Are Food Deserts an Issue?

In the latest Cincinnati mayoral debate the issue of food deserts came up.
But as more and more delivery options come online, do the old desert definitions still apply?
Meijer has announced they will be delivering most grocery items (no hooch, prescriptions, etc.) and Amazon already has a limited supply of groceries (and hooch) with Prime Now. Will Kroger be far behind? They already have pick up for online ordering.
Some convenience stores have ordering set up with 3rd parties somewhat similarly to 3rd party delivery for restaurants.
People complain that not all people have internet access but, as long as we can maintain our library system, that can be their contact line.
So, will the co ops like Clifton Market & Apple Street Market succeed?
Will the big guys rule supreme with low paid drivers?

Vegan Lasagna Recipe

The lemon sounds interesting. Readmore in Springfield had a lemony sauce on their pizzas & subs. I obviously have all the wrong kitchen accessories.

Taco Hell Delivered

What could go wrong ?
Taco Hell has announced it is thinking about delivering their Juadaperras, Tuscomeenos, Grande Supremos and other delicacies to your door but thy are not sure how.
Since crispy corn tortillas tend to dissolve in grease over time, some dishes would only make it out to the sidewalk. Other dishes in flour tortillas lose their heat rapidly and wouldn't be hot pretty much after they made it to the sidewalk. The thing is, they don't serve hot food in the stores.
So, what to do?
Make the food in the delivery vehicle? Like - like a taco truck ?
Yes, roaming taco trucks using the stores as commissaries would work and, given the popularity of the Hell, they could offer subscriptions! A piping hot spudilla at your door every Tuesday at 7PM !
yay
and you are welcome Taco Hell.

Read more at HuffPo

Tea

Not sure if Lipton is reading their tea leaves right on this one. They are partnering with Pepsi to market carbonated tea. But not just any tea - sweetend fruity carbonated tea. This article cites declining interest in mainstream soft drinks for the reasoning behind offering these new drinks. I think most people are turning away from the mainstream soft drinks to avoid all the sugar & syrupy artificially flavored crap.
A carbonated, plain, sweetened or unsweetened natural tea might have been a better idea. Or at least another flavor in the line up.

Man Sends Lamb Chop Into Space

While everybody was watching Rosetta & Philae chasing a comet a few billion miles away, ome guy in England sent a Tandoori Lamb Chop into space with a helium balloon.
While space exploration used to be the sole domain of Russkie & American space programs, other people are getting involved now with exploration & satellites & other crap. The private sector getting into exploring the final frontier is just another piece of the puzzle.

New Paths

As some of my more sober minions might have noticed, there's a new page in town - The Blogging isn't Cool Recipe Page. There's a link on the top right
Yes, the secrets from the Qitchen of Quimbob are revealed.
One of the first concoctions I came up with after moving to Porkopolis & being introduced to the local chili was my own version that went for hot rather than sweet & added mushrooms. I wanted to call it Omniway or Manyway but my girlfriend called it Shit and Shit stuck…
Recipes are weird. They are handed down from generation to generation but most come from the Woman's Home Companion Cookbook or Betty Crocker or off the label of a soup can…
When I moved out of my parent's house, my mom wrote down some recipes for me. I couldn't do it myself because what she had written for herself was littered with ^$%! short hand. But that doesn't matter much because I can't read her handwriting anyway. (This is the woman who taught me to write cursive, too.)
Anyway, I will add more later so that YOU can be as fat & ugly as I am someday.

Hey Frisch's

COCA COLA

FISH FRY

yup, that time of year again, be sure to check out St Boniface's Fridays through Lent (whenever that is) from 5-7PM.

The Most Influential Hamburger

I'm not exactly sure what that even means, but Time has listed the 17 Most Influential Hamburgers with the White Castle slider at #1.
ok, but The Big Boy doesn't even make the list?
wackos…

Jim's

Any Bob City native over 40 should remember Jim's. Located near the Regent Theater on Limestone in hygienic Springfield, Ohio, Jim's serrved sodas & sandwiches to Ftogtowners for decades.
It's interesting to me to see how people's tastes have changed over the years. no more egg phosphates, egg malted milks, Green Rivers, and no more chopped olive sandwiches. I gotta say, it all looks pretty good to me. Especially the prices.
Jim ran the shop with his wife or sister. We never really figured it out. They would yell orders, etc. across the dining room and would frequently bicker.
My parents would dump me off at my grandmother's apartment on weekends and we would walk up to town, past the train station, to Jim's, the Regent & Woolworth's on Saturdays after sitting up watching old horror movies on Friday night - Chiller Theater.
oh well...

