TheSnackHound

The Pillsbury Doughboy is still a mascot for Pillsbury baked goods in the freezer and baking section, but he is not as in heavy rotation as a spokesperson–or spokesdough–as he used to be. He sort of is just “phoning it in” these days. And the printed boxes? Well, that was a from a photo shoot from 1987.

Nowadays, Mr. Pillsbury is holed up in a stunning downtown loft-style first floor apartment with a bevy of winged beauties. Greek muses, to be exact. Two of them.

Did I just see what I thought I saw peering out at the traffic? I rubbed my blurry eyes as my sleep-deprived brain processed the sight on the way back from a supply run.  I stopped before making the turn, like the dedicated paparazzo that I am.   Somehow, the other drivers were sensing my official business and were reluctant to honk or nudge me into making the turn out of the parking lot of the business across the street.  You can swing your camera in any direction in LA and New York and find a celebrity or socialite, but that’s sighting #1 for small Michigan town.

So next time you are in the grocery store, does your opinion about funding the doughboy’s playboy lifestyle change your purchasing choices?

Remember when the sitting President of the United States (a.k.a. POTUS which looks okay in print but is weird to say) would be on every channel you flipped to when he had something important to say, or was relaying The State of the Union?

Somewhere around 1983, I realized that you could flip to MTV and still watch someone shaking their rear or jumping up and down when mom and dad left the room. That’s not quite accurate. Not to many folks were shaking their rear at that time. They were mostly standing around with spaghetti strainers on their head and moving from the shoulders up only. Sadly, today you can flip on the telly box and not even realize the President is on, since station programming is so splintered.

Commonfolk can relive, I have found, the feeling on being on three different networks at once if one only had a Chocolate shop. Here’s what you do: You somehow get the Food Network to come do a segment of unwrapped featuring your chocolate covered ants, scorpion lolipops or chocolate dipped tipsy cakes. Once that’s in the can, you can flip on the Discovery Channel at a later date to see footage from the same visit on “How It’s Made.” Well, you might get more shots of machines cranking than face time for employees, but heck, it’s publicity. After that, you might trickle on to “Modern Marvels,” lumped in with several other establishments. I forgot. There has got to be a travel segment in there when the Travel Channel discusses your town or city. You could be perpetually the same age on television for the next ten years.

My mouth was watered by Modern Marvels this weekend when they reran a segment at See’s Candy. I saw myself in the background when I was there six years ago. No. I really didn’t. The segment featuring their small curios of boxed chocolate was packed amid other candy making establishments that worked on the small scale or operated the old-fashioned way in some way. I made a mental note to visit them all. I grabbed some See’s at a pop up mall store during Christmas time and was enticed by free samples. The milk chocolate varieties are a bit sweet for my tastes, as I think my taste buds have been complete spoiled lately on $7 organic dark chocolate bars, but the dark chocolate was better suited. My grandfather enjoys the bridge mix, with a variety of nuts, caramels and other goodies thrown in for good measure. He likes to try to guess and decipher each one before he takes a bite. Try it. But don’t lose your dental work!

So, the moral of the story? There really isn’t one. Oh, I guess it is that you don’t have to travel to the factory to try See’s, and you most definitely must find an insider to try to appear as “background shopper person” so that you can laugh at what you wore “back then” ten years from now when your segment is repackaged on all the stations the folks that own the Discovery Channel have their mitts on.

The Folger’s plant in Downtown Kansas City will be closing in 2011. Operations will be relocated to the Smuckers headquarters in Ohio to consolidate operations. While it of course will mean job loss for Kansas City, the locale will also loose an iconic building. The troops are rallying to save the historic structure.  I first heard it from @ShellyKramer on Twitter who is local to the area, and there is hope that it wouldn’t be turned into condos.

