Condiment Experiment

What the heck do you put on a sweet potato french fry to make the damned thing edible? Let's find out!



Junk Food Jones Sweet Potato Fries Experiment from Scott Sullivan on Vimeo.

Santa For Sale

I don’t begrudge Santa Claus some endorsement deal income. He makes toys and gives them away. That’s just not a sustainable business model. Santa's choice of products to endorse kind of annoys me, though. 

Not Coca-Cola so much. The fat man in the red suit has been pushing Coke since the 1920s.

I don't really mind M&Ms either. 

Junk food just makes sense. We all know Santa loves him some cookies and sweet treats are a part of Christmas. It's the other stuff that kind of gets to me. Electric razors? Santa don't shave. Cars and motorcycles? Santa drives a sleigh. Jewelry? Santa shouldn't help prop up the evil diamond industry. Shame on him.

 

I bring all this up because I got one of the special Christmas Twix bars.

Santa not only let them shape the candy just like his famous face, he also allowed them to stamp their brand name right on his hat. Even if this is a candy endorsement that last bit feels like he's gone too far. 

How does it taste? Well, if you’ve ever eaten a Twix and thought, “This is pretty good but I wish it were thinner and looked like Santa Claus’ head,” then they’ve finally made a candy bar for you. Enjoy!

Treemageddon!

I keep seeing links to online articles about how people are all up in arms over Reese’s Peanut Butter Trees. They say they don’t look like trees, they look like blobs. It's gotten so ridiculous that Reese's has been issuing apologies. What?

First of all, as we discussed in these pages back at Halloween, all of the Reese’s special seasonal candy shapes are just blobs. Always have been. But maybe this year’s batch of trees is blobbier than normal. I took the bait and clicked on an article posted by a local television station (Fox 11 in Los Angeles).  According to this fine piece of journalism, “People are upset Reese’s Trees don’t actually look like trees.” That’s the headline. You can see it for yourself here.

But if you read the referenced tweets, people mostly just seem amused by the (lack of) tree shape and include hashtags like #ItsStillReeses and #StillEating.

It's the Starbucks Red Cup Controversy of this week. Almost no one is actually upset about the actual candy. It’s all just clickbait and internet hysteria.

Here’s one of the pictures of the offending candy that’s been tweeted.

Okay, I'll admit that’s a little blobbier than usual. So, purely in the interest of science, I went out and bought my second package of Reese’s Peanut Butter Trees of the season, cracked them open and took a look.

They’re exactly the same as the first package I had which were exactly the same as every Reese’s Peanut Butter Tree I’ve eaten since I discovered them ten or twelve years ago: A barely Christmas tree-shaped blob. In other words, they look exactly like they’re supposed to which is pretty much the way they’re depicted on the package. Check it out.

Can Reese’s please stop apologizing now? They have nothing to be sorry for. In fact, it’s the world who should apologize to them. Why Mr. Reese doesn’t have a Nobel Prize on his mantle for giving the world the gift of peanut butter encased chocolate wonder is beyond me.

So if you want an even better ratio of peanut butter to chocolate than the standard, year ‘round variety, eat the Reese’s Peanut Butter Trees while they’re here. If you want something that looks exactly like a real pine tree then go eat a pine tree. And if you want to trump up some fake controversy to get people to click on your website you don’t need me to tell you how to do that. You nailed it. I clicked and told other people to do it too. Well done. But I also ate extra peanut butter trees. Who’s laughing now?

Bough Measuring Contest

If you’re falling for the whole Reese’s Treemageddon, I thought I’d offer you an alternative: The Snickers Tree. It's much more tree-like than the Reese’s. See?

 

So if looks are your only candy criteria then Snickers wins (and I never want to take a long car trip with your crazy ass.) But if you care about taste, then let’s dig in. 

