Put it On A Hot Dog (I just cringed typing that)

Welcome to the most obnoxious and indulgent thing I have ever written/probably should be a Buzzfeed list/avert your eyes now.

Whenever I get a hot dog, I have this compulsion to gather everything in the vicinity to dress my dog. Whether it be the contents of my fridge (every vegetable, pickle, cured meat, snack food, condiment, and cheese) or the entire condiment bar at Costco (HELLO ketchup AND mustard, onions, relish, AND sauerkraut) my approach to the hot dog can be, at times, blasphemous and hedonistic. If a Chicago dog is also called a "dragged through the Garden" dog, you can call my hot dog a "dragged through every dumpster and alley in New York" dog. To the people who hold strong that the only sauce for a hot dog is mustard -- I'm holding up my bastard-dog where my middle finger should be (so essentially, I'm making a fist and holding up a hot dog and it's making a huge mess everywhere, oh god).

Here are some toppings that would go great on a hot dog.

Disclaimer: Author usually eat hot dogs in fits of stress, desperate hunger/anger. I have never eaten any of these hot dogs. Yet.

1. Spaghetti Bolognese - This is the best method if you want to go about insulting an Italian chef. Ohio already did the heavy lifting with their Cincinatti chili that goes on a hot dog or spaghetti. The next best, most lecherous thing is putting a tomato beef and red wine sauce that's been simmering for 12 hours onto a pile of spaghetti which is sitting on top of a hot dog in a bun.

2. Nachos - The danger here is the possibility of stabbing yourself mid-bite with a pointy chip.

3. A hash brown, egg, and cheese, ketchup - The other day, I picked up a beautiful glossy bun with a ketchupped, cheesy hash brown baked into the center from a Korean Bakery. It's about 3/4 the amount of calories you should eat in a day so be prepared to make some sacrifices because it's worth it. With a hot dog in it, I think it's a day's worth of calories. So, um, sorry.

4. Falafel and fixings - I made this connection when thinking about  my parents' recent love affair with falafel and how I can soil it. My parents made a lot of falafel last week and it was delicious; everyone whose door they knocked on and served it to said so while they watched them eat it! They even talked about opening up a shop at the beach! If I'm still half unemployed by summer, I just might sneak into ol' mom n' pop's new establishment and start serving under the counter hot dogs topped with their homemade falafel. You'll never ground me again!!!!!!!

5. Salad - I'm specifically thinking either a Caesar salad, Cobb, or taco salad would go great on a hot dog. It would give the hot dog a deceiving lightness and good texture contrast or a statement equally full of shit. I just had another terrible/brilliant idea. Som tum (papaya salad). Thai people are really into hot dogs. Whether they're folding them into a pizza crust, eating it in soup, or just spearing it with a stick and selling it on the street, they are everywhere in Thailand. I wonder what my mother would say... (Probably the same thing she said when she watched me eat two Hostess snowballs: "What is wrong with you?" In my defense I had been experimenting with a recreational plant medicine herb thing, uh, I WENT TO A COLLEGE.)

Kind of tired and out of sorts today. I decided to visit home for a long weekend to hang out with mom.

Spent a long time trying to decide on a writing prompt and ended up being inspired by "Mady's Recipe of Me" from the blog Take My Word For It! Food Writing For Kids.

Here's Mady's poem.

Mady’s Recipe of Me

            1 piece of rock salt which means your life is full of flavor

            3 dill pickles which mean everything to me

            1 oxilion olive which I love

            Cheese!!!!!

            15 lemons

            75 cups of Judaism

            100 lbs of little

            2,000,000,000,000,000 cups of happiness

Here's my own poem, inspired by Mady:

Samantha's Recipe of Me

- 1 teaspoon loud laugh my mother told me I'd get stuck with if I kept making fun of people who laughed like that
- 1 cup she was right
- 2 cups inappropriate public and semi-secret eating
- 1 tablespoon bad temper
- 1 teaspoon oh my god there's a stinkbug crawling down my blinds right now I thought the cold killed them all??? I'm too "busy" to remove him
- 2 cups inconvenient bladder
- 3 cups sorry,  I was watching that bug climb up a string
- a dash of I don't know how to braid
- 1 teaspoon you better not be in my box of records, bug
- 1 cup I just found my old Jay Reatard shirt I was wondering where that went!
- 1 cup I won't let myself pee until I finish this post

Okay, I have to pee now.

Name 3 foods you'd hate to live without.

