Instead of plain, ol’ turkey for Thanksgiving, Danny and Claudine treated us to a gourmet turducken, procured from 4505 Meats. This franken-turducken was half turkey on one side and half chicken on the other, with duck sausage and cornbread stuffing in the middle. It arrived pre-cooked sous-vide, so all they had to do was stick it in the oven to heat it through. It was very tasty. Thanks to Claudine for the photos!
Update: This newspaper ad for Pepto-Bismol tickled me so much I had to take a photo of it. Suffice it to say the Turducken above did not require any Pepto.
I sometimes wondered what it was like for those of you who followed my dispatches from our travels over the last year. If they were even half as interesting as Terrie’s updates from her Peace Corps training in Ghana, I can rest easy. Access to Terrie’s blog is restricted to friends and family, but I wanted to share one small slice of life that made me smile:
My favorite meal so far, and maybe my new favorite food…fried red plantain with beans…it was like caramelized sweet potatoes that you scoop up with baked beans…amazing! It was so good it made me teary and homesick for Thanksgiving.
If you happened to catch the recent Duncan Hines “Bake On” commercial, you may have registered a subliminal cupcake crop circle that momentarily materialized before disappearing beneath a giant flying brownie. I’m not making this stuff up. The first time I saw it, my brain didn’t even realize that it had seen a QR Code until after the next commercial started—and by then I had no recollection of what that crazy kaleidoscopic, cupcake-tastic commercial was even advertising. Here are some screenshots from the trippy 30 second spot:
At first glance, it seemed utterly pointless—flashing a QR Code so fast no one even knows that they’ve seen, let alone has the time to pull out their smartphones. I imagined people on the edge of their couches with iPhones primed, eagerly anticipating that split second when the commercial inevitably airs again. Visions of Orphan Annie’s Secret Society decoder pin danced in my head.
And then I remembered all those DVRs out there. Now assuming folks are not already skipping the commercials, this is actually a pretty neat strategy to get people to stop and take note of an ad, albeit one with a pretty high technical barrier to entry.
So where does the QR Code go? Well, that depends. It encodes the URL http://dhbakeon.com/qr/code/1, which, if you scan (or click) using a desktop web browser, will redirect you to Duncan Hines’ Facebook page. But if you scan with your iPhone (a more likely scenario), you’ll get a little web-based mobile site with recipes and coupons, including some features that are “locked”, requiring you to “Scan more [cupcake?] QR codes” (leaving no brownie unturned, I’d imagine).
Texas pride can be a little over the top sometimes, so when I saw a steak in the shape of Texas on the side of an H-E-B semi-trailer the other day, I had to get a photo of it. I was driving at the time, so I asked Stephanie to snap these out the window for me (with her original iPhone). It was only after passing the truck that we realized the entire ad was a barbecue-rific recreation of the Texas Flag, complete with “lone star” tongs. Absolutely brilliant!
Parma started out as a whim. I mean, when people think about visiting Italy they usually think: Rome, Florence, Venice, Naples, Milan—not Parma. But while looking at the cities between Florence and France, I thought to myself, “Hey we like Parmesan and Prosciutto, let’s go to Parma!” At least I figured we’d get to taste some cheese.
In the end we spent four nights at the friendly, family-owned Camping Arizona, we visited each of the Musei del Cibo (the incredible, I-can’t-believe-they-actually-exist “Museums of Food”: Parmesan, Prosciutto, Salami, and Tomato) and we discovered something even better than prosciutto: culatello. Though we never ended up in the city of Parma itself, we fell in love with the countryside. And it’s where, I can say with confidence, that I finally started to feel comfortable driving with a stick-shift.
This is Parmesan country
The real gem of our trip to Parma was visiting C.P.L., a working caseificio, one of over 400 independent “cheese factories” within the Parmigiano-Reggiano Consortium. Each makes what we commonly refer to as Parmesan: the famous hard Italian cheese that comes in 40kg (88lbs) wheels and fractions thereof (not the stuff that comes in green cylinders labeled “Kraft”). (Update: I received word that C.P.L. was spared in the 2012 Emilia earthquake.)
A traditional copper kettle for making Parmesan cheese next to a modern one at the Museo del Parmigiano-Reggiano in SoragnaInside a Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese factory
