Food » That Not So Fresh Feeling

Why I Laughed at the Phantom Gourmet Dude Working the Mall Kiosk

Feb 212011

Around Christmas time, I was shopping in the Burlington Mall and saw one of the Andelman brothers working their little Phantom Gourmet booth shilling coupon books. And I laughed. Mostly because I imagined the internal thought process being something like “I’m a TV star, why do I have to work in a mall with these…plebians,”, but also a little bit “Ha. What a racket. Sell coupons to the restaurants you review on TV.”

Well, here’s another reason to laugh at them.

Mike Andelman: We walk in and the hostess who’s the typical hot woman, rude, cold- as-ice, never would talk to me in high school-type girl…So she goes, “Two?”, and I said yes, and she looks at us and says, “I’m sorry, we’re not open until 5:30, so there’s nothing I can do.”

Dan Andelman: And what time was this at?

Mike: 5:05.

Eddie Andelman: It was about 5:10.

<snip>

Mike: And it’s not like this was 8pm on a Saturday night. It’s 5 o’clock, and guess what, if the owner of Grill 23 was standing next to this dumb hostess, this moronic hostess who was just getting her, uh, jollies off by sticking to the rules of her little brochure in a little binder, this little monkey, her only job is to look at this binder and say don’t let people in ‘till 5:30…

Dan: Although in her defense she was good-looking apparently. I’d like to see a picture. Was she wearing yoga pants? These are things I want to know. I have a thing for hostesses.

Mike: There’s not a hostess who’s not good-looking, because they’re incompetent and can’t do anything else in life. If you can’t model, when you’re good-looking enough and not tall enough to model, you stand behind a little box and say, How many?

Jesus. What enormous tools.

(Via Server Not Servant.)

Don’t Eat a Laxative Before Getting on a Plane

Food, General, smells like fish No Responses »

Dec 112010

I flew out west for work. Before getting on a 6 hour flight back, I figured “hey, now that airlines suck and don’t give you even a snack, why don’t I grab a snack for the flight.” I walked into one of the newstandy places in the airport, looking for some chips or candy.

I’m a sucker for Jelly Bellies, so when I saw a bag, I figured “hurrah, my snack.”

I wasn’t super pleased that they were sugar-free, but how bad could it be?

Pretty bad, it turns out. Mostly because I didn’t notice the little warning in the lower left hand side of the bag:

You can imagine the rest. Thankfully, the plane was pretty empty and I was sitting maybe 3 rows from the back, so I did not make a spectacle of myself on the 3 or 4 trips to the lavatory.

I ate this

Food, General No Responses »

Nov 142010

“The King” from Boston Burger Company.

That’s a burger with bacon, peanut butter, and fried bananas. And it was pretty tasty.

Two Tries at Sweet Potato Pie

Food 1 Response »

Nov 272009

In preparation for Thanksgiving dinner, I decided that I a) wanted to try cooking again, and b) wanted to try this recipe in particular.

For one of the few times in my life, I knew that I needed to do a trial run. There was enough that could go wrong that if I relied on doing this right the first time, I would likely be left with a pie full of messy badness. And, I was mostly right. Here are things I learned from Attempt #1 at Sweet Potato Pie:

If you have a steamer, it should probably have feet.
If you don’t have steamer feet, using binder clips is not a good replacement.
If you don’t have a potato masher, an ice cream scoop is not a good replacement.
If you can’t mash your potatoes by hand, neither a blender nor a hand mixer will likely get it done.
If you have chunks of potato left, your batter will probably be too thin.

Needless to say, the first attempt led to a thin batter with chunks of sweet potato in it. It overflowed the pie crust. It ended up looking like this:

It tasted ok, if you could get past the “eating whole chunks of sweet potato in your pie” thing.

For Attempt #2, I got a new steamer and a potato masher. Mashing the sweet potatoes into a nice paste made the batter much thicker, with no chunks. That lead to a pie that looked like this: