Foodgoat ... something tasty every day

Fur Job

2008-04-30T19:02:00.003-04:00

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*

2008-04-28T21:35:00.003-04:00

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

2008-04-26T19:54:00.004-04:00

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

2008-04-25T19:35:00.004-04:00

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

2008-04-23T20:53:00.003-04:00

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

2008-04-21T22:25:00.002-04:00

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

2008-03-26T21:46:00.004-04:00

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

2008-03-25T10:43:00.000-04:00

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

2008-03-20T11:10:00.005-04:00

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?

2008-03-19T09:43:00.002-04:00

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

2008-03-18T10:41:00.005-04:00

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

2008-03-17T08:39:00.000-04:00

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!

2008-03-12T14:19:00.000-04:00

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.

Sick and Tired, of Being Sick and Tasteless

2008-03-10T21:30:00.002-04:00

It's no fun being sick. Especially when it's a sickness that hits Foodgoat, then takes me down, then gets Foodgoat for a second go round. And a sickness that wipes you out, and keeps us in bed, delirious and coughing, for days, and one that continues to linger on annoyingly for weeks.

But, even worse, being sick means having losing your sense of taste and your appetite. When your great comfort and enjoyment in life comes in food, it's depressing to find that nothing tastes good and nothing even sounds tasty. As a result, we haven't managed to make a good, interesting meal in weeks.

Instead, the only things we have had the energy or inclination to eat are Cheerios or bagels with cream cheese. One day we managed miso soup. Oh, and lots and lots of hot tea with honey. Indeed, we've gone through more honey in two weeks than we have in two years. Everything else, though, just tastes like cardboard. Which is really very sad.

Nothing Says Love Like Bacon

2008-02-25T20:33:00.003-05:00

For Valentine's Day, Foodgoat and I shared an intimate meal ... over burgers and fries from Wendy's. After all, what could be more romantic than matching Baconators?

The Wendy's Baconator, introduced last June, consists of six strips of bacon on top two quarter pound beef patties with two slices of American cheese, mayo and ketchup.

Besides having the most awesome burger name ever, the Baconator is actually really tasty. Wendy's burgers tend to be among the better of the fast food choices, but the Baconator stands out as being particularly yummy. The key, I think, is the bacon: the hickory smoked bacon is slightly sweet and quite flavorful and crisp. It's an aptly named product. And it's huge - much bigger than I could finish off. Or would want to: the Baconator comes in at (gulp!) 830 calories.

But every once in a while, Foodgoat and I look into each other's eyes ... and decide what we really want is a Baconator.

Super Taco Tuesday

2008-02-05T21:18:00.001-05:00

It doesn't look pretty, and it can an agonizingly long time to digest. That was today's taco dinner, as well as the waiting for Super Tuesday results to come in. Hopefully the primaries will end leaving as good a taste in my mouth as the tacos did.

Foodgoat has managed to perfect his taco construction technique: blue corn hard shell tacos held inside a soft tortilla with a layer of warm refried beans. You get the crunch and the flavor of the blue corn hard shell, without the danger of structural collapse. Some ground beef (flavored with taco seasoning), some cheese, some salsa, and of course a dollop of sour cream, and you can face a night of primary returns fortified.

Tacos never look very big, but they are incredibly filling. Foodgoat doesn't know if it's the tacos or Hillary Clinton causing the indigestion. Maybe it's both.

Food You Don't Expect For Your Birthday

2008-02-04T22:09:00.000-05:00

For his birthday, Foodgoat got just what he wanted: a case of military MRE's, or Meals Ready to Eat.

MREs are self-contained, individual rations in lightweight packaging designed for field conditions where organized food facilities are not available. They're designed to last 3 years in 80-degree weather; longer if stored in more optimal conditions.

