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.
  

Easy as bagged lettuce

I'm not sure what started me thinking about this (it was probably being at the grocery store), but I wonder what my generation's "As easy as sliced bread" metaphor will be.* I thought about this while walking home with seedless grapes, bagged and washed lettuce, and peeled baby carrots. None of these are particularly sexy sounding, but in terms of making food preparation remarkably easy I think they are amongst the big players. I mean, who buys a head of lettuce these days?** When is the last time you peeled a carrot? Every now and then I see a real carrot in the grocery store and I wonder what kind of growth hormones it must be on to get that big.

Anyways, the real genesis of this post was my newfound love: butter lettuce. How did I not know about this until two months ago? The trick with bag lettuce was always finding a kind that would last more than two hours after being opened, which wasn't terribly difficult if you didn't mind eating lettuce that tasted like shoes. But this butter lettuce stuff (BTW, just fabulous branding... if more vegetables had butter in their name we might not have an obesity problem in the US. Butter broccoli, I'm looking in your direction) is just fantastic. It lasts a full week, it has a nice taste, and, I can't believe I'm writing this, a very velvety texture. Who knew lettuce had texture. Props to butter lettuce.

On the downside, I can't get decent yogurt out here. I became very attached to Stonyfield Farms (or Stonybrook, or Stonysomethingorother) yogurt during the past year. It had a nice mix of fruit and yogurt, a decent texture, and it was never cloyingly sweet. It was also organic, which I'm a big fan of. I can't find an organic yogurt out here that is any good, and that's very disappointing.

Update: Yup, I was right. I don't know how to ID a metaphor. Saying that simile was my 2nd guess probably isn't very believable, but it was my 2nd guess.

* Please let me know if this isn't a metaphor. I know Mrs. Lange hates that I got a 5 on the AP Comp exam without knowing this.

** I do know two people who actually cook who buy real lettuce, but I'm not sure they read the blog.