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OPE's Culinary Conversation with Cookin with Congress
38 Plays10 days ago
Don't miss the season finale of OPE's Off Season Off Topic Chats! Iowa Joe chats with @CookinwithCongress about presidential meals and future culinary dreams.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Guest Introduction
00:00:02
Speaker
Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to another episode of OAP. I am Iowa owe Joe, and this is the season finale of my off-season, off-topic episodes.
00:00:13
Speaker
We will be getting back to Packer content here in the next week or so. Training camps are rolling around. I'm sure Mike's ready to talk about football here pretty soon. But this is the ah the season finale of this off-season, off-topic, and I figured I'd go big and get a and a really good special guest on.
00:00:32
Speaker
And i sent out email after email to
Football and Personal Stories
00:00:36
Speaker
people. And this is the one person who, I don't know if you want to say won the lottery or whatever does appear on, but I am talking with Bennett from cooking with Congress on Tik TOK.
00:00:49
Speaker
Uh, I, I looked and you have a pretty big following 203,000 people so far on Tik TOK Bennett. Thanks for joining me on today's show. Yeah, no problem, Joe. Thanks for having me. I was excited to talk to someone who is interested in this and also football fan as well. I am from Pittsburgh originally, so i i remember going to training camps when I was a kid, and I got a bunch of like footballs in my garage signed by like Alan Fanica and other Steelers stalwarts. So happy to be on the show today. Thanks for having me.
00:01:20
Speaker
And that was I was made aware that you were a Steeler fan and we kind of had that moment where I was told that there might be a little there might be a little resentment from from Super Bowl 45 but we were able to get through that.
00:01:33
Speaker
Yeah, we made it through so far. oh man, that was tough. It was a great game though. Great game. No
Inspiration for Cooking with Congress
00:01:38
Speaker
hard feelings. i like the Packers. and And I got to say that, you know, even though he's kind of flipped his lid a little bit, you know, I got to give it to Aaron Rodgers. And, you know, he'll always, I always believe the same thing with all my teams. Once a once a Packer, always a Packer.
00:01:56
Speaker
And, you know, he did a lot of great things, including Super Bowl XLV for the Packers. So I will say this, though. No takes backsies. He's yours now. We're not taking back.
00:02:09
Speaker
Oh, man, yeah, he's either taking us to a Super Bowl or to the number one pick next year, so we'll see. I just got to say, take care of my boys out there, though. You got Caleb Johnson and Yaya Black from Hawkeyes, don't be surprised that if Caleb is probably starting for at running back pretty soon. hope so.
00:02:30
Speaker
He's real deal, but that's not what we're here for. maybe we can get you back during week eight when the when the Packers do play Pittsburgh this year so we can get you on and talk then but we are here to talk about your channel cooking with Congress and I guess the first question I've got for you is why what got you into wanting to do the cooking with Congress and the stuff that you do on you on i was gonna say YouTube on TikTok Yeah, sure. I'm on YouTube and Instagram as well. i got, I've just hit like 500,000 followers across all the platforms this past week. So celebrating by, i celebrated by eating like Ulysses S. Grant, which involved like seven cigars in one day.
00:03:11
Speaker
Sort of celebration, sort of punishment. um What got me into it? So I was always into like pause politics as a kid, and specifically like the president as a figurehead always fascinated me. When I was six, I wanted to be a chef and the president of the United States at the same time.
00:03:29
Speaker
is probably the best version of that that that I could ever accomplish. and ah and ah And so I always had that within me. i love the cooking side of things. I love presidential history. I just think they're like a fascinating group of maniacs.
00:03:46
Speaker
And humans too, right? and Yeah. yeah so I started this project as a blog back in 2018 after I got this really cool, weird cookbook from my wife's grandmother back back in the day. She's since passed actually, but it was a South Dakota Centennial Cookbook, 100-year anniversary of the of the state of South Dakota. And it was chock full of these weird recipes like happy ham and like beef with like strange sauces I'd never heard before, wine jelly, raw onion soup, and all this other stuff that had come from Congress people, senators, Ronald Reagan, George
Historical Cooking and Family Connections
00:04:26
Speaker
Herbert Walker Bush. I just thought it was so funny. And I was like, well, I gotta make, I gotta make some of this stuff. And so I started making them.
00:04:33
Speaker
were disgusting, which is so much fun to me. And then I went down the rabbit hole finding more and more cookbooks like this, especially from the past, you know, the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, and thousands of recipes from politicians, and most of them were pretty bad.
00:04:51
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, we have a bunch of old school cookbooks, too, because long story short, my dad was a late child for his parents, so grandparents were, my grandma was born in 22 and my grandpa was born in 13. So we have like a lot of old school cookbooks going through the house. And, you know, a lot of them are the church cookbooks that you would get and all that stuff. And we still use some of the recipes out of it, but then you go through and look at some of that stuff. It's like, I don't know if I want to try that.
