No, this image is not an exclusive sneak peek at the surely jaw-dropping graphics from the upcoming Uncharted 4. Along the west bank of the Mississippi River in downtown Minneapolis, Mill Ruins Park is a quiet, disfigured little spot where foliage meets wreckage.
Someone needs to teach schoolkids the importance of flour to everyday American life. If parents won’t do it, the Mill City Museum will. Pictured above: giant educational pancakes.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:
Each year from 2003 to 2013 my wife, my son, and your humble writer headed out on a long road trip to anywhere but here. Our 2014 road trip represented a milestone of sorts: our first vacation in over a decade without my son tagging along for the ride. At my wife’s prodding, I examined our vacation options and decided we ought to make this year a milestone in another way — our first sequel vacation. This year’s objective, then: a return to Wisconsin and Minnesota. In my mind, our 2006 road trip was a good start, but in some ways a surface-skimming of what each state has to offer. I wanted a do-over.
After we finished our business at the Mall of America, our Day Three proceeded from the south end of the Twin Cities to Minneapolis’ north side, where we discovered something completely different.
One of the advantages of traveling without children is that you can stop at historical attractions that they’d never agree to, that would make them think you’ve lost your mind and all your accumulated cool points. If you’d like, you can even check out places that other adults would never dream of investigating because they’re too busy looking for vacation destinations where they can drink or hike or tan or drink or relax or meditate or drink. It takes a special kind of couple to look at each other and think, “Let’s go see the ruins of a flour factory!”
The Mill City Museum is that kind of place, and we are that couple.
And now, a brief history lesson for all the bread geeks out there!
Your ideal Wisconsin post-lunch dessert: fried cookie dough! Each ball of batter-fried gooeyness contains a different flavor of cookie dough: sugar, peanut butter, chocolate chip, double chocolate chip, and white chocolate macadamia.
Longtime MCC readers know my wife and I are loyal fans of the Indiana State Fair. Despite all the road trips we’ve done over the past fifteen years, we’ve never tried anyone else’s state fair. The idea has occurred to us more than once, but most state fairs are held later in the year than our vacation week. It’s not our fault that everyone else’s timing is wrong.
This year we were shocked to discover a state fair held in July and in one of the states we were already planning to visit: the Northern Wisconsin State Fair, held each year in Chippewa Falls for the benefit of upstate residents who can’t work out travel arrangements to the adjectiveless Wisconsin State Fair outside Milwaukee, down in the southeast corner of the state. Once we confirmed it would exist during the right time frame and not far off our route, we had to squeeze it into our Day Two schedule.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:
Each year from 2003 to 2013 my wife, my son, and your humble writer headed out on a long road trip to anywhere but here. Our 2014 road trip represented a milestone of sorts: our first vacation in over a decade without my son tagging along for the ride. At my wife’s prodding, I examined our vacation options and decided we ought to make this year a milestone in another way — our first sequel vacation. This year’s objective, then: a return to Wisconsin and Minnesota. In my mind, our 2006 road trip was a good start, but in some ways a surface-skimming of what each state has to offer. I wanted a do-over.
The Apples in Stereo!
In a modest Indiana town called Danville, there’s a place called Beasley’s Orchard where parents can bring their children to let them experience the natural resource of fresh air, and older couples can wander around as a birthday date and/or happy excuse for light exercise. During certain times of the year, visitors to Beasley’s can peruse a farmer-food shop, walk quickly through a small-business sales-tent, get lost for years in a corn maze, or lay traps for the Great Pumpkin in their rather sincere pumpkin patch.
You’re surely familiar with one of the orchard’s biggest superstars: Them Apples.
My wife and I are largely immune to the siren call of the fall pumpkin stampede. We don’t hate them, but we don’t wake up on October 1st and draw up a meal schedule of pumpkin omelets, thin-sliced pumpkin sandwiches, and pan-seared pumpkin steak with a pumpkin reduction served over a pumpkin salad tossed with pumpkin vinaigrette. Pumpkins are acceptable, but they don’t wow us.
Maybe it was odd, then, that we spent part of her birthday celebration last weekend traipsing through a pumpkin patch, surrounded by the very source of so much autumn shrugging. We couldn’t deny their iconic appearance, though.
The mandatory “sinister side” pic from their upcoming episode of the Oxygen true-food-crime series Snacked.
One contender in particular, their Cappuccino Potato Chips, seems to be the most taboo-breaking of these next-wave snacks. In a recent Yahoo! article, New York Times coffee authority Oliver Strand was called in from whatever he was doing at the time that had to be more important than this, and was asked to test these chips for coffee authenticity. His conclusion is unsurprising yet apt (“The chips smell like the coffee candy your grandmother kept in a glass bowl in the living room”), but he also delves into the background of the company that provided Frito-Lay with the food-science technology necessary to pull off this modern anomaly. It’s a short, recommended reading that foreshadows other unprecedented, amalgamated endeavors in the future, except maybe those will be popular and people won’t scrunch up their noses at them.
