You Call That Thai? I Call It Filipino!

On a comment on our recent post about Mr. Brisket, Cookbook recommended trying their Thai sausage.  So we did. 

And oh my goodness, that was some very good sausage. Succulent, juicy, wonderfully flavored.

But Thai? 

When I think Thai, I generally think spicy.  This sausage is not spicy.  At all.  It's sweet.

What it really tastes like to me is Filipino sausage.  It tastes like languanisa, the sweet Filipino sausage that is usually served with breakfast, and generally so juicy that when you poke it with a fork while cooking it squirts up these little fountains of fat.  and that's just what the Thai sausage did too.  Yummy!  Really, languanisa is a one of my very favorite things in the world.

Is this really what Thai sausage is like?  Did the Thai sausage come first?  Or did the Filipino languanisa come first?  Or do they share a common sweet sausage ancestor?  Or did the sweet sausages emerge independently?

I'll be stopping by for more, but in my mind, I'll be calling it Filipino sausage.

The Day of the Scones

I tried to get excited about the royal wedding on Friday, because they seem like a nice and unobjectionable couple.  So what if the monarchy seems terribly, terribly archaic and pointless, not to mention sexist, in these modern times?  I suppose there are worse things than keeping around a royal family for the sole purpose of voyeuristic entertainment and to be, well, just very, very British. 

But I was not AT ALL motivated to get up at 4 am, or 5 am, or even 8 am, whatever God forsaken hour it was televised at.  I wasn't even motivated to try to get Foodgoat to change the channel away from NFL Draft coverage.  Weddings can be very boring to watch.  Of course if the Daleks started attacking in the middle of the ceremony I would have been sorry that I missed it, but alas, they missed a rather golden opportunity. 

But I did make up a batch of scones for the occasion (I just couldn't bring myself to try and make a fruitcake).  I feel like I must have had scones at some point in my life, but I don't remember actually having them or anything about what they are supposed to be like. They always just look dense and dry and sweet.  They never look as good as muffins do in the morning.  So I didn't have a lot of high hopes for my own attempt at scones.

Well, was I ever surprised.  I used the King Arthur Flour basic recipe, and added chocolate chips.  It was not only really easy, it tasted just wonderful.  Scones, as it turns out, are just what I know as biscuits, and they were buttery, moist, crusty on top, and not too sweet.  I loved them.  I'll definitely be making these again.

So if nothing else, at least the British monarchy has introduced me to the deliciousness of the scone. 

Wendy's Natural Cut Fries With Sea Salt

A report came out last week that Wendy's new "Natural Cut Fries with Sea Salt" are in fact, not all that natural.  But instead of being deterred by the news, Foodgoat just craved them even more.

So what if they are dusted in dextrose (sugar derived from corn)?  And dipped in sodium acid pyrophosphate?  (These keep them from turning brown from when they are fried prior to freezing and fried again at the restaurant.)  And what if they are fried in oil mixed with dimethylpolysiloxane, a silicone-based chemical that helps keep the vegetable oil from getting foamy after a whole day of frying? 

We are talking about fast food, after all. 

Because even if they are not exactly fresh from the potato farm, they do taste great.  Foodgoat isn't the only one to think so:  Wendy's claims their fries beat McDonald's fries in a national blind taste test, and fries sales at the 6,600 Wendy's (which is based in Ohio) worldwide have gone up 10%. 


The new fries still have the potato skins on, they are are crispier and the flavor is much better than the old Wendy's fries. Natural or not, they do make us happy.

Fish Sticks and Custard and Doctor Who

We celebrated the premiere of the new Doctor Who season on Saturday with - what else? - fish sticks and custard.

When we first met the 11th Doctor last year, of course, the young Amelia Pond offers a variety of foods to feed his newly regenerated body, but each one - the yogurt, the apple, even the bacon - is rejected, spit out, or deemed evil.  The ultimate and unlikely winner is fish sticks dipped in custard. 

Naturally, I didn't have high hopes for how well this would taste, so we went with minimal effort - Van De Kamp's Frozen Crunchy Fish Sticks and Jell-O Instant Pudding in Banana Cream. 

But guess what?  It wasn't bad at all. 

The fish sticks were nice and crunchy (I don't know why, but I was greatly reassured by the fact that the fish stick instructions said explicitly that microwave cooking is not recommended), and they didn't so far so badly dipped in the sweet, banana cream pudding.  Perhaps not the ideal dipping sauce, but not nearly as weird as I anticipated.  I finished off all the fish sticks this way! 

Why does Foodgoat look so sad then?  Maybe it's because he had to watch Doctor Who in standard definition instead of high definition.  Come on, DirecTV, carry BBC America in HD!

Review: Spice Packs - Not for the Seasoned Cook (heh, heh)

We have a well stocked spice cabinet - a lot of spices, and an excellent spice source.  Foodgoat can mix and match his own spices very well, so we didn't have particularly high hopes for these individual spice packets made by Aromatica Organics, who claim to be America’s first organic spice company,which we were sent samples of to review a while ago.

Each spice packet is sized for making a dish that might be enough for two people - enough to one pound of chicken, let's say, or two potatoes - so there is no measuring needed.  The packet also helpfully comes with suggested uses and directions.

They have a large selection, but we tried out three in one meal - the Green Bean Seasoning with pan-sauteed green beans, the Potato Topper Seasoning with mashed potatoes, and the Caribbean Jerk with a roasted chicken.

Before ...

After the chicken as been roasted ...

Surprisingly (to us, anyway), the spice packets worked generally very well and were easy to use.  The chicken was great and the mashed potatoes was delicious.  The green beans were overwhelmed by the spices, though.  I don't know if I necessarily blame the spice mix on that, because generally I don't think green beans even really needs much in the way of spices. 

All in all, I was surprisingly happy with the spice packets.  They were easy to use, tasted great, and made cooking very simple.  Still, they aren't something we are likely to use a lot, because we do tend to have our own spices on hand.

But they are still nice to have around, I have to say.   And I can think of a lot of situations in which these individual, pre-mixed spices make a lot of sense: when you don't keep a wide variety of spices on hand, when you don't quite sure how to blend spices, when you're traveling and will be cooking in a different kitchen.

And, because they gave us way too many of the spice packets to try, I will be giving some of the extras away!  Just leave a comment by Thursday, April 28, at 5 PM EST telling me what your favorite spice is, and a random commenter will receive a selection of the spice packets to try for themselves.