endorse John McCain. Clearly, the man can bring together an impressively diverse pack.

Still, I've got my reservations about him.

I must think of all my compatriot dogs stationed in Iraq. Remember, 100 human years is 700 dog years. That's a long time for us dogs. Our entire species could be completely different by then. And war is as hard on dogs as it on humans. Remember in "Courage of Lassie" when Lassie got drafted, and came under fire right on the front lines? SO SAD. Lassie had PTSD! She had such a hard time adjusting back to civilian life! She had flashbacks! I have tried to do my part by sending care packages of Bil Jac treats and Doggles to our dogs in Iraq, but wouldn't it be better for us to send them home, than for us to send them there?

And, this very large menagerie of McCain's might also be suspect as well. Isn't it only crazy old ladies who amass these very large packs?

And, there are other issues I must still consider: their position on pet insurance, affordable pet medication, and standards for regulating the dog biscuit industry. Like everyone else, I'm watching this election carefully.

*Opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Foodgoat or Ladygoat.

The Dog Blogs the Draft

It's the football draft weekend again, and I'm just glad that Foodgoat is not trying to put a giant Browns foam finger on my head, so I thought I'd play his draft day game too: take a shot every time there's a trade between teams during the first round. Today he's drinking Midori, the melon liqueur. How bad could it be?

Eight - no, wait, nine - trades later ...

The Pack Will Provide

I have heard a great deal of anxious talk in the last few days among the humans about of food rationing. Now, this is not a new issue among us dogs. I have known several dogs who advocated the food hoarding lifestyle, including a husky who insisted on burying every bone she got in the backyard. It's understandable, after all, a dog has to have contingency plans. However, it's messy, the humans for some reason get generally displeased by the digging and stashing away, and there are freshness issues.

But most of all, I say, The Pack Will Provide. I've lived a long time and stayed with a couple of different packs, and there has always been food in my dish, even if sometimes it wasn't ham. Occasionally, the food was a little more crumbly than usual, but then another giant bag appears and all is right again.

Not only that, but I've hunted with my pack a few times now, and to be honest, it looks pretty easy. You just drive up to this window, and food comes out in a little bag. I've been able to hunt this way all year, so it doesn't seem to be seasonal thing. And so, I'm not going to start hoarding food, or worry too much about this allegedly coming food crisis. It's a lot of panic, IMHO. Certainly I don't think packs should be hoarding rice (I never touch the stuff myself anyway), as this induces further panic and drives up prices. Like the bones buried in the yard, you'd just get a lot of stale rice after a while. Be calm and submissive to the rice market.

Anyway, in the absolute crisis of my pack running out of food, there's always the grass in the backyard. And it's looking very long and green these days.

New Blogger on the Block

You may have noticed that Ladygoat and Foodgoat has been somewhat absent of late. They may tell you that they has been preoccupied with Some Recent Exciting Developments, but it looks to me that they have been doing the same old things they always do, which is sit in front of the TV and computer and try to warm their freezing cold feet under me while I'm getting my after-dinner nap (which, frankly, I resent).

Since they have been neglectful of the blog, I've decided to take the blog into my own paws. I'm pretty busy, what with sleeping and eating and paw licking and did I mention sleeping?, but I think I can squeeze it in. (If I'm good enough at it, maybe I can make enough to get that stimulus package, which I understand can buy a lot of biscuits. )

Expect to see a lot of posts about the various types of ham Foodgoat has been purchasing at the local Italian store.

The Chili-Delphia Story

How much did we enjoy Dorito's Spicy Sweet Pennsylvania Primary Coverage From Chili-Delphia - The City of Brotherly Crunch! - on the Colbert Report last week?

Enough to try out the Dorito's new Spicy Sweet Chili flavored tortilla chips! (Not that we are ever influenced by clever marketing ploys at all.)

Foodgoat found them, surprisingly, not bad at all, considering that he doesn't care for the regular Doritos Nacho Cheese flavor much. A little spicy ... and then, yes, a little sweet. Crunch-goat-licious!

Thank Goodness Easter is Over

It's a great relief to me that Easter season is over, because Easter candy is quite possibly the most unappealing holiday candy of the entire year. There are Peeps (no one actually eats these, do they?), there are Cadbury eggs (raw eggs, even pretend candy raw eggs ... eww), and then there are the aisles and aisles of cheap, sugary, probably grainy and untasty, milk chocolate bunnies.

In third grade, we had to sell foot tall milk chocolate bunnies. I ended up eating a lot of them myself. I must have overdosed then, because I can't stand the idea of eating a Easter chocolate bunny now.

Addicted After All

Not long ago, I decided to give up coffee for a few months. I didn't drink that much to begin with - 16 ounces at the most, spaced out into tiny sips throughout the workday, thanks to my handy thermos. Usually I wouldn't even finish it. That's not much, right? So how bad could it be to stop drinking coffee for a while?

I kept a giant plastic bottle of water on my desk in the morning instead of a thermos. I sipped cold water and felt virtuous.

But it's now almost two months into cutting out the morning coffee, and you know what? I'm done. I'm so over the experiment.