Frisch's Jumps the Shark

In a recent interview with WKRC…

Representative for Frisch's, Karen Maier, said, "It does not taste the same but it is still good. It is flavored Pepsi or it is flavored Coke and they don't taste the same but they are both good products."

So, consider, if you will, an Italian restaurant swapping out Chianti for Liebfraumilch. "It does not taste the same but it is still good. It is fermented grape juice and they don't taste the same but they are both good products."
For that matter, everything on the Frisch's menu is about equal quality, so why bother with menus? Just tell the waitress what you want to spend and get whatever. It does not taste the same but it is still good.

For folks wanting to turn this fiasco around or just vent your outrage, there's a FB page, Bring Coke Back
and there's a petition drive
Change.org

WKRP article here

ok, when I heard the WalMart of funeral homes was buying Stewart Enterprises, the first thing I thought of were those nasty over-salted, over-preserved maybe-mummy-meat sandwiches they used to sell in schools & gas stations. It turns out they were just buying the KMart of funeral homes.
whew

MUSTARD !
Springfield's Woeber Mustard takes the Gold for their Supreme Honey Mustard & the silver for their Genuine American Mustard in the 2013 World Wide Mustard Competition.

Wieners list here

Be a Hit at Your Hallowe'en Party!
Gross finger food is always welcome around Halloween and, if you think about it - year 'round.
This exotic delicacy is salami wrapped around cream cheese & topped off with a half olive. Pimento & Tabasco are added to the cream cheese for more zing. You can use tomato instead of olive but - why?
If you need a recipe, you're dumber than the Blogging Isn't Cool culinary staff that frequently can't even keep the dishes clean. For our next recipe? - How to Order a Pizza !.

Fish Fries !

Forcing people to behave contrary to their common behaviour is a staple of religious domination. But having fun with it is just so fun. Springtime Catholic fish fries on Fridays are one of those bizarre religious traditions of fucking with people's heads that, if you aren't tied to it, are just fun nonsense.
St Boniface Church, on Chase Avenue in fertile Northside (currently not part of east Westwood), has a pretty good Friday fish fry through Lent, whenever that is. Folks are nice and beverage service by teenage girls in white shirts, plaid skirts & crew socks is too fun even for this heathen.

For more info,Click

Disappearing Food

Nothing calamitous, just annoying to depressing. One of my Christmastime indulgnces is Nabisco Whatsworth crackers & a tube (midget longhorn ?) of Colby cheese. It's been getting harder to find the crackers & this year… well, it ain't gonna happen. WalMart can't locate them within 100 miles. Amazon has me on a alert list. Kroger, Meijer, Remke - no go.
I recently had to resort to Amazon for Knorr/Lipton instant Red Beans & Rice. hey, I'm a single guy…..
Campbell's soups has discontinued chili beef, pepper pot & now it looks like bean with bacon is on the way out. I read somewhere Campbell's was focussing on novelty kids' soups & discontinuing the soups with "high end ingredients". Tripe & beans?
Hellshire Farms has a hot smoked sausage that goes great in Cajun type dishes. The 4th of July is Jambalaya Day in Quimbob house. Problem is, almost nobody carries that variety of Hillshire's line. I have to go across town, stock up & freeze the stuff so I can have it for summer. Years ago, you could buy the crap all over town.
Then there's the disappearance of canned corned beef.
Don't even get me started on Arriba salsa & Stouffer's Welsh rarebit....
sigh, I fear Porkopolis is becoming a convenience food desert.

FWIW, you can buy Pepper Pot t-shirts on ebay.

