VITALLY IMPORTANT MOONPIE UPDATE
That’s what Smartass gets for trying to tell the old coot something
he didn’t know.
November 22, 2008 — 9:11 pm
Comments: 19
You can take the Weasel out of the MoonPie, but…
The phrase “RC Cola and a MoonPie” came up two threads down and, because I totally have nothing else to do, I hit Google. Turns out, it’s another fine culinary innovation you can thank Tennessee for. You’re welcome.
The MoonPie was invented in Chattanooga in 1917. It’s two big round soft graham cracker cookie things with marshmallow filling, dipped in a sweet coating. I only remember chocolate and banana, but Wikipedia says there was also vanilla and strawberry. And, in modern times, lemon and orange. MoonPies are unspeakably vile.
Royal Crown Cola was invented in 1905 and is apparently also still around. The company renamed itself Nehi in 1925 — you may know them from the truly awful grape and orange drinks — and were later responsible for Diet Rite, the first diet soda. In the mid ’90s, RC came out with a “draft” cola — a 12-ounce premium cola made with cane sugar like the old days. Sales were disappointing due to distribution problems, and the line was dropped.
In the ’50s, an RC cola and a MoonPie became the standard workman’s lunch across in the South. You could get the combo special RC Cola and a MoonPie for a dime, which is one giant asswad of sugar and food coloring for a mere tenth of a dollar. Jesus. Wikipedia reminds me that some would buy a packet of peanuts, empty it into the cola, drink the cola then eat the peanuts. Damn you, Wikipedia! I had successfully papered over that memory!
This filthy combination was so wildly popular that it was set to music repeatedly, beginning with Bill Liston’s 1950s ballad “Gimm’e an RC Cola and a Moonpie” (which is where I’m guessing my mother picked up the phrase) and ending with the recent children’s record — I so totally and completely am not even a little bit shitting you — “Weezie and the Moon Pies.”
The little town of Bell Buckle, Tennessee has an RC and Moon Pie Festival every year that features deep fried MoonPies and crowns the Queen of…no, it’s no use. I can’t bear to paraphrase. I quote:
The 2008 Queen is Dr. Phyllis Qualls-Brook, Assistant Commissioner of Tennessee Community and Industry Relations and the King is actor/director Lane Davies who will be directing the 1st Annual Tennessee Shakespeare Festival to be held in Bell Buckle the two weekends following the RC-Moon Pie Festival.
Taking center stage as always is the wildly popular Synchronized Wading extravaganza, lovingly referred to as “dry humor on a wet stage”. This year’s performance will be “A Midsummer’s Nightmare” starring who else but the lovely little Moon Pie and the charming RC with unfortunate guest appearances by GooGoo Cluster, Coke, as well as a host of fairies and soldiers. Director and choreographer Carla Webb who is also known as the First Lady of Bell Buckle says that this year’s Synchronized Wading performance is one of the best since she began performing in a kiddy pool over 13 years ago.
Some things are unforgivable even in jest. There is also a more recent association of MoonPies and Mardi Gras, with some krewes throwing miniature pies into the crowd. You have to show your tits to make them throw beads, I don’t EVEN want to know what you have to show to make them throw MoonPies.
And people wonder why I’m changing my name and moving thousands of miles away to a country that makes puddings out of sheep guts.
November 20, 2008 — 6:47 am
Comments: 45
Please make my dairy products shut up leave me alone
I like sour cream. In fact, I like anything with the word ‘cream’ in it. Ice cream, clotted cream, cream of wheat, creamed corn, aspercreme, Thomas Neill Cream: give me it! On a biscuit!
You know what kind of cream I don’t like? Preachy cream. I bought this unfamiliar brand of sour cream because it had the longest sell-by date on the shelf, and look wht was printed inside, on the foil seal: If life gives you limes, just rearrange the letters and return a smile.
Ugh. Horrible. That doesn’t even scan good. How about, if life gives you limes, make margaritas?
Okay, maybe a dairy doesn’t want to promote booze (though LOLcats teamed up with Jones Soda, surely another Sign of the Apocalypse). I don’t think it’s too much to ask my food not to make me feel actively nauseated.
Anyhow, that’s not what I’m flexed about. Side B is what I’m flexed about. One of the great things about sour cream is that it’s immortal. It starts out sour; there really isn’t anywhere for it to go (that’s not original, but I’m damned if I can remembered who said it first). When it’s tired of life, sour cream just goes green and hairy.
