“Grocery Store Tea.”

The above was my tea this morning, and has been everyday for the past few days. What can I say? I enjoy its smoky beginning, its peaty finish, and its strong followthrough. Steep it for an extra few minutes for a real kick, a tea that cannot be submitted like so many others, a tea that…umm…yknow what? This is total crap. I like Prince of Wales tea because it makes me think of Maine, and more specifically, cold foggy mornings at my Grandmother’s farm. I like that memory. I’m big on connecting senses to memories.

Another Story
A year ago, my mother went looking for stocking stuffers for the family, including tea for me. She stopped by a local specialty shop. She asked for my favorite - Twinings’ “Prince of Wales” tea - and was told that while the specialty shop could order it, they generally didn’t like to stock, “grocery store teas.” The woman behind the counter must have been the hipster of teas, what with her not wanting to associate herself with the Twinings more proletariat offerings.

The condescension that comes along with everything these days is so incredibly off putting. Tea, golf equipment, music, art, stereo equipment, movies, food. People wrap themselves up in these things, assuming that their preferences are somehow indicative of inherent truths about the thing. The woman at the specialty store condescended to the so-called grocery store teas because she assumed that her own preferences were somehow themselves superior her customer’s son’s preferences. Of course, all teas are equal; nobody’s preferences are better than those of anybody else.

On some issues, it is silly to preach relativism - we should be free to judge cultures that persecute women for the crime of being women, for example. But music? Or golf equipment? Or tea? There is no reason to assume that our personal preferences are somehow superior to another person’s; there is no reason to endow our preferences with the ridiculous notion of truth.

Do I like the teas sold by the specialty store? Absolutely. But the tea for sale on grocery store shelves, like my favorite Prince of Wales, is equally good. I’d be silly if I thought I could rank order them for any number of nonsense reasons. I could say that I like Prince of Wales more than I like Twinings Darjeeling tea, but that’s not evidence of truths about the teas themselves. There are plenty of people who’d prefer the Darjeeling.

Needless to say, this absurd assumption that our preferences represent truths inherent to the thing that we prefer is madness.

Technorati Tags: Preferences, Tea

More Ramps, Less Clinton

-Strange but true: you can get homework done early. So far, I’ve now turned in three assignments for my classes early. This is truly a bizarre feeling. It’s like I’m being genuinely productive or something. And only 15 years after I should have started acting like this.

-Ate a huge MustGo dinner tonight from my fridge, right before Clay Erinn called, offering me ramps and potatoes. Who am I to turn down such a delicacy? You can see them photographed above. The recipe was as follows: potatoes fried in one pan, with chopped ramps, bacon, and eggs cooking in another pan. Combine in a single bowl, add hot sauce, and consume. Needless to say, I was awfully full, but ramps are damned delicious.

“If you have the means, I highly recommend that you try them. They’re choice.” Thanks Ferris Bueller.

-Congratulations Hillary Clinton. She won Pennsylvania while simultaneously reminding anybody who was actually paying attention what an awful person she is. Way to go! What with her attempts to run a campaign that looks like it has been managed by Karl Rove, she clearly represents nothing more than the empty pursuit of power and the desire to do whatever she can to get it. Even if that includes costing the Democrats the election in the fall.

Incidentally, I saw where Clinton overwhelmingly won PA’s women. My instinct is to stomp around my house cursing anybody who voted for Clinton just because she happens to be female; that would be wrong of me, so instead, I’ll assume that every vote cast for Clinton was done by people who had thoroughly evaluated her positions on the issues and found themselves in more agreement with her than Obama. Because, really, voting for a candidate just because they’re female is so ridiculously stupid that it isn’t worth discussing…for anymore than at least one more sentence, which is this: I’m not supporting Obama because he’s a man, but rather, because he’s a good candidate who has a chance to win nationally, which is what Clinton supporters should be evaluating, instead of concerning themselves with the fact that she has a vagina.

Needless to say, if somebody supports her because they agree with her political positions, fine. If the support is there only because she’s a female, then that’s as dumb as any man’s decision to support Reagan over Mondale simply because he was running with Geraldine Ferraro. Bigotry doesn’t depend upon the bigot’s demographics.

Yes, I’m aware that we can’t change how people vote. But dammit, we can get awfully angry about it, can’t we? Also, that was more than one more sentence…

-At some point, this website is going to change its look. Part of that will include me no longer posting a photograph with every single post. Sometimes, I just want to write something. Of course, none of you are regular readers, because my regular readers don’t exist. Still, I thought you should know.

Ramp Fest

Some poor kid searching the internet is going to stumble across the headline and think that I’m talking about something awesome, like skateboarding. But I’m not. I’m talking about ramps, a strong wild onion that grows early in the spring in the mid-Atlantic states. (Here’s better information.) Needless to say, it is now the middle of Spring, which means ramp dinners are popping up all over the area.

I headed out to the Mason Dixon Ramp Festival on Sunday, and was rewarded with all manner of ramp usage. I tried the simple: ramp burgers (chopped ramps mixed in with the ground beef) and fried potatoes (with ramps). I tried the slightly more complicated: baked beans with ramps, homemade ramp sausage (delicious!), and and a mushroom/ramp dice on toast (not so good). There was bread with ramps cooked into the dough, chocolate chip ramp cookies, and a truly strange ramp hash. There was also ramp wine and ramp cheese and eggs pickled with ramps, all of which I declined the opportunity to taste. Finally, there were very simple fried ramps, which was arguably the tastiest thing I tried.

