The Dreaded Birthday Chicken

My father and I went to Dugan's Pub the other day so I could get my annual celebratory Buffalo chicken sandwich in honor of my upcoming birthday. This isn't a long-standing tradition. I discovered the sandwich somewhere in the last decade and, knowing that eating it on a regular basis would shorten my lifespan, have assigned it formal designation as a birthday treat.

The sandwich is a model of perfection. A full breast of chicken, butterflied, deep fried and Buffalo-ized in an amazing spicy, yet flavorful, red-orange sauce, covered with melted Swiss and served on a bun butch enough to hold up under pressure. Since I was already throwing caution (and several major arteries) to the wind, I went ahead and ordered the beer-battered fries as my side and didn't forget the bleu cheese dressing. It's Buffalo chicken, after all. Any other condiment (with the possible exception of ranch) is un-American.

The end result of eating the Dugan's Pub Buffalo chicken sandwich should come as no surprise. Sensations of burning, bloat and discomfort are immediately visited upon you, and again several hours later when the alien vacates its host body. Sweating, congestion, tears of shame and joy -- all the things you hope for when over-indulging in your favorite flavors and seeking a satisfyingly trough-like experience, leaving you emotionally drained from overwhelming satisfaction and self-loathing.

This year, all the effects were magnified exponentially.

Not only am I growing older, finding myself slightly less capable of tolerating such unbridled over-eating with the passing of each year, My Lovely Wife and I have also been making an effort since the start of 2016 to eat less like hormone-charged teenagers and more like responsible adults interested in meeting our grandchildren. Since January, I've lost close to twenty pounds and dropped two inches from my waistline. Shirts have gone from extra-large to large and I'm as close to not having a pot belly as I've been since graduating high school. While we have cut back on certain foods (I'm looking at you, breads and starches!) and reintroduced ourselves to daily portions of fruits of vegetables, the biggest factor for me has been portion control.

Left to my own devices, I'd eat and nibble and pick and peck and nosh and munch and crunch all day long on all the things I know I shouldn't be eating. Then, I'd sit down to a table three times a day and stuff myself. Even during past diets, I'd replace pretzels and chips with apples and carrots, yet I'd still cram those healthy items down my pie hole like a starved hyena gulping down a baby gazelle. This time around, I'm taking it seriously. Meal portions are reasonable, snacking is down to a bare minimum, water consumption could flood a small Texas town, exercise is more strategic, and foods and sundry ingredients are chosen with greater care.

Which is exactly why Dugan's Buffalo chicken sandwich and beer-battered fries were such a delicious, spice-coated, deep-fried offense to the senses. I've always known fries weren't good for me, but this was the first time in 48 years I could recall ever wishing I had ordered the broccoli florets or fruit cup instead. Not that the fries weren't awesome -- they were, and I ate every last one. Not that the chicken sandwich didn't meet my expectations -- it did, and I smiled and snorted all the way through it and went home with a red-orange tint around my mouth and finger tips. It's just that I was uncomfortably full for several hours.

You might be wondering what lesson I learned from this experience. As I'm fairly dim, with a memory that can be measured in nanoseconds, the answer is: probably none. Next May, I'll go to Dugan's Pub and order another Buffalo chicken sandwich. I might think about a healthy side, but that insanity will pass before the waitress arrives to take my order.



© 2016 Mark Feggeler

Those, Sir, Are Nuggets

I'd never heard of Boston Pizza before our trip to Niagara Falls. Turns out the company has locations in Canada and many US states, just not in the Carolinas. Who knew?

When the Boston Pizza commercial appeared on screen to help fill the gap between hockey periods, the company heralded its latest addition to its menu: All Meat Wings!

Uh, um, huh, wha?

Apparently the oft-used phrase Boneless Buffalo Wings didn't satisfy the Boston Pizza marketing department. That, or the name is trademarked by some other restaurant. Maybe Chili's Southwest Grill? They have boneless Buffalo wings. I should know, I've eaten my share of them. They serve well when you're craving the spicy goodness of chicken wings but can't afford to have your fingers tinged red up to the second knuckle and your face smeared with bleu cheese dressing.

But, the benefits of not slopping yourself full of Buffalo sauce up to your earlobes aside, the brazen claim of that Boston Pizza commercial was the feather that broke this chicken's back. I don't care how convenient they are or what you call them, they aren't wings.

Wings have bones and shreds of meat so small any rational human being wouldn't waste time attempting to extricate them. The joy of wing eating doesn't come from sustenance. People don't finish a dozen wings and push back from the table, satiated, unbuttoning their pants to relieve the strain of a bulging belly, and announce loudly to world they are full. They push back, greasy and stained, sweat beading on their foreheads from the heat, bits of chicken dangling from their teeth like Quint from the jaws of Bruce the shark, wondering how many more dozens they can eat before their tastebuds are permanently damaged.

But these boneless bites are all about sanitized, generic quantity. And when you break them down, they are nothing more than breaded breast meat (I hope) coated with sauce and served with a side of dressing for dipping. In short, they are chicken nuggets.

