Shameful Confession

So, I basically haven't eaten at McDonald's for years because a) I don't like it and b) everything there has ten million calories. And I know that a) should preclude b), but in the past, it didn't always, because sometimes Mickey D's was just too convenient and cheap. It wasn't until I decided that if I'm going to "spend" 1700 calories on one meal, that meal had better rock my world rather than be just tolerable, that I really left McDonald's (and most fast food) behind.

Fast forward many years to when my son is introduced (by my MOM) to McDonald's. Now I basically have to go to McDonald's a couple times a month to get Happy Meals (i.e., food that gets thrown away and a really crappy plastic toy made by slave children in China). If I'm hungry too, I usually grab something for myself somewhere else, like the French bakery nearby my local McDonald's.

Today, my son wanted to eat at McDonald's so he could play in the (also craptacular) play structure because he hasn't had enough exposure to flesh-eating bacteria lately. I didn't think I could get away with bringing my own sandwich to a "restaurant," so I resolved to try to find something to eat at McDonald's.

I settled on this. The southern-style crispy chicken sandwich is a fried piece of chicken breast on a bun with a pickle. And, to their credit, McDonald's now provides easy access to nutritional info at their locations, so I knew in advance that the sandwich is 400 calories, which I deemed reasonable for something I figured would be bland and unmemorable, but filling.

Imagine my surprise when I took a bite and liked it. I mean, I'm not saying this was some kind of delectable gourmet snack, but it was tasty, and here's why: The chicken itself tastes like pickles! This totally appeals to the seriously trailer-parkish part of my palate that enjoys the occasional bowl of ramen noodles with melted American cheese slices, pickle sandwiches on soft white bread, and Tater Tots.

So now I'm looking forward to the next time the junky toys change genre at Mickey D's and Chase wants to get his next Happy Meal. I'm not going to make a habit of it, of course, because there's probably a ton of junk like growth hormones or DNA-altering herbs and spices in there, and because I recently renewed my commitment to pesca-vegetarianism, but, dang that pickle-chicken made me say yum!

Recipe: Lime smoked salmon with avocado

A recipe that's been in my repertoire for years, and happens to be one of my mom's favorites, is grilled salmon with lime, chive, and avocado vinaigrette. It's super simple, delicious, and I think it came from a special issue of Bon Appetit magazine about eighteen years ago. I can't find the original recipe anywhere anymore, so I'm just going to claim it as my own until the copyright police find me. Heck -- who knows how I've changed it over the years? Anyway, the fun part is making the leftover recipe (which will be my next post. probably).

Lime-Grilled Salmon with Avocado Vinaigrette

Adjust amounts to fit your needs. In this case, we had too much salmon for one meal, which is why the leftover dish came about.

I used an outdoor gas grill and hickory chips for smoking. I'm sure a charcoal grill will also make this pleasantly smoky. If you wish to use a grill pan or indoor grill, it's still a delicious meal without the smoky taste.

Salmon

If you are using an outdoor gas grill, set your woodchips up for smoking as directed.

2 pounds wild-caught salmon, fileted
2 to 3 tablespoons fresh lime juice
kosher or sea salt
fresh ground pepper
1/8 to 1/4 cup olive oil

With the salmon skin-side down, sprinkle the lime juice over the salmon. Sprinkle salt and pepper on top. Drizzle olive oil over, and rub mixture into salmon until well coated. Let sit for ten to twenty minutes.

Grill fish until it bounces back to the touch (about eight minutes on medium-high on a gas grill).

Sauce

2 medium avocados, diced
1/4 cup lime juice
zest of one lime
1/3 cup of olive oil
1 tablespoon finely chopped chives (or more to taste)
salt and pepper to taste

Combine all ingredients in a small bowl. Let rest several minutes (while fish cooks). Taste, and adjust seasoning as necessary.

When fish is done, serve with several spoonfuls of sauce on top. Accept the kudos when your mom acts like you're a big chef!

Will Nobody Think of the Pancakes!?

As my legion of faithful readers knows, I am very concerned about what America is doing to poor, innocent pancakes.

Until recently, it had not occurred to me that the largest threat in the Pancake Axis of Evil would be The International House of Pancakes (a.k.a iHOP, as if we wouldn't see through their disguise.) My naivete was due, in part, to the fact that I don't ever eat there. Why would I go to a crowded, plastic-coated, weirdly-shaped place with embarrassing dish names when I can get my pancake needs satisfied here? Or here? Or, dare I say it, at home?

