Hot Dogs!

Re-Discovering Past Favorites
There are foods you eat as an adult. And then there are foods you eat as a kid. There are also foods you re-discover as an adult when you have kids; and you like them. And last, there are foods you re-discover and you kind of wish you hadn’t. For example, canned, sliced carrots. Those are just nasty. But my baby girl loves them, so we buy them and feed them to her.

Foods you’re thankful for re-discovering, cause they’re good: grilled cheese, peanut butter and jelly, Cheez-It crackers, Ritz crackers, tater tots, and hot dogs. Yes, hot dogs! As an adult, hot dogs are reserved for the ballpark, and even then you usually get the bratwurst. Otherwise, hot dogs conjure up images of miscellaneous pig parts, horse meat, and other various meat products that if you found it laying on the sidewalk, you’d just as soon step around it then on it, let alone eat it.

As a kid, you probably snarfed down the dogs like it was a gourmet meal at Gary Danko. Then you grew up, and you learned better. You became an adult and your tastes evolved. Then you had kids. And you send your kids to daycare. And daycare has hot dogs on the menu. At first you revolt: No way are my kids eating all those nitrates and mystery meat! And then you run out of time to make a special lunch for the kids to take to daycare and you say: Fine, let them eat the dogs. And the kids like them. They snarf them down like they were dining at Boulevard. So, you buy them at home to feed them on the weekends, cause nothing else seems to be working, and you can only make so many grilled cheese sandwiches.

But then my wife gets smart, she does her research, and what does she find: all beef hot dogs with no nitrates. And these things are good. They are real good. And once again, hot dogs become a re-discovered food that you don’t have to feel guilty about eating and they don’t make you feel sick if you eat more than one (I’m looking at you, dollar-dogs at the Coliseum…).

And then I found this article over at Serious Eats, and we’re back at square one. Doesn’t matter what the article says, I like hot dogs, my kids like hot dogs, and we’re gonna eat hot dogs!! Especially during baseball season.

“Nobody, but nobody, puts ketchup on a hot dog anymore!” —“Dirty” Harry Callahan