Sell Out Sunday – SOS For Short
Today is probably a day of recovery. There is a lot to recover from yesterday. Even if you didn’t participate in both the derby and Cinco de Mayo celebrations, you may have braved the lines of Free Comic Book Day, or spent too much time in the sun at the Troy Farmers Market.
I had planned to shop there and pick up some early spring goodies, but Albany Jane convinced me to go to the Menands Market, which would have been good if you were considering planting a garden and needed cuttings. It was less good for someone who was looking for food.
But spending time with my fellow food writers never fails to produce fodder for future features.
Anyhow, this week I only have one official press release to share. I don’t want to ruin the surprise, but it’s from Price Chopper. However, to try and bring some balance to the post, I’ve also highlighted some upcoming events at the Niskayuna ShopRite. Soon I’ll wrap my head around the programs on deck in Albany. The final blurb is an update on an event I mentioned last week. It’s sold out, but there is still one way to attend: all you need is a lot of good taste and a little bit of luck.
Food Fights: Stock Versus Stock
Yesterday’s food fight was about semantics. As always, I think Mr. Dave said it best when he wrote, “I honestly could not think of a dumber subject to waste words on.”
Today’s food fight is different. It’s not about challenging the meaning of a dish, but rather its approach. And tomorrow’s fight is different still. What’s especially dumb is every day this week we go deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole.
As far as I am concerned, yesterday’s issue was pretty clear-cut. There are the things that are ice cream and then there are the things that aren’t ice cream. A puree of frozen bananas firmly falls into the later. Today’s is much less so. And tomorrow, I’m clearly the a-hole to my long-suffering wife.
Now I am keenly aware that on television there are people who are advocating doing things I find to be unconscionable. This should go without saying, but I’m going to put it out there anyway: just because something is on the Food Network doesn’t make it good. The same goes if it is printed in the Schenectady Gazette, because I saw this and it made me irrationally angry.
Food Fights: Your Bananas
Welcome to Food Fights week. For those who didn’t read Monday’s post or folks who have no interest in going back to refresh their memory this is the salient thing to remember:
Sometimes I can be a really nice guy. But other times I encounter something so upsetting to me that I can feel the vein in my forehead start to throb. And I know the best course of action is to just to stop, take a deep breath, and let it go.
But. I. Just. Can’t. Do. It.
These things are often about food, and to someone else they may seem entirely trivial or insignificant. Today I want to shed some light on a recent example of this. Two weeks ago a tweet that came across my screen from someone who I truly admire and respect, Christina Davis of the From Scratch Club. It was about ice cream.
Now the idea here isn’t to rake her over the coals. In fact it’s just the opposite. I already did more damage than I intended. Rather I hope to show how little things drive me bonkers, and perhaps provide a bit more context to why a loose turn of phrase got under my skin.
Not only do I have some strong thoughts on ice cream in general, but I’ve also had it a lot on the brain lately: I’m mulling over the Tour de Hard Ice Cream and moments before I saw the offending tweet, I had sent a note to A Professor’s Wife proclaiming the superiority of The Snowman’s hard product over Guptill’s less than stellar soft serve.
With all of this context in mind here is what Christina wrote:
FUSSYlittleBLOG 4.0
Three years. Almost every day for the last three years I have written several hundred words about food and posted them to this blog. That’s 935 posts to be precise.
One would think that would get repetitive.
One would think that readers would eventually get bored.
One would think that I would run out of interesting things to say.
My maternal grandmother famously told me that I was a “One-Note Johnny.” And my paternal grandmother once said to me in disgust, I had “An answer for everything.” While they evidently saw these as weaknesses of character, I found them to be strengths. And I think they keep me writing with a singular purpose towards a deeply held belief, that people should be eating better food.
Currently, I think the FUSSYlittleBLOG’s best claim to fame is that it’s the Most Prolific Independent Individual Food Blog in Albany. Maybe next year I can even improve upon that in my march to be the Most Influential Food Blog in the Capital Region. But despite making some progress in that regard, I’ve still got a long way to go.
All the same, I’m amazed at just how far the blog has come from its beginnings and the accomplishments of the past year. And the one I’m most proud of couldn’t have happened without you.
Food Fights
Sometimes I can be a really nice guy. But other times I encounter something so upsetting to me that I can feel the vein in my forehead start to throb. And I know the best course of action is to just to stop, take a deep breath, and let it go.
But. I. Just. Can’t. Do. It.
