Food Thoughtz Restaurant Review: Playa Cabana - Hacienda (4)

M just whipped up these crepes/palacsinta to satisfy my hunger and my rage. But I will not be silenced and I will not be placated.

Food Thoughtz Restaurant Review: Playa Cabana - Hacienda (3)

The support is rolling it! Keep it coming, valued readers!

It's especially funny because why would anyone ever visit Toronto, let alone plan a visit there?

Food Thoughtz Restaurant Review: Playa Cabana - Hacienda (2)

I am still so enraged about this experience.

Food Thoughtz Restaurant Review: Playa Cabana - Hacienda

Tonight M and I went out for dinner together. We settled on the Hacienda branch of the burgeoning "Playa Cabana" franchise because it seemed cool and hip. And also Mexican, which is what M was looking for. We had settled on this place specifically because they serve nachos, whereas most other Mexican restaurants seem to make their nachos using that disgusting liquid cheese that comes out of a pump.

Things started out well enough. We ordered a bucket of beer. And then I noticed a little addendum to the menu saying that they were not willing to make substitutions except in the case of allergies, when possible. I kindly asked the waitress that though I understood they had this policy, would it be possible to order nachos totally plain, just with cheese. (And let me just state that while I understand that making substitutions and exceptions in a kitchen is likely really annoying, I feel like when your order is changed to be the most simple version of that dish, it really should not be a problem.) The waitress said she didn't think it would be a problem but that she would have to double check with the kitchen. Meanwhile, M ordered a chorizo burrito.

The waitress came back and said it wouldn't be a problem. And I said "great," because I was really looking forward to those nachos. A quick note about the nachos: they were listed under the "appetizer" section of the menu, which is pretty common. I'm not sure I have ever seen nachos listed elsewhere. They are generally considered a food to be shared, and they also usually come in heaping portions. I ordered these nachos with the expectation that I would eat approximately half of them and take the other half home to eat tomorrow. One thing I've learned this year is that re-heating nachos in the oven is delicious. The nachos were also $14, which, again, is a pretty standard price for nachos. I saw no reason to consult further with the waitress about the size of the nachos, because every other waitress' response to this question in every other restaurant is something along the lines of how enormous the portion is.

And then the nachos arrived. And first of all, they arrived approximately five minutes before M's burrito, which is always really frustrating. But more frustrating still is that "nachos" consisted of eight chips. EIGHT CHIPS. For $14! Eight of them! I was outraged. I still have not calmed down. Meanwhile, in the five minutes that it took me to come to terms with the fact that I just spent $1.75 per chip ($2, if you count the tip), M's enormous burrito arrived.

Words cannot express the kind of outrage I experienced tonight. The "nachos" were designed in two circles, with four chips per circle (so do not think that I am exaggerating the smallness of this portion: there were exactly eight chips). Above you can see a photograph of the final chip. I did not take a picture of the entire ("entire") meal, but we might understand this as an example of metonymy.

In hindsight, I regret leaving any tip at all because I think it was unconscionable of that waitress to not divulge the true nature of these nachos. At first I thought it was not fair to punish the waitress for this pathetic attempt, but frankly, it was. And also, she was a pretty garbage waitress in other respects as well. She brought us the bill before M had finished her food, and then she whisked away the sauces that M was using, also before she finished her food. And then she just left the ATM machine with me and walked away. Like, what am I? Is someone going to pay me for ripping off this "merchant copy"? Give me a break. Also, give me like 100 more chips.

In conclusion, I hope this shitty garbage restaurant crashes and burns, and I hope that whatever monster is behind this atrocity ends up on the streets, unable to make anything work for him/herself. And then I hope that I just so happen to be strolling home from Costco with about twelve double-packs of bulk-sized chips, and he is asking for food. And I will say, "Oh? All of these chips I have with me? I am actually planning to just put them straight in to the garbage. I suppose I can spare eight for you." And then I will stare him straight in the eyes. And then I won't even give him those eight chips unless he forks over $14 first. And even then I won't give him those chips, because whatever chips I manage to buy at Costco will probably taste better than the garbage I endured tonight. I hate this restaurant. I hate it so much. I hate it enough to start a Yelp account and give it a terrible review.

Playa Cabana (Hacienda branch): I hope you are reading this. I hope you can taste my rage as strongly as I wish I was tasting a full serving of nachos. You are the worst. You are the worst place in the world and I hope you cease to exist. If you are in fact reading this, please comment below to ask for my address in order to send me $14 worth of nachos. I will eat them, vomit them up, and then parcel that vomit off into fourteen servings so that I might mail it straight back to you. And because I expect this will not satiate my rage, I will probably do something else that I have not yet thought of.

Campbell's Everyday Gourmet Roasted Potato & Spring Leek

One thing I'm certain of in this crazy world is that I really like packaged soups (in limited flavours, it goes without saying). I really love those dry Knorr soups (in minestrone, broccoli, or potato-leek) and I also really like the Campbell's Garden Minestrone. Campbell's used to have a condensed minestrone, but they seem to have gotten rid of it. I also really liked those cartons of soup that Campbell's put out. They came in broccoli and potato & leek, and I think that maybe they were "Gardennay," which presumably is a division of Campbell's. Anyway, they were always really good, but also pretty expensive, so I would just wait until they went on sale. Even on sale they were pretty expensive, but they were also a lot better than the other soup options, so I would go for it.

Recently I have noticed that Campbell's changed their packaging for these soups. Now they're "Campbell's Everyday Gourmet" instead of "Gardennay." They're a lot brighter and modern, and part of me thinks they might be Andy Warhol-inspired. But the packaging works. Their line-up of carton soups looks appealing and hip.

This picture took me a really long time to make and didn't come out nearly as well as I had hoped for.

