the food rant thread

[Pingu]

...I'll drink whatever I like...

This.

[contango]

When I order unsweet ice tea and the first thing the waitress asks is whether I want sweeteners. If I wanted sweet tea I'd have ordered sweet tea.

I hear that in some southern states drinking iced tea that isn't so sweet you can feel it sucking the enamel from your teeth is considered a capital offence. I think those are the same states where it's legal to marry your sister, but only if she has more teeth than you do.

Sadly another Arby's rant. They're rapidly on their way to falling from "preferred fast food" status, which they have largely because I refuse to eat at most of their competitors. This visit, another one to break a tedious drive, resulted in a portion of fries that tasted like they had been cooked in old oil, then left to go cold, then warmed to something marginally warmed than the prevailing temperature. That one pissed me off enough to actually spend the time, while on the phone to their customer services department, to scan the route I'd taken on Google Maps and find the offending branch. I got a couple of vouchers for free meals out of it. They don't seem to have any serial numbers or other identification on them, so I have to wonder how many enterprising types scan them and print their own. That might explain why it costs nearly twenty bucks for a couple of beef sandwiches, curly fries and drink.

[T42]

Supermarket prepacked sliced Italian ham: thin as newsprint, stuck together like a wet newspaper and about as easy to separate out into slices. Miserable bloody stuff.

[ElyDave]

...I'll drink whatever I like...

This.

Absolutely, had that discussion in Cafe Boheme with the owner once.
Q - Would you recommend this white or this red with what I've ordered?  - it was a meat dish
A - Well, which do you like most? That's the most important thing.

And this from a Frenchman. 

[ian]

I was once forced by a large waitress in a restaurant in Richmond to drink so much iced tea tea that I actually came close to exploding somewhere on I64. My companion at the time cried. Not because she was sad, merely from hydrostatic pressure. She had to wee behind a billboard by the Interstate. She's not proud and she certainly won't thank me for mentioning her name on the internet. So, hi there Tina 'shout if you see a State trooper' [redacted].

Not quite as much fun as we had the time we got lost in West Virginia. All the good stuff happens to me in West Virginia (admittedly this one not as good as the Shock N Awe Crawfish Broil, but close, I'll save that for another post as the last person I told it too laughed so much she wet herself*).

Arby's. Their tag line is We Have All the Meats™. Including, presumably, rat and cockroach.

*No really, she had to buy new knickers. And she really won't thank me for mentioning her name.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Hotplates in a crowded kitchen on a warm day, full of kids.

[ian]

Thick sliced bread. Why?

It's like eating a mattress.

And it's always the stuff supermarkets have in stock because no one likes it. Just stop making it. I don't want my toast raw in the middle. Ergh, raw toast. It's the worst.

[ElyDave]

Thick sliced bread. Why?

It's like eating a mattress.

And it's always the stuff supermarkets have in stock because no one likes it. Just stop making it. I don't want my toast raw in the middle. Ergh, raw toast. It's the worst.

and there's me thinking it was German sausage jokes that are the wurst



It's the very damp, grey one in the corner (rainy today)

[contango]

Cheap diners that have decided to restrict the number of free refills available from the soda fountain. Seriously? You want to charge me $2.39 for a 16oz cup that's mostly full of ice, when it costs you about 5c/gallon, and then tell me I can only have one refill? If anyone truly manages to drink the 50-odd gallons it would take for the restaurant to lose money they deserve an award, not being cut off. Perhaps the award would turn out to be a Darwin Award but even the fattest of the American fat folks would struggle to drink that much soda.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Stupid @me. I went and ate about two thirds of a tub of Ben & Jerry's ice cream.  Drinking even more tea than normal in an attempt to counteract all that sickly sweetiness.

[Mr Larrington]

USAnia 'invents' new summer snack.  I had not the words.  And then I read they were calling it a "Puff Dog", which must surely be up there with the Mitsubishi Carisma and the multiple personalities of Sean Combs when it comes to sheer ludicrosity.

[ian]

They always had the weird bastard children of sausages rolls suntanning under the heat lamp on the rollers of culinary doom in a 7-11. Though it was never clear what they'd wrapped the 'sausage' part in.

