You'd Think I Like Food, Or Something

Trinamick filled out a "food questionnaire" yesterday. She has invited her readers to fill it out too.

As an added bit of fun, I have decided to reply to some of her responses while I fill in my own responses (they are the items I was going to comment on at her blog anyway, so I'm killing two birds with one stone). It seems that we have a couple similarities here and there.

The Food Meme

How do you like your eggs?

I like them over easy (medium), but I especially like them just ever so slightly past over easy (medium well?), so that the yoke is half runny, half hard. These days, I mostly eat egg sandwiches (two over-hard eggs, thoroughly salted and peppered, on bread). I used to love to put a slice of cheese on my egg sandwiches, but that is just too rich for my tastes these days.

How do you take your coffee/tea?

It is very refreshing to find someone else who has avoided becoming a stereotype. Trinamick's answer is nearly identical to my answer, so I shall copy most of it and add my own thoughts. Her words are in brown text; mine are in brackets:

"I don't drink tea or coffee [ever. Well, I guess I'll drink tea if that's my only option, and only if I'm dying of thirst. My mom has been addicted to tea since she was a kid. She carries a glass of it EVERYWHERE she goes. If I meet someone again after 20 years apart, one of the questions that person will eventually ask me is, "Does you mom still carry a glass of tea everywhere she goes?"] It's not possible to make tea taste decent. [I always say it tastes like dry water, for lack of a better term.] You just hold your nose and hope for the best." [Very well said. I cannot top that.]

Favorite breakfast foods:

I like the usual down-home menu (bacon, eggs, pancakes, sausage, toast). But that is almost never an option, so I eat cereal almost every morning. For me, missing breakfast is like forgetting your notes before you walk on stage to speak in front of a huge audience.

My favorite cereal, which I don't eat very often, is Golden Grahams. There are others too, but I cannot remember them at the moment.

Peanut butter: smooth or crunchy?

Both. It really doesn't matter because I love peanut butter the most when it is in some sort of recipe. I go nuts over peanut-butter cookies. I am also head over heels in love with peanut-butter malts (or shakes). I'm doing a Homer Simpson drool right now just imagining one of those delectable treats.

What kind of dressing on your salad?

Trinamick wrote: "Here in Nebraska, we have an excellent dressing known as Dorothy Lynch."

I didn't know it was only available here in Nebraska. I like it too and usually choose it over most others; however, I actually like to mix certain dressings together. It's not easy to do it just right, but I managed to accomplish it once in 1984 in Lemmon, South Dakota, after I had had a bit to drink (after a really hard day building a swimming pool). Ever since then, I have tried, with varying degrees of success, to make another salad as perfect as that one was.

Coke or Pepsi?

If those are all that's available, I will drink either one of them, but I don't like colas. I like 7-UP, root beer, Dr. Pepper (if that's a cola, then it's the only exception) and creme soda (occasionally).

You're feeling lazy. What do you make?

Trinamick wrote: "Little Juan burrito."

Exactly. I have several of them in the freezer right now. I don't really like them, though. I will also resort to making an egg sandwich, if necessary. Half the time, I will just eat a bowl of cereal.

Trinamick wrote: "...Tuna and cream cheese mixed together and eaten on crackers. Before you vomit, try it. It's good."

Too late, I'm already vomiting. I have eaten tuna and crackers a lot, but with cream cheese mixed in? Oh, my God!

You're feeling really lazy. What kind of pizza do you order?

I think I really shocked Kathleen a while back when I told her that I have never ordered a delivery pizza in my life. Friends and family members have ordered them while I am in their company, but it was never my idea (yes, I contributed to the costs if I was a willing participant in eating them; if I was an unwilling participant, then no, I didn't ;-). I like pizza, but not as much as I did when I was a kid. It was the treat to end all treats in those days. I find them to be a bit too expensive, and it isn't worth all that money to feel "blah" when I'm finally full. I am also a big fan of thin and crispy, whereas the rest of humanity, since about the 1980s, has gone with thick and chewy.