So I picked up a box of their Roasted Potato & Spring Leek, assuming it would be the exact same soup as before. But it isn't. I don't like it. And I think that what I don't like about it is the "gourmet" aspect. It takes like a bunch of Campbell's execs in charge of the soup division (I don't know if there are any other divisions at Campbell's) talking about how they need to make this soup more appealing, and that something that appeals to people is the word "gourmet," and that adding too much pepper to something is a way that one can achieve that "gourmet-taste." This soup literally just tastes like pepper.

But it also has a not very nice texture to it. Like, every once in a while you come across a chunk and you can't be certain if it's a piece of potato peel or a piece of leek or some stray piece of garbage that made it into the batch ... until you get it in your mouth and realize it's actually just a clump of pepper.

I am honestly getting so fed up with Campbell's these days. They're also gluten-free. I will not buy this soup again.

My hunger did I try to allay

With Campbell's Everyday Gourmet.

Dressed up pepper-garbage in a Warhol design

Unfortunately this soup is not suitable to dine. 

Stop screwing around, Campbell's, and bring back Gardennay!

Brains

Distinguishing between what parts of an animal you will eat and what parts you won't is, I guess, a pretty arbitrary decision. But I'll be damned if anyone ever convinces me that eating a brain is an acceptable meal. I am sorry to all you brain-eaters out there, but that is disgusting. That is where thoughtz live. In the brain. They are created and live there. Even in animals. I don't think we should be eating animal thoughts.

Did you know that what of the prion diseases associated with eating brains is Fatal Familial Insomnia? It's a thing. Look it up. Symptoms include "progressively worsening insomnia," but the science is still out as to whether this is a symptom of the disease or just because you're so horrified with yourself that you just ate a brain and now you will never be able to sleep again because you're haunted by your own depravity.

The picture quality is terrible and I can't even be bothered.

Aside from how deeply disturbing I find brain-consumption, I also don't think I would like the look, texture, or smell of a brain. I have no idea how they're typically prepared (although I guess it would depend on the culinary culture), but I always imagine just a full brain, boiled, and sitting on a plate as a steaming mass, oozing some liquid (probably liquid thoughts) onto a plate. Maybe smelling like damp, old sports equipment? I don't know why, that's just what pops into my brain.

Brains are where our thoughtz live.

I think eating them is really unattractive. 

"Dear Food Thoughtz": Failure to Thrive

Failing to thrive is a frequent experience for me. This edition of Dear Food Thoughtz will explore whether or not food is a useful tool to dig yourself out of a pit of misery.

Dear Food Thoughtz:

I have lost the will to live, do you have any food recommendations this?

Yours respectfully,
Failing-To-Thrive

p.s. I have a potato, will that help?

Okay, well first of all, “a” potato is not helpful to anyone. One must have at least (at least) four potatoes on hand in order to be of any help. Like, even if it is an enormous potato, one is never enough. Don’t be ridiculous.

A basic flowchart will help us narrow down the scope of this question.



So it looks like we’re going to forge forth with “too lazy or apathetic to thrive.” Here are a list of food experiences I’ve had in the past relevant to your needs:

• One time, after wrapping up a long semester, I bought myself a large pizza and went home with it. I tried to watch a movie, but was so exhausted that I fell asleep with the pizza in bed with me. When I woke up the next morning, I rolled over and stuffed some of that cold pizza in my mouth. I felt like I never needed to leave the bed again. I did, but only to get another pizza.

• Sometimes, when I expect I won’t make it through the week, I buy a bag of frozen fries and eat nearly all of them in one go. After eating that many fries, I then feel like I physically cannot go on. Usually I do not. I pass out in a food-coma.

• When I lived in Montreal for the first time, I barely ate anything at all. This was mostly a result of laziness and extreme frugality.  But every once in a while I would feel like I was on the verge of passing out. Instead of making myself something to eat, I would just go to the corner store and buy a box of Oreos or a big bag of Miss Vickie's jalapeno chips and eat the entire thing at once.

I will say, however, that if you want to turn your life around and start to thrive, one of the best things you can do is actually make something worth eating that won’t make you feel like you’re slowly (or rapidly) transforming into the garbage you’re eating. I mean, who knows! Sometimes all you want is to feel like garbage! In which case you should refer back to this beginning of this discussion. But if you want to turn yourself around, you should go out and get yourself some fruits or vegetables and then prepare them in some mildly time-consuming way that will not be too overwhelming but will make you feel like you’re actually doing something. It's important to note that you can do this in a bathrobe, or whatever your preferred uniform of failure may be. Buying some broccoli, cauliflower, and carrots, cooking them, and grating a bit of cheese on them makes me feel like I am really doing something with my life—even if it takes more or less the same time as ordering a pizza or buying and baking a bag of frozen fries. I guarantee you that even if you take the five minutes required to make a serving of apple sauce, it will make you feel like like you are poised to take over the world (when you realize that you are not in fact poised to take over the world, you will falter, flounder, and sink back into a bag of frozen french fries. The beautiful cycle of life continues!)

Eating poorly generally makes you feel pretty terrible, and it makes it more and more difficult to pull yourself out of a failure-riddled slump. But sometimes that feeling of total failure and no longer caring about what your body looks or feels like is kind of satisfying. So if this is the stage that you're at right now, I would recommend stocking up on crappy frozen foods or several pizzas and curling up on the couch and watching so much tv that you feel like you're either merging with the couch itself or that your eyes are about to burn out of your skull. Ideally both. (Pro Tip: there are usually a lot of good Criminal Minds marathons on, especially during Christmas. They typically last for days.)