OK, I made the mistake of using the internet. Maple syrup pancakes rollers. Processed meat wrapped in a processed pancake. With added sugar.

[contango]

They always had the weird bastard children of sausages rolls suntanning under the heat lamp on the rollers of culinary doom in a 7-11. Though it was never clear what they'd wrapped the 'sausage' part in.

OK, I made the mistake of using the internet. Maple syrup pancakes rollers. Processed meat wrapped in a processed pancake. With added sugar.

You just have to love some of these places. The hot dogs that get put on the roller in the morning and stay there until they sell. If that means they sit there for hours, so be it.

Then you get the jugs of coffee where the establishment brews up a jug or two and it sits there on the hot plate until it sells, when they make another jug. I had the misfortune of sampling the coffee at a place advertised as "the best coffee in town" (not much of a claim, given there are only two other places in town that serve coffee, but that's another story). Having tasted it I shudder to think what the worst coffee in town must taste like. It says something when I'm uncaffeinated at the beginning of a long drive at some ungodly hour of the morning and still won't drink the coffee.

Thankfully now most of our early morning runs take us past the Sheetz. It's odd to think of a gas station selling coffee (actually here it arguably isn't) but seriously odd to think of a gas station selling coffee that's good enough you might actually want to drink it, even when it isn't the only source of caffeine within a 100 mile radius. At least it means that most of our silly-o-clock starts don't involve a lack of caffeine. I'm not good in the morning without my caffeine.

[ian]

I was once in a hotel in Florida opposite a 7-11. I'd pop in there for the occasional drink. I watched the same sausage spin for the entire week. For all I know, it's still there several years later.

I'd forgotten how desperately special 7-11 food is, though this sums up the myriad lowlights. Even in the US there's not many vendors who can squeeze 20% of your daily sodium requirement into a single chicken wing. Get through five of those and you can cross sodium off your daily to-do list. Makes room for other stuff, like ensuring you don't fail short of your saturated fat target. And they're there to help with all those pesky requirements. And it ain't a sandwich if it doesn't have a seventeen line ingredient list, or less a list, more a chemical supply catalogue.

And loaded doritos. Basically synthetic cheese. Covered in sintered dorito. Deep fried. Perfect accompaniment to your Chili Cheese Hot Dog Roller.

[fuzzy]

Junk food is an art form and can be wonderful to ingest.

The secret is to appreciate that culinary magic it ain't. Bath in the glory of food designed to hasten the day you shuffle off this mortal coil and the experience then becomes almost sexual.

[Mr Larrington]

I certainly came close to heart failure the first time I saw my grate frend Mr Lem¹ putting himself outside a corn dog.

1: battle cry: c'mon, you guys, I'm hungreeeeeee!

[ian]

There's proper dirty food which should indeed be relished. Who hasn't made a brown sauce sandwich out of two potato waffles? And if you're a (a) student, (b) drunk, and (c) in Scotland, there's little that can taste has heavenly as a kebab pizza. Yes, it's the meat from the animals God didn't get around to completing and no, you can't eat it sober for breakfast the same day (unless you are from Stirling, in which case all bets are off).

7-11 is just sad though. It's the food of howling desolation. Processed meat food items that roll into infinity only occasionally pausing to shed a pearly tear of saturated trans fat. Tanker-size vats of concentrated high fructose corn syrup. You could just pay a man to repeatedly thump you in the pancreas to achieve the same effect.

Reminds me, I ate a Pizza Hut pizza at the weekend. I'm not sure why, it seemed like a good idea at the time as we were passing the takeaway at a benighted hour and couldn't be bothered cooking when we got home. We weren't expecting much and it failed to deliver even on that. It didn't even taste like pizza. It didn't, to be honest, taste like anything beyond stodge. Stodgy base (thin crust, fat lie), stodgy chewy cheese that might have actually been some kind of plastic, and a miserly collection of other indifferent toppings. It was a bad symphony of unpleasant textures. I'd like to say the sides improved matters, but if you like soggy potato wedges that taste like wet flour and something that might have been the deep-fried existential despair of a battery chicken staring into the void, you'd have been in heaven. It was a meal that comprised entirely of slightly different kinds of chewing.

