Growing Up at Denny’s
Who woke up this morning with a sugar hangover? Those are the worst. But hey, I stuck to my plan. I ate one bite sized Butterfinger, one bite sized Baby Ruth, and one bite sized Nestle Crunch. Oddly, the only one of those I did not regret was the Butterfinger.
Dang, that’s good food science. And the bite sized Butterfingers are the best, because they have the highest ratio of “chocolate” to whatever the heck that is on the inside of those things. Seriously, I have no idea how you would even define it. If only we had some rock star pastry chef like Greg K. around to tell us the name of the French technique for transforming sugar and fat into a crisp, multi-layered biscuit.
… I’ll wait…
Dammit Greg. Where are you? Ugh. But since we’re just coming off candy night, I thought it would be a good day to follow up on last week’s post about the impossibly sweet pancakes from Denny’s. If you don’t remember, those were the ones that come with a pitcher of warm salted caramel to pour over them.
Amazingly, the caramel sauce was one of the very few things that wasn’t made with soy.
I have no idea how much Denny’s has changed from the late 1980s until today. But I used to spend a lot of time there. How much time? Well, if I were to go looking for my wasted youth, the first place I’d check would be between the seat cushions of a booth at Denny’s. And somehow, after all these years of blogging, I haven’t written anything about it at all.
So, here it goes.
The 2018 Candy Bowl
It’s Halloween, and I’m going to keep this light. There are plenty of other places on the Interwebs where you can go and read about the true life horrors of the day.
Blessed be the innocents who go around and pretend to be frightened by imaginary monsters.
So for them, I’ll have candy. And frankly, I could use some candy too. Although as the designated stay-at-home-and-pass-out-candy person, my own little treat is a sweet double IPA that I picked up at the store. It should help to pass the time, since last year the doorbell rang twice. Twice.
This year, as a result, I bought less candy. I hope the stash holds out. And as opposed to the Halloweens of the past, I’ve put much much less thought into the selection. Which isn’t to say this year’s candy bowl isn’t focused on some strategic objective. It is. It’s just that, much like last year, I still feel broken by the candy industry.
What’s in the bowl? I’m glad you asked.
The Best Donuts We Almost Missed
It’s hard to be unhappy when you’re eating a donut. Unless, of course, that donut comes from Dunkin. Then it’s fair to feel a sense of dread and loss. Otherwise, it’s pretty much nothing but sunshine and rainbows.
So let’s turn our attention to donuts. Especially since I’m woefully derelict in revealing the results of the Ninth Annual Tour de Donut. That’s right. Ninth. Which is why I’m excited about finally putting this thing to bed.
For nine years we’ve been leading people out into the wilderness in and around the Capital Region of Upstate New York in search of the season’s best apple cider donuts. For seven of those years, we went to five entirely different places each year. That’s thirty five different cider donuts in all.
One of those years, we limited our visits to just bakeries. Albany’s Cider Belly won that contest easily, and established itself as such a major apple cider donut force of nature, that the bakery scored a bye into the grand finals. Last year, on year eight, we did a championship round of the top five orchards from the previous tours.
This year the stakes were high. Because this was for a spot in the grand finals against Cider Belly and Terrace Mountain Orchard. This year we went back to three places were somehow our donuts on the first visit weren’t reflective of their general excellence. Plus we hit two additional spots that somehow were off our radar.
How did it turn out? Well, the donuts were some of the best we’ve experienced.
To Life
This has been a difficult weekend. Last night I cooked a simple dinner. I had been craving pasta with a basic Italian-American meat sauce. Not bolognese. Just straight up ground hamburger, tomatoes, and spices. So that’s what I made.
Mrs. Fussy thought the whole thing smelled amazing, and suggested it might be a meal with which we should have a glass of wine.
As it turns out, the wine cabinet was almost empty, which means it’s time to buy another case. So while a pinot noir might not have been the perfect pairing, it filled in just fine. Mrs. Fussy pulled the cork, filled our glasses, and when we clinked them together, I said l’chaim.
Which is finally when I started to feel better. But it wasn’t the wine. It was the words.
A Sweet Breakfast Turns Sour
Healthful eating isn’t really my thing. Sure, I try to make sure to balance out all the super fatty foods I eat with a diet full of whole grains, legumes, and vegetables. But a lot of that is out of vanity. Some is about trying to avoid a lifetime of prescription medication. And there is even a soupçon about staying, ahem, regular.
That means pancakes are an occasional indulgence. I love pancakes. Especially the ones my father-in-law makes on the farm in Pennsylvania. While I may try to limit myself to one, I usually end up eating at least three.
If I am going to be eating pancakes, they have to be special. The odds of getting a stunning pancake when out and about is slim, so I typically don’t even consider them an option. A large part of the problem is that a vast majority of places that sell pancakes don’t even have real maple syrup in the building.