The results are pretty much the same as the Reese's vs. Snickers Candy Pumpkin Showdown in October. I like Reese's better than Snickers so ugly tree shape doesn't even enter into it. But even if you prefer a Snickers bar, I still think Reese's wins. The Reese's Peanut Butter Tree is like a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup only better. The Snickers Tree is like a Snicker's bar only worse. The peanut/caramel/nugat-to-chocolate ratio in the Snickers version is off. At least for me. Maybe you disagree. Which is fine. Don't take a long car trip with my crazy ass and leave all the Reese's Trees for me.

Poetic Gratitude

Nothing says Thanksgiving like an uncouth American attempt at Japanese traditional poetry so here's a little haiku I wrote about my favorite Thanksgiving junk food.

Cranberry jelly

Molded into tin can shape

I'm thankful for you

Happy Thanksgiving!

You know who's most thankful today? Deer. Because if you read Edward Winslow's account of the first Thanksgiving, he didn't mention turkey by name but he did say that the Pilgrims and the Indians ate venison. Lots and lots of venison. I don't know exactly how the fourth Thursday of November became the Great Turkey Massacre while deer got off scot-free but every buck and every doe certainly has something to be grateful for.

I don't want to talk turkey, though or any of the other kind of wholesome comfort foods traditionally associated with Thanksgiving. I want to talk about the junk food that really sets the holiday apart. I mean, you eat turkey all the time but cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie only come around once a year.

Without cranberry sauce Thanksgiving dinner is kind of beige and bland. You can make the stuff all fresh and fancy like some kind of relish but I prefer the jelly version that comes in a can. In fact it comes "as" a can. Cut open the top and plop it out on a plate and you've got a perfect can-shaped mold.

I know it don't look like much but the canned stuff kicks the stem-hole (can the stem-hole be considered  cranberry ass?) of that highfalutin' other kind. It's junk food holiday heaven.

And no Thanksgiving dinner is complete without a piece of pumpkin pie. The fact that something this delicious can be made out of a tasteless gourd proves that enough sugar and spice makes everything nice. Apparently, you can pie anything. And don't forget the whipped cream on top.

No, seriously, you have to use more than that.

There you go. Spray it on thick right out of a can just the way the good Lord intended.

I might be stuck 25-hundred miles away this holiday but home tastes just a little closer thanks to junk food.

Over the L.A. River and Through the Woods...

It turns out I’m not the only one trying to create Thanksgiving-centric junk food. The Southern California hot dog restaurant chain Dog Haus is offering a Turducken dog complete with Thanksgiving-ish trimings.

If you haven’t had the pleasure, turducken is a dish consisting of a chicken stuffed into a duck stuffed into a turkey. On the plus side, that’s like a magic trick. Someone should yell, “Ta da!” when it’s served and the napkins should be pulled in an endless chain from the waiter’s sleeve. On the negative side, though, the name “turducken” starts with the word “turd”. A food has to taste pretty good to overcome that.

Anyway, apparently plain old turkey wasn’t fancy enough for a company that calls themselves a “craft” hot dog stand on their very own website and named themselves “Dog Haus” because their limited time Thanksgiving hot dog features a sausage made from this Russian nesting dolls of a poultry dish.

To the bird-in-bird-in-bird mix Dog Haus added Thanksgiving table staples sweet potatoes and cranberries and blended it all up into a sausage. Then they put that sucker on a King’s Hawaiian roll and topped it with sage gravy, roasted Brussels sprout & bacon slaw and crispy fried onions then they served it with a side of sweet potato fries.

The Turducken dog is pretty good and it does taste something like Turkey Day. I loved the crispy onions, the sprout slaw was nice and the pops of sweet from the cranberry in the sausage were great. The biggest surprise for me, though, was the King’s Hawaiian Roll. Every hot dog should come on one of those.

So I sat outside on an 80 degree late November afternoon and ate a fancypants Turducken hot dog. Yep. That’s feels like an L.A. Thanksgiving to me.