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Memorial Day weekend and Labor Day weekend have special meaning around our house, and not just because there is a holiday involved.

No, both weekends are BratFest weekends.BratFest is put on by one of the local supermarkets. One dollar gets you a bratwurst and a soda. Fifty-cents gets you a hot dog and a soda. There are plenty of condiments (the annual usage of condiments for BratFest is measured in gallons) and napkins to go around.

Local celebrities man the cash registers. Local groups and organizations volunteer to cook the food, police the tables, and generally keep the place sanitary. In return, they get all the proceeds of the Fest.

To give you some idea of the volume of food served at BratFest, try these stats on for size (all of which apply to just one of the two weekends per year):

• Brats served per minute (average): 77
• Gallons of mustard used: 153
• Gallons of ketchup used: 201
• Pounds of sauerkraut consumed: 5,580 Lbs. That’s over two tons!

We’d been to three BratFests before this year. Two last year, and one the year before that.

The first one had the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile, tables, chairs, umbrellas, and a local radio station van pumping out classic rock.

The next two had the Weinermobile and whatnot, but they also added the Johnsonville Big Taste Grill, which is a semi tractor-trailer rig that is nothing more than a giant, mobile, gas grill. It can cook 2500 bratwurst per hour and it is quite a sight to see.

2500 bph (brats per hour) sounds like quite a few, but even the Big Taste Grill isn’t enough to satisfy the BratFest hordes. There are only thirty-two hours of BratFest per Fest (eight hours per day for four days). The current record is over 148,000 brats consumed in four days, so that means that over 4625 bph (on average) were cooked and consumed last Memorial Day weekend when the record was set.

This year, they finally dumped the lame radio station van and installed a small stage. Local bands and singers get to play the stage, which is a nice change from hearing the same old classic rock tunes yet again.

For the first two hours of BratFest today, it rained, so there was only six sunny hours of Brat consumption. And yet, they still managed to sell 49,302 brats today alone. That’s just a bit over 6,162 bph!

I’m really fascinated by how many brats are eaten at this affair, if you haven’t noticed. The premise is so simple: cook brats, serve them cheaply, watch the crowds appear. There is no stuffiness about the affair. There is no hidden agenda. It’s just people eating bratwurst in prodigious quantities.

I’ve eaten plenty of breakfast cereals in my time and I can say without reservation that there is no worse breakfast cereal than Grape Nut Flakes.Sure, Cheerios smell awful and Uncle Sam cereals taste like they’ve gone rotten in the box, but for sheer tactile disfunction, nothing beats Grape Nut Flakes.

To whom did Post test market that product? Those without teeth? Did the testers say, "Could you make the cereal turn to mush when I just wave the milk near the bowl?"

Grape Nut Flakes turn to mush as soon as they even sense a liquid nearby. And, once they turn to mush, they also lose any flavor they once had (not much to begin with). So, once you pour a bowl of the cereal and add milk, you end up with a gelatinous mess of milk and sludge with no flavor beyond that of the milk. Mmm…..

I eat great mountains of cereal for breakfast. It takes me, on average, two and one half-days to empty a box of cereal. It took me six days (!) to get rid of a box of Grape Nut Flakes, though. It was like my own personal version of Breakfast Hell. Every day for nearly a week I got the chance to relive my horrible decision to try a new (to me) cereal.

From now on, I’m sticking to old, reliable, Frosted Mini Spooners. They’re sweet, high-fiber, cheap, packaged in a bag (no enclosing box; less waste), and tasty.

Last week I bought a bread machine at a garage sale. It’s not a particularly fancy model, but it was in good shape and lightly used.Since then, we’ve been baking up a storm of carb-filled loaves. I’ve been working on a sourdough starter mix so I can start making sourdough bread in a few days or so.

It’s not clear to me how anyone could own a bread machine and not use it. The process of making bread becomes so easy (measure, dump, depress button), that there is no excuse for eating store bought bread any more.

Why is it that American restaurants insist on placing so many foreign objects in their offerings?While Sarah and I were still living in Massachusetts, we visited a sports bar/pub near our home one night. She ordered…something. I don’t remember what. I ordered some sort of pasta and chicken with alfredo sauce.

The food arrived, and we started to eat. I had eaten about five or ten forkfuls when I encountered about a one-inch square, jagged piece of broken glass in my food. I brought this to the attention of the manager and he offered me half-price off the cost of my entree(!) and a replacement dish.

Suffice it to say that I let the manager know in no uncertain terms that his offer was…not acceptable. I explained to the manager that things were going to happen a bit differently. Sarah and I left, didn’t pay a cent of the bill, I contacted the health inspector first thing in the morning, and we never went back there again.

I offer that story as prelude to the items below:

• A woman found a mouse in her soup after she started eating the soup at a Cracker Barrel restaurant. It’s one thing to find a dead mouse in your food before you start eating the dish. It’s another thing entirely to find the mouse after you’ve been chowing down. Who knows what sort of nasty diseases the dead mouse has helpfully transferred into the food.)
• A Costco customer somehow manages to get a pair of 9mm bullets with their hot dogs. My advice to that customer is to try chewing the food, before swallowing it. That will make the detection of the bullets easier.)
• A woman found a live frog in her airline salad. No, it’s not an American restaurant, but it does demonstrate that the problem of generally undesirable toppings to pre-made food is not an exclusively American problem.

While watching Master and Commander: Far Side of the World over the weekend, Sarah and I started talking about the origin of the word vegetarian.In the movie, which is set in 1805, a character describes lizards that live on the Galapagos as ‘vegetarians.’ This immediately set my nerves jangling as the idea of people being vegetarian in 1805 just didn’t sound plausible. Some research uncovered the fact that the word vegetarian wasn’t used/coined until 1842. So, the anachronistic color of the word in that setting was true.