00:05:25
Speaker
but So, but, uh, you I did watch the one on Grant and i do have to say, how are the lungs feeling you know after all that? and They have they've fully recovered. I um um i usually like go on pretty long hike the day after I eat like a present because it's a lot of calories. I did not do that this time. i had to take one extra day just to make sure I was able to like do the hike successfully and not stop midway through and get helicoptered out or something like that. so uh the lungs are feeling better now you know and i had some very concerned fans who are like you don't have to do this was like it's just one day over the course of my life it's okay like my grandfather smoked for like 45 years and like still lived into his 80s so i will be okay for one day i definitely did get nauseous ah so i guess that's another question i have you know obviously you're in pretty decent shape but some of these
00:06:21
Speaker
cooking with or these recipes are pretty hardy how do you balance out that do you like go on certain fasts after eating you know obviously we'll talk about one here pretty quick about taft but know how do you balance keeping in shape with with a lot of the recipes and that that you're dealing with yeah i i have to stay active and my off days are pretty tight I mean, not restrictive in terms of like, i still get to eat, you know, great food.
00:06:51
Speaker
But I'm very thoughtful about what I'm putting in my body five days a week. So I don't have to really think about it on those two days when I'm just eating like a completely different person from ah know history or from around the country. So,
00:07:04
Speaker
I've had a lot of people clamoring for like, what do you eat in a day exactly? Like do the version like eating like America, but for you, we want to see it. So I will, I'll be doing that soon. But you know, the it's, it's not going to be thrilling ah ah because you know, like so a lot of coffee in the morning and lot of like boring, like Greek yogurt with blueberries and stuff on it, you know, it's just to kind of counterbalance the fact that sometimes I have to eat like seven dinners in a day.
00:07:29
Speaker
Yeah. yeah and you know that makes sense i obviously i'm a bigger guy and i i've been on kind of a weight loss journey thing too and i i feel it a lot of times too where it's like okay you've got to be good for you know five six days you can have that one day where you can do a little bit of this but you gotta stay strict with it on on the rest the days and And I even find that it it's hard because it's like, I don't want to do this. I just want to eat my you know pizza, my junk stuff
Sourcing and Balancing Recipes
00:07:59
Speaker
over here. It's like, no, you gotta to he got to live longer than 40. You got to do something. and
00:08:08
Speaker
It's so tough too because like there's there's all those stories. You know you talk to people who are like 112. you do it? They're like, well, one cigar every day, lot of red meat. And what?
00:08:19
Speaker
Okay. like So there's, i always, i never want to be too precious with it because you know I also to enjoy food. And so if I'm just like eating purely for efficiency,
00:08:33
Speaker
I would get bored after a while. So I still like, you know, I have a family, have like a wife and daughter, so i like I like to eat with them at least, you know, five days a week. And I don't want just like, all right, you guys are eating like delicious, like pasta and you know beautiful side dishes, maybe a casserole.
00:08:50
Speaker
And I have my sauteed chicken sauteed in zero oil with pepper on it, you know, like, so I do try to not be a maniac about any of it either. Right.
00:09:01
Speaker
and And there is a good balance, not to turn this into a diet thing, but there is a good balance. and And, you know, I've talked to a lot of nutritionists and I've talked to a lot of different people and they say, you know, you can have what you want. You just got to do in moderation and and, you know, don't overload on it and be mindful of certain things. And of course, nowadays it's more about your protein intake than it is about anything else. And, you know,
00:09:29
Speaker
most recently I talked to a nutritionist and they were like, you need to hit about 90 grams of protein per meal. So i was like, okay, that that seems reasonable. that Yeah, that no problem, I do that.
00:09:40
Speaker
And then when you actually sit down and start going through, it's like, this is almost impossible. It's insane. if you ski if you If one meal a day, you're like, maybe I could have not just like two pounds of chicken. Like, sorry, that's not going to work.
00:09:53
Speaker
but You have to somehow integrate two pounds of chicken into your cereal this morning. So yeah, it's it's crazy. But oh so obviously you had the one cookbook that you said you got from your wife's grandma that, you know, had a lot of, of those politician cookbook or recipes in.
00:10:14
Speaker
Where do you get a lot of your other ones or do you, is it just a lot of Google searches or, or have you managed to come? I know when I did a search one time that like the Library of Congress or some of the presidential libraries have some, you know, have like family cookbooks or whatever you can get, but where do you get a lot of your recipes from?
