Tag Archives: New Year

2014 was a great year for chicken curry

Sure, it’s been around forever, but 2014 is the year chicken curry finally hit its stride. In a sort of quiet culinary coup d’état, chicken curry mounted what can only be described as gastronomic guerrilla warfare, catapulting itself from boring Indian restaurant mainstay to a perpetual flavor-of-the-week. People are finally getting excited about chicken curry, and rightfully so.

Seemingly overnight, the modest “chef’s special” menu standby has transitioned to a standout dish at Indian restaurants across the country. Gone are the days when your sister Jane would be the only one to order chicken curry. “Where are we going for dinner? Indian food? Come on, I don’t want to go out for Indian food. Can’t we go somewhere else? What’s wrong with Luigi’s? Ugh, fine, I guess I’ll just get that chicken dish, what’s it called? Yeah, curry, chicken curry, I guess I’ll just get chicken curry.”

And it’s not just Indian restaurants riding the swollen wave of chicken curried popularity. The past year saw a variety of establishments cash in on the versatility and easily adaptive nature of one of America’s favorite ethnic meals. Select TGI Fridays offered limited time chicken curry entrées as part of their “Two For Twenty” value menu, and a rogue McDonald’s franchised out of Spokane, Washington bucked the corporate kitchen by unveiling an east-meets-west McCurried Chicken Sandwich on its limited “Flavors of the World” sandwich of the month menu.

Probably the most dramatic sign of chicken curry’s inevitable western crossover can be seen in the results of 2014 Lay’s “Do Us a Flavor” consumer vote-in potato chip flavor competition. While the snack-eating majority ultimately decided to give the starring role to Kettle Cooked Wasabi Ginger, chicken curry came in third, which would have been unthinkable even five years ago. Just the idea that consumers would be willing to snack on curried flavored potato chips shows that chicken curry’s surge in popularity is much more than a passing trend.

I’m anxious to see how high chicken curry is going to climb in 2015. If I had money to invest, and there were some sort of a stock exchange where you could bet on foods, I’d without a doubt put all of my money on chicken curry. We’re at the chicken curry tipping point, much like the chicken parmesan tipping point twenty years ago. You can’t go anywhere without finding chicken parm on the menu. Even Subway does a chicken parm sandwich. Mark my words, chicken curry is on the exact same trajectory.

If you’re not a big fan of chicken curry, do yourself a favor and learn to like it. Because ten or twenty years from now, it’ll be all but unavoidable, completely saturated into all aspects of modern society. Kids are going to eat it served by school cafeterias. Hospitals will serve it to bedridden old people. “What’s for dinner?” won’t even be a question worth asking anymore, because chances are, the answer is going to be “chicken curry.”

I know what I’m making for dinner tonight. It’s chicken curry, and I’m pumped.

Rob’s guide to 2014

Do you feel like you were just getting to know 2013? Like it wasn’t until October or November that you finally thought, oh, OK, I get it now, 2013, this is what it’s all about, this is great. And now it’s over, and for what? The teased promise of what could have been, if only you knew what you were doing for the first nine or ten months? It’s kind of like that really cool friend you made during your last semester at college. Where were you hiding this whole time? Why have we never hung out before?

And then it’s graduation and you both go your separate ways and, even though you make an effort to stay in touch, one of you moves away and the other gets a job and, well it’s not like you have that much of a shared history to fall back on. I mean, yeah, it was cool watching the entirety of Star Trek: The Next Generation together on the Sci-Fi channel. But time flies by, people enter and exit our lives seemingly at random.

Is this what 2014 is going to be like? Are you asking yourself, am I fated to stumble around blindly through the ages, never really getting a grip of where I’m at or what this year is supposed to be all about, not until it’s way too late?

Of course you are. But I’m here to make things a little easier. Even though we’re only at day one, I’ve got 2014 practically all mapped out. And I’m going to share with you some tips and tricks to really squeeze the most out of this year, what would have been the second new-world New Year, if only the Mayan apocalypse had arrived like we were all promised.

Let’s talk 2014 TV. Breaking Bad is over. That’s so 2013. And all of your other favorite TV shows aren’t getting any younger. Do yourself a favor and make sure you catch the second half of Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Yes, it’s on Fox, and nobody really watches Fox. But I’m telling you, this is definitely the most underrated show currently on TV. I started watching it almost by accident. I have my Netflix and Hulu all streaming to my TV via a little Roku box I picked up at Costco, and for whatever reason, when one show ends, it gives you like five seconds to play a new program, or it starts streaming something else automatically.

When Brooklyn Nine-Nine started up, I made a pretty decent attempt to find the little wand remote that the Roku came with, but after forty-five seconds or so of not immediately eyeing it within my general vicinity, I gave up and thought, OK, well at least I can dick around on my iPhone until this thing’s over.

I had no desire to watch Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Aside from the Lonely Island SNL videos, I never found Andy Sandburg to be particularly funny. But this show had me roped in almost immediately. I don’t know what to say besides the fact that it’s really funny. If it survives past season one, I know that it’s going to blow up into something huge. But that’s a big if. Fox has a reputation of cancelling strong shows that don’t immediately post stellar ratings.