Chicken nuggets are not manly. Chicken nuggets require little effort, no tearing meat off bones that stack high like morbid structures in ancient catacombs beneath Paris. Chicken nuggets satisfy no deep-rooted, caveman-like desire to hunt and gather. Chicken nuggets are pacifiers for children too fussy to eat real food.

So, do me a favor Boston Pizza, Chili's, and yes, even you Buffalo Wild Wings -- hold your hype and modify your menus. Those breaded shams you're shilling may taste good in the spicy sauce, but that doesn't make them wings.



© 2012 Mark Feggeler

Turd-ucken

There are some things humans might never have eaten if not for lack of money or resources.

Take vegetable stew, for example. Back in the Middle Ages, root vegetables were seen as being unfit for the English upper classes – food from the dirt fit only for commoners – so the poor found ways to use these relatively accessible items. What better way than to mix and match them in a big pot of contaminated water from the nearby stream and blend their flavors together over a low simmer?

The rich also harbored a distrust of certain raw foods like nuts and fruits. They ate cheese but avoided milk. These were also times when most people (including children) drank mead because it was safer to risk alcoholism than to trust the quality of the local water supply.

Anyway, you get the idea. Long story short, the poor ate meager yet relatively healthy meals while the upper class died of scurvy, gout and rickets from seasoning, salting, drying and boiling the beneficial nutrients and vitamins out of everything they put in their mouths. The whole raw food diet craze never would have caught on 1,000 years ago.

These days, food snobbery is more about trying everything than about avoiding any particular ingredient.

There are dozens of shows on television in which people wander the world to find the most bizarre food customs, and the more disgusting the main ingredient the better. I’ll bet if I really pushed hard enough I could get Travel Channel or Food Network to fund a one-hour special about the best recipes for hamster testicles from around the globe. Just to tie it in with their other programming, it could air right after a new Iron Chef America featuring Rocky Mountain oysters as the secret ingredient.

Now, I don’t want to rag on my brother, because he really was acting out of a sincere desire to give us all a memorable food experience. After all, who doesn’t like to try new things?

Our palates don’t stop developing when we reach a certain age. If so, I never would have learned to love shrimp, or Mexican food, or oatmeal. Okay, so maybe I can't say I like oatmeal. For me it’s more like a bowl of heated brown sugar, honey and cinnamon with a few soggy oats thrown in for fiber.

But back to my brother and that turducken. Whoever dreamed up the idea of stuffing a deboned turkey with a deboned duck stuffed with a deboned chicken clearly had too much time on his or her hands. Maybe this is the kind of meal that results from bored culinary students getting high before their finals.

That said, I was willing to approach the meal with an open mind. I like turkey. I like chicken. I think I ate duck once and liked it. There was no reason to suspect this meal should be any less than the sum of its parts.

The first red flag popped up when I was advised to try a spoonful of the drippings to taste for myself how spicy it was. Call me old-fashioned, but I’ve never been much of a five-alarm turkey kind of guy. Sure, Buffalo chicken is one of the greatest inventions known to man, but a kick ass hot turkey really doesn’t lure me to the table, let alone a spoonful of hot and spicy turkey grease.

I initially believed the excessive heat came solely from the liberal seasoning of the turkey skin. That was a false assumption.

The real fire didn’t break out until we reached the spicy sausage dressing. Yes, you didn’t misread that or suffer a sudden astigmatism. Spicy sausage dressing. I can just imagine someone sitting around thinking: “You know what this chicken inside a duck inside a turkey needs? Pork and cumin.”

By the time the meal was finished, I was cured of any curiosity I might have had about turducken. A few of us tried politely to find nice things to say about it, but even my brother was beginning to offer qualifying statements about the meal before the table was cleared. I felt bad for him, but I have to admit he did give us an unforgettable experience.

In the end, the best single word I can think of to relay the lingering impression of turducken can be found by shortening the name of the meal to its first four letters.



© 2011 Mark Feggeler

Challenges, Diets & Favorite Foods

I am, by nature, optimistically cynical, which means I am willing to give something new a try but I don't really expect it to work.

That was my frame of mind a few weeks ago when, in an effort to lose a few unneeded pounds, my Lovely Wife and I decided to take the Special K Challenge.

If any of you have ever taken the Special K Challenge, you'll know the most challenging part of it is figuring out how the Kellogg's marketing department managed to pull this scam over on us. To be fair, they never refer to it as a diet, just a challenge.

And it's only for two weeks, so they're not proposing a dramatic lifestyle change. It's more a brief exercise in caloric intake control that just happens to fill the Kellogg's coffers along the way. I flaunted my radical contempt for authority by substituting Honey Bunches of Oats.

If nothing else, I expected the massive increase of fiber intake to either benefit my wastline or take a toll on my colon, yet even that lingering promise/threat went unfulfilled. I lost all of of three pounds for my trouble, and I didn't drop a jean's size, like the model on the back of the box -- who probably has never struggled with weight issues -- implied I would.