00:10:35
Speaker
Yeah, presidential libraries are great, a huge resource, especially for the Eating Like a President days for me. I'll call and talk to them and see what I can get information wise. I have like, you know, behind me there's bar stuff, but there's also the library, which is like 40, 45 different cookbooks, all community cookbooks like that. So there's congressional club cookbooks, which a lot them are actually the wives and partners of the senators and congressmen over time, but eventually it mixed in the actual representatives.
00:11:05
Speaker
And really like it's analog though. That's kind of the cool thing to me is you can't find a lot of these recipes online. In fact, like, there were a couple of people who were like, i found some recipes online. I found this one and this one and this one. I found this like really interesting ham mousse and a frozen jello salad. And i was like, what website should you get those from? They're like, oh, it's, oh, it's ah was from your website. So like, I was like, yeah, I know there's, there's really not much out there on the internet, which is, is pretty incredible. There was one site that used to exist that I can still access through the internet archive, but they tore it down.
00:11:38
Speaker
But that was basically it in terms of all these old recipes outside of the presidential library. So you got to like go thrifting. I also get like gifts from people. They'll send random old cookbooks that have like a recipe or two in there.
00:11:50
Speaker
And sometimes they'll just find a gem. You know, I have this cookbook that I got that was mostly not famous people contributing or anything. And then randomly there's like Nikki Haley who ran for president and, you know, it was a politician, but Nikki Haley was in there because for fundraisers, parents will be like, well, friend of a friend knows Nikki Haley or a friend of a friend, you know, knows like Hillary Clinton. Let's see if we can get her to contribute a recipe as a fundraiser for the school.
00:12:14
Speaker
And then they think no one cares about it and no one will find it. And then I find it 10 years later. Yeah and that's the thing with those, like I said, those church cookbooks is you know it's just the congregation throwing in recipes so I'm sure there's a lot of that out there too and unfortunately Iowa only has the distinction of one president who never even claimed the state after he left it and that's ah course Herbert Hoover so you know the and you did you did a cooking and you can tell that
00:12:45
Speaker
he didn't stick with a lot of the iowa themes left that behind no respect for his roots there at all i think it's always so interesting to see like like i did benjamin harrison recently and people were like oh yeah there's that like indiana you can tell with all the corn and everything else yeah nothing for hoover it's just like purely like get me to the fancy new york style like lobster and whatever else Yeah. And, and what's crazy is Iowa still kind of, said I mean, i can't tell you where it's at cause it's been years since I've seen it, but they still have like his birth home and museum and everything else like that. And you know, so, but it is what it is.
Experiments with Exotic and Historical Foods
00:13:29
Speaker
to be honest, if I didn't live here, I probably wouldn't move here either. So, you know, whatever, but it,
00:13:37
Speaker
is And to be honest, probably a lot of the foods from Iowa are simple. Corn and pork are the two main things out of here. So, which isn't bad. I love pork, which again- Those are two great things. Yeah. I mean, you can't go wrong with either of those things. Those are staples. I'm going to give you a secret here.
00:13:54
Speaker
So don't tell anybody outside of just us. I don't like corn. Whoa, you picked a bad- time and place to be alive and it's not so much that i don't like corn you know we had it a lot when i was a kid i just i i don't know it's got an all right flavor i just i hate the whole corn on a cob field and mess and you don't like to floss for 25 minutes after dinner no no i'd rather not deal with it and
00:14:26
Speaker
It's got an all right flavor when I can throw it it. It's kind of like me and tomatoes. I'm not a big tomato person, but if I can throw it in something, if I can mix it in something, then I can enjoy it a little bit better. But I'm not a big fan of that stuff.
00:14:38
Speaker
And corn's the same way, which is i I had a doctor one time that goes, well, you need to eat more vegetables. And I'm not talking corn. And I said, I don't like corn anyway, so we're good on that one. And she just kind of looked at me like like, like you just did, you know, well you you're...
00:14:53
Speaker
ah you know, I can go down the street and we got a cornfield right there and and I could probably pick my weight of it. And it's like, I, you know, I'm good.
00:15:04
Speaker
Uh, yeah, maybe it's just being around it too much, you know? Cause like, I, uh, I feel like if I ate too much, I, I ate too many Cheez-Its and Fritos for like a certain period of time when I was a kid. And now like someone offers me a bag of Fritos. I'm like,
00:15:19
Speaker
I think I'm just done with that. I don't know. I overdid it, you know? So maybe maybe a little bit of that if you grew up around it. And I find that I've done that a lot over the years with foods. Like now we I'll cook something up and or or my parents will cook something and say, do you want some of this? it's like, no.
00:15:36
Speaker
And they'd be like, well, you used to love this. Like, yeah, but you know, when you have it every other week or every so often, it's like, no, I'm good. You know, I'll come up with my own thing. But so I do want to get into this one because I think this has been the most impressive one that I've seen. And I know you've done a lot of them and you still got a lot more to go.