And from what I’ve heard, there’s not too much buzz about it. I’m saying this not from looking online or reading any reviews, but just by asking around. Nearly everybody who I’ve inquired about Brooklyn Nine-Nine gave me the same dead stare, like they’d never heard of it, wondering if I was talking about something maybe I dreamt of, but a really strong dream, one that I carried into my waking life, mistakenly believing that I’d happened upon a hidden cool show. But it’s cool. Watch it.

More 2014 advice: Did I talk about Brooklyn Nine-Nine already? I did. Right. OK. What else? Actually, I don’t have anything else. I thought I’d get the ball rolling with the TV show thing and that it would naturally lead to all of my other great 2014 plans, but here we are, I’ve basically written what’s usually a blog post’s length of material here, and I’m kind of thinking that, why force any more out of it? So what, so I only have one half-hour network sitcom serving as the bulk of my plans for the New Year. Whatever. And yeah, I guess I should have just turned it into a straight up review post instead of making it like it’s going to somehow be topical, about today, about New Years. But like I said, I’ve already lost interest. I’ve got plenty of the year left to waste everyone’s time with this nonsense.

Happy New Year.

New Year’s Resolution

Happy New Year’s Day everybody. Wow. A whole new year. What is a year? It’s funny to think about how we measure time, planetary rotations around the sun. What if some day we set up a colony on Mars? Will they follow our Earth calendar or will they have something unique? How will people on both planets coordinate interplanetary vacations? I’m sure it won’t be impossible, but it won’t be as easy as just randomly deciding to blast off this time next year. Because, this time next year, what, Earth? Mars?

Did you know that on one of Saturn’s moon, Europa, a year lasts only twenty-one days? What if we set up colonies there, will people live to be like five thousand years old? I didn’t even look that up, by the way, that Europa fact. You know how I knew it? I didn’t. I just made it up. You really shouldn’t just go around blindly believing everything you read on the Internet. That could maybe be one of your New Year’s resolutions. Not to just accept total bullshit as fact.

One of my resolutions is to only write true stuff on this blog, from now on. Not that I ever write anything fake. Only strictly seriously serious stuff here, like the title of the blog says. But now it’s official, now it’s a resolution. I mean, that whole Europa thing was just a clever trick, to get you to see how gullible you really are. If you’re sitting there thinking to yourself, “Well I wasn’t convinced,” I hope you take comfort in telling that to yourself, but we both know you believed me, if only just a little bit. I’m not even sure if Europa is one of Jupiter or Saturn’s moons. Not that it really matters.

But I have to think of more resolutions. I can’t just have one. And this is really all my fault, because last year I made a really half-baked resolution, that next year, which is now this year, I’d make several New Year’s resolutions. So I got off the hook last year, but sure enough, and I knew this would happen, it’s come around to bite me in the ass here. I guess I could just make several resolutions, each one promising even more resolutions for future years. Like one resolution could be that next year I’ll make five resolutions. And then another resolution could be that in 2015 I’ll make ten resolutions. And, now that I’m thinking about it, that seems like a pretty decent plan.

No, I can’t do it, I’ll just be hurting even more next year when I not only have to make five resolutions, but I’ll be stuck, unable to resolve to make more resolutions for years to come. Because I’m going to run out of future years eventually. I guess I could just assume that I’ll live to be two hundred. But I don’t want to die with all of these unfulfilled resolutions. I should just bite the bullet and do it, right now, make more resolutions.

OK, so, how about, I resolve to … to what? What’s the point? What do I need a resolution for? I’m already doing great. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right? Man, but then I’m not fulfilling last year’s. Geez, I’m in quite the pickle. I guess I could resolve to get a haircut next week. Not this week. I think I’m busy this week. But definitely next week. This is going to be tricky, because getting a haircut, that’s something that I’m always forgetting to do. I get out of the shower, I’ll look at my hair and think, wow Rob, time to get a haircut. But I won’t. The next thing I know I’ll be going to bed, like the whole day flew by and I didn’t even think twice about getting a haircut.

I always leave it until it gets so unruly that somebody eventually says to me, usually my boss or somebody else who’s “in charge” or me, they’ll go, “Gee Rob, getting about time for a haircut, no?” And I could go on forever about how I hate being told to do things in the form of a question, about saying a sentence and then finishing it with the whole, “no?” like it’s a suggestion, or a question. But even though I’m angry, I’ll be like, shit, I must look crazy. I have to get a haircut right this second. And I’ll get one and I’ll look so dramatically clean-cut, especially considering how bad it looked.

Regardless, this is why I never get a haircut until the last second. I never think about it. I always get bossed around. And then I actually love all of the compliments I get, “nice haircut!” which wouldn’t be there if I got it cut regularly enough so that my hair always looked the same length.

Fuck it, I’ll try to get a haircut next week, but I’m not making that a New Year’s resolution. Too easy to forget. Too easy to start 2013 on the wrong foot, on having already broken a New Year’s pledge. Nah, I’ll just do what I said earlier, resolve five for next year and then another resolution for ten in 2015. Whatever. Happy New Year’s. I hope your year is great, almost as great as I hope mine is, just slightly less great than mine, good enough really.