Archive for the ‘Food’ Category

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Obit watch: March 22, 2025.

Saturday, March 22nd, 2025

George Foreman. ESPN.

Foreman’s career spanned generations: He fought Chuck Wepner in the 1960s, Dwight Muhammad Qawi in the ’80s and Evander Holyfield in the ’90s.
With his fellow heavyweights Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali, Foreman embodied a golden era in the 1970s, when boxing was still a cultural force in America. The three great champions thrilled fans with one classic bout after another. Foreman was the last living member of the trio.

…

Success came quickly in the amateur ranks; only a year and a half later he was Olympic heavyweight champion, defeating Ionas Chepulis of the Soviet Union by a second-round knockout in Mexico City in 1968.
After the fight, Foreman, who was Black, waved a small American flag in the ring, days after the track athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised clenched fists during the national anthem to protest the country’s treatment of Black people.
“I was just glad to be an American,” Foreman said afterward. “Some people have tried to make something of it, calling me an Uncle Tom, but I’m not. I just believe people should live together in peace.”

…

Foreman’s affability helped him transcend boxing and cross over into the media world. In 1993-94, in the midst of his comeback, he starred in “George,” a short-lived sitcom on ABC in which he played a retired boxer helping troubled youth, and he made guest appearances on several other shows over the years. He appeared in a Venus-flytrap costume on the reality competition show “The Masked Singer” in 2022. (His performance of “Get Ready” by the Temptations was not enough to stave off elimination.)

Kitty Dukakis.

Posted in Food, Obits, Politics, Sports | No Comments »

Obit watch: February 24, 2025.

Monday, February 24th, 2025

Joy Reid’s show on MSNBC.

MSNBC’s president suggested Sunday that blindsided staffers of liberal host Joy Reid’s canceled show can apply for other jobs within the progressive network as she confirmed the group of employees would be canned, according to a report.

Just gonna slide in here before Lawrence does…

Lynne Marie Stewart. Other credits include the animated 1995 “The Tick”, “The Running Man”, “The F.B.I.”, and “Son of the Beach”.

Roberta Flack.

“I’ve been told I sound like Nina Simone, Nancy Wilson, Odetta, Barbra Streisand, Dionne Warwick, even Mahalia Jackson,” Ms. Flack told The New York Times in 1970. “If everybody said I sounded like one person, I’d worry. But when they say I sound like them all, I know I’ve got my own style.”

Tom Fitzmorris, who was the food guy in New Orleans for many years.

Mr. Fitzmorris had a corny sense of humor, which often involved jokes about the phrase “soup du jour.” (A customer asks what the soup du jour is; the waitress says, “I don’t know. They change it on me every day.”) He also liked to play elaborate April Fool’s pranks. He once made up a new restaurant that he said was opening near Commander’s Palace and described the fictitious competitor with such detailed admiration that Ella Brennan, then an owner of Commander’s Palace, dispatched her daughter, Ti Martin, to investigate.
Ti Martin, now one of the restaurant’s proprietors, remembered him as a particularly harsh critic, not out of meanness but because he wanted things done in a way he perceived as proper. When she ran out of iced tea at a restaurant she had just opened, he went on about it on his show for what she said seemed like an hour.
“But he was right,” she said. “Who runs out of iced tea?”

Posted in Food, Music, Obits, TV | No Comments »

Gun books, not so much gun books, and other tales of recent library additions.

Friday, February 21st, 2025

If I make a small push here, I can get the last of the gun books out of the living room. That will leave me with one on the kitchen table (which is there waiting for me to do the combination gun crankery/gun book post) and a few new additions upstairs. (Plus the backlog. We don’t talk about the backlog.)

Some of these books I can cover relatively quickly, so maybe it is worth making that push. All of them are interesting to me, but for varying reasons.

Shall we get on with it?

(more…)

Posted in Books, Food, Hoplobibilophilia | No Comments »

Quick preview of coming attractions (also relevant to Lawrence’s interests).

Friday, January 31st, 2025

I do intend to resume gun book blogging (and random gun crankery) soon.

Right now, I’m trying to finish the updates to the list of Texas congressional representatives. I’m about 1/3rd of the way through, and hope to have that done by the end of the weekend.

