It's Not Good Bye, It's Just Bye

We are going to take a break on this project. For how long? Probably a very long time, but please check back every day, just in case.

We stopped a few cities short: Baltimore, Cleveland, Dallas, Detroit, Houston, Jacksonville, Los Angeles, Memphis, Minnesota, Nashville, Orlando, San Diego, Sacramento, Salt Lake City, Toronto, Seattle, and oh Lord…Oklahoma City.

We covered Atlanta, New Orleans and Phoenix at Seattlest.

Oh don’t worry about us, we’ll still be cooking, in fact above is a photo of some Mango Curry Chicken we made the other day.

Super Bowl Primanti Brother’s Sandwiches

We’ve watched every Super Bowl since XXII.

Well, we didn’t so much watch the game three years ago, so much as have a four-hour-long panic attack, as the Seahawks and referees handed the game to the Pittsburgh Steelers.

Now the Steelers are back in the Super Bowl, and we were supposed to forget that XL ever happened. Well, to quote a stereotypical version of my Grandfather Ted, “Not bloody likely, old chum.”

Many of our Seahawk fan brethren are still bitter, jealous, and whiny about the Steelers, and we weren’t gonna let go just because our “division rival” is in the Super Bowl.

Sure, one could make the argument that in 2006 western Pennsylvania was a desolate and barren land, home to every unemployed, down-on-their-luck person east of the Mississippi, so in the end they deserved to get that little morsel of joy in their lives.

Now Seattle, and everyone else in the world, have the same unemployment problems as Pittsburgh, so they don’t deserve dick any more.

However, not everything from Pittsburgh is completely depressing. For example, Primanti Brother’s Sandwiches.

These sandwiches consists of grilled meat, coleslaw, mayonnaise, tomatoes, and French fries, between two fat slices of Italian bread. We’ve been wanting one ever since we received that heart transplant.

They’ve been a staple of Pittsburgh cuisine since the 1930s, at first feeding steel workers, and now filling the expanding stomachs of tourists and late night drunks (much like your mother…you’ve just been Seattlested).

What appealed to us the most about the sandwiches is they don’t have just any coleslaw; it's vinegar based. We’re gonna take us some shredded cabbage, and soak it over night.

Our choice of meat is still up in the air. You can use anything grilled from chicken to bockwurst. Since we are who we are, we went with ham.

[LOUD TURKEY CALL]

That noise means it’s time for our completely unfair, borderline insane, rant of the week: It’s quite possible the only time we rooted for the world financial crisis was when we saw all those Frenchmen in the streets protesting. Hey, Jean-Luc, how about you work more than twenty hours a week, besides, aren’t their some North Africans you can blame your problems on, it's always worked for you in the past. End rant.

Sorry, about that, we’re just a bit worked up because the Steelers won again, that stinks.

You know what else stinks? Cutting cabbage, literally. Also, why are tomatoes so hard to slice? You can take a sharp knife, and as soon as you sink it into the tomato the whole thing collapses with seeds and tomato spunk flying everywhere.
Enough about vegetables for a second. We’re just gonna say that our little Primanti Brother’s experiment did not go well.

We got too cute, and forgot that the Super Bowl isn’t like any other week of football. From September through January just the people who show up with beer and chips will usually eat any meal.

The Super Bowl, however, is more event than game. The crowd in your living room will usually triple, and with the extra people comes the store bought pizzas, microwavable snacks, and containers overflowing with pulled pork.

People come to the game with enough food to kill a charging donkey on the spot. Our sandwiches never stood a chance. We would have been the goat of the party, if our host’s TV hadn’t switched over to record a House repeat, causing us to miss the game winning touchdown.

The actual sandwich wasn’t that bad when we made it fresh in our kitchen. The vinegar soaked slaw, was vin-tastic, and our Red Mill French fries were thick and tasty.

We love Red Mill, even if they are mad with power: no cell phones, cash only, signs telling you not to bother the staff unless you hear your name called. It’s like eating at a cranky old man’s house, who happens to serve kick ass food.

