Tag: food

Ever had a New York Egg Cream?

On By StevenIn Life At Home, When I Was A Wee Person26 Comments

During NanoPoblano, November’s blogging challenge, I stumbled across a note that March 15th is National Egg Cream Day, and that got me thinking. My parents loved New York Egg Creams when I was growing up. I didn’t really know that much about the drink, but I remember my mom having them all the time when I was younger. I never enjoyed them when I was younger because I don’t really like seltzer water.

I should back up and explain Egg Creams. I realized when I started talking about New York or Brooklyn Egg Creams over the last few days that a lot of people don’t know about these, or have never had one. So let’s talk about the drink itself.

First of all, an Egg Cream contains neither egg nor cream. It’s a misnomer. There’s a lot of theories as to why this is, but most of them circle back to anecdotes from the early 1900s. This drink was historically most popular with Eastern European Jewish immigrants in the New York area. This totally fits with my parents- My father was a first-generation American, and my mother is a second-generation American. About a hundred years ago, we were all in the old country. But I digress. Back to the etymology of the egg cream!

One theory holds that someone was saying “echt keem” in Yiddish, which the Internet tells me is close to Yiddish for “pure sweetness,” and the name caught on. Another theory is that a guy named Boris Thomashefsky asked a New York soda jerk to make the Parisian drink “chocolate et creme,” and the correct pronunciation of the word was lost in translation. A third theory goes much simpler and just says that since grade A milk was used in the making, “chocolate A cream” was eventually shortened to “egg cream.” Nobody alive today really knows for sure why it’s called an egg cream, or who first made one.

A popular theory attributes the egg cream to a man named Louis Auster, a candy shop owner on the Lower East Side. The story goes that he made the first one by accident using a store-made chocolate syrup, and became instantly popular.

Historians are quick to point out that there was a popular drink made in the 1880s from chocolate syrup, cream, and raw eggs mixed into soda water. While that sounds positively disgusting to me, the theory goes that the version of the egg cream that we know today was a version served in poorer neighborhoods.

What it does contain is milk, seltzer water, and chocolate syrup. If you go hunting for Egg Cream recipes on the Internet, the vast majority of them will specifically point you toward either Bosco or Fox’s U-Bet Chocolate Syrup, and with good reason. In my opinion, Fox’s is thicker and more chocolatey than other brands. It contains real cocoa ever since it was introduced in 1900, and you can taste that clearly. Both of my parents loved Fox’s U-Bet, and I was happy to discover when I started looking at recipes that it’s still readily available.

It’s impossible to make a real New York Egg Cream at home. An actual egg cream is made at a soda fountain, and a big part of what makes the drink so delightful is the foamy head. You can get close mixing them at home, but it will never be quite as fizzy and ephemeral as the originals- because they used old-timey soda fountains, the drink would have to be enjoyed within a few minutes or it would go flat. (I wonder if one of those SodaStream doo-dads would work for this…)

That’s not to say that you certainly can’t give it a good try! While researching for this post, I found no less than eight different recipes for a New York/Brooklyn/Bronx Egg Cream. Most of the differences are about the percentages of the ingredients.

Here’s the recipe I used to try an egg cream:

• Fox’s U-Bet chocolate flavor syrup
• Cold whole milk or half-and-half
• Ice-cold club soda or seltzer water

How to make it: Pour 3 tablespoons of chocolate syrup and 1/4 cup of milk or half-and-half into a 16-ounce glass. While beating vigorously with a fork, slowly add club soda or seltzer until the glass is almost full. Add a straw and serve very cold.

I made some adjustments, of course. I don’t usually keep milk in the house because I can’t drink it without some discomfort, so I used oat milk. My seltzer water was refrigerated but hardly ice-cold. And of course, I didn’t measure a damn thing. I don’t know if I used three tablespoons of U-Bet, or if my milk-to-seltzer ratio was even close to right. I didn’t drink it with a straw. And I’m almost positive that my frothy head wasn’t nearly frothy enough.

I do know that it was pretty damn tasty, though. I think I get why my parents love these things.

