Burger Round-Up

I am currently on hour 55 of my 64+ hour trip home.  So far I have consumed 3 airport burgers, and one Kelowna burger at The Keg before taking the Greyhound to Vancouver.  Here is a brief overview of those burgers:

1. The Keg:

No photos exist of this burger experience, and frankly, if photographs are supposed to serve as memory keepers, I’m glad: eating at The Keg isn’t really an experience I am eager to remember.  The burger tasted a bit strange, possibly because I believe it was prime rib burger (I have no idea what that might mean) or possibly because there might have been BBQ sauce on it.  The fries were truly terrible, which was surprising because I expected The Keg to, first of all, have steak fries, and second of all, have good fries.  Adding to this already disappointing dining debacle, the waitress was truly abysmal, and at one point referred to my empty plate as “that little guy,” as in, “Let me get that little guy out of the way for ya!”


2. Vera’s Burgers:

Vera’s Burgers are all over Vancouver and are always being touted as “Vancouver’s Best Burger.” You’d think that with all that bragging, they might actually be able to produce a decent burger, but you would be wrong.  After The Keg, this was the second worst burger on the trip.  Everything about it was terrible: the bun, the meat, the cheese, the packaging… It was really disappointing.  I think my burger might have been composed entirely of chunks of ground beef that broke off from previous patties.  I have eaten at Vera’s once before, and I remember thinking that it was okay, but not amazing.  
This burger didn't even register as okay.

I friggin' hate it when buns have a hard shell.  So many unnecessary crumbs,
and it really takes away from the overall experience.

 3. Moxie’s Burger:

You guys.  You guys.  Air Canada put me up in the Sandman City Centre in Calgary after my connecting flight to Toronto had been cancelled and I couldn’t be rebooked until 5pm the following day.  In addition, they gave me a dinner voucher and breakfast voucher to use at the in-hotel Moxie’s restaurant, and another $10 to spend on lunch at the airport.  The Moxie burger was pretty good, and while I couldn’t put it in my Top 10 Burgers, it did taste better because it was free.  I had fries on the side and the waiter didn’t know what malt vinegar was and claimed that they “didn’t have any,” which I find really hard to believe. 


I have no idea if that pickle that was skewered atop my burger was edible or plastic, but I didn't appreciate the gesture.

 4. Montana’s Cookhouse Saloon Burger: 

Okay, despite a few drawbacks, this burger was by far the best of the four and in general is just a really solid burger.  At first I was a bit put off by the high prices because my $10 voucher wouldn’t cover the $15 burger, but then I noticed that they had an “unloaded” option for $11, and I went for it.  And let me just say thank you, Montana’s Cookhouse Saloon, because I have been waiting for an “unloaded” option at a cheaper price for my entire life.  But let me also add, why doesn’t anyone who works at your restaurant know what “unloaded” means?  When my burger arrived, it was topped with lettuce and tomato, and with a larger pickle-quarter on the side.  I promptly put it on a napkin so the waitress could see how she had failed me.  (I didn’t get a refund though.  Montana’s Cookhouse Saloon, if you’re reading this, please give me a free unloaded burger).  Once again, the waitress had never heard of malt vinegar, but she was decent enough to inquire about it for me, and obviously they had some because obviously.  Take note, Moxie’s.  Once again, the fries left something to be desired, but were undoubtedly improved by the malt vinegar.


"Dear Food Thoughtz:" Hamburger-Pizzas; Breakfast Ideas; & Attire Choices

Welcome to the very first installment of Dear Food Thoughtz, a free advice column where I do the thinking so you don't have to!  All relevant questions welcome.  Email: food.thoughtz@gmail.com

Dear foodthoughtz

Last night I ate pickles on a pizza. Don't freak out - hear me out. Everyone has heard of cheeseburger pizza before. All pizza chains - especially the grossest ones - have it. Who even orders it? It's just ground beef, tomatoes, and the addition of cheddar cheese to the mozzarella.

