One More Corner Bar, Best Cook on TV Award, Peep Parade, BBQ Road Trips, and Happy Greetings
Saturday News Scraps Newsletter, V/E6
Table of Contents
Another Neighborhood, Another Corner Bar
The Rigged Best Cook on TV Award
The Situation Desk
On the Barbecue Trail
Happy Happy…
Another Neighborhood, Another Corner Bar
After a rough week in my Brooklyn neighborhood, on Thursday we all seemed to have headed to the corner bar down the street from my house for a much needed happy hour. It’s not Manayunk, but it’s close enough.
The Rigged Best Cook on TV Award No one comes close to Sam
The fundamental reason why this award was rigged in favor of Sam Fox, Pamela Adlon’s character on Better Things, is because she is masterfully capable of diving at a moment’s notice into the full repertoire of the day’s meals unencumbered by recipes. The camera zeros in on her messy dicing, squishing, smashing, spilling, stirring, and dipping a finger into pots and bowls to taste. In short, she is an everyday cook in an everyday kitchen. Her portrayal ravishes us with flavors and envy of the people who will eat with her. Sam and Pamela probably have never watched a cooking show in their lives and wouldn’t fathom why anyone else would, either. That she can deal at the same time with the tumultuous life convulsing around her—three complicated daughters, plus her 80ish mother living across the street, plus her bumptious career and precarious finances, and PLUS her aging woman’s body—while coming up with an abundance of homey dishes is heroic. So here’s to you, Sam and Pamela. You have earned not only this year’s award but our gratitude!
The Situation Desk The Peep Wars
It used to be that you had to wait a whole year for Peeps. You’d stuff as many of their little squishy sugar bodies as you could into your mouth and then steal some more from your brother and sister. That supreme Easter joy is no more. In recent years Peeps have shown up for every holiday, in garish colors and bizarre flavors, such as birthday cake. This is the definition of repugnance.
Peeps are also yet another divisive element in our society: People either love or hate them.
For lovers, there’s a surprisingly mammoth amount of recipes on how to make them that will alleviate Peep cravings when they are out of season.
Haters have been busy concocting mutilating recipes such as Peep popcorn and eatable Play-Doh. The worse is a Peep martini that requires a marshmallow flavored vodka, a criminal act on both a martini and vodka and yet another sign of society’s crumbling.
On the Barbecue Trail The competition season is on!
My neighbor Scott is many things, including one of my favorite on the block, second only to his wife, Felicia, a fellow Philadelphian. He is a prodigious dessert eater and baker, especially of pies, and every year for our Christmas party I make at least one specifically for him. He is also a Kansas City Barbeque Society certified barbeque judge. For the last decade he has averaged about seven contests a year. By now he has racked up a total of 75 and is working toward 25 more, which would make him a master judge. Given that the competitions usually draw at least 25 teams, Scott has eaten a lot of barbecued chicken, pork, ribs, and beef brisket. A morning talking to him causes a rational person to quickly decide to become a judge, too. Last March, my son (the BBQ cook in the family) and I spent a day in a firehouse in a small Pennsylvanian town being schooled in the Society’s complicated rules and regulations. The hardest part of the course was accepting the Society’s version of what textures and flavors constitute a winner. These may very well be the opposite of your personal standards and will separate those who will receive their official KCS badges from those who will return home without one.
I signed up for a competition last summer but, unsurprisingly, the Delta variant hit several of the judges and the event was cancelled. Hopefully, I’ll be able to participate in a few this year with the goal of surviving several more decades to catch up to Scott.
I’ll present my full interview with Scott in the next week or two. In the meantime, check out the society’s competition calendar and find one near you!
Happy Happy…
رمضان كريم or رمضان مبارك
Easter
פסח סמח
To everyone!
I could not agree more with your assessment of the Sam Fox character in her kitchen! I would love to be invited over for dinner. She cooks with such gusto.