Piper's cat tree went to an illustrious home

Earlier this month I donated one of Piper's cat trees to Katie Ackley. As I unloaded my car, I was unaware that she was one of Wisconsin's most influential Native American leaders. Congrats Katie!

Song of the day, 28 March 2026

Leftoverture is such a great album. And Kansas put an indelibly American stamp on progressive rock. For all the lies and shit talk about prog lyrics being about hobbits (thanks Jim DeRogatis :/) check this out:

Well, you told me that I was just not the one
And you left me standing out in the cold
It's been a long time and I'm so much better now

That I'm looking back and seeing it all

And for the first time, there's no pain in my life
Been a long hard road that I've gone
We had a good thing
And it made me a man

Did any other prog band sing anything like that, make even a passing reference about maturing into manhood? Great stuff.

You can have Christmas in March in Albuquerque

A friend and I had lunch the other day at Ian's Pizza at Garver. My dining companion ordered breadsticks and we were asked what kind of dipping sauces we wanted. The helpful and friendly counter helper ran through the list of what was on offer: bacon queso, marinara, green chile ranch...

Wait!

Green chile ranch?!

I immediately took her up on that option as it was something of a vestigial reflex from my recent trip...

I grabbed a taxi a bit after midnight at the Albuquerque airport. It had been a long day of travel. A light wouldn't turn off on the plane in Madison which meant we sat on the runway for an hour or more and so I got to O'Hare late and missed my flight which necessitated a long layover. Hours and hours of interminable layover. I wasn't sure I'd be able to catch a flight that night as apparently there was a power outage at the Denver airport and the effects of that were cascading down to O'Hare. But the plane took off a bit after 9, thankfully.

Despite the lateness of the hour, my cab driver offered an important culinary lesson: in Albuquerque you have the choice of green chile, red chile, or both. This last option is called Christmas.

What a wonderful thing! As the trip wore on, I would learn just how significant the chile was to Albuquerque's identity, just how ingrained the humble fruits are in Albuquerque's psyche. I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that public schools give kids a day or 2 off at harvest like Chicago students get Casamir Pulaski Day off or kids up north can take a week away from school for gun deer hunting season.

Green chile granola? Yes, I bought some.

While there I learned that the official state cookie is the biscochito. My stepson and his fiancée took me Celina's where they had a variety of flavors on offer including those with chile.

I think the use of lard and anise are the distinguishing features of this cookie. Very tasty!

The duality of chile even went beyond foodstuffs. Got a pain in your back? There's a chile for that.

Methinks a return trip is in order to further investigate the green-red dichotomy.

********

After 4 or 5 days of eating at restaurants, I did some cooking at home. First was a loaf of Polish rye beer bread.

Misshapen, perhaps, but tasty.

In addition to the staff of life, I finally got around to making shrimp creole.

The poor shrimp had been in my freezer since I moved in here back in October. Prior to that, they were in the freezer of my marital residence for a short time. This batch of shrimp creole had been a long time coming.

It turned out well. Nice and chunky with extra Holy Trinity.

I need to grocery shop today and am thinking about what I want to eat in the coming week. If I recall correctly, I have most of the ingredients for bigos, including venison, and just need some cabbage.

The walls are not quite so bare any longer

My living room is getting there. I got some pictures hung yesterday and now Grab and Pipe will be above my couch if/when it arrives.

Oh my sweeties, I miss you both greatly.

And those paintings my friend gave me when I was in Milwaukee last autumn now grace a wall.

Soon I will have a stylin' bachelor pad.

Sunrise, 26 March 2026

Finally!

Something new from The Claudettes: a new version of "Touch You Back" from their forthcoming album Garage Glamour. They'll be here at the North Street Cabaret in June.

New Who

I hear that a couple more "lost" Doctor Who episodes have been found - a couple from The Daleks' Master Plan. The total might get below 90 before I die. Toby Hadoke dresses just like a Doctor Who expert here.