1. Tacos - I had this big revelation when I spent a semester of my college years in Los Angeles: I could eat tacos every day, forever. But ever since I lived in Los Angeles, I have been hungry. In New York, tacos that compare don't park nightly in my local grocery store's parking lot. Sure, there are tacos around me, but usually not the ones I crave. The ones filled with crispy stomach, ear, cheek, brain, chicharron, tongue... Carnitas don't cut it anymore. And if there's no radishes on the side? I can't take it! I've got a full blown taco problem. The only thing that can cure it in this city is when summer rolls around and all the taco trucks set up shop on the weekend at the Red Hook Soccer Field. (That link there says that the taco trucks signed a six year lease and last year was when it ended???? This is a serious loss and I hope, not true. If it is, there's always Sunset Park...)

2. Pizza - Growing up my parents made homemade pizza with my brother and I on occasion, for a birthday party or a play date. We'd order delivery pizza like the doughey, premade, gluey thing from Papa John's, more than we made homemade pizza. I think growing up, that's the reason why I wasn't super excited about pizza like every other white kid on my block. The first time I remember actually craving pizza was in college (of course every craving I've ever had goes back to college). I lived above an Italian brick oven pizza place that would put stuff like potatoes, pancetta, salami, rosemary, gorgonzola, and arugula on their pizza. I was poor and the pizza was expensive for my student salary. but that was usually how I rewarded myself. Finished a paper? Order a large cheese pizza topped with crispy salami. Eat half of it one night, the rest for breakfast. Long weekend? Pick up some blueberry yum yum, roll it, invite over my best girl, and order a white pizza with pancetta, potatoes, gorgonzola and rosemary. Shittttt.

Last year, I got really into making skillet pizzas with my boyfriend, Brad. It's a super decadent cheap and speedy meal. My favorite is a re-creation of this pizza from Piccolo's in Newtown, PA where Brad is from. Get a can of whole San Marzano whole peeled tomatoes. Squish 'em up in a bowl. Start with a little garlic in a pan until it's fragrant, not brown. Then add your squished tomatoes and a couple tablespoons of sugar, a pinch of salt. You want the sauce to be sweet. Simmer for 10-15 minutes until the oil in the pan turns orange. Add some whole fresh basil leaves, let them wilt and stir them in. Crisp up your dough for a few minutes on your pizza stone. Take it out, turn the crispy side up, pour that shit all over your pizza. Add some slices of mozzarella and pop it in the oven. It's done when it looks done.

For the record, my dad makes bomb pizza now. He's really awesome at making the dough ever since he started hanging out with the guys at the pizza shop next to his work on his breaks.

3. Sushi - It's rare that I get to eat something that I think actually qualify as sushi. I know that is like the worst, most snobby thing a person could ever say but I really mean it. I don't count rolls as true sushi. In Brooklyn, I order sushi rolls a lot, and a lot of the time (also horrible) I don't trust the fish I'm eating. I make sushi rolls at home too. I take care in where I buy my fish from. But it's still not real sushi. I do it to satisfy a craving that I can't actually afford. To me, real sushi you can't take out. The temperature has to be controlled, you have to eat it right there. A chef who knows his fish and knows exactly how to slice the fish, how to cook and prepare the rice, has to make the sushi. I think that's the main reason I look forward to eating sushi. Eating it is like a special ceremony. Oh, and I've never had seafood that tasted as amazing as it does at a sushi bar.

--

This list is hilarious to me because at a glance this list looks like some little 10 year old was like, "Okay, my favorite foods are... those hard shell tacos with cheese and ground beef -- NO LETTUCE!!!!! Pepperoni pizza from Pizza Hut, and california rolls."

What foods will you never develop an acquired taste for?

I used to pretend I liked brussel sprouts. As a kid, I'd eat them leaf by leaf, as if I were tossing a tiny salad. The process of dissecting every sprout took a lot longer than it would to actually eat a brussel sprout. That alone should have been a sign that eating brussel sprouts wasn't a priority for me. I couldn't even bear to eat asparagus, so why did I go through the trouble of feigning interest in a vegetable that looks like a cabbage's constipated poops anyway? I like asparagus now but it once tasted to me the way it makes your pee smell. I'd run to the bathroom to spit it out after being force fed (figuratively) it by my awful (love you guys) parents.

Recently, I went out to dinner with my boyfriend and there was a special on the menu: caramelized spicy brussel sprouts. It was a dish I had read about, that I have heard people rave about, that my boyfriend wanted to try. Let me end this pointless and anticlimactic story by saying yes, I was underwhelmed. Uninterested even. I tried. Boyfriend was really into them though. This from the person who said the shrimp wonton soup from Noodle Village smelled like cat pee.

