Before we get into the food, don’t forget about the picture quiz and its fabulous prizes. I think I’ll close out the contest on Wednesday, and believe me, it’s still open to anyone.
After my mom came to visit I was left with a nostalgic hole in my heart that could only be filled with pickled herring.
At the HEB, if you buy three times as much, you get half off. This is because no one in their right mind would buy the large jar of pickled herring. Most of the time people buy a small jar of pickled herring out of a sense of cultural responsibility, put a couple slices in a dish as part of a Christmas party buffet, and then after the party put the slices back, put the jar back in the fridge and eventually, a decade or two later, when moving out of the house, throw the jar away.
So there I am, with a huge jar of fish that taste a lot like spongy sweet pickles (but not enough to actually pass as pickles), and I try to find new ways to prepare it. Here’s the pickled herring on toasted slices of French bread with goat cheese.
During a trip to the Phoenicia grocery, I bought this Italian sweet:
I thought the white bits were white chocolate, but it was actually more like nugat.
I also impulsively bought a 12-pack of the Brazilian guarana-flavored soda "Antarctica."
Supposedly guarana has huge levels of caffeine, but I haven’t noticed any caffeinated effects, in fact I tend to fall asleep an hour after a couple cans of this stuff.
I hear that some of you out there have been questioning just how tough I am. Well, I’ll have you know that I eat shark for breakfast.
Blacktip shark, technically. At HEB it was just about tilapia cheap. Here it is after an overnight garlic and olive oil marinade:
It tasted like merciless primordial killing machine. And garlic.
The best thing about the LBJ museum is the giftshop, which offers you the chance to buy space food, a cuisine synonymous with the LBJ administration.
The peanut butter space snack stick was apparently designed by NASA to satisfy astronaut urges to consume styrofoam.
The freeze-dried astronaut icecream is of course a classic. It has all the dry crunchiness that mundane icecream fails to achieve.
And then when it sits on your tongue, it makes that magical transubstantiation from dessicated powder to slimy, stale, pre-melted dairy solids and corn syrup.
Now that I’ve had astronaut icecream, I can let go of my childhood ambition to become an astronaut and focus my energy on becoming a firetruck.