I always have a container of sour cream on hand, sometimes long enough for us to develop a personal relationship. So when I read The container date indicates how long unopened Daisy will remain fresh. TO PROLONG FRESHNESS AFTER THE FOIL SEAL IS REMOVED: Spoon out the Daisy you’ll need and promptly return to refrigerator, I considered it a complete violation of the sour cream contract, that sacred covenant between Weasel and ultra-pasteurized dairy products.
Last night, I tried to enjoy my baked potato the usual way, with the wide open carton of sour cream at my elbow, ready to add supplementary sour creamy goodness at my merest whim. But it preyed on me. It niggled at my attention. Could I really hear tiny spores landing on the surface with a soft, ripe shush, like early snow? I put the lid on. But inside, wasn’t it still gently warming? Making a hospitable home for those spores I heard earlier?
So I spooned out the Daisy I needed and promptly return to the refrigerator.
Damn you, Daisy. Damn you in all four cardinal directions. Damn you right into the parched, airless desert of the non-dairy aisle, where you belong. I’m handing you itembe, Daisy. I don’t know what the hell one of those is, but I reckon you can rearrange the letters and bite me.
April 28, 2008 — 4:52 pm
Comments: 37
Good morning! Share my dog’s breakfast?
I like my real estate agent. I mean, she’s a real estate agent, so she’s a loathsome reptile, but she speaks in an amusing, roundabout code. Like, when she first hooked me up with a handyman, she said, “you’ll like Mortimer. He’s a wonderful, wonderful man. He’s got the chiseled features and almost gray skin tone of some African chieftan.”
Translation: okay, don’t panic. He’s an old black guy, but you can totally trust him.
So instead of telling me right out not to get my hopes up, she said, “it’ll be lovely and cool down here in the basement this Summer. The market dies out completely in August, so we have to make sure we’re ready to go for the Fall market.”
Got it. Making self comfortable.
Speaking of language, I am so going to start calling McGoo Goo Boy. I owe him. Thanks to him, Uncle B calls me Weas now. Weas! Before that, he called me “Weasel” or “Auntie” or, way back, “Spam.” Dignified. Stately.
Yeah, can you believe I had the nickname “Spam” before the internet was a gleam in Al Gore’s eye? I’ve forgotten why. I had to drop it. My first internet addresses were spam@whatever.com, which was okay for years. Then I started getting angry emails that went, “I’m writing to report a disgusting message that came from your server…”
I’d write back, “Look, I’m not really the spam reporting address for this ISP. I’m just some woman whose nickname is ‘Spam.'”
Until I got this one lady who decided to argue with me about it. Like, “don’t you try to wriggle out of this! I don’t want to see any more emails in my inbox with the word ‘penis’ in them. I mean it!”
I hope things worked out for that lady. I bet she knows a lot more words for “penis” these days.
Welp, gotta go. Friday is pancake day at the company cafeteria. I love pancake day, because they left a crucial comma off the menu: “blueberry pancakes with whipped butter bacon.”
Mmmmm…whipped butter bacon! Can I have mine with lard?
April 25, 2008 — 7:49 am
Comments: 47
Ow! I think I broke my ethnicity.
What is this? I’m glad you asked! It’s fried chicken with crumpets and gravy.
Dear sweet fancy Moses.
I didn’t have any biscuits ready made, okay? I hadn’t planned on making gravy but when I was done frying I couldn’t bear to throw out all the lovely chicken grease and crispy bits.
I only had this packet of crumpets because I wanted to show Uncle B. (Look Uncle B! Crumpets! And they were actually made in the bakery at my local Stop & Shop!)
Wasn’t bad, okay?
If you think a crumpet looks like an English muffin cut in half, you would be correct. That is what they taste like. Which is presumably why we call English muffins English muffins. The English don’t call them that, on account of they mostly know where they are.
A crumpet is cooked on a griddle and an English muffin in an oven, which accounts for why the former has a bottom and a top and the latter has an outside and an inside.
Heh. Y’all didn’t think I could talk about politics four days in a row, did you?
April 24, 2008 — 11:37 am
Comments: 53
Let’s kill stuff — for Gaia!
Happy Earth Day! Yes, today’s the actual date, though NPR is pretty much observing Earth Week. (I listen to NPR so you don’t have to. You’re welcome).
Yesterday they ran a little feature called Food Footprint: Minimizing Greenhouse Gasses (yes, with “gasses” spelled like that…when did that become okay?).
Did you know that 18% of the world’s greenhouse gases are produced by “animal agriculture”? Animal agriculture: making and moving meat.
Turns out cows are especially bad, because hippies hate beef. Raising a cow and bringing it to market releases thirty six pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere for every pound of edible meat.