A Bucket Full of Raw Animal Organs (Pre-Sausage Version)

Pig slaughter season continues in Hungary, and things are only going down hill following the previous post on the pig head in a bucket of its own waste. Note on the pig head: the Hungarians involved have provided some additional information about its preparation: "they smoke the head and eat the flesh from it and they also put head-flesh into kocsonya which is a very disgusting thing. Sally, trust me, you dont want us to go into details!" Kocsonya, which it turns out I really didn't want to know more about, is apparently some sort of disgusting jellied dish made from preparing a soup with a strong cartilage base so that it will jelly when cooled. It is also worth noting that the brain evidently is not eaten raw, as I initially assumed, but is fried and served on toast with onions and, although not explicitly mentioned, probably paprika because they are Hungarians. 

But what appears below can only be described as a horrific massacre. After chopping off the pig head, smoking it, and then tearing the cooked flesh off with your teeth (unconfirmed), the most disgusting organs are harvested and thrown into a large plastic tub. These include kidneys, liver, and lungs (lungs!). These organs are then ground up, stuffed into sausage casings (which for all we know are pig intestines, but might be synthetic, but let's face it, probably aren't), and then people willingly put them in their mouth even though they already saw the raw organs sitting in a heap in the tub. 

I'm sorry that I am making you all look at this in such a large format, but it really haunted
me when I had to see it for the first time, and there's really no reason why I should
have to suffer alone. At first I thought it was a bucket full of slightly unhealthy lobsters.

I'm sorry, but I just could not do this. I couldn't be involved with this. I don't know if this means that I shouldn't be eating meat in the first place, but this bucket of organs is not for me. I can't imagine being involved in this process start to finish. I have no idea how to pull organs out of an animal carcass. Do you wear gloves? Aren't they slippery? Are they surprisingly heavy? Do you drop them in the bucket with a thud, or lay them gently because bruising is a concern? Do you have to cut them into smaller pieces to stuff into the meat grinder? Do you hose them down first? I was told that these organs were being made into hurka sausage. Is it called hurka because you kind of naturally make that sound when you vomit? I don't know if I even want to know the answer to most of these questions. I feel like I already know far too much.

This post about raw organs

Took a lot longer to write because—

Oh wait, hold on, I have to go puke again.

A Skinned Pig Head Cut in Half and then Dumped into a Bucket

Someone I know just ventured out into the wilds of rural Hungary to slaughter a pig. Good for them! I've always kind of agreed that if you're going to eat meat, you should probably be okay with and able to perform the processes required to procure that meat. I say "kind of" because I'm actually not okay with the processes and would never be able to perform them. Case in point: this skinned pig head that has been cut in half, presumably to extract the brains, presumably to consume it:

Okay. So this is what it looks like if, after slaughtering a pig, you cut off
its head, skin the head, cut the head in half down the centre, and then
dump it all into a bucket full of its own fluid.

Umm, this is gross. This is GROSS. I hate this. This pig's brains have been extracted from its skull (probably; still waiting for confirmation*) so that one person or several people can put those brains in their mouth and swallow them. As FOOD. I wish there was a more extreme italics, but there's not.

This is one of the most gruesome things I've ever seen, and yet I cannot look away. Can you imagine touching it? Like, most of it is surely skull, but then there's sinewy muscle fibres laced over top? And it would probably be really slippery? So the only way you could hold onto it is by tightening your grip, and then you had to feel the hardness of the skull even more as it dug into your fleshy hand? You would probably grip it around the jaw because you could easily reach your hand around the bone, and perhaps it would bump against you, and you would feel its dead teeth push against the top of your hand. And maybe even still you would drop it, and it would land with a thud on the muddy ground, and you would pick it up, but it would be speckled with bits of grass and dirt, matted into the flesh that is still clinging to the skull? Or, like, can you imagine cutting a skull in half? I don't even know how you go about it. Personally I would just swing an axe down on it (although then imagine all the little pieces of flesh and bone that would fly back and hit you, and would maybe speckle your skin so that you have stringy little pieces of pig flesh hanging off your face), but I have a feeling you probably can't do that if your entire purpose is to pull the brain out still intact. And imagine pulling the brain out. Like, isn't it still attached to something? Even if the head has been cut off, surely that little brain stem is still attached to some neck vertebrae, and then, like, you have to tug on it and feel and hear it snap apart. And then you're just left holding a brain! And you have to look at it and know that you're about to eat it! And who knows if there's still some shell of skull plastered onto the top of the brain. Probably. I wouldn't have any idea. I've never done this before. I hope I will never have to do this.

Before I wrap things up and hopefully put this horrific image out of my mind forever, I want to stress that I obviously do not have a problem with killing pigs and eating them. Pig meat is probably the best kind of meat there is, and it's probably even more delicious in Hungary because the Hungarians have squirreled away a secret breed of pig that has taken on mythical proportions (and which also seems to be out of mythology because it looks like a bizarre pig-sheep hybrid that Ovid might have dreamed up). Rumours have it that this rare and elusive mangalica is more delicious than any other breed of pig. None of this really changes the fact that the above picture shows a pig skull cut in half with the brain pulled out though.

It has been said that slaughtering your own meat

Is so much more humane.

But in order to do so, you have to crack open the skull

And haul out the brain.

And throw into a bucket of slop 

The bloody and gruesome skull-and-muscle remains. 

And it is this act that separates a mere captain 

From the heroic kapitány.

* It has been confirmed. This is what happened.

SallyBot Speaks the Truth

Courtesy of SallyBot.

"What Would I Say" is one of my favourite things on the internet. Except for maybe this picture of me as Aladdin on a magic carpet made of buttered bread.

Saladdin. ("Prince Sali" is probably more appropriate at this point.)

NB: This bread picture came from a "recipe" for cinnamon toast. I didn't bother to read the recipe, but surely it only consisted of "put cinnamon-sugar on buttered bread." There is nothing else to that "recipe." But also, don't you melt the butter on the bread, not just spread it? Maybe I should consult that recipe...

"Dear Food Thoughtz": Binging to Deal with Sexual Malevolence

This installation of Dear Food Thoughtz deals with Jian Ghomeshi, but not really. It's pretty directionless.