I get the impression the Cappuccino Chips may not be flying off store shelves and will soon be relegated to Dollar General clearance bins within the next six to twelve months. My wife and I have been slowly working our way through the bag we bought, a chore prolonged by my reading comprehension failure that caused me to buy a party-sized bag. Why that size exists, I’ve no idea. Maybe they satisfy a fine-print contractual obligation. Good luck finding a crowd of twenty to one hundred friends and relatives who’d love you enough to unite and eat the entire bag for you in a single month, let alone in one party.
I don’t loathe them, but as Strand points out, they lack the enchanting loyalty that a classic potato chip commands. Anyone who’s ever tried to eat a single Pringle knows those sensations — the surprise hunger pang that wasn’t there a few minutes ago, and the sudden, insatiable craving that demands you eat at least another pound of them before you reseal the container. Unlike Pringles or actual caffeinated products, the cappuccino chips have an addiction factor near zero. They’re okay, but they’re becoming a chore for us to finish.
After a few other food-synthesis experiments that proved unappealing, this past Tuesday night I stumbled across one use for them that truly, sincerely clicked. I like to think every foodstuff exists for a reason, and I believe I’ve discovered the Cappuccino Chip’s true calling. And hopefully this doesn’t lead us into a darker future fraught with French-fry lattes or hazelnut casserole or mocha tots.
Actual potato chip flavors as of today. I’m saving this as a reminder for myself five years after I’ve forgotten they were a thing once.
Yes, it’s true: I allowed these in our house. Some experiments you have to try for yourself.
Someone at the Lay’s Potato Chip factory got bored this year and let the general public choose new flavors for their mad food scientists to concoct and test on us consumer guinea pigs. So far I’ve tried two of the four ostensibly brazen offerings. Our first contestant, their festive Mango Salsa variety, tasted like authentic dried fruit from the health food store, but crispier so they’re less depressing, and with a pound of salt to help tone down the overwhelming potpourri-basket sensation. I imagine these are what astronaut fruitcake would be like if NASA hated astronauts enough to invent it.
Last weekend we picked up a bag of their Cappuccino chips, which tasted bizarre but not offensive. I suspect this fugitive product hails from an alternate Earth where coffee-flavored sweet cream is a common topping for baked potatoes. The sweetness seems out of place, though it contains zero grams of sugar, only fake flavors. From that standpoint it’s a healthier option than dunking them in HFCS-laden ketchup. Call it a Pyrrhic potato victory.
(Of the other two new flavors, Bacon Mac ‘n’ Cheese sounds perfectly in tune with today’s America and therefore wasn’t abnormal enough for my testing purposes; and I’m flat-out afraid to try the Wasabi Ginger flavor. If they’re terrible, there’s no one else around who’d finish the rest of the bag for me.)
The scene above was part of today’s breakfast: a pumpkin donut. Only because it’s that time of year when every American has a pumpkin quota to fulfill. My part is done. I’m legally free to move on and go back to eating normal food in the flavors I like.
Every year the same product wave pummels all consumer shorelines: pumpkins are in, everything else is out. Pumpkin flavors permeate and overwhelm every conceivable grocery item, restaurant dish, and miscellaneous product or service. Looking away or hiding are futile defenses because pumpkin surrounds you in every direction from your personal space to the horizon. You’ll never be allowed to exit autumn until and unless you surrender to the will of Big Pumpkin.
Gamers gaming with games. The costumes are incidental.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: my wife and I attended Gen Con 2014 and took pictures as usual.
The first five parts were all costumes, costumes, costumes. In this, the final chapter in the Gen Con 2014 saga: slightly fewer costumes. Because there are other persons, places, and things at entertainment conventions besides costumes. Yes, really.
It’s that time again! The Indiana State Fair is an annual celebration of Hoosier pride, farming, food, and 4-H, with amusement park rides and big-ticket concerts by musicians that other people love. My wife and I attend each year as a date-day to seek new forms of creativity and imagination within a local context. Usually, 70% of our quest is food.
Each year the State Fair announces the annual theme of a single ingredient and holds a contest daring all the vendors to create a new dish around it, like a sort of Food Network cooking show except I think the grand prize is just “for exposure”. Recent history has brought us the Year of the Tomato, the Year of Corn, the Year of Soy, the Year of Popcorn, and so on. This year’s theme was the disappointingly non-food-based Year of the Coliseum, in honor of the longtime event venue that reopened this year after a two-year closure for major, modernizing renovations. Some reverence is to be expected for the Pepsi Coliseum as an integral part of the fairground experience for many attendees. Just the same, this break from thematic tradition left the vendors a bit directionless and less inspired to whip up new concoctions for us. We managed to find a couple.