Song of the day, 26 March 2026

Voivod kicked ass last night! It was my first time at Crucible and it is a really nice venue. Great size to see a show, good sound, and the beer wasn't outrageously expensive. Bat and Flying Fuzz were great fun too. I got invited to go see Sepultura in Milwaukee in May!

A Polish Pop Up

Eat beef or die: Beefy's Own Salt N' Vinegar Beef Tallow Potato Chips

I think Beefy's Own is a fine name for a potato chip. Something right out of The Simpsons.

These chips are from New Hampshire and do not have a backstory involving children who cannot eat normal snacks fried in seed oils. Instead the family behind the brand just didn't want to eat seed oils.

What is it with all the negative press for seed oils? It seems like whenever Americans adopt some kind of dietary prohibition, there are cultures without it that have people living to 100 routinely.

This the second beef tallow chip I've encountered and I found it, like the first, at Woodman's. However, these were in a clearance cart. Perhaps people are supporting local tallow chips more than those from the Granite State.

I give Beefy's Own high marks for packaging as A) the bag has a flat bottom so it stands upright and B) the bag is resealable. 

While I am on the subject of packaging, why is it that salt & vinegar chips come in bags that have a lot of blue on them? If a small section of the labeling is given over to the flavor while the rest of the bag is the same for all flavors, salt & vinegar is blue. The vast majority of salt & vinegar chips are denoted via blueness. How did blue become the color of vinegar? Where is Uncle Cecil when you need him? 

The first thing I noticed when opening the bag and peering inside was that these are some large diameter chips. I don't think I ran across a small one my whole tasting. These are some manly chips! They were also thicker than normal. Extra manly! As color goes, these chips were a lovely light tan with some occasional brown spotting. As with Teddy's tallow chips, bubbles were not prominent. At least not large ones.

Beefyness was first to be smelled. That smell, that tallow smell. The potato aroma was on the sweet side and the vinegar was rather faint and required some deep inhalation to be noticed.

Given their thickness, the chips had crunch but it was slightly soggy. It starts off well but my bite got bogged down rather than finishing with a snap. They had a nice tallowy taste but Beefy went very easy on the salt. Not only was there no extra, these seemed to not even have your average dose. Weird. The vinegar tanginess was rather mellow and the spud tasted sweet.

Aside from some smart packaging, I give Beefy's Own credit for a snack that doesn't read like a chemistry textbook. Just spuds, tallow, salt, and white distilled vinegar.

But these chips needed more salt and more vinegar. They were fine, just a bit uninspired.

Wrong turns were taken

From my vacation:

Song of the day, 22 March 2026

Song of the day, 17 March 2026

Tallow, tallow, give it to me, give it to me: Teddy's Vinegar Vibe Tallow Chips

When I first saw these chips, I immediately began singing Porcupine Tree's "Shallow" in my head with the song's title replaced by "tallow". Personally, I think Steven Wilson would be proud to have his radio-friendly riff rocker in a mashup with rendered beef fat. 

I found these Teddy's Tallow Chips in the organic/artisanal junk food aisle at Woodman's. Since buying this bag I have discovered a second brand of tallow fried chips laden with salt and vinegar there which makes me wonder if tallow chips are having their micro-moment of trendiness.

The brand has a story not unlike that of Jackson's: Katherine Horvath found that her son Teddy had severe food allergies so he couldn't eat most snack foods. Mom then tested various options and found that her son could eat potato chips friend in tallow without a reaction.

Oddly enough, Teddy's, like Jackson's, hails from suburban Milwaukee - Cedarburg, in this case.

Tallow, in case you were wondering, is rendered beef fat. That is, beef fat cooked slowly so that, upon melting, the fat can be separated from any non-fat bits. 

The bag had "Subtle Tang" on the front so I wasn't expecting a vinegar overload. Still, I looked forward to trying these as I had never had tallow fried chips.

