Posts Tagged ‘food’ |  

Must be that time of year.  I’ve received a number of emails asking me how to make the roast tomatoes I describe in Truck: A Love Story. It was tomatoes, fresh thyme, fresh marjoram, olive oil, sea salt, fresh ground pepper, slow roasting, and as much garlic as you like.  Separate the stock and the pulp.  Eat the garlic while standing at the stove.  The actual recipe can be found on page 92 of Tom Collichio’s Think Like a Chef, worth buying for the photographs alone.

Truth be told, the Collichio technique, while lovely and all (the garlic…roasted in the husk…I digress), is relatively time-consuming.  This year we’ve dealt with the tomato overload by making “Tomato Glut Sauce” from a recipe in Joan Gussow’s This Organic Life.  You can get through a monstrous bunch of tomatoes with this one, and the sauce is fine, fine.

Having held this opinion for decades, I will now speak: Pringles are salted on the wrong side.  You place one on your tongue like a tiny saddle and the salty part is against the roof of your mouth.  As delightful as these mysterious chips are (mysterious because they are less than 50% potato...!?!?), imagine the exponential flavor explosion if the salt and flavor crystals were actually facing tongue-ward.

Got hooked on Pringles early when Mom brought some home.  Mom was notoriously frugal (oatmeal in 25-pound bags) so it might seem counterintuitive that she would be purchasing packaged junk food, but I recall those early canisters (or perhaps the print ads) featured comic drawings showing the chips being punched out and baked in a science-fiction sort of way.  This suggests to me that they were probably offered at a low introductory rate.  Also, we lived in range of a test market, so we often got cut-rate deals on new food products.

One hesitates to always default to Wikipedia, but the Pringles entry is a quick, interesting read.

Anyway.  C’mon Procter & Gamble: flip those chips.