And you know, it doesn’t matter where it comes from. It can be from a family member, a friend or a complete stranger on the Internet. I see these transgressions of taste, these crimes against food, and have to take a stand.
For some reason, this has been happening a lot lately. And I mean a lot. These exchanges tend to happen on Twitter, Facebook or in real life. But I thought it was time to bring some of them here, so we can talk about them in detail.
Can anyone say, Theme Week?
Sell Out Sunday – The Return
Weekends are difficult. It’s nice to occasionally take a full two days off from writing. But the Fussy household is full of six-day workers (including half of the children) so my schedule is far from atypical.
Still, I’ve been struggling for a long time about what to write on Sundays. It wasn’t the best day to talk about wine. It turned out to be a great day to write about breakfast, but over the past several months I’ve covered most of my breakfast repertoire. In theory I could try to expand my cooking for the sake of the blog. But that kind of feels wrong.
Then there was this Sell Out Saturday thing where I took press releases and set them to post automatically on the one day I did take off. I never really got into the hang of that.
All of this is to say that I think I see Sell Out Saturday morphing into Sell Out Sunday. Except the things I’m promoting below aren’t all press releases. Two are actually events that I was informed about over email that are being spearheaded by people I know. I figure that’s close enough.
Maybe this should be Shout Out Sunday, because I also just stumbled upon a new Albany food blogger I think you should meet. Her name is Mimi and her blog is here (and now in the blogroll).
We’ll see. But until I figure it out, you should check out these upcoming events.
Food, Science and Transparency
In my twenties I turned on to the fact that partially hydrogenated oils were in everything. Some early reports indicated that it was problematic. But the mass media hadn’t quite jumped on the story and nobody was even talking about labeling trans fats.
But there I stood in the grocery aisles like a crazy person reading all the ingredients of everything, and finding only a small handful of products that I felt good about eating. I’ll never forget how glad I was to find those MI-DEL ginger snaps.
Eventually the media, the scientists and the policymakers got around to making sure these trans fats were labeled. And soon thereafter they have almost disappeared entirely. It’s amazing what happens when consumers are given information and then have the ability to make informed decisions.
Over two years ago, I wrote about “pink slime” after a big story ran in the New York Times on the meat product also known as Lean Finely Textured Beef (or LFTB for short). I guess the paper isn’t quite as influential as it used to be, because it took years for the story to capture the attention of the national television news. But once people were aware that something other than ground beef was lurking in their ground beef, there was public outrage.
Now that LFTB is out in the open, manufacturers, grocers and restaurants are distancing themselves from it. Although Forbes ran an interesting and inflammatory counter argument recently called Anti-Technology Activists Are The Real Slime. Read it, then let’s discuss.
Two Chances to Celebrate The Blogiversary
Do you know what Mrs. Fussy and I do every year on our anniversary? Usually nothing. Well, that’s not entirely true. Every year we tell each other how glad we are not be having a wedding today.
Our wedding was great. It was a bright and sunny day surrounded by our closest friends and loved ones, with tasty food, good cheese, well-paired wines, and lots and lots of joy. But planning an event like that is often stressful, and it’s a unique challenge to enjoy the company of so many people in such a short window of time.
And to commemorate this most momentous occasion, we do nothing. No gifts. No festive meals. No cards. Nada. Sometimes we lose track of how long we’ve been together. In part because we’re joined until death. That was the deal. So achieving two years or twenty-two years isn’t a goal, it’s an expectation.
I think one year I bought us an anniversary bottle of single malt scotch.
With this background, perhaps it makes more sense as to why I was going to let the anniversary of the FUSSYlittleBLOG just pass by with a simple post on May 1 that acknowledged the day. However, I was cajoled by DerryX into doing something. So, this is my new plan.
Ask the Profussor – Ta-Ta Terrible Twos
This is it. The last Ask the Profussor as a two-year old. By the time the next edition rolls around, the FUSSYlittleBLOG will be three! Where has the time gone? I’ll tell you where it hasn’t gone, answering your questions in a timely manner.
You see, if I did even a passable job at that, the questions that fell through the cracks could be reasonably answered every three or four weeks in these periodic round-ups. But today is a continuation from last week’s AskTP post, because Mrs. Fussy couldn’t copyedit much beyond the 2,100 words mark. That’s usually a good sign I’ve gone on too long.
So here are the rest of those questions plus a few more that have accumulated over the course of the past seven days. And as always I’ll try to do better. After all, my commitment to you is that all questions, so long as they use proper punctuation, eventually get answered.
Now, let’s see what was on your mind.
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