Eat more cookies

and they call it a “vacation.”

We have just slept in 9 different places over the past couple of weeks, and visited with 10 cousins - plus 4 “friend” cousins.

We have consumed Fritos, Muchos, Funjuns, gummi bears, Coke, vanilla Coke, Mountain Dew, 200mg caffeine tablets, M&Ms, Milky Ways, Snickers, Skittles . . .

There are at least 56 McDonald’s restaurants on Interstate highways between Lamar, PA and Tulsa, OK. By my reckoning, this works out to approximately 1 McDonald’s every 23 miles.

I told you so.

A report from poverty aid organization Oxfam concludes that biofuel development is driving up prices for staple foods among the world’s poorest, with one official calling biofuels a “crime against humanity.” Read the story here.

It is already insane that most of the crop acreage in this country is devoted to raising feed for livestock. Now we’re raising crops to feed our cars - something we don’t eat indirectly! To think that we’re plowing up CRP land to plant corn for the “good of the planet” is asinine. But it’s happening, and meanwhile, Mexico’s poor can’t afford tortillas. Something seriously wrong here folks . . .

Found this BBC story today about a huge beer heist in Dublin that made off with 180 kegs of Guinness! This seems like a fairly well planned operation in that police recovered the empty trailer in County Meath, so the beer has already been distributed or hidden. The part I don’t get is why the robbers also took 180 kegs of Budweiser. It really bugged us during our great Ireland trip in 1997 to find the noble Irish sipping our American swill in their pubs. Stop drinking that crap, me brethren!

Last Wednesday, “The Shrikes” played their debut concert at the 2007 Chili-Cook-off annual fundraiser for the Student Chapter of The Wildlife Society. It rocked. Here was our 10-song set:

“Can’t You See?” Marshall Tucker Band
“The One I Love” R.E.M.
“Never Been to Spain” Three Dog Night
“Bad Moon Rising” Creedence Clearwater Revival
“You Wreck Me” Tom Petty
“Atlantic City” and “This Hard Land” Bruce Springsteen
“Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World” and “Cortez the Killer” Neil Young
“Whipping Post” Allman Brothers Band

The Shrikes: Emily George (bass), Tim O’Connell (rhythm guitar and vocals), Andy George (drums), and Jason Heinen (lead guitar).

I just enjoyed a Nature Valley “Sweet & Salty Nut” granola bar. This particular flavor comes in a nut-brown wrapper with pictures of peanuts on the front. It says in bold lettering “PEANUT Naturally Flavored“, and includes a little banner that says “Dipped in Peanut Butter Coating Bursting with Peanuts!” The first ingredient listed on the back is “ROASTED PEANUTS“.

You can see where I’m going with this . . .

Below the ingredients, in bold letters “CONTAINS PEANUT . . . INGREDIENTS“.

I know this has nothing to do with Ivory-billed woodpeckers, but it’s on my mind and I have to say it: chefs shouldn’t smoke!

Last night on the Restaurant Wars episode of Top Chef there was all this noise about using scented candles in the restaurant and how horrible that is around food. Point taken. But then they show the chefs standing around discussing what they’re going to cook while smoking cigarettes. If a chef should have a good sense of smell, shouldn’t he/she have living tastebuds? I’m sure I’ve eaten plenty of good food cooked by people that smoke, but I can’t stand this show talking about all the nuances of flavors and the chefs’ taste and flavor profiles, etc. when these chefs don’t seem to care what they are doing to their health and their ability to actually TASTE food! Yikes!!
- tdo

Check out this analysis of obesity by state over time in the US. Here in Oklahoma, we love it when other states are in worse shape than we are - especially when one of those states is Texas!*

*or as we like to call it, “Baja Oklahoma”

Like most folks I imagine, we would pause to reflect a moment on Memorial Day, and then go back to our hot dogs and potato chips. That is, until we moved to Boalsburg, PA - the “Birthplace of Memorial Day“. Boalsburg is a postcard small town nestled between Mt. Nittany to the north and Tussey Mountain to the south. It’s also the home of the Pennsylvania Military Museum, a tribute to hometown heroes from Bunker Hill to Baghdad.

Robert Baumbach photo

Boal Mansion Museum

Memorial Day in Boalsburg cannot be ignored. It could be the bands, the buntings, the speeches, the smiles, the cannons . . . But there you are reminded that idyllic “small town America” comes with a price. A heartfelt “thank you” to the fallen is shared by everyone in Boalsburg, from the most conservative to the most liberal. In Boalsburg, they wipe the same tears on Memorial Day.