00:15:58
Speaker
But the William Howard Taft video that you did and just to let people know this was 8200 calories. And you even said it in the video, this is like more calories than a person would eat in like three to five days, depending on meal sizes and stuff like that.
00:16:17
Speaker
How were you able, and I know you said that you only You didn't finish a steak and like part of a piece of salmon, but how are you able to get through that and not like pass out from exhaustion?
00:16:32
Speaker
I mean, you can see if you look like not even that closely at the video, you're like, is he just sweating for like half of these shots? And yes, I am. i got meat sweats going on i My body's working hard to like metabolize and digest all of that.
00:16:47
Speaker
uh it it was a true challenge i knew it was going to be hard i knew it was going to be difficult i knew it would also sort of be like a throwback to like thanksgiving i used to be a little bit bigger i lost like 65 70 pounds or so and i can still so two things are true after like you know uh being that size and being this size I can still put it away if I have to. I can still eat food and a lot of it if I have to. And two, i still sweat like I did back then too. So like, and I'm in California too. And I still like, still get like big guy sweats. i don't know what it is, but I still have that.
00:17:23
Speaker
And so that was on full display for this one. I was, I never fasted before like on purpose or like, I just forgot to eat for half a day. Like that's not my, that's not in my life.
00:17:36
Speaker
But that next day, I truly like didn't feel hungry. I just felt full up until maybe like 2 or 3 p.m. the following day. And I had finished eating at like 8.45, I think, the night before. And I decided, I was like, I first started to feel a little bit hungry like 3 o'clock the next day.
00:17:52
Speaker
And I was like, you know, I'm just going to see when I feel really hungry. And that was at like 6 p.m. And I still didn't eat until it had been like 25 hours because I just wanted to see. And I was like, well, I might as well. i've never fasted for longer than like you know 16 hours by accident so yeah i'll push it to a full day that was incredibly hard i don't know how he got things done just spending like four hours a day eating you know like four and a half hours a day eating it's wild well and like i said i'm a bigger guy i'm about six foot one three nine i used to be a little bit bigger i i have dropped i used to be 4 30 and i dropped down to
00:18:31
Speaker
three nine and Well, actually I dropped, but but again, that's a long story. I don't think in my life I've ever hit 8,200 calories in a meal.
00:18:42
Speaker
And, you know, I know he was smaller than I am comparative, you know, back then weights and today's weights are kind of weird when it when comes to things where people, when they hit that certain weight, looked like they were, you know, balloons.
00:18:58
Speaker
Whereas I have people tell me that they can't believe I'm the weight I am because I hold it well. And i just, when I saw that you were going through these meals, it's like, this is insane.
00:19:13
Speaker
i you know, one, how do you get stuff done? And two, where are you putting it? At a certain point, I was asking that very thing. i was like, is this going to go somewhere? Is it just gonna like line up all the way up to a certain point where like you just like, I started to think of my body as like, is it just a tube? i don't know. Like it feels like just putting food into a tube and at some point like, oh, tubes full. That's it. You can't put anything else in there.
00:19:41
Speaker
that's, I did hit that point with that final steak. I was looking at the steak. was like, there's no chance. like i I can't even get through this last bite salmon. There's not a chance I can do the steak. There's no way. If I want to finish the, because I still have to eat the fruit pie afterwards for dessert and other elements too, because every single meal was like a full-on like spread. you know And so I was like, I'll come back to the steak, which was a lie to myself.
00:20:08
Speaker
I'll come back to the steak after the dessert because I wanted to- Three days later. Yeah, right? Like, man. so I, I don't know where it all went. Uh, 8,200 calories for me is like three and a half days worth of food. the next day I didn't eat too much at all, except a big, big old thing of nachos, I think in a burrito.
00:20:27
Speaker
and after the fast broke, but man, it was, it took me a few days to like recover fully from that day of eating is an impressive, uh, he was an impressive eater and he ate well. That's the thing. and like,
00:20:42
Speaker
yeah foods Food was good, just too much at every single turn. And and if people haven't seen the video, you what was it? You did seven or eight different types of meats.
00:20:54
Speaker
Yeah, I think it clocked out at nine, technically, with like the chicken stock for broth and like veal knuckles that went into the turtle soup. That's a weird... but That whole thing just sounded very strange. Veal knuckles in my turtle soup and the the possum, obviously. It was a lot of weird...
00:21:11
Speaker
And that's where I was getting at was the possum. Now, me being the country hick that I am, you know, obviously there's a lot of things that we eat around here that, you know, a lot of people probably wouldn't.
00:21:23
Speaker
I never had possum because my dad grew up as a hunter and he always believed. And again, because of his parents and the time that they grew up with, you didn't hunt unless unless you were going to eat it.