Pickles
When I first moved to Cincinnati in the early 80s, my sweetheart introduced me to hot dill pickles that could be purchased at bars & pony kegs around the town. Establishments would have 5 gallon jars with hot or mild pickled cucumbers, pickled eggs & pickled pigsfeet. It was fairly common to see groups of kids walk into dark smoky bars to purchase these delights that were served up wrapped in paper.
Over the years, the pony kegs either got cheap & seedier than tolerable or went corporate, the bars went seedy or trendy, regardless, the pickled crap disappeared. King Kwik sold out or went out of business, I forget. The remaining convenience stores might have carried individually packaged hot dills from some far off corporate pickling plant but they just were not the same.
Bill's or Bob's or whatever that place was that later became The Comet sold the crap as late as the mid 90s. Does anybody in Cincinnati still sell the pickled goodness?

Northside Farmer's Market Returns to Hoffner Park

Northside's Farmer's Market returns to Hoffner Park for the summer & fall. Tunes will be supplied by The Northside Garage Band. The Market has a FaceBook page, just like everybody else. Be a fan.
We can now expect rain every Wednesday afternoon for the next 6 months.
UPDATE: Members of the Northside Skate Park will be at the Market doing demonstrations & discussing plans for the proposed skate park.
ALSO.....
FREE PANSIES !!!!

Where is the Outrage ?

A new business model for food vending has arrived in Cincinnati. Food Trucks are nothing new nationally but are new to Cincinnati. Their arrival has got lots of people excited. Naturally, the foodies are into it and young urbanisto types are into it, too. Those younguns tend to fall into the category of liberal/progressive. Their love for big government knows no bounds, of course, so when Cincinnati City Solicitor commented that the city has no specific regulations for the food trucks but that they will be looking into it, you would think some alarms might go off in some people's heads. It raised Julie's eyebrows & elicited some concern over here. Nothing public from the Chamber of Commerce. The Business Courier Notes their arrival, but no mention of new regulations.
But, where is the outcry from the other side? The folks who promote smaller government, lower taxes & deregulation? Between COA T, The Libertarians, The Tea Party & the (cough cough) Republican Party, I haven't heard a peep.
The Libertarians tend to be more reactive, so their current silence is understandable.

Libertarians helped save the Gamble's house
The Cincinnati Tea Party hasn't done what it does best, protest with angry shouting, raised fists & a plethora of misspelled signage. It might be under their radar, however, since it is a Cincinnati issue & apparently, their only real connection to Cincinnati is their name.
The GOP ? While they pay lip service to entrepreneurs, they serve well monied corporations first & usually last.
The region's A#1 Wolf Criers at COA T, who routinely predict the falling of the heavens & predict (usually incorrectly) the malicious actions & intentions of elected officials (of the Democratic persuasion) haven't even been making any public pronouncements on the issue. Given their anti business attitude, I guess it is no surprise.
People criticize the faux outage intended only for political gamesmanship. They have a point.

PS - yeah, I know my taco truck sucks. Got tired of screwing with it as did the software LOL. The Caddies are pretty cool, tho. They were made by this guy.

Pizza Strips
Pizza is good. generally speaking.....
These things are, apparently a Rhode Island exclusive, kinda like Cincinnati chili & Goetta around here. The glaring difference is that Goetta & 5-ways are edible. OK, not everybody agrees on that. The picture above looks reasonable enough. Lemme tell ya, looks can be deceiving.
First of all, you buy these things at gas stations. They are not in the cooler waiting to be microwaved. they are up at the cashier station in cellophane wrappers in canisters next to the Slim Jims and fobs & stuff. You don't cook 'em, you just open up the wrapper & chow down. There is no cheese on these things, no discernible spices. In fact the red stuff on top that looks (from a distance) like tomato sauce might very well be paint. Think 5 year old latex house paint.
I love bread, but no saving graces there. It is thick, tough tasteless cardboard substitute.
Now I like some nasty shit. Those pink snowball (?) Hostess things, LaChoy Chow Mein, Jeno's pizza rolls.....
I have no idea how a taste for Pizza Strips are even acquired. It is the worst regional comfort food I have ever found in the U.S. They are so bad, Family Guy doesn't even make fun of 'em. Or maybe that's what the writers snack on, who knows ?
If you have the taste & the craving, or if you just want to ruin somebody's party (these things are, apparently, a party staple in R.I.) you can buy 'em online, just click on the image above.