It's All About Number Ten

I've been blogging for nearly two years now and I cannot believe that in all this time I've said practically NOTHING about the best soup on the planet and my favorite restaurant. Perhaps I did and just never bothered to give it a proper label so I could look it up. Anyway, you all need to know about Sawasdee in Indianapolis (corner of 86th Street and Ditch for those of you that want to give it a visit). Sawasdee means, "hello" in Thai.

My brothers-in-law and I or my friend Brian and I typically visit this place for lunch during work. Everything on the lunch menu is delicious and they even spell "lunch" correctly on the menu, unlike Thai Castle in Carmel, Indiana (also a good Thai place, but nothing comes close to Sawasdee--NOTHING!!!!!). But there is one thing on the menu that we almost always get. Other places in the Indy metro area and in other towns have their own version of it, but nothing comes close. In some circles, this dish is known as "Thai Noodle Soup". At Sawasdee, it's known as "Number 10" because it's the 10th and last item on the lunch menu.

I don't need to see a menu when I go to Sawasdee. I don't even need to order. The waitress (who is a member of the family that owns the establishment) looks at me and says, "Numma tehn, medium wit two spring rolls," and I nod in agreement. What makes this soup so good? Why can't other restaurants match it's complexity of flavors? Here are just some of the things that we know are in the soup:

• white chicken
• shrimp balls (don't even go there--you know what I mean)
• hot pepper flakes
• ground peanut (at one point spelled "penut" on the menu)
• chives
• cilantro
• thin rice noodles
• bean sprouts

The broth is at least partially chicken based. Based on what I've read about Thai food it is probably fish based as well. There's a sweet, sour and spiciness in this dish that is like nothing else I've tasted--and it's inexpensive (about $7.50 with two spring rolls and a slice of fruit to cleanse your pallet). What else could be in there?

Bears Attacking Nationally

If you read my "When Grizzly Bears Attack" entry the other day, you know that it's important for business professionals to be on the lookout for bears in the office. Apparently, this is not exclusive to my office or even my part of the country (Indiana is known for Grizzly bears).

I got my copy of Information Week today and look what was on the cover...

...No, I'm not making that up. Bears are in your IT departments and I guess that the new thing to do is stare them down.

The Price of Oil and Vacations

Just about every year our family ventures down to southern Indiana to attend the Holiday World/Splashin' Safari amusement and water park in Santa Claus, Indiana. That's right. It's located in Santa Claus, Indiana. In fact, the park used to be called "Santa Claus Land". I know that some of you Big Doofus readers are familiar with this place. It's an awesome park that's very family friendly. They have world-class rides and the water park is first rate.

But instead of spending all of our money on park tickets and gas, we decided to stay close to home this year. I'm sure that the kids will not let us get away with this every year, but it was great in '08. We visited the Plainfield Aquatic Center only ten minutes from our house. Sure, it's no Splashin' Safari, but the pools were huge with three cool slides, diving boards, indoor basketball and games, etc. If we lived in the city limits of Plainfield, we would have saved a few more bucks. But everyone had a blast with the exception of my 14 year old boy (and that was his own choosing).

We left the park at 4:30 and headed to downtown Indy for dinner at The Old Spaghetti Factory. When I first moved to Indy in 1991 this was about the only restaurant destination downtown. That's all different now with downtown being so incredibly vibrant, but The Old Spaghetti Factory is a nice, affordable place to eat. We had a reservation for all 16 of us so we didn't even have to wait for our table--perfect. I walked out to the waiting area for a bit and got to hold my youngest nephew for a few minutes while his daddy visited the bathroom. That's where this picture was taken. He's a very mommy-attached boy, so you take ANY opportunity you can get to bond with him--and I think we did that a bit. He was either REALLY interested in me here or just cannot get over my weird beard or big nose.

We ended the evening with the 10:00 pm showing of WALL-E. Yes, that's a very late time to start a movie, but we all managed to stay awake through most of it. I'd seen it already and loved it the second time (and didn't feel guilty about dozing off for five to ten minutes in the middle). You should all go out and see this movie. It's great for so many reasons, but I'll spare getting into it as it was covered very well by Timothy Power in his "Sometimes I'm Actually Coherent" blog (one of my new favorites along with Arby's Archives).

Another TDJ

Here's another TDJ entry from ten years ago today...

July 27, 1998
I just remembered my locker combination from my senior year in high school! Isn't it amazing how our minds work like that? It was something like 22-something-something, I think. Wait, I know there was a 2 in it. It may not have been 22. Man, that's amazing.