In the meantime, I thought I’d put up a quick post that’s sort of gun book related. Lawrence gets a fair number of possums in his yard. Or maybe just one possum, over and over again, that his dog keeps cornering. I don’t know for sure. I haven’t checked the serial numbers on his possums.

Anyway, I thought I’d throw this up as a preview from a forthcoming book: a recipe for “possum sausages”. I do think my use of this limited excerpt from How Wild Things Are by Analiese Gregory counts as “fair use”.

(Click to embiggen.)

One thing I do want to point out, though: Lawrence’s possums are the “Virginia opossum” (order Didelphimorphia). The possums the author is describing here are the “common brushtail possum” (order Diprotodontia), which are considered invasive in Tasmania. I suspect with enough pork back fat stuffed in, either one tastes good. Especially if you follow the recommended process of caging your possum for two weeks and feeding it fruit and veggies to reduce the “gamey” taste.

I do not know if the differences between Didelphimorphia and Diprotodontia make a difference to the cooking time or the taste of the possum sausage. I have not tried this recipe yet. (We don’t have a sausage/meat grinder. We do have a Kitchenaid stand mixer, but I would never buy the sausage stuffer attachment for it, as reliable sources say that is a POS.)

Posted in Books, Food, Hoplobibilophilia, Mammals | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: January 17, 2025.

Friday, January 17th, 2025

As promised, David Lynch. NYT. This is the same THR obit link from yesterday, but I think they’ve substantially updated it since I originally posted.

David Lynch PSA for the New York City Department of Sanitation. (Hattip: NYPost.)

Roger Ebert’s one-star review of “Blue Velvet”.

Joan Plowright, actress. IMDB. I feel bad that I don’t have more to say about here, but I just don’t.

Nathalie Dupree, cookbook author and personality. She’s actually someone I’d heard of, but didn’t really have a lot of context for. The obit makes it sound like she would have been a fun person to know, more so in her Diet Coke days.

Ms. Dupree had a particular blend of Southern hospitality and risqué charm. Over the course of her career she was called “the Julia Child of the South,” “the queen of Southern cooking” and “the anti-Martha Stewart.”
She shocked the host Katie Couric by ending an elegant entertaining segment on the “Today” show, in which she prepared an entire pork crown roast, by presenting a supermarket chocolate cake. She filmed episodes of her television show with a red AIDS ribbon pinned to her apron, a bold move in the 1980s, when conservative suburban women made up much of her audience.
“She is one of the few people in my life who seems more like a fictional character than a flesh-and-blood person,” the novelist Pat Conroy wrote in “The Pat Conroy Cookbook: Recipes and Stories of My Life” (2009), after taking one of Ms. Dupree’s classes. “You never know where Nathalie is going with a train of thought; you simply know that the train will not be on time, will carry many passengers and will eventually collide with a food truck stalled somewhere down the line on damaged tracks.”

…

Her early television shows, orchestrated solely by Ms. Graubart, were sponsored by a Southern flour company. Ms. Dupree wanted the kitchen segments to run with no edits. With a smear of flour on her face, she might leave ingredients half prepared or forget to add them altogether. She wiped her hands on her apron a lot and once searched around for her diamond ring that had fallen off as she cooked.
“Whatever happens to me is going to happen to you,” she’d tell audiences after a mistake.
“She was a hot mess, and that’s what people loved her for,” Ms. Graubart, who coauthored “Mastering the Art of Southern Cooking” in 2012 with Ms. Dupree, said in a phone interview.

Posted in Food, Movies, Obits, Theatre | No Comments »

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#138 and #139 in a series)

Thursday, January 9th, 2025

Mike the Musicologist tipped me off to an interesting story from Louisiana.

Tyrin Truong is the mayor of Bogalusa. He’s 23, which makes him the youngest mayor in Bogalusa’s history, and one of the youngest ever in the state.

And he got busted on Tuesday for drug trafficking.

Investigators determined that members of a drug trafficking organization in the Bogalusa area were using social media to distribute opioids, high-grade marijuana, THC products and MDMA, State Police said. Profits from the drug sales were used to purchase firearms. Some of the firearms were “funneled” to individuals prohibited from legal possession and some were linked to crimes in the Bogalusa area, State Police said.