So I’m thinking…hunting has got to be the greenest thing on Gaia’s green earth. It tranforms dangerous wild animals — animals that would otherwise spend their lives destroying nascent forests and emitting harmful fumes into the atmosphere — into healthful, planet-saving food.
Why let Al Gore have all the fun? Once we work out the lifetime carbon load of various animals, every hunter is his own one-man carbon credits business.
“Mornin’, Sir. I’m taking carbon orders. Will you be needing a rabbit-sized credit or the deer-sized credit today?”
April 22, 2008 — 12:28 pm
Comments: 102
And you thought the North Koreans were dangerous!
Behold, the Col-Pop! Yes, it’s for reals! Straight from South Korean food chain BBQ Chicken, who have recently set their sights on the American market.
Piping hot chicken goes in the inset, ice cold soda goes in the chamber below. Thanks to physics and that whole heat-rises thing, it apparently works pretty well. The reviewer at the first link said there was a little condensation after twenty minutes, but who takes twenty minutes to eat a handful of chicken poppers? A sister company is also serving spaghetti, french fries, and fried mozzarella balls in Col-Pop containers.
Yes, there’s video.
To see the future, look to the East!
April 17, 2008 — 8:31 am
Comments: 75
What in the name of all that is GOOD and PURE and EDIBLE is this?!?
This would be a disturbing thing to find in a jar of pickles you just brought home from the store. It’s a TERRIFYING thing to find as you are attempting to fish the very last pickle out of the jar. I’m almost certain it’s a chunk of root or something.
Only…whenever I look more closely at it, it appears to be bilaterally symmetrical, with a defined head and thorax. It’s got way too many legs for a terrestrial beastie, but they cluster into what could conceivably be considered six leg clumps and some extra antenna and mouth parts. Like a regular, albeit very large, bug that exploded in a hot vinegar and dill solution.
No, I’m not fishing it out.
I’m not.
I don’t want to know. I don’t care if it is science. I ATE THOSE PICKLES.
March 4, 2008 — 6:00 pm
Comments: 34
Snow day!
Okay, as snowstorms go, it’s not too impressive…but, as employees go, I’m a complete waste of human skin. So here I am, at home making pizza.
Hey! Want my pizza recipe? I believe I have already mentioned I was once a pizza professional. Yeah. Is there no end to my accomplishments? We made an award-winning, very deep dish Sicilian pie, and here’s how:
Start with raw white bread dough. That bagged stuff you get at the supermarket is fine. One of those (a pound) will make about two pizza doughs. You want to spread this in the bottom of a pie dish. Eight inches, eleven…whatever you’ve got. Press it into the bottom until you have a thin layer in the middle, and a thicker lip all around the edge. Try not to tear it.
The pie plate needs to be very slightly greasy, or the cooked pizza will stick. But too greasy, and it will pull away from the edges before it’s done. At the pizza joint, we simply wiped out the pans and left them unwashed; the accumulated pizza goodness did the trick. Wiping the pan with a very small amount of oil works, too, Mister Germophobe.
Now bake the dough, all by itself, in a 400° to 450° oven for about ten minutes, until the outer lip just starts to brown. This keeps the bottom of the pizza from going all wet and ‘orrible later on. First thing in the morning, we’d bake the whole day’s crusts and store ’em in the refrigerator until called for. You can too, just like a pizza professional!
When you’re ready, smear a layer of sauce on the crust (I use spaghetti sauce, for simplicity’s sake), then your desired ingredients, THEN your shredded cheese. Toppings under cheese — innovations you can really use. The shop used cheddar and mozarella. I like to use muenster. Whatever. Give this about ten minutes in the same 400° to 450° oven, and viola!
Let the pie sit a few minutes to firm up a little, then run your biggest knife underneath, all the way around, to make sure it’s totally unstuck. Leave the knife under the pie, hover over the cutting board, and pull the pan away from the pizza.
There you have it! Two years of my life in a nutshell.
February 22, 2008 — 1:22 pm
Comments: 72
Ow! What the hell…?
I woke up with a nasty headache this morning. I don’t get many of those; not since I quit smoking, anyhow.
I didn’t have any caffeine yesterday. I usually have a thermos of coffee and a couple of Diet Dr Peppers…but I forgot my thermos, and I’ve been stuck with black cherry soda since they were out of my favorite tipple since my last supermarket run.
Is that it? I’ve never believed in the caffeine-withdrawal headache. I thought I could pick it up and put it down at will. But I have been increasing my dose lately.
If this is the first sign of that nasty flu that’s making the rounds, I’m going to go HOWLING apeshit. In between trips to the bathroom.
February 21, 2008 — 11:19 am
Comments: 24