I'm home ill today. I'm not sure why I'm telling you all that, as it has very little to do with food. But, eh, people have been telling me to be a little more personable on the blog. Consider this you getting to know me better. :-P

Tara and I spent the part of the day on Saturday shopping at Uwajimaya, possibly my second favorite place to shop in all of Seattle. The best part about this place is that it is the place to find imported foods and products from East Asia. If you want Pocky or any other of Mass Produced Japanese products, this place is Nirvana.

Which is how I came across this soda. It's an imported Japanese soda, and it's perfectly, beautifully, horrible. Here's what I think would be the recipe if one wanted to make this drink at home.

Take 300 ml of carbonated water. Place in eight packs of Bubble Yum. Allow to set overnight to extract the bubble gum flavor.

The next morning, remove the gum, add twenty-seven servings of cotton candy. Allow to melt. Add one drop of blue food coloring. Serve.

It is so sweet. SO sweet. I have no idea on the taste for sweets held by Japanese children, but I've never tasted a drink like this. For all of my kvetching about American Soda, there's little in comparison to this.

I'm home ill today. I'm not sure why I'm telling you all that, as it has very little to do with food. But, eh, people have been telling me to be a little more personable on the blog. Consider this you getting to know me better. :-P

Tara and I spent the part of the day on Saturday shopping at Uwajimaya, possibly my second favorite place to shop in all of Seattle. The best part about this place is that it is the place to find imported foods and products from East Asia. If you want Pocky or any other of Mass Produced Japanese products, this place is Nirvana.

Which is how I came across this soda. It's an imported Japanese soda, and it's perfectly, beautifully, horrible. Here's what I think would be the recipe if one wanted to make this drink at home.

Take 300 ml of carbonated water. Place in eight packs of Bubble Yum. Allow to set overnight to extract the bubble gum flavor.

The next morning, remove the gum, add twenty-seven servings of cotton candy. Allow to melt. Add one drop of blue food coloring. Serve.

It is so sweet. SO sweet. I have no idea on the taste for sweets held by Japanese children, but I've never tasted a drink like this. For all of my kvetching about American Soda, there's little in comparison to this.

A couple of weeks ago, I went to Minnesota for the first time. I had never been to the Midwest, but one of my best friends was getting married, and so I headed out to Minneapolis and hung out for a week.

Every region in the States seems to have its own chains. Pharmacies vary from Walgreens to CVS to Duane Reade to Rite-Aid, supermarkets can be Cub, A and P, King Kullen. Fast food is the same way. I know no one aside from people who have been to upstate New York who has ever been to a Roy Rodgers. Tim Hortons is reserved to Canada and those states close to it. For Midwesterners, the place of choice is Culver's.

Culver's is famous for its butter burger (a burger fried up in real butter) and its frozen custard: one of my best friends from high school swore by Culver's frozen custard and claimed it was better than any ice cream she'd ever had.

I can't vouch for any of these things, but I can say that they sell an amazing alternative to mozzarella sticks: deep fried cheese curds.

Yep, those little orange and white balls that sometimes appear atop poutine and that I received once as a gift from the same aforementioned Wisconsin buddy are coated in breadcrumbs and deep fried to create the perfect snack. Much better than french fries, in my humble opinion.

If you ever find yourself near a Culver's, I recommend checking these out. Does anyone else have any regional fast food joints that make something ten times better than what the local McDonald's and Burger King offer?

emiglia
Tomato Kumato

This time where is the bacon innovation? Someone has placed it in a cinnamon roll! Even when I have my Id muffled, my ego and superego are going "Y'know...that might work." I very much want to try one.

(h/t to Scott)

When I discuss food, taste is almost always the only sense that is brought up along with it. But I don't believe I've ever given the aroma of food equal time. Let me address that slight. Below I've listed what are my favorite and least favorite aromas in the food world.

Favorite Aromas

• Freshly Baked Bread: I have yet to meet anyone who despises the aroma of bread straight from the oven. Even the Wonder bread bakery in just north of Downtown Columbus, Ohio had wonderful aromas wafting from their bakery. The nutty/grain smell gives me such a warm feeling. Nothing even comes close to making me like I'm home.
• Just Popped popcorn from a kettle: A movie theater just would not smell the same without popcorn. However, I rarely eat the stuff.
• Sage: Out of all of the aromatic herbs out there, sage is the one that resonates with me the most. It smells like autumn and the woods. It makes me salivate just thinking about it.
• Garlic and onions: I put these two together because I believe that they go together like peanut butter and jelly. When I go into a persons house and smell these aromas, I know that there's a fair amount of cooking going on.
• Coffee: Is there any food or drink out there that smells better than it tastes? And I love the taste of coffee, so that should demonstrate what I feel of its aroma. Everytime I get a whiff of it and its hearty woodsy/chocolate notes, I get a definitive sense of time and place - breakfast and my favorite coffeeshop or diner.
• Fresh Whiskey direct from the still: Those of you who have ever been around a spirit safe will know exactly what I am talking about. Hints of the grain, both sweet and lascivious. If ever there was a aroma that defined "temptation" fresh whiskey from the still would be it.

favorite Food Aromas

• Microwave Popcorn: For as much as I love the aroma of kettle corm, Microwaved corn makes me ill. It's a little more astringent I believe, but really it comes from too many people burning microwave corn. It has turned me off of the stuff completely.
• Kim Chi: I love me some Kim Chi, but oh lord does it stink. Fermented Cabbage? There's simply no good aroma there.
• ery's Red Hawk Cheese: This is a great cheese, don't get me wrong. But when I brought it to room temperature, it had the subtlety of a old gym sock. Stinky cheeses have a place in my heart, but even I recognize that the aroma can be a but...offputting.

I haven't tried durian yet, so it's not on my list. I've had no problems with natto nor with the fish sauces I've come across. These are the ones that get most people.

What are your favorite and least favorite aromas?

So Gourmet know tells us that it's okay to enjoy ranch dressing again. Phew!!

The issue with Ranch Dressing wasn't that there was so much of it. It's that what was so much of what was generally available missed the mark on what made the dressing so interesting to begin with. Ranch Dressing is simple: Buttermilk + Mayo + Herbs. Of course the better these ingredients, the better the dressing.

But this isn't what we're given by the folks at Hidden Valley. What we get is this:

Vegetable Oil (Canola Oil and/or Soybean Oil), Egg Yolk, Sugar, Salt, Cultured Nonfat Buttermilk, Natural Flavor, Spices, less than 1% of Garlic (Dried), Onion, Vinegar, Phosphoric Acid, Xanthan Gum, Modified Food Starch, Monosodium Glutamate, Artificial Flavors, Disodium Phosphate, Sorbic Acid and Calcium Disodium Edta As Preservatives, Disodium Inosinate and Disodium Guanylate.

I'll give them a liberal benefit of my doubt on the mayo (represented here by the vegetable oil and egg yolk), but using nonfat buttermilk is like using splenda in a Snickers Chocolate bar. If you're going to use buttermilk, the fat is one of the things that makes it better. Then, of course, is the typical list of agri-chemical nomenclature found within the ingredient list.

So instead of getting Buttermilk + May + Herbs in our bottles of ranch dressing, what we get is little more than salty and sweet white mayonnaise like-sauce with a bit of spice thrown in. People like me offer little respect to ranch dressing because it doesn't bring anything new to the table, not because it's overused. The chefs out there experimenting with it are heading back to the actual recipe, not trying to recreate the travesty of mediocrity that is what we find in the grocery store.

Jus' sayin'.

(h/t Chow).