Special Holiday Edition for USAmericans: Happy 4th!
You know, I pity non-Americans in a way. We might be angry and dying from far too many gun-related incidents, but there’s a whole huge cohort that remains exuberant. Fashion trends, TikTok trends, all the fraudsters (there’s a reason why Elon Musk set up shop in Texas and not Canada or South Africa), stock market bubbles and drops, and the storefront preachers and “bless your heart” church ladies. The holiday sales that promote new and used cars and mattresses, for some reason, the real estate speculation, the aggressive monolingualism and non-desire to travel abroad, the attempts to pet the wildlife at National Parks, all the Darwin Award winners. Some of the astonishing mortality rates for one of the richest and most powerful Western industrial countries can be chalked up to our dietary exuberance. [I’m one of the most cynical people I know and in Mediterranean Europe I’d be considered a dimwitted optimist.]
The Pioneer Woman (Ree Drummond), for those of you who don’t know, married into a ranching family that owns something like half of Oklahoma (and if the oil and mineral rights are still tied to the land, probably among the wealthiest families in the country) and has her own wildly successful Food Network TV show, and cookbooks, and blogs, and all kinds of brand extensions. I love the Pioneer Woman and turn to her when I’m in the mood for something I’ve made many times before to see what she would do to it. She often comes up with a little tip or trick that’s good to know, or adds or subs in a common kitchen staple to a recipe that I wouldn’t have thought of doing. Plus she seems like a really, really nice person, so.
This Fourth of July, why don’t you cool off with one of Ree’s Donut Ice Cream Sandwiches? I know that if you have a drug overdose you can be administered Naloxone. In New York this is such a frequent occurrence that residences and businesses are encouraged to stock it, which, or how about not shooting a heroin/fentanyl mix into your veins in the first place, and just enjoy a…I don’t know…whiskey sour? But I don’t know what you would do if someone went into diabetic shock. Do Your Own Research before you serve these at your Fourth of July Celebration of Our Sacred Freedoms.
Ingredients:
8 ounces semisweet chocolate bars, broken up into pieces
8 glazed donuts
2 pints salted caramel ice cream, softened
1 cup rainbow sprinkles [Try to get red, white, and blue—Ed.]
Place the chocolate in a glass bowl and melt it over a double boiler (or in the microwave) until completely smooth. Set aside. Slice the glazed donuts in half horizontally. Add a large scoop of the ice cream to the bottom half of each donut and use an offset spatula to spread the ice cream to the edges. Press on the top halves of the donuts and roll the sides in the sprinkles. Drizzle the sandwiches with the melted chocolate. Place the sandwiches on a parchment-lined baking sheet and freeze until the ice cream is firm, at least 4 hours. At this point, enjoy the sandwiches or wrap individually in plastic wrap and freeze until ready to eat.
In a different post here I mentioned we never had actual trained people working as the school nurse and just had parents and grandparents volunteer.
We also had a cool kid in my grade school class with type 1 diabetes, so we all had to learn (and go over) every fall when school started (1) what does diabetic shock look like, (2) what to do if he passed out, (3) where the emergency insulin was, (4) who would be responsible to grab the emergency insulin if there was a fire, tornado, or earthquake drill.
Anyways, that was very useful information and one time in grad school I was in a class with undergrads watching a girl start showing symptoms of diabetic shock during a group presentation and turns out I was the only person in the room who had any clue what the fuck was going on. I will admit I was a real bitch about it afterwards, saying something like “all the fucking diabeetus in Alabama that your family members have and not one of you has ever learned what hypoglycemic issues look like?”
I wish I had that training! One of my coworkers nearly died because I had no idea how to help him and we were the only two at work. He was in denial that something was wrong and refused to let me call an ambulance. When he started talking gibberish, I called 911 and he survived.
Oh, shit! I’m so glad you called 911!
I’m that annoying person thanks to grade school (and later some family members with the beetus) that I’m always the one being like “jeet??” if someone is acting a little off or “what did you eat today?” if they’re not from here. Sometimes I get entertaining responses like “no it’s not low blood sugar, it’s a fucking panic attack!”
Why is she named Pioneer Woman?
Shouldn’t she be named Oligarchy Woman?
She absorbed the void left by Paula Deen and the aww shucks Merrica! energy.
Something something modern ideas about cowboys and good honest folk just working the land out west something something farms and ranches.
Although I will say that Ree Drummond seems like she might actually be not a crazy hateful racist like Paula Deen.
Okay… Ree definitely did fill the void for more Diabeetus Two!
That is her schtick. She is a humble rancher’s wife. (She went to USC). I saw an episode once where she said she only grocery shops about once a week because the nearest grocery store is two hours away. Why is that? Her husband owns all the land and the grocery store is actually at the edge of her property. They showed her cruising along in her truck, of course she drives one. There’s no traffic because that is a private road. Say she goes 70 miles an hour. That means that in one direction her property extends for 140 miles. Now imagine how far it might extend in other directions. They also have several employees and she enjoys making hearty breakfasts for “the boys” before they set off on a long day of ranchin’. But she seems really nice and trying to be helpful.
Also I don’t know that I like the idea of these ice cream sandwiches. I like soft fluffy donuts and I don’t think they have the structural integrity to be an ice cream sandwich.
Surprised she just didn’t make waffles and use cooled waffles as the sammich layer.
Waffles and ice cream is fantastic, FYI, if you’ve never made a waffle ice cream sandwich.
There was a trend in New York a while ago where people would put improbable things in between glazed donut halves. Burgers were one thing. Luckily that only lasted for six months, if that, and I was never subjected to it.
I was just trying to remember food trends I might have embraced when I was in my 20s. I remember a lot of pine nuts and pesto. Also, food cooked over a certain kind of treated wood, it wasn’t called chipotle, but that was all the rage. It was Southwestern. I remember certain restaurants served nothing but. I can’t believe I can’t remember what that was called. It was so ubiquitous I used to laugh about it.
Mesquite?
Yes, that’s it, thank you. Everything was mesquite grilled. And then suddenly nothing was.
Omg I remember that trend! And the follow up but less popular pink Himalayan salt block that they would grill fish or steak on. It made the protein way too salty (or at least that was my one experience with it).
That salt block trend was so gross!
I came across a recipe once from the early 60s that used gold leaf. I could have sworn that was a much more recent invention, but the recipe claimed that it was done in the Gilded Age, and may have been inspired by recipes dating back to the Renaissance, which in turn were based on food eaten at the height of the Roman Empire. So the next time we want to laugh at Salty or whatever that weird Turkish guy is called maybe we wouldn’t be so quick to judge and applaud him for keeping alive culinary traditions that Tiberius and his court might have enjoyed. Before they were thrown off the cliffs at Capri and dashed on the rocks below, of course.
Speaking of The Gilded Age, Julian Fellowes, we were promised a Season 2 sometime in 2023 but none seems to be on the horizon. One can only reread one’s tattered paperback copies of Edith Wharton novels so many times.
This is as extra as the piecaken the piecaken. (Yes, I would taste test it for you.)