Why would he want this? Peace of mind: we are set for at least a week should disaster strike. That can of Wolfgang Puck soup is just not going to cut it for us if we are hit by gamma rays from an exploding neutron star or Canada attacks Cleveland or if a volcano blows up in New York. (34 is apparently the age when paranoia strikes).

Plus, MREs have apparently come a long way from their days of being known as Meals Rejected by Everyone, Meals, Rarely Edible, or Three Lies for the Price of One (it's not a Meal, it's not Ready, and you can't Eat it). Nowadays, they are reputed to be quite palatable. The military changes up their menu of MREs every year based on feedback as well.

Typically, each MRE has:

Entree - the main course, such as Spaghetti or Beef Stew
Side dish - rice, corn, fruit, or mashed potatoes, etc.
Cracker or Bread
Spread - peanut butter, jelly, or cheese spread
Dessert - cookies or pound cakes
Candy
Beverages - Gatorade-like drink mixes, cocoa, dairy shakes, coffee, tea
Hot sauce or seasoning - in some MREs
Flameless Heater - to heat up the entree
Accessories - spoon, matches, creamer, sugar, salt, chewing gum, toilet paper, etc

Want to learn more about MREs? This site is loaded with information.

Since we have not actually been hit by gamma rays recently, we haven't yet tried eating any of the meals. But stay tuned for the next time the power goes out!!

One Food Hack, One Non-Food Hack

2008-01-22T19:32:00.000-05:00

The food hack:

To prevent foods from sticking to the pan when pan frying or sauteing, preheat the pan before adding any oil or butter. Use the heat setting you intend to use when cooking (not high heat), and pre-heat for a few minutes. When is it ready? When the pan is about 180 degrees, or until it passes the "butter test": add a dab of butter on the bottom of the pan. If it bubbles briskly without burning, it's hot enough.

Add your oil and allow the oil to heat. Then throw in your food. No sticking to the pan!

This tip ended a long string of bad pan stickiness I've had lately.

Why it works:

I truly thought I read about this in Harold McGee's The Invisible Ingredient editorial, but re-reading it, I don't see it anywhere, so I'm at a loss as to where I heard it. But here's Foodgoat's best guess as to why it works -

When the metal pan is cold, its surface has actually rough, although it may look and feed quite smooth. Heat will cause this metal to expand, which causes the surface to even out and become smoother. But, if you add the oil when the pan is still cold, the oil gets into those surface hills and crevices, preventing it from smoothing out.

Oil added to a preheated surface, however, sits right on top of that surface, so that it acts as the slick, lubricating layer you need to keep food from sticking to the pan.

The Non-Food Hack

If, by chance, you should suck up the Wii Sensor bar with your vacuum cleaner, thereby mangling it beyond all recognition, you can still play with your Wii by lighting two candles, set about 9 inches apart, in front of your TV. Your Wiimote and all the games will work just as well with this super low tech sensor bar stand in. This is how we spent our Martin Luther King Jr. Day. It's really quite romantic.

Why it works:

The sensor bar doesn't actually sense anything, nor does it send any data to the Wii console. It just has two blue lights, one on each end, that the Wiimote uses to triangulate its position. It's the Wiimote that talks to the console. The sensor bar is just plugged into the console to power the lights. Candles provide the needed lights just as well.

Milk It For All It's Worth

2008-01-14T19:50:00.000-05:00

Last Friday was National Milk Day, in honor of the first day, in 1878, that milk was first delivered in bottles.

Foodgoat is a longtime devoted milk drinker who routinely pours a big tall glass to go along with his dinner at home. But now, he has also made milk his drink of choice for lunch at work. While everyone else grabs a soda (or pop, if you must call it that) or a bottled water at the cafeteria, Foodgoat is among the few adults drinking milk along with their meal.

And why not? Maybe because buying milk at the cafeteria is sooo 3rd grade. But for Foodgoat, as in about 36% of those of Southern European descent, milk can continue to be a healthy, delicious option for adults as well as children. Milk, more nutritious and more filling than soda, has calcium and protein and a whole host of other vitamins and minerals. There's surprisingly a lot of controversy around the health benefits of milk, but I attribute it to the agitations and warmongering of vegans.

