BBQ X-Plosion

Last night we went to Brand BBQ Market on Armitage, and it was really good. Miriam got a good brisket sandwich and I got a superb hamburger with cheesy mac & cheese sauce and "burnt ends," which are delicious pieces of fried brisket fat. The main event of the evening, however, was what Seth got: Brand BBQ's in-house food challenge sandwich, the Brandeurysm. It's a 1.5-foot long wide sub roll heaped with burnt ends, topped with a great deal of mac & cheese and more burnt ends and fried onions. It comes with cornbread, coleslaw, and kind of a lot of french fries, and if you eat it alone in an hour it's free. Otherwise, it costs $30.

Seth went very hard in eating his Brandeurysm, but in the end wisely decided to stop midway through, preventing certain misery and ensuring a supply of reheated barbecue for days to come. Unfortunately we did not take pictures, but the restaurant did and pledged to post them on their website. Also, I liveblogged the experience here.

To date, no one has eaten a Brandeurysm alone, and really I wish such an accomplishment on no one.

Bfast

This is what we ate for breakfast our first morning in SF:

--Rustic olive sourdough bread
--5 year aged cheddar cheese
--salami
--blood oranges.

This, to me, is the ideal traveler's breakfast. It is pretty cheap, lasts a big chunk of the day, and is much tastier than it costs. Also, in my imagination it's more or less what French people eat all the time.

The next day we had the same basic thing, except different cheese, bread, and cured meat. The oranges were the same, and we also had mini cupcakes for dessert.



This is us later, in the museum.

Ssnd Dried Squid 250

Just moments ago, I was in my kitchen eating some seasoned dried squid, when I began to ponder what I would call my food blog if I had one. Based on my working knowledge of corny food blog names, my first thought was "A few of my flavorite things," which was, surprisingly, unclaimed. So now I have a food blog. In addition to writing about haute cuisine, I'm going to frequently cover a more graceless corner of the food world that I and others choose to call "nutrient mush." This is a type of food usually prepared by students cooking a hurried meal for 5-10 housemates, or (in my case) by people who bike a lot and have physical jobs and limited time and need to make food that quickly supplies large amounts of carbohydrates and protein. Two prominent examples of this type of meal are Noodles & Yeast and Beans and Rice. I'll also write about nicer things that I eat.

At any rate, one thing I've been enjoying lately is Seasoned Dried Squid from Chicago Food Corp., a Korean supermarket near our house. It's strips of sweet, slightly spicy squid with sesame seeds, and I think it's supposed to be eaten as a garnish or companion to other things, but I just nibble on it. I really enjoy its chewy seafood texture, but it can become overwhelming when I put too much in my mouth at once.



Tomorrow I am leaving for the San Francisco Bay Area, where hopefully I'll eat a lot of great things to blog about upon my return. I won't be going to the renowned Chez Panisse, however, because I have a friend who was once photographing his roasted bone marrow with celery root there for his food blog when all of a sudden Alice Waters jumped out, grabbed his camera, and dropped it in some jus. Any other suggestions?