00:21:38
Speaker
So that was always a rule. So you didn't hunt it unless you ate it. and dad did possum and he said it was the worst meat he's ever had well outside of muskrat he had muskrat too and it was the same way and he said it was one of the worst he ever had so we never i never had it and you said kind of the same thing that my dad said about the meat it's like a greasy you know weird consistency and yeah so how were you able to choke that down you know on top of the other calories
00:22:10
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, I was very excited about it. I had never tried possum before. My dad also was a hunter, is a hunter still, bow hunter. So just like primitive bows, like, you know, it goes out, chops down a tree, builds a bow out of it, makes his own arrows and all that stuff. So I grew up in this I grew up eating weird meats. It's kind of like, I don't, I don't think I like read that way. You know, like i I'm in California, I'm on like TikTok and stuff.
00:22:38
Speaker
But my my bones are kind of like in that rural Pennsylvania. i got some I got some hick to me for sure. Because I'm like, oh yeah, I grew up eating like barbecued raccoon burgers and stuff like that. I really like them.
00:22:49
Speaker
yeah Possum was was greasy and kind stringy and it felt like so easy to like, and i roasted it, but with a lid and everything too. And it's still just like any bit of liquid just left.
00:23:01
Speaker
I feel like maybe next time Next time, i don't know what I'm talking about. next Next time I just endeavor to eat a little possum, I would braise it or something to try to keep it a little softer because it was tough and not fun to get through.
00:23:17
Speaker
But I don't know if it's the worst meat I've ever tried either. it's It's up there. It's not nearly as good as raccoon or squirrel or, you know, honestly, like beaver is even better than that, I think. So I don't know. I'm i'm more interested. I want to hear what other...
00:23:32
Speaker
Iowa delicacies you've had? Well, I've had rabbit. And, you know, that's that's a pretty good meat. I didn't have it prepared well. For some reason, my aunt decided to throw it in the crock pot with, like, cream of mushroom soup.
00:23:46
Speaker
but hello Yeah. it The meat was good, but it was just a weird thing with it. will be honest, I haven't had a lot of exotic stuff because my dad got burnt hunting so and when i started growing up it was to the point where he doesn't want to hunt with a rifle he'd rather hunt with a camera so he didn't you know he kind of lost that edge of wanting to kill an animal just to kill an animal so we we i get certain things like i've had like emu we have elk farms out here so i do get elk once in a while um um uh i used to go to
00:24:28
Speaker
One of the towns about an hour or so away had civil war reenactments. So we would get like gator and, and frog legs and stuff like that through the reenactments. So I've had stuff like that, but you know, the big thing around here, because we have a huge population is deer.
00:24:48
Speaker
yeah And the white tail, I've not had anything but white tail because we've we've been pretty, you know, that's our species is here and
Future Plans and Challenges in Historical Cooking
00:24:57
Speaker
here in Iowa. But oh pheasant, I do remember having pheasant. And then I've had wild, we have populations of wild turkey around here too. So I've had the wild turkey.
00:25:08
Speaker
So... so I haven't quite had the exoticness that you seem to be saying that you had from from the Pennsylvania, but I've had a few of my own and some of them were just like, no, I probably not touch this ever again, but some of them like the elk. And, you know, if I can get somebody to get me some rabbit, you know, because like I said, we we just don't hunt anymore. So, you know, I'll munch down on some of that stuff. But.
00:25:38
Speaker
The emu was nasty all the time. I don't ever want to touch that again. Gator is pretty good. I wasn't big on the frog legs. i I know it's going to sound weird, but it was too fishy. And it was just like, you just got this weird fish flavor with it. And it was like a weird consistency to it And i was like, no, I just, ah ah it's not for me.
00:26:01
Speaker
No, my dad loves it. So, you know, it just, it's a different app palates, but yeah, I mean, squirrels are big around here. My dad said that when he was a kid, they would bring in lots of different meats like rabbit and deer and all that and grandma would package it and throw it in the freezer. But if they brought home a mess of squirrel, that was what they were having for supper because that was one of her favorite meats.
00:26:25
Speaker
So if I can find somebody to go squirrel hunting with or somebody to get me some squirrel, that would be, that's that's probably my next meal. but but's That's mine too very soon. have two squirrels in the freezer right now because when I had my dad send out the possum, which he caught for me, very much the same ethos of like, you know, he only hunts to eat and use pretty much every single thing from the animal as well. So like, he's going use the hide, he's going to use the sinew to like wrap arrows and whatever else. And then he sent out the possum and there was more room. was like,
00:27:01
Speaker
fit a couple of squirrels in there. So I know i knew it was gonna happen at some point because I had done the research on some previous presidents, 1800s especially, squirrels were pretty common yeah at the White House for for meals. So I'm excited to integrate that in the next couple of weeks.
