Little Miss Count Along

I don't know how I made it so far in life without knowing about this.



Ok, so the Spin Doctors were on Sesame Street, teaching people about the value of sharing, you may say. Big deal. But would you be so callous if you knew their music made it on to Sesame Street again, this time being covered by The Count? Exactly. Behold the greatness of Little Miss Count Along.

Kingston Restaurant Review - "Stuff'd Urban Eats"

I'm not sure there is a more versatile food item anywhere in the world than the sandwich. They can be incredibly simple, or loaded down with exotic ingredients, but the end result is pretty hard to screw up. Really, when you boil it right down to its essence, the sandwich is just a handy framework for getting a bunch of ingredients into your mouth in the simplest possible manner. It excels as a vehicle for flavour because you can layer all sorts of stuff together and rest assured that it'll all comingle nicely in a chewy, crispy, bread delivery system.

Still, there are good sandwiches, and then there are great sandwiches. You know the ones. Super fresh bread, the perfect balance between being stuffed with ingredients and not being too thick to bite, moist delicious protein (chicken, beef, pork, tofu, whatever), tasty veggies, and just the right amount of condiment. Sandwiches like this can go toe-to-toe with just about any dining experience in the world for sheer satisfaction, and the price-to-deliciousness ratio for a good sandwich is hard to beat.

All of this sandwich rhapsodizing has a point. I want to emphasize that when I talk about Stuff'd Urban Eats (272 Bagot St., across from Shopper's Drug Mart) making the best sandwiches in Kingston, I am not throwing that statement out all willy-nilly. Nope, these are sandwiches beyond compare.

Stuff'd has kind of a gimmick as far as sandwich places go, in that you order by taking a pencil and one of their elaborate order forms, and manually constructing your sandwich layer by layer. Every parameter is customizable - bread, cheese, protein, toppings, condiments and greens. It's a neat idea, because having all the options laid out in front of you allows you to conceptualize just about any sandwich you could ever envision. Feeling like a sandwich with a bit of Asian influence? Get yourself some chicken with green onions, cilantro, tomatoes, sesame chili oil and spring mix. Hell yeah. Italian? No problem. Go with the genoa salami, parmesan cheese(real parmesan, not the crappy pre-grated stuff), fresh basil, roma tomatoes, romaine lettuce and mustard. Amazing.

The biggest flaw with the Stuff'd system is that the array of possible sandwich configurations is damn near infinite. There are at least 20 potential toppings, another 15 or so condiments, six cheeses, a ton of different protein options (including premium choices like in-house roasted chicken or prosciutto), and a bunch of different greens. Unfortunately, my brain interprets this playground of flavour as a challenge to assemble the perfectly optimized sandwich. I can't just start ticking off ingredients haphazardly, since cheese choice is intrinsically dependent on condiment selection, and optimal condiment selection is a function of toppings, which are themselves related to the protein and the cheese. It is a highly complex system. The best way to get things done is to go in with a vague notion of the general sandwich style you are craving, and tailor the ingredients from there.

Once you actually make it through the task of assembling your sandwich order, you hand your form over to one of the employees, who puts it together in a few minutes. The wait can be a little long if it's busy (I waited about 10 minutes today), but they always have a few copies of the current Globe & Mail for patrons.

Total cost for a decked out sandwich with a few extra toppings (you get an allowance of 2 toppings and up to 5 condiments to start off with, but I always add a few more veggies) comes in at under $7, which is a total steal compared to some of the other upscale sandwich providers in downtown Kingston like Pan Chancho. In fact, Stuff'd pretty much obliterates Pan Chancho in terms of sandwich quality. It's not even close.

All in all, if you're in downtown Kingston and you appreciate a good sandwich, you need to check out Stuff'd.

My New Favourite Blog

Ridiculously-tiny-niche blogs are nothing new, but I think I have found the king of them all.

Mix equal parts death metal and baking, and behold, The Black Oven.

These are some seriously horriffic recipes. Frostbitten Molasses Cookies, Call of the Wintermoon Lemon Curd Cookies, and the fearsome Petit-Gâteau des Légions Noire. The descriptions, too, are dark, chilling missives from a tortured realm. Gaze into the twisted visage of the molasses cookie...

"Boiled down to its very essence, metal is nothing more than a mixture of molasses and alienation. By that definition, these cookies are black fucking metal. Packed full of grim and evil spices, they will leave you feeling despondent and isolated within their stronghold of flavor."

The PB&J Campaign

There have been tons of conservation campaigns launched by governments and environmental organization over the last few years, and most of them have focused almost exclusively on electricity use and transportation. Now, granted, those two types of consumption make up a huge proportion of our total energy use, but the unfortunate reality that these campaigns have bumped into is that human behaviour seems especially rigid when it comes to things like transportation and electricity use. People find their habits, and stick to them pretty firmly.

One area where substantial energy savings are possible that has yet to be mined by mainstream conservation groups is food consumption. Pretty much the only idea to gain any traction so far is the "100 Mile Diet" and the idea of eating locally, which is a great concept, but which also requires a significant individual commitment. This is kind of a shame, because there's a much easier way to take a HUGE bite out of your ecological footprint (get it? bite? because we're talking about food!), and that is to eat less meat.

First things first, let me just state that I am not advocating a mass conversion to vegetarianism or veganism, though they are by far the least energy-intensive diets. I loves me some steak. In fact, I love just about every kind of animal I've ever encountered on a plate. Problem is, the consumption of meat for caloric energy is HEINOUSLY inefficient.

Basically, we need to put energy into the agricultural system to grow plants, then we need to harvest them, and then feed the plants to animals, who are not very efficient at turning plant energy into caloric energy in the form of animal tissue. Then, we've got to keep the animals alive, well fed and watered for a few months to a few years (depending on the animal), then there's butchering and processing on top of it. If you cut out that whole animal portion of the system and eat plants and plant-based products directly, you are obtaining caloric energy at an efficiency rate an order of magnitude better than with meat.