As for eating pizzas in a pizza place, I like almost every type of pizza, but it must have meat on it. I hate cheese-only pizzas and would probably hate vegetarian pizzas. I also don't like pineapples or fish on a pizza. Green peppers on a pizza once made me horribly indigested (to the point of illness) when I as was a kid, so I try to avoid them if at all possible.

You feel like cooking.

I was a cook in a cafe for a few months when I was 23 (and got compliments from the customers, even from ranchers who liked my steaks, believe it or not; I had never cooked a steak in my life before then because I didn't like steaks). But I haven't felt like cooking in a number of years. Why work for a half hour or an hour, just to spend five minutes eating? When I did feel like it, I made hamburgers, homemade burritos, goulash on rare occasions, my own gourmet brand of french fries (more involved than just frying them) and other things that I can no longer remember. One of my poor-person specialties was to fry a bunch of hamburger, boil elbow macaroni, heat up some cream of mushroom soup and mix it all together. It was quite tasty, but you didn't want to eat it as a regular habit. It's been twelve or fifteen years since I last had any of it.

Do any foods bring back good memories?

1.) The shrimp and seafood pasta (or something similarly named) at the Olive Garden is one of my favorite memories.

2.) Everything our guides cooked was fantastic during our four-day rafting trip down the Colorado River in Utah in 1979. I imagine the location and our situation probably helped to make everything taste better than it might have at home, but that cannot be all of it. Those people fixed amazingly good food.

3.) The Breakfast Frisco at Hardees was amazingly good for a fast-food delicacy.

4.) Calamari, which I ate in a very nice restaurant in Coronado, California, in 1995 (while staring across the bay at the San Diego skyline). The "catch of the day" white fish (a plate full), which I ate in a small bar/restaurat on Lake Michigan in Racine, Wisconsin, in 1993 is unforgettable.

5.) My aunt's corn-cob jelly is amazing. It is really made out of corn cobs, but it tastes somewhat like apple jelly.

6.) The Hot Pepper Sandwich (thinly sliced prime rib, cheese, oils, peppers, etc.) which was invented by one of the cooks in the bar/restaurant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where I was a bartender. I would eat one during my lunch break about twice a week (didn't want to get sick of them) and then have some chocolate-marble cheese cake for desert. Sigh... Those were the days...

7.) The chicken noodle soup I made from scratch when I was a cook in that cowboy cafe stands out. I used the Betty Crocker cook book as a starting point, then I improvised like crazy after that. The results were beyond anything I could ever have hoped for. But..., like Woody Boyd on Cheers, who mixed the perfect drink, I didn't write down my improvised recipe. ;-(

8.) Finally, my Iranian girlfriend in college used to make the most amazing sandwich ever devised by woman or man. Every week or three, she would bring one with her to the college library to give to me. No other food in my good food memories compares to it. She gave me the recipe at one point, but I guess it requires the just the right "je ne sais quoi" while making it, because I couldn't come close to matching what she made. The ingredients include: boiled potatoes, boiled eggs, cooked chicken cut into pieces (tuna is a good substitute if out of chicken), salt, pepper, lemon juice and mayonnaise. Mix together in a bowl and serve on toast. Based on what you are reading, I bet you cannot imagine just how delicious that sandwich was and how thoroughly thankful I was whenever she brought one with her. I gave up a long time ago on trying to make it because the results of my efforts were just too depressing. The lemon juice is completely necessary, but if you get too little, the sandwich is dull and lifeless. If you get too much, I'm sure all of you know how to say, "Yuck!" with me. Regrettably, there was almost no room for error. A milligram too much, and it was ruined. A milligram too little, and you had to guess how much more should go in it.

I'm sure there are other foods I could think of for this list, but that's a good sampling.

Trinamick wrote: "...the big family dinners we had when my grandma was alive. A seven course meal would sit before you, you'd eat until you were sick, and then my grandma would say, "You didn't eat hardly anything. You must have snacked before you got here. Have some pie."

