Food for Thought: Hot Dogs

First, a brief history. Sausages were the precursor to hot dogs, and may have originated in Frankfurt, Germany. They started being sold as hot dogs around 1870 on Coney Island in New York. In case you are an alien, hot dogs are tubes of meat (typically beef, or a combo of other meats) served on a bun with a variety of toppings available Also check out this wiki page of hot dog variations by region.

Hot dogs are like a good pair of jeans - they are easy to accessorize. Different color denim - different types of meat. A belt? Ketchup. I like hot dogs because the flavor in them is basic, but they are easy to dress up, and stylize with a pair jacket or any number of other toppings. Okay, that’s enough of that metaaphor.

Instead of a metaphor, let me tell you about a mountain of gluttony that I scaled late last year. I was on vacation in Phoenix, Arizona and on one of our last nights in town, we went to Alice Cooperstown restaurant near the stadium downtown. Co-owned with Randy Johnson, the pitcher who exploded a fucking bird during Spring Training in 2001, the restaurant features a menu item named for Johnson, the Big Unit. (FYI, the video incorrectly identifies the bird as a duck. It was actually a dove. And his name is Johnson, not Jackson. I think they might be mislabeled because the MLB has removed every other video of the incident.)

Weighing in at one full pound and measuring 22 inches and served on a full baguette, this meal is also served with two sides. This daunting dog was featured on Man versus Food as the fully loaded Big Unit. Plus sides. I’m not totally insane, and I wasn’t high, so I stayed safe with the sides of chili and fries.

Because I’m The Man, I managed to finish my Big Unit and it’s accompanying side dishes. My two friends that I was competing against did not fare as well as I did. B ate about half of his monster, and K chickened out. He peeled the casing off of the meat, didn’t work on the bread, and still didn’t finish the Vienna Beef.
Above is a picture of me holding my portion of the Big Unit. If you should chose to eat something this size, I would recommend hot sauce or ketchup because the dog got bland after a while.

I was inspired to write this post because hot dogs for me are a good stand by food when you aren’t sure what you want to flavor your food with. It’s easy to go sweet (ketchup), salty (cheese), or spicy (Siracha). I made two unique hot dog blends recently and wanted to share them. Today’s selection, show immediately below,
was on a bed of baked beans, with corn and American cheese and Siracha and ketchup. Below is my other design, a chili cheese dog with a Mexican cheese blend and salsa.
As I leave you with this information to digest, I want to know what makes your perfect hot dog, and how you try to accessorize it.

Smoke well,
XY

PS. hot dogs are also known as wieners. WIENERS I SAY!

Blogging with Baggage

Everyone smokes pot for their own reasons. Some use it to medicate, to motivate, to pass the time, to escape, to relax. For the past six months, the reasons that I smoke pot changed.

I remember way back when I started smoking, I loved the euphoria I got from smoking. The first time I smoked - really smoked and got high - and just laid on my friends bed and laughed for what seemed like a long time. Since then I've had many different reactions to smoking - mostly the munchies - but some sessions still stand out in memory.

I remember inaugurating a newly remodeled bathroom quietly with an old friend.
I remember discovering new burn ride routes.
I remember the thrill from smoking at work.
I remember the joy of new pieces.
I remember the first time I smoked with family, and with old friends.
I remember the first time I wanted to smoke because I was angry at being evicted.

The last one is the most similar to what I recently experienced, when smoking went from being recreational to an escape from life. Between troubles with work, school, family, money, time management, friends, maturation, everything became overwhelming. No longer did I come home from a long day and smoke till I got high and enjoyed it, but I started power smoking more and buying larger quantities. I stashed lighters away in drawers, pockets, and corners so that there would always be one accessible. I had travel kits/smoking supplies ready to go.

Smoking was still a daily ritual, but now with a very different emphasis. It was a darker time for me, and as a result of me getting lost in the transitions of life, I lost the interest in blogging. Who wants to talk about how much they enjoyed smoking because their boss yelled at them, or they got a bad evaluation from a professor. I didn't have enough time for all the cooking projects or travel or exciting things that I wanted to do. I didn't even have enough energy to get my writing partner involved in the blog.

I managed to have some fun along the way, but now that it is all said and done, I am glad to be free of the pressure that I felt. I have things to talk about now that life is getting exciting again.

So friends, I apologize for the delay of fun, and welcome you back to the blog about the best times around.

Smoke Well,

XY

Cleaner Smoking

I think a great thing about pot is that I can use it to make mundane tasks fun. The vacuum sounds louder. Driving is smooth sailing. Just moving in repetitive ways can be fun if my body is relaxed enough. Getting to the point of being relaxed and capable of doing stuff can be a tough balancing act. It is often far too easy to just take one more hit and then – stuck on the couch.