It’s a crime.
Just today I got an email from the largest kill joys in the food business, The Center for Science in the Public Interest. I think all they eat at home are bran flakes, kale, and avocados smashed onto 100% whole grain bread (with no salt). Historically they are famous for comparing everyday foods to Big Mac’s. So if you know the factoid that a large tub of buttered popcorn is the equivalent of two Big Mac’s, you can thank the good folks at CSPI.
Now they are taking on salted caramel pancakes, which sound fantastic, except for one thing.
Halloweenie
How many of you wait until the last minute to do things? How many of you are planners?
It’s funny because pretty much my entire professional existence has involved planning. But in my heart of hearts I’m a procrastinator who saves things for the very last minute. I don’t quite know how to make sense of those two things. I guess I have the capacity to plan ahead, but only if somebody is paying me to do it?
Case in point. I was in Target last weekend with Little Miss Fussy who saw all the Halloween decorations, and more importantly, the bags of candy. So she asked me what our plans were for the holiday this year.
“We’re going to do the same thing as last year” I told her. “I’m going to run out the night before Halloween, and buy whatever candy is left for trick-or-treaters”. So that means I can pretty much push off thinking about Halloween until Tuesday night.
[Quick show of hands, if you can see where this going]
Refrigerated Cake
Maybe I’ll never publish the results from the Ninth Annual Tour de Donut. That would be a humdinger, wouldn’t it.
No, I won’t be that cruel. They are coming. For some reason it’s just proving to be a challenge to find the time to write a post tour post. Those take longer than most, because there’s a lot to cover, including at least a little bit of number crunching.
But there are always food topics to discuss, including even new ones that I’ve never brought to light, yet still have bothered me for a long long time. Although in this case, I’m starting to embrace cold cake with grace.
Just know this isn’t coming out of nowhere.
Instant Pot Short Ribs
We were talking about how little meat the Fussys eat. Well, here’s a great example.
Let’s flashback to last Friday. The young man had his braces adjusted, the wife was off on a business trip, and it was Shabbat. Old timers call it Shabbos, as did Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski. It’s the Jewish day of rest, and technically it begins Friday night at sunset. We play the whole thing a little bit fast and loose, but we still try to make a special meal for dinner to commemorate the holiday. It is, after all, the only holiday that makes it into the Ten Commandments. And it happens every week.
Usually, we have roast chicken. But apparently, when you have braces tightened, all you can do is suck food through pouches and maybe slurp some soup. Fortunately, I’m still sitting on a bunch of delicious homemade beef stock from those gorgeous bones I got from Bella Terra. And that broth combined with some orzo was a delightful treat for my progeny.
The big question is, how do you make that into dinner. The answer is short ribs.
Big Food on the Fringe
Saturday was the Tour de Donut: Wild Card edition, and it was a great outing. I’ll have the official results for you later this week. This weekend was also the Third Annual Adirondack Film Festival in Glens Falls, and it was fantastic.
I don’t know if I had ever stepped foot in downtown Glens Falls before. It’s a really beautiful little city. And across the river in South Glens Falls in Common Roots Brewing, which I finally got to visit. Queensbury is to the north, and since I was with Little Miss Fussy, we had to stop in at Mr. B’s Best for a roast beef sandwich.
This weekend I also took on an unplanned cooking project which involved short ribs and the Instant Pot. Maybe I’ll be able to get around to that story later this week too. But for right now, there was a quick but interesting story I stumbled upon in the aisles of Target yesterday.
It’s always fun to see big food companies finally catch on to consumer demands.
On Pouches and Doom
Tomorrow is the last Tour de Donut. Sure, there will be a grand championship round which will put Cider Belly against Terrace Mountain and the winner of this Wild Card tour. However, if you want to caravan across the Capital Region by car on a fall day, to eat five difference cider donuts with the FLB crew, Saturday may be your last day to do that.
Which isn’t to say the FLB tours are coming to an end, but the Tour de Donut has run its course.
This year’s tour will end at Saratoga Apple, which will put us an easy drive to Glens Falls. And this weekend Glens Falls is hosting the Adirondack Film Festival. I know this because Yelp is one of the sponsors. I’ve been told downtown Glens Falls is really thriving these days, so I’m looking forward to seeing it on Saturday after the tour.
Driving all around the Capital Region to sample five different donuts surely is not consistent with a drive to limit one’s carbon footprint. But I’m going to do it anyway. I will be bringing Little Miss Fussy along, so it’s not like I’ll be driving solo. And we’ll try to get some errands done before we return home too. Plus, I drive a Mazda5 which while it may look like a minivan is based on the Mazda3 platform, so it gets the fuel economy of a small car.
As long as we’re confessing the small things we do that will lead to our eventual doom, maybe this is a good time to talk about convenience foods.
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