We observed that once the sandwiches sat for a few minutes, the slaw would soak through the bread, the fries would cool off, and we would be left with a sloppy mess.

Again, no match for the bevy of Super Bowl food.

Lesson learned. Next year, we’ll bring a pizza, and call it a day.

Washington DC Baked Ham with Glaze

As we’ve mentioned before, we are the world’s pickiest eater, but there is one food that we love the pants off of, ham.

Sweet Jesus, do we love ham. When we go to the deli counter to buy our lunch meat for the week, we stare at the piles of ham and imagine that we are on a beach somewhere stuffing our face and drinking wine coolers.

From what we’ve come to understand, ham is grown in Virginia, which will fill in for D.C. this weekend.

We have had a problem finding a good meal for Washington D.C. before; however, many of the fans who root for Washington’s teams live in Northern Virginia, because, well, you can walk to the state from the Lincoln Memorial.

Hey, remember in the election when McCain desperately needed to win Virginia, so they had his brother call everyone a communist, and then sent a spokesperson on the TV to let people in Northern Virginia know that they weren’t real Virginians because they didn’t say racial slurs directly into a camera?

What were they thinking with that strategy?

Virginia hams are borrowed from the inside of razorback hogs that are fed all kinds of sweet things to eat, like peaches. Wait, they start to marinate the meat while the pig is still alive? We don’t know whether to be impressed or horrified.

People started get all excited about Virginia ham when the whiteys first came to Virginia hundreds of years ago. They brought pigs with them, and started producing ham that blew people’s sacks sideways. One New World settler reported, "Virginia ham was as good as any in Westphalia." Wow, you know that had to piss off the folks in Gelsenkirchen.

We found that information on this Virginia Tech website, which also gave us our biggest laugh of the day.

The site also gave us step by step techniques for preparing the ham. However, it looks like you need to start days, if not weeks, in advance, and well, we had things to do. So we skipped to the end, and we think things went okay.

We also be making a glaze to dump all over our ham, which we then tried to climb into the oven and cuddle with.

Like fluoride, glazes come in a wide array of flavors. However, since we’re from the other Washington, we’ll be making an apple-based glaze.

Finding a ham this time of year is like finding a national story on how pathetic Seattle sports teams are.

Speaking of which, (not to brag but) we were at a bar on Friday night, and as we often do, we kept one eye on the sports match, while whoever we were talking to was telling us about something (ZZZZZZZ).

In this case, the game was the Hornets vs. the Thundercats, two teams that don’t play in Seattle. ESPN took this opportunity to show a video montage of how all our teams are taking it in the David Stern these days. Oh, and to cap it off, they threw up a graphic about how Starbucks is closing 6,000 stores, meaning Seattle folks are losing their jobs.

Thanks for that extra "fuck you" there, ESPN.

Let us repeat that, there was not a Seattle team involved in the game. Oklahoma City is not Seattle.

A more fitting video montage would be Oklahoma City fans booing their 13-game-old team, or P.J. Carlesimo getting fired, or Aubrey McClendon losing a ton of cash.
Douchebags.

Sorry, getting back to our original point, which is that finding a ham in the stores these days is like finding a methed-out, hardcore-bestiality-snuff-film-addicted child in the Bristol School District. They are overflowing from aisle to aisle.
However, these hams are huge. We are preparing to stuff our face from Thursday through Sunday. We didn’t need that much ham the weekend before, no matter how festive the red foil.

We went with a much smaller three-pounder.

There really wasn’t a recipe that we stuck to, rather using the guidelines from the Virginia Tech website (oh, and still funny). First, our ham spent all night soaking in water. Then we filled a roasting pan with some more water and the ham went into the oven.

Every ten minutes we would baste the ham with the water and drippings; it was all very sensual.

For every pound of ham, it has to be baked at 325 degrees for twenty minutes, so three pounds times twenty minutes equals 600 minutes.

Finally, it was time to add the glaze.

Again, we kind of made it up as we went along, which is easy to do with such a simple dish. We were told that for every cup of liquid we should use another cup of sugar. So, two cups of apple juice and two cups of brown sugar went into a pot, and simmered on the stove for about an hour.

