Tasty Hand Turkey!

For a holiday that’s all about eating, Thanksgiving sure doesn’t get much junk food to call its own. In an effort to change that I’ve already cobbled together my own Reese’s Thanksgiving Turkey. Now let’s do a candy version of that perennial grade school craft favorite, the hand turkey!

Just grab some Fun Dip and/or some War Heads Sour Dippers and a piece of candy corn and you’re ready to go.

Wet each of your fingers, dip them in the assorted powdered candy, bite off the end of a piece of candy corn to make a beak and stick that onto your thumb. Done.

Festive! Or insane. It could be insane. Either way, it’s Thanksgiving-specific junk food. That’s more than Big Candy is giving you.

Also, it turns out that War Heads Sour Dippers are pretty damned sour, especially after candy corn. Proceed at your own risk.

Ice Cream Sandwich Upgrade

Ever since John Montagu, the Earl of Sandwich, told a peon, “Bring me some meat between two pieces of bread so that I may eat while I continue to play cribbage or whist whatever old-timey card game I’m playing right now,” the “sandwich” has been a popular mealtime choice. But in the same way that slicing bread was surpassed by sliced bread, the traditional sandwich was made forever better when it morphed into the dessert sandwich. The ice cream sandwich. Man, those things are tasty. But it turns out that they can be even better.

I don’t know what mad genius first realized that you can make an ice cream sandwich out of a Pop Tart but that guy deserves some kind of a prize. I learned about this ice cream sandwich upgrade from my friend Jeremy to whom I will be eternally grateful.

Step One: Get some ice cream and some Pop Tarts. I prefer vanilla ice cream and Strawberry Pop Tarts but since I’d just bought a box of the seasonal Pumpkin Pie kind to give them a try (they’re okay I guess but they just made me want a regular Pop Tart and a piece of actual pumpkin pie) I went with what I had in the cabinet.

Step Two: Cut the Pop Tart in half. (Or just use two whole Pop Tarts like a real man.)

Step Three: Plop a scoop of ice cream on a half of Pop Tart.

Step Four: Drop the other half on top and enjoy!

I think even that snooty dandy The Earl of Sandwich would have approved.

It's Alive!

I just discovered that the Reese’s Peanut Butter Christmas Trees and Reese’s Christmas Bells are in stores! You know that made me dance a little dance and sing a little song. At first. Then I stopped dancing and singing, and not just because the people in the Ralph’s candy isle were staring at me. It was also because I realized that Reese’s is completely ignoring one of the best junk food holidays around: Thanksgiving. Why no chocolate-peanut butter turkeys, y’all? That ain’t right. How can I go straight to Christmas candy knowing that Turkey Day is being snubbed? So I decided to do something about it. I made my own damned turkey. Suck on that, Reese’s!

You can do it too! Grab yourself some of those trees and bells and also a bag of Reese’s Peanut Butter Ghosts, a Reese’s Peanut Butter Pumpkin and a sack of candy corn off the leftover Halloween candy discount shelf and get ready for some tasty arts and crafts.

It’s quick and easy. Just use a peanut butter pumpkin as the body, cut off a hunk of tree to make the fan of tail feathers, decapitate a ghost and there's your turkey head, shove the top of a piece of candy corn in it to make a beak, cram all that together then stick it on a Reese’s Peanut Butter Christmas Bell which serves as the feet. There you go! It’s a delicious Reese’s Peanut Butter Turkey!

I may have too much free time. 

How to Pronounce "Louisville"

Here's a simple (and junk food-centric) way to pronounce "Louisville" like a Kentucky native.

Say "Louisville" from Scott Sullivan on Vimeo.

Shiver Me Timbers

What the hell happened to Long John Silver’s? When I was a kid the place looked like a pirate ship. It was all rustic wood and stuff with nets, harpoons and cutlasses on the walls. Now it looks like this:

And this:

I know businesses have to keep up with the times and I’m not privy to the market studies and whatnot that led to the changes so I guess (as usual) my opinion doesn’t count for all that much but when I was a kid going to Long John Silver’s meant eating fish & chips in something that felt kind of like a theme park (or at the very least a Renaissance festival.) That’s all gone now, replaced by crap like this:

I get the feeling that they changed it because someone thought all that pirate stuff was a little too intense for the family crowd. But eating greasy fast food in an environment filled with jolly rogers and replica weapons didn’t hurt me. It entertained me. The old Long John Silver’s décor was fun and unique. Now it’s milquetoast.

I’m not going to go off on a rant about the nanny state and how we’re raising a generation of perpetual babies but I will leave you with this: Here’s what the paper give-a-way pirate hats used to look like.

Now they look like this:

Someone should be made to walk the plank.

Fish & Chips & Stuff

I’d been eating fish & chips all my life before I really ate fish & chips.

As a kid I assumed that the dish had been invented by Long John Silver when his pirating days were over and he retired to America to open a chain of fast food restaurants from coast to coast.

(That guy might have been a dirty pirate who loved to loot and pillage but if he could invent food this good he couldn’t have been all bad. Besides, Long John had clearly paid for his sins. Check out that eye patch, peg leg and hook hand. Not to mention the fact that he’s saddled with the burden of parrot ownership. Those birds are filthy squawking jerks who live forever.) I didn’t learn until later that the combination of deep fried cod or halibut and chipped potatoes goes back 150 years or more in Britain.

Fast forward a few year more years. I was doing my stand-up act at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland when my wife and I discovered a little chip shop near my venue. It might have been the post-show euphoria talking but the authentic fish & chips I got that night was one of the best meals I’d ever had. Wrapped up to go in a piece of newspaper and eaten on the street, the fries and the fish had to pretty much be consumed as a combination in the same bite. And I’d covered the whole thing in something called “brown sauce,” a tangy condiment akin to U.S. steak sauce that turned out to be amazing. I’d always used ketchup on my fast food fish & chips but brown sauce was better and bites composed of fish & chips & sauce were perfect.  And it pretty much ruined Long John Silvers for me for a good long while. I missed the real thing. I missed that damned brown sauce.

I still haven’t been back to the UK but I have found something a little closer to home. Turns out there’s an authentic British chip shop run by an authentic Brit called Mac’s in Santa Barbara, California. They make the real deal and they serve it with brown sauce. Was it as good as I remembered? Nothing’s going to compare to the magic of walking through the Edinburgh streets at night having just killed at the biggest performing arts festival in the world eating that combination of food. But Mac’s came close. It really did. I highly recommend it.

Can't talk… Eating 

Conditunity

I love condiments. For me, some foods sometimes just serve as condiment delivery systems. Knowing that, it probably comes as no surprise that I have strong feelings about which condiments go with what. For example (absent brown sauce) I like ketchup on both my fish and my chips. Nothing else will do. I enjoy tarter sauce but with the fish (literally) covered that left tarter sauce a condiment (figuratively) without a country. Until I solved it. Put that stuff on a hush puppy!

Seriously. It’s just makes sense. You can’t ketchup them. Hush puppies are already sweet enough. Ketchup is overload. And eating hush puppies plain is a waste of a good condiment opportunity (or a “conditunity”) so try it. Maybe together we can make it a thing. Eating tarter sauce on hush puppies, I mean. “Conditunity” should never be a thing.