Dear Food Thoughtz

With the nation reeling from the intimate details of Jian Ghomeshi's wild and crazy sex life, no doubt people are turning to food in order to cope with having to wait for the full story to break in the press about what really happened. What foods are you relying on to sublimate your anticipation about what really happened? I need some inspiration here, because all I have is a giant jar of fermented corn, and I don't know how long I'm going to have to wait for this news to be released.

Sincerely,
Someone who thought for way too long about how to make a sign-off name that was an acronym of BDSM

Just when you thought sauerkraut couldn't get any worse.

Dear person who aspires to be known by the acronym BDSM,

Might I first of all suggest "'Bout to Dig-in to SauerMaize" as a future sign-off name that would translate to an acronym to BDSM? I haven't put much thought into it yet, but this is what came to me first. Also, I have no idea what "sauer" actually means, unless it just means sour. Which it might.

The good news is that you have your choice of any food to eat while watching how this whole thing shakes out, unlike all of those other idiots who initially rushed to his defence (I'M LOOKING AT YOUR TORRAH JANG) who now have to scarf down a bunch of crow baked into a humble pie.

Something about Jian Ghomeshi's facebook post
being a ferment-crock of shit.

Personally, I guess I would have to say that I've been eating a lot of potatoes. Not because I think they're well designed for scandal-binging (although ... they are. They are well designed for any kind of binging; they are delicious) but because they keep showing up in my oven when I get home. So, I don't know. I've never really considered that certain foods are better than others when waiting for a horrific story about violent assault against women to unravel before your very eyes. You know what? I'm going to go with potatoes. I think a lot of people would say popcorn, but popcorn is too light. This is the kind of story that only gets worse and worse as more information is revealed (but also more and more satisfying), so you should match that with a food that makes you feel heavier and heavier the more you eat of it, but leaves a taste of satisfaction in your mouth. Eventually you will get to the point where you feel so sluggish and worn out from all those potatoes and all of the terrible, skeezy revelations about Jian Ghomeshi that you can't be bothered to pick yourself up off the floor again. But at least you'll also have the sweet, sweet taste of potatoes and justice lingering on your taste buds.

Something-something, Jian Ghomeshi is as revolting as this sauerkraut.

I certainly would not recommend eating fermented corn, no matter what the scenario. I mean, unless you wanted to prove to everyone how disgusted you are by Jian Ghomeshi. I guess you could induce vomiting by eating that corn. I guess that is something that you can do with fermented corn. If you're going for BDSM food-bingo, the fermented corn would definitely cover the masochist aspect. For me, potatoes definitely cover the B, D, and S: I am bound to them through love, they dominate my diet, and the ferocity with which I devour them could probably be described as being sadistic (toward the potato).

The Parsnip

I don't know what a parsnip is, but it looks like the offspring of a carrot and a turnip that should have been aborted.

I have no idea why or how people eat these things, but I know they're not for me. I guess maybe some people put them in a soup or a stew, but I would not.

What do you get when you mix a carrot and a turnip?

Something even worse,* and we call it a parsnip.

*There is no reliable data on whether or not a parsnip is in fact worse than a turnip. They're probably equally bad.

Ode to the Apricot

Remember a couple of weeks (months) ago when I posted a poll asking whether or not my dad should write a post about apricots? The results are in, and it's a resounding yes. He put it off for quite a while, but it has finally arrived and I am sharing it with you today. It seems that there will never be an accompanying post about apricots, but sometimes you have to take what you can get.

Melona Ice Bar (Strawberry Flavour)

Do any of you remember how, approximately three months ago, I set myself the seemingly impossible task of trying all four Melona Ice Pop flavours (widely touted as the "Melona Ice Pop Challenge")? Well, I did. And then I never got around to trying the strawberry flavour and it just languished in my freezer. Until today.

I didn't make a .gif. Partly out of laziness and partly because
I forgot to take enough pictures to do it. I guess it was
ultimately just out of laziness.

 I started to write the strawberry post shortly after I posted the banana post, assuming that I would just fill in the blanks when I actually tried it. This is what I wrote:

"Lately social media has been a-buzz about the ice bucket challenge, but absolutely no one is talking about my recent Melona Ice Pop Challenge. Rather than dumping a bucket of ice water on my head, I managed to consume all four Melona flavours over the course of approximately one month, and in doing so, raised just under four dollars for Binggrae. Today I will be writing about the final flavour: strawberry."

Well, now it's nearly November (or perhaps it is November--I guess it depends when I will get around to posting this), and no one even remembers what the ALS ice-bucket challenge was. In a sense this means I beat ALS (in the sense that this Melona Ice Pop Challenge has dragged on way longer. I didn't cure ALS ... yet).

So let's wrap this up: the strawberry flavour was pretty good. I still don't love these things, but for what they are, yeah, I would say the strawberry flavour is a good flavour. I didn't love it. It didn't shock me in the same way that the melon and banana flavours did; it was more or less what I expected it to be. It's definitely the "safest" of the flavours, so I think that if I, for some reason, bought one of these things again (I really don't think I will), it would probably be the strawberry flavour. There were no surprises here, and that is how I like my food: predictable.

In conclusion, here are the awards I would give to each flavour if I was in the business of handing out awards to popsicle flavours:

• Mango - Biggest Disappointment
• Melon - Most Closely Resembles a Honeydew of the Four, or so I Assume. I Have Never Tried a Honeydew.
• Banana - The Dark Horse
• Strawberry - Safe & Predictable

I finally tried strawberry, and yeah, whatever.

I'm just glad this stupid challenge is over.

"Indian Corn Snack"

I went into this snack not knowing what to expect. Would they be sweet? Would they be savoury? Would they taste racist? Who could know!