This cheeseburger pizza was different. It had the regular ground beef, tomatoes, cheddar. But it also had pickles, and mayo and mustard zigzagged all over it.

Foodthoughtz, this was the best pizza I've ever eaten. I can imagine what you're thinking, and let me just say I'm not thrilled about it either. Today I didn't do anything other than wander around aimlessly, crying, wearing tights as pants and wishing I had that pizza.

I need your tough love, foodthoughtz. Help me.

Sincerely,
Pining for pizza on the prairies

Dear PPP,

Thank you, first of all, for being the first to write in to Dear Food Thoughtz.  Your support does not go unnoticed.

Now onto the pizza!  I think I'm going to have some surprising advice for you: when it comes to pizza, as long as it doesn't have pineapples on it, just be true to yourself.  If a pizza with hamburger toppings is what you're into, then don't be ashamed!  Honestly, I'm not thrilled about the pickles -- and especially not since M admitted to once melting a block of cheese with old pickle juice in a microwave and then eating it. 

I am not sure why you were expecting tough love from me, or if you wanted me to forbid you to ever eat this pizza ever again.  The mythical hamburger-pizza is actually something I've spent a lot of time thinking about.  Not because I would ever eat one, but because I am fascinated by those who would.  I say "mythical" because we clearly have two very different ideas of what a hamburger-pizza entails.  I don't doubt that your pizza had hamburger-influenced toppings, but it's not, in my mind, a hamburger-pizza.  A hamburger-pizza must have literal hamburgers as toppings.  Pizza Hut came pretty close, but as far as I know, this pizza only exists as a photoshopped image and probably in real life in Japan:

Admittedly this would be really difficult to eat.  I've never understood the appeal of those novelty foods that are, like, 80 burgers stacked on top of each other and then someone eats all of them as one giant burger.  That is so disgusting.  When you bite into a burger, you should be able to get a piece of everything in your mouth at one single time.

Another option that I thought of last night was to have a hamburger baked into a pizza, like a calzone, only to wake up this morning and discover it already exists on the internet!  In a way it bothers me that it's a calzone and not an actual pizza, but this seems like a really practical way to bring these two worlds together.  I honestly don't understand why calzones always get so much hate--they seem delicious--but it's true that they are not pizzas.

Finally, a Burger King restaurant in Time's Square launched a pizzaburger which is probably one of the best fusions of these two foods I've seen because it maintains crucial characteristics of both foods.  It's in the shape of a pizza, but each slice is clearly a bun.  Inside, there's a hamburger patty topped with pepperoni and mozzarella.

So these, to me, are hamburger-pizzas.  You just ate, I don't know, a pizza.  There's nothing to stress out about.  It's definitely not as disgusting as a dessert pizza or a Hawaiian pizza or lord knows what else.  Own it.  I mean, really.  Sure, there are a lot of foods that I think are disgusting, and by extension, I think that the people who eat those foods are disgusting.  But at the end of the day, what Food Thoughtz is really about is acceptance.  Not accepting others for their food choices, but accepting yourself for your own.

Dear FoodThoughtZ advisor:

Could you please comment on what would be an appropriate breakfast to serve for:

    a 32-year old daughter who will eat anything,
    her 3-year old daughter who will eat everything,
    a 26-year old daughter who will eat buns, rice and potatoes,
    the last-named's friend who is a vegan,

all of whom are visiting for breakfast on December 23.

Dear Nameless,

I’m confused as to why you are asking this question at all seeing as you have already answered it: potatoes. 

At least this would be the answer if you had not neglected to mention that the 3 year-old daughter of the 32 year-old daughter does not in fact eat everything; she does not eat potatoes.  There is no reason to force the other guests to abide by her strict dietary needs, so I would still recommend pan-fried potatoes, perhaps with servings of fruit, toast, and yogurt on the side to appease your fickle guest.

Coffee, of course, is expected.

