Nostalgia

A recipe that frequently gets revisited due to it;s simplicity and memory is called "Ms. O's Chicken." The recipe calls for a raw chicken breast to be covered in hot butter, and then dipped into crushed Rice Crispies cereal. The Crispies act as a breading agent, similar to Shake 'n Bake. It was a neighborhood recipe, created by Margaret Oleskiewicz.

Her son and I are the same age and went to the same school, so we frequently hung out. After a sleep over, Mrs. O made this unnamed chicken recipe for us. The topping was a mystery until we sat down at the kitchen table. Upon hearing it, I started to have some reservations about chicken and cereal combinations.

There was no time to turn back. My chair was already scooched, the utensils were laid out, and the sauces were out in full display. I was suppose to be picked up any minute by a parent, so any possible embarrassment or discomfort didn't have to last.

I didn't expect to fall in love.

I went overboard with it, and the mom's exchanged recipes. Even to this day, it's something that can be easily whipped up, and has since become a staple in housecooking.

As I've grown up, it's something I wish to get away from. Variations to the recipe have garnered bad to decent results so far. It's been hard to try to incorporate it into a larger meal with sides (corn on the cob works, greens are iffy, kabob potatoes work wonders) yet, my older brother still loves it. Either as is, or with ketchup or barbecue sauce makes him happy, but nothing else. I begin feeling disconnected at this point. I'm trying to hard to get him into more situations where he must eat a different food, yet he's complacent in my odd discovery from 10 years ago.

Review - Parmesan's Wood Stone Pizza

Parmesans Wood Grill is situated in an upper-class strip mall, connected to a rib joint and bar and surrounded by doctor's offices. The dinning room resembles a free-for-all. There are no booths. The tables are arranged and distanced in rows on a well-lit floor with beige tile. A counter wraps around the restaurants side, complete with register, dessert case, food for sale, dessert tray, decorative bread, and a modest bar. It is an Italian restaurant, as anyone could tell by the wall-paper runner of grapes and wine, accompanied with a small shelf running along the perimeter, decorated with old cooking instruments.

The lazy organization makes one feel as if they are all eating at different kids table for the same party, which is a shame because Parmesans' Italian cooking deserves loftier, more imaginative

decor.

Parmesan's opened in 2004 as a ma-and-pa operation. Its continued existence among several recently shuttered restaurants in Frankfort is owed to authenticity in both Italian cooking and ingredients. The bread and pesto are made daily, and both were offered while we waited for the main course. Their pesto, though tad more oily than others, covers everything with flavor while not overpowering. It's the strongest hint of taste without completely undoing the meal or bread it finds itself on.

The basics are handled deftly, allowing the more experimental options to flourish without being hindered by inferior ingredients. However, these combinations should not be attempted on a diet. Their exhaustive menu of 14 inch gourmet pizzas offer sinfully delicious combinations. On a visit with my family, I was able to sample a slice of antipasto pizza (12.95). The sheer flavor and weight of the slice made the heart burn worthwhile. On the healthier side, they offer eggplant parmesan and vegetable primavera pizzas.

In other vegetarian choices, I opted for the eggplant rotolini ($12.50). Not because I am vegetarian, but because the sign of a good chef can be determined by an eggplant's taste in an Italian dish. In previous experiences with eggplant parmesan, the taste starts to mimic meat and loses a minute sweet juiciness inherent to the vegetable. Parmesans nails it, with eggplant stuffed with ricotta, the cheese acting as a base flavor to the eggplant's expressiveness. The portions they serve guarantees leftovers to savor later.

The real star of Parmesans is the chef, Michael Papandrea, who seemingly handles orders personally. During our visit, a customer approached the counter and inquired about catering options. The girl working the counter went into the kitchen, and five seconds later, Papendrea burst out with a hand primed to shake. He wrote down the order personally, gave advice on how many trays they would actually need for the given head count, and when the customer said they didn't need it delivered, offered guidance on how to properly transport trays in the back of a car. He then went back into the kitchen, and resumed the role of unseen hero.

After eating a meal such a great meal, looking around the restaurant was jarring. The posters and statues from the J.C. Penney's kitchenware section still stared down, defying me to take it all seriously. It is one of the finest upper-middle class restaurants in the Southwest suburbs, but the environment denies itself pretension, and not for the sake of comfort, either. The waitstaff seems to be still in high school and without discernible uniform besides one mandated by the summer heat. The clientele ranged race and age, dressed for either the elegance and lawn care. The lack of unity was at first off-putting. Yet, to have such a terrific meal without pretension, compared to the countless restaurants that seem to only serve pretentiousness in the absence of competent cooking, Parmesans is a safe haven. It is a meal that should not be missed, nor easily forgotten for it's suburban community.

There was a dessert tray that looked absolutely amazing, filled with standard Italian treats done to visible perfection. Even after eating half of their large portions, it is difficult to turn down. We left with several Styrofoam containers, along with a 4 oz container of pesto and a loaf of bread.

Eating Inventory

The following are split up by days, "days" being defined as the time between I wake up and fall asleep.

