Driving-while-Drooling Road Trip Puzzle

Food-Road-SignIt’s Labor Day, everybody, your last chance for a summer road trip! And since (for me, at least), road trips go hand-in-hand with delicious local specialties, we’ve cooked up this little puzzle to test your knowledge of iconic dishes from specific cities. From the descriptions listed below, can you name the dish and the city with which it is most closely associated? Hint: if you’re in the continental U.S. right now, you could drive to any of these cities, though one would require a border crossing. A few of these are tricky, so if you manage to get ten out of twelve, consider yourself a road food champ.

  1. A crust pressed into a high-edged pan, filled with mozzarella cheese, chunky tomato sauce and toppings, and baked
  2. A French baguette stuffed with roast beef or fried seafood and dressed with lettuce, tomato, pickle and mayonnaise
  3. Shoestring fries topped with guacamole, sour cream, Cotija cheese and seared, chopped beef
  4. A particular kind of seafood, formed into a patty (often seasoned with Old Bay) and broiled, served with a lemon wedge and saltines
  5. A long roll (preferably an Amoroso roll) filled with thinly sliced beef and topped with provolone or Cheez Whiz
  6. An open-faced turkey and bacon sandwich, covered with Mornay cheese sauce and baked or broiled until brown
  7. Black-eyed peas mixed with diced vegetables in a vinegar-based sauce and usually served with tortilla chips
  8. French fries topped with fresh cheese curds and covered in brown gravy
  9. Buttered bread filled with roast pork, glazed ham, Swiss cheese and thinly sliced dill pickles, pressed and toasted in a plancha
  10. A cream-based soup prepared with potatoes, onion and a particular shellfish, but definitely no tomatoes
  11. Cubed red meat, deep-fried and served with toothpicks as utensils, with salt, hot sauce and crackers on the side
  12. A meat sauce spiced with cinnamon and allspice, served atop spaghetti and finished with finely shredded cheddar cheese, onions and kidney beans

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Historic Blizzard: Dairy Queen of My Heart

dairy queen blizzardI grew up on the edge of the Great Lakes Snow Belt, so impressive snowstorms were no rarity. Any notable storms of my childhood, however, only caused my parents and elder siblings to reminisce about THE storm, the one that had wreaked havoc in the 1970s before I was born. “Remember when Dad shoveled a tunnel through the eight feet of snow on the porch after we’d been stuck inside for three months?” they’d sigh, with nostalgia and, one hopes, some measure of exaggeration. “Now that was a real blizzard.” This weekend it seems that I narrowly missed another historic storm, New York now a slushy, melting mess while our neighbors to the north are still shoveling themselves free. Even so, it has put me in mind of another blizzard, one that I know very well.

It is my firm belief that even people who are largely devoted to healthy or carefully prepared meals have a few fast food skeletons lurking in their pantries. One of mine is the Dairy Queen Blizzard. Dairy Queen opened their first shop in 1940 in Joliet, Illinois (just a hop, skip and a jump away from where the original Ray Kroc McDonald’s would descend fifteen years later), and they first coined the term “blizzard” for their ultra-thick milkshakes. It wasn’t until 1985 that they introduced the Blizzard as we know it today—candy or other sweets crushed and mixed with soft serve ice cream into a cholesterol-laden sludge so dense that it will not slide from the cup when a Dairy Queen employee turns it upside-down. (At small outposts of the chain, they will still enact this ritual for you, unbidden). I love them.

I don’t think I have ever eaten a Blizzard without feeling slightly nauseous afterward, but that’s not important. To me, Blizzards are sacred totems of the open road.

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