I found them to be of a darker hue of yellow and brown spots were not uncommon. They had been very thinly sliced and looked fragile. I didn't spy many bubbles on the surface of the chips. I read that tallow has a high smoke point and wonder if one fries chips at the same temp in tallow as seed oils. Being thin means less cooking time so perhaps this accounts for the lack of bubbling.

The aroma was beefy with an earthy spud scent beneath.

Crisp and tallowy is how my notes say they tasted. I think they went easy on the salt but the salinity increases the further down the bag you go. The bag did not lie as I found them to have a subtle tang as advertised. The potato flavor was sweeter than the aroma.

It would have been interesting to have tasted Teddy's chips not knowing they were friend in tallow. Would I have picked up on the animal fat? These really do have an earthy, beefy flavor to my tongue. Seed oils give a "cleaner" flavor, one that is sharper, maybe? Less earthy.

These were very tasty chips though I would have preferred more tanginess.

Song of the day, 16 March 2026

A fine name for toilet paper

Bringing balance to the humble potato chip: Humble Sea Salt & Cider Vinegar Potato Chips

So we're back to last fall with this selection.

Humble Chips hails from Ontario, Canada and so I thought it odd to find their products at the Willy Street Co-op which prides itself on local foods and tries to minimize stocking foods that use a lot of fossil fuel to get to their stores. I guess the organic on the label trumped other concerns. Or perhaps Humble has an American potato chipery.

These were, if I recall correctly, my first cider vinegar chips in a while. Not the first to have cider vinegar flavor in the mix but where it's prominent and right there on the front of the bag. It seems a very autumnal flavor though available year-round. 

The color on these chips ran the gamut from yellow to light tan and had some nice browning on the edges. Although thinly sliced, they had rather large diameters. I loved the earthy potato aroma which stood apart from the oily scent. However, my nose detected little to no vinegar.

In addition to being of the fairly rare cider vinegar family, these were also the first non-kettle cooked chips I'd had in a while. And so they were indeed as the label said - light and crispy. While there was no extra salt to be had, the potatoes did have a wonderfully earthy taste which was complemented well by the cider vinegar flavor. The problem was that, although there was plenty of cider vinegar taste, I found them to be rather mild with only a modicum of tanginess.

I suppose this is not surprising as the Humble website describes these chips as a "balanced take on a classic." My disappointment concedes that the Humble folks were honest.

Not as sour as I'd like them, but these chips had a very good flavor.

Faith, hope and spuds: Ole Salty's Kettle Cooked Salt & Vinegar Potato Chips

If memory serves, I found this bag of Ole Salty's chips at the Mobil at Aberg and Shopko Drive early one morning at around 1:30 back in January. I was on my way home and thirsty so I figured I'd make a quick stop for a soda or something I didn't have at home. One stroll through the chip aisle later, I walked out with a new brand of salt & vinegar snacking adventure ahead.

 

 

The next day I took a look at the bag in daylight and found that Old Salty's is in Rockford, Illinois, the home of Mrs. Fisher's potato chips. Rockford punches well above its weight when it comes to potato chips. There's a fellow on the label who reminds me of someone from the Pink Panther cartoon wearing rain gear. Also on the bag is Biblical verse, 1 Corinthians 13:13:

 

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

 

I read it as "But the greatest of these is spuds." 

 

The chips were fairly lightly colored though brown spots were common. I guess they were mostly cut from fairly narrow gauge spuds as the chips were generally small and dainty. However, they did appear thicker than normal. Oil of the soybean variety came first in my sniff test. Spud came next with a hint of vinegar bringing up the rear.

 

A healthy crunch was to be had and I found that these were the first salt & vinegar chips in a while that actually tasted like there was more salt on them than you normally get on a potato chip. The vinegar flavor came with a moderately strong tanginess to it while the potato flavor was more earthy than sweet, my preferred ratio. The oil wasn't a prominent taste for my tongue but it did catch a little roastiness which was delicious.

