Tag: Chips

May 15th Chocolate Chip Day

May Holidays

Chocolate Chips are a wonderful addition to cookies, muffins, cakes and pies… just about any kind of dessert and even in some cereals! Chocolate chips were created in 1937 by Ruth Graves Wakefield who was preparing cookies at the Toll House Inn. Back then, they really weren’t the chips we know today, rather they were actually chips broken off blocks of chocolate, since then… they have been shaped and created in drops, or chips, for use in a number of different ways.

How to celebrate – Learn how to make your own chocolate chips. Create a new use for chocolate chips. Just eat chips straight out of the bag… who needs the cookie!

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July 21st National Junk Food Day

July Holidays, Unboxing the Bizarre

Junk food is often referred to as “Comfort food” because we normally turn to it when we are unhappy or sad about something. It probably does make us happy for the moment, that sweet taste or salty goodness tastes so good… it’s what happens afterwards that makes us even sadder and unhappy.

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Sure that ice cream smooths things over for a few minutes, that bottle of beer (which by the way is junk food as well) makes the troubles disappear, and that bunch of french fries makes us forget about anything else while we are eating them. But whatever drove us to those comforts will come back shortly and haunts us, reminding us daily as we look at our stomachs, our thighs, and those frightening man boobs!

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The thing is, it’s not the junk foods fault! It’s ours! There’s nothing wrong with junk food, as long as we don’t get carried away. Diets don’t work because when we are on a diet, all we can think about is what we can’t have instead of what we can! Under normal circumstances given the choice between an apple or a candy bar we might actually choose the apple, but when we are denied the candy bar, that is what we crave.

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Junk food does have a place in life today. It is convenient, it is fast, and it does taste good. Used when we don’t have time or other choices it serves a purpose. The problem is, in life today we find those conditions more the rule than the exception. A soda will cool you down, but it will also increase the sugar in your body which heats you back up! Diet sodas are known to mimic serious desease. Pizza really isn’t all that bad for you, as long as you don’t eat the whole thing by yourself. Hamburgers aren’t all that bad either, though red meat does have its drawbacks,  it’s more all the bread and condiments we add to it. And fries, well.. there isn’t really much good about them at all. There is nothing wrong with a potato but fry it in grease, add a lot of salt, and shove that in your mouth, it’s a different story.

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Cereals are more often than not filled with sugar. Donuts, brownies, chips, and candy have little redeeming quality to them either. It’s not that eating them is so awful for you, its eating so many of them that causes the problems. But for today you can forget all of that as we celebrate junk food day. And tomorrow, we will pay the price for our celebration.

How to celebrate – visit a candy or chocolate factory. Maybe replace that candy bar with a piece of celery or that hamburger with a turkey sub (after today if course). Don’t worry about it and eat what you want which is probably what you are going to do anyway.

July 13th French Fry Day

July Holidays, Unboxing the Bizarre

Are they French Fries or are they Belgian Fries?  Well, does it really matter?  I guess if you take pride in your fries it does but I don’t think either country gets any royalty for that.

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The name supposedly comes from the World War 1 era when the American Dough Boys went to Europe and ordered these odd things called “French Fries”, but the Americans were actually in Belgium at the time. They were stationed with Belgian troops but the soldiers spoke French so naturally, the Americans assumed they were French.

French Fries had been around for a long time before that. In fact, there is reference to them being served in 1680 in Belgium. They apparently did not come to France until 1789, over a hundred years later. Thomas Jefferson had them served at the White house in 1802 and they were mentioned in a cookbook called “Cookery for Maids of All Works” by E. Warren in 1856.

Since then, we have come a long way with versions of the cut potato that is generally deep fried in oil, although they can be baked in an oven as well. They are called Chips in England and Finger Chips in India.

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There are crinkle cut fries though I am not sure why this is important, I suppose they are a bit stronger and maybe hold sauces better.

And lanky smooth cut fries, like those served at McDonalds. In fact, McDonald’s seems to have cornered a market with their fries, generally preferred over the fries of other fast food restaurants.

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We have put cheese on them, added chili to them…

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… and even made them out of sweet potatoes so that we feel like we are eating healthier.

There are all sorts of sauces we dip our fries into but few seem to out perform ketchup. It is widely accepted that Thomas Jefferson introduced them to the American diet, though it was quite different back then than it is now. Ironically today, what could be more American than the French Fry?

How to celebrate – Go find some french fries and eat them all yourself, no sharing!  Find other veggies you can cut up like fries and invent your own version of the “American” fry.  Make your own comparison of the french fries available at different fast food venues.

March 23rd National Chips & Dip Day

March Holidays

Break out those potato chips, tortilla chips, or the chip of your choice and start dipping! This is your day!  No one knows when it began, or why it began other than as an excuse to add a few extra pounds.  We do, however, have a little history on when the potato chip got its start.

The first reference to a thinly sliced chip made of potatoes comes from William Kitchiner’s “The Cook’s Oracle” published in England in 1822, they were called Crisps. At least a little more romantic, the story goes that American Chef George Crum in Saratoga NY, in 1853 got annoyed with one of his customers who kept sending back his potato saying it was under cooked.  Crum cut the potato into very thin slices and fried it until is was burnt to a crisp.  Amused with himself, Crum sent out his joke to his customer who in turn loved the potato adding to Crum’s frustration.  Soon, everybody was asking for Crum’s potatoes and an entire new industry was begun.  His customer may have been Cornelius Vanderbilt which would explain how it caught on so fast.

Now dip has no real history.  It also means many, many different things… chewing tobacco, an unsavory character, or something that enhances the flavor of a chip.  It probably first came from ancient days when breads were dunked in herbs and oils.  Since then, people have been trying all sorts of new items to include in their “dip”.

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So somewhere along the line somebody got the bright idea that our chips and dip were not healthy enough for us.  They decided to put things like fruits and vegetables along side the dip to get us all eating better.  Okay, so it’s a good idea and is better for us but this sort of anarchy just leads us to a total meltdown of what National Chips & Dip Day is all about!

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A little less objectionable to connoisseurs of the traditional Chips and Dips  is the dessert chip & dip.  While it does leave us craving salt it satisfies other taste buds in our palate.

So raise that chip, or carrot, or cookie high in the air and with a determined, yet graceful, motion bring it down and scoop up whatever flavor dip you desire to consume, taking care that you are not close to a spittoon where you might find another sort of dip less accommodating.