It’s been a few years since our last Boalsburg Memorial Day, and the holiday seems ignored by comparison here in Stillwater. We’ll celebrate tonight by dining on Indian food prepared by our Canadian friend. I guess that’s small town America too.

If you’re really lucky, you might live in a town where you have access to authentic, fresh-baked bread. Maybe it’s good Kaiser rolls or bagels or Italian bread or baguettes. There is no substitute on earth for such gastronomic delights. If you’re really unlucky, you have access to no such things. To you, a hamburger bun with a hole in the middle is a bagel, and a “French loaf” is a doughy cylinder of WonderBread recognizable only by its cylindrical shape. Then there are those of us who reside somewhere in between, “purgatory” if you prefer. For us, there’s Panera.

Panera Bread is a bakery franchise; there are others. They tend to pop up in cities that have no real bakeries of their own. That, sadly, was us until Panera came along, and we were thrilled to get one. They are making a fortune here too: You can get a decent cup of coffee elsewhere, but not a decent cup of coffee and anything resembling a bagel. Panera draws you in with their warm-stained wood, terra cotta walls, cozy gas fireplace, soup and sandwich combos, passable bagels, piped in Mozart, (usually) ample parking, and their crusty breads. Yes, you can get a fresh loaf of something that looks like a baguette, slices like a baguette, and at least on the outside, crunches like a baguette. All in all, Panera is pleasant, and now that all your friends hang out there too, it’s value lies as much in facetime as it does in baked goods. We are happy to be considered regulars there, and always echo the workers when they emerge from the back shouting “hot bagels!”

But there’s still something off about this place. Too cookie-cutter. Too sterile. You get a sense that a Parisian wouldn’t be caught dead with one of their baguettes. I just couldn’t put my finger on it, until one day it hit me: PANERA HAS NO SMELL.

That’s right. In this building, every day, people are baking breads and scones and bagels by the dozen, and the place does not smell of baking bread! What’s up with that? Makes me very suspicious. It’s kind of like the way they had their food prepared on Star Trek, by some kind of computer molecular simulation process. I bet the bagels on the Enterprise lacked an aroma too.

So Panera is a mixed blessing for me. It would be so much better if the place smelled like baking bread. Maybe they should have little bread-scented scratch-n-sniffs set out on each table. Like everything about Panera, it’d be better than nothing.

~tjo

If you’ve spent any time flipping through cable TV channels over the past year, you’ve probably stumbled across Rachael Ray. She’s the 30-ish, irrepressibly perky brunette who’s enjoyed a meteoric rise to celebrity in 2006 thanks to two different programs (both on the Food Network, I think), and a marketing blitz usually reserved for up-and-coming tweens at Disney Headquarters. If you still can’t place her, she’s best known for “40 Dollars a Day,” in which she demonstrates how to get 40 bucks to cover three great meals in cool travel destinations both in the US and abroad. She also has her own cooking show now, and I think the point of that one is whipping up something great at home in 30 minutes or something.

Now $40 a Day was a neat idea for a show, and Ms. Ray seems to be a fine cook - she makes good old fashioned meals without all that trendy crap like the other shows. (”Today we’re making smokey chipotle pancakes with jicama and sun-dried tomatoes with rice noodles, wrapped in filo, and served on a bed of tilapia-infused risotto. Oh, and we’ll hit it with a dash of ‘essence’ for that distinctive flavor of New Orleans.”) She’s cute - she’s an Upstate New York chick - and she’s developed her own loyal following of lonely men. If Tina Fey is the ultimate woman for America’s super nerds, Rachael Ray holds the same status for our beer-swilling Teamsters. For all her annoying perk, there is something very girl next door about Ms. Ray, and she can be embarassingly appealing.

But COME ON! For the love of God and all that is Holy, we are being Rachael Ray’d to death in this country! She’s got the two shows going concurrently now, she’s doing guest spots on other shows, she’s in the circulars that come with the Sunday paper, she’s in book stores, on calendars, and I hear she’s even popping up in medical textbooks.

OK that last one I made up, but this one I didn’t: Last night, I went to open a new package of my beloved Premium saltine crackers (don’t get me started on their switch to plastic sleeves a few years back), and there was Rachael Ray’s perky smile hocking one of her many endorsed products on my box of crackers. OK, so what, but wait! There she is again on the same box of crackers. And again! Folks, there are NINE (9) photographs of Rachael Ray on my box of crackers!!! This must stop!

Rachael, Honey, if you want so badly to be a part of my life, then just give me a call and we’ll go out for a beer and some wings or something. I’m sure Tracy won’t mind. But PLEASE stop stalking me on my crackers! You’re starting to creep me out. You can be famous and successful without being slipped unawares into America’s drinking water supply.