I didn't know that taste buds had handedness...

When I joke that a "nation cannot long stand half Chick-Fil-A and half Panera Bread" I mean it mostly tongue-in cheek... I mean, I happen to be a fan of both chains ...but it absolutely seems to be a thing.

Earlier this year, a reporter at NBC News posted on X that she’s “not sure [she] will ever recover from learning” that a colleague gets restaurant recommendations from Federal Election Commission filings, the periodic reports that reveal how candidates for Congress and the White House spend their campaign dollars.

Her colleague tweeted in reply: “If one of the 535 people who run our legislature is gonna spend thousands of dollars at a barbecue place I’ve never heard of, you better believe I’m gonna go to there.” Immediately, we had questions.

Do political campaigns know something about America’s restaurant scene that we don’t? Do Republicans and Democrats dine differently?

Thus began our effort to glean gems of dining wisdom from the seemingly mundane depths of the nation’s campaign finance reports.

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"Tempura-breaded buffalo cauliflower? You some kinda commie or something'?"

Some Links...

• Marko's writing update...


• Bobbi's omelette tips...


• I updated my older posts on the 1967 Plymouth GTX and 1968 Plymouth Road Runner with period road test data.

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A Jog Around the Blogs...

• The best Monster Truck Rally story I've read.


• I had completely forgotten about Screaming Yellow Zonkers.


• How much do shooting skills degrade over time if you don't practice?

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Little craters full of sweet and salty.

I'd forgotten how perfect a toasted English muffin is as a delivery device for melted Irish butter and orange marmalade.

I'd thought they were about as English as Dick Van Dyke's cockney accent, but Wikipedia says that they do have them in the scepter'd isle, but they just call them "spanners" ...er, "muffins".

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Gourmet Dining

I was putting together a little cheese plate for brekkie yesterday morning. A little brie, a little gouda, some crackers... that sort of thing.

What beverage should one pair with brie and gouda at 9:00AM?

I went with Dr. Pepper & Cream Soda Zero Sugar, served chilled in the can.

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Yum?

I normally like to keep a bag of those Tennessee Pride mini sausage biscuits in the freezer. So few foods from my adolescence and early twenties have remained palatable in my Pretentious Hipster Foodie Douchebag adulthood, but the little nuclear sausage biscuits still have.

The serving size is just right, and it's easy to pull out a two-pack, toss them on a paper plate, stick 'em in the microwave for 45 seconds, and it's a quick brekkie at my desk while blogging or doing the morning crossword with zero cleanup afterward. Just toss the plate and napkin in the lidded trash can in the corner of the office and get back to writing.

Anyhow, last time I was at the grocery store I saw these Jimmie Dean biscuit rollups (with sausage, egg, and cheese!) on sale and thought "Well, heck, let's give those a try. How bad can they be?"

For starters, they're not individually wrapped, nor are they in little two-sammich pouches like the Tennessee Pride fare. Instead there's just a big plastic envelope with a dozen frozen nutrient pucks sliding around loose in there.

I gotta say, when I slid a couple out onto a plate, they did not look like the picture on the box.

I definitely felt like I was in some dystopian sci-fi future, about to put two "RATION BARS, FROZEN, BREAKFAST, SOUTHERN STYLE" into the food reheater.

Taste report? Well, they weren't awful, but they're no Tennessee Pride comfort food, either. The idea seemed sound: Take breakfast burrito fixins and wrap them in biscuit dough rather than a tortilla. The execution was a little weaksauce, though.

Don't think I'll be repeating this particular purchase.

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Truly an Age of Wonders

RX: "...and the box even had a picture of a clown on the front."

Me: "Yeah, I remember that box. It was a lot of kids first introduction to c... clownophobia."

RX: "There's actually a word for that: 'coulrophobia'."

Me: "Oh, I know the word, but I suddenly realized I had no idea how to pronounce it."

Before the internet, I would have had to go to the bookshelf with the big dictionary, look this up, and decipher what the the good people of Oxford meant by "kälrəˈfōbēə".