I have my own proposal for the structure. Actually there are two.  This would be the most awesome bed and breakfast. You know, it would be “The Best Part of Waking Up.” While most coffee operations would be moved to Ohio, maybe a small amount in small batches would be made here.  It would be like going to one of those winery tours where you learn to brew your own wine.  No secrets would be given out, but they could mix the different coffees to your preferences. There could be bins and they would mix you a bag or can of half caff/half decaf.  Or maybe you want to mix Chocolate Silk and Cinnamon Swirl.  Maybe you like them, but not a lot so you add half regular and have Chocolate.  You take that home, and then you could order one there with whipped cream on the top.  Some of the bedrooms would be industrial decor themed and some would be antiquey and cozy – whatever you chose.

Each room would have a theme.  What about the “Scott Bakula Room?” If he is between tv and movie roles, he and his wife (not the actress pictured) perhaps stay there? Or would he sneak into your room and start brewing the coffee to wake you up and sneak out? (Commercial dates to 1985).

Of course, the upper floors would be the rooms, but they all wouldn’t be next to eachother.  There may be rooms with glass cases and historic memorabilia in between. You wouldn’t want your romantic weekend spoiled by the people in the next room, would you?  Or maybe a room would be really big so the whole scout troop would sleep over.   Then, there would be the “business end” down below and a trendy coffee shop for people on the street who are not staying there.  Of course you could order pastries made with Smucker’s Jelly in the middle of them and coffee.   I haven’t decided if I would go with ubertrendy or would hang my hat on the industrial theme again.

Of course, they should leave some of the factory “as-is” for the museum element of it or truck in historical collectible memorabilia about Folger’s and Kansas City history and people would tour it.  You just never know – It could be a really happening Bed and Breakfast/Coffee Shop/Museum and maybe even a funky place to have your wedding reception.  Of course, there would be free coffee with the room rental but it would be BYOB or BYOF – Bring your own Beef or Bring Your Own Fish. Smuckers, the parent company is just not big on main courses.

See…lives are changed with Folger’s.

Follow me on Twitter @TheSnackHound “just because” and for updated news (Oh, and I need a few more followers before Twitter will let me follow more of you!), and follow @SaveFolgersKC too.  I don’t drink coffee…but I brew it for the smell! (Oh, and I love historical buildings).

I received a high volume of email about my Pathogens post, so I am going to regale you with a similar mother+microscopic parasites story.

I was visiting my parents, and my mother was a little grossed out by my dogs licking my face.

“There was a guy who got TAPEWORM because he let a dog lick his lips,” she announced.

I scratched my head, “My mouth isn’t OPEN when they lick my face, and my dogs have a clean bill of health.  They don’t have worms.”

This went on for a few days.  I wondered where she heard this.  She indeed works at a vet clinic so this could be plausible.  However, she also was the one who taped Ann Landers colums to my bedroom door when I had lizards.  It was a story about someone who got salmonella from a pet turtle.  It turned out you can get it if you are a two year old who decides to lick a turtle, or to let the turtle help you prepare chicken for dinner.  Since I didn’t have turtles, nor would I ever lick my lizards, my likelihood of getting salmonella was very low.  There was also the big scare of 1995 when I got the flu or several bad headaches, she thought I must have toxic shock syndrome.  I was beginning to feel like Typhoid Mary.

Today the truth came out when i finally sat down to hear the story of the tape worm spreading dog.  I thought that I could be in for one of my mom’s “sorta kinda got half the story public service annoucements.”

“This guy’s lips were blue and they were losing him.  They found out that his spleen was rock hard and getting bigger, and they had to remove it in emergency surgery.  There were tapeworms that attacked his spleen and looked like they had been growing there for 30 years.  He was asked how could he have had tapeworms that long? It turned out that 30 years ago, he went to Cambodia.  It was the summertime, and a feral street dog licked his face and licked him on the lips, and they figured out that the dog must have had tapeworm fragments on his saliva that they passed to the guy.  All that time the man had been living with it.”

I said to her,” Okay.  First off, a feral dog wouldn’t probably lick somebody’s lips.  They would steer clear of people. ”

“Well, maybe it was a stray. Or it was a puppy.”

I continued: “Secondly, my dogs aren’t feral street dogs living in a mostly very humid country that has third world conditions in some parts of it.  They see the vet and get their shots regularly, they are on heartworm preventative and are tested every year for other worms.   They have not lately been near a river in Cambodia.”

