Johnny ‘Tookie’ Appleseed

Not even the fruit aisles in Chicago are safe from gang activity:

Stephanie: I bet they're getting ready to fight the Blood Oranges

So I went to ChiTown over the weekend to visit Step.

I tried to use Canadian coins so many times to pay tolls or give to hipsters (read: BUMS), but it turns out that doesn’t fly in anywhere but Michigan.  I’m pretty certain some Canadian places won’t even take fucking Canadian confetti money.  “Let’s let that shitty hand state with no economy use this stuff, because it’s fucking Monopoly money, eh?”  “BRILLIANT!

As you know I have recently been obsessed with Hell’s Kitchen, so Sunday we were going to go out to an upscale food eatery.

Because I do not own a jacket, we were forced to instead hit the local Jewel-Osco (or as I will now refer to it, Chicago Meijer) to fuck snooty ChiTown and cook up our own delicious foodstuffs.

The base components of fine dining add up fast!  We spent like 60 bucks on like fucking clumps of vegetables!  DEATH BLOOMS.

First course: some weird weird things called Chease?  I later found out that this is basically spoiled animal milk mixed with bacterium!  How is this a legal foodstuffs?!  WHAT THE FUCK>!

Protip: Don't eat the red bullshit!

I then fired up a pan and seared some fresh sea scallops in it.  We had to go to Tyler’s Bane to pick up those lil babies.  We also cooked up some Leaf of the Gods to top it off.

Like 20 dollars for eight scallops, sirs.

Steph then fired up a most perfectly cooked asparagus risotto.

You win this round vegetables...

Finished off with a filet mignon, with my extra secret seasoning.  I’ll give you one hint: it’s probably butter.

Protip: don't eat five people worth of food before the meat course

I don't know what I am doing...I think that's raisin bran in there.

(That's cooking wine. We just chugged it.)

Jesus H. Ross (Perot)

rofl I was following links due to some Yahoo! article and found out about this book: On Wings of Eagles, which (according to it’s wiki for everyone too lazy to click and read it on their own, Adam) is about how some workers in one of Ross Perot’s company got arrested for bribery, so he “recruits a team of volunteers from his executives, led by a retired United States Army officer, to break them out by force, if necessary.”

This is a non-fiction book.

Perot, it appears, is also from Texarkana, a place I didn’t know actually existed outside of the song “East Bound and Down”.  I wish I would have voted for him back when he was running for President and I was underage and couldn’t vote.  From everything I know about the man–which comes from Dana Carvey impressions and the Wikipedia to some crazy-ass book, he’s like a funnier, less stupid (but maybe more crazy?) version of the Texan we did end up with.  He has five billion dollars!  And spawned some of the most memorable All That sketches of all time.

All That was a terrible Nickelodeon version of MadTV, which itself is the phail version of Saturday Night Live, but for whatever reason I watched All That ALL THE TIME.  I am hilariously well versed in the cast members of All That, from noticing the fat girl when she had a small part in Dodgeball, to having huge crushes on the unfunny girl. (Link provided because that could have been ANYONE ON THE SHOW.)  So when Knuckle Puck got moved up from All That to Saturday Night Live a few years back, that incident was unequivocally the funniest thing he’s ever been part of.  Who was behind that crappy decision?

Garrosh Hellscream is a moron.

Obama was on Letterman last night, and said something I really liked–”Some of the things I discovered about being president.  If there was an easy answer, someone would have solved it and it wouldn’t get to my desk.”  lol that’s super true and funny

In Hell’s Kitchen: Bay City news, I was trying to cook some type of bullshit when I totally burned my hand.  I didn’t think much of it until it blistered up, causing a Tommy Boy-esque chain reaction of…

Jesus Christ, what happened to your hand?!

…at work.  Thankfully, since I work at the hospital, I got every nurse ever’s burn remedy.

I no longer have that hand.

Of Apples and Annie

So I was reading some random article about the University of Minnesota’s super apple breeding program and how they developed the variety of apple known as Honeycrisp, which by all accounts is the Best. Eatin’. Apple. Ever.  SO I spent like a whole day driving around the city trying to find them last week or so and couldn’t.  Turns out they weren’t ripe or something.  I don’t know, I’m not a farmer.

But the other day I went to Meijer and lo, the ’09 Honeycrisps are out!  And they actually are really fucking good.  It’s weird to eat fruit though, since they are vile weeds.  But my desire to taste this apple, and now that I’ve tasted it, to tell everyone about it,  is partially due to Hell’s Kitchen, the show run by some madman with easy access to giant knives and ovens.  He loves fresh things that taste fresh, yes?  Ever since I started watching Hell’s Kitchen, I’ve begun to think I know more about food, when I definitely do not.  Example: I almost sent some salmon back at Hoolihan’s the other day because I felt it was too dry.

Disregard that: A) I don’t know what ‘dry’ even means in this context and instead focus on the fact that I ORDERED FUCKING SALMON.  I will kill you show for keeping me from steak or soup.  DEATH BLOOMS.

They are always cooking scallops on that show and apparently it is really hard to do because the pans they use to cook them usually end up ON FIRE or THROWN ACROSS THE KITCHEN–oftentimes both!  I got it into my head to try cooking some myself and went and got like four pounds of them from Meijer.  I bought so many because I thought they were only $4.99/lb., but the sign was tipped to a convenient angle to obscure that they were actually FOURTEEN DOLLARS AND NINETY-NINE CENTS PER POUND.  Great.

So I’m cooking them and eating them and cooking them and eating them and slowly realizing I have no idea what the fuck these things are supposed to taste like AT ALL.  Awesome plan, Big Boy.

Annie, who wrote the best electropop album that no one else listened to in the last couple of years has a new one coming out after a long delay due to some argument with her label that I will pretend to know something about.  Here’s the first single from it or supposed to have been the first single or version that will never be released because she remixed it all before it comes out on October 19, 2009.  I don’t know.

In other music news, I went to Bonnaroo last year and one of the ‘headliners’ was a Mr. Kanye West.  He was supposed to go on originally at like 8:15p, but then moved it to 2:45a for some damn light show he just had to have set up only in the dark.  I did not care either way: who is he I don’t know let’s eat more paper and ignore him and maybe sleep.  SOUNDS LIKE A PLAN.

…but that was not meant to be, since he went on at like 5 am–WHEN IT WAS GETTING LIGHT OUT.  Smart move, Mr. Smart “I need dark 4 mys show!!111″ Guy and his horrible racket made it more impossible to sleep than it already was, further not endearing himself to me 4-F-R.

Welp, it appears Kayne wins again!

Lastly, Trevor’s Second Video.  Watch it!