Tastes (Kinda) Like Chicken, Looks Like The Lower 48?

Call me old-fashioned, but I like my food to look like food.  Sure, it's a well-known fact that I enjoy the little cheese crackers with the peanut butter in them, and that color does not occur in nature except to scream 'poisonous!', but they do look exactly like they're designed to.

On the opposite side of the coin, what's the deal with chicken nuggets?  First it was McDonalds, and now it seems everyone is jumping on the 'that's-not-shaped-like-food' bandwagon.  I don't eat McNuggets, but on occasion, nuggets from other fast food icons make a quick and tidy snack when I'm on the run, and they're all shaped the same. Some of them look like Minnesota.  Some of them are shaped like animators used to draw pork chops back in the 1940's.  Some of them are shaped like paramecia.  Some of them have no rhyme or reason whatsoever, and they're only benefit is the ability to fit neatly into a vat of barbecue or sweet-and-sour.

I get the dinosaurs, the stars and the other amusing kid-friendly shapes, because we want our kids to eat something besides paste and scabs.  But unless you come out with the full fifty state nugget pack to teach them geography, it seems wrong to pick on one or two.  And 50 nuggets would just add to the growing childhood obesity issues in this country, especially dipped in honey mustard.

Round is good.  Shape them like drumsticks, I'll be happy.  It's an extrusion, you can't tell me these are the only shapes we can come up with.

Does that look like a McNugget/New Hampshire to you?

I mentioned my curiousity about this to someone the other day, and they sent me to this article about genetically engineered ground meat.  That's right, scientists are developing cell structures that will grow a hamburger without ever needing to be farm-raised, slaughtered or butchered, and it won't create the mass amounts of greenhouse gas expelled by real cows and chickens. 

This makes perfect sense to me, that half of the meat we consume is already ground, so why not remove the animal cruelty from the picture?  I love the American farm and the American farmer, but I've read much on the environmental impact a single cow can have on global warming, and how each cow produces 1/16th the meat-to-pollution ratio of smaller animals like chickens.  And now, everyone could grow their own meat.  I'm on board.

The only tragedy here?  Every day I don't finish my old novel is a day that my imaginary happenings become closer to truth.

Damn.  I wish I had some of those cheesy peanut butter crackers.

Blast from the Past - Before the NFG rocked the F

January's a busy time around here at CDS Enterprises (A wholly-owned division of NFG Worldwide, Ltd.)  As such, I don't have the time to rant anew - at least not in print.  Being as we are four months from my cresting (and subsequently being 'over') the hill, it seems only appropriate that I share with you some crotchety posts from the past.

We're jumping into the Wayback Machine this week, courtesy of an old college friend on the Facebook.

Because if you can't laugh at yourself, who can you laugh at?


Me, apparently.  The more I look at this, the worse it gets.  Is that...hair gel?  Why yes, I think it is.  And those sneakers.  I'm sure that was the style, but really? 

But hey, at least I wasn't fat.  That's something, I guess.  Though NSG doesn't have quite the same ring. 

Fun Fact Friday - An' Ahhhh Hepped!

I know stuff.  Lots of stuff, much of it useless, except when it's not.  

So I've been fighting a compulsion today.  I like to be helpful, even if I wasn't asked.  If I know something, I want to share.  However, it really isn't my place to answer questions posed by others on a third party's blog.  Even if I know the answer.

Because I want to be helpful.  And since nobody asks me questions directly, I have to resist the urge to answer questions that weren't asked of me.

Because I know stuff.

Random Acts of Thursday - Pick a Side

What, me worry expound on the glory of the James Bond series of films, or the spaghetti westerns graced by Clint? You're shocked, I know. No quiz today, either, dear reader. You have plenty of work to be done on past Thursdays where you've feigned ignorance, so today is simply about adding to the growing trivial knowledge of the mundane that is Cheesehead Displacement Syndrome.

Growing up, my father would always point to someone in a movie and tell me "he's a great character actor." I didn't understand that as a kid, either you were famous or you were just there to give the famous person someone to shoot. It wasn't until I got a little older that I saw these actors again and again, filling role after role without much fanfare, and realized just what he meant.Danny Trejo has never been a marquee name, but he's everywhere in film and you know him when you see him. Same thing with Brion James. Keith David. W. Earl Brown. Anthony James. All actors who make (or made) a living working, not taking down $20 mil a picture. This started to make sense to me after a few years. What still threw me, though, were the actors who assumed assorted roles in a single series of film or television. Gian Maria Volonte played, essentially, the same character in Per Un Pugno Di Dollari and Per Qualche Dollaro In Piu. (That's A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More, in case you were wondering.) In both films, Clint Eastwood played, essentially, the same character as well. However, The Man With No Name was timeless, and could easily have taken part in both settings. Even his wardrobe followed him through the films. Add Il Buono, Il Brutto, Il Cattivo to the list, and you have Lee Van Cleef playing, again, a similar enough character between For a Few Dollars More and this film, despite having different names (and dying in G,B,U). Can you see how this could be confusing to an eight-year-old?