“Well,” she said, “Fleas spread tapeworms, so you never know.  Fleas travel.”

“How does a flea who doesn’t live very long travel around the world? (BELOW: Photo of a flea performing in a flea circus…unless he is pulling around a cart in Cambodia…) How can a tapeworm fit inside a flea anyways? Aren’t they bigger than fleas?”

“Eggs.  Or fragments.”

“But if it is tape worm ‘fragments’ wouldn’t the tape worm be dead?”  I was really rationalizing now, “Like a killed vaccine.”

“You went fishing when you were a kid.  You know that if a worm gets cut in half that it can grow back the part that is missing.”

“But not if it is in twenty different fragments. And those were night crawlers.”

“Maybe it would be enough.”

“But a dog’s mouth is WAY cleaner than a human mouth.  I am more likely to make THEM sick.  But my mouth is closed.  And there aren’t too many diseases that humans can carry that can make a dog sick. So that won’t happen.”

“But it happened.  So you have to stop your dogs licking your face”.

And that was that.  So there you have it.  One guy, allegedly according to my mother, got tapeworm thirty years ago, allegedly from a dog, and not from wading in a swamp, getting bitten by a flea himself, or eating something that he shouldn’t have eaten while in a foreign land that wasn’t pasteurized or FDA approved. Go figure.

Lovely unbaked cake, floating in space, did someone leave you out in the rain?  Of course, it isn’t raining now, but does someone’s carelessness doom your future? Or, more likely, was a photo snapped of you hovering?  You were using your fuel to get away from me, like a mini mother ship to tiny aliens.   After all, assembling you was only half the battle.  There was still the actual baking and decorating where I could still potentially mess things up.

Every weekend for the past few months I have been baking a cake.   I have been doing so for several reasons.  Firstly, I seem to be invited to many occasions where I am asked to bring a cake.  Maybe they have never read this column, where I outline very specific cooking disasters, and are understandably delusional about my skills.  The other possibility is that cakes are less frightening to transport than something that will immediately spoil or curdle on the journey.  The other reasons is that I have a Favorite Guy, and we both have a particular preference for all things chocolate and we must try a variety of chocolate cakes.  Yup, you read it right.  We must.

This past week, I made something that was partly of my own creation, and something I faked very well.

The original inspiration involved going downtown and spending $7.00 on a slice of very decadent cake.  The other half of the inspiration, was a few weeks back, making the Orange Chocolate Torte recipe on the back of a Ghirardelli Ultimate Fudge Brownie mix. It suggested preparing the mix, and adding orange zest. The part of the recipe that intrigued me was actually the idea of using a round pan and how mirror shiny the frosting looked.   The idea of making two and stacking them on top of each other entered my consciousness.  Of course, they needed to have whipped cream in the middle.  The real stuff.  That for sure would give me a cake that might be as good as that $7.00 a slice number, but for less.

Then, I could use that frosting stuff that they give you on the whole thing, and the desired result would be like making a giant Hostess Ding Dong, or King Don, or whatever they are calling those now.  Oh, there is another important aspect of this. It is not supposed to be orange this time.   So, just get the idea of orange out of your head.

After the mix was prepared exactly according to the instructions on the box, I did it all over again and made a second one.  Some people would suggest making things together and doubling the recipe, then splitting them into two different pans.  They forget who they are talking to, as I would probably be the one to get less egg in one and more in the other just by attrition.

This is how they looked, entering the fire pit of doom:

Then, I FREAKED. I took one cake out, and the other one was lonely for a short time.

You see, I had a temporary meltdown. I usually crack eggs in a mug. One mug had a suspiciously yellow tinged liquid in it still. I couldn’t have forgotten to have added the egg to one of them, could I? What would happen? Would it be an unqualified disaster? I then took a breath, and decided not to panic. What will be, will be. I inspected both cakes for loft and air bubbles and they both appeared to be the same.  Perhaps the yellow liquid was just the result of rinse residue.

