Food Quandaries

Why don’t olives and cherries taste similar? They both have pits.

French Toast is just bread and eggs. Why don’t we put maple syrup on scrambled eggs and toast? Or salt and pepper on French Toast?

Is BBQ sauce vegan?

If bread can be buttered, can it also be mayonnaised?

How do microwaves – even ovens – work?

mmmmm… vegetables

Most of you, our readers, are meat eaters. Which I am fine with. Sometimes people apologize to vegetarians for eating meat in front of them, or preparing it around them, but there is no need to apologize. As long as you don’t force it upon me, we’re good.

But I am going to propose a little something to you. First of all, check this out.

GOOD magazine did 10 Best Foods for Your Looks. Notice, none of these are meats. One of them is fish. Providing you with natural vitamins to fight the evils of the world, fresh fruits and vegetables, olive oil and walnuts (my favorite nut, note) can do things for you that you never thought they could (if you had thought about it.)

Here is what I’m proposing. If you aren’t a vegetarian, I am not asking you to never eat meat again. Try a week of it. Remember our friend Nate Scull? He made a New Year’s resolution to be a vegan and it stuck since. So who knows what can happen. If you refuse to not not eat meat, then just go without it for a week, see how you feel. People like my grandmother are baffled at what the other option is if there is no meat involved. Let me tell you, there’s plenty. Give it a whirl, try something new. No pressure.

Also, if you like making fun of TWILIGHT, read this. It’s hysterical.

It’s summertime, and you know what that means: Ice Cream!

product one

product two

I saw these two ice cream treat at Wegman’s. From what I can tell, they are in essence the SAME product. I don’t know why they bother making two. Granted, the above is 6×3.8 oz cones, and the latter is 6×4.0 oz cones, they have the same ingredients. It’s not like one of them is organic either! The kicker in the pants is, they cost the same too. I’d say go with the 4-ouncers – more bang for your buck!

Quick Hit List of things that annoy me

Here are a list of things that have been annoying me lately:

-People bitching on their facebook status about snow

-People constantly updating their facebook status (how about instead of doing that 8 times a day, you get a life instead? just a thought)

-People who write long statuses and or notes on facebook in which they try to bring up serious topics and seem wise (instead of seeming wise, you seem quite, quite douchey)

-People who end their sentences with questions.  I’m trying to have a conversation, not be interrogated here.

-Everyone overusing the word “extreme.”  How is everything extreme?  It makes no sense people, I doubt that my  deodorant is  extreme, but the label says it is.

-Night classes

-Bandwagon fans who all of a sudden love sports teams that they cannot name more than one player on (yes, USA hockey fans, I am talking to ALL of you)

-People who break up and get back together all the time (just pick something and stick to it, you aren’t Ross and Rachel)

-People whose only source of humor is quoting movies, let’s get some original material people.

And finally, my number one pet peeve lately………………

-2nd Floor letting TONS of underage kids in.  Has anyone else noticed this?  When we were younger we had to wait to get into the bars, now that sleazy bouncer at 2nd floor (you all know who Im talking about) is letting all these underage kids in.  It makes the bar more crowded and makes it harder to get a drink (it’s already hard enough at 2nd floor as they have the SLOWEST bartenders in all of Ithaca, hey bartenders stop hiring your girlfriend and hire people who know how to make a damn drink and be snappy about it!). Plus as someone who is of legal age, seeing the annoying juniors in the bar who think they are soooo cool because they are in the bar drives me to drink even more which wouldn’t be a problem if I could get a damn drink in that bar.

That’s what is annoying me this week.  What’s annoying you?  Comments people, let’s make this a weekly thing.

Beer Can Chicken

As avid readers of this esteemed publication know, I’m eating inorganic this year; no not to put myself at greater risk of disease or to skimp on all-natural benefits that organic food offers. I’m doing it for economical reasons – whole chickens for 88 cents a pound. I picked up two five-pounders for well under ten bucks.

What to do with ten pounds of chicken and a huge appetite? Well I thought back to the summertime when my father shoved a beer can up a whole chicken’s ass, threw it on the grill, and called it dinner. Sorry, to any of you readers, if that sounded sexual, in any sense of the word. From personal experience, let me tell you that it is not sexual, nor is it even fun to watch.

So I headed to the Beverage Center. Unlike the then-classically American Bud Heavy my father used to moisture-infuse the summer chicks, I decided to go with some heavier beers. So I picked up an Ithaca Smoked Porter and a Smuttynose IPA. I made the purchase, placed the two bottles next to my two birds and headed home. “What are you doing buying two glass bottles of beer to make beer can chicken?” you may be wondering. All you gotta do is pour the beer into rinsed-out cans, and proceed.

I employed the help of fellow beer and chicken connoisseur, as well as camera-phone enthusiast, 2008 Ithaca College graduate, Jim Walker.

Now I could bore you by transcribing the recipe on to this page, but I’ll do so with some fine photos:

beautiful birds

beautiful beers

Now, to combine the two. As stated earlier, we had to pour the beer into cans, and insert the cans in the cavity left by the giblets, previously removed.

canal insertion

As I stated before, this is not sexual or glamorous. But in two hours it will be delicious.

slick rub

The next step is to grease the bird up with vegetable oil, and coat it with a rub of salt, pepper, paprika, garlic powder, onion powder, and love.

give 'em time

Throw the chicks in the oven, and wait…

patiently!

In two hours, (at 375 degrees), your birds will come out looking, smelling and tasting like heaven.

mmmmmm

For more recipes, check out NotDrugs.com‘s future page of gourmet meals, brought to you by 6fu.

Bacon, Thanks to the Internet

I spend a lot of time on the Internet. Hopefully, as a reader of this esteemed online publication, you do too, on this site. Most of my cyber meanderings arbitrarily take me to random images, some with funny captions, others, with cats. Sometimes, themes emerge, and subjects just pop out. Cats, like I said, are one of them. But another less cute and much more delicious subject is bacon.

Here’s a creative, humorous bacon image…

The use of a hand dryer at a rest stop disproved this sign

There’s a beer brewed with bacon. Pouring it in here would be meat-gasmic!

Don't Mind If I Do!

With this new product, bacon bits could be a thing of the past:

Vegetarian-Safe!

The Internet has also lead me to some cocktails made with bacon. The “meatini,” “bacon, not stirred.”

If you look hard enough, you’ll be able to find bacon-bras out there in cyberland. I’d like to put a picture up, but we’re trying to keep things SFW here at thacant.

What’s important to remember about bacon, is that it’s always there for you, offering solace comparable only to beer and screaming oneself to sleep. Here’s a closing picture that really sums it up:

prty plz