That sounds exactly like my relatives in southeastern South Dakota. I truly believe they ate six meals a day, yet they would constantly ask me if I was hungry for a lunch-sized snack in between each of those meals. To me, that was torture.

Do any foods bring back bad memories?

Aside from that green-pepper-laden pizza I ate when I was 15 or 16? Not really.

OK, I take that back. When I was painfully in love with the Iranian woman in college, everything tasted terrible for about the first month after I met her, at least when we were not together. When swallowing anything, it felt as if I was trying to force a balloon underwater.

Do any foods remind you of someone?

Well, I guess I already gave that one away. The Iranian sandwich naturally reminds me of the Iranian.

Is there a food you refuse to eat?

Yes, Trinamick's tuna and cream cheese. ;-) Also, I agree with her on cow's tongues and brains. But I did have escargot once at La Chaumière, a fancy French restaurant near Estes Park, Colorado (in 1980-81, my college French class went on a trip to Estes Park just to eat there; I cannot believe it is still open). I must say that escargot is really very good. I figured if snooty rich people can eat it, then there must be something to it. They are right. It is well worth it. Think about it: If a person can eat clams and oysters in soup (even Rocky Mountain oysters ;-), then they shouldn't consider escargot to be that offensive.

What was your favorite food as a child?

Pizza and French fries.

Is there a food that you hated as a child but now love?

Probably, but I've drawn a blank right at the moment. I never ate broccoli as a child, but I can imagine I would have hated it. I totally love broccoli-and-cheese soup.

Is there a food that you loved as a child but now hate?

I loved Big Macs from McDonald's in high school (I almost never had one prior to high school), but now that special sauce is just too sickeningly sweet.

Favorite fruit:

Strawberries (but only when turned into topping for angel food cake) and mulberries right off of the trees at my relative's old farm in eastern South Dakota. Certain red-gold delicious apples are really good, but I'm not much of an apple eater. In fact, I'm not much of a fruit eater. That may be hard to believe when you consider that, for almost a year during high school, I worked in a giant produce in a huge grocery store here in western Nebraska. All that fruit was lying at my fingertips, yet I almost never ate any of it, unlike the rest of my coworkers.

Favorite vegetable?

Potatoes are about it for me. I absolutely love potatoes and gravy (someone once noticed that about me, which I hadn't realized was so obvious). I would include corn on the cob, but it's such a messy chore to eat it and then to pick half of it out of your teeth that I cannot YET include it in good conscience. It's a really close call, though. I love it far more now than I did when I was a kid (I loved the taste as a kid, just not the messy work). I hated getting food caught between my teeth when I was a kid, and dental floss was an exotic luxury that never crossed the minds of my parents (either that, or I didn't know what it was when I saw it in the bathroom cabinet).

Favorite junk food:

I've got to pick just one? Well, OK. Dakota Style Potato Chips (made in Clark, SD) are, without a doubt, the best potato chips ever made. I didn't even like potato chips until I discovered those in about 1987 (cheap ones used to give me indigestion). Regrettably, they aren't sold this far into Nebraska. Some towns in Nebraska along the South Dakota border are lucky enough to have them in certain stores. I used to stop at stores in South Dakota during my trips home just to buy some to bring home with me. A secretary in the school where I used to work, while visiting her daughter in a certain Nebraska college town, went out of her way a couple of times to buy some and then give them to me as a gift.

Favorite between meal snack:

Whatever is handy at the moment. I have no preferences. It can be sugary; it can be salty. It can be both at the same time.

Do you have any weird food habits:

I hate hard-frozen ice cream, so I will microwave a bowl of it for 8 to 12 seconds, depending on the strength of the microwave. I get it to a perfectly soft (drive-inn) consistency. I don't melt it to liquid form.

You're on a diet. What food(s) do you fill up on?

I don't fill up on anything. I just eat smaller portions of the same old junk food.