 

God smiled upon the Tater Chicks 815, LLC, who manufactured these chips as they were very tasty. They simply hit all the right notes for me - earthy potato flavor, more salt, and a good, firm vinegar zip. Highly recommended.

Got to keep on risin'

Yesterday I baked a loaf of jalapeño cheese bread.

I remember watching the dough get perilously close to the window on the lid of my breadmaker. She was really risin'.

**Jim Morrison voice**

Mr. Jalapeño Rising

**end Jim Morrison voice** 

With about 10 minutes before the rising was to give way to the baking, the top collapsed.

Gah!

Oh well.

I brought it to gaming and sampled it there. I thought it turned out well and so did my gaming compatriots. Earthy jalapeño with a little zip and some cheddar goodness all brought together by tasty Maillard reactions.

No tang, man: Salt & Vinegar Kettle Cooked Potato Chips by Pop Daddy

Another review delayed. The photo is dated early December of last year. I honestly do not recall where I found these chips but, given the date, I suspect they were bought somewhere in Chicagoland.

Pop Daddy is a Michigan company, Howell, to be precise, which looks to be about halfway between Detroit and Lansing. Their "About Us" section says the company was founded by folks looking for healthier junk food, essentially. Ha!  

The chips' webpage uses phrases such as "Sharp, tangy" and "bring the zing". I just found these words and so had no tangy, sour preconceptions about these chips going in.

Not a bad photo. I think the preponderance of red helped my cheap camera to not wash the color out with its auto-enhancers from Hades. These chips were thick and had nicely browned edges, though I couldn't tell if it was because the skin was left on or from the cooking process. The surfaces of the chips were densely packed with bubbles. Overall color was a fairly deep yellow but dotted with brown spots. Many of the chips were curled up into non-Euclidean snack shapes.

The aroma in the bag was big on oil and followed by some spud and then a hint of vinegar.

These puppies had a nice, big crunch to them. The potato flavor was on the sweet side and, being thick kettle chips, the oil flavor was prominent. Salt levels were normal. There was a medium vinegar taste to the chips but my tongue didn't register much tanginess which I thought to be really odd. Odd as in preternaturally weird.

Consulting the label I found malic acid, citric acid, vinegar solids, apple cider vinegar solids, and tartaric acid. Given this lengthy list it seems inconceivable that these chips didn't A) have a stronger vinegar taste and B) have more of a tangy zip to them.

As they were, I wished that the spuds had more of an earthy flavor to them, a fairly minor gripe, as, overall they had a nice, vinegary taste. But there was virtually no tang. The mind reels. Their website's description beggars belief.

I'm going to (eat) Jackson('s): Jackson's Kettle Cooked Sea Salt & Vinegar potato chips

Where did I find these? Woodman's? At least my tasting happened this year and not last fall. Playing catch-up - slowly but surely.

This sampling happened last month.

Jackson's! 

Besides a different taste, is there something beyond gimmickry to frying in avocado oil? Is it healthier? Better for the environment? I guess it's not a seed oil which found themselves being demonized for reasons I do not comprehend not that long ago. Avocado oil isn't cheap so perhaps using it is supposed to give a "premium" vibe - chips for the well-heeled.

Here's the company's story, in brief.

Megan and Scott Reamer's son, Jackson, was diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder and they found that a high-fat diet rich in "premium fats" benefited him. Aha!

I also see here that it's a Wisconsin company. They're in Muskego, part of the greater Milwaukee area and I like to support my local chipsmitheries. 

The camera on my phone auto-boosts brightness and either has a lousy auto-white balance or it f***s with color. I have turned off every photo enhancement setting I can find yet many photos, especially those with bright colors, end up slightly washed out. So apologies for the photo.

