Comments on: I can pick up raw peanuts with my toes and fling them pretty far…

By: rita

rita — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 20:17:23 +0000

hi! i hope i’m not too late on this. when i was a kid, i used to like fried spam and peanut butter sandwich. i know. it’s disgusting. don’t ask me how i came up with that concoction. i can’t eat that anymore. for one thing, among the list of my allergies that i have under the sun, that includes the sun (i get sun poisoning) – nuts (all sorts) is one of my top nemesis.

By: We Are Never Full

We Are Never Full — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 00:02:31 +0000

food network ran out of ideas in about 2000/2001 when they hired rachel ray and sandra lee to start leading the way for the future of the cruddy station. this is just ridiculous. they haven’t given me a reason to watch since the quietly let go of mario. alton brown is all that’s left! someone needs to help america by giving that station a real culinary make-over!

By: Vinny

Vinny — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 15:42:06 +0000

When my daughter was teething, we used to get her zwiebacks or arrowroot cookies to chew on. I’d be holding her and she’d chew/gum one until thit was half gone and semi-soggy, then say, “Here, Daddy!” and jam the rest of it into my mouth. We used to call them, “Daddy cookies”. Its a good thing I really like zwiebacks.

By: Susan G

Susan G — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 18:42:55 +0000

The peach cobbler story reminded me of Aunt Mildred: She needed sugar to bake a cake, borrowed from a neighbor…but what she got was mistakenly salt! Another time she washed a teapot with a cake of kosher soap (for washing dishes). The next time they drank tea it had a funny taste: a knob of soap was left in the spout. She loved to tell these stories, died a few years ago after 104 years.

By: chadzilla

chadzilla — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 17:22:05 +0000

Here’s my disgusting food story…
It’s called ‘post-katrina’ clean-up of commercial hotel walk-in coolers.
Imagine opening the door to a walk-in refrigerator 2 weeks after the hurricane and loss of power, sweltering heat, flies the size of humming birds. The first time we opened the big door (with a professional clean-up team behind me), you could hear the gush of air movement as the crack in the door released a cloud of rotten ammonia so foul that 8 grown men had to turn their heads and shield their faces as though someone had just opened the Ark of the Covenant. The inside clean-up was worse. Have you ever seen meat melt… this was far beyond the normal stages of food degradation. Going from rancid, to rotten, to food for parasites, to a complete break-down of the matter itself… dripping out of the plastic garbage bags it was thrown into. Protected with little more than rubber boots, a garbage bag over the body with holes ripped out for the arms and head, and only one of those dust masks over your mouth and nose imagine the many levels of disgusting rot you must remove before bleaching down every inch of the coolers (I am using the plural because we actually cleaned about 10 coolers in our hotel following the aftermath). Imagine waking up in the morning and that smell is still lingering in your nostrils as well as visions of maggots… you simply cannot remove yourself from it. The only thing that allows you to eat afterwards is the ultimate pull of true hunger… not the kind brought on by a healthy appetite, but pure eat or die hunger.
The bright side to going through something so hideously grostesque as that, is that I feel a strong sense of confidence that I will probably never in my life have to go through that again. As a chef, we deal with foods that spoil on a regular basis. We check meats, poultry, and fish. Sometimes they turn and the smell of rancidity takes hold. These smells are nothing to me anymore… I have been to the hell of rotten food and these little demons are only peons in the hierarchy of nastiness. I laugh in their face.
Sorry, no pictures for Food Network… my camera battery died beforehand and my charger was lost to the flood. The creative visuals will have to suffice.