I don't need the thermos, but I think I'm going to go back to coffee in the morning. It wasn't that I got headaches or got all Mr. Coffee Nerves on everyone (okay, maybe a little), but starting mornings without at least a few sips of steaming hot something just didn't feel right. I love tea, but it's more of an afternoon and nighttime thing, and hot cocoa is too sweet. Half a cup of hot, black coffee, on the other hand, is perfect.

Retro Lunch

I previously mentioned that recently, Foodgoat resumed a practice of his youth. Tired of buying the super sweet sodas (or, if you must, pop) and generally opposed to paying for bottled water, he started buying milk at his work cafeteria to drink with his homemade, bagged lunch. True, it's skim milk now. But not many grown-ups are pairing their lunches with milk at all.

Today he is having a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a Granny Smith apple, a bag of Fritos, and milk. How charming is that? It makes me want to buy him a Star Wars lunch box on eBay.

Can I Get A Napkin Please?

I do not generally associate food courts with delightful dining experiences, but then I wasn't lucky enough to be one of the unwitting customers for this hilarious and totally awesome improv-infiltrated food court musical.

Tasty, Tasty Murder

I saw this classic Threadless t-shirt on sale for $9 today, and I thought to myself, I'm glad I eat meat.

I don't feel any guilt about eating the delicious flesh of animals killed solely to satisfy my hunger. None at all. Should I?

Cheesy Dreams

It's an old wives' tale that eating cheese gives you nightmares. I've actually never heard of this, until I came across a study by the British Cheese Board in 2005 that looked into it.

They found that eating cheese before bed actually helps with getting a good night’s sleep (it's the tryptophan). The best finding, though, is that different cheeses cause different types of dreams. For example:

• Stilton, a blue cheese, not surprising perhaps, resulted in really vivid and weird dreams, though not necessarily bad dreams, for 75% of men and 85% of women who ate it. How weird? Talking soft toys, a vegetarian crocodile upset because it could not eat children, dinner party guests being traded for camels, soldiers fighting with each other with kittens instead of guns and a party in a lunatic asylum.

• Brie caused women tended to experience nice dreams, such as Jamie Oliver cooking dinner in their kitchens, or sunny beaches, but men had obscure dreams, such as driving against a battleship, or having a drunken conversation with a dog.

• Cheddar-eating participants tended to dream of celebrities.
  

Now this is a study just crying out for verification and reproducibility. Time for some nighttime snacks!

Krab People!

Times being what they are, the time had come to pass up on the crab, and to try out krab.

I know I've had krab, or imitation crab, before. I must have - it's often used in California rolls or in crab dips and the like. But it's not something I really remember tasting.

Crab, on the other hand, I've tasted - and love. When my parents bought crab, it was fresh - so fresh that if you dropped it you'd have to chase it to get it back.

Foodgoat doesn't quite that fresh, and I'm not even sure we can really get that level of crabbiness here in Cleveland. But we do often buy excellent, freshly made crabcakes from the West Side Market and the occasional can of crabmeat.

Alas, that can can come in at upwards of $25 a pound. Imitation crab, we noticed, rang up at $11. Would it be worth it? It was time to find out.

Imitation crab is actually made from fish - specifically, surimi, which white fish meat that is ground into a paste and becomes gelatinous and rubbery when cooked. Usually that fish is Alaskan or walleye pollack, a very mild tasting, plentiful fish (it's certified as a sustainable fish, so you can eat it with confidence that you're not draining the oceans of life). Surimi has been made for over 800 years in Japan (it's also used to make fish balls and other types of processed fish products), but imitation crab meat was introduced in the United States in the early 1980s.

To turn surimi paste into something crab-like in texture, they add starch (usually wheat or tapioca, for firmness), sugar (for preservation), and egg whites and vegetable oil (for cohesion and shininess). To give it a crab-like flavor, they add both natural (from actual crabs) or artificial (from New Jersey) flavorings. Add a little food coloring to give it a crab-like pinkishness, and all the ingredients are in.

This paste is formed into smooth sheets, which are then cut into strands that are rolled into a rope, and steamed cooked - and in the end, it looks a lot like crab (and, some say, like string cheese).

We initially got the krab for California rolls, but ended up making a crab salad instead. Texture-wise, it was awfully rubbery, rather than meaty. Taste-wise, well, I really wouldn't mistake it for real crab in blind taste test.

However, it wasn't bad - - it was mild and vaguely crabby and generally inoffensive. It just wasn't really much like crab.

But, imitation crab is quite popular and lot of people genuinely like it. I think I would be more enthusiastic about it if it didn't pretend to be crab. If we just called it fish fillets or ground pollock or something, I feel like it could stand pretty well on its own. Obviously, it does all right in California rolls, mixed with avocado and rice and wasabi. It would probably do excellently in a creamy seafood dip or a mixed seafood cassarole.

But as a straight up crab substitute? In recipes in which crab is central to the flavor? Not so much. In recipes where the crab is central to the texture (like crab cakes or crab salad)? Really not so much.