Have you ever had a New York Egg Cream?

52/52! Achievement unlocked!

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My Prime Directives

On By StevenIn Miscellany20 Comments

Several of the other Nano Poblano participants this month have posted entries which led me to respond with comments about the set of rules that I have taken to calling my Prime Directives. Yes, that’s a nod to Star Trek, because of course it is.

Obviously I have to obey certain rules and customs to get along in this world, like wearing clothing to the grocery store and so forth. “Thou shalt not give people involuntary haircuts.” Aside from the basics, I don’t have a lot of rules though.

Being an adult with no real requirements on my time besides work and basic existence means I can pretty much do my own thing, and that means I get to set my own rules for getting along in life.

That’s where my Prime Directives come in.

This may not be a complete list- sometimes I add or remove directives on the fly, as they occur to me. I might also have forgotten something as I write this up.

For this precise moment in time, at least, and in no particular order, this is my list of Prime Directives.

Rule the first: Be kind.

This means exactly what it says. I try to be kind to other people, and I hope very much that when most people think of me, they think of me as a kind person.

Sometimes I’m bad at this one. Very few people in this world have seen me truly angry, but those who have seen my anger know that I can be a spiteful, vindictive, cruel bastard. I have Bruce Banner’s problem. It’s always there, the rage, right under the surface. I try to negate that as much as possible by choosing to be kind whenever possible.

It seems like the thing to do.

Rule the second: Never eat anything bigger than your head.

This one is lifted from a 1976 B. Kliban book I read when I was a kid. When I was little, it was funny to me, but as I got older, I realized it’s actually really, really good advice. I have stomach issues, and eating too much is a trigger for Very Bad Things to happen to my digestion. Plus I could make some earnest noises here about moderation being good for you, I guess.

Rule the third: Share the music.

Music is life. Music is very often the one thing that truly saves what’s left of my sanity – if I don’t listen to it for too long, I get cranky. It calms me, reduces my anxiety, helps me concentrate, and elates me.

If I had to choose, right now, between a life without delicious food or a life without music, I would say “sign me up for the cream of wheat, and then let’s go to a concert.”

It’s precisely because I love music this much that I believe it’s important to share it. When I was in high school, I made mix tapes. Later in life, I made mix CDs. Even now, sometimes I’ll put together mixes to share with people- the method changes over time, but the goal is always the same: “Let me play this amazing song for you! I hope you love it as much as I do!”

Music is life. Sharing the music means sharing life. It’s that simple.

Rule the fourth: Embrace your whimsy.

I am a silly, silly man, and don’t you forget it.

My second favorite thing to do with other people, right after sharing music, is to make them laugh. I’ve said on numerous occasions that my resting state is whimsy, and I think that’s basically true. If I am drained of my other emotions, and free of anger or ennui or despair, then what remains is just pure unbridled whimsy.

Leaning into my own whimsy helps me keep things light. Embracing my inner Muppet keeps me balanced.

Rule the fifth: Never wait longer than 70 minutes for a theme park ride.

This one is just good common sense for logistical planning. No ride is worth standing in line for more than an hour and ten minutes when you’re surrounded by the entire rest of the theme park. Especially when the entire ride only lasts five or six minutes. Just go do something else instead of waiting in line. You’ll definitely have more fun that way.

A Questionable Rule the sixth: Nothing good happens after 2 AM.

While I never heard this one articulated until I was watching “How I Met Your Mother,” it’s an often true statement. I can think of many, many times that I’ve stayed up late on the off chance that something cool would happen, only to have nothing happen, or worse, to have bad things happen instead.

I marked this one as “questionable” because I can think of a handful of times that I’ve had really cool stuff happen well after 2 am. Only a handful, though. Most of the time, it’s just better to go to sleep.

Everyone says you should get enough sleep, right?

Rule the seventh: Family is important.

I am fortunate to have a fairly close-knit family. My siblings and I get along really well, despite all the times they’ve tried to kill me. This extends to more than just that first ring of family, too. Just last week, I had lunch with my cousin because she’s not far away and I enjoy her company. It’s important to me to try to nourish those relationships when I can. Speaking of which- Happy Birthday, Older Brother! (Even though I’m positive you’ll never see this blog post.)