One of the routine tasks that I had to do the other day was one of my least favorite, cleaning my piece. Not only does it leave my hands smelly and sticky, it takes time and effort and caution to do correctly. The worst part – not being able to smoke the piece for several hours while it dries.

As things happen, it was late and I was bored. I decided that I was tired of working hard to pull hits and wanted to clean Littlefoot. The significantly details about Littlefoot as far as cleaning goes – a big chamber, a long pipe, and thin glassed. Littlefoot, like in The Land Before Time, is a brontosaurus. The shotgun is the tail and the mouthpiece is...the mouth. More details on this piece, and others, later

Cleaning bowls is tough. Making sure the water is the right temperature, the right chemicals and tools need to be available. For a long time I used only Bling, a combo of liquid and sediments that worked well with smaller pieces. As my collection of gear grew, so did my resources. Pipe cleaners were used for a while, toothpicks became a staple for scraping resin, I tried using salt as an additional scrub.

Typically, when I clean Littlefoot, I run hot water through him and then use some Bling. Once some of the resin has softened, I'll use toothpicks to start picking away resin from the bowl or mouthpiece. I will let the bowl fill with water, plugging all holes, and then shake loose anything that I can. I'll drain, add an abrasive like salt or Bling, refill with water, and shake again, repeating as necessary. I also use rubbing alcohol to clean bowls and it works really well to freshen scents. Sometimes, if I have a large enough container or a small enough bowl, I will fill that with a solution and shake that with the piece inside of it.

One problem that routinely develops as a result of Littlefoot's shape is that salt drains down into his feet and doesn't easily come out. In addition, his legs are hourglass shaped. I usually have to rock sediment out of him using water to lubricate the process. This time, instead of salt, I tried using baking soda as my scrubbing agent. The results were similar but left a strange aftertaste.

After 20 or so minutes of cleaning, I usually have resin on my hands and Littlefoot is only looking marginally cleaner. The souls of his feet stay dark and the top of the chamber stays dirty because the water level doesn't rise enough. His tail and neck stay pretty clean, but he gets dirty again at the mouth. The underside of the bowl has dingle-berries that are parallel to the glass and impossible to remove.

Why I don't boil bowls: One time my friend, I'll call him Simple Matt, offered to clean my bowl Snackpack by boiling it along with his. At the time, I was a relatively new smoker and had no techniques for cleaning developed yet. Well, he got stoned and forgot to remove the bowls from the uncovered pot of water. After maybe 20 minutes the water had evaporated and the bowls were simply sitting on a very hot surface. To make matters even worse, in his frantic scramble to remove the bowls from the empty but hot pot, Snackpack was dropped, splitting in two.

What do you think is the best way to clean pieces, whether they be bowls, bongs, pipes, steamrollers, slides, one-hitter, or anything else you have. Any recommended products or processes?

Good luck and smoke well.

-XY

Lasagna - Sauce

I think I nailed the sauce, but we'll have to wait several hours before I can test it and find out for sure. Here's how the sauce happened:

1. Peel skin from onion, 5 small/medium garlic cloves (I was getting towards the middle of a head so I used what I had, but I'd say this is equivalent to about 3 large cloves), and shallot. Chop coarsely.

2. Peel skin off sausage (if necessary) by slitting skin down length of sausage with sharp knife and gently pulling casing away from the filling.

3. Drop large pieces of sausage (pull apart with fingers or gently cut with knife) and the ground beef into a large pot with 1 tbsp olive oil and the chopped garlic, onions, and shallots.


















4. Cook together in own juices on medium low heat until meat is pale brown with a slight pink tinge. The meat shouldn't over cook because of the amount of juice in the pan keeping it moist, but you might want to keep an eye on it. Remember, the meat will cook all the way through while it simmers with the rest of the sauce!

5. While the meat etc cooks chop the green bell pepper and Serrano chili.























6. When the meat looks like it's been cooked to your satisfaction (the onions should still hold their form but they'll look like they're beginning to become slightly transparent), add about half of the chopped Serrano, stir into meat mixture, and simmer together for about 2 more minutes.


















7. After the 2 minutes is up add a 29 oz can of crushed tomatoes along with the rest of the Serrano and the green bell pepper.


