Similarly, watching the entire catalog of James Bond films, secondary characters have been played by repeat actors for years. M, Q and Moneypenny, until those actors retired, were played by the same actors for decades, in many cases appearing in more films than the actors playing Bond himself. What gives me more pause, though, are the actors who switched identities and allegiances between films.
Walter Gotell started his Bond career in From Russia With Love, as the S.P.E.C.T.R.E. training camp leader, Morzeny. Then, beginning in the Moore years and carrying through several subsquent Bonds, Gotell was featured as Soviet General Gogol. This portrayal began in The Spy Who Loved Me, and continued in A View to a Kill and The Living Daylights, to name a few.
Charles Gray similarly took a break between Bonds, first showing up as Connery's quick-to-die informant in You Only Live Twice, before taking on the role of villain-to-end-all-villains Ernst Stavro Blofeld in Diamonds Are Forever. (And then going on to do the Time Warp. Again.)
Joe Don Baker showed up as the unscrupulous arms dealer Brad Whitaker in The Living Daylights, then after an eight-year absence, suddenly turned up as CIA agent Jack Wade in Goldeneye, reprising the role in Tomorrow Never Dies (the only film, near as I can tell in all my film-watching history, where the sinister, world-dominating character gets to be named Elliott, instead of the simpering, nerdy loser.)
Finally, Maud Adams. Oh, sweet Maud Adams. Succumbing to Roger Moore's charms (SERIOUS ACTING ABILITY!) in The Man With The Golden Gun, she's killed by her lover for turning to Bond. She then turns up in one of the rare 'empowered woman' roles in Bond films as Octopussy and coming to Bond's rescue not once, but three times in the film.

Hopefully this has shed some light on things you didn't know you wanted to know, this knowledge might come in handy for past or future quizzes, too. If nothing else, at least it builds character.

Oh, and I finally figured out how do do strikethrough text. My mad HTML skillz is growin', yo.

Fun Fact Friday - Science, it's what's for dinner

While I'm performing little science experiments with dinner and blogging about them, Lori has embarked upon her own brilliant project. She's barely a week in so far, but she plans to post a new photograph every day for the next year. You can see what she's doing here! You'll notice that, in contrast to my own photography, her pictures are studied, well-balanced, in focus, and level. I can't even do level without photo-editing software, and she throws around big photography words like - well, I can't think of any. I can be supportive, just don't ask me to understand the lingo.

Wednesday night I threw together some crab cakes, thinking they'd be a nice addition to Melissa's white corn recipe over at Alosha's Kitchen. They sell sweet corn at the grocery store this time of year, how bad could it be, right?

Bad. Little chewy nuggets of starch. If vegetables could have gristle, this corn did. In a willful suspension of disbelief (WSD), I allowed myself to buy something that is clearly not in season.

For any of you that might not be familiar with the general geographic, geologic shape of the planet that we all, presumably, live upon, the earth is a sphere. That orbits a big ball of super-hot gas we call the sun. Because of that orbit, we have seasons. And if you live in the northern hemisphere, it's the coldest damn part of winter right now. Even here in Florida they're expecting us to dip below freezing again.

Corn, on the other hand, is a summer vegetable. Growing up in Wisconsin, oft was the time I'd heard 'knee-high by the Fourth of July', meaning that sweet corn wouldn't really be in season until mid- to late August.

Funny thing about hemispheres, when it's winter up here, it's summer down south, and vice-versa. That means that mid- to late February is the perfect sweet corn season, if, say, you live in Argentina, or New Zealand, or Rand McNally.

Which brings me to the actual science-y bit of today's discussion.

Fresh-picked sweet corn, corn that self-justifies the term 'milk stage' when a kernel is popped, corn which is then soaked in icy cold water and grilled until the husks are almost gone, dipped in melted butter and salted lightly is a good thing. It is good, because fresh corn kernels are still filled mostly with sugar. And it's difficult not to feel joy as butter dribbles down one's chin.

However, the farther corn needs to travel from field to table, or the longer it sits on grocery store shelves, the more that sugar is converted to starch through an enzymatic process, especially if the corn is held at less than optimal temperature. Sweet corn for market is hypercooled to remove as much field heat from the ears as quickly as possible to slow this conversion process. However, a careless or hurried farmer may rush the process, damaging the quality of the corn before it's even loaded on a truck.

Additionally, when I'd buy sweet corn in Wisconsin, it was coming from a farmer who drove it a mile up the road to where he's selling it, and probably picked the ears that day. Right now, I'm approximately 4000 miles from Argentina and Rand McNally, making that trip significantly longer.

Fresh corn is doomed this time of year, because no grocery store has the capacity to hold it at optimal temperature. The warmer corn is, the faster it converts all of the sugar to starch. Corn kept in a humid, 33-degree environment will convert approximately 6% of its sugar reserves to starch in a day. Conversely, in an arid, 50-degree environment, one I'd say closely resembles my local market, corn will convert nearly 60% of its sugar reserves to starch in one 24-hour period.

So sorry, Melissa, to have sullied such a fantastic recipe with bad science. Next time I'm buying frozen.