I scooped up a little handful of these weird corn flakes, popped one in my mouth, chewed it, swallowed it, said "no," and dumped the remaining "corn snacks" into the bag. They are gross. I do not like them. Midge is eating them as I type this and claims they are "okay," but admits she bought them for the packaging. These revolting little crisps leave a taste in your mouth far more disturbing  than racism.

Riddle me this, riddle me that -- 

Is there anything worse than a colonial, genocidal attack?

Maybe, just maybe, this "Indian Corn Snack" 

NB. I originally tagged this as "Slaughter on the Plains." It was in poor taste.

Mustard

It goes without saying that the views expressed here do not represent my own. Mustard is disgusting. I found out that I used to eat mustard-glazed hams, but now I don't do that anymore.

If living with Food Thoughtz has taught me anything it was that I can't do things my way. It has also taught me some things on the mysterious and sacred nature of tea- and other towels, but that is a subject that should be tackled on my own blog, where I discuss the wonders and mysteries of the created and the eternal world.

Point is that Food Thoughtz has been tugging at my ear until I just gave up resistance, sighed and sat down to my computer to compose an essay on the genera and species of mustards. I love mustard and hot sauce, and condiments in general, especially if you count yogurt as a condiment. (FYI: I do) Although my parents' came from fairly different backgrounds they have always agreed about one thing: dry food is for fools. When I was a kid, we used to eat deep-fried things (I don't anymore, and neither does my sister and my mum. My dad does, but maybe that is the reason why he divorced my mum and married someone who is fond of schnitzels.), but always combined with something juicy or creamy. If we had schnitzels, we had them with mashed potatoes, if we had croquettes, or fried potatoes there was always some kind of sauce or condiment to balance dryness and crunchiness. Later on, when my sister and I went through adolescence we have discovered that the addition of yogurt enhances the quality of EVERY SINGLE dish. It was also around this time that I have discovered mustard and horseradish, and ten years later I have completed my gastronomical education by embracing hot sauce. 

This post is solely about mustard and the different kinds of it, I might write a review on hot sauce in five years, when Food Thoughtz has accumulated a sufficient amount of CAD to buy me a variety of them.

Plain old mustard

I am the direct descendent of a man who ate baloney, bread, mustard and mayonnaise horseradish for dinner every day, for fifteen years, while watching this.

At first I thought my grandpa's choice of dinner was somewhat boring and not very nutritious, but after having lived with him for three years, I have accustomed to his diet, and I would eat baloney with horseradish and mustard any time! Or maybe the love for baloney, mustard and horseradish was already in my genes? Nature vs. nurture! I'll let you decide.

Anyway, my grandpa always bought plain old Univer mustard, which is an excellent choice. It's not cheap store-brand grade mustard, which has most probably been died yellow by sulphur-dioxide or something, but it isn't too expensive to eat with suspicious-looking baloney either. Univer as the name says is universal, and can be put in everything to improve its quality.

Hot recipe tip: Mix it with yogurt, salt and a pinch of sugar, and dip some carrots and apples in it. Also put it in your béchamel sauce, along with nutmeg. Use it to marinate beef. Eat it with boiled beef and vegetables. I could go on....

Dijon mustard

At home, we call Dijon mustard the variety with coarsely ground grains. But one thing the I have learned as a French major was that us Hungarians are fond of naming foods inaccurately.
Hungarians hold a grudge against France because of the treaty of Trianon, and they took their revenge by naming baloney "Parisian" and a gross mayonnaise-covered steamed vegetable medley "French salad" (known as macédoine by the French). Anyway, the coarsely ground mustard (moûtarde à l'ancienne) is not the Dijon mustard, actually it is called old-fashioned mustard by the French, and just one among the varieties of Dijon mustards, which are instead characterized by the addition of white wine. The more you know.*

Dijon mustard is actually my favourite. It is the perfect mixture of heat, saltiness and tartness. It's delicious, it complements pork, beef and cold cuts perfectly. It's so good that you should not use it as an ingredient but as a condiment unto itself, or just serve it as dessert. Desserts are a waste of time anyway.

Hot recipe tip: eat it with a spoon. Put it on everything.

*I have discovered the true nature of French mustard around the time I have discovered my unending love for it, upon devouring a whole jar of Wendy's Maille mustard. Thank you, Wendy for the time I got to spend in your house and your fridge + and for buying me an extra bottle of Maille before my arrival to Canada this year. I don't think I would ever buy it for myself, so really, this post could have never been written without your contribution.

Sweet mustard

Sweet mustards are quite disgusting. Mostly because they are sweet. Sweetness belongs with fruits, drinks and desserts, it has no business in bread, meat and vegetables or mustard.

The Bavarian sweet mustard is apparently based on the idea of substituting sugar for vinegar as a means of preservation. Well, why would you do that, when you could have just used vinegar, or wine? As far as I know vinegar is actually just sugary water in the final stage of rotting, so I assume it must also be cheaper than sugar. It makes no sense whatsoever, unless Bavarians were just too lazy to mix the sugar with water and then let it rot (which actually makes sense, because they are also too lazy to get up from the table to go pee).

I am not sure whether I had this mustard when I was staying in Germany, but if this was the one I had, then I guess it was OK. It looks like diarrhea, but it's fine with rye bread, tomato and (obviously) baloney.

This President's Choice mustard on the other hand was vile and disgusting, it tasted like a tub of sweet earwax, much like the barbecue sauce that was served at McDonalds in the nineties. I put it on the street, because I assume that people in need need nothing more than a tub of earwax. Something like that will greatly enhance the quality of the actual food they already have.

Hot recipe tip: Avoid it.

Flavoured mustard

Why do you want to improve something that is already perfect? You cannot. (cf. Republic 381b-c, this is why Christians later denied that God actually got mad at Adam and Eve or at the idolatrous and faithless israelites) What is even worse, while you cannot spoil God, you can spoil mustard with your foolish attempts. Just don't do it. (Maybe redcurrant mustard would be nice, though? Just a thought. Cooking is not theology there are no strict rules.)

