Category Archives: holiday
Hello Fall: The Wawa Gobbler Is Back!
This summer was ungodly hot and humid. At one point it even almost killed my car. At one point it almost killed me (100+ degree weather plus no ac in the car is no good for anyone, including an overweight jackass who has to drive to AC from Philly). While I am not looking forward to winter and all it’s bs that comes along with it, I do love fall. My birthday was this week and usually right after that (or after I recover from my hangover) Fall creeps in. I got my first look at it when my neighbor had a big bag of candy corn (that, much like Lewis Black says, tastes like crap but I eat it every year). My second look at Fall was that the Wawa Gobbler has returned!!
For those of you who don’t live within an hour of Philadelphia (or now in Florida!), Wawa is what some might call a convenience store. Using the word convenience store, you think of 7-11, which is correct and very, very wrong. Wawa has all the things a convenience store has, along with awesome freshly made food. A night out is not the same without stopping into the store to pick up a hoagie, and a morning after is usually soothed by a breakfast sandwich. Everyone has a favorite, and they have some awesome seasonal favorites, which brings us to The Gobbler!!
The Gobbler! Hello, Fall!
The Gobbler is a sandwich that we have all made: the Thanksgiving sandwich! Turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce and gravy.
Most places make them with lunchmeat turkey that has just taken a quick dip in some kind of salty, gross neon gravy. Not this turkey! It is thicker cut for some bite and they aren’t skimpy with it!
Side View!
The stuffing has some seasoning in it, and it tastes like it came off of someone’s kitchen table, as opposed to just slapped together. Now, I am not naive, I know there isn’t some little old lady in the back making turkeys and stuffing for all of us. But I like the fact that they try and don’t just make a tub of salt and slap it on a roll.
Anyway, the gravy is excellent too, and it is not, as some gravy bought in stores ca be, a salt bomb. it’s actually tasty and really pulls together the whole sandwich. It also seeps into the roll and makes a home within it, oozing in over, under and around the ingredients. My absolute favorite part is the cranberry sauce, which has real actual cranberries in it! See them in the picture? Oh yeah!
When you order a sandwich at Wawa, it’s all computerized, so you can customize it any way you want. I added pepperjack cheese and creamy horseradish sauce. Delish! The flavors mingled like a drunken wedding party at 2am. Strictly speaking, the sandwich is happiness on a roll. Get one if ya can!
The deliciousness!
Photo Roundup!
Hey Everyone!,
So I realized I had a bunch of stray pictures hanging around. I am the asshole you see snapping pictures of food at inappropriate times (“I know you are having that cookie because of your low blood sugar but it looks cool”…Snap!) but not all of my pics can be a whole blog post unto itself. So, here is a roundup of assorted pics that I thought would be cool.
First up! In a previous post, I drooled all over the internet about a Prime Rib that my cousin-in-law, Bob, the firefighter chef, had made. Well, what I did not mention was that his wife Chrissy cut me a giant piece to take home. So, later on, home alone on New Years Day, I wanted to eat it. But how? I cut it up, threw it in a cast iron skillet and started to just heat it up.
Leftover Prime Rib & Eggs
In a little bowl I mixed some ketchup, A1, sriracha, worcheshire sauce and water and threw it in so it wouldn’t get dried out. Then I thought, what should I eat with it? Duh.
It was a thing of beauty. The sauce had cooked down and caramelized on the meat and the eggs were cooked but the yolks were still kinda dippy. I sat in the green leather armchair in the living room with this plate on my lap and welcomed the first day of 2012 (yeah, I had to check) with reckless abandon. And lots of meat!
Changing gears…
I was in North Jersey doing some comedy awhile back with my friend Latice. It was a long drive and I was super crazy hungry. I ordered a burger (an aside: please don’t advertise a big giant burger and then give me a big giant…jetro frozen burger. It takes 20 minutes to make like 45 fresh burgers for the week. Salt. Pepper. Maybe something else if you wanna get crazy. It’s cheaper to buy a chubb (haha, yeah that’s what they call it) of meat from wherever you get your meat and make them yourself then to lie to me and make me angry.) and wanted nachos. I love nachos.
And what they served me made me so angry I wanted to burn the building down.
The Worst Nachos In The History Of The World
What we have here are the Worst Nachos In The History Of The World. They were over salted regular and blue corn tortilla chips with the bagged shredded cheese and old chili on them. Oh. And olives. Where are the other ingredients? They were on another plate (that I didn’t take a picture of due to being angry) in little cups. There was not enough for the both of us, which irritates the crap out of me, because nachos should be big enough to be shared by at least 3 people. THAT IS WHY THEY EXIST. Some idiot in the kitchen decides to make deconstructed nachos and then doesn’t even mention it in the menu. And then tries to pass off a frozen burger as homemade. For shame. FOR SHAME.
This is what nachos should look like:
Nachos at Urban Saloon
There is everything you need there. They don’t make their own chips either, even tho it is simple, but there is height, heft and yes, DELICIOUSNESS.
(And the maraschino cherries for dessert? You really get me internet, you really do…)
Ahem.
Frankenstein Cake Pop
My little cousin Matt turned 7 earlier this past year and he wanted a monster themed party (fitting for Matt, but you don’t know him, so this must seem very inside baseball. You’d be right. But, trust me.). So his mom Lorrie made a very cool cake and gave out these monster cake pops!