00:27:17
Speaker
Now i'm my I'm having like a Mandela infect because that's another reason why I was going through the your videos to catch up because I was like, I know he did the possum, but I swore he had like a squirrel soup.
00:27:30
Speaker
and i couldn't find it so i might have mentioned it though because it's coming up very soon very okay soon oh yeah it's like it's in in the next month i'm i'm doing squirrel soup so i'm really interested to see what you say with that because uh one thing and not just my dad but my my mom's stepdad you know grew up in minnesota so they did a lot of and you don't even want to know how they used to skin the squirrels out there because it was they're up there because it was just He would cut it down, step on the tail, rip it out. And
00:28:06
Speaker
and he said, we'd do that all day. as like But that was and from what I understand, that's some of the best meat you can have as long as it's cooked right. You can't overcook it. You can do that stuff to it. But as long as you cook it right, it's some of the best stuff you ever had.
00:28:22
Speaker
Now, it's a pain because squirrel so small, so trying to get the meat off the bone, but Yeah, been fun. So not only do you do presidents, but you do like congresspeople and senators and first ladies.
00:28:38
Speaker
I do have to ask you this because it looked like at the end of the video, you were you were you were feeling it pretty good, but the whole Betty Ford diet.
00:28:49
Speaker
Oh, yeah. Did you feel like you had to go through rehab just after finishing that one day as her? It's so funny for, you know, for some people, I think like three vodka tonics in a day is like nothing like, yeah, great, whatever. Like if you space them out, who cares for me? Like I don't drink too much. Just by having like a gigantic bar and having a background and working at distillery and knowing how to make cocktails and stuff.
00:29:14
Speaker
Uh, three vodka tonics for me with like not that much food behind it. I was definitely, i was definitely feeling it, which is also also ah the point, like the point of the series for me, it's out of this curiosity. It's out of fun. I'm just like, it's so fun to me to do, but I knew that like her state was kind of slurry, you know, on those days because she was struggling with it.
00:29:34
Speaker
I like, I'm very fortunate enough not to struggle with alcoholism or addiction or anything like that. And I didn't want to like add, you know, benzos or like opioids into the mix. I'll smoke some cigars for you, Liz S. Grant. I'm not going to do benzos for this show. You didn't want to do the full immersion of of her skin. Yeah.
00:29:52
Speaker
I got, I have my like limits and lines, you know, like, so I was like, how do i get there? and I was, and I was like, you know what Maybe the vodka Thomas just do it. and they totally did. They totally got me there.
00:30:03
Speaker
end of the day. just kind of, you know, buzzing lightly along as the as day wrapped up and felt pretty close to how Betty Ford must've felt at that time, I think. And I have to say, you looked like you enjoyed it all the way through once you hit the end of the video. So, you know, fun i have you found that there's any foods that you just like, you balked at that you were like i i don't even want to touch that because it's something that you've it's got an ingredient that you don't like and you're just like i don't want to mess with it or you know is is has there been anything that you're just flat out like i really don't want to go through the process of this so i mean the first thing i can't so i'm allergic to carrots so i can't do anything with carrots in it so i have to like kind of sub in parsnips or other weird things uh for those recipes so i try to avoid anything with carrots in it
00:30:55
Speaker
from the get go. So I have to like tweak it too much, try to stay authentic. Other than that, I mean, I don't like ketchup. That's like one of the few things foods.
00:31:05
Speaker
Yeah, it's one of the few foods I just do not care for really. And you're from from Pennsylvania with I know it's so a it's like you with the corn, you know, like, yeah it's the same thing. Like how do you not like ketchup? I like I had a friend who lived in the Heinz factory when they converted it into apartments.
00:31:21
Speaker
And I can't, I just don't really like ketchup. I appreciate what it does out there in the world. like, I'm happy for Heinz. I don't know, but ketchup's just not my thing. I don't like it on burgers, fries, eggs, really anything. And especially didn't like it on Richard Nixon's pile of cottage cheese.
00:31:39
Speaker
So I like, always get a little like sad to see ketchup on the menu and, and excited at the same time, because to me, the like, The intensity of the experience is the fun part. Like Taft was so fun for me because it was hard. It was a challenge and like eating cottage cheese and ketchup, like this is disgusting.
00:31:58
Speaker
This is gonna make people laugh so hard. And that's like a huge part of it for me. So the stuff that gets me the most worried also gets me the most excited because I know people are gonna have as much fun with it as I do. I will say that like some of the stuff that intimidates me to actually work with are but like very old baking.
00:32:17
Speaker
yeah it's hard Yeah, the recipes are a little vague. They expect you to know because they're like 200 years old, you know, some of them. I'm looking at this cake that I am planning on doing maybe for next year to time with the 250th of the United States.