The chips were actually of a medium dark yellow not the near white you see above. There were some brown edges and minimal bubbles. They were cut thicklier than your normal chip. I was happy to catch a big vinegar aroma, so much so, in fact, that it hurt my nose. "A good portent," I thought to myself. Potato came next with oil trailing in third. Very odd. Oil is usually the primary smell. "Another good portent," I figured.

They were crunchy as I expected considering their thickness. Plus they were kettle cooked. I was surprised that the potato flavor was way out front with a nice sweet-earthy balance. Salt level seemed average while the vinegar tang was medium-light, a disappointment considering it was so prominent a smell and had caused me some mild olfactory distress.

My notes end with "Fine but needs more tang."

Piper, your tree has a new home

I am happy that Piper's cat tree has a new home and is appreciated by some fellow felines.

A Salt & Vinegar Miscellany XX: Extrude this!

Another one from last fall. I am really behind in my salt & vinegar snack reviews.

Lay's strikes again.

Stax are Lay's newfangled answer to Pringle's, apparently. Potato paste extruded into a mould. Not really my thing but I will give any salt & vinegar snack a tasting at least once.

These Stax thingies are all uniform in shape - and color too: yellow with the odd tan area. I was surprised to find that they had a big vinegar smell to them but this was followed by a reconstituted potato aroma - like instant mashed potatoes.

Putting one into my mouth, I was surprised again but this time it was their crunch. Pringle's are crispy but these had crunch. Maybe they're thicker than Pringle's. I didn't find them to be saltier than your average potato chip food product and was highly unsurprised to find that they had that instant mashed potato flavor. Lactose and malic acid gave them a solid medium dose of tang.

While I appreciated the firm tanginess here, the spud flavor was found lacking.

Casey's you better watch your spuds: Casey's Salt & Vinegar Kettle Potato Chips

Last fall I made a trek south for reasons I cannot recall. I just remember that I ended up at the Duluth Trading Co. outlet store in Belleville, about 20 miles south of Madison. Perhaps that was my destination - to get some new shorts.

So I bought a couple pairs of shorts and a vest and then drove around a spell during which I spied a Trachte building. Before heading home, I stopped in at the Casey's on River Street. (Is there more than one in town?) There I did a stroll down the junk food aisle and happened up their house brand of salt & vinegar chips. I eagerly busted the bag open upon my return.

They were slightly darker than most chips - a nice tan hue. It seemed the skin was left on as the edges were lined with brown. Although I didn't pull out my calipers, these chips were thicker than normal. Sticking my nose in the bag and taking a sniff, I got a big whiff of oil while the vinegar was pleasantly pungent. The spud smell was rather faint, however.

Their thickness and/or kettle preparation gave these chips a massive crunch. I think my skill vibrated while taking my first bite, good sign, I felt. They tasted a bit oily, initially, but a potent vinegar tang made itself known and I found that it had brought its salty friend. With enough chips in my maw chewed to a paste, I found that I could taste a nice, earthy spud flavor.

These chips were an unexpected find and an unexpected pleasure. I adored all the tangy goodness and appreciated the elevated level of salt. Plus the potato taste was, er, tasty. More earthy than sweet.

Some very fine chips, here.

Song of the day, 15 March 2026

Down and dirty mofawar

Last fall I made my second annual stop in at Qahwah House in lovely Lombard, Illinois. I bought a bag of their coffee beans in addition to a cuppa thinking it would be fun to ward off the chill of winter with a mofawar in-hand. Well, it took me a while and spring is nearly here but I've finally opened that bag o' beans and tried my hand at coffee Yemeni style at home.

I have not been brewing it in the traditional manner and instead have been using my coffeemaker. Step 1: grind the beans. Check. Step 2: lightly crush some cardamom pods. 

Check.

Step 3: put everything in basket and let 'er rip.

Add cream and voila! 

It took me a couple pots to figure out how much cardamom to put in there but, once I got that down, things have been humming along. Good stuff.