Also, you have the date wrong.  Two of the four will likely be there on the 23rd, but the other two will not be arriving until the morning of the 24th as part of a Christmas miracle.

 dear foodthoughtz

I am really confused. What are you wearing in this picture?

your sister

Dear Inquisitor,

First of all, I am going to assume that your sign off as “your sister” was meant as a ruse to trick me into addressing this response to “Dear Sister.”  It did not work.

To answer your question, it’s a dusty pink boyfriend-style women’s shirt from the Gap that I bought on sale in Spokane.  It’s weird that the style of shirt is called “the boyfriend” given that these shirts are so lesbian-y.  I'm wearing a charcoal-grey cardigan overtop, purchased at the Gap Factory Outlet Store in Toronto.

I assume this question was meant as an insult, but it fell flat because I love this shirt.  In the future, please limit yourself to food-related questions.

EveryBurger Chocolate Biscuits

When I found these in an international food store (yes, in Lethbridge), they were nestled between two different kinds of ramen.  The only clue I had to go on was their name, EveryBurger, and that there were “two inside.”  But even these snippets of information seemed to raise more questions than they answered. 

I’ve never been seized so firmly by a desire, nay!, need, to know what something is.  And so in a moment of reckless passion, I purchased the only box of EveryBurger available in the store — possibly the entire world.

For a short time I worried they might be a savoury treat rather than a sweet one, or even a weird kind of burger-flavoured bouillon cube; they were, after all, in the ramen aisle.  When I opened the box, I discovered two individually foil-wrapped containers. Ah-ha! A portion of the mystery solved: the “two inside” marked on the box clearly referred to the number of packages, rather than the total number of EveryBurgers in the box.  My prayers were answered when I carefully ripped open the foil and slid out a plastic tray: the “burger” filling was undoubtedly chocolate; the bun was undoubtedly a kind of sweet biscuit (similar to the ChocoBoy mushrooms but denser, and because it had some sort of glaze on it, the biscuit was not quite as crunchy as the ChocoBoy) peppered with some other kind of sweet meant to represent sesame seeds.


It’s hard not to compare these EveryBurgers with the ChocoBoy mushrooms, and invariably the ChocoBoy mushrooms come out on top.  Like the ChocoBoy mushrooms, I really loved the shape of these sweet little snacks. As you can tell from the photos, they’re actually quite realistic, and although they were certainly tasty, it’s their shape that really sets them apart from other chocolate/biscuit combos.  But when it comes to munching pleasure, they just couldn’t compete with ChocoBoy.  The main factor is the quality of chocolate: ChocoBoy was simply better.  Of course the quality of chocolate is important when enjoying a chocolatey snack, but what really stuck out for me was the design.  EveryBurger just had too much biscuit, and the biscuit also wasn’t of the same calibre of ChocoBoy.  So the process of eating a chocolate mushroom that I laid out in the previous post and that was so enjoyable for me, just wasn’t there with the EveryBurger.  It felt like just eating a generic cookie.  Like one of those tea biscuits or something.

I don’t want anyone to think that I didn’t wholeheartedly enjoy these little baby burgers.  They tasted pretty good and their form really was divine.  I really took a leap of faith when I purchased them, but you know what, sometimes taking a risk really pays off.

I really struggled with whether or not to put these EveryBurgers in under the Cartoon Food Update.  After all, they really look like Jughead’s burgers—more so than the gummy burgers.  But I guess what stopped me is that now my idea of “cartoon food” as a genre of food is so wholly wrapped up in the idea of gummy food that I just couldn’t bring myself to include these chocolate and biscuit burger cookies.

Here's me immediately after I found the EveryBurgers.

UPDATE:

I now have a direct line to EveryBurger.  They can be purchased at the same Korean grocery mentioned in the post about chocolatey biscuits.