But, apparently, no blow. Which is kind of disappointing, because:

Northshore District Attorney Collin Sims, whose agency is involved in the investigation, said Truong allegedly “organized entertainment with a prostitute” at an AirBnB while attending a mayor’s conference in Atlanta. The AirBnB had been rented using public money, Sims said.

…

Truong, now 25, was booked into the Washington Parish Jail in Franklinton on counts of transactions involving proceeds from drug offenses, unauthorized use of a moveable and soliciting for prostitutes, State Police said in a news release.

“unauthorized use of a moveable”?

Even before officially becoming mayor, Truong did not shy away from political battles and controversies. As mayor-elect, he pushed for the resignation of the Bogalusa police chief after a Black man died in the department’s custody.
During his tenure he encouraged law enforcement to patrol more in Bogalusa, but also suggested the city could dissolve its 33-officer police force and transfer responsibilities to the Washington Parish Sheriff’s office to save money.

Meanwhile, Thomas Clasby, the former director of the Quincy Department of Elder Services (that’s in Massachusetts), has been charged with “embezzlement, mail and wire fraud and interstate transportation of stolen property”.

Starting in 2019, Clasby used the city’s purchasing power to pay for personal expenses and make money for himself.

What kind of expenses?

Clasby arranged for the city to pay $8,950 to a music studio to produce recordings of him singing, $2,236 to food service vendors for 153 pounds of bourbon steak tips, $4,800 for a Toyota Prius and $1,658 for a self-portrait, federal prosecutors said.

The articles don’t specify if that was a down payment on a new Prius or an outright purchase of a used one. I did run the numbers, and that works out to $14.61 a pound for the bourbon steak tips. I don’t know if that’s a good price or not: my H-E-B app does not list steak tips (with or without bourbon) at my local store. I also can’t find “bourbon steak tips” online – I was thinking that might be something Omaha Steaks sells – but I did find lots of recipes for “bourbon” and “honey bourbon” steak tips online. Might be something worth trying.

Clasby also arranged for the city to pay over $38,000 to a New York consulting company owned by his friend, federal prosecutors said.
The consulting company didn’t provide any goods or services to Quincy, federal prosecutors said. Instead, Clasby’s friend cashed the city’s checks and gave Clasby the money at three separate places: A rest stop in Framingham, a ferry terminal in Bridgeport, Connecticut and at the friend’s New York apartment.

Okay, now you’re just being scummy instead of amusing. But we’ll always have the “signed, lacquered, framed portrait” and the studio recordings of his singing. Not that I’ve found those anywhere yet, but I’m sure prosecutors will be entering those into evidence and playing them for the jury.

Posted in Beef, Food, Law, Politics | No Comments »

Have yourself a merry little…

Tuesday, December 24th, 2024

…Vincent Price Christmas.

Victoria Price told Fox News Digital that her father, the star of classic horror movies like “House on Haunted Hill” and “Edward Scissorhands,” had a “weakness for large jewelry that he loved buying his wives,” and after going to Poland in 1974 he gifted her stepmother a chunky bone butterfly necklace.
“My stepmother hated it,” Price said. “That wasn’t her cup of tea. And unlike us, she just said it. ‘I will never wear this. I hate it.’”

…

She continued, “My dad loved Christmas; he was like Father Christmas. Christmas was his favorite holiday. They were married for 18 years. Every year for the next 18 years, [her stepmother] would get in her thing of Christmas packages some beautiful Tiffany box or something, and there it was, every damn year that bone necklace, so that was my dad’s humor.”

…

She got one of her favorite gifts, a portable typewriter, while they were spending Christmas in England one year, but her favorite gift was one she got from her dad every Christmas – a $10 gift certificate to a bookstore in Beverly Hills where she was able to buy a stack of books. “My dad and I would go to Hunter’s Books after I got my certificate, and he would amuse himself for as long as it took. There was no time limit,” she remembered.