There were plenty of ramp foodstuffs which weren’t available at the festival, including scrambled ramps/eggs and fish stuffed with ramps. Still, it was a good experience. I’d like to give all the credit to West Virginia for this particular delicacy - the Wiki linked to above certainly does - but I’d be lying if I did that. This festival was held just over the border in Pennsylvania.

Unfortunately, the women in my house right now barely tolerate my love of onions so the chances that I’ll be allowed to use a stronger variety in our cooking is highly unlikely. Which means that my ramp consumption is going to be limited to a few times per year in the early Spring.

Thoughts On A Trip To The Farm

I went to Rich’s Fright Farm yesterday. A lot happened. Here’s a recap:

1. There was a midget in front of us in line. I might be 26, but I wasn’t too old to wonder if she was going to be twice as scared.

2. There are a lot…and I mean a lot…of people who go to fright farms who are positively blown away by Slipknot. I am not one of these people.

3. I went to high school with at least one of the people in the New Relics. I think I was once at the Fright Farm while his band was playing. I thanked God that they weren’t playing last night, only to have a woman turn around and…

“Excuse me, but are you a fan of the New Relics?” She asked.
“Umm…..ummm….no?” I responded.
“Because my cousin is in the band…” She said.

And that was the end of that. (It’s a terrible name for a band that is a rough amalgamation of literally everything there is to hate about music. But check them out.)

4. I am not above making bad jokes at every opportunity. Immediately after leaving a room in which a tortured woman was having her spine ripped out, I said, “I won’t be going back there.”

5. Or leaving a “mine” haunted by a ghost miner, saying, “Maybe he wouldn’t be so angry if only he’d located his mine underground.”

6. Also, I am very fond of disinterested teenagers. The weight on their shoulders must be more intense than anything I can imagine, because whereas most of the show’s actors were screaming and yelling and doing a good job at…umm…be vaguely disconcerting, some of the teenagers just sort of grunted at me and looked bored. Minimum wage just doesn’t buy what it used to I guess.

7. Oh, and, “A corn maze? They should have called it the Maize Maze.” The worse the joke, the more apt I was to make it.

8. Some apparent skimping by the folks at Rich’s Farms: one of the scary masks was actually The Burger King with blue Christmas light eyeballs.

9. Speaker of burgers, the guy behind the counter at Hardees (post hayride) was overjoyed to tell me that his wrist tattoo was referencing Hank Williams the Third and that, one time, he’d gotten baked with the man himself. Thanks Hardees Guy.

10. Speaking of Hardees, seeing this has the opposite of the intended effect, right? I mean, it makes me all the more unlikely to choose a Hardees to visit. Also, Paris Hilton will put literally anything meaty into her mouth. (See? Bad jokes. I can’t get enough.)

11. Finally, look at the above sign. Hardees is basically charging you a little bit extra to throw out the vegetables - “Tomatoes is for homosexuals!” - and replace it with more cheese and bacon. Incidentally, Hardees Guy from bullet 9? He was a large man.

Hot Food

I’ve waxed poetic about hot food before here. It is one of my passions. But I have to admit certain biases. I am a loyalist to the hot cuisines of Thailand and India. If this makes me a snob, so be it, but the Thai and the Indians have done a hell of a job figuring out blazing hot food. You’ll excuse me if I don’t want to eat a chicken wing covered in Blazing/Burning/Hiroshima sauce.

But there I was earlier this week, staring at a menu warning me away from Jamaican Jerk Chicken. “This is AUTHENTIC and very hot!” It read, which might as well be a parent telling a teenager not to go out with that girl because she’s bad news. What else is he going to do? I ordered it as hot as they would make it, giving my standards spiel, “Please, as hot as you’re willing to make it. I will not send it back. I promise.”

Lo and behold, I get a delicious meal that is unbelievably hot by my standards, so hot that it gives me the giggles, the mark of a truly excellent experience. Read the post linked to above for a brief description of the giggles, but the short of it is that truly hot food makes me giggle.

The restaurant, if you’re wondering, was Solera. It is in Morgantown, West Virginia, my home. And the food appears to be excellent. God only knows if it will actually survive. My town has a strange history of brilliant eateries that flame out within a couple of years. But here’s hoping.

The Ghost Pepper

The Bhut Jolokia has recently been established as the world’s hottest pepper. Its Scoville rating (the scale used to measure heat) is double the previous record holder. Of course, this is positively unbelievable. For more on the in-depth history of the ghost pepper (so named becauuse its heat could allegedly chase away even the dead - see the end of this article), try here.

I am now 26, and have been eating hot food for at least ten years. I remember my first dish - spicy shredded beef, extra hot. Since first trying that, I have eaten hot food from all over Asia. I have worked at an Indian restaurant. I have made my own hot sauces.

It is harder for me to eat hot food now. My stomach is finally rebelling against my pleasure. Whereas I could once eat tremendous amounts of hot food without repercussion, my body is now acting progressively less pleased with my consumption.

A funny thing: if the food I eat is hot enough, I get the giggles. My bosses at the Indian restaurant used to know food was hot if I started laughing while eating it. Recently, I went to Pittsburgh with a friend, and she was taken aback when I got the giggles. That hadn’t happened for months before a Pad Thai (ordered at 15/10 on th heat scale) got me. This doesn’t happen as much as it once did, because I’m not eating as much hot food as I once did, and when I do, it isn’t hot enough to trigger the giggling.