Okay, back to the show. The two cakes baked on 350 degrees for exactly 38 minute.  Actually, I think I left them in for 40, and then worried if they were over baked.  No matter. Through the magic of television, both cakes had cooled and had stacked themselves. Whipped cream was even in the middle.

Actually, in the meantime, I beat the whipping cream senseless with a hand mixer, until it had the consistency of concrete. I wish I had taken more photos, or at least could find them. The whipping cream was so heavy that when I filled half of the cake, both layers were completely parallel. I could have made a little diorama on the one side. The photo shows the cake put together, and with whip cream present. It is before I cleaned it up and dripped the frosting on it. it did not look like a big Hostess thing because I didn’t warm up the frosting enough and instead of just letting it drip, I spread it a bit too eagerly with the spatula.

How did it turn out, in the measurement of body count?  Actually, it was liked!  I think this is about the best cake I’ve ever made.

How did it tastes?  Don’t go cutting the cake in half and shoveling it down your gullet.  This is a very rich cake.  You could do well with a smaller piece, unless you want your stomach to twist in a knot, feeling like it all sunk to the bottom like a big rock, develop a temporary case of gout and not want to eat for a week. Of course, I am being facetious, but that’s one rich cake. If you don’t tell anyone, it tastes like a rather decadent, fancy cake, as long as you can keep it together.

How ’bout you try this “fake” recipe?  It isn’t really fake, but it is from scratch.  Let me know how you do.   A cake like this was $7.00 a slice downtown, and this cost about $6 a mix, plus $3 for a medium whipping cream.  So, that’s $15.00.   That would buy us two slices of the cake downtown.   Being that we got twelve slices out of the cake, we would have paid $84.00 if we brought all of our friends out.   Wowee…we’re rich!

Stay tuned for next week’s cake!

By popular complaint demand and reader request, I am republishing my article from November 2008 on Sick Glasses. Remember…YOU asked for it!

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I learned something new today. Did you know that there as such a thing as sick glasses? When your parents used to harp on you to wash your dishes before sitting down for dinner, perhaps they were not concerned about crosscontaminating the food with your 5th grade science project or the nose you just wiped. Perhaps they were more concerned that you did not infect the glasses in any way, or somehow spoil them.

Of course, I am being facetious. Unless your parents’ Obsessive Compulsive Disorder involves making sure no one touches a glass with dirty hands. Actually, I am not trying to make fun of folks with OCD, of which I know several, but that would be the only logical explanation being that a crystal highball or a sippy cup just doesn’t seem to be able to contract disease. They can carry them from wiping your snotty nose touching hands on them, but for them to get sick themselves? Just a carrier only. There are illnesses that can jump species but I have never seen one jump to an inanimate object. Disney Studios, of course, would disagree. Just ask 3/4 of the cast of Beauty and the Beast.

On a serious note, Sick Glass Syndrome is very real.

Q: What is a sick glass?

A: I am glad you asked! A sick glass is typically crystal, but it can also be a cheap juice glass too. Dishwasher detergents and mineral deposits leave a cloudy film. Mineral deposits come form hard water. These detergents and deposits eventually scratch the glass.

There is hope for sick glasses that don’t involve any antibiotics. You can test an area with vinegar, and if you see a little ray of hope shining through, proceed to douse the rest of the glass in vinegar. Many glasses can sparkle like the day they were purchased, cleaned, and placed on the shelf. Be sure to rinse the vinegar off when complete, or your whole cupboard or kitchen is going to smell like salad dressing. On the other hand, if you were HOPING that your kitchen was going to smell like vinegar, you may want to check out the salad dressing recipe from the archives HERE.

Some people advocate warming up a solution of vinegar and water to the same temperature that you would suds them up normally.  You can, but I have found that room temperature works equally well.   This may seem like a lot of work, but it certainly can move the glasses you would normally pitch back into the rotation.  Also, if you have luck for this, look for pretty glasses marked very inexpensively at yard sales.  For five cents or a quarter a glass, you have not much to lose when you gamble on them.

Have you had success reviving glasses back from zombie land?  What has been your most amazing find?