I guess honey mustard flavouring is OK.

Hot recipe tip: Re-gift it to someone who likes arugula and dark chocolate with chilli.

Apple Sauce

Everyone: fall has arrived. The reason I know is because I just made my first batch of apple sauce from discount apples—and it was a roaring success!

Apple sauce is one of those foods that I really love, but that I don’t eat nearly often enough. For some reason I always think that I am going to have to devote an entire week to making a few jars of apple sauce that I will likely just gobble up in a matter of hours. But this is never the case! Nothing could be easier than making apple sauce! It takes only as much time as it takes to cut up however many apples (usually five apples for me, because that’s the maximum number that can fit in my pot), and then you just put those apple cubes in the pot with a bit of water, and just go away and do something else. Usually I add cinnamon during the cooking process, and sometimes I also add a bit of brown sugar as well, but the sugar is rarely necessary.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I am currently enrolled in a Master of Information program at the University of Toronto. But when I was first applying to schools, I also applied to McGill as a safety-school and got in because I am a rising star. To celebrate my success, a West Coast celebrity gifted me a jar of apple sauce that was made in a crockpot. And it was delicious. Until I found out that what made it so delicious was the addition of cloves. I associate cloves so strongly with hams that the apple sauce kind of lost some of its magic. But it was still really good apple sauce. I just wish I didn’t know about those cloves.

My mum used to always make and preserve apple sauce. It was usually that puréed apple sauce, which is good, but I think isn’t as good as the chunky apple sauce. She also used to whip up a dish of chunky apple sauce for breakfast sometimes, which was great because it tastes like apple pie without the cumbersome pastry. Recently she has started to bake the apple chunks, which is also really delicious, but then she made me two jars while she was visiting and put way too much butter in the baking dish so that when the apples were transferred to jars and then to the fridge, the butter re-solidified, and looked really gross and it was difficult to want to actually eat it.

One thing I am realizing as I desperately try to think of a single interesting thing to say about apple sauce and my experience with apple sauce is that it can be difficult to speak and think about certain foods in a  way that could be considered even remotely engaging. Usually it’s foods that I really like, but don’t necessarily love—a food that that is, and always have been, a part of my life, and which I expect to always enjoy and consume. I mean, what can I say about apple sauce? It’s really good. I like eating it. I like eating it cold and I like eating it hot. I like eating it plain and I like eating it with vanilla ice cream. I like the feeling of accomplishment that I get after making a batch of apple sauce. I like getting good deals on apples that are perhaps too bruised or soft to eat naturally. I like apple sauce.

The way that I mark the arrival of fall
Is with a discount-rotten-apple-haul.
Boil it, add cinnamon, and store it in a jar:
You’re all set for a fall-fruit consumption bazaar. 

Self-Contained Shell Lasagnas

If I know anything about Robert Burns—beyond the fact that he inexplicably has his own day—it’s that he once wrote a poem with the line “best-laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft agley”, but as neither mouse nor man, my best laid schemes almost always stay on track. Except this one time when I tried to make self-contained lasagnas in large shell pasta. It was a disaster. A delicious, terrible, ugly disaster.

Okay, but let me just give you an overview of my thought process here: I love spaghetti bolognese, and I like lasagna fair enough, but how amazing would it be if everything that I loved about these two dishes was contained in a single, large shell (I mean, obviously not a single shell; of course I ate about ten of them). Right? Like, if I cooked a bunch of large shell pastas, and then lined the interior with cheese (probably cheddar, but parmesan or mozzarella would work fine as well), and then filled the rest of the shell with bolognese sauce, and then grated more cheese on top of all the shells and then baked them. Right?! Has anything ever sounded better to anyone?

So finally, when I was in Grand Forks for reading break last year, I did it. And … it didn’t really work out the way I thought it would. First of all, I forgot the interior cheese lining, which was a huge mistake because the end product didn’t have nearly enough cheese. But it was also a lot harder and a lot messier to stuff the shells than I thought it would be. And in the end it just looked terrible. It was so disgusting. It looked like a fake organ display in a low-budget haunted house. But I ate it anyway, and they were pretty good. Maybe they weren’t as good as I was anticipating, but still a pretty solid meal.

Right? Look at how terrible this looks. Who could ever
want to eat this? But eat it I did.

I made the same dish again this summer and ate so much of it that I couldn’t move for a full twenty-four hours. This time I remembered to line the shells with cheese. It was still really messy, and the dish didn’t come out of the oven looking particularly appetizing, but yeah, I would say it was a pretty good meal. I’m not sure if it’s necessarily worth the effort, because it’s certainly not significantly better than just regular pasta topped with cheese, and in fact I’m not sure if it’s better at all. But anyway, I still have half a box of large shell pasta which have virtually no other application, so I guess I am just going to have to make this again.

The best-laid schemes o' shells an meat

So oft are destroyed

An'lea'e us nought but grief an' defeat

For want of promis'd joy!

Potato Water

That gross, milky water that's left over after cooking potatoes never would have occurred to me as being a food. But then I married someone who stores it and later drinks it. And it is disgusting. No one loves potatoes more than I do, but even I must draw the line somewhere. And frankly, that line is drawn long before potato water (it's drawn at scalloped potatoes).

As I found it.

It goes without saying that this is not a "food" I would ever consider eating. I thought I would write a post about it because M just saved herself a bowl after making mashed potatoes for Thanksgiving dinner, and I just had to deal with it. So I dealt with it like this:

"MAGDI'S GROSS
POTATO WATER
(Seriously, so gross)"

I mean, this actually isn't food -- it's food waste. And frankly, it's a waste of my time to even talk about it further. So. Gross.

Hello Muddah,

Hello Fadduh, 

All I got is

Potato Wadduh.