This also gives me a chance to vent mildly about one of my disappointments this year. Vincent Price’s cooking show, “Cooking Price-Wise” is being reissued on blu-ray…

…but it is a region B/2 blu-ray that won’t play in the US, and I don’t have a region-free blu-ray player, alas.

Posted in Books, Christmas, Food, Movies | 3 Comments »

Frustration…

Friday, December 13th, 2024

I was going to post a short video that was relevant to Lawrence’s interests, but I can’t get it to display properly here. The first five or so seconds are cut off, and since it is only a 14 second long video, that just doesn’t work.

I was going to post a short note on a movie we recently watched, but there are no good videos of the bridge bombing from “The Bridges at Toko-Ri” on YouTube. At least, none that I can find, and I wanted to use that to illustrate my point. (I found one of the fuel dump scene, but that really doesn’t do a good job of showing what I wanted to talk about.)

Edited to add: Okay, I found one that gives a good illustration of what I’m talking about.

This is clips of aircraft footage from “The Bridges at Toko-Ri”. I’ve set it to start with the bridge attack at 8:41.

“Bridges” won an Academy Award for special effects in 1955. Interestingly, the other nominees were “The Rains of Ranchipur“…

…and “The Dam Busters“. We’ve seen “Dam Busters”, but not “Rains”. I may try to sell that to the Saturday Movie Group. On the one hand, it seems like one of those typical potboiler romantic melodramas, with a natural disaster thrown in. On the other hand, that cast: Lana Turner, Richard Burton, Fred MacMurray, and Michael Rennie (among others). On the gripping hand, the blu-ray is pricy.

Posted in Admin, Food, Movies | 2 Comments »

Bagatelle (#124).

Thursday, December 5th, 2024

Shot:

Chi-Chi’s is returning after closing 20 years ago.
The Mexican chain once had more than 200 locations before the last restaurant’s doors shut in 2004.
Now, the founder’s son is spearheading the comeback with a plan to reopen Chi-Chi’s locations in 2025.

Chaser:

Posted in Bagatelle, Food | Comments Closed

Silly food blogging.

Sunday, December 1st, 2024

Regular readers of this blog know of my fascination with things that sit at the weird intersection of food and popular culture.

The holidays are here! “Elf on the Shelf” cereal is at the H-E-B! Two flavors, even!

I didn’t buy any. I don’t eat cereal for breakfast, the last box I bought disappeared, and I don’t want to get yelled at for bringing food into the house that nobody’s going to eat.

However, I think it is more likely we will use these:

“Yellowstone” branded spice mixes. In “Cattleman Steak”, “Skillet Butter & Herb”, and “Cowboy BBQ”.

“Life on the Dutton Ranch requires a fistful of grit and the spirit of a cowboy! After a hard day of taking people to the train station, nothing hits the spot like a good steak seasoned with our Cattleman Steak seasoning!”

(No, I don’t watch “Yellowstone”, due to my “won’t pay for TV” policy. But I have picked up a few things about the series…)

Posted in Christmas, Food, TV | Comments Closed

Bagatelle (#122).

Thursday, November 7th, 2024

A few food related things Mike the Musicologist and I saw while running around:

The New Braunfels Rotary Club has gone up to $16! for the sausage and potato pancakes plate. Thanks, Joe Biden!

(Seriously, I think it was $12 the last time I went to Wurstfest.)

Because it just isn’t charcuterie unless it is on a stick. Also, that raclette sounds really good.

(We’ve driven past that cheese shop when we’ve been in New Braunfels, but I’ve never been in. May have to fix that.)

They’re not just pork rinds. They’re “small batch” pork rinds. I don’t think they are “artisanal”, however.

Posted in Bagatelle, Cheese, Food, On a stick | Comments Closed

Fun with snack food!

Sunday, September 29th, 2024

I could take this over to Lawrence’s, but I have two very good reasons not to.

One, Lawrence would tell me “Get this s–t out of my house.”

Two, I can post it here, where perhaps a handful of people who were on old school USENET will get a small chuckle (maybe) out of it. Heck, for all I know, he might even show up in the comments.

(“One of his better-known works is the typography for Philip K. Dick’s novel Gather Yourselves Together.”)

Posted in Food, Geek | Comments Closed

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