As a volunteer ranger, i saw this too often. I had to tell them to add the fluid to a some charcoal not in the BBQ, then add the soaked briquette to the BBQ- assuming the BBQ had 'gone out"- which often it hadnt really. I saw many singed arms and eyebrows.
Are we talking fresh, or canned?
Nothing like nice Mediterranean baked sardines, whether what I think of as Portuguese-style (with a tomato sauce), Greek-style(lemon and garlic and herb crust), Moroccan-style (stuffed with chermoula) or any other way. But that needs fresh.
A baked potato is much like a wedge salad. It’s merely a delivery mechanism for foods that you wouldn’t eat on their own. You can’t eat a pile of sour cream and cheddar cheese and green onions and butter, but toss it on a baked potato and you’re good. If you tried to eat a bowl of bacon bits, tomatoes, chopped egg, bleu cheese, and buttermilk, you’d get looked at cock-eyed, but dump it on a chunk of iceberg and you’re good.
I’m talking in-the-can snack type things (well, they’re also good in a pasta). I don’t know if I’ve had fresh grilled sardines or not, but I’ve had and prepared grilled mackerel, and that stuff is fantastic. But I’m talking simple joys in the pantry for myself, something I could pop open when I get the munchies around lunchtime and not feel guilty for eating.
Ooh, i agree! At the place we go for summer vacation, the chef built a smoker. The first year he used it for everything. That was a sad year, food-wise. He still uses it for the Sunday lunch turkeys. We used to have roast turkeys, now it’s smoked. It’s fine. But i always think, “this would be better if it didn’t taste smoky”.
Hmm. I don’t especially want to eat a mound of sour cream and cheddar cheese, either, although i will eat the stuff that falls out of my taco. But the taco is superior in every way. I get meat and beans, too. And it’s all wrapped in a delicious crunchy corn chip (go sue me, i like crunchy corn taco shells) instead of a bland baked potato.
Iceberg lettuce is underrated. Crunchy, refreshing, and i rather like the flavor of the lettuce.
I’m another fan of canned Norwegian sardines, the little ones that would grow up to be something like a mackerel. Greasy and rich and just sitting there at room temp, waiting for the moment i want to eat them. A very satisfying lunch on toast or flatbread.
Heard the movie was pretty good (never seen it, though).
Pepperoni does have a decent amount of anise in it.
Italian sausage has fennel which is licorice-like. I didn’t realize pepperoni had anise - I don’t detect that at all.
Ham is overrated. I can tolerate it very thinly sliced on a hoagie with other meats, but a slab on a plate is a version of hell for me. As Dorothy Parker supposedly said: “Hell is two people and a ham.” Why it’s associated with Easter is a mystery to me, but I wish someone had chosen spaghetti instead.
According to allrecipes.com: “Ham is traditionally served on Easter because, many years ago, pigs were slaughtered in the fall and the meat was cured during the winter. The ham was ready to eat by springtime, which made it the perfect main dish for Easter.”
I’m with you on this because even though we have no interest in Easter we always end up with a free one in the spring that sits in the fridge for a week until most of it gets chucked. We do try to use it as an ingredient (pea soup, cordon bleu, mac and cheese, etc.) but when ham is what’s for dinner I need a huge glob of strong mustard just to choke it down.
For some things, that’s absolutely true. I’ve met a surprising number of people who claim not to like seafood, until they actually have good seafood, at which point they change their tune. I suspect that something similar is going on with a lot of these foods.
But there are other dishes that are overrated by the fervor/adoration they get in relation to their difficulty, etc… That’s why steak was my example. With the right tools and raw materials, they’re not very hard to do, and they’re kind of unimaginative. There are far more interesting, subtle, and skillful dishes out there than a big slab of beef, although you’d never know it if you looked at the DFW restaurant scene.
I have not yet read the whole thread, so I apologize if this answer has already been said, but for years and years and years I never tried brussel sprouts.
Brussel sprouts is one of those foods you only ever hear bad things about usually. I had never even tried them and I thought that I would dislike them simply because everybody else seemed to.
I am 46 years old. I first tried brussel sprouts when I was 45, last year, when I was in a psych hospital for a while. I tried brussel sprouts for the first time and I was amazed at how they tasted. People dislike this? How? Are they tasting the same food that I’m tasting?
Brussel sprouts are delicious. I love them. Since then I have had them many times, I will often seek them out intentionally to have them. I have even had them unsalted and unseasoned and unbuttered, and they are just as good. Brussel sprouts get a bad reputation, in my opinion. If any person is like me, they simply never tried brussels sprouts because they feared they would dislike them due to the bad press that they get. In my opinion, they are actually delicious and yummy. Definitely underrated. They get a bad rap and I feel that it’s undeserved.
Well historically, no. Starting in the mid-1990’s the compounds associated with natural bitterness in brussels were discovered and new varieties began to be bred to reduce that traditional bitterness associated with them. Gradually these newer improved varieties pushed out the old by the 2000’s. Modern sprouts are much sweeter, milder and nuttier than the ones I had as a kid or your parents ate. That was shift #1.
Shift #2 was away from a standard American culinary tradition of boiling the shit out of sprouts to roasting them, which further helps to naturally sweeten them.
So the boiled, bitter brussel sprouts of my youth are a long way from the delicious sprouts you first tried last year. When I was a kid, garbage. Today, delicious.
There is literally a YouTube channel for everything! This one popped up in my “suggested” feed recently.
Plain brussel sprouts are not great. When they are roasted correctly and fancied up they can be heavenly. One of my favorite steakhouses has a roasted brussel sprout with sweet chili glaze and bacon that is the best thing on the menu.
Quoting (and editing) Jim Gaffigan:
“If it wasn’t for bacon, no one would even know what a water chestnut was. Bacon bits make a humdrum salad or potato the best part of the meal - like fairy dust. Bippity! Boppity! Bacon! Even frying bacon sounds like applause. And you can’t tell me the popularity of Kevin Bacon isn’t related to his name. ‘The new Kevin Bacon movie sounds delicious…’”
Very true. When I was a kid, my mother would boil the crap out of frozen Brussels sprouts, then wonder why my sister and I hated them. They had no taste left, except for “bitter and more bitter.”
Years later, my (now ex) wife made a point of getting fresh Brussels sprouts, doing something with them involving herbs and spices, and roasting them. They were delicious.
This is only true in America, I only found out this was a thing when visiting friends in Detroit Easter 24, never once seen Ham served at Easter elsewhere (UK, Belgium, Germany, Ireland, where I’ve lived, and they serve Ham with EVERYTHING in Germany).
Timely, because we just had my sister’s birthday dinner last night at a local steakhouse we’ve going to since we were little kids. Their steaks are dried-aged for 90 days (I think?), but we always rave about the baked potato, because it’s always perfectly cooked. Fluffy, not dry. I like both butter and sour cream, and the sour cream is homemade. Just amazingly good for such a simple item.
But I’ve also had mindblowingly good creme brulee. I still dream about one I had at a restaurant on the Big Island when I was in Hawaii ages ago. Sadly, the next time I went back, that restaurant was gone.
Not a fan of twice-baked. It messes with the texture.