Food Thoughtz Emergency

I am currently enrolled in a Master of Information program at the University of Toronto. I am studying to become an archivist. A requirement of the programme is to complete two "workshops," which I had initially assumed would be somehow relevant and practical in nature. I thought that we would work in groups to develop and execute an appraisal plan, or something along those lines. But, never failing to disappoint, the iSchool has upset my assumptions once again. These workshops are largely impractical and could focus on any number of topics--few of which have any direct connection to my area of study.

One such workshop, offered this winter, is entitled "Communicating Identities at the Table." Here is the course description:

This interdisciplinary workshop explores a very popular social and cultural practice, the dinner party, in order to engage students with contemporary discourses about cooking, eating and performing identities through food in both domestic and public spaces. In the past few decades, communication and information about food and culinary cultures intensified in everyday contexts, exposing contemporary communities, globally, to the poetics and politics of food production and consumption. For information students, this workshop will provide a new approach to thinking about the diverse ways in which we communicate and share information about food, foodways and food technologies.

This workshop zooms in on the dinner party, a practice with a rich cultural history, in order to highlight the different forms of communication which make up the current foodscapes. The course introduces students to the social and cultural history of the dinner party, highlighting some significant examples, such as Tupperware parties, underground supper clubs, dinner reenactments and Mad Men-inspired evenings. The focus of the workshop is on how such events are communicated through various media, from magazines and television to apps and blogs. Some examples analyzed in the class are popular television shows–“Dinner party wars” and “Come dine with me, Canada”, movies–“Babette’s feast” (1987), “Big Night” (1996) “Julie & Julia” (2009) and “The hundred-foot journey” (2014) and magazines–Food & Drink, Bon Appétit, Food Network Magazine, etc.

Please note that students will require no specialist knowledge of either food studies or media studies in order to take this workshop, although some background in communication/media theory and/or cultural studies will be helpful. Students will be expected to consume food media relevant to the content of the course and should be aware before enrolling that some food tastings will take place during class time.
[my emphasis]

I repeat: this is a real thing. This is a course I could actually take and get credit for in the coming semester.

What I need to know from you, dear readers, is what course of action I should take in response to this ludicrous class. Should I submit a strongly worded letter about how the iSchool is excluding a small subset of society that may or may not suffer from an undiagnosed and unrecognized--but still conceivably possible and real--eating disorder ("selective eating disorder")? Should I challenge myself and enrol in the course? Should I forget that I ever read this course description? Please advise.

Individual Yogurt Cups

You guys. Something has changed. I’ve started bringing individual yogurt cups for my lunch, and I don’t know how to feel about it. I used to have them when I was in elementary school and loved them. They were a perfect amount of yogurt for me, but they were also these Dairyland yogurts with the fruit on the bottom (peach was, obviously, the best one, but strawberry wasn’t bad either) and those ones are no longer available. But now I’m not sure what role these yogurts could continue to play in my life. I’m bringing two yogurt cups for lunch because one is no longer enough for me. They’re really tedious to eat, and I am afraid that I tend to throw out a lot of the yogurt just because it’s difficult to access to it in all the nooks and crannies of that small container. Would it not be better to buy a large tub of yogurt and redistribute it to other containers that better suit my needs? Well, probably, yes. And that is what I had done throughout the summer. But then there are all these individual cups of yogurts that were 50% off at Loblaws, so I just went for it.

This yogurt expired two weeks ago.
Still eating it.

I guess I don’t regret it. I don’t hate eating yogurt out of a tiny cup designed for a baby. But I don’t love it either. I guess one good part is that I bought one pack of 16 yogurts and got 8 different flavours. I would probably buy the individual cups again if they were 50% off again, otherwise I think I will just get a big tub. Or who knows? Maybe I’ll take a break from yogurt for a while. There are a lot of directions this could go. Well, there are three. There are three different directions this could go.

Anyway, whatever. I’m sorry for this post. It’s truly terrible. School is starting to ramp up and I don’t really have time to Food Thoughtz anymore.

Is it reasonable as an adult to sup
On fruit-flavoured yogurt from a tiny little cup?
Or can it only be considered as far too juvenile
To gel with my new professional style?

Armadillo Potatoes

This afternoon I read an article that someone posted on facebook about how you're eating food wrong. There was a picture of this delicious potato that looked like an armadillo. I was intrigued and needed to try it. I went out and bought potatoes. I tried it. And you know what? I'm not doing it wrong. I have been eating potatoes correctly my entire life. These armadillo potatoes weren't that great.

They ended up looking pretty good though, right?

Basically I just sliced them up as best I could while ensuring that each slice was still connected to the body of the potato at the bottom. Then I brushed them with olive oil because I got a free pastry brush on the street about a month ago. Then I sprinkled kosher salt on them (admittedly too much). And then I popped them into the oven for what felt like eternity, but was realistically more like an hour and a half, which is still way too much time to spend preparing a potato.

I think one of the reasons I didn't really like these potatoes (but don't get me wrong, I obviously still did really like them; they just weren't as good as pan-fried potatoes) is because I'm not all that crazy about olive oil. These potatoes might have been much better if I painted them with butter instead. I don't know. In the end they kind of just tasted like exactly what they are: potatoes painted with olive oil.

They also seriously took way too long.

Tonight I fashioned my potatoes like armadillos

Nothing relevant rhymes with "armadillos."

NB: I have labeled these potatoes as "Food I Have Tried But Would Not Try Again." Obviously I have so many more potatoes ahead of me in this life time. They just probably won't be these armadillo potatoes.

Borscht

Look. I don't need you to tell me that there is no discernible structure of reason or meaning underlying my food choices. I know that already: I am a rogue palate. But early on in my life I constructed some general guidelines that served as justification for certain decisions regarding what I would or would not eat. At the broadest level, these include rules like "no mixed food" and "individuals servings of one food cannot come into contact with other individual servings of another food." There are multiple and obvious exceptions to these very general rules: I love spaghetti bolognese, I love hamburgers, I'm generally okay with baked goods which are typically, by nature, a mix of various ingredients. But perhaps the most surprising and flagrant exception to these rules is my love for and devotion to borscht.

