P.F. Chang’s China Bistro
Okay, let’s get out of the way what P.F. Chang’s isn’t. It isn’t genuine Chinese food, to begin with. You know that, I know that, they know that. And it isn’t a great neighborhood restaurant, run by...
View ArticleParker House Rolls
If you’d been a visitor to Boston in the second half of the nineteenth century, chances are you might have desired a room at the new Parker House Hotel, one of the city’s finest. The rooms were...
View ArticleNabs
Now, I understand the traditional term “Nabs” for peanut butter crackers (and by association, other packaged crackers) is largely a Southern thing. I could have titled this post “Peanut Butter...
View ArticleSliders
I loved these before they got their own name. Used to be they were just small burgers, until some smart marketing person (maybe working for White Castle) thought about calling them “sliders.” The name...
View ArticleSchooners, Bloomington Illinois
I recently had the pleasure of speaking about Great American Things with Scott Laughlin of WJBC Radio in Bloomington, Illinois. During the course of the conversation, I mentioned that I liked to...
View Article“Joy of Cooking”
If ever a cookbook deserved to be a Great American Thing, this is the one. Sure, you could argue for Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which certainly had a major impact. But read that...
View ArticleCheerios
General Mills really stumbled onto something in 1941 when they made some oat cereal shaped like little “O’s. But they weren’t sharp enough then (hey, there was a war in Europe, they had other things on...
View ArticlePhiladelphia Cream Cheese
Is there anything that doesn’t taste better with some cream cheese added? It’s a rhetorical question – of course there isn’t. That sweetness, that richness, that nutritional value – okay, two out of...
View ArticleVelveeta
The Kraft folks call it “liquid gold.” And just before the Super Bowl, we were told by the Cheese Powers-That-Be that we could face a shortage of the precious stuff. A “cheesepocalypse.” Fortunately,...
View ArticleFood Trucks
It may seem like food trucks are a recent phenomenon, but they’re not. They’ve just migrated from blue collar workplaces, like construction sites, to city streets. It was a transition born mostly of...
View ArticleTrader Joe’s
You don’t have to be a nonconformist or a geek to like Trader Joe’s. But it probably helps. If you don’t have a Trader Joe’s in your town, it’s a good bet you desperately want one. Although you may not...
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