Zombie Boogers: My Cycling Comfort Foods

They’re the foods that fuel your ride or welcome you home after suffering in the saddle.  They’re your weird, bizarre, locked up in a closet personal favorites.  After getting soaked for the last hour of that Sunday hammerfest, you don’t want a sandwich to get the feeling back in your fingers.  You need Usinger's Braunschweiger on soft Italian bread with brown mustard, real butter and onions.  You don’t want a cookie in your bag after the cyclocross race; you want a molasses cookie from the box on the counter at your grandmother’s house.  It’s not the Campbell’s tomato soup, it’s the 15 saltine crackers crumbled over the top and so thick a little person could run across it.  Or, is it the crusted three square inch burn the roof of your mouth hot cherry pie in the corner of the Hungry Man TV dinner.  These are some foods that reward my ride.

I’m sure it’s what they use for zombie boogers at Haunted Houses, but I love to eat it.  It’s green, long, slimy, gushy and wet.  If you threw one against the wall it would smack, stick and slide down like a night crawler.  Still, since I was a kid when every vegetable was disgusting, it’s one of my all time favorite foods.  I’ll only eat the long spears, only from a can and it absolutely must be Green Giant asparagus spears.  I do like fresh asparagus, especially grilled with olive oil and salt and pepper.  Without preservatives, I’m sure it’s healthier, but that’s hoidy toidy to me.  They serve that with $30 steaks at Jeff Ruby.  Not to mention you have to cook it. I don’t need a bowl or a fork, only a can opener or my Leatherman multi-tool.  I thoroughly enjoy pulling them out of the can with my fingers, tilting my head back and dangling them into my mouth.  It’ll probably be my last meal when I’m 120 years old and a need to be fed by a nurse.  “Head back Mister Biker.  Eat your spears.”  Nom nom nom.

My wife calls them “Joe foods” and second on my list and in my lunchbox right now is Windmill cookies.  It confounds me how inexpensive yet so intricate they are.  I think the box of 12 I bought was under $3.  Maybe it’s because I’m a quarter Dutch, but my affinity for the Windmill cookie runs deep.  With each one, I marvel at the detail.  The almond slivers almost give the illusion of textured stone made from tulip field mud.  If you look closely at the photo there are 3 separate designs on the mill: a cross at the top, two (E) shapes left and right and a diamond in the center.  You can stick your tongue in the doorway, or let it be the axis of the windmill blades.  I’m not entirely sure there’s a specific brand I like or what brand these are, maybe there’s only one.  It’s not like chocolate chips with a million varieties.  At the grocery you’ll be lucky to spot them.  Almost glad they weren’t hanging out with the other lesser cookies; I found these in the health food section at Kroger.  As it turns out, these are completely vegan.

The all time greatest culinary creation is Candy Raisins.  How can you not love a candy with a smiling sun on the package?  They are not candied raisins, contain raisins or even taste like raisins.  The only thing they have in common with actual raisins is that they are wrinkly on the top.  They’re comparable in texture to the candy Dots.  They feel the same way in your mouth, but the flavor is unlike any candy you’ve ever tasted.  The website Save The Candy Raisins describes them as “a translucent, honey colored candy…with a light ginger taste.”  I grew up in Wisconsin, and from what I can gather they were only made by Stark, a division of the NECCO candy company.  As you can gather from the website, sadly, after shutting down a plant in Pewaukee Wisconsin, they are not being made anymore.  I have not had a candy raisin in at least three years.  If I saw them, even on Ebay, I swear to God I would spend at least $10 a bag to attain them.  I love them so much; I’d accept a box as my only Christmas present.    

Maybe it's crunchy peanut butter and dill pickle sandwiches you crave like our reader Lloyd, tell us your favorite weird foods.  Leave a comment below or "Like" us on Facebook here.

Child’s Play: Nephew’s Huck at Ray's Caught on Video

The dump truck, the fire truck, all of them, on a triple top-tube spray painted black Schwinn with BMX tires I sailed over 27 Tonka trucks.  Hmmm.  That sounds like a lot.  Maybe it was 19, or 11.  Regardless, 30 some years later, I can see the wood jump at the edge of my childhood driveway.  We’d approach downhill from the street, cut-in to the driveway, hit the lip of the 8-12 inch scrap 2x4 and plywood jump along the curb, fly over every kid in the neighborhood’s Tonkas, and land in the front lawn beneath the sugar maple.  I remember a friend’s endo sending him sliding barebacked onto the freshly paved road.  His mom must’ve had to pick stones and tar out of his wounds, total Jackass.  With yesterday’s video text shot by my sister in law at Ray's Indoor Mountain Bike Park in Milwaukee, my nephew entered the age of bike stunts.

In my days before cars, our days before Jackass, we jumped fire pits and creeks and circumnavigated our hometowns with a boombox strapped to the rack.  None of it captured on video.  I don’t think any of our parents could afford a video camera and we wouldn’t even dare to take the expensive family still camera on a jaunt through the neighborhood trails.  That was for vacations.  Taking it out of the house tempted a serious grounding.  Without cell phones, at dinner time my Dad would hollar down the street repeating himself to the East and West loud enough to be heard three blocks away, “Joe and Mike!!!  Time for Dinner!”  So, my childhood bike memories are that, memories.  My 8 year old nephew’s are now online.

My Childhood Trails Went Through Lime Kiln Park 

Yesterday, my sister in law texted a 10 second video of my nephew “Shady Brady” doing a BMX jump into the foam pit at Ray’s MTN bike park in Milwaukee.  Coincidently, they live in the same neighborhood I grew up in, in the same house that my wife grew up in, only now they have a video camera on their cell phone and a foam pit to save the road rash.  Some things have changed.  The twisted network of trails along the Menomonee River of my youth are home to Target and Home Depot.  Judging from this video, I’m sure that won’t stop Brady.  There’s still has to be a killer stuff down by the Lime Kiln Park or a 3 foot loading dock drop somewhere.  If not, they have a family membership to Ray’s.

8 years old, Brady, or as I like to call his BMX persona “Shady Brady,” doesn’t really know what road rash is yet or what it’s like to get up from a fall in the trails to find a stick sticking out of your leg.  He’s 8, still under adult supervision in the childhood protection plan.  His Dad, like most Wisconsin Dads has a corral of ATV’s and snowmobiles.  As a consequence, and conversely to my experience, under Dad’s eye, Shady Brady learned how to ride before he could pedal.  Compared to the speed and snarl of the motors on Wisconsin fire roads, hucking a four-footer inside of an old Menards hardware store is nothing to him. 

Trying to be the good Uncle, or as good of an Uncle that I can be working at a radio station from 400 miles away, I put my computer media skills to work and made him his first “pro” video.  With a screaming announcer, X-games music and a cheering crowd, he’ll have a memory as blown out of proportion as my Tonka jump.  My sister in law said he watched it 30 times within the hour I sent it.  I hate to say it, but his airtime makes my exaggerated Tonka truck jump look like child’s play.