TheSnackHound

There was a little take out place in a Boston suburb that I used to frequent. The Chinese food was so good that even when I moved across town, I still went for their food.   I would call right as I was getting in the car, and by the time I was there it was waiting for me.  Maybe I should qualify this whole story by saying that I am a rut eater.  I stick with one or two things until I get sick of them in regards to take out food, and then and only then, do I venture farther.  This may seem shocking coming from someone who writes about food, but there are times when all I want is comfort food.  To me, that means predictable.  I had a bad day.  I am in no mood for surprises.

The General’s chicken at Mei Ling’s had just a slight crunch or firmness to the coating. I later abandoned it for healthier fare, but for awhile I was on a General Gao’s chicken kick. Wait a minute, its General Tso. Whatever his name is, he made a pretty mean coating. Later, I found out that the slightly crunchy coating is so wrong. If you were really in Szechuan or wherever its from, the chicken should be a little more soggy and soft. I am not about to join the fan club for soggy anytime soon.

Can you imagine me winning a trip to China and sidling up to the counter to have a side of the General’s Secret Recipe, and telling people when I got back that Medford, Massachusetts, had better Chinese food than China does?  Well, perhaps for those very reasons, I will never win a trip to China. I could, however, win a Blu-ray disc player from  Sun-Bird.   No, I am not talking about the late model car.  Sun-Bird makes all sorts of seasoning mixes for Asian food that you can use in the safety of your own home.   If you want to go ahead and make your General’s Chicken crunchy or soggy, you can go ahead.  No members of the Food Police are going to come after you (as far as I know).

The Food Police may drive up to you and pull you over in China, however.  They are not there to arrest you, but to clue you in that the General’s chicken is not traditional Chinese food!  It was invented by a Hunan chef from Taiwan who emigrated to New York City.  Allegedly, the world only started shouldering the responsibility of producing the crunchy or chewy dish in the 1970s.  I don’t know when Sun-Bird first introduced its General Tso seasoning pack, but they do make one.  I always wanted to experiment to see if General Tso’s shrimp could be invented.   Maybe I will have to invent it this week.

To make the Sun-Bird General Tso, you will need to pick up a few additional ingredients. Soy sauce, oil, flour, and sugar are things that you will need to add the spice too.  Whoops.  You will need chicken, too, unless you want to be generous and make shrimp or tofu.

Sun-Bird is available at your favorite grocery store, and your least favorite one, most likely, too.  It is up to you to decide whether you prefer to have award winning customer service or not.  We are not going to force you.  To enter to win a Blu-Ray player, pick up an entry form.  They are located in your grocery store’s Asian aisle.  If your store doesn’t have an Asian aisle, don’t panic.  Wander over to the “ethnic” or “International” aisle.   Hurry up.  The contest ends October 31, 2009.   After that, you will have to just break down and buy your own Blu-Ray, knowing that you can’t possibly win because you didn’t enter.

Today is Thanksgiving all over Canada. Since Detroit is north of Windsor, Canada is technically south of me, so it is Thanksgiving in the South. Unlike the Independence days of Independence Day and Canada Day, respectively, that commemorate different events with the same theme, US and Canadian Thanksgiving Celebrations commemorate the same event. The traditions of American traveled North in this case, and Canada has been celebrating it since 1879, although the date was not fixed until 1931, when Thanksgiving and Armistice Day occurred on the same day. The holidays were split after that point. In Canada, it is now the second Monday in October, to commemorate the end of the Fall Harvest, while in the United States it is on a Thursday.

To celebrate, dear friends, here is a painstakingly accurate reenactment of the very First Thanksgiving on record.  Of course, it involved capturing it with technology that was way ahead of its time.

A little while ago, I checked out MyLife. It is a different kind of people search site. It is not one of those private investigation sites. If it was, than you would have to grow a Tom Selleck moustache or decide if you were Maddie or David. You remember Maddie and David….Moonlighting? I swear I was a little kid when that was on and wasn’t allowed to watch it.  I just remember Bruce Willis from the Seagram’s commercials. It’s Wet and It’s Dry. Whoops.

On the contrary, it sort of extrapolates all the information from social networking sites and figures out where all the folks you know are.  It also finds the people who you want to know.  Again.  You don’t have to register for Classmates.com, Reunion.com, Myspace, Facebook, Bebo and all the others to try to connect with everyone.  Luckily, since these folks are all over the social networking sites, they WANT to be contacted, and you are in no danger of contacting anyone who is now in the witness protection program by accident.

There is a dashboard area that starts off by showing you the people in your address book, and then looks for people that you graduated with, and share other associations with.  The thing that is so different is that you can find out who is trying to contact you as well.   I guess that would make people really careful what they clicked on or who they searched for.  I bet you wouldn’t search for half the people on the internet if they were able to see you doing it.  Well, I guess it doesn’t really talk about people who are searching for you, but who is looking to connect.  This is actually a great feature, because I bet there are people out there that are searching for you, and you are searching for them, but neither of you have the guts to contact eachother.  If you find that you have both been searching for eachother, I would consider that a sign that you need to get in touch. It wouldn’t be stalker-y at all to tell someone you saw them looking at you, because you know its true.  Nope, nothing stalkerish if its true.

Is there anyone, out of all the people you have ever known, that you would love to reconnect with?  Maybe you wouldn’t want to be their bestest buddy, but would you want to know how their life was going?  Would you rather keep to yourself and not know?  I wonder if we somehow break a weird law of physics by reconnecting with people around the world.  I mean, back in the day we were lucky to travel outside of our town and when we picked our covered wagon up and hauled it away, the liklihood of seeing someone again was almost.  I think I like our situation just a little better.