Now I can turn to Google...

...or just say out loud "Alexa, how do you pronounce the word for a fear of clowns?"

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Thanksgiving Dinner

Bobbi did the by-now traditional Roseholme Cottage turducken over hardwood charcoal on the little grill out back.

It was droolworthy as usual.

The turnip, apple, and fennel bulb in which the turducken was cooked.

The feature attraction itself.

The best gravy I've ever had, bar none.

Yummy.

Bobbi has the deets of the preparation over at her blog, in case you were looking for Christmas feast ideas.

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A Jog Around the Blogs...

• The Work-Life Diet. That reminds me of how I lost a ton of weight while working at CCA, between being on my feet all day and only eating anything like supper a couple nights a week.


• Prof. Yamane's book is finished and in the hands of his publisher. Hooray!


• Setting boundaries, big and small. (And enforcing them.)

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Gourmet Tater Tots?

Some dude was whingeing about Half Liter BBQ on Yelp.

Who orders tater tots expecting freshly grated Yukon gold spuds artisanally hand rolled between silk cloths by Bavarian tater nuns?

It says “tater tots” right there on the menu, hoss. They’re tater tots.

(Secret Menu Dining ProTip: Half Liter has loaded spuds on the menu, so if you order a side of tots you can also ask for some sour cream on the side and…presto!…you have unlocked the hidden bowl of mini latkes.)

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Overheard in the Office...

[TAMARA enters the room holding a plate with two Tennessee Pride sausage biscuits]

Me: "Yay! When you remember to put a packet of these in the fridge to thaw the day before, they only take 25 seconds to nuke instead of 45 seconds."

RX: "So you save twenty seconds. And they taste better?"

Me: "Oh, they taste better, too. At least they say they taste better."

RX: "So you don't know they taste better."

Me: "Well, I seem to remember they taste better. But I also remembered that Spaghetti-O's tasted good, so..."

RX: "Children don't taste sugar the same way."

FWIW, they do in fact taste better.

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Pedaling to Protein

Saturday afternoon Bobbi and I saddled up the bicycles and pedaled down the Monon Trail to the intersection of 46th & College for an early dinner on the patio at Root & Bone.

I had the carpaccio mac, described on the menu as "thin sliced beef, soft egg remoulade, herb crouton, crunchy iceberg, pickled shallot & crunch capers", and it was absolutely delicious.

Bobbi ordered the Fried Green Tomato "BLT", which was basically a BLT sammich, sans the bread. It, too, looked yummy and I made a note to get back there and try it myself some time.

On the way home, we pulled off the Monon at Half Liter BBQ because Sunday was the last day of Devour Indy Summerfest 2023 and I wanted Bobbi to try one of the special desserts that Half Liter was featuring for the event. Knowing how much she likes bread pudding, she didn't want to miss out on the Buffalo Trace bread pudding (Homemade bread baked with cinnamon, nutmeg, and vanilla and topped with a Buffalo Trace bourbon cream sauce.)

From there we pedaled home and chilled out and read for the remainder of Saturday evening.

(Well, I tried to watch Frankenstein on MeTV's Svengoolie, but I was too full of good chow and kept dozing off.)

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Yum!

Bobbi has pics and a cooking description of yesterday's delicious roast, which we ate while watching the finale of the first season of The Lincoln Lawyer. 

She has really got the process of doing those on the grill down to a science.

I really, really enjoyed The Lincoln Lawyer. Good television, and I hope the second season holds up to the first.

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Yummy!

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Trying again...

I got all excited to go try out the Vietnamese place that went in the storefront where Naked Tchopstix used to be. I'll miss having a nearby source for dolsot bibimbap in the middle of an Indiana winter, but having it get replaced by a premium phở & bahn mi joint is a fair trade.

So I boarded the Red Line yesterday morning for the short hop up to the Broad Ripple station, keeping an eye on the obvious tweaker just in case he decided he might need my Nikon D800 more than I did.