Obviously this Directive doesn’t work for everyone- I have loads of friends who don’t speak to their birth family or have disowned parents or siblings over long and sustained pain. That’s why this isn’t just limited to families of blood. Families of choice are important too.

The people you choose to thread through your life are another kind of family. I have friends all over the world, and many of them are, in my estimation, a type of family. There are people in Germany who are dear to me, and people in Orlando, and people in Long Beach, or in New Orleans, or in South Florida.

Family is important, whether you grew up with them or added them on later in life.

Do you have any Prime Directives of your own?

42/52 (and 21 of 30!)


The most boring decision I’ve made all year.

On By StevenIn Life At Home25 Comments

Since I arrived in Arlington, I’ve been trying to find the One True Grocery, and my search has been unfulfilled so far. I mentioned back on the first of November that I’ve been to a crazy number of different grocery stores since my arrival, and I still haven’t settled into a grocery routine here.

When I moved to Germany, I did some of my grocery shopping at the Globus near the office, but the vast majority was at the Kaufland a few minutes away from my apartment. Since I was walking to and from the grocery store there, I fell into the habit of only getting what I could carry. When I repatriated, I started grocery shopping with a car again and the amount of food that I bought was significantly larger. I have a tendency to overbuy, and it’s something I’ve mentioned before in this blog.

Here in Arlington, I’m somewhere between the two extremes. I’m not buying a lot of food, and that is in part because the grocery stores haven’t thrilled me yet. It’s really tough to top Publix. I’ve been to many different stores here so far, and these are my impressions so far:

  • Harris Teeter – I Teetered my Harris on my first day in Arlington, and I haven’t been back. The one I went to was a two-story affair with a very confusing layout. It looked to me like what might happen if MC Escher was really into neon and wanted very much to make a knockoff of Whole Foods. I have not yet been to a second Harris Teeter to see if a different location might suit me better.
  • Giant Food – I’ve been to two different Giants now. The first one was like a dirty, poorly stocked Winn Dixie where nineteen out of every twenty people completely ignored the directional arrows on the floor. The second one was a bit better, but I still had trouble finding everything I was looking for.
  • Safeway – I’ve been to three different local Safeways so far, and the closest location off Lee Highway is the one I’ve actually gone back to more than once. They have a decent selection, and their Zebra Cakes are always really fresh. (Snack standards are important.) I was thinking that they reminded me a lot of Albertsons, but then I found out while fact checking this post that they’re actually a subsidiary of Albertsons now, so that tracks.

I haven’t bothered to shop in Target, Trader Joes, or Whole Foods, even though they’re reasonably close. I haven’t even seen a Wal-Mart, even though there’s gotta be one nearby. And last but not least, everyone keeps telling me Wegman’s is great, but I haven’t felt like driving half an hour each way for groceries.

If even a single one of these stores carried absolutely everything I wanted, I would keep going back to that one over and over again, but some things are just incredibly difficult to find.

For example, my favorite pickles are Claussen, but they’re not carried anywhere locally except for Wal-Mart. I did try Vlasic again, and I immediately regretted that decision. They taste like turmeric and existential dread.

As an aside, when I couldn’t find Claussen in six different stores, I turned to the Internet for reassurance that they were still being sold, and I was treated to the most delightfully unlikely sentence I’ve ever seen online:

“The Federal Trade Commission blocked the proposed merger on the grounds that it would have severe anticompetitive effects, leading to a monopoly in the refrigerated-pickle market.”

So that’s where things stand with the Great Grocery Selection of 2020. They opened a Wegman’s in Tyson’s Corner this week, so maybe I’ll finally give that a try this weekend. Or maybe I’ll finally give in and just go the Instacart route. If you’ve read this post all the way to the end, then bless your heart! It’s definitely not my most interesting work. If you’ve read this far, you deserve a treat, like a cookie or a White Claw or something. Treat. Yo. Self!

