Why Salt Lick sauce is so good

I just wrote about my new favorite BBQ sauce, the original recipe from The Salt Lick, outside of Austin, TX. Now I know why. As I was perusing the label to look at the ingredients (oil, vinegar, prepared mustard, Worcestershire, spices, etc) I noticed the nutrition info.

Egad.

Take a look at whatever sauce you keep handy near your computer. (Don't tell me you don't have sauce at your desk at work.) You'll see that per 2 Tbsp serving it has something like 25 calories and no grams of fat. Well, the folks at the Salt Lick seem to have adopted the "Fat, it's where the flavor is" theory of cooking: their original recipe sauce has 160 calories and 16 grams of fat per two Tbsp serving. Which basically means it is BBQ sauce flavored salad dressing.

Now, God didn't design BBQ to be healthy, but do we really need to put a fat-based sauce all over our fat-based meat? That said, if there is that much oil in the sauce, I wonder if I can deep fry a turkey in it. Hmm.

3 bullets on food

Some random stuff before I head off to New York:

• I think I've found the best barbeque sauce in the world. My mom's family comes from the part of South Carolina that uses mustard as the base for their BBQ sauce, and I'm partial to Mathews (which I think is from Saluda). I never thought that it would be replaced in my sauce hierarchy by a sauce from Texas, but it has. I'll be the first to say that Texans get a lot wrong about BBQ, including the feature animal (cow) and sauce base (tomato), but the folks at The Salt Lick in Austin are on to something great: a mustard based sauce with good tang, a touch of sweetness, and just the right amount of vinegar. I've been told their BBQ is also good, and if it's half as good as the sauce it's worth your trouble to acquire some.
• Many moons ago I complained about the lack of decent yogurt around here. Well, my favorite market started selling Stonyfield, which is great. What's weird is that I've been eating a lot of the caramel yogurt. It seems pretty strange to have "caramel" on the bottom as opposed to "peaches" on the bottom.
  
• Cheeks are hot. Huan experimented with halibut cheeks several times, and they were fantastic. Then on New Year's Eve I had a pasta dish with pork jowl. Now the New York Times just ran a story about to towns in Italy that have competing versions of a dish based on, you guessed it pork jowl. And it turns out that one of the few places you can get cured, unsmoked pork jowl in America is in Seattle. I'll let you know how it goes.
  

Sports!

Despite being inhabited by relatively fit and athletic people, hosting three professional franchises and being home to a pretty big university, Seattle would not strike anyone as a "sports" town. Like most major cities people are rabid about football. Locals care about the Mariners until they fall out of contention in July (about three months after my Orioles have fallen out of contention back East), and after that the crowds are mostly Japanese tourists excited to see Ichiro. The Sonics get so little love that they are going to get moved to Oklahoma City.

Anyways, I'm a big sports fan. Back in DC I would usually go to a couple of Redskins games (thanks to my friend Todd's parents), maybe a baseball game or two, and a Wizards/Caps/Georgetown game if I could luck into Capital One's box seats. If you look at my sports attendance in 2007 you'd notice a difference:

• Three Seahawks games;
• One UW football game;
• One UW basketball game;
• 10 Sonics games (3 pre-Durant, 7 post-Durant);
• Five Mariners games

That's 20 sporting events in 12 months. I feel like that's a lot. I was talking with the girl who cuts my hair on Friday about how hard it is to make same-sex friends in a new city. She is young and hip and "Myspaced" someone, which I think means that she met someone randomly on Myspace who ended up as her best friend. Anyways, we were talking about the awkwardness of the "friend date", and got to talking about how men have sporting events, which are nearly perfectly designed for man-dates (firm stopping times, requires paying attention to something else making silence okay, excuse to drink obnoxious quantities of beer, etc). We couldn't decide if there was a female equivalent, although she thought shopping could qualify.

I was hoping to have a lot more to say other than "I went to a lot of sporting events" last year, but it turns out that I've got nothing. But I do have Sonics/Jazz tickets in two weeks if anyone is interested.

