Epic Portions

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  • Tea Wars, or Finding the Perfect Arnold Palmer

    After reading John’s post about Peace Iced Tea, I decided to give it a try (you will get no stupid give peace a chance puns out of me.) I discovered, much as he said, that it was superior to Arizona and the $0.99 price was also quite nice. I then thought that it should be my mission to do some tea research of my own, specifically the wonderful half lemonade half iced tea concoction known as the Arnold Palmer. Over the past two weeks I’ve had more tea than Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady on a trip to Mexico. It has been a labor of love; it is difficult to screw up the Arnold Palmer, even at its worst it is still pretty delicious. Mixing iced tea with lemonade is magic. On top of that I owe the beverage a lot for helping to end my cursed addiction to Diet Mountain Dew.

    First a few words about sweeteners. I already railed against high fructose corn syrup and will not use this post to do it again. It is simply a fact that an Arnold Palmer sweetened with HFCS just doesn’t taste quite right, and has a thick finish. Not what I’m looking for in a supposedly refreshing beverage. I’ve also tried many sweetened with sucralose, which is the primary sweetener in Lipton Diet Tea; pretty mediocre stuff if you ask me. Our friends at Peace Iced Tea combine the use of real sugar with sucralose to make a lower calorie version, highly superior to the diet teas.

    What is sucralose, you ask? It’s the artificial sweetener used in Splenda. According to Wikipedia, it is 600 times sweeter than table sugar. Sorry Peace Iced Tea, you can say you use “all natural ingredients” but I’m not buying it.  You can plaster your can with all the hippie symbols you want, but it doesn’t change the fact that you use an artificial sweetener coupled with sugar for your tea. The use of sucralose and its unholy level of sweetness would explain why Peace Iced Tea leaves an unpleasant aftertaste in your mouth. Not awful, just not what one would hope for out of a true sweet lemon tea, as they call their Arnold Palmer.

    So whose version of the Arnold Palmer is best? I found some really great ones out there, Nantucket Nectars Half and Half is outstanding, as is Sweet Leaf Organic Half and Half and Honest Tea Lori’s Lemon (even if the name is a little too cutesy for me.) It is with some regret, however, that I have to admit that Tazo Black Tea and Lemonade is the best version I found. I normally don’t like philosophical messages on my tea unless Sartre makes an appearance, but I suppose I can drink it without looking at the idiotic feel-good quotes.  I also am not a fan of Starbucks (they bought Tazo a little over ten years ago), but I will let John’s spot on rant about them be the definitive word on Starbucks instead of launching into a predictable anti-Starbucks diatribe.  I just have to assume that the original founders of Tazo came up with the current recipe and Starbucks was smart enough to leave it alone.

    So there it is, Tazo Black Tea and Lemonade rocks. The only drawback is the 13 oz. bottle, but hey, I suppose I don’t need to drink any more than that anyway.  Have a different opinion or feel like I’ve missed something? Let me know, I’d love to do more tea research, it was good times.

  • Food Network Goes Hollywood!!

    It was bound to happen. After having a taste of the pate de canard en croute that is celebrity, the cocksure cuisinier at the Food Network have decided it is time for a mass leap onto the silver screen. With the help of our intricate network of spies, Epic Portions has been able to get a glimpse of the plot outlines in the works for these dinner time divas. It is our pleasure to share them with you, our loyal readers. Does Oscar beckon our culinary heroes, or will they crash harder than Emeril on NBC? Time will tell, but you may judge the potential of these films for yourself.

    Man on Fieri

    We’re rollin’ out to Mexico!  While eating lunch during a vacation, Guy jumps behind the counter and heads to the kitchen to tell the cook that his tamale was money. Unfortunately, several members of the Mexican Mafia at the restaurant overhear him yelling “Dinero! Dinero!” at the cook and decide to kidnap the crazy looking and eccentric gringo. Upon hearing of Guy’s kidnapping, fellow Food Network Star winner Aaron McCargo goes beserk and destroys half of Mexico rescuing Guy and bringing him back to safety. Directed by Michael Bay.

    Requiem for a Deen

    A venture into the dramatic for Paula Deen, Requiem for a Deen tells the story of a woman so riddled with an addiction to butter that she is forced to engage in unspeakable acts just to feed her habit. During the climactic downward spiral into delusion and depravity, Paula holds a charity bake sale using margarine because she freebased the 10 sticks of butter she was supposed to use to make her pecan chewies.