It sort of surprised me a couple of weeks ago when my son woke up on a Saturday and informed us that we would be going to iHOP for breakfast. I didn't even know it was on his radar, since we never go there. My mom and dad thought it would be harmless enough -- perhaps even a nice change from the usual, high-quality restaurants we frequent, so we got ourselves in the car and drove to the nearest fake Swiss chateau, or whatever it's supposed to look like.

Inside, I got my first inkling of the horror that was to come. First of all, at 10:00 a.m. on a Saturday, there was no wait. Every other breakfast place in San Diego always has a line out the door at that time on a weekend.

When I got into the tiny lobby, my son pointed to a poster bearing images of characters from Horton Hears a Who around this startling item:



"Oh my God, what is that?" I exclaimed. "It's what I want for breakfast," my son explained.

Indeed, iHOP has invented Who-cakes in a cross-marketing campaign for the recent movie version of Horton Hears a Who. What they are is a stack of about six pancakes covered in not-found-in-nature pink and blue sauce with candy sprinkled all over and a lollipop stuck in the center. For children. For breakfast.

Now, I'm not super vigilant about my son's diet. I try to make sure he has a fairly good balance of veggies and pasta and proteins and such, but I let him have cookies and candy, and I indulge him with milkshakes and pie for dessert, probably more often than I should. But this particular monstrosity really tested my limits. In the end, I let him order the Who-cakes.

My son ate approximately one bite of one of the less-sauce-covered cakes, and declared himself finished and asked for some of my veggie omelet. I asked how he liked the Who-cakes, and he declared them "kinda maybe yucky." Unfortunately, so was the omelet, though it wasn't as much of an assault on the eyes.

So, sense prevails, even in six-year-olds. They may be taken in by advertising, but they will figure it out when something is just not good.

Finally, in another terrible strike against pancakes, our waiter revealed that the iHOP does not stock real maple syrup. What the hell?

Green, Green Orzo Salad

Last night, I made an orzo salad with a lot of green ingredients. It tasted like spring.

1/2 pound orzo, cooked al dente, dressed with a bit of olive oil, and cooled
1 cup frozen peas prepared according to package directions and cooled
1/4 cup garlic-infused olive oil
zest and juice from 1 medium lemon
2 T mint, chopped
2 T chives, chopped
salt and pepper to taste
3 oz crumbled light feta cheese

In a medium bowl, whisk together the olive oil, lemon zest and juice, mint, chives, and salt and pepper. Add orzo and peas and toss to coat with dressing. Fold in crumbled feta.

This tastes even better the next day.

The Flu Sucks

This might be the first time in several years I've come down with the actual flu, as in high fever, fake-sounding cough, horrible headache, and general all-over "owwwww, unghhhh" feeling.

But soon, I will update you on the latest salvo on America's War on Pancakes.

Here's a preview:

Fettucine with Green Pea Pesto and Spring Herb Salad

I've been watching Jamie Oliver's new series on FoodTV and getting inspiration from some of the things he makes. Not so much lately, though, as the latest few episodes have been about game and lamb, and I do my best to be a pescatarian, if that's a word.

A couple of weeks ago, a salad he made inspired me to try to recreate it, and for some reason, I thought it would go nicely with a green pea pesto and pasta dish. I'm not going to write out a recipe, because I used a recipe from Gourmet magazine for the pesto (with the addition of a little tarragon and parsley), and the salad was just arugula, Belgian endive, Italian parsley, and raddicchio tossed with a lemon-tarragon vinaigrette. The point is, it was really good, and I remembered to take a picture of it.

Actually, there's more: My son LOVED the pasta. In his little mind, pesto now means the pea mixure that was on that pasta, so I have finally found a way to get him to eat vegetables. As long as I puree cooked veggies with garlic and parmesan and call it pesto, he seems to be willing to eat them. (I recently tried this with roasted cauliflower and called it "white pesto" and it worked.)

Aside: The plates in my house reflect my mom's taste, not mine so much.

Food: It's What's for Dinner

I just noticed that my friend Gumbeaux Gal has linked to my blog as one of her favorite food blogs, so I'd better post about food again right quicklike.

Last night, I didn't think I had anything in the house to make for dinner, but I definitely did not want to go anywhere, so I opened the fridge and looked for inspiration. There it was, in the form of a bag of cleaned, sliced crimini mushrooms from Trader Joe's that if I didn't use right now, would probably convert to something unrecognizable overnight. Well, maybe they weren't that bad, but let's just say I had a bag of mushrooms I needed to take care of.

