Kentucky Fried Road Trip

I took my mom on a little road trip from Friday, September 28th to October 1st. Our primary mission was to attend the World Fried Chicken Festival in London Kentucky. It made sense because my mom lives on a strict school-lunch diet of tacos, pizza, and fried chicken, and Kentucky is much easier to drive to than Mexico or Italy.

The Chicken Festival was definitely cool, but it wasn't quite what I had been expecting. In St. Louis there are barbecue festivals, and in Springfield they have chili festivals, and what both of those things mean is a bunch of people who are good at making those things compete at who is the best. And I like it because then I get to try food made by professionals from all over the place. I figured that's what the Chicken Festival was going to be like. Going from booth to booth, stuffing my face with awesome fried chicken. Well, it wasn't quite like that. It was more of a county fair type of atmosphere. There were the usual booths all over with people selling stuff, and political groups. There was the section with the carnival rides, and there was a stage for little shows. There was a country singing girl on stage for a while who was really good. Country on the radio makes me want to wretch, but she was playing Johnny Cash, and led me to discover Patsy Cline's "Walkin' After Midnight". I've listened to that song in the car about a hundred times since then. Tangent alert.



Anyway, so there were chicken signs everywhere, and I got this pretty rad paper chicken hat, but the only edible chicken was being made by a church group. I feel like there must be something going on when there's only one group selling chicken at the World Fried Chicken Festival. Seemed very monopolistic to me. 

And when you've only got one group making chicken at a damn chicken festival you get: one massive line.

To be fair, it was really really good. And they had this cool world's largest skillet thing that made watching the frying process pretty amusing. There was a guy walking around with a garden rake pulling the chicken in that had floated out of arms reach while frying.

Next we took a quick drive to Cumberland Falls, located in Daniel Boone National Forest. The leaves were just starting to change colors. It was very nice.

Apparently there is an actual thing called a moonbow, created when the moonlight hits the mist from the falls. It sounds pretty awesome.

I like to try local stuff, so of course I had a Diet Ale 8. Once I drank it I realized it had caffeine in it. What sort of a monster puts caffeine in a ginger ale? Why not start putting codeine in there as well? Sneaky soda pharmacists.

The final sight seen for the day was Corbin, Kentucky, home of Harland Sanders' original restaurant.

The place used to be a roadside restaurant and motel. I think the story was that they were going to move the highway which would kill Sanders' business. So he went and sold his secret recipe on the road.

I thought the story here was pretty cool. The sign said that the lady of the house would always check out the rooms at a motel before a family would agree to stay the night. So to smooth out this barrier Sanders made the restaurants bathrooms accessible only through replica of the rooms. Pretty good marketing I thought.

All of this Colonel Sanders fun times reminded me of how he rolls in Japan. Read about how he is dressed up by season and confused with Santa Clause here. Then, read about how the Colonel put a curse on Japanese professional baseball's Hanshin Tigers here.

Way Down in the Hole

Today we went to the Missouri History Museum to see Wendell Pierce give a presentation on food deserts. I had hoped for a presentation on food desserts.

Wendell is an actor who featured in my favorite show of all time: The Wire. These days he's in HBO's Treme which is pretty solid as well.

Acorns For Dinner

I was strolling around Soulard last night when I had the tragic idea that it would be cool to try to cook some large acorns hanging from an old nearby oak tree. I had just recently seen a painting of Andrew Jackson heroically sharing his acorn dinner with one of his soldiers on some war campaign. In my book the only two criteria for becoming a badass mountain-man are a dislike of shaving (check) and the ability to just eat whatever is growing within arms reach.

So I picked a handful of them, making sure not to get any with visible holes in them, which would indicate bugs.

While consulting a couple of online articles I found on the subject, I hit the acorns with a hammer to split them and remove the shells. That turned out be the easy part.

The thing with acorns is they contain an apparently weapons grade level of tannins in them. The same substance makes wine taste dry. It is also used to tan animal hide into leather. One online source warned that íf I just ate the acorns raw I wouldn't die but may wish I had with: a mouth that tastes and feels like felt, nausea, and a multiple day long case of constipation.

So, not eating them raw. The easiest way was to leach the acorn meat of the substance by putting them in a pot of water and bringing it to a boil. The instructions said to keep them at a boil for 15 minutes, dump the water, and then repeat the process. Each time the water would turn a brownish color, which was kind of cool because it was clear that something was happening. It was a little less cool the second time. After about an hour of moving the acorn meat between two continuously boiling pots of water, the process was decidedly uncool. The water just kept getting dark brown with evil tannins. At this point I was ready to eat them and face the consequences.

I put them in the oven and just baked them as is. They came out looking not bad, and some of the smaller pieces had become satisfyingly crunchy. While all of that boiling had failed to completely remove the tannin taste, it had successfully removed any other taste the acorns may have originally had. Adding salt really just made them taste like salty batteries.

Tannins are the damn devil and I hate them. The End.

Salmon on the Grill

I made a really good meal a couple of days ago. I've been getting into cooking a bit more lately. This super expensive sockeye salmon was on sale at the supermarket, which is what got me wanting to experiment in the first place. The dish actually called for cooking the fish on the grill (purchase a weber q120 bbq), but apartment living makes that a bit impractical. I just cooked it on the stove. The heart of the recipe was a marinade that consisted of soy sauce, brown sugar, lemon juice, and a few other ingredients (full recipe here). The recipe also wanted me to marinade the fish for two hours, but I didn't have time so cut that corner as well. I realized that the marinade would just roll off of the fish if I just dunked it on, so I poured a bit of it into the pan when I cooked the fish. It cooked down and formed a nice sort of glaze on the fish. It was still really good. I'm starting to feel like I have enough comfort with cooking that I can deviate from recipes and nothing will blow up. I rounded out the meal with some canned diced tomatoes with peppers and a can of black beans mixed together and just heated up on the stove. It turned out pretty awesome.


 This is a sponsored blog post.

Free Nelly, You Jelly

One fun thing about St. Louis is they do public free shows downtown at Soldiers Memorial in July during Celebrate St. Louis Summer Concerts. A gentleman by the name of Nelly was the act tonight.

Apparently the locals have heard of this Nelly character because the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that over 40,000 fans showed up. I was so far away that I couldn't tell which of the many people on stage was Nelly. I do recall it was cool because everyone knew all the songs and was singing along. There's a sort of soulful chant at the beginning of "Shake Ya Tailfeather" and hearing all those people sing it in unison gave me chills.

At one point in the show they started to perform "Air Force Ones", abruptly stopped, then said "we don't rock that shit no more". I rock it! Please let's rock it at least for tonight.

Zoe and her friend Stephanie we also in attendance.