How does such a place even exist is beyond me. We did the pizza thing elsewhere, but it's such a simple thing to make, and few things taste as good, so how the holy flying fuck can they make something so awful out of a simple concept? And why are people buying it over and over? Isn't once every thirty years too many times?

[fuzzy]

7-11 stodge is possibly manna from heaven for some folk. Tastes differ. In the same way that one person may wax lyrical about a 30 year old Bordeaux whilst another really loves a bottle of merlot from Asco's 3 for £10 range, your idea of heaven possibly being a proper greasy spoon cholesterol time bomb complete with fried slice and all the crunchy bits (thanks Cdr The Lord Vimes), a 4 hour old 7-11 corn dog is just what the next man craves.

Perhaps it is nurture (or professional experience). I mean, having spent 6 years in the army and more than enough years standing in the queue at Uncles kebab van on Bridge Street after dealing with the worlds finest for the first 3 hours of a Sunday morning being engaged in a bit of 'banter' by the dregs of the evening- "Oi officer, is it really true a pregnant woman can demand to piss in you elmet? I fucking hope so!!!!" "Excuse me gentlemen, do your friend a favour, take him home before he says something that REALLY pisses me off and I wrap him up, cuff him and dump in in the back of my panda- morning Uncle, large doner with all the trimmings please" "You want chilli sauce with that mate?"- an appreciation of a wide range of culinary oddities is developed.

As a copper, I had perfected the stance- feet wide apart and a slight lean forward at the waist so that the excess grease doesn't contaminate the boots or uniform. Junk food as a stand alone food group has been a life saver on more than one occasion.

[mrcharly-YHT]

Dear fuzz, having spotted a group with just such a stance as you describe, it occurred to me; do the footsoldiers of our peace get a 'meal allowance'?

Most of us workers can 'bring a pack up from home', but I haven't seen a 'sandwich holster' on a copper's utility belt.

[ian]

Oh, I celebrate the joys of a filthy snack, but I think you misunderstand the grimness of 7-11 convenience food. It's the sort of food that can only aspire to be the last microwavable burger in the service station fridge. It's not just not good for you, it's just not good. That's a lot of 'nots'. It's not really food, come to think about it. And I'm the low-fi, low class kind of guy who can be found by the Interstate munching White Castle burgers. My favourite wine is red. If I'm given white, I'll make it red with a splash of Vimto.

There's actually a serious point – there are places in the US now where there simply no reasonable access to food that isn't 7-11 or similar, more so if you don't have a car. So this is the only junk on the menu, like it or not.

[fuzzy]

Dear fuzz, having spotted a group with just such a stance as you describe, it occurred to me; do the footsoldiers of our peace get a 'meal allowance'?

Most of us workers can 'bring a pack up from home', but I haven't seen a 'sandwich holster' on a copper's utility belt.

You get a meal allowance if you end up doing overtime beyond a couple of hours. State sponsored kebabs

[Jack Standish]

Do you know why I hate pudding? Because the ancient art of making a good, God's honest pudding seems to be lost on people. My old lady can't make it, my folks can't make it, even the restaurants that pride themselves on their pudding, like Hawksmoor and Tibits, can't actually do it. What they all make is a modern gooey substance shaped into devilish forms that pretends to have the name of pudding.
I don't know what it is: the food, the means of cooking or the people. But pudding is disgustingly un-puddinglike these days. The only thing I can hope to get from pudding today os an aftertaste of added products. Or maybe I'm just being nostalgic for the times when I was a wee boy who loved the real food.

[Jakob W]

Steamed puddings? They're pretty easy to DIY (& very easy if one trades off the faff of authenticity for the microwave, though​ this tends to give a slightly gooier result.)

[T42]

Mrs. T42 makes a wonderful treacle pudding that I'm theoretically not allowed to eat.  It's theoretically bloody marvellous with theoretical custard.

[Jakob W]

And these days most supermarkets do a posh custard that is 99% as good as proper made-from-scratch-with-eggs-cream-sugar-and-vanilla (which microwaves are again a godsend for), so that cuts down on the (theoretical) labour required...