Borscht from the USCC. Thank you, graduating class of whatever.

Before we get started, a general note of caution to all the Ukrainians out there: what you refer to as borscht is not borscht. It is two different colours of puke layered on top of each other. When I say borscht, what I am referring to is Grand Forks Doukhobour borscht and nothing else. I also have no patience for that watery vegetable substance that I believe some non-Doukhobour Russian peasants incorrectly classify as borscht.

Grand Forks borscht is made up of 100% cream, 100% cabbage, and about 30% of other vegetables, like potato and carrots, equaling 230% of all of the deliciousness in the entire world. Sometimes there is also dill. Given the makeup of this soup, there is 0% reason for me to like it. I hate cabbage and I don't think that dairy has any place in a soup. But for whatever reason, it just works. I can't figure out if it's because I started eating it at an age before I began to develop a capacity for reason, or if it's just because it's that good. Probably a little from column A and mostly from column B.

There has always been a tradition in Grand Forks of arguments amongst Doukhobours about whose baba makes the best borscht. As someone with no Doukhobour ancestry, I can say with objective and indifferent certainty that the USCC ladies make, hands down, the best borscht in Grand Forks--no exceptions. That borscht is delicious. This is not to say that there aren't other perfectly acceptable borscht recipes floating around Grand Forks. There are. Of course there are. The Grand Forks Hotel used to throw together a decent borscht, there's always some nice looking borscht for sale at the Farmers Market, Megan makes delicious borscht, and every once in a while there will be a great (both in volume and quality) jar of borscht in my mum's fridge, courtesy of one of her friends. All that aside, none of these will ever compare with the borscht on offer at the few and far between borscht feeds at the USCC. I have long maintained that the only reason Grand Forks Secondary School should continue to exist is because inevitably the grad class of whatever year will organize a borscht feed, and hopefully it will coincide with my visit home.

Here's a picture of some borscht that I
discovered in our fridge at home. A
very welcome and pleasant surprise.

It would be unfortunate to finish this post without mentioning the delicious, thick, pillowy Doukhobour bread that accompanies borscht. That bread is the best. It is so good. It's so much better when slathered with about an inch of butter that then melts into the borscht when you dip it in. Pro Tip: the only way to eat borscht is to sop up all the liquid with two slices of break from the outset, and then finish up the stew-like, cabbage-heavy remainders.

There is nothing in this world that I love more 

Than the borscht prepared by an old Doukhobour. 

Frankenberry Cereal

I've been lusting after a box of Frankenberry cereal ever since I can remember. There were always advertisements for it on American TV channels, but as far as I could tell, the cereal was either never sold in Canada or my mum refused to buy it for me (which seems somewhat unlikely, considering the amount of Lucky Charms I used to eat).

But tonight all of my wildest dreams came true and I bought a box of Frankenberry cereal that was on-sale at Metro. This, along with Count Chocula (another cereal that seemed to only be available to American audiences, but one that admittedly never appealed to me in the same way as Frankenberry), are back for a limited time, presumably coinciding with Halloween. These were part of a monster-themed collection of breakfast cereals produced by General Mills in the 1970s.  Others in the series include Boo-Berry and Fruity Yummy Mummy, both of which I would really like to try, but which I think have been discontinued even though they were briefly revived in 2013.

You can see here that there are about 3 marshmallows
to a bowl of cereal. Pathetic, but also kind of welcome
because the marshmallows are not very good.

 Despite what any sane-minded individual would think approaching this cereal, Frankberries are actually delicious. They taste really similar to Cap'n Crunch's Crunch Berries (also, as far as I know, not available in Canada, but one of my favourites). There are marshmallow bits in there, but I can't figure out why because the cereal-to-marshmallow ratio is terrible.

I guess if this cereal was readily available all of the time, I probably wouldn't eat it--at least not very often. It's good, but it's not as good as Lucky Charms or even Honeycomb or Golden Grahams. It's still a pretty good children's cereal. I like how sweet it is because even though it's good, it's too sweet to have more than one bowl at a time, which is always the problem I have with Lucky Charms. I'm really glad I went for it tonight though, because wanting to try this cereal is something that has been bothering me since I was about four years old, and now I can finally put that to rest.

Even though Count Chocula doesn't really appeal to me (I've never been too crazy about chocolatey cereals, but would definitely still eat them if provided for free), I think I will probably pick up a box if it becomes available.

So, that's it. That's my experience of eating Frankenberry cereal. It was a really solid cereal experience.

Oh. It might also be worth mentioning that when Frankenberry first hit store shelves in 1972, it contained a kind of pink dye that couldn't be broken down by a human body, so it turned poos pink. (Note: the "Embarrassing After Effects" tag refers to this).

Also, in all seriousness, has anyone ever completed any of the puzzles/games on the back of cereal boxes by actually filling in the blanks with pen? Because I never did. I always completed the mazes or matching puzzles, but I never actually wrote on the box. I wondered about this again because of the activity on the back of the Frankenberry box, which, let me just say, is a pretty lame activity for a box of cereal that is only released once a year.

As a child, the cereals I dreamed of were always American

The Canadian counterparts paled by comparison.

Several years later, my dream has come true:

I have an entire box of Frankenberry to munch through!

Kürtőskalács: Revisited

On Friday a kürtőskalács, the famed Hungarian chimney-cake, arrived for me in Toronto, direct from Budapest, courtesy of LOT Airlines. It was less like what you might expect a chimney to look like, and more like if you encountered a metal chimney and then hammered it flat with a sledgehammer, or if a brick chimney was laying on its side and then collapsed into a flat collection of bricks. It was still pretty good.