Friday

12:30 PM - Coffee

1:00 -Breakfast sandwich, with egg, bacon and cheddar cheese on an English muffin. Homemade.

5:00 - Fuze health water

9:00 - 20 oz of water.

10:30 - Rather large salad. Greens, snap-peas, feta cheese, cherry tomatoes, chopped up onions, and slices of grilled chicken breast with Italian dressing.

12:00 AM - Throat soothing herbal tea

1:00 - Yoplait Cherry Fruit on the Bottom yogurt.

Saturday

10:00 PM - Fuze health water

3:20 - one pint of Two Brothers Bitter End Ale

4:00 - Goatcheeseburger at Hackney's, with fries.

4:30 - Half of a four-layer chocolate cake slice, ala mode.

8:00 - 2 AM - seven 16 oz cans of Miller High Life.

Sunday

3 PM - Coffee w/ whipped cream

4:00 - Nature's Valley bar.

6:00 - 12 oz Glass of water.

8:00 - Fajitas, homemade. Green and red peppers, grilled chicken, rice and caramelized onions on flour tortilla with low-fat ranch and mango and peach salsa.

9:30 - Blue Moon and a Coke.

12 AM - Glass of lemonade and vodka

Monday

12:30 PM - Coffee

2:00 - Faijita reheat.

4:00 -12 oz glass of water

8:00 - 6 large squares of pepperoni pizza, with Garlic Tobasco. Picked up by a local pizza place.

8:00 - 16 oz glass of Sailor Jerry Rum and Coke.

11:00 - Smirnoff Ice of some fruity variety (Raspberry something?)

12:00 AM - 16 oz can of High Life

2:00 - Reheated two slices of pizza w/ Fuze health water

Tuesday

12:00 PM- Coffee

3:00 - Reheated Fajita filling, mixed with large salad.

5:00 - Fuze bottle filled with water.

9:20 - Hot dog with mustard, onions, and tomatoes, with a Mountain Dew Pitch Black.

12:00 AM - A seventh of Doritos Bag.

Analysis

My food choices here come from a place of comfort, needing food but not wanting to actually work towards the food I eat. I'm powerless to conveinence. It seems as if I think the less time I spend with food, the better. The homecooked, ordered, and premade foods dominate my diet, though there are some anomalies between this weekend and my usual choices

The chocolate cake was because of a lady. Two classmates and I had gone to Hackney's after we spent the day at Printer's Row. I had mentioned to the female classmate how I don't usually order deserts at restaurants, but I was quickly swayed by seeing a nearby table's dessert. It was wonderful. It was a societal pressure, attempting to appease a girl I somewhat fancy. I also justified the consumption by A.) Not eating all day, and B.) Needing to pad my stomach for drinking later.

The Fuze drinks are new. My mom started buying them whenever they were on sale and never looked back. They're not bad, by any means. but all the nutrition is derived from artificial supplements. One 16.9 oz bottle has 45g of sugar. I could fill up a water bottle, even take some non-toxic Emergen-C with me if I wanted to spice it up, yet somehow the 10 seconds Fuze saves seem necessary.

Junk food is always eaten begrudgingly in an "eh screw it" mood towards eating. There was honestly entire cabinets and refrigerators of better food, yet I settled due to laziness. This inventory will give me some leverage to handle how my avoidance of creating and eating perferred food manifested itself.

Examining the Accidental Hedonist.

The Accidental Hedonist by Kate Hopkins

Format

The page is simplistic. White background. Black text. Ads and hyper-links cover the margins, which is quite distracting. Pictures are not posted with every written post, but Hopkins has a reoccurring "Food Porn" column that more than makes up for it. Articles can run from 500 to 2000 words.

Content

the articles fall under two different types. The writer either write upon her own experiences with food and dining, or analyzes/critiques found flawed food writing.

The food and dining articles may or may not be about the food being eaten. While there are a few actual food reviews to be found on AccidentalHedonist, her descriptions and stories associated with dining have fascinating interpretations of her surroundings. In the following snippet, she describes her experience at a diner:

These types of places just work. Many of the diners I have visited in my travels have a pulse about them, one that indicates some sort of progression. Whether that progression is a metaphor for life, or for working-American culture, I am not sure, though a case could be made for either. What I do know is that in these places, no one cares of your successes or failures. Pretense isn't just frowned upon at places like these, it's outright unknown. And rare is the diner that appreciates irony. Diners have cooks, not chefs, and waitresses, not servers.

The only mention of the Chicken Fried Steak she ate is when it was ordered and the picture opening the post.

The analysis articles included entries challenging a Slate.com piece bashing pie and another where a prominent food blog stated the best way to be a good food blogger was to "be a man." The writer uses the blog to challenge ideas and speak about food in a more metaphysical way. There is little concern for taste, instead attempting to understand sociological implications of dining, cooking and gender roles. In another post examining the genesis of the housewife, she writes a history lesson and speaks about the social and monetary necessity.