I've always got pasta on hand, and lately, I've been buying bags of Trader Joe's mini ravioli to feed my little boy. So, with the mushroom mini ravioli, sliced mushrooms, some fresh thyme and sage, and some onion and garlic, I created:

Carmelized Double-Mushroom Ravioli in a Pinch

1/2 bag of Trader Joe's mini mushroom ravioli
1 bag Trader Joe's sliced crimini mushrooms (about two cups sliced mushrooms)

1 medium sweet onion, diced

3 cloves garlic, minced

1 T fresh thyme leaves
1 T fresh sage leaves, minced
1/2 cup dry white wine
olive oil
salt
pepper
grated parmigiano-reggiano

In a stock pot or large sauce pan, bring a whole bunch of water to a boil, and then add salt. Cook ravioli according to package directions, and drain.

Meanwhile, In a hot saute pan, add just enough olive oil to coat the bottom. Add mushrooms and cook over high heat until mushrooms give off their liquid and begin to brown (about ten to fifteen minutes*). Add onions, and season with salt. Cook until onions and mushrooms begin to caramelize (about ten more minutes*). Add garlic and herbs and cook until garlic turns golden and mushrooms and onions are nice and brown (about five more minutes*). Deglaze the pan with the wine, and cook until wine reduces by half. Season with pepper and more salt, if necessary.

Throw the cooked ravioli in with the mushroom mixture and toss. Top with grated cheese and enjoy.

Variation

I seriously considered adding about 1/4 cup of cream once the wine was reduced. Also, I think rosemary would be nice in place of the sage. If I'd had spinach on hand, I would have added that too, as well as some crushed red pepper.

*All times are approximate and reflect the crappiness of my stove.

Tyler Florence Does Not Understand the Concept of "Buddy"

On Saturday mornings when I have nothing to do before a play date at 1:30, I do not tidy up my room or go for a walk or write my best-selling novel. No I do not. Instead, I park myself in front of Food Network programming for, like, five hours. I watch all the shows, whether I like them or not. In fact, I think I like the shows I don't like more than the shows I like. I mean, Jamie Oliver just makes me hungry, but Paula Deen provokes deep, philosophical questions like "What were you mainlining when you thought Velveeta should be an ingredient in fudge?"

Today, I watched Tyler's Ultimate with Tyler Florence, which I don't find particularly interesting in either respect, but what am I going to do -- laundry? He was making something out of a beef shoulder, and in trying to describe where on the animal the cut comes from, he said, "You see, our cow buddy here . . . " and pointed at the beef.

Pssst! Tyler! When you have an animal killed so you can eat it? It stops being your buddy pretty much right away. It probably questions whether you were ever really friends at all.

I guess this didn't bug me as much as when the Cuban lady kept saying "shrimpies," but . . . sheesh. One Rachel Ray is way more than enough.

Guilty Pleasures

I pride myself on a certain amount of snobbery, but I must confess to having more than a few guilty pleasures. For the moment, allow me to indulge my snobbish side while I explain what I mean by guilty pleasure.

I believe the term guilty pleasure has suffered from a bit of the Irony Effect. Alanis Morissette screwed up a generation's understanding of the true definition of irony. I don't know who messed with guilty pleasure, but my experience indicates many people think it means "something you feel guilty about but still like to do it, so you have no intention of stopping." Like smoking or drinking. Or cheating on your diet. I define guilty pleasure the One True Right Way: "something you like that you would be ashamed to have your friends know about." Like Kid Rock. I'm hardcore.

But most of my guilty pleasures fall in the area of food. My mom has never been the most imaginative or fastidious of cooks. She honed her cooking skills over a period where meat and potatoes ruled the dinner table, and frozen and convenience foods were fabulous new ideas. So, many of our family dinners comprised a pan-fried or oven-roasted protein, Rice-a-Roni, and a small portion of frozen vegetables. I don't recall the spice rack getting a lot of action during those times. We definitely had no knowledge of fresh herbs, and a limited understanding of fresh vegetables: corn on the cob for Independence Day, occasional green beans, and potatoes (though scalloped potatoes from a box showed up frequently on our plates).

Sometime during my late teens and early twenties, probably influenced by all the varieties of fresh and delicious foods I had during a stay in France, I started to develop my own interest in cooking. Guided by Bon Appetit and early cooking shows like "The Frugal Gourmet" and Jaques Pepin's show on PBS, I gravitated toward fresh ingredients, including lots of herbs and fresh garlic, and explored the world through food. I also decided to become a vegetarian, and for years, I eschewed the hearty, nutritious, but boring, meals my mom made.