Treat. Yo. Self.

Do you have a favorite grocery store?

27/52 (and 6 of 30!)

Nanopoblano and a brief update.

On By StevenIn Life At Home, The D-M-V20 Comments

Back at the start of the year, I said that I was going to try to do at least a post a week, thinking I should be able to come up with something bloggable that frequently without too much difficulty.

Then the pandemic happened, and most of the things that are interesting enough to talk about went away- travel, concerts, going outside a lot… each of these things vanished and I spent more than half of the year (so far) in my apartment, without anything interesting happening. The blog posts have fallen off as a result.

Enter Nanopoblano! Nanopoblano is “the Internet’s least-official November blog challenge.” Basically, it’s a bunch of people who commit to following one of several paths- some people will post every day for thirty days, some will commit to engaging with the other participants. The recommended way forward is “10 days of posts, 10 days of reading/commenting, and 10 days of sharing posts through any other platform.” I’m going to go my own way a bit and try to do the 30 posts in 30 days route. It might be the kick I need to make blogging a habit again. I might suck at this too, but I’m at least going to try.

Team Tiny Peppers, 2020!

Now that I’ve got the Team Tiny Peppers housekeeping out of the way, I can detail some of the myriad ways that I’ve been spending my time since I arrived via the Amtrak Auto Train in the last post. The last post which was nearly 90 days ago.

  • I’ve been setting up my apartment, more or less, once the movers brought my stuff. There are still lots of things to do.
  • I’ve been exploring my neighborhood.
  • I’ve updated my voter registration and been to the DMV.
  • I’ve been working a lot, naturally. I enjoy my job- it’s challenging and busymaking and really doesn’t require more comment than that.
  • I’ve been ordering a LOT of GrubHub- like too much. Seriously it’s so easy, which is very empowering for a wannabe agoraphobe.
  • I’ve explored a few local monuments and touristy things and taken lots of photos- I’ll make a post out of these because I’ve got pictures.
  • I had a houseguest for one weekend a while back when my longtime friend Lorrie visited. We went to some of the aforementioned local touristy things and even had lunch with another friend who went to high school with us.
  • I purchased and returned an uncomfortable, inadequate sofa. This is also going to get its own post because I have analysis, lessons learned, and – of course – photographs.
  • I’ve been to a crazy number of different grocery stores since my arrival because I still haven’t quite settled into a preferred grocery option. Long time readers will remember that I had the same problem with grocery shopping when I got to Germany. It’s really tough to top Publix. This is probably going to get its own post as well.
  • I’ve been having at least one meal out every week or so with one of my local friends, but I haven’t gotten to see everyone I know around here because some of my local people are skittish about going anywhere during a pandemic. I don’t blame them for being more cautious than I am, but I miss seeing them. I did have dinner once with my cousin but then got wildly side-tracked with things- I definitely need to share more meals with her now that we’re geographically close for a change.
  • I went to an actual concert in an actual venue with an actual live act and an actual audience. And it was actually weird.

And that’s pretty much it! I nearly traveled to Florida for a family thing, but did not. I’ve had lots of canceled events and trips, and it’s just been day in and day out of the same stuff, most of the time. There are seeds in the above list of longer posts that are going to be coming throughout the month, but this is where I’ll leave it for the moment.

See everyone back here tomorrow! Same Bat-time, same Bat-channel.

How have you all been for the last 90 days?

22/52 (and 1 of 30!)

The sixth stage is lunacy.

On By StevenIn Life At Home2 Comments

Happy Rex Manning Day, everyone!

I was supposed to be in Washington DC right now. I had the hotel and airfare booked. I was going to work from DC for the week, and hang out in various neighborhoods to see what the food options were like, and maybe go to a concert midweek. I was going to look at apartments, hang out with friends a little, and maybe even see my cousin.

I was hoping to see the cherry blossoms while I was there. Of course, the cherry blossoms hit peak bloom about two weeks earlier than normal, so that was a wash. And then there was a pandemic, and everything got cancelled. Everything was pushed off and postponed and scrubbed away.