Me, I do not have dairy herding in my genes. I am among the 90-100% of Asians, who stop producing lactase, the enzyme required to digest milk, in adulthood, and thus can be found curled up and clutching their tummy after having a big a milkshake. Fortunately, there is yogurt.

Linkgoat

2008-01-11T14:49:00.001-05:00

Minas Tirith during the Battle of Pelennor Fields ... in candy!

Here are the two food-related ones out of the 10 creepie st old ads ...

My Bologna Has an Ingredient, It's Mechanically Separated Poultry

2008-01-09T12:35:00.000-05:00

Foodgoat didn't like bologna before, and he disliked it even more after learning (from the excellent episode of Modern Marvels about cold cuts) that one of the key ingredients was "mechanically separated chicken. "

You can figure out what this means. But maybe you can't, and if that's the case, it is:

... paste-like and batter-like poultry product produced by forcing bones, with attached edible tissue, through a sieve or similar device under high pressure to separate bone from the edible tissue.

Mmmmm!

Bologna, according to the USDA, is a hot dog (I take issue with that, but that's beside the point). So, according to the USDA, bologna can contain any amount of mechanically separated chicken or turkey but no more than 20% mechanically separated pork.

Fortunately, mechanically separated meat (MSM) must be labeled as such in the ingredients statement.

Not for fortunately, mechanically separated meat probably contains lower-quality protein than that found in meat from muscle tissue, and bone marrow, so it's higher in fat and cholesterol. Not to mention that it's just plain old gross-sounding.

Makes you want to go out and try that bologna bubble gum, doesn't it?

A Reluctant Acknowledgement of Southern Ohio Cuisine

2008-01-07T20:59:00.000-05:00

I've been campaigning for Foodgoat to make Cincinnati chili ever since we saw Anthony Bourdain have a unpleasant-looking, probably worse-tasting, chain store plateful of the stuff on the Cleveland episode of No Reservations. But although his particular dish and the restaurant he go it from didn't look all that good, the theory behind Cincinnati chili seemed pretty sound to me. Pasta = good. Chili = good. Cheese = good.

Ergo, we should make our own.

And then it showed up on the Saveur 100! We must have some now!

Of course, Foodgoat's version is slightly different from the traditional version of Cincinnati chili. For one thing, instead of spaghetti, we used rigatoni. And our chili was thicker and spicier, rather than the thinner version laced with Mediterranean spices like cinnamon, cocoa, cumin, and allspice.

We had a pile of cheddar on top (making it a three way chili; with just pasta and chili it's a two-way chili), but we could have also added chopped onions as well (four way chili). Kidney beans would make it a five way chili, but since we had kidney beans already in the chili, I'm not really sure what number assignment to give it.

Despite of, or maybe because of, these deviations, Cincinnati chili turned out to be very filling, and very tasty - an excellent way to use the leftover chili.

How Foodgoat Rang in the New Year

2008-01-03T09:46:00.000-05:00

Foodgoat spent the last day of 2007 cursing and denouncing the name of Tony Dungy.

The only things that made him feel a little better was Slyman's sandwiches (one with Swiss cheese and mustard, by the way, is a "Smurf", which makes it loads of fun to order), a bottle of our favorite J sparkling wine, and hours of Puzzle Quest.

Only a little.

Maybe The Turducken Is Why Santa Has a Belly

2008-01-02T20:48:00.000-05:00

On Christmas day, we spent the day with our good friends, their lovely family, and their very, very large turducken.

A turducken, in case you don't know, is a chicken in a duck in a turkey, with layers of yummy-ness in between. It's like those nest Russian dolls, but with meat, so it's better. We had never had it before, but thanks to John Madden, we had been wanting to try for years.

