Welcome back to the weekly roundup here at Eating...Our Words, where thanks to this week's plentiful rains, our blood oranges are now constantly being carried off by vulture-sized mosquitoes who don't understand the hyperbolic nature of fruit-naming. IT REFERS TO THE COLOR, YOU BUZZING BASTARDS.
We started the week off on a shady note with some shrimp thieving. You can't start shrimp season too early or else you get -- yes -- shrimpy shrimp. That joke is both accurate and terrible. Let's hope the rest of this column goes better.
We followed that up by opening a real can of worms -- which would technically be consumable while on the Paleo Diet, a new-ish kind of diet which attempts to throw your eating habits back to simple foods not laden with preservatives, carbohydrates, unnecessary ingredients or corn every damn which way. Gotta say, it seems like a pretty good idea in light of obesity, heart disease and diabetes statistics, and in fact given my own struggles with weight loss lately, it might just be time for this writer to buckle down and give the Paleo Diet a...what's that? No cheese? Oh. Well then forget it. Methinks the Mediterranean Diet might be the way to go. Mmmm, feta!
We listed the five sexiest male celebrity chefs to remind you that sexiness and food together isn't all just Paris Hilton rubbing a big sloppy Carl's Jr. burger all over her tits. Say, now there's an idea for the ad campaign for Ninfa's new tortas. Local foodie-hotties, please sign up in the comments section.
We had some more top fives this week, including the strangest ice cream flavors, five brunch dishes that double as dessert and the top five red wines to serve chilled. A few years back, I stopped drinking red wine chilled, and I'll tell you why: not because I suddenly got classy, but because I discovered sangria. If your red wine is cheap and sweet enough to serve chilled, then you might as well take it the rest of the way to sangria, that's my feeling on the matter.
Katharine revisited her eight-year-old self's eating habits and found that they've changed and stayed the same in surprising ways. My eight-year-old self would have answered every question with "pizza" and "hamburgers" without even reading them through first.
The actual oven is always better than the microwave oven, right? Not anymore -- as we discovered. Products nowadays are specifically designed to be nuked and come out weird if you try cooking them in the oven. Especially if the directions call for you to leave the product in a container of some sort. Nothing like hurriedly yanking a flaming ball of paper and pizza pocket out of the oven and stomping the shit out of it on the kitchen floor.
Here's a fairly genius idea: enter in the foods you have in your house right now and get back a list of recipes to cook. This is pretty much how the Shameless Chef worked half the time, in case you hadn't guessed.
Do you have a favorite utensil? I do, and it didn't make the list. Ready? It's the fork. The art of the chopstick may be gracefully finesse-ful to behold when done properly, but if you haven't been trained in their use since a young age, you're going to look like a monkey. I feel like admitting I am hopeless with them and asking my waiter for a fork is far more respectful to the culture than fiddling around with a pair of sticks like I'm lost in the woods and failing really badly at making a compass.
That pizza place on Ella (I forget what it's called) is getting some serious respect for their tasty pizza and more than respectable selection of craft and local brews. If you're still pining for Late Night Pie, you're out of your mind.
Robb Walsh returned for a look at community barbecuing, particularly in the little community of Kenney. No lie, I still have a standing offer from Robb to come over and make Shameless Chef dishes for him. I should really do it one day out of the blue and ruin his entire evening.
There are some people in Europe all pissed off about "natural" wine. As with most wine stories, I can't figure out what the hell they're talking about, but maybe you can. I'm much more intrigued by cross-breeding beer and ice cream.
Finally, we've got good news for those of you with friends or family addicted to chain restaurants: their local, and therefore nearly always superior, facsimiles. This list reminds me how urgently I need to get the hell out of the suburbs. *sigh*
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