We disembarked and he spasmed off eastwards down the Broad Ripple Avenue sidewalk while I went south to Eating Fresh...only to discover that they were open six days a week, and Tuesday wasn't one of those six.

I really had my mouth set for some phở, too.

Oh well. I'll try again today.

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Ordering off the special menu...

The daily special at Twenty Tap yesterday was a ramen bowl that was unbelievably delicious.

Because I knew I'd never remember the ingredients, I took a picture of the menu board...

If you're coming to Indy for the NRA Annual Meeting in April, you should check them out. They've been a neighborhood fave of mine for a long time for good reason. It's good chow.

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Destroyer of Pizzas

We've got a handful of really excellent pizza joints in the neighborhood: Bazbeaux, Diavola, Napolese. Byrne's Grilled Pizza over at 56th & Illinois does a pretty good thin crust. There are a few decent chains, too, but we rarely make use of those...well, I'll occasionally take the Red Line up to Broad Ripple Village and grab the lunch special at Lou Malnati's.

I'd always wondered why really excellent pies, like the ones from Bazbeaux or Diavola, were always so much better at the restaurant than delivered.

The culprit was not what I would have expected:

"Pizza delivery, it turns out, is based on a fundamental lie. The most iconic delivery food of all time is bad at surviving delivery, and the pizza box is to blame. “I don’t like putting any pizza in a box,” Andrew Bellucci, a legendary New York City pizza maker of Andrew Bellucci’s Pizzeria, told me. “That’s just it, really. The pizza degrades as soon as it goes inside,” turning into a swampy mess.

A pizza box has one job—keeping a pie warm and crispy during its trip from the shop to your house—and it can’t really do it. The fancier the pizza, the worse the results: A slab of overbaked Domino’s will probably be at least semi-close to whatever its version of perfect is by the time it reaches your door, but a pizza with fresh mozzarella cooked at upwards of 900 degrees? Forget it. Sliding a $40 pie into a pizza box is the packaging equivalent of parking a Lamborghini in a wooden shed before a hurricane."

Well that explains it. The crust is always not quite as crisp, the cheese is always a little congealed, the toppings a bit soggier, than compared to getting it served to the table fresh from the oven. All because it gets to spend 15-20 minutes in its own little steam room.

The lunch special at Byrne's: A big ol' slice, small salad or breadstick, and a soda . It's a treat coming home from the range. (Don't forget to de-lead first!)

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Particular Idiom

Russian, especially colloquial Russian, is a language rich in earthy, colorful idioms, as this phone-translated menu from a restaurant in Bishkek shows...

That 4th dish down sounds interesting pic.twitter.com/OiPYCqTrZT

— Chris Arnade 🐢🐱🚌 (@Chris_arnade) December 9, 2022

(Translation software, for instance, has no problems with passages from Dostoyevsky, but feed it a page of chatty posts from Russian gun nuts on LiveJournal, and it breaks down in machine frustration pretty fast.)

Happy Turkey Day!

As usual, I am thankful for Bobbi and her tasty, tasty cooking: Turducken, veggies, mashed potatoes, and bacon-onion gravy.

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Sportsball

I avoided my normal weekend haunts yesterday around brunch time because Fat Dan's Chicago Style Deli was likely to be a zoo, what with the Bears and the Colts both having games at 1PM and the weather being too cold for outdoor seating.

Instead I went and had brunch at Half Liter: Brisket & jalapeño queso over home fries with scrambled eggs & crumbled bacon.

While I was reading and noshing on my chow, they switched away from the FIFA World Cup on the televisors there in the dining room to the Colts game.

I didn't really pay any attention initially because who wants to watch your home team, which has been struggling all season, get blown out by the likely Super Bowl contenders who are sporting one of the best records in the league?

Instead, a couple hours later I was still watching. The Colts blew their lead and wound up losing in the final quarter, but the fact that the game was in contention at all had me tickled pink.

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