My sinuses are currently holding the majority of my cognitive capacity hostage, so there will be no fantastic blog today. Please keep your weeping to a minimum.
As homework to kep you busy until I return, consider this question:
Would you read a second blog written by me that was entirely focused on writing? I would frequently post fiction to that blog (something that just wouldn’t fit here). Maybe even a serialized novel.
More stuff about food, because I eat a lot. I’ll give you two courses of delight, a palette cleansing course of terrible, then finish with a final course of astounding.
First off, Momos! These Tibetan/Nepalese dumplings come from “Momos at the Market” at the Western Fair market, and they are delicious. A very simplified and straightforward flavor combination that I could eat for hours. The chicken curry is also great. It’s mild but flavourful. I could eat some right now. “Momos at the Market” is open on the weekend all day, and for lunch during the week.
Second course, funnel cake. I know this is a staple fair food, and nothing new to anyone, but the one I ate at the Western Fair yesterday was just right. I added some vanilla ice cream to the cake, and I almost let out a tiny shriek of delight as I ate the whole thing. I must have really been in the mood for uncomplicated tastes, because the simplicity of deep-fried batter and ice cream was (at the time) the best thing I have ever eaten, ever. I tried to share with the lad, but he was having his own love affair with a giant lollipop and he actually refused to try my dessert.
The tiny bit of awful flavour: bad wings, bad! Earlier in the week I tried out the wings at Morrissey House and my stars, they were terrible. Breaded wings? Really? the taste was similar to the z-grade chicken nuggets you had to eat as a kid. Not the tasty ones at McDonald’s, but the ones that are all dark meat and come in a sack of 2000. The final indignity to the wings was a critical shortage of sauce. Either put a generous amount of sauce on the wings, or put it on the side and let me administer my own. Don’t tease me with a dab of sauce on most of the wings.
And now, the baffling. Doritos now makes a tortilla chip that is advertised as being ‘cheeseburger-flavoured’ and by god, they are. They taste exactly like a McDonald’s cheeseburger. After a lifetime of being lied to by chip companies as they gave me promises of strange flavours like “pizza”, “poutine” or “chicken and gravy” but failed to deliver anything but a weird ambiguous taste, a snack company has stepped up and delivered the goods. As a diligent fake scientist, I ate most of a large bag of these perplexing chips, and they stayed true to the cheeseburger ideal, all the way to the end.
As an aside: I have never seen the movie ‘Oliver!’ so I’ve never heard the song I’ve appropriated as the title. I only know the song through my chum Matt, but a quick google search establishes that he was dead wrong when he sang the next line as “hotcakes and mustard”. Please continue to not put mustard on your pancakes, unless you are really looking to stretch your flavor experiences into a weird and unpleasant direction. Moving along.
I have come to rely on my recipe for little pizzas. The boy loves to eat them and loves to help make them, so it both nourishes him and keeps him busy for a bit. There’s no grand secret to the little pizzas, other than the pizza base itself: pitas. Specifically, the “greek-style” pitas that are sold at Costco (4 packs for 7 bucks). You can get the pitas at your regular grocery store as well. Because they’re fairly thick, they can hold a goodly amount of toppings and sauce without collapsing. And, after 5 to 10 minutes of sitting on a baking sheet in a 400 °F oven, they are fully done. The variance in time is strictly crispiness level and cheese melt-a-tude.
As a warning: these little pizzas are not the venue for your bold and complicated pizza dreams. You won’t be cooking the pizzas long enough to cook any raw toppings, so keep it simple. Any meat that you use has to be fully cooked beforehand, like pepperoni or kielbasa. And remember that little grabby hands will be helping you dispense the pizza sauce (just use plain spaghetti sauce), stacking the toppings into a tower, and sprinkling cheese everywhere as they shove handfuls of the cheese into their mouths, so try to keep the chopping and cutting prep work to a minimum while they are in the kitchen with you.
Chris Loblaw, Author 