You know the old playground song “Found a Peanut,” don’t you? Just in case you want to get it firmly lodged somewhere in your cranial lobe, here is a sample of just some of the many, many verses** (**Of course, it goes on to talk about dying, to be told that its not your time, and then going back down to your body and then finding a peanut again.  Alas, the kids at our school were underachievers and never even got to the point about the doctor even entering on the scene.)

Found a peanut, found a peanut,
Found a peanut just now,
Just now I found a peanut,
Found a peanut just now.

Cracked it open, cracked it open,
Cracked it open just now,
Just now I cracked it open,
Cracked it open just now.

It was rotten, it was rotten,
It was rotten just now,
Just now it was rotten,
It was rotten just now.

Ate it anyway, ate it anyway,
Ate it anyway just now,
Just now I ate it anyway,
Ate it anyway just now

Well, I did find a peanut just now, too.  It is on a Caro-nan vintage basket purse.  As you can see, it is portrayed with exact realism and in exact proportions to the skyscrapers and quaint historical buildings of Savannah, Georgia.  Is the peanut smiling, or does he have enormous teeth that he/she/it refused to get braces for when it was just a mere bud on a peanut plant, if that is how indeed smiling peanuts start out.  it is much less scary than Mr. Peanut, if you have an irrational fear of monocles.

 If you would like to check this peanut out for yourself, this vintage purse is currently for sale on Etsy.  That is, if you hurry up before the peanut growers association of America finds him and takes him back to the lab where smiling peanuts have mutated and start to desire using canes and wearing top hats.

I was helping some relatives work on their house last week. They bought a place in a coastal town where if I jump up and down really crazy, a freighter will honk at me.  Maybe even someone from the other river bank will wonder why my relatives let me Out and Aboot** in my crazy state of affairs (they may think Michigan looks like a crazy state as well from their vantage point).

**= Actually, Out and About is not really spelled that way in Canada.  It doesn’t sound that way either, but its the closest I could get.  Some people who grew up watching the CBC, such as myself, and some of my Canadian friends raise to mid vowels with the onset of a dipthong when proceeded by a voiceless obstruent or a mild plosive like p, b, k, or t at the end of a word. 

In fact, I was listening to the radio while I was painting, and they were advertising what sounded like the most awesome ice cream place since awesome came to awesome town. I went to go look for it, but I was so upset because it was over the bridge! Literally, I could have ran a mile down the street, walked across the bridge and told the dude or the dudette on the other side of the bridge that they needed to tell me where that ice cream place was because it was an ice cream emergency of international proportion. Unfortunately, I looked like a hobo in my painting clothes and I didn’t have my birth certificate with me, nor an enhanced license, nor a passport. Of course, there is delicious ice cream in the United States, but it is about what you can’t have!

If you are fortunate enough to be able to wave at me across the river, pointing to your big old waffle cone and laughing, you are eligible to enter to win a kitchen makeover.  Yes, that’s right.  Maple Leaf markets is giving away a $32,000 kitchen makeover. Yup, $32,000 big ones.  Also, other lucky winners will receive one of 12 Frigidaire® fridges.

What is the meaning of all this?  Maple Leaf Market has launched a new website that features meal ideas and more.  There are new personable characters on the website: The Butcher, The Baker, and the Candlestick Maker.  I’m only kidding.  There is no Candlestick Maker.  It’s a Pasta Maker.

I don’t know what kind of integrated technology it is, but the aforementioned people do little demos for you. It is like you are at Maple Leaf on sample day, and you are walking around. It is not a video that you have to start in a traditional way. Also, check out what they do when they are done with their demos. They just sort of look around like they are waiting for the next person to come by.   I am just completely intrigued by this.  The lady at left is The Baker.

Unfortunately, these people don’t come with the new kitchen if you win. You will have to make all of your own stuff. Bummer. You can’t win, though, if you don’t enter. If you live in Canada, you can enter once every single day on the new Maple Leaf website. Just enter your email address where it tells you and you are good to go to win the Dream Kitchen or a brand new Fridge.

As for my relatives, they were tearing out the kitchen two weeks ago.  I am going to suggest putting a lasso around the whole thing.  They can wait until the river freezes and then pull it a half a mile across the water.  Then, they will be in Canada and can win a kitchen.  However, I am sure that the expense of moving a two story home across the ice would completely eat up any profit or cost savings from winning a free kitchen.  I would be happy enough to win a fridge.  However, it would be a real let down to put that much effort in and just get the fridge.

Well, they are out of luck, but good luck to YOU!

Happy Pumpkin was a pattern introduced on Fiesta Ware, and by most sources it was discontinued in 2002.  The pattern sometimes pops up at this time of year from the vaults, meaning that sometimes you can order a few from Homer Laughlin.  You can also find it on the secondary market from private parties.    The smiling Happy Pumpkin is on actual Fiesta, not another Homer Laughlin style of dish.  It is available directly from the maker at $14.99 for the luncheon plate.   They are currently in stock, but in limited quantities.  Replacements, Ltd., also carries them.

What you might want to also look for are other pieces.  The various serving bowls do not have a pumpkin face on them, but feature a Trick or Treat theme featuring Halloween cats.   The other pieces typically have the motif shown below.  The exceptions are the round place and the round candlestick holders which have jack-o-lantern faces on them.

These pieces tend to easily get overlooked at clearance and estate sales because if you were not close to them, you would not even imagine that they were Fiesta unless you remembered some of the Christmas plates and how they also had designs on them.  Happy Halloween hunting on this pattern.  If you find any other good sources as far as physical stores or websites for this one, let me know by comment or email.