Things we eat: January 2009 Archives

Remember that I said I'd discovered Scrabble Cheez-Its at Weis?

Well, you might also remember that I've talked about Buffy, our features editor. Buffy is a faithful reader of this blog (thanks, Buffy!) and decided to have a little fun.

She bought a box of the Cheez-Its and took it to the features department staff meeting. Just like in Scrabble, she gave each person seven "tiles," and they had to make a word out of them. Once they did, they had to brainstorm a possible story idea based on that word. A couple of them that they found were "wry" and "grin."

I did hear, though, that some people had a real shortage of vowels!

Well, I wanted to play, too, so Buffy gave me some Cheez-Its. Here are my first seven:

Not sure if either of those words give me a blog post idea. Wavy. Hit. I could post about... people I'd like to hit? I'm guessing no one wants to read that list. :)

Anyway, it was fun. Thanks for playing, Buffy!

Call it serendipity... I was going through my list of local food traditions, trying to decide which one to post about next, when I saw this discussion on our message boards about another regional favorite - chow chow. (And they give a shoutout to my Farmers' Market, yay!)

You can tell it's mostly a local favorite, because if you search for Chow Chow, chowchow or chow-chow, you get this:

And, while he's cute, he doesn't exactly look like a relish made from a mixture of pickled vegetables to me.

No, I meant this kind of chow-chow:

Anyone eat it? What do you think? I've only had it a couple of times... what sticks out to me is how sour it is.

Yesterday, we had a couple of things to pick up at the grocery store, and Hubby had some stuff to mail, so we went to the Weis on Roosevelt Avenue, which has a postal store in the front of it.

The post office part wasn't opening for about another 10 minutes, so we wandered around and looked at super-healthy snacks (yeah, right!) while waiting.

Guess what we found?

Scrabble Junior Cheez-Its! One of my hobbies happens to be playing competitive Scrabble and collecting Scrabble boards and tile sets. Hubby said I should get them and play Scrabble with them. I couldn't do it, though. I was afraid I'd eat all the Es or something, then I'd get upset.

The girl was happy to help model the Cheez-Its for me, though!

This comes from my friend Dan, and his soon-to-be-brother-in-law in Hawaii:

It's a sweet and salty treat! Pineapple kettle corn. Now that's NOT an "Only in York County!"

Here's a possible Yorkism for your consideration:

What do you call the three meals you eat each day?

Breakfast, I think we can all agree on. But what do you eat at midday? What do you eat in the evening? You get bonus points if for you, like in my family, it differs based on day of the week.

Post your comments... in a couple of days, I'll tell you what our family's meal names are.

Just for fun, here's a Lego version of the Last Supper from The Brick Testament.

Yes, way back in the dark ages (OK, in November), I asked about sweet and salty combinations. You know, like dipping your french fries in a Wendy's vanilla Frostee?

Well, I got a lot of responses, and I never adequately acknowledged them!

So here are some of my favorites:

Adriane: pretzels and chocolate milk
Jo: Jiffy extra crunchy peanut butter on a Ritz with a glass of ice cold chocolate milk
Mark: dropping pretzel bits in a glass of Pepsi (as a side note, one of MY favorites is Utz sour cream and onion chips with a diet Pepsi)
Joe: Nature Valley's sweet and salty nut granola bars. His favorite is cashew; they also have peanut and almond.
Kris: Martin's barbecue waffle-cut chips dipped in vanilla ice cream
Eric: He says his grandpa used to drop a few salted peanuts into his bottle of Pepsi. And in Mexico, salt and lime are common additions to beer or soda pop. (Eric knows beer; check him out here).

He had a NOT tasty sweet-and-salty story to tell. "When we went to Guadalajara a few years ago to visit my wife's relatives, I bought a Squirt citrus soda on the street. The vendor asked, "Con sal?" I said yes. Had to dump the whole thing out. Nasty."

My daughter, by the way, has started with the pretzels-in-ice-cream thing. I'm raising up a little Yorker!!

I'll have to decide what my next food question is going to be. I get such great answers - thank you all!

New commenter Craig checked in with me recently on my post about the pizza shop that used to be where Moonlight Cafe is now, in Dover.

The shop was Salvo's Pizza, and Craig provided me some new info I didn't have before - he says the Moonlight's owners are relatives of the folks who owned Salvo's - whose original owner has since passed away.

Craig reminded me of something super-good about Salvo's... they had a fabulous pizza steak sandwich.

He describes it: "The bread that he used for the steak sandwiched was actually like a pizza crust folded in half, baked, sliced and filled. I loved those sandwiches! I haven't found another place that makes them like that since."

Anyone know a place to get a pizza steak like that? I'd forgotten about these, but reading Craig's comment brought back some really delicious memories!

This morning, our whole family took a trip to the Market & Penn Farmers Market in York to get some good Ilyes ground beef for a manicotti-making project this Sunday.

I grew up at this market - my mom and dad were standholders there, first with a baked-goods stand called Mom's Kitchen, then with a Fitzkee's candy stand, Joan's Candy Corner.

It's changed a lot since then (we were there from 1986 until about 1998) but we still like to go back to visit our favorite food vendors - the Market House Deli, run by our friend Linda Humphreys, the Ilyes' meat stand, and June Keeney's produce stand.

Since I was there, I decided to take some pictures of some super-local food favorites that I've never seen for sale outside a market or butcher shop.

Here we have the ponhaus and pudding, both mixtures of meat and cornmeal with slightly different textures and seasonings, for sale at the Ilyes' meat stand. Ponhaus/panhaus in this context is very similar to scrapple; in fact, here's a recipe for a Pennsylvania Dutch version that uses the terms interchangeably.

One new commenter, Ann, remarked a week or so ago that her family had just finished eating something called pontas or ponhaus. She said hers is different from the way I had originally described ponhaus because hers is not savory, but sweet - a breakfast dish.

"Originally made by my German great grandmother. Pork neck bone meat, cornmeal, cinnamon, nutmeg, salt and cloves. Put in loaf pan, cool, then slice, fry and eat w/ syrup. The Panhas name looks close but this is not savory, was served as a breakfast dish. Our family origniated in Germany, settling in central Indiana in the 1830s," she writes.

I think it's really the same thing - ponhaus - just cooked different ways. In fact, that recipe I have above does call for savory, but also includes the cinnamon and nutmeg. If you're curious, here's my previous post on scrapple/ponhaus.

And, ah yes, the souse, for sale at the Market House Deli. Head cheese, you might call it. (Though Wikipedia very nicely mentions that us Pa. Dutch call it souse.) I can tell you honestly that I have not eaten this. It's basically pig tongue, feet or heart, served in aspic (a gelatinous, edible material) and seasoned with lots of things, like onion, salt, pepper and vinegar.

We've had lots of debate about ponhaus, but would anyone care to enlighten me about the wonders of pudding (and why it's at all different from ponhaus) or souse?