The first food piece I ever wrote was a review of Good Dog/Bad Dog: Sausages For All, in downtown Portland. My friend Brian Covey and I, editors at our school paper (The Cardinal Times, Lincoln High School) were wandering through downtown one night in the 1991-92 era and came across this new place. We were easily lured in by the promise of meat. It was great. We befriended the owners, brothers Ted and Brian Gamble, and wrote a review of the place for the paper. As I recall, we tried to sneak the phrase “damn good sausages” past our hard-as-nails faculty advisor, Mr. Bailey. I can’t remember whether we succeeded.

My favorite meal at GD/BD was the “mag chair”–that’s the Chairman of the Board sandwich, a sausage patty with mozzarella and tomato sauce, made with their “magma dog” extra-spicy Italian sausage. Later they allowed you to order any sausage “facemelter style,” with sauteed jalapeños and Tabasco sauce. Not everything at GD/BD was spicy, but I don’t think I ever ordered anything that wasn’t.

Laurie just emailed to tell me that the downtown GD/BD closed in October. Ted and Brian had already sold it years ago, but I’d been after that and it was still good. There’s still a location at the airport (past security, which is too bad, because the airport is near Laurie’s parents’ house) and one at Washington Square mall in southwest. I can’t vouch for the quality of these, but they’re worth a try.

If I had a time machine, I’d go back to 1992 and find my younger self, assuming I could pick him out among all the longhaired kids listening to _Nevermind_ on their Discmen. “Younger self,” I would say, “I have news from the future: writing about sausage is going to become your career.” I wouldn’t mention the Kurt Cobain thing.

Chocolate Jesus

> Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, fumed, “It’s an all-out war on Christianity.”

Yeah, Christianity had a good 2000-year run until Chocolate Jesus ruined it.

I thought of three ways this story could get even better:

1. The hotel claims that they shuttered the exhibit because people kept eating Chocolate Jesus.

2. The Catholic League provides a complete list of unacceptable Jesus-sculpting materials.

3. Jesus returns to Earth in delicious chocolaty form, and Bill Donohue is *so* embarrassed.

Recently I asked, in a post about frozen potatoes:

> Is there a web site devoted to revealing which convenience foods are good and which are terrible?

Still haven’t found it, but I thought of a couple of other convenience foods I can highly recommend.

One is polenta in a tube, or as Iris and I call it, a chub. (“Dada, where’s that chub of polenta?”) I’ve been getting it at Trader Joe’s for $2. For breakfast yesterday, I sliced off about seven slices and cooked them in a skillet with butter. No matter how much of this I make, it’s never enough. Iris will eat polenta until she’s full even if there’s bacon on her plate. The thing I’ve noticed about chubbed polenta is that, presumably because of the high water content, it takes much longer to cook than I expect–it ends up being about ten minutes per side, which only heightens the anticipation. When I was a kid, my mom occasionally made fried cornmeal mush for breakfast, and this is basically the same thing.

Next, I guess this isn’t exactly a convenience food, but someone needs to speak up for Monterey jack cheese. For a long time, I had dismissed jack as a cheese for people who don’t really like the taste of cheese. Then I tried it while testing this enchilada recipe, and was surprised to find that jack worked much better than cheddar for this recipe. The cheddar browned too quickly and turned into sort of a parody of itself, tasting a bit like a Better Cheddar cracker. Again, it’s the water content.

Dismissing jack, I realized, is like tossing out your cream for being not enough like buttermilk. Jack stakes out a middle ground between undeniably cheesy cheese and process cheese. Or between cheese and butter–think of it as an unfermented dairy product and it will serve you well. Incidentally, I also tried a Mexican process cheese in the enchiladas and didn’t like it. Last time I went to [Tat’s Deli](http://www.tatsdeli.com/) I got the traditional Cheez Whiz on my cheesesteak. I prefer the provolone. So I can only take this man-of-the-people act so far, but count me as pro-jack.

This week’s Culinate column is about oil.

> At the risk of turning this column into one of those “everything currently in my desk drawer” pages from the early days of the Web, I would like to share which fats I keep on hand and what I use them for, and speak up for lipid diversity in the kitchen.

[Chewing the Fat, Part I](http://www.culinate.com/read/bacon/Chewing+the+fat*2C+part+I)

As Wendy suggested, I’ve put up a page that duplicates the dinners from the sidebar, so you can ask questions and leave comments. There’s a link to it (“comment”) in the box, or [click here](https://www.rootsandgrubs.com/dinners/). Maybe this will inspire me to be less lazy about planning dinner for the week on Sunday. You’re also welcome, as Lauren did, to talk about your own dinner planning methodology. I never tire of this topic.