The upside to this large efficiency gap between meat- and plant-based meals is that you don't have to alter your regular diet that much to make a substantial difference. One vegetarian meal per day can save as much as 2.5 pounds of CO2, 133 gallons of water (!), and 24 sq. ft. of land use. These numbers are courtesy of the PB&J Campaign, which is aiming to get people to switch from a meat-based lunch to a PB&J sandwich every once in a while.


How can you go wrong? You get to save the environment just a little bit, plus you get a delicious peanut butter and jelly sandwich! If you haven't had a PB&J in a while, go make yourself one. I'm willing to bet you've forgotten how delicious they are.

Bonus tip: it's raspberry season. Go get yourself some fresh raspberries and throw them in between some toast with peanut butter and raspberry jam. It's the haute cuisine PB&J upgrade.

The Disadvantages of an Elite Education

I've got about one month left on my Queen's-student-countdown clock, and while it has been a ridiculous amount of fun, I have developed a few issues with the modern "elite university" environment. It is an excellent system for producing elite university alumni and for securing large research grants, without a doubt. Still, I can't help but feel there are some fundamental flaws with the system. I would go on at length, but this article by William Deresiewicz summarizes pretty much all the major shortcomings with the Elite University Education, but in a much, much more insightful and articulate manner than I could manage. The guy was an english professor at Yale, after all. It's a top-notch university.

On the types of intelligence ignored by the elite university...

"I also never learned that there are smart people who aren’t “smart.” The existence of multiple forms of intelligence has become a commonplace, but however much elite universities like to sprinkle their incoming classes with a few actors or violinists, they select for and develop one form of intelligence: the analytic. While this is broadly true of all universities, elite schools, precisely because their students (and faculty, and administrators) possess this one form of intelligence to such a high degree, are more apt to ignore the value of others. One naturally prizes what one most possesses and what most makes for one’s advantages. But social intelligence and emotional intelligence and creative ability, to name just three other forms, are not distributed preferentially among the educational elite. The “best” are the brightest only in one narrow sense. One needs to wander away from the educational elite to begin to discover this."

On the limiting nature of university educations...

"When parents explain why they work so hard to give their children the best possible education, they invariably say it is because of the opportunities it opens up. But what of the opportunities it shuts down? An elite education gives you the chance to be rich—which is, after all, what we’re talking about—but it takes away the chance not to be. Yet the opportunity not to be rich is one of the greatest opportunities with which young Americans have been blessed. We live in a society that is itself so wealthy that it can afford to provide a decent living to whole classes of people who in other countries exist (or in earlier times existed) on the brink of poverty or, at least, of indignity. You can live comfortably in the United States as a schoolteacher, or a community organizer, or a civil rights lawyer, or an artist—that is, by any reasonable definition of comfort. You have to live in an ordinary house instead of an apartment in Manhattan or a mansion in L.A.; you have to drive a Honda instead of a BMW or a Hummer; you have to vacation in Florida instead of Barbados or Paris, but what are such losses when set against the opportunity to do work you believe in, work you’re suited for, work you love, every day of your life?"

And finally, on the inability of the elite university to foster truly free thinking...

"Being an intellectual means, first of all, being passionate about ideas—and not just for the duration of a semester, for the sake of pleasing the teacher, or for getting a good grade. A friend who teaches at the University of Connecticut once complained to me that his students don’t think for themselves. Well, I said, Yale students think for themselves, but only because they know we want them to. I’ve had many wonderful students at Yale and Columbia, bright, thoughtful, creative kids whom it’s been a pleasure to talk with and learn from. But most of them have seemed content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them. Only a small minority have seen their education as part of a larger intellectual journey, have approached the work of the mind with a pilgrim soul. These few have tended to feel like freaks, not least because they get so little support from the university itself. Places like Yale, as one of them put it to me, are not conducive to searchers."

(link courtesy of kottke.org)

Internet Comments - The Movie!

I'm clearly not the only one with an intense loathing for most internet comment boards. Check out the Internet Commenter Business Meeting video over at College Humor. Brilliant. Parts two and three are equally funny.

ROFL!

Peak Transparent-Plastic-Number

A few weeks ago, my housemates and I were watching CNN, and they were running yet another "gee, gas is more expensive than it was in the past!" story. Clearly, however, they had run out of interesting angles from which to cover this unexpected, totally inexplicable event, as the entire content of this particular 5 minute spot focused on the sudden shortage of big plastic number fours. It seems "4" was not commonly found in gas prices at the $3.99-and-below level, and yet here we are, in a $4-a-gallon world. Needless to say it was a hard-hitting story, complete with testimonials ("Yeah, we never carried many of them fours, figured we'd never need them! Now we do.") and a few examples of the inextinguishable ingenuity of the human race ("I just took some of them big plastic ones, and a roll of electrical tape, and made them into fours"). Bravo, CNN. Bravo.

Apparently the plastic four shortage has swept the nation, and increased in severity, since the New York Times has now got in on the action. And people say the quality of news media is on the decline.

Really, what these stories illustrate is that we have a more immediate problem than Peak Oil, and that is Peak-Transparent-Plastic-Number-Fours. Luckily, America's finest corporate scientists have found huge natural reserves of big plastic fours buried under some environmentally fragile coastline near Bermuda. Now, the only things standing between the USA and relief for the beleaguered gas station sign supply companies are a few whiny leftist-types, and some starfish. Don't worry though, while we're digging up those fours, we'll also be planning for the future by figuring out a way to synthesize big plastic fives from plentiful, worthless food.

(NYT link courtesy of the great Ken Jennings)