I use a lot of potty talk for someone so intent on keeping a food diary. I guess I am leaving you with this: everybody has different taste buds! Now I will end with a cloyingly cute phrase: Everybody has different taste buds. When it comes to brussel sprouts, count me out! I'll eat a chicken heart any day!

End scene.

10 Favorite Flavors

I like multidimensional flavors. Like, taking a bite of stinky cheese and then a raspberry. Coconut ice cream and a dark stout. Sausage and apples. Laab.

Here are my 10 favorite flavors:

1. Salty-sour - I feel like from everything I’ve heard about pregnancy, I have been pregnant before. Like in a past life. Or something. Not like I was pregnant in my sleep and ugh, this has taken a dark, unintentional turn.

I get intense cravings for pickles and could eat an entire jar in one sitting if I truly let myself be myself (a monster). Salt and vinegar chips were something my mom craved when she was pregnant. Perhaps I acquired my taste for those in the womb. She also ate spicy things because she is a spicy woman and she said I kicked her, as a fetus. I like spicy things. I’ve never kicked my mother.

2. Salty-sweet - Alida at The Frenemy wrote about brunch, “ I spend a lot of time battling the Braveheart war of whether I want sweet or savory Sunday eatings and because I’m wearing Spanxx, I feel super slim and feel like I can have both. I would anyway.” That is sooo spot on for me. Why make decisions when taking a bite of something savory and then sweet or vice versa is the most indulgent/genius eating technique ever??? But also, I can’t eat a lot of sweets. I can’t and I don’t enjoy it as much as pickles. I feel sick when I try to eat a full plate of a belgian waffle or sweet pancake.

I tell everyone this story and I don’t know why because it’s not a flattering story about myself nor a significant one and I can’t remember in what context I would think to bring this up -- but one time in the third grade my mom packed me a salami sandwich and twinkies for lunch (this was a one time thing -- she usually packed very well balanced, healthy lunches, much to my dismay). I ate everything. Then I went to the bathroom and threw up (again, not a regular thing for me). My friend asked me what was wrong and I told her that I have a sensitive stomach. Huh.

3. Wait, how can I list 10 flavors? I didnt even know that many existed?

4. Sour - the exterior of a Warhead candy (spit that shit out before it gets sweet. yuck). Sour Belgian beer. Tequila chased with a lime. Anything that makes the front of your brain tingle.

5. Kisses - hahahahahhahaa

6. Stinky - People call this “umami” but I feel like a douchey culture reappropriating bag when I say that. It’s where fish sauce and pussy meet. Or it’s just fish sauce. Or like, sherry. No wonder old men dig it. Cheers. It’s fucking good and weirdly sexual. Like scratching yourself and smelling it. I know you fucking do it.

7. Wow I’m already at number 7?? Fat - This is the worst. By worst I mean best and I feel like Paula Deen over here because I keep a jar of pork/beef/heart fat in my fridge and I spoon some of it into my hash, or butter my pasta with it. It makes things rich and meaty. Then I wonder if I’ll have to start taking those cholesterol pills my parents take 20 years early. Basting your meat in butter is the only way to pan fry it. Seriously.

8. Meat - The other day I made bolognese sauce with my friends Ross and Megan and we deglazed the pan with some red wine and then added the tomatoes. The result was a much meatier taste. -- and, aside: the recipe called for no salt. I have never seen that before. I guess what I’m saying is, I’m not necessarily talking about just biting into meat. I’m referring more to a meaty essence that gets in things that gives your food a richer, earthier flavor. Like licking a cow.

9. Honey - I could say sweet but I don’t mean sweet as a favorite flavor. Tasting “raw” honey or honey straight from a honey comb is something completely else. It’s like if flowers were candy.

10. Garlic - Korean people have this dish where they wrap some barbecued meat up in lettuce and just grab a clove of garlic and eat it all together and it is so awesome. I’ve never wanted to just eat a clove of garlic but when I saw this laid out with the rest of the banchan, I was on board.

Another anecdote about garlic: My grandma made mjadra like I have NEVER seen it before. Everytime I try to look up a recipe for it, it is not like hers at all. She makes hers into a thick, grey, disgusting looking, goopy gruel. It looks disgusting but it's delicious. I don’t know why that boggles me so much, but it does, because her’s was the best. You could have it cold or hot. Plain, with pita, or on white bread. In all the recipes I’ve seen for it, I have never seen garlic listed as an ingredient but she put in a ton. I tried to make it like hers in college and added a whole garlic. The whole thing. And I still couldn’t get it to taste like garlic inside that thick porridge. Years later, I’d find out the secret was smushing the garlic in a mortar and pestle to get all the garlic juices and oils out.

Okay, I sort of cheated a little but that’s 10 so suck it, losers.