8. Stir together until well combined.


















9. Cover pot and simmer for 2-4 hours. I'll probably end up close to 4 hours.

I chose to make the sauce on the stove top for convenience since I'll be building a whole other dish and only wanted to dirty one pot, but if I were planning on leaving the apartment or just making a pasta sauce then I would use our Crock Pot. If you wanted to use a slow cooker you would simply transfer the mear/onion/garlic/shallot/Serrano mixture into the crock pot after Step 7, taking or leaving as much of the juices as you want (more juice means more flavor but also more fat...it's personal preference). Proceed with Step 8 and then cover and cook on high for 3-4 hours or, preferably, on low for 4-6 hours. It's tough to overcook things like this in the Crock Pot so don't worry about exact times. DO NOT OPEN CROCK POT COVER DURING COOKING.

In the time that it took me to write this all out the apartment has begun to smell delicious. I love these pasta sauce/chili type recipes because the aromas slowly change through the cooking process. While I wait (im)patiently for the sauce to cook I'll chill and watch "How the States Got Their Shapes" on the History Channel, then I'll forge ahead with the cheese sauce filling for the lasagna. Until then...

Lasagna

I'm planning to make lasagna this weekend and, if all goes as planned, you can follow along through the steps. I usually go "off-book" (as in recipe book...obvi) when I cook and eyeball the amounts of ingredients that I add, but I'll try my damnedest to keep up with what I add and/or document it all photographically so that we know exactly how to re-make the dish if it's good and so anyone else who accesses this page can try to make it to.

First, the ingredients. Now, this is only what we're planning on putting in it right now but I usually raid the spice cabinet a few times when I'm in the middle of recipes so this is subject to change. Also note that I'm making the sauce from scratch so many of these ingredients are for that.

1 29 oz can tomato puree
1 29 oz can crushed tomatoes
1 6 oz can of tomato paste
4 large hot Italian sausages (it's okay if it's in the casing...we can cut off the part we don't want pretty easily)
1/4-1/2 lb ground beef (we're going with 85/15 because we like the flavor)
medium-large Spanish or yellow onion
1 medium shallot
1 head of garlic (okay, that's a lot...but we haven't decided how much to use or whether or not to roast it first so we're keeping our options open for now)
1 green bell pepper
1 fresh Serrano chili pepper (this is a shot in the dark - we know we want spicy but we don't know peppers well enough to figure out which variety will give us what we want)
1 box no-boil lasagna noodles
1 small container ricotta cheese
1 cup grated mozzerella cheese
1 cup parmesan/romano cheese blend
2 medium-small zucchinis
1 lb frozen spinach
2 fresh tomatoes
~2 tbsp olive oil
salt
pepper

It looks like a lot of ingredients but they're all relatively inexpensive, especially considering the sheer volume of food that it will produce.

So here's what's going to happen. I'm going to pack a bowl and watch some Food Network to get myself revved up and then I'm going to cook the sauce. After the chopping and meat browning is done and the ingredients are assembled I'll let it simmer together for anywhere from 2-4 hours and probably do another minor cooking project which is yet to be determined and may or may not be related to this recipe. Once the sauce is finished I'll make some sort of cheese blend sauce and prep the veggies. When I finish THAT I'll go ahead and assemble the whole thing and then refrigerate it until tomorrow night, at which time the lovely boyfriend and myself will enjoy dinner, wine, and a movie.

Check back later for my progress and possibly some pictures!

Why hello there big bad world...we meet again.

Arriving home from a family vacation right around New Years time means that an empty fridge (sad face) and the possibilities for new years resolutions (double sad face) stand before me. I don't generally believe in resolutions (if you're really going to be serious about doing things differently then why put off the start date til January 1? Or why bother to embark on an endeavor that's just a spur of the moment thought thrown on to your list of other poorly thought out resolutions?), but this year seems different to me. Maybe it's because I graduated college and got a job in the middle of 2010 and I'm the type of person who needs distinct beginnings, middles, and ends, but I somehow feel as if this is really it for me - life starts now. This is a beginning for me. I'm not getting any younger but I have a ways to go before I need to start worrying about getting old. I have bills to pay but no kids, pets, or other major responsibilities. It's totally cool if I don't call home every week and - get this - sometimes I actually WANT to call my mother just to say hey. Having gradually eased in to all of those things I feel a distinct need for a starting point from which I can measure my successes, failures, and everything in between.

As you may have guessed, I will not be making any formal resolutions this year, but from here on out I will try my damnedest to take full control and ownership over the things that are mine, relinquish control over things that are not, and do all that I can to just take it easy on the in between things until they fall into one category or the other. I'm optimistic that by doing these things I can effectively keep my shit together and have a happy and (relatively) healthy 2011.