''The first one I ever had I was doing a game in New Orleans,'' Mr. Madden said. ''The P.R. guy for the Saints brought me one. And he brought it to the booth. It smelled and looked so good. I didn't have any plates or silverware or anything, and I just started eating it with my hands."

When you think about it, a turducken sounds like an abomination. Perhaps God did not intend for us to kill, debone, the stuff a bird inside a bird inside a bird, especially on Christmas. But then I learned that the record for a nested bird roast is 17 birds - a Rôti Sans Pareil or Roast Without Equal - at a 19th century royal French feast, starting with a tiny garden warbler and ending with a bustard, with apparently every edible fowl creature, including what are now protected species, in between. The turducken seems positively modest compared to that.

And here is the delicious turducken cross-section! It's like one giant turkey-sized meat roll. Mmm!
As if turducken wasn't enough, we also had piles of other good things to eat.

How did it taste? Very good, surprisingly. I thought it would just be a novelty dish, but I liked it much better than straight up roast turkey, which is usually plain and dryish. The turducken and its various stuffings didn't lack for flavor, and the assortments of meats actually added up quite nicely. We kept on turduckening!

You could guess what happened next: Foodgoat and I realized that we are not cut out for binge eating. Those competitive eaters could probably eat circles around us, because this Christmas turducken took us down.

The turducken seemed to have some kind of expanding-in-your-tummy quality, because "fullness" does not begin to capture the feelings our stomachs felt in the hours after eating. "Stuffed" would be closer. "Overstuffed" would be just about accurate. We were so full we didn't really eat for the whole two days.

And yet, we'd definitely do the turducken again. Well, maybe a little with just a little bit less. Just a little.

Merry Christmas To Us!

2008-01-01T12:32:00.000-05:00

Happy New Year!

My New Year's resolution: I will make more of an effort to emerge from the wine-induced haze enough to blog more.

For Christmas, Foodgoat and I got each other something we've been eyeing for long time: the Bodum Santos coffee maker, which is an electric vacuum coffee maker. We first witnessed it in action at a Phoenix coffee tasting, but it always makes me think of that that great scene when Katherine Hepburn tries to make coffee for Spencer Tracy in "Woman of the Year". I thought it all looked very complicated as well, so I was sympathetic.

Too bad she didn't have the Bodum Santos. It's electronic, rather than stovetop, which takes out all the guesswork out of the process and is as easy to use as any automatic drip machine.

How does a vacuum coffee maker, aka vac pot, work? Magic!

Oh, all right. Vapor pressure and vacuum force.

As water in the lower chamber is heated, the gas pressure rises, pushing hot water up through the tube into the higher chamber. There, the water mixes with the coffee grounds, brewing your delicious coffee. When the heat shuts off on the bottom, a vacuum is created, and pressure, instead of pushing liquid up, pulls the liquid down through the tube in a great coffee whooosh!, into the lower chamber. The grounds are kept in the upper chamber by a filter. It's hugely fun to watch the water travel from one part to the other and then back down again as coffee.

It's an old-fashioned way of brewing coffee, invented in the 1830's, and the predominant method used prior to the 1950's. But one never sees it these days, despite the fact that it makes a delicious cup of coffee (CoffeeKid has some theories on why). We got ours at Phoenix, and all of the employees there got very excited about our buying it.

With a 12 cup capacity, we can brew up a lot more coffee than with the French press, and it seems faster and more consistent. Plus, it's a delight to watch (and to hear the whooosh!). It's been has been going on the road with us to various holiday parties, along with the Aerator, to entertain other people as well, making it quite the conversation piece.

Here, watch it work yourself:

There are some down sides: it's more awkward to clean than the French press, and other reviews have complained of a short lifespan and the company's poor customer service.

But overall, it's made our morning coffee a lot more fun. And I can have whole pots of coffee instead of just the one cup that the French press made, which has been great for the long, cold Cleveland holidays.