Am I surprised? No. But it did get me thinking about all of the things I would rather be eating that are worth the calories and fat they carry with them.

Along with spicy chicken wings -- which are a natural goodness and really should be considered health food based solely on how content with life they make me feel -- there are certain meals that hold a special place in my heart. Some are home-cooked and others are from restaurants. For the sake of keeping this post from rambling on forever I've limited myself to a Top 10, presented in no particular order.

1. Lobster Pizza from Red Lobster: I ordered it for the first time recently because I've been meaning to try it. While certain menu items at Red Lobster never seem to live up to their promise, I can strongly recommend the Lobster Pizza for its great combination of sweet lobster and sauce, salty cheese, and crunchy crust. Not a substitute for real pizza, mind you, but a wonderful appetizer.

2. Pepperoni & Mushroom Pizza from Vito's: I grew up in New York on Long Island. There are two things you get accustomed to growing up in New York on Long Island. One of them is outstanding bagels, piping hot in the morning with cream cheese piled a mile high. The other is great pizza. It's almost impossible to find a bad pizza on Long Island, so you can imagine my culture shock 20 years ago when I moved to the middle of North Carolina and experienced the dreadful monstrosities passing for pizza. Thin cracker crusts, bland sauce no better than ketchup, and cheese that looked like plastic shavings and tasted about as good. Then, in the heart of Southern Pines, I found Vito's Ristorante and my tastebuds were saved!

3. Sauerbraten: I was a fussy eater as a kid, which, as George Carlin pointed out, is just another way of saying "huge pain in the ass." But this was one meal that my grandparents served a few times each year that always made me belly up to the table. My Grandmother would blend the perfect flavors together, cooking and simmering them for just the right length of time. Then my Grandfather would carve the meat like a surgical machine, all the slices the same thickness and fork tender. Smother some mashed potatoes or potato pancakes in the thick brown gravy and you have a perfect meal.

4. Sesame Chicken w/ Pork Fried Rice: Anyone's from any restaurant will do. I discovered this combination during college when a dumpy little Chinese restaurant in downtown Plattsburgh offered the chicken for $5 and a bathtub-size portion of fried rice for $3. You could make it last two or three days, providing you avoided those late night college munchies.

5. Spare Ribs and Rice: My Mother used to prepare some unconventional spare ribs in a slick red sweet & spicy sauce and serve it with plain white rice that soaked up that sauce like a sponge. She was convinced they were the favorite meal of my brother, Steve, but I always looked forward to them.

6. Braised Short Rib w/ Gnocchi at Eliot's: Sticking with the rib theme, my Lovely Wife and I enjoyed a special dinner earlier this year at Eliot's on Linden in Pinehurst. She had Elk, which was great, but my braised short rib was astounding. It fell apart in its light gravy that also soaked into the gnocchi. I traded out the collard greens for sautéed mushrooms and enjoyed a rustic, earthy delight.

7. Lobster & Filet in Puerto Vallarta: During a trip to Mexico, the concierge at the resort recommended to us and another couple to try Felipe's in old Vallarta. A 20-minute deathcab ride later and we were sitting on the back veranda overlooking the bay and dining on a meal for two that consisted of two whole lobsters, two small filet mignons, and several shrimp each. Perhaps the most spectacular meal I've ever eaten -- and the company wasn't bad, either!

8. Bread Bowl & Soup at Panera Bread: Okay, I know it's a chain, but they do have amazing bread bowls and some excellent soups to pour in them. The bowls soak in the broth and turn into delectable flavor sponges.

9. Buffalo Chicken Sandwich at Dugan's Pub: I've eaten at Dugan's quite a few times over the years, and it's been a long time since I've needed a menu. Every time I go, there is only one item I want. For starters, they give you an enormous breast of chicken soaked through with the tastiest buffalo sauce I've ever experienced. Then they top it with a thin slice of cheese, put it on a tasty soft bun, and serve it up with beer-battered french fries. Give me an extra cup of the buffalo sauce, a diet coke, and a bib, and I'm a happy man.

10. Grandma's Meatballs: Shortly before she died, my Mother-in-Law taught us how to make her highly-coveted meatballs and sausage in tomato sauce. Apart from the fact this flawless meal satisfies on many different levels, the kids love digging their hands into the raw ground beef and pork to mix it with the eggs, cheese and chopped herbs. The kids and I mix and shape the meatballs, my Lovely Wife browns them to perfection, and we build the sauce together in our biggest pot. Throw in some sweet Italian sausage for added flavor and I could eat it every night and twice on Sundays.

I could keep going but I've got to stop or I'm going to lose control and completely ruin my diet. Even though the Special K Challenge has now gone the way of the dodo, I am trying to behave myself and get back to the low 180s where I feel most comfortable. I only need to lose another five pounds, so it shouldn't be too difficult.

On the other hand, we have a big container of Grandma's Meatballs in the freezer...

What are some of your favorite meals?


© 2010 Mark Feggeler