Sarah and I tossed around the idea that in 1805, animals that only ate plants would mostly have been described as ‘herbivores,’ especially by scientists of the day (as the character in question was).

That got us wondering if someone could be an herbivorian. If a vegetarian eats vegetables, wouldn’t an herbivorian eat herbivores? That is, would your diet be limited to cows, goats, pigs, chickens, and other animals that eat plants?

Of course, the problem is that we took our cue from the word vegetarian. If the suffix -ian meant “consumer of,” then Christians would literally eat Christ (and depending on your religion, this may actually be the case). However, the suffix -ian means “follower of” or “of or belonging to.” So, an herbivorian would actually literally mean “someone who follows the way of herbivores” or “belonging to the category of herbivores”.

Given that, vegetarian is actually an incredibly incorrect word construction (all hail English!). Those who practice vegetarianism then literally “belong to the category of vegetables.”

Tonight I made a hot and spicy blackened chicken on the stove. Well, that’s what I intended to make, anyway.The recipe wanted a heavy, large skillet heated over high heat for five to eight minutes. So, my twelve-inch cast-iron skillet went onto a large burner over high heat for five minutes.

Meanwhile, I dusted up some unfortunate chicken’s muscles with a potent mixture of cayenne pepper, cumin, black pepper, onion powder, garlic powder, salt, paprika, and thyme. Then, I applied a drizzle of butter onto the spice-encrusted chicken breasts before putting them in the smoking pan.

As soon as the chicken hit the pan, smoke billowed out of the pan and started to replace all the breathable air in the kitchen. I started to cough because this wasn’t just regular smoke, it was a thick smoke filled with cayenne pepper and black pepper. Whee!

Sarah’s wildfire fighter training kicked in, and she ventured through the smokey haze to see which national forest I had trundled into the kitchen and set ablaze. She, of course, was immediately overcome by the pepper smoke and started to sneeze and cough. Dalla was also sneezing madly as the pepper smoke has reached her level, as well.

At that point, we ran around and opened windows and doors and activated vent fans in a vain attempt to vent the house of the acrid smoke. After ten minutes, we were able to breathe without coughing, even though our nasal passages still burned from the pepper impacted in them and we started sneezing and coughing again every time we took a deep breath.

Fortunately, the net result of all that smokey mess was a flavorful, hot and spicy blackened chicken. However, if I were to cook that dish again, I’d probably use the grill because we obviously don’t have the right air moving/purification equipment to cook the meal indoors.

Living and traveling in different parts of the US has driven home one point with which almost no one can argue:

Americans will drink just about anything labeled “coffee” no matter how god-awful it is.

The whole time we were traveling on our latest trip, we didn’t have one cup of coffee that was even half-way decent.

Here are some helpful tips for those who think it takes special skill or equipment to brew decent coffee:

1. Start with good grounds. Just as you can’t make a steak out of dung, you can’t make decent coffee from crappy grounds. Folgers, Maxwell House, Hills Brothers: these are the three Goblins of the Percolator. Most of the big companies use the cheapest, rottenest coffee beans they can get their grubby little hands on. Then, to increase profit, they cut the beans with sawdust and oil refinery byproducts to increase yield. This doesn’t mean you have to use unbelievably expensive gourmet or boutique coffee grounds. Chock Full o’ Nuts and Dunkin Donuts both sell ground coffee that is affordable, but decent.
2. Actually wash the coffee pot periodically. Just as we expect pots and pans to be washed after using them, coffee pots need to be washed as well.
3. Throw out old coffee. Ideally, coffee would be thrown out twenty minutes after it was brewed. Even more often would be better. However, if your coffee is older than one hour, chances are it is now bitter.
4. Don’t skimp on the grounds. If I wanted water with a hint of brown in it, I’d drop some vanilla flavoring into my cup. However, if I’m drinking coffee, I want actual coffee flavor, not hot water with a hint of coffee flavor and bouquet.
5. Don’t reuse filters or grounds. Both of these should be shooting offenses.

Decaf drinkers like myself have it especially bad. As soon as we leave the comfortable confines of our own home we’re immediately relegated to little decaf ghettos. Most people and companies that serve decaf seem to assume that we should be happy just to have the option to drink decaf and that we’ll gladly slurp down anything decaffienated.

If you’re serving us cheap-ass decaf coffee, chances are it was decaffienated in some third-world nation by running it through a pair of sweaty socks. Trust me, we can taste the difference between good decaf coffee and bulk-rate, third-world slavery produced coffee that was decaffienated with a blend of donkey droppings and nerve gas and then shipped to this country in the ballast tanks of rusty container ships.

Why would establishments like Hampton Inn or Clubhouse Inn and Suites, for instance, serve shitty coffee? They concentrate so hard on all other aspects of their customer-facing appearance and then they expect us to overlook the sorry excuse for coffee they serve for breakfast? Do they not realize that we put the coffee in our mouths? If I serve you something to put in your mouth, you can be damn sure I’m satisfied with it, because you will form an opinion about it (and me, by extension). They’ve got people out there fluffing the eggs and sausage every five minutes. Quick-brew industrial coffee pots are also in use. Would it be so hard to keep good coffee handy?

A pre-emptive response to those who would say that Starbucks is where I should be drinking coffee when I’m not at home:

Starbucks overroasts their beans. The coffee tastes burnt. And no, I’m not just sensitive to dark coffee. In fact, I drink French Roast coffee with chicory every morning. I actually like coffee much darker and richer than most folks. Starbucks coffee doesn’t taste dark and rich, it tastes burnt and awful. Why should I support Yet Another Chain Store by paying exhorbitant prices for bad coffee?