Meet the donut that killed me.
Right this way for more food, if you have any appetite left!
The picture and my plate both looked too plain, so I added Crow for garnish. Maybe it’s not something you would do, but I’m an otherwise reasonable adult and I’m perfectly happy with my garnish choices.
Pictured above is my newest creation, inspired by frustrated circumstances. It’s a stale Marsh donut sliced in half bun-wise, filled with one layer of chipped-beef-‘n’-cream-cheese from the best kind of cheese ball, one layer of Ritz crackers, and one layer of plain cream cheese. I dubbed it the Good Afternoon Burger. It would’ve been even better if someone had thought ahead and brought in some rich, creamery butter to use as dressing. They had veggie dip, but that’s the absolute opposite.
[The very special miniseries continues! See Part One for the official intro and context.]
Day 2: Sunday, July 23rd (continued)
After a long, hard day of amusement and soaking came another long-preplanned stop, dinner at a restaurant named Crabby’s Seafood Buffet. Not just all-you-can-eat seafood: every ad we saw from the Internet to brochures to local posters pictured a pair of clean-cut geeks pretending to be surly pirates in satin, posing beneath a caption vowing “Free Pirate Battle!” This promise was in every single ad we saw, more of a mantra than a motto. To us, this sounded like Medieval Times with a different angle and more food. We expected to improvise our meals on the run all vacation long, but Crabby’s was the only restaurant specified on our itinerary because it just sounded that promising. They even give each patron their own paper pirate hat to wear all through the meal. As with the Jelly Belly Factory, my son protested his hat and refused to don it.
We, on the other hand…
Beyond these doors were sights that would’ve made Spongebob Squarepants shred himself with fury.
Sometimes a lazy summer strikes when you least expect it. For a few random days at a time, you’re surrounded by quiet, relaxing doldrums. Your TV schedule loses its pulse. Theater screens are usurped by movies clearly rated NFY (Not For You). Headline news is, if not slow per se, more irrelevant to you than usual. Sometimes a muffin with too many ingredients is the most exciting thing that’s happened to you.
Behold one of the greatest pleasures of my work month: that very special occasion known as “breakfast for dinner”, or in some circles “breakfast for supper”. Always consult your local linguist for proper lingo before discussing cool things.
Tonight was that night for us, a bit of perfect timing for me since I’d had salad for lunch. Don’t get me wrong: fine salad, varied ingredients, fresh quality, but it only whets the appetite through part of the afternoon. Come three p.m. I’m already scrounging through my desk for emergency cheese-‘n’-crackers or stale chips left over from previous months’ birthday pitch-ins. But the premature hunger pangs are worth it if you know there’ll be a feast waiting for you when you eventually get home once you’re done working too much overtime yet again. Thankfully my wife has taken to making each breakfast-for-supper event an extra hearty meal — extra scrambled eggs, extra bacon, just extra, extra, extra. She’s stellar that way.
If you don’t get the magic of the whole “breakfast for dinner” concept, there’s not much I could do to persuade you. Either your eyes sparkle when it happens or they don’t. All I can tell you is it’s the kind of meal that puts a song in a man’s heart.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Part One of a trilogy of outtake selections from this year’s family vacation photos, those that didn’t make final cut for the original 33-part narrative. Some were omitted for specific reasons; some were due to space, pacing, and attention span considerations; some, I have no idea why.
Part Two, then: Massachusetts randomness, photos held back from Day 3 to Day 6 for reasons.
Beginning with our last stop in Massachusetts on Day 6: the Dr. Seuss National Memorial Sculpture Garden in Springfield. In the original entry I opted for a comprehensive head-to-toe shot of Seuss himself and the Cat in the Hat, but I also like how this pleasantly level portrait incorporates the greenery around the museums.
Your opinions about The Way Chili Should Be will vary. All I can tell you is my wife and son are fans of this version.
This is not now, nor will it ever be, a home cooking blog. I don’t mind cobbling together the occasional recipe, but I rarely have the patience or attention span to work with the kind of recipe that requires twenty-plus ingredients, some of which I can’t pronounce. Also, my wife does most of the cooking because she works less overtime than I do. In those select moments when I’m motivated and free to cook, three dishes are requested more often than any other. They’re not complicated compared to the average recipe, they’re not fancy, and they’re definitely not healthy, but they’re each a part of simple old me.