Redskins photos

As promised, photos from my trip to the Skins-Hawks game this past Sunday.

http://www.flickr.com/gp/72188899@N00/29g855

34 hours in coach? One way? Sure!

I've been toying with the idea of a trip to visit my friends in Asia this spring. It isn't hard for me to find a reasonable flight from Seattle to Singapore (under $900, stopping in Tokyo each way). Shanghai, it would seem, is nearly impossible to get to from Singapore for under $1000. I don't mind search engines returning expensive flights, since sometimes that is all that is available.

Kayak has managed to break all the records for "least reasonable flight suggested, ever." How unreasonable? Try this:

Leave – Wed 27 Feb 2008
This flight leaves and arrives on different dates.
	American Airlines Flight 5832 Operated by Japan Airlines	Departs: 11:30p Changi (SIN)		Arrives: 7:10a Narita (NRT)
	Coach | Aircraft: 744 | 6h 40m
	[ Layover in Tokyo, Japan (NRT) for 4h 50m ]
	American Airlines Flight 5822 Operated by Japan Airlines	Departs: 12:00p Narita (NRT)		Arrives: 8:20a O'Hare Inter­national (ORD)
	Coach | Aircraft: 744 | 11h 20m
	[ Layover in Chicago, IL (ORD) for 2h 35m ]
	American Airlines Flight 289	Departs: 10:55a O'Hare Inter­national (ORD)		Arrives: 3:25p Pu Dong (PVG)
	Coach | Aircraft: 777 | 14h 30m

Return – Sun 2 Mar 2008
This flight leaves and arrives on different dates.
	American Airlines Flight 288	Departs: 6:00p Pu Dong (PVG)		Arrives: 5:20p O'Hare Inter­national (ORD)
	Coach | Aircraft: 777 | 13h 20m
	[ Layover in Chicago, IL (ORD) for 17h 45m ]
	American Airlines Flight 153	Departs: 11:05a O'Hare Inter­national (ORD)		Arrives: 3:15p Narita (NRT)
	Coach | Aircraft: 777 | 13h 10m
	[ Layover in Tokyo, Japan (NRT) for 2h 35m ]
	American Airlines Flight 5836 Operated by Japan Airlines	Departs: 5:50p Narita (NRT)		Arrives: 12:30a Changi (SIN)
	Coach | Aircraft: 777 | 7h 40m

Yeah. That's right. Singapore -> Tokyo -> Chicago -> Shanghai. The Great Circle right my a**. Go find a globe. Trace that out. You'll find that a straight shot is 2300 miles, or about 5 hours on a modern jet airliner. American Airlines, in their infinite wisdom, would suggest you take a trip that is 34 hours (going) and 54 hours (returning), where you cross the International dateline TWICE on each leg, and cover approximately 33,308 miles. For those of you keeping track at home the circumference of the Earth is 24,901 miles. It's almost a bargain at $7,238.

You'll notice that the itinerary doesn't tell you what date you land. I'm not sure I could even do the math and figure it out.

It's a small world, but this is ridiculous

Took my seat for the Seahawks/Redskins game today. Qwest Field is about 2700 miles away from DC. It holds about 69,000 people. The guy sitting in front of me? Went to high school with me. As in my same class.

Pictures to follow tomorrow.

Placed on the 15 day DL

I sustained maybe the lamest injury of my 30.9 years this past Sunday. To celebrate the Redskins making the playoffs (and, as luck would have it, coming to Seattle) I decided to replace the flush and fill valves on my toilet, which has been slowly running for the past 11 months. Turns out that replacing the flush valve involves taking the bowl off the base of the toilet, which requires a lot of lying on the bathroom floor loosening old bolts*, which requires contorting myself into some weird shapes.

I woke up Monday with what is best described as a Grade 2 strain of my left hamstring. I literally hobbled around work on Monday, and couldn't actually do anything at the gym. I managed to walk 9 holes today, but it required lots of stretching. I don't know how I'm going to make it through life if I regularly injure myself by lying on the floor.

* Don't worry, I had mopped the floor prior to starting this exercise.