Y’know, a pinch of cinnamon may have been awesome. Nuts.
Once our glaze was done, we dumped most of it on our ham, and placed it back into the oven for ten more minutes at 375 degrees.

Our guidelines said that the center of the ham should be a balmy 140 degrees, however, one of our guests pointed out that the baking thermometer said that ham should be 170 degrees.

Now, usually if there is a discrepancy like that, we just ignore the problem and move on. However, this time since we were called on it, we had to stick it back in the oven for another twenty minutes.

Fine, 170 degrees. Everyone happy?

Once our ham was safe to eat, we were delighted that the glaze had covered our salty ham with a sticky sweet flavor. The extra glaze was poured on the sliced ham like syrup.

Tasty, enough to make us forgive ESPN, and so good that if ESPN’s Mike Tirico knew you were making it for dinner he would probably sit outside your house until you offered him some. Oh, we haven’t forgotten about what you said to us back in '95, Tiricio.



Drink of Choice: American Ale

Last World Championship: 1991 Washington Redskins

Athlete You Should Pretend To Be So Locals Will Buy You Drinks: The Hogs

Chicago Deep Dish Pizza

Chicago and my home town of Seattle could not be more different from each other. Chicago is flat; we are hilly. They have very distinctive accents ("Dish one armed man, what colored eyesh did 'e he-yave?"); we are slowly building our local dialect.

They have government corruption to assure that civic projects get completed; our City Hall tries to include everyone on a decision to assure that nothing ever gets done.

Why should the cities pizza be any different? Our pizza is pretty basic, and will kill you slowly over time. Pizza in Chicago is deep dish, which means there is like a square foot of cheese and sausage that will cause you keel over that day.

That is how they roll in Chicago—they enjoy the f-bomb out of life. If you ever go out in the Windy City, you are assured of two things--the greatest night of your life and that you will wake-up smelling like a condemned slaughter house.

They eat what tastes good, and don't apologize for it, which is why their deep dish is the best pizza we've ever had.

As we prepared to try and make it ourselves, it's wasn’t the cheesy/sausage part, that concerned us—it was the crust. It has to be made a certain way so it will stick to the pan. We know what you're thinking, and trust us staples don't work.

Honestly we were terrified of this, however, we knew that if we can just make the crust (and that was a big if) we felt that we would be fine….What is cornmeal?
We gathered green peppers, Italian sausage, and a brick of mozzarella cheese, while looking forward to the middle of our pizza.

However, since we feared the crust we enlisted the help of our special-touch-friend, who in another life is running a bakery in Paris and isn’t dating engaged to someone who spends their Sunday mornings making jokes involving the words need and knead. She dodged our puns while making sure we knew that liquids and powders have different measuring tools, and calming us down when we discovered the true power of yeast.

We had a small glob of dough, covered if for an hour, and when we removed the napkin it had grown to the size of Walter Jones’ forearm. Will it only stop growing once it’s destroyed us all? Should we just give it whatever it wants? She quickly explained what was happening, and that it was nothing to worry about—something we kneaded.

As for the pizza, well, we decided to make two in order to match the combined quarterback rating of the Bearsh Rex Grossman and Kyle Orton.

The first one was an absolute disaster. The filling never really settled, and we were left with deep dish soup. Spoons were handed out and the meal was slurped down.

For the second one we took the advice of MBA Jason and baked it a lower temperature. Much better, a pizza you could eat without a straw.

Next time, lower heat for longer and less sauce. We also put paper between the crust and pan, with the thought that we could remove the pizza by pulling on the paper. As they might say in Chicago, “Datsh, a bad idea dere.” The crust covered the paper, and a friend helped us very carefully move the pizza from the pan using 1-2-3-lift method.

So feel better Cub fans, second is the charm.






Drink of Choice: Whatever Al Capone is serving at his speakeasy.

Last World Championship: 2005 Chicago White Sox

Athlete You Should Pretend To Be So Locals Will Buy You Drinks: MJ