What I learned today (Take Two)

[Jenise]

Earlier this week I purchased a rotisserie chicken at Whole Foods and if this was a contest between WF and Costco, well I learned that Costco wins. I'm not even sure the WF chick was rotisserie vs. merely baked, the color and texture of the skin would not support a rotisserie situation.

Anyway, the bones are in a pot making broth now.

Discussing this with my brother in law last night, he who keeps a pot of bone broth on the stove 24/7 with which to make food for their dogs (the headcount of which tragically went from 3 to 2 yesterday with the loss of my favorite Polly), he claims that adding a tablespoon of vinegar to the pot hastens the release of proteins. He doesn't resort to that since his is a long/continuous process, but he mentioned that he knows it's so which is why there's a faint sourness to many commercial bone broths.

[Jenise]

Yesterday I ate lunch in a Pho restaurant whose menu, amusingly, had four basic categories: Appetizers, Pho, Specialty Soups and Vegetation.

Did the Vegetation menu include a Shrubbery?

[Jenise]

Not salads as you might think, just their word for 'vegetarian', mostly phos. Cracked me up, though.

Did the Vegetation menu include a Shrubbery?

Provided by Roger, the shrubber?

(So that's what I learned: Melinda's Sriracha Wing Sauce is good!!!![/quote]


I was not a fan of Sriracha for a long time until I discovered Lee Kum Kee Sriracha Mayo. That stuff is tasty. I make a killer Bacon, tomato, avocado, sandwich, and that stuff is my secret ingredient. My son loved it, and the next time he came up, I gave him a bottle as a gift.

[Jenise]

It's really popular stuff, Karen. Supermarket sushi has contributed a lot to that, I think--the color's so decorative.

[Jenise]

I'm currently binging Mad Men, which I'd not seen when it originally aired. The period references are, in general, astonishingly accurate and in many cases surprising. The anti-semitic attitude of the profession they're suggesting were prevalent, for one. Maybe that really was New York at the time, but wow. To a liberal West Coaster, this suprrises. Food and drink--drink especially--play a part in setting up a lot of the scenes. I was especially surprised by an episode where they're having the owners of an Israeli cruise ship company in for a midday meeting and they served Mai Tai's and caviar. Forget any church-lady bias against day drinking, the weirdness of that combination...really? That would have been considered good?

It certainly sounds splurgey. Nothing succeeds like excess.

I don't know. A properly made Mai Tai (as opposed to an overly sweet mashup of fruit juice and rum) might not be too bad with caviar. Not nearly as good as a decent champagne, but maybe not bad?

[Jenise]

I would think it would be awful! Just a good example, though, of how tastes have changed.