Hey, it's Sunday and I cannot think of anything creative to come up with today. Besides, this was perfectly fine in 1998 when we had three readers. These days, I'm almost certain that I have four, sometimes five readers and only two of them used to write on TDJ.

TDJ - Ten Years Ago

Here's a TDJ entry from ten years ago today...

July 26, 1998
My church is currently between pastors for the first time in eighteen years. The guy who preached today did a pretty good job, although I'm not sure that colonic irrigation is really prescribed in the book of Philemon. At least it was a refreshing alternative to communion.

The Zucchini Conspiracy

I've been thinking about this for years now and I'm totally convinced that there is a ZUCCHINI CONSPIRACY in our country. It all goes back to when I was a kid and my parents started growing this strange green squash in our garden. I could appreciate everything else that we grew: corn, tomatoes, peppers, even the cabbage. All of these items had a purpose in the culinary world or served as terrific compliments to other ingredients. But based on the recipes that my mom used to incorporate these strange "cucumbers on steroids" they seemed to have no real purpose of their own.

We didn't eat a bowl of zucchini or baked zucchini or fried zucchini. And you never walked out to the garden to grab a zucchini to eat right off the vine (or plant--whatever it is). We had zucchini bread, zucchini cookies, zucchini meatloaf, zucchini this or that. In all of these dishes the zucchini never served the role of adding flavor or zest. It always played the role of a filler (sort of like lips and "you-know-whats" in a hot dog).

By the looks of 99% of the zucchini recipes I've seen, you could substitute just about any soft, flavorless vegetable, fruit or sponge for the zucchini and get the same result. Take the zucchini out of zucchini bread and do you know what you have? Great tasting bread. Take the zucchini out of zucchini cookies and what do you have left? Tasty cookies! What's a zucchini meatball without zucchini? The perfect spaghetti topper! Do I need to go on? It's the ZUCCHINI CONSPIRACY, folks. There's a group of zucchini seed sales big-wigs that are pawning off this vegetable to us by convincing Americans to cook with it in the most useless ways.

This is not to say that the zucchini shouldn't have a place in our gardens and kitchens. First off, they make great gag gifts for the neighbors. Fill your entire back yard with the plants and just keep giving away grocery bags loaded with them. They're never refused (because that would be rude, right). Most Americans don't want to throw away perfectly good "food" so they come up with ways to use them--and this is how all of those recipes get started. It's crazy!

So, I ask you, "What's next?"

Ten Years of TDJ!!!

I cannot believe that I missed a very special anniversary last month. Sure, I'm getting ready to attend (maybe) my 20 Year High School Reunion in a month, I've been married for nearly 16 years, my wife is turning [insert number here] in a few months, but this is important! Last month was the anniversary of The Daily Journal.

The Daily Journal was a blog before blogs were even invented by Al Gore. Back in 1998 my friend Jason (of Uvulapie and His Amazing Hillbillies) started up The Daily Journal (also known as TDJ) as a way to make fun of a few of the journaling sites that we had seen online. Back in those days, you did everything in HTML or you had some annoying web editing software like FrontPage to make your pages look sassy. It was old school Internets, baby. A few days later I joined in on the fun and some time after that Scott (of Java Jesus) became a regular contributor. We carried on this exercise in futility for about 8 years (although the last two were hit and miss and at one time we even tried to convert TDJ into a blog).

The good news is that it's still there. You can go back and read the old posts any time you like. Every so often I'll post an old entry on my blog and I plan on doing that more often. Why should I waste all of that creative energy when I could just steal something from the past so I can spend more time on the Oprah Forum.

For the life of me I cannot find the entry that goes with this picture (help me, Jason), but I thought I'd share it in light of yesterday's post about grizzly bear attacks...


Jason came up with this--based on an actual graph that he only modified slightly. It's subtle and yet it still manages to hit you in the face at the same time.

When Grizzly Bears Attack

There seems to be a lot of interest in grizzly bears these days. For some unknown reason, there has been a rash of attacks on humans--specifically bikers who are huffing it through scenic roads and trails in the western part of our country.

So, it's probably a good idea to make sure that you know what to do to keep yourself safe from grizzly bear attacks (and all bear attacks, for that matter). You might want to mosey on over to this short test to see how you do.

As for me, I didn't do so well. I got the first two questions right and then I stepped out of my office. While I was making my way back to my desk by way of the reception area, I was surprised by an office grizzly. You never know when one of these is going to jump out of a cubicle or break room and try to eat you.

Let me know how you all do on that test.