It's Guinness Season

Another St. Patrick's Day has come and gone without my indulging in green beer or other nonsense. To be fair, I did scribble my math lecture at JSNN in green marker, so all was not lost. But in the days leading up to this glorious day, I found myself with number of Guinness-themed options.

Apparently Guinness flavored chips now exist... (and they're made in England). I once commented to a gentleman in Cork that either Guinness travels poorly or they just ship the skunk batches to the states. He simply said, "No. We keep the best for us, but we send the worst batches to England." I snagged a single bag from the local Harris Teeter, but if commitment is your thing, you can order a large case from Amazon.

Like many all of my favorite foods, this is "not suitable for vegans," as is clearly printed on the back. A proper side dish for this side seemed like a thick-cut bacon & white cheddar grilled cheese sandwich. I've never been much for flavored potato chips, but all the strange extract powders combine to create a potato chip that tastes as if it were dunked in Guinness and then flash dried (but in a good way). It's like eating Guinness... with bacon and cheese and locally brewed beer on the side ("the best beer").

For a proper ending, we have a Guinness flavored cupcake, courtesy Maxie B's, Greensboro's own frilly bakery. Supposedly, there's Guinness in there, but it just tastes like a $3.50 chocolate cupcake. It would have been $2.50, but the "decorations" tack on an extra dollar. Pictured beside it is a 7Up cupcake, which, quite fittingly, tasted like a $3.50 "yellow" cupcake with a zap of citrus. Luckily, this one was not "decorated," so it only fetched $2.50.

So here we are in the post-St. Patrick's Day portion of 2015. 2014 feels like just yesterday, but Easter is just around the corner. Here's to a happy March onward.

Three years later....

I started this indulgence of a blog just before starting to write my PhD thesis. Suffice it to say, I got distracted somewhere along the way. In early 2012 I was a young bachelor, making my living as a graduate student. Yes, if you stay in school long enough, they will eventually PAY you to remain a student. But for only so long. Now, I am a married man with five cats (the picture on the right depicts what having five cats looks like when you go to brush your teeth in the morning), one dog and a house. Somewhere along the way I even ditched the Oxford comma.

What hasn't changed is my adoration of the food that will surely lead to my untimely demise. In a brilliant twist of irony, part of my current work at JSNN focuses on understanding the development of atherosclerosis through simple physics.

Hopefully I will unravel the mechanism and develop a cure before I succumb to the diseases caused by the beautiful dish pictured on the left (courtesy Pack's Tavern in Asheville, NC). Not only is that bacon and a sunny-side-up egg on a burger... there is also a crispy hashbrown tucked neatly between various layers of protein. The only shame in a meal like this is the wasted space occupied by those cowering vegetables.

As fate would have it, I've made it back to my old college town (and Megan's hometown) of Greensboro, NC. As it turns out, it's not so bad after all. There's the new, with breweries popping up out of the woodwork. But there's also the old, like Tex and Shirley's Pancake House, where you could be like everyone else and just get a giant stack of pancakes... or be just cruel and enjoy a plate of grilled chicken and eggs.

So here's to 2015 being the year of my triumphant return to spending a lot of time writing a few words that no one will ever read about food that has already been consumed.