Lorrie makes such awesome baked goods that sometimes I daydream about keeping her in my basement to just make me baked goods all day long. But then I remember how silly that would be…my cellar isn’t big enough for that kind of operation. A girl can dream tho.
Anyway, aren’t they cool? The hair is oreo crumbs and the cake is a light and airy chocolate. Did I almost get into a fight with another 7 year old over one sitting on a table?
One may never know…(I sure as hell ain’t tellin’….)
Red Velvet Donut
I found myself out of my area of cheesesteaks and tastykakes and into another area called Brooklyn. It looks a lot like Philly but with much more annoying Yankee/Giants/Mets crap plastered to all the cards. So instead of making an afternoon out of keying cars, I ended up eating this…a red velvet donut.
I didn’t eat it when first given to me. It sat in the bag for a bit. While I do tend to write about baked goods, I really very rarely eat them because too much carby stuff turns me into a parade float. Ahem. Anywho, this beauty is from the Peter Pan Bakery on Manhattan Ave in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn. This thing was freakin’ amazing. Could it have been better with cream cheese frosting? Perhaps. But it was like eating a cupcake, a cake and a dance on a ballroom floor and I’ll take that any day.
Awesome Cupcake
I’ll end this hodgepodge post with a cupcake. A plain vanilla cupcake. I don’t remember exactly where I had this thing (it might have been another one of Bob’s creations), but I remember the icing. I hate cupcakes that have skimpy sugar-ball icing. They have no flavor. No panache. No…soul.
This was a perfect cupcake. Cream cheese icing. Tiny sugar crystals. It took me awhile to get down to the cupcake but ya know what?
It was a holiday cupcake and I was in love with it. And that was just fine with me.
New Year’s Eve Feast
There are some people who need to go out and roam about drunkenly to have, what they consider, a successful New Year’s Eve. There are others who need to have an epic, crazy, shitshow of a party at home in order to be successful (including, but not limited to: a painted cat, someone’s underwear in the freezer and the sofa covered in spray cheese with the lawn covered in PBR cans). And then there are some people who are content to stay home and cuddle up with their significant other whilst drinking wines, eating cheese and watching some kind of PBS special about NYE celebrations around the world. Those people should be kicked (but that’s besides the point…).
I like a one stop house party. This year, I deviated and went to a gathering of cousins up in the Northeast and then to my friends Jackie & Tim’s annual bash afterwards. Both were a great time (Jackie & Tim’s parties always rock!), but I wanted to write a little bit about the food at my first stop.
My cousin-in-law Bob likes to cook, and he really outdid himself. First up? Prime Rib!
Prime Rib out of the oven!
Prime Rib, over the years, has gotten kind of a bad rap as a boring standby buffet food atany big hall occasion such as a wedding, anniversary party or anything someone’s parents have to pay for. If it is not seasoned and boring, it can be a let down. If it’s like this, right out of the oven, you just get EXCITED! (Ok, so maybe not that excited, that might just be me. I don’t get out a lot and have been single for awhile.)
Some people think Prime Rib is just Roast Beef. No! Roast Beef is made instead of Prime Rib and once you had really, really mouth watering Prime Rib, you will never blaspheme again against the lovely Prime Rib. (Bonus! Count how many times I used the term “Prime Rib” in this paragraph! Pat yourself on the back!)
Prime Rib after resting!
A big mistake people make about meat is that they just take out of the oven, or off the grill, or even off the stovetop, and they don’t give the meat a chance to rest. Resting lets the meat relax and the juices can redistribute. If you ever cut into a steak and all the juices ran out and the meat ended up being kinda dry, the meat didn’t get a chance to rest. Feel free to smack the chef and grab some A1. This is what a Prime Rib, fully rested, looks like!
Au Jus!
While the meat is resting, you can pop the roasting pan up on the stove and turn up a medium heat. Add some wine & stock and start scraping the bottom (the meat drippings!) of the pan to create a very cool Au Jus (or, thicken it up and make some gravy). Bob did just this, while I tried to drool on me and not the counter. I leaned in and snapped a shot!
The best part of the Au Jus, besides it being unbelievably delicious and cheaper then jars of salt filled gravy, is that when you have to clean that pan, anything that would have stuck to the bottom has dissolved into the liquid. So, really, you are just helping yourself.
Prime Rib all carved up!
Wondering what the final product looks like? How about this! Absolutely amazing! My hat is OFF to Bob! I know I ate a good 2 slabs of this buttery goodness, and even some of my other relatives, who aren’t into big pieces of meat, enjoyed it as well.
Deviled Eggs
Not to be outdone, My cousin Michele made her Deviled Eggs. I don’t know what she puts in them, but she knows how to pack them. She doesn’t fill those eggs with a skimpy bit of filling, she fills and covers the whole egg with the filling! And they are fantastic!
Deviled Eggs are, again, another food that people kind of sigh when talked about. But find a good recipe and run with it! There is a reason why this appetizer (or, as we use it, side dish) has been around for so long…they ROCK!
Homemade PIzzelles!
Dessert, you say? After taking a lap or two around the block, I cleared some room and took a look at the dessert table. Homemade Pizzelles (made by Bob yet again!), cupcakes and cookies.
I love holidays, but I think my pants are glad it’s over! That is, until all the Valentine’s Day candy goes on sale…
DidjaEat? 