00:32:32
Speaker
Okay, and it's Martha Washington's cake, but it requires like 40 eggs, which is so much money in eggs. yeah And like I'm just afraid of like blowing it basically and making a huge mistake.
00:32:47
Speaker
Like, all right, I put like all this money into something that will be more expensive than my wedding cake. And it just like doesn't rise or something. Cause I didn't know to put one specific ingredient there. So those kind of worry me sometimes like the really old baking. Cause I'm not, it's, it's my like biggest knowledge gap there. Like I'm not an expert baker. I'm getting better, if I'm not an expert.
00:33:07
Speaker
And, 1700s cooking is it's different than modern recipes where modern cookbooks they tell you what salt to use like oh use this brand of salt and this print back then they're like brown it in an oven of moderate temperature for a time okay all right great here we go winging it is that like a three-tiered cake or 40 eggs seems like a lot i I can't even, that would be like, Jesus.
00:33:38
Speaker
Yeah. It's not an omelet, I swear. Like, it just sounds like you're like yeah, so you're making like just an omelet for an army or something, but it's it's a cake. that The amounts are all in like bushels and stuff too. Like, it's going to be, I'm pretty sure ah ah absolutely massive. I don't know. And I need to like dig in. That's why it's for next year. because I'm like, oh, yeah yeah next year. know what I mean?
00:33:59
Speaker
More resources, maybe even a bigger production budget or something. but I think it's very, very large too. so i'm going to have to figure out how to make it like probably cut together pieces or something to make it as large as it's supposed to be, which is probably half the size of this small dinner table that I'm sitting at.
00:34:13
Speaker
Yeah, that's, that's nuts. I I'm still 40 frigging eggs. That would that's going to be a Costco run. That's for sure. Oh yeah, for sure. For everything. I mean, the eggs, the flour, when you're talking about like, you know,
00:34:30
Speaker
add two cups of baking powder you're like oh my god this is insane like there's no way and what's weird is i had a friend of mine well it was kind of like a surrogate mom for my my dad but she makes one of the best meatloaf she could ever have a meatloaf that just amazing so you'll sit there and ask her well you know Chris & your recipe or what's it oh well I just you know feel whatever I whatever i've gotten whatever I feel like I just kind of throw a little bit of this little bit that so it's kind of the same way where it's like and i've seen a lot of old recipes because at one time I got. Chris & I love to cook and and I do like to bake a little bit and I like to come up with my own stuff so.
00:35:13
Speaker
I, you know, every once while, find, you know, I think one year it was, i was hoping to make matzah just out of, the out of the blue. i was like, oh, you know, let's, let's try this. And we just throw a little bit of that and a little bit of this. So I was like, okay, just sitting there and it just, it didn't turn out for, but it just, it's amazing how they used to do things and it was still like edible.
00:35:39
Speaker
yeah yeah they just knew they and the recipes assume that you knew enough right they're like well i don't need to tell you to add salt
Personal and Historical Cooking Stories
00:35:45
Speaker
so like now you do you do need to tell people to add salt in the recipes they they expect much more of you as a baseline in those olden days you know yeah and a lot of times you know the the recipes were just you know word of mouth you know somebody would show up one day a well that was a good thing well you know what can you so they had to give the most generic answers that they could because you didn't have pen and paper ready at hand to scribe this stuff down so but what president or politician are you really that you haven't done yet are you that you're really looking forward to taking a deep dive into
00:36:28
Speaker
So i mean i'm excited I'm excited to try Winston Churchill next month, August. That's going to be a lot of cigars again. Yeah, I might, i might because i think I might not do all of them on camera, or I might have to like, but you know,
00:36:43
Speaker
but I got relaxed. Like, it's just so much cigar smoking. I took four showers that day because I would come inside be like, smell like a humidor just lit on fire. I have like people in my house who also have to live with it, you know? So I, I don't know. We'll see I'll try to do as much of the smoking, but like starting the day with like champagne and stuff. sounds hilarious. So really looking forward to Winston Churchill. He's also like one of my most asked for politicians.
00:37:08
Speaker
Other than that, I think like, going back through history i am excited to get to some of the founding fathers next year too thomas jefferson like famously culinary right macaroni and cheese yes exactly like there's an ice cream you know like yeah versions of it there's so many different things that he popularized kind of brought to the us didn't also have just something it wasn't quite a french fry but it was it's something that we kind of view as close to french fry as possible for what they did back then
00:37:40
Speaker
I'd have to look into that. like they i really do like I know a little bit about the about the founding fathers, but because I like go back for a few times the series goes, I'm excited to like discover that. But he has so many different recipes. Monticello, like his his website for his library is chock full of them too. So great resource. I'm excited. I want to visit Monticello, maybe like time you know a trip there with the release of that that episode. And again, like right around the 250th, it'll be really kind of cool to see all those things come together. So i'm excited to go back and do that.