    Evil Bread: Bread by Dawn

    Chef Robert Irvine is faced with his greatest challenge ever. Only able to use the contents of a dumpster behind a Subway and two EZ-Bake Ovens, Chef Robert is supposed to bake enough bread for the Michigan State football team’s annual banquet. Realizing he will need supernatural help to complete his task, he resorts to reading from the “Cookbook of the Dead,” causing the release of evil spirits, not the least of which is a severed hand that attacks him during a thrilling scene where Chef Robert slays his possessed sous chef with a cheese grater. To deal with the severed hand, Chef Robert launches into a verbal tirade so viscous, so devastating, that the hand gives up and gets put to work kneading the dough, helping Chef Robert complete his task by dawn.

    Super Molto Mario

    Help! Princess Giada has been kidnapped by the evil Bobby Flay! Watch as Mario Batali powers up on porcini mushrooms and battles Bobby’s evil minions, played by Seth Rogan and Bill Heder. After Mario defeats them and several other monsters, an uncredited Anthony Bourdain shows up with some “special” mushrooms to help Mario. Tony’s special shrooms give Mario the wisdom to give up and let Bobby keep Giada, where he forces her to become a kitchen test cook for Throwdown.

    Ray

    Ray is an inspiring biopic starring the effervescent and effusive Rachael Ray. It tells the amazing story of how one person overcame the debilitating handicap of being extremely annoying to forge a multi-million dollar media empire.

    Cocktail II: Cougar Patrol

    Yes, its Cocktail time as Sandra Lee stars in the only authorized sequel of the bunch. After microwaving a bunch of stuff and calling it a cooking show, Food Network execs give Sandra the pink slip, leaving her unemployed. She decides to leave the hectic food scene of NYC to head for the Bahamas to work as a bartender. There she finds romantic fun and sun, headlined by torrid affairs with a vacationing college student played by Twilight star Robert Pattinson, and a local medical intern played by Shia LeBeouf. Will Sandra decide to stay with the younger, fun-loving Robert, the brilliant (but passionate!) Shia, or embrace romance with the easy-going humor of the bar owner played by Matthew McConaughey?

    Ina Garten Cop

    Tired of being forced to have the most boring show on Food Network, Ina Garten makes a career change, just in time to stop a terrorist (portrayed by the guy who played Samir in Office Space) hell-bent on destroying her neighbor P. Diddy’s mansion.  Along with her partner, a normally undercover vice cop played by James Franco, Ina has to stop the plot and make lobster ravioli for Jeffrey before the terrorist blows up Diddy’s mansion, setting off a destructive “doomsday device” that will trigger the end of the world.

    Tyler Perry’s I Can Do BBQ All By Myself

    Watch out Gina! When sassy Sunny Anderson moves in next door, Gina’s long lost Grandmother Madea is afraid she will try to seduce Pat, all while Gina is working overtime to prepare for the big church barbecue. It turns out that Sunny is there to help Gina, as she discovers the church barbecue is a ruse by Bobby Flay to show up and challenge Gina to a barbecue throwdown. As Gina and Sunny prepare to defeat Bobby, the competition never takes place after Madea beats him over the head with a meat tenderizer when he shows up with plum glazed pork ribs for the throwdown.

  • A Pig Died for This?

    As a carnivore, I have much appreciation for the animals I eat and their overwhelming deliciousness. That is why an experience such as I had this evening pains me so. I went to dinner to celebrate a birthday for a family member at a restaurant in swanky downtown Plymouth, MI called Tavern 1999. I purposely left my camera at home so I could enjoy a meal without having to review or write about the food. I just wanted to enjoy myself and see my nephew and the rest of my family in a non-working capacity. And I would have been able to do that if Tavern 1999 didn’t destroy my pork chops.

    I loooooove pork chops. When I make them at home I use Jamaican Jerk seasoning and they are mine and my son’s favorite. The pork chop is a forgiving cut of meat, season it well, and DON’T OVERCOOK THE MEAT OR IT WILL BE TOO DRY!!! Well guess what the barbarians at Tavern 1999 did? They overcooked my damn pork chop. Not just by a little, they sucked all the delicious pork juice out in a food faux pas most foul. I almost cried, not for me, but for the poor pig. This was a culinary crime, a pig died to be turned into a dry, overcooked piece of shoe leather. That ain’t right.

    Doubly infuriating was that along with my pork chop flambe, Tavern 1999 served the most delicious cole slaw I’ve had in a long time. How do you fuck up a pork chop that bad but put so much attention into cole slaw? They used some kind of seedy stone ground mustard in the slaw dressing and it was outstanding. And in the interest of fairness I had a bite of the “St. Louis Style” Ribs and they were very good. As I am originally from the S-T-L, I felt they did justice to the ribs. My man Nelly would be proud.

    In short, Tavern 1999 may be a decent restaurant, but my displeasure with them runs deep. Don’t overcook my pork chop, you amateurs. They need to apologize to all of pigdom for the way they treated the poor beast that ended up on my plate.