In the ensuing years, I have maintained my love of cooking, trying new flavors, and experimenting with new dishes. Unfortunately, I also got a lot busier in life, what with having a child and working a stressful full-time job. Also, I moved back in with mom and dad after my husband and I split up.

As unmemorable as most of my mom's dinners were, she had a couple "special" meals she made that really stand out in my memory. Recently, after a long stressful week, she made what I discovered I still consider the ultimate comfort food: The Joy of Cooking's version of Chicken Cacciatore, as modified by my mom. As I described previously, my mom does not like cooked onion, so she substitutes onion powder. She also uses garlic powder rather than regular garlic because in the fifties and sixties, I don't think Americans had discovered garlic yet. She doesn't drink wine, so she uses the old standby bottle of dry sherry we keep in the cupboard pretty much just for this dish. Finally, because she hates mushrooms, but my dad loves them, instead of fresh sliced mushrooms, she uses canned whole button mushrooms that she can easily avoid when plating up her serving. The sauce is made by thinning out tomato paste and the chicken juices with the sherry. The chicken is served with a side of spaghettini and green beans, and the whole thing is drizzled with the sauce and then sprinkled with parmesan.

Don't ask me why, but I love this. There's something about the blend of crappy "wine" and rubbery mushrooms that takes me straight back to a secure, comforting family dinner after a winter day. These days, I have been known to turn and flee if I see canned mushrooms in a salad bar or as an ingredient in any other recipe, but in this one dish, it's the only thing that will do. I confess that when I lived by myself, I tried to make this dish using fresh ingredients and the original recipe, but the result did nothing for me. It didn't have the tang of the vinegary sherry. It didn't have the little bursts of salty brine that come when you bite into a canned mushroom. It didn't taste like home, or like mom.

I love mom.

America's War on Pancakes

Looking back, I suppose I should have known it was inevitable, but I just didn't realize the pancake was such a threat. In my own experiences with pancakes, they've ranged in threat level from innocuous (say, an iHOP short stack) to divine (my friend Margaret's perfectly spiced gingerbread pancakes, for example). Evidently, my experience was not typical, as there is no other explanation for recent developments than an angry public's response to pancake aggression.

What developments, you ask? Why, the humiliation and subjugation of the entire pancake race, of course! Haven't you heard?

It started innocently enough with the Pancake Puff device. On the surface, it doesn't seem like such a bad idea. Who's against puffy stuff, right? But then you get to thinking about it. A puffed pancake is pretty much just a muffin. So, that niche is already filled. And if you need to put stuff in your pancake, all you have to do is roll it, like people have done for centuries. The pancake shape is what sets it apart! You don't need to inject it with pudding, because you can just blop the pudding on the pancake and roll it. And if you really want to make a pizza out of your pancake, I don't think the world wants to know about it.

But it was about to get much worse. Recently, a coworker alerted me to this crime against pancakity: Pancakes on a stick. Around a Jimmy Dean sausage. With chocolate chips. This is when I first started to suspect there was an anti-pancake agenda in this country. I don't know how it started or why, but I began to see that a rising tide of pancake hatred was flowing over America. And America wasn't afraid to fight the pancake insurgence. With chocolate chips.

I had no idea at the time how far the people of this country were willing to go to win the war against pancakes. It wasn't long before I learned how deep the pancake hatred went. The very same coworker who spotted the besticked pancakes pointed out this monstrosity: The Batter Blaster. The American people hate pancakes so much, they confine them within aerosol cans! Organically! (Presumably, this was one of the lessons learned from the cheez internment of 1953. What an embarrassing episode in this country's history!)

I don't know what's going to happen next. If you care about the pancakes of your future, write your representatives and ask them to step in to stop this massacre! I believe this can only get worse: The Batter Blaster is imprisoning waffles too!

Yummy, Yummy Anchovy-Mushroom Pizza

The Background
I'll tell you what: If you don't like pizza, there is something wrong with you. I state that unequivocally, without fear of contradiction. It would not surprise me to learn that neither George Bush nor this man likes pizza.