I wanted to talk about how all my canceled plans have me feeling adrift in this post. I wanted to relate it to the Kübler-Ross stages of grief, but every time I tried to write it that way, it just felt forced. Contrived. Besides, Homer did it better anyway.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot. People close to me have lost family members to Covid-19. Others have lost their jobs as entertainment industry jobs shut down. I know that I’m incredibly fortunate to have employment that is unaffected by the pandemic, but I wrestle with these two notions:

Having all my concerts and trips be washed away like a sandcastle at high tide is incredibly depressing. I am incredibly bummed that all my plans have dissolved as concert venues close and travel becomes unsafe- but I simultaneously feel guilty about feeling bummed, because other people are facing harder losses. I’m sad about the stuff I don’t get to do, and I also feel terrible about being sad for the stuff I don’t get to do.

But enough of this navel-gazing- let’s talk about what I’ve been up to in order to pass the boundless time!

Firstly, an update on the data loss I wrote about in the previous post: I received the new NAS hardware at the end of last week, slapped the original drives into the new enclosure, powered it up, and… miracles occurred. Everything was still there.

I did some reconfiguration on the new hardware, ran a disk check, and started some proactive replacement of the older, smaller hard drives. I couldn’t have asked for a happier ending on what could have been a data-loss tragedy.

Secondly, I cut my own hair last week. Yes, really.

I have no idea when the hair places will reopen, and I was starting to feel desperate and fluffy. I discovered that one of the electric clipper thingies in my cabinet had a plastic spacer to keep it from being full buzz cut, and I set about trying to make myself look a little less like a Q-tip.

Luckily for me, my hair is pretty simple. I keep it short to begin with, so clippering out the sides did most of the work in making me look less fluffy. I tried to use the fingers-and-scissors thing that hair stylists do on the top of my head, and all I really succeeded in doing was scraping up my knuckles.

I can’t see the back, so I know it’s kind of a disaster. I suppose I could set up a complicated series of mirrors to retry the back, but I’m not quite that ambitious.

All in all, this could have come out so much worse.

Lastly, I tried a thing that I saw on BookFace, because it looked interesting, and I’m here to share my results with you all.

I started with a box of cornbread mix, some beef franks, and a muffin pan that had me wandering around the house singing, “Do you know the muffin pan? The muffin pan? The muffin pan!”

I used a box of “instant” cornbread mix. This is pretty simple stuff; it just needs eggs, milk, and butter.

My chosen meat was Hebrew National beef franks. There are several good options for the hot-dog part of these, but I’ve consistently enjoyed the flavor of Hebrew National.

Step one is to mix the eggs and butter. For what may be the first time ever, I have managed to melt butter in the microwave without a) having it spatter all over everything requiring a massive microwave cleaning, or b) breaking a glass because I misjudged how long to heat it.

I just want to take a moment to address the fact that my eggs and butter combined in some sort of mystical foodie sorcery to pretend they were an avocado.

And now I wonder if I could have managed to add avocado to this recipe…

The recipe called for milk, but I don’t keep actual milk around, so soy milk had to do. It worked fine though.

Pay no attention to the Pasta Boat in the background of this photo. It is NOT my most prized kitchen plastic. Shut up!

It was at this point in the cooking process that I remembered that landscape photos look better on the web than portrait photos do. OOPS!

It only took a few minutes of hand whisking to get the mixture ready to go. I don’t have a hand whisk. This is an electric mixer whisk attachment that I was just using by hand, because I am fancy.

A little PAM sprayed into the muffin pan (the muffin pan, the muffin pan) kept the mixture from sticking to the metal during cooking. They just popped right out after.

Based on the advice of a friend, I tried two hot dog delivery methods: upright and chopped.

During the cooking process, the upright ones did not stay upright. I don’t know if this is a failing of my dough or just gravity at work. Maybe I wasn’t chopping them at appropriate right angles.

The clear winner was the chopped hot dog muffins, because they delivered considerably more hot dog with every bite. All in all, I would call this entire experiment a delicious, delicious success.

What have you been doing to keep busy in quarantine?

15/52