Enjoy my badly spaced run on paragraphs and, more importantly, happy New Year!

-xx

Drug Tests and Work

With new jobs and opportunities often come drug tests. Though many of us that get high don't do it at work, or are at least sober for most of the work day, we are still required to be clean for annual testing or pre-employment testing.

The last time I had a test for a potential new job, I spent weeks chugging cranberry juice, spent $50 on a drink from GNC, bought home drug tests for urine, and then got the news - this test was going to be a hair test. Fuck. I had just gotten a buzz cut, so I knew that the hair wouldn't be coming off of my head. Since I didn't know where they would take hair from, I couldn't even get the allegedly cleansing shampoo. I couldn't even find a home hair drug test. They ended up taking my armpit hair, and I failed that test. I didn't have any 'medical explanation' for pot being in my system, so I ended up applying somewhere else.

I used to go high to my old retail job all the time, and it was typically great. Except for that one time I had to worm my way through a cluster of managers. Without saying where I worked, I think that the red shirts helped hide my sometimes bloodshot eyes. One of my bosses from this job, Todd, told me he used to sell pot "by the handful" when at Grateful Dead concerts. This company also had a drug test policy, but that was only for starting employment and when you got hurt on the job. When I first started there I was young enough that I had not yet started smoking. .

While I worked in retail, I also worked in a hotel. There was a woman there, Karin, who told me how her son used to grow pot at home when he was still alive, and how she helped her son hide it from the dad, who sounded like a control freak. Whilst Karin could not smoke anymore because of her heart, she was tolerant of me smoking and often would let me go out to my car for smoke breaks. This job was 8 hours of standing at a counter and just checking people in and out. Being high made an otherwise depressingly boring job better. Since this was a hotel, I could even hunt down the breakfast bar foods for munchies. I used to take an empty duffel bag and fill it with pop tarts and cinnamon buns for late nomage. When I started working at the hotel I had just started smoking, and asked about the drug test policy in my employment contract. My boss just looked at me and asked, "what drug test?" That was a total green light for my activities.

At the same time I worked at the hotel and in retail, I also worked at Wawa. If you are unfamiliar with the Wawa brand, I'm sorry for you. It's an awesome convenience store with a deli and sandwiches and frozen treats and bagels. In the summer there is Hoagiefest, my 2nd favorite holiday after Christmas. Hoagiefest uses very retro 1970s style advertising and is quite pleasing to the eye. When I worked there I hadn't started smoking yet, but was amazed at some of my toking coworkers. They used to go into the walk in freezer and blaze at work. Without ever bring caught. Sadly, our manager got fired and so did our favorites assistant managers, so those habits had to change. But that didn't stop them from adding liquor to the unlimited free sodas we were allowed to have.

Now there is a new job on the horizon. This is a salaried! job with, I'm assuming, a lot more pressure then retail or hospitality have. When the job was first posted online, it didn't mention anything about drug testing, just criminal and child abuse testing. Fast-forward one month to interview time, then to job offer. Along with the job offer came news that a new industry standard came out about 25 days prior: mandatory drug testing for new hires. So began the cycle of cleaning up and researching new methods at passing tests. We looked at Niacin (I can't take this because of my cholesterol medication), cranberry pills, vitamins to increase metabolism, and of course, stopped smoking. Amazingly enough, now that we are sober, we can remember to take the pills. The downside is, we started drinking again. We enjoy drinks once in a while, but twice in the same week we are going out to the bars. Before this, I went to the bar twice in the last six months. Another downside is that these pills are impacting liver function. We went out, and our body got rid of everything except for the pure alcohol. Which was thrown up the following morning. After only 1 beer! (but it was almost 10% alcohol).

This test is only for one of us, but the other is stopping as well as a show of support and solidarity. Lucky for me, it's easy to take a stop smoking when I'm busy and out of the home 12+ hours a day. One of our new traditions is eating toaster strudel from Pilsbury and using the icing to write custom message instead of just covering the top. When applying for jobs, we wrote "JOB" on top. When I needed a good grade for class, we wrote "A+" on top. And they both worked. Below is our newest strudel icing, and hopefully this one works too.

This is the closest that I have come to believing in folk medicine, and it has me wondering what else might work. Voodoo maybe? We've combed forums looking for information and hints for passing tests, but it's tough to separate fact from fiction. It's the internet - who knows what's true!? So this is where you, our readers come in. What's your preferred method of passing tests? How long do you think it takes for the THC to get out of your system? Any hints or tricks that you know work or don't?

Wish us luck!
-XY


And before I forget to mention it, using another person's urine or fake pee just creeps me the fuck out.