I do understand why many people would not like anchovy pizza. I happen to love anchovy pizza, but can't usually make it for myself because I typically share my pizza with my little boy who wants only cheese. If I do a half-and-half thing, he sees the anchovies on top of mine, and thinks they have somehow contaminated the whole thing. Plus, it can be unpleasant to end up getting a large piece of anchovy in a smallish bite. So, last night, I set out to find a way to have my anchovy pizza and still share with my little boy.

The Recipe
This is not so much an actual recipe as it is a method. Or a series of suggestions, if you like. Quantities are based on taste, and many substitutions could be made. For example, any pizza dough would work, and you could substitute a different type of mushroom if shitakes aren't available. In any case, these are the ingredients I used:

1 package Trader Joe's pizza dough

olive oil

shredded mozzarella cheese

8 ounces shiitake mushrooms, thinly sliced

approximately 1 1/2 cups simple marinara sauce leftover from last time I made pasta

1 clove fresh garlic, minced

3 anchovy filets, chopped

2 or 3 sprigs fresh thyme, leaves stripped off woody stems

Preheat your oven to 425 degrees. (Note: This is for the Trader Joe's crust. Use whatever temperature settings work best for the crust you are using.)

Heat about two tablespoons olive oil in a saute pan and toss in the mushrooms. Do not add salt. Saute, stirring occasionally, until mushroom water has evaporated and mushrooms are caramelized. This can take awhile. Last night, it took about thirty minutes. Add a pinch of salt and a few grinds of pepper toward the end of the process. Remove the mushrooms from the pan and set aside.

Roll out or stretch the pizza dough to fit your taste and your pan. In this case, I decided to make a thickish crust on a round pizza pan. Brush or spray the crust with olive oil, and then sprinkle with about 1/4 cup of shredded mozzarella. The cheese should just dot the crust, not form a layer. (This is a tasty way to weight the dough so it doesn't puff too much when you par-bake it.) Bake the pizza crust in the oven for ten to twelve minutes, until golden brown.

While the crust is baking, heat a couple teaspoons of olive oil in the pan you used for the mushrooms. Add the anchovies and cook until they "melt" into the oil. Add the minced garlic, marinara sauce, and thyme and stir until anchovies and garlic are well incorporated into the sauce.

Remove the crust from the oven and spread with the sauce. Sprinkle caramelized mushrooms over the sauce. Top with shredded mozzarella to taste. Pop the pizza back into the oven for about ten more minutes, or until mozzarella is bubbling and browned in places.

Slice pizza into a manageable number of pieces and eat! Well, you might want to wait for it to cool first. Or you could put it on a plate with a sprig of thyme if you're into presentation. Some people would probably take a picture before they take a bite!

The Result
Yummmm! Well, that's just me. The anchovies lent a savory depth to the sauce, and the mushrooms were almost smoky and . . . well, they tasted brown. In a good way. The thyme brightened everything up a bit, whilst the tomato sauce provided a touch of sweetness.

I would love to tell you my little boy ate it up and loved it, but after I spent a good hour working on that pizza, he told me he'd rather have the Kid Cuisine my mom had gotten at the supermarket. Damn you, Kid Cuisine, with your whimsical characters and included crappy desserts!

The Future
Next time I make this, I will make the crust thinner. To be honest, I was just a little lazy about it last night. Depending on who you're serving, just about any vegetables could probably be added. I think it would be especially good with some thinly sliced eggplant, but I'm an eggplant whore. In general, I really liked this savory, salty pizza. As with so many sauces that include anchovies, the taste was not the strong, fishy one many people expect, but the anchovies' presence was noticeable and tasty!

Lentil and Sausage Soup. If you call it "stoup," I will cut you.

The Reasoning
As the millions of you who have faithfully followed my meandering mutterings have likely deduced, I have no clear idea what to do with my blog. Until the light bulb comes on, I will take the common road of bloggers throughout time and post whichever of my thoughts I believe the world cannot do without. Also, I plan to steal ideas from others. In this post, I take a leaf from my friend Gumbeauxgal's blog, and post a recipe I puttered with that came out pretty darn good.

The Background
It all started sometime last week, when my mom wanted to make black bean soup. She got the idea too late in the day to soak the beans, so we talked about other options, like using canned beans (ick). I said she could always have used lentils, which don't need to be soaked before cooking. She hasn't cooked much with lentils, but then reminisced about a soup she used to get at a great no-longer-existent restaurant called Cane's (owned by these people). The soup she remembered had red lentils and some kind of sausage. I had black lentils in the pantry and a curiosity about andouille. So, I decided I would make lentil and andouille soup on Sunday.