00:38:11
Speaker
And then I really want to get to, I might have to do it sooner, but I'm excited to try Zachary Taylor, who died from eating.
00:38:21
Speaker
You would think that Taft is a guy who died from eating out of all the presidents, but Zachary Taylor died legitimately from food, like yeah from eating too many cherries with iced milk, and he died from it.
00:38:34
Speaker
Like that is president dying from like milk and cherries. I got any love squirrels so like that'll be a squirrel day and I'll get to eat like 100 cherries and a safe amount of milk I guess I'm not gonna like risk it but also I don't know what the combination is that was like well you just you know you eat to you know what they say eat too many cherries of milk you're dead yeah I remember the story and just kind of crazy but you know let me know you can come out here I got a cherry tree that I planted several years ago that was so
00:39:08
Speaker
then if you do well jimmy carter you've already done jimmy carter i got a peach tree on the other side that's full of peaches so you know you come out here you can that you know if i get to uh if you're in iowa still and then if i get to uh you know hoover's site you know or something like that i'll have pay a visit get some peaches off the tree yeah the i was Matter of fact, we had some bad storms a couple weeks ago and i was driving by and I just happened to look out by the tree and I saw it just all splayed out and i was like, damn it.
00:39:40
Speaker
The storm destroyed my tree. And now I went back there and it's just so full of peaches that it's holding the branches down, but they're just not ripe yet to be ready to be picked. So i had my dad looking at it and we're trying to figure a way to hold it up so it doesn't break the branches off. But Yeah, I've got a cherry tree and a peach tree that I planted probably 10 years ago and there they're full of they're full bloom. So yeah you you can have as many of them as want as long as you come get them.
00:40:15
Speaker
I'd be happy to. Let's see, I did write down a couple of questions as I was preparing. uh we kind of covered the weirdest recipe so far well actually no we didn't because i think the one that i know of that could be your answer is the martha washington lettuce pie yeah i'm excited i'm excited to redo that one and make it delicious so outside of that and the possum one what has been the weirdest one that you've done so far the weirdest one the yeah
00:40:53
Speaker
More recently- know you've done so many. I know, it's tough to pick just one. More recently, I think the, man, no, I gotta to go back to this. There's this pea and peanut salad and it looks so beautiful.
00:41:07
Speaker
But it's a jello salad and it's basically mustard flavored jello. So like mustard, whipped cream, couple other ingredients and makes a mustard flavored jello. And then in the center of it, you mix together mayonnaise and Spanish peanuts and green peas and you're supposed to like eat it all in one scoop.
00:41:27
Speaker
It's bread. It's bad. It's not good. It's very gross. And it's also just like texturally a nightmare and like, but beautiful looking. So it's, I did another one too. It was like a blue cheese mold. It was so pretty. It looked like this like panna cotta or something, but then you take a bite. You're like, oh, this is the worst version of blue cheese I've ever tasted in my entire life. Like even with Buffalo wings, I don't know if I'd eat it this way. So it's that. I don't know how you'd make that better.
00:41:56
Speaker
I don't know if I can improve the blue cheese one, one, um but I am excited to improve like the lettuce tart for sure from Martha Washington. And I really want to improve, although it was delicious, her artichoke pie too. like there There's something there with like the vegetables and desserts that she was obsessed with, I guess.
00:42:12
Speaker
But I do think there's a there there. like they They could taste really good at least be a little less strange looking like along the way. You know, ah ah one of the one of the breads that I grew up with, sweet bread grew up with, was zucchini bread. So, I mean, it's possible.
00:42:31
Speaker
Love zucchini bread. Huge fan zucchini bread. And even though you're allergic to it, one of my favorite cakes is a carrot cake. So... i don't know what it tastes like i know what it smells like it smells like cream cheese and spices and stuff but uh i i think that's the last carrot thing i ate when i was like three or five or something like that and so i don't i don't remember much from it except that uh it does smell good so yeah you know what's weird and just thinking about you being allergic to carrots my dad's allergic to cucumbers cucumbers really and but he can eat pickles
00:43:07
Speaker
cucumbers but can eat pickles yeah nobody's been able to figure and there's something in the the pickling process that takes whatever it is he's allergic to out but he yeah he yeah he'll blow up like a blowfish if he eats cucumbers but he can eat pickles all day long so interesting uh yeah i could I mean, I haven't tested out if I could eat a pickled carrot. It's probably not worth it.
00:43:37
Speaker
I'm not a doctor, so don't take my advice on it. So, you know. But ah so has there been anything you've done so far that has become like a regular staple