 Few things in life have worked me up into such a fervor
As these chocolate filled biscuits in the shape of a burger.
I didn’t know what it was, but I had to find out
Whether savoury or sweet, I had to eradicate doubt.
EveryBurger is not like every burger that I would eat
Their patties are chocolate—not made of meat.

But inspite of this flaw, they're still just as sweet.

Cartoon Food Update

When my sista and I arrived in Calgary from Montreal, we drove through the hamlet of Nanton on our way to Lethbridge.  That there’s an antique-style candy store in Nanton comes as no surprise, but that they had one of the most well-stocked sections of gummy candy that looks like food was unexpected and ultimately bittersweet. 

Okay, so the selection wasn't that great, but still, I had never seen these before.  The "Lunch Bag" collection wasn't too
exciting because, with the exception of the hotdog and fries, I had already see all these candies before (there are two
Coke bottles obscured by the "Lunch Bag" text).  I have to admit that the fries were a really exciting find, though.  By
no means was the Lunch Bag collection a disappointment, but the Mexican collection was especially fun, if not slightly
disgusting. I'm not sure why there's a hotdog in there. It also comes with two corns and two peppers.

You know that feeling when something is so powerful and overwhelming that you’re certain it could happen only once in a lifetime?  And the whole time it’s happening to you you’re playing Celine Dion’s video of “A New Day Has Come” in your head and watching the camera pan around her as she stands in the clouds looking down on the world like the angel that she is?  But then that exact same experience happens again, and it almost cheapens the initial experience?  As if someone with a much weaker voice was now singing “A New Day Has Come”?  You know?  But at the same time, you’ve been here already, you know how great this can be, and to be lucky enough for something great to happen to you twice, let alone once, is really phenomenal and humbling.  These are the thoughts that were rushing through my head when I saw the different gummy candies available in the Nanton candy shop.

I don't want to spend any more time talking about these gummies, so I thought I would just provide a series of photos and perhaps make a few brief comments.

Here are the burgers from the Lunch Box series. Nothing we haven't all seen before.

The fries are new to me, however, and really appreciated.  One thing
that I think is really special about the fries is the sour sugar coating,
meant to stand in for salt.  Without it, they would have been just
gross strands of yellow gummy.  The cardboard fry container
is a really nice touch, too.

Here's the hotdog. I think it's a pretty decent representation, but sometimes these gummy
foods can really suffer when the makers put too much emphasis on condiments. 
I think I would have preferred just the hotdog and bun--just like in real life.

I stand by my original criticism of the gummy pizza, but one detail I really appreciate is that the pizza actually is in
five separate slices.  And, actually, that one mushroom looks pretty good.

Here they are all together, including the cola bottle which I didn't
provide an individual picture of because we've all seen it before.

Moving on to the Mexican collection, these peppers were probably the biggest
disappointment of the pack.  I'm not sure why. They felt like a lazy afterthought to me.

The corn was a really nice surprise for me. I really didn't see that coming.  I worried that I wouldn't enjoy eating
them because they were made of that weird marshmallow candy, but they were actually pretty good.

Now we're getting into the exciting additions to the Mexican collection.  This tortilla is pretty disgusting
to look at, but I'm not sure where the happy medium would lie between this and the pizza. The
pizza is way too busy, and as a result loses the simply quality that cartoon food needs in order to be
appealing.  But this tortilla is too plain.  I think that Trolli missed out on a really great opportunity to
make something special, and the vegetables are obviously way too globular.  That being said, without it,
the Mexican collection would have really been lacking.

Along with the tortilla, this Chili con Carne is the other big draw of the Mexican collection.
It's really disgusting to look at, but a neat detail is that it comes in a little plastic "cast iron"
serving pan.  I could not bring myself to eat this.  One lingering question I had after unpacking
the Mexican pack is why wasn't there a taco included?  But then I remembered that for some
strange reason, there is a hotdog, and now I am thinking that the hotdog was probably intended
to function as a taco.  At any rate, I think that was a pretty major oversight and lost opportunity.