The Recipe
Because I spent the last half of the eighties and all of the nineties as a vegetarian, I haven’t cooked much with meat, especially “exotic” meats and sausages that weren’t available in San Diego until the last decade or so. So, though I know how to make a vegetarian lentil soup, I did some research on the web to figure out how long I was going to have to cook the sausage. I came up with this recipe. Based on the reviews, I knew right off I was going to make the following changes:

• I increased the amount of the veggies to one-half cup (more or less) each.
• I omitted the first half hour of cooking the lentils in the broth by themselves.
• I made my own creole seasoning rather than using a commercial product. This is the recipe I used.
• I used twelve ounces of sausage.
• I used fresh thyme.

Then I had to make some further modifications due to personal limitations:

• I could not get hold of my aforementioned friend Gumbeauxgal to find out whether good andouille is available in a San Diego market. Rather than risk disaster, I instead opted to use Trader Joe’s smoked chicken-turkey-garlic sausage.
• My mom hates, hates, hates the texture of large pieces of cooked onions, celery, peppers, and probably some other vegetables. For my mom, large is defined as detectable. Therefore, instead of dicing or even mincing the vegetables, I essentially turned them into pulp in the food processor. I drained off some of the water that pooled in the bottom of the processor, and then sweated them with a bit of salt for five or ten minutes.
• I couldn’t find beef broth, so I used all low-sodium, organic chicken broth and reduced the amount of broth from nine cups to eight.
• Finally, to make extra super sure that my mom would not notice any sort of vegetation, after cooking, I stuck the ol’ stick blender in there (being sure not to “catch” any of the sausage) and whirred it around for awhile. It seems to have worked!

The Result
After about an hour of making my house smell like smoky sausage heaven, the soup came out pretty darn good. My mom loved it, which means I successfully hid all the veggies from her (and makes me think those books that tell you how to sneak veggies into your kids by pureeing them must have some merit). Though smoky, the sausages weren’t overly salty, so, with the couple big pinches of kosher salt I added during the cooking process, the soup was perfectly seasoned. There was a bit of a kick from the cayenne in the creole seasoning, but not too much, so this soup would be good for kids. Sourdough rolls dipped in were divine. And in the end, it’s healthy!

The Future
As good as it was, I will continue to refine this soup. For me, it was a little thin, so I will definitely increase the amount of lentils the next time I make it. I also felt it was a bit celery-riffic, so I would change the vegetable proportions to those used in mirepoix. Here are some of the other tweaks I will try:

• Create a vegetarian version using vegetarian sausage and/or liquid smoke and vegetable broth.
• Increase the cayenne, if not serving kids.
• Find out how to get andouille and use it. I’m still dying to know what it tastes like!
• Experiment with different varieties of lentils.
• Add rice.
• When using the chicken sausage or other lower salt sausage, render pancetta or bacon for the fat in which to start sautéing the mirepoix.
• When using the stick blender in the future, I will cook the sausages whole so I can remove them easily, blend, and then cut them up and put them back in.

The End
While I was shopping at Trader Joe’s for the remaining ingredients I wanted for the soup, I remember standing in front of the Greek yogurt section wondering if I ought to get some for the week. I couldn’t think of anything I would use it for, so I didn’t get any. It would have been absolutely perfect dolloped on top of a nice hot bowl of this soup. I can’t believe I didn’t think of that! Let that be a lesson to you all. Always get the Greek yogurt.

An Open Letter to Guy and His Big Bite

Dear Guy, from "Guy's Big Bite" on the Food Network,

Surely I'm not the first person who has begged you, for the love of all that is holy, to stop tasting your oh-so-manly, meat-stuffed-meat, pseudofusion greasetronomy and pronouncing it "money."

If an actual cool person ever used that expression, he stopped ten seconds after Swingers came out. (Psst! Swingers is about guys who think they're hip, but are actually pathetic. Okay?)

Clearly, you think you're a rock star, but real rock stars don't use hackneyed expressions like "That's so money" and "It's on like Donkey Kong." Plus, I hate to break it to you, but there are no rock stars on the Food Network. No matter how blond you bleach your hair, no matter how often you refer to yourself in the third person (smooth, dude), and no matter how many times you name one of your wake-n-bake entrees after a cocktail, you're still just a no-repeat Saturday throwaway on the Food Network. Your audience is way more Good Housekeeping than Maxim, so you might as well just try to make good food instead of a spectacle of yourself.

By the way: It's 2007. I know! That's fifteen years later than you thought it was.