Please note: many of you are much better cooks than I am. Many of you will and should turn your nose up at these because of your vastly superior culinary skills. I’m not mocking you; I’m acknowledging your advanced knowledge in this field with utmost sincerity. I was in the fast-food industry for twelve years and developed above-average skills suitable for a fast-paced mass-production grill area, but that career path dead-ended thirteen years ago. Since that time, I’ve done the best I can with the fading talents, remaining free time, and affordable ingredients allotted to me.
(If you want to see me cooking something truly terrible, I’d be happy to share the nightmare fodder from several low-carb cookbooks I resorted to during my 2004-2005 diet. You haven’t known gastronomic misery until you’ve had a sugar-free dessert baked in a crust made from vanilla whey protein powder.)
[Special note for this historic occasion: 70% of the following entry was written by Midlife Crisis Crossover’s very first guest contributor, my wife Anne. She knows I welcome her input anytime — above and beyond her ongoing, invaluable photo contributions — but she’s never taken me up on my standing offer on a writing basis till now. Remember: the more you applaud and embrace this entry, the more leverage I’ll have in wheedling her for more contributions in the future.]
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Blame our 2013 road trip for this entry. We discovered the Food Network’s Chopped while flipping channels late Tuesday night in our Boston hotel room. The concept of this cooking-competition series is cerebral and daffy at once: four chefs are given a basket filled with four different ingredients that must be transformed and worked together into a single course, even if they don’t go together, even if they don’t go with the course in question (e.g., meats in the dessert rounds), even if they’re the vilest substance on Earth (durian!), even if mishandling the ingredients might kill put one of the judges in the hospital. (We’ve never thought that last one was a good idea…) The winner selected by three judges earns $10,000.00. The rest are treated to an empty-handed walk down the Hallway of Disappointment, with reactions ranging from excited letdown to disgusted fury to indignant self-hatred to horrific realization that defeat has destroyed their livelihood. The show can be funny and inspiring and tear-jerking and tragic in the space of a single episode.
After vacation we marathoned every Chopped episode available On Demand, caught many of the Tuesday and Thursday reruns, and are now keeping up with new episodes each week. Even though we’re recent converts, we’ve been taking mental notes along the way of the errors and omissions that occur with the most frequency, from the stupefyingly obvious to the obscure-but-fatal. Just in time for the upcoming Chopped five-part “Tournament of Stars” miniseries (yay celebrity contestants!), the following compilation is our armchair-cook advice for future would-be Chopped competitors based on the dozens of episodes we’ve devoured to date. This list is far from complete, and we welcome any additions in the comments below, especially from those among you who can truly cook. Though neither of us is a fancy gourmet chef by any stretch, we hope this helps anyway.
It’s Valentine’s Day once again! That special day of the year when sweeties are sweeter on each other than their normal level of sweet, sugary sweetness. That controversial day when Hallmark brings out the best and the worst in your local internet users. That long-standing tradition that inspires fun cartoons, bad movies, and a pointless sequel in Sweethearts Day.
And yet, there are no Valentine’s Day carols. The level-headed among you might think, “Silly typing guy! Every love song is a Valentine’s Day carol!” I’m reminded of that classic anecdote in which kids burdened by the twin responsibilities of Mother’s Day and Father’s Day ask when their mythical Kids’ Day might be, but are rebuffed with the hollow promise that “Every day is Kids’ Day!” No self-respecting kid buys this answer for a second. Otherwise they’d be swimming in 365 new Kids’ Day presents every year. Remember, they’re younger than you, but they can still do math.
Anyway. My point is, unless they contain direct allusions to the day and/or its trappings, love songs are not automatically Valentine carols. To fill that entertainment void, please enjoy this meager initial foray into this brave new subgenre, just to get the ball rolling for all of America. Hopefully enough songwriting hermits are inspired by my sterling example to emerge from hiding, add their voices to the mix, and someday accumulate enough of a Valentine’s Day song catalog to warrant a compilation album that generates perennial royalties for all of us so we can retire early.
Even if we don’t reach that goal this year, have a Happy Valentine’s Day anyway!
This way for that crazy new holiday tune all the kids will be digging!
Behold our leftover cookies as of today. Most of these will be shared with others in the days ahead. This photo would look a lot more appetizing to me if I hadn’t just spent the last seven celebratory days enjoying sugar as an integral ingredient of every other meal.
The Indiana State Fair is a fun annual celebration of Hoosier pride, farming, food, and 4-H, with amusement park rides and big-ticket concerts by Top-40 or country artists. My wife and I attend each year as a date-day to seek new forms of creativity and imagination within a local context.
This year’s food theme was the Year of Popcorn. Unlike the food themes in years past (e.g., tomato, soybeans), very few vendors tried to incorporate this ingredient into new dishes. Local artists did their best to work within the inherent limitations.
Midlife Crisis Crossover! 