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photo credit: FLOODkOFF

I’ve taken a slight detour from California, the sunshine state, to Michigan, the mediocre state. A land so savage and backwards they actually experience seasons. And here the beginning of summer is signaled by Memorial Day, about two weeks before the summer solstice signals the middle of summer. Poor suckers.

So in this weeks edition of the trough we’ve got a whole section of summer drinks, grilling debates and unique ways to violate a chicken carcass all in celebration of summer.

• First, Lifehacker brings us a great resource page on becoming a Memorial Day Grill Master. If you can’t grill after all this you might as well become a freegan.
• Serious Eats brings some expert metal to the age old debate, Chunk vs. Briquette Charcoal.
• Summer is the time for an obscene amount of two things, overcrowded, tacky weddings and ice cream. The Leftover Queen brought us both, but I’m more interested in her Papaya-Mango Ice Cream.
• I’ve often wondered how I could further humiliate an animal after it was killed but before I actually ate it. Serious Eats finally gives me what I want. I think the chicken likes it myself.
• “The goal of Beer Suggest is to provide the most informative beer site on the net.” What more need be said about summer’s official adult beverage.
• If you’re looking for a less adult beverage, Tip Nut has a great Home Made Lemonade recipe. Although instead of using lemon rind I suggest using lemon zest, but then again I’m not a fucking heathen.

photo credit: aJ GAZMEN - GucciBeaR

A phrase that’s been thrown around a lot recently is:

Eat food. Not to Much. Mostly Plants.

And there’s certainly nothing incorrect about it, but it’s so alien to the way we eat in America I don’t know how anyone could apply it. We not only eat a huge amount of meat, but we don’t even realize what else there is to eat. We define our meals by what meat we’re eating; Steaks, hamburger, etc.

And as for eating food, that ship has sailed. We eat things that are processed into generic blocks of transportable organic matter then processed again to replicate the taste, texture and shape of food. But we don’t even know where to start with eating actual food. So I’m picking a place to start and throwing down the gauntlet

We start with a definition, what is food? Food, as we’ve come to know it in the western world, is a composition of 4 different groups:

1. Meat. Good old meat. We eat more of it then we should, but there’s no getting around the fact that it’s the most nutrient (and calorie) dense category of food available. I certainly don’t suggest getting rid of it, but if you’re eating more than 4 ounces it really should be a special occasion.
2. Fruits and Vegetables. Nothing revolutionary here. Too often we relegate these to side dish simply because we don’t have the skills to make them as tasty and desirable as meat. That’s something we have to fix.
3. Herbs and Spices. Basically, anything eaten for taste and not calories or nutrients. Again it’s something we are woefully inadequate at using. And considering our ancestors enslaved whole continents just to get a hold of some of these spices, I think maybe we should pay a little more attention.
4. Staples. Staples are building blocks of any meal. If dinner were a cathedral the staples would be the…building blocks of the cathedral. One of the things that always makes me laugh is how cheap staples are in America even when we don’t know how to use them. Do you know that you can make pancake mix for about 25 cents, the same mix you’d pay $3 a box for at the store? Mastering staples will save us huge amounts of money (especially as global prices for them rise) and are the gateway to eating actual food.

So over the next few weeks I’ll be talking about each of these in turn. How we can better acquaint ourselves with each, how we can master them and create real food. So many of us are used to eating frozen mini-hamburgers we heat up with a microwave we’ve forgotten what actual food tastes like. We’ve forgotten how much better our lives can be when we eat it and make it ourselves.

This post is the beginning of remembering(cue the theme music from Red Dawn).

photo credit: Randy Son Of Robert

photo credit: Xurri

Once again I’ve scoured the interwebs and I’m bringing back the best, freshest food news you can find. Wrap in dry paper and don’t leave out for more than a few hours.

• I’ve made my distaste for Papa Johns and their cheese topped placenta abundantly clear, but it’s obvious people aren’t listening to me. Not listening to the tune of over a billion dollars. Fuckers.
• It’s always gross when you pull a chicken out of the package and it looks like you pulled it out of a lake, but how many of us have figured out what to do about it? Domestigeek has.
• Summer time = grill time. Here are some of the manliest grills and recipes around. This one gets bonus points for using the term CAR-B-Q.
• If you’re a filthy savage like me, you pots and pans don’t get the care they deserve. Tipnut has some…well…tips that will help get them back in shape.
• Now, if you say “Asparagus Wrapped in Pancetta with Citronette” you’re asking for a punch in the junk. But if you say “Asparagus wrapped in Italian super ham, grilled crispy and dipped in uber mustard” you’ll be looked upon as a hero for years to come. Serious Eats needs to work on their titling.
• One thing I can’t stand about foodies is their obsession with paying more. I’ve had great ingredients that cost a dollar a pound and some that cost a dollar an ounce, but cheaper always tastes better. Over at Cheap Healthy Good they share my wallet’s delicate sensibilities, and they have a post up on how to save hundreds of dollars on your food bill in 60 minutes a week.
• After this guy is done lecturing us on how we should be like Europeans and buy food daily instead of trusting the untested technology of refrigeration, he actually has some useful information on how to store chocolate. By the way I’ll adopt their shopping habits when they adopt our deodorant habits.
• And finally PopSci has a neat little article on the Science of Scotch. How you can apply scientific theory to something that touches my soul I’ve yet to understand.