You're off your diet. Now what would you like?

Whatever is in the kitchen.

How spicy do you order Indian/Thai?

Trinamick said it all: "Are you kidding? I live in the middle of nowhere. We don't have Indian/Thai restaurants out here. But if I ever get the chance, it'll be spicy."

I don't know what either food is like, so I cannot say if I should order it spicy or not. A few years ago, for about a year, there was a Mongolian restaurant here. I never felt the desire to go there. Obviously, neither did a lot of other people, because they aren't open anymore.

Can I get you a drink?

Yes, a Tom Collins, please (consists of gin -- preferably Bombay Sapphire Gin -- 7-UP and Squirt). I am also very partial to Rumple Minze chilled on ice in a snifter. That is a very high-class, 100-proof German schnapps that tilts the world very pleasantly to one side, in very short order, especially if you've had at least one beer with it. ;-)

When you chill Rumple Minze over ice, it tastes as if it is only about 10 proof. If you drink it at room temperature, it has an extremely strong taste. It's hard to believe it's the same liqueur.

Red wine or white?

Red. White is too bitter. But I'll hold my breath and drink whatever is available. I much prefer champagne over wine, though.

We only have beer:

As a bar tender of three years, I am totally indifferent to beer brands. When I was tending bar in Montana in 1987, I wasn't very fond of Stroh's (I believe that was it), but neither were most of the customers. I had just gotten out of college and was still "smarting" from that old "lost love" story, so I was a bit more receptive to drinking than usual. Nice guy that I am, I decided to do my dad a favor (it was his bar in which I was working). I figured I would reduce his inventory of Stroh's before it got too old. Every day at lunch time (it became a ritual), I would drink three cans of Stroh's, each mixed with just the right amount of tomato juice and tabasco sauce. That covered the crappy flavor of the beer with a concoction that I absolutely love. When I reached my third can of beer, I would cook myself a horribly crappy Deli Express microwave sandwich (or maybe even half a Tombstone pizza). During this daily ritual, I would either read my American literature anthology from college (I had promised a professor I would do so), or I would write. I usually had the place to myself around the lunch hour, so I truly enjoyed myself.

There is one beer, though, that I consider to be my favorite of all time. It is a very hard-to-find Norwegian beer called Ringnes. I think the last time I had any was in the early 1990s. I have only been able to find it in Rapid City, SD (at the Albertson's store) and in Sioux Falls, SD, at Sid's Crown Liquor Store. Regrettably, I couldn't find any at Sids in 2005.

I discovered Ringnes by accident while tending bar in Sioux Falls in 1988-89. The lounge in which I worked had sold it regularly to customers before they remodeled, and the new owners had taken over. For over a year, a single case of Ringnes remained in the beer cooler, but I just ignored it. Finally, I asked the manager if I could buy it for cheap, and he agreed. It was quite strong at first, but by the time I was a third of the way into the bottle, I had decided it was the best beer I had ever tasted. I eventually introduced it to a best friend during a visit here in Nebraska. I warned him not to judge it too hastily. He took a couple of sips and said, "This tastes like B.O." After about ten sips, he said, right on cue, "This is the best beer I've ever had."

Favorite dessert?

Too many, but I'll name a few: 1.) Chocolate-marble cheesecake, 2.) a certain pecan pie made by the restaurant/lounge in Sioux Falls where I tended bar, 3.) tin-roof sundae ice cream, 4.) peanut butter shake, 5.) banana shake, 6.) chocolate-chip shake, 7.) upside-down banana split from Zesto (meaning simply that they serve it in a large paper drink cup). There are many deserts to die for in specialty restaurants in Omaha, NE. My educator colleagues and I would stop at these places religiously every year when we went to the NETA Conference. I had to go with them because we were all in the same van. Everything was too expensive, but I splurged just once.

The perfect nightcap?

Rumpleminze, I suppose, but why waste all that great inebriation on sleep? One needs to drink when there are still a few hours of consciousness remaining! ;-)