The Bison Burger

2013 has been, so far, a year of new discoveries. Well, of one discovery. And actually, I discovered this last year, but the ramifications have been rippling outward ever since. I have often seen “Bison Burgers” listed on menus, but until December 2012, I had always assumed that in this context, “bison” only referred to a breed of cattle or a kind of beef, like “angus.” Admittedly, although being a lover of burgers, I know very little about them or the different kinds of beef that go into them (or even that there is such a thing as “a different kind of beef”). I certainly never imagined that we have the option of eating actual bison burgers, because if obsessively playing Oregon Trail throughout elementary school or looking at that picture of all those buffalo* skulls (and I always imagine Teddy Roosevelt standing on top of this, but I think I am just confusing this photo with the one of T-Roos and the elephant) has taught me anything, it’s that we have killed far too many bison and now they don’t exist. I personally used to kill several thousand pounds worth of bison, and as it would not all fit in my wagon, it was presumably left on the plains to rot.

Learning that bison burgers are actually made from bison was a strange moment for me. I was at once forced to acknowledge two pieces of information that I always carry with me, but that I have never once actually put together: 1) that yes, the European settlers did slaughter pretty much all the bison and then compiled their remains into a mountain of bones, and 2) that my elementary school music teacher breeds (or perhaps bred?) bison, so of course they must still exist and exist substantial enough numbers that would suggest we can make burgers out of bison meat. But the idea of bison burgers seems kind of grotesque and unnecessary to me. 

When I first looked at this finished product, I thought, Wow. What a
dream come true! A mountain of burgers! But a mountain of burgers would
be so disgusting in reality. They would be so soggy and soft and you couldn't
actually perch atop them, like this gentleman is doing, because that soggy
mass of bread and meat couldn't possibly support your weight. And while
slowly sinking into a pit of old burgers isn't the worst fate, I think it's one I
would nevertheless meet with an annoyed "Ew."

I really want to stress here that I do not care where out meat comes from. If I were to care about the ethics of factory farming, then I would probably have to stop eating that meat, and I honestly cannot be bothered about animal welfare enough to even slightly complicate my life by paying more for or by tracking down a place that sells ethically raised meat. And yet, on one hand, I kind of feel like maybe we should just leave the bison alone because I don’t trust anyone to not slaughter them all at once in an orgiastic frenzy of gore, since that seems to be how we typically interact with bison. But on the other hand, even if we have developed a moderated way of rearing and slaughtering bison, I still don’t want to eat it. I wouldn’t eat a bison burger no matter how it was raised or where it came from or how much it cost because bison give me the impression of being too wild and too unkempt to actually eat. Thinking of them reminds me of that time Rory (and his family) came to sheer one of our alpacas (Tommy Tippy Toes, for the record), but in the end the alpaca hair (fur?) was too tangled and frizzy and full of various materials from our field to be useful to anyone and eventually it was all just thrown away, and the idea of trying to extract meat from a bison carcass makes me worry that the inevitable dust and old twigs would get into the meat and would remain there throughout the cooking process and that I would be forever pulling out random things out of the burger. And also? Bison burgers are just one more food on a long list of foods that I absolutely do not need in my life. Why would I need to supplement my beef burger intake with bison burgers? I am always worrying that I am not eating nearly enough burgers as it is, and I approach every burger opportunity with relish (not with actual pickle-relish, because that is disgusting) and am not willing to sacrifice even one of these occasions in favour of trying a different kind of burger that I already know to be totally redundant and superfluous because I have already discovered the burgers that I like.

*I am only learning now that buffalo and bison are not the same animal. I always thought that bison was the plural form of buffalo.

Everyone says bison is better than beef:
More vitamins, leaner meat, and environmental relief.
But I don’t care enough about the ethics of factory farming
to eat a bison burger--what I consider to be a form of self-harming
Besides, you don’t have to act the act just to look the look:

Simply present an ethical image of yourself for all to see on facebook.