Intention & Tone

Hopkins does not sugarcoat her blog. She writes upon revelation or reviling, motivated upon new ideas on dining or the misconceptions and misconceptions in the food world. As such, there are articles where she writes on a professional level open her own experiences. They have a self-contained narrative and a tone that fluctuates between joking and ideas, her senses and surroundings usually driving the story. Her theory and argument articles have humor, but it becomes accusatory towards her object of scrutiny, becoming barbed. Words and sentence structure are at an 8th grade to Freshman level, with winding sentences and moderate use of underused words. Prosaic, comes to mind. Still, she is able to flip between very casual to straining sentences within a paragraph in order to introduce and define her points.

Theory

In her older posts, Hopkins addresses the fast food restaurants' change into food factories, the worker's rights at candy factories, and  Coca-Cola's response to obesity. She takes a social justice stance in her posts, arguing that a lot of the health problems of working class families come from the food that is most affordable to them, or whichever saves them the most money. This is entirely in line with Pierre Bourdieu's theory of the class restrictions and food.

Inaugural post!

Food writing and I didn't cross paths much. Instead of reading foor critiques, I grew up on parodies of food writing, hyperbolically describing Inside-Out Reese's and other mass-produced foods: "There are your sweet circles, nestled in their corrugated-wax-paper diapers, but they're light brown instead of dark brown, as though the colors of the world have not been adjusted properly, or you're looking through a visor as you explore an alien landscape. Already, you have been thrust into a new way of viewing the universe, and you haven't even taken a bite." I was never really good with serious approaches at food writing, worried that my senses would somehow be wrong, nowhere near worthy or applicable to others as a good review. This, coupled with the hesitations to write anything that could be judged made the idea of serious critique absolutely terrifying. Because of this, I ended up writing a review of the KFC Double Down. In it, the unholy concoction induced hallucinations and a Lovecraftian turn.

Food at the moment has become a hassle, which is terrible considering the survival perks of eating. A few times a week I make sure to prepare and eat a fantastic meal. Usually salads or grilled chicken breast based. Beyond that, I eat food as it comes to me from my surroundings. I'm at the mercy of my mom worried about my paper-like thinness and my friends' suggestions to grab some fast food. It gets to the point where I eat just so I have something in my stomach, and padding is by no ways a means of enjoyment. It all sounds complex but it's pretty simple: I'll eat what's there.

As a kid I was always an adventurous eater, if not just to show up my brother's penchant for pizza or anything with ketchup (no tomatoes.) Once I had to make my own meals, I lost said adventure. I had to analyze how hungry I was with the dangerousness of the adventure, if I even had time for such analysis and didn't nuke some sort of Lean Cuisine.* My food habits went along with my stress levels, and I remember the supreme satisfaction I would get by making a meal. Even spaghetti was an adventure once I figured how to microwave the vodka sauce and chicken in a coffee mug and then mix it with just-strained spaghetti. I understand the allure, the enigma of the perfect recipe, yet most of my good experience with cooking came from trying to make anything work out of the miscellaneous foods that were days away from expiring.

The aforementioned scavenge for fresh food tells much about my own identity, not having the foresight to have ingredients for old stand-bys, but also not having the money to live surrounded with possible recipes. The choice of food defines comfort. The dish that's made by the family the first day back from college is a loaded plate, most likely picked out for its understanding as the supreme comfort food. That said comfort food is defined by the socio-economical status of the family, their region, religion, countless  factors that all manifest into a plate. It also comes down to the person at that moment, if what they're eating is something they went out of their way for, or is it something like the McDonalds dollar menu shame burger, bought out of convenience for stomach padding's sake.**

One of the biggest comfort foods is pizza, just for it's sheer prominence, simplicity, and taste, but like a friend who always has an extra cigarette for you even though you've said you're trying to quit, the ease of access becomes terrifying when it goes unchecked. After my dad died and the community food supply had started running low, the scrounging of pizza coupons started, as even the simplest recipes miffed us in our shellshock. We started picking up pizza setups from a local Italian deli and food store, something we use to do when I was a kid, and a burst of creativity happened over the next few days. The relatively basic barbecue chicken pizza had suddenly needed caramelized onions and a mix of barbecue sauces with some of our own seasonings. In three weeks, we found out how to grill using pizza stones, and our communal attention to taste meant fine-tuning how my mom's caprese salad could make the leap onto flattened dough. We got it down to a point where we could have people over and cook 10 pizzas over the course of an hour and a half, a night of too many pizzas, ending with S'more. It filled up a hole in hearts of the family members, though not a pizza shaped hole, lest our hearts looked like Pac-Men. If I were to break this down, I'm sure most of it has to deal with the agency of pizza to rebuild emotional and social autonomy, personal strength through mastery and the like.

Conversely, I had an argument over guacamole. Not that I hate guacamole, as tried I explained to the offended friend of a friend who made the dip, but I usually only eat it when it comes with as part of a meal. Liquor played a factor in his response. What should have been nothing escalated into the supposed vendetta I had over a man's guacamole. Sides were taken. I thought people were joking. I think I was the only person that remembered it the next day.

*Nuke should only be used when describing microwavable dinners. It describes the cooking and the body trying to process it.

** I will not lie, after the first class I had the dollar shame burger and the dollar shame chicken. I always save the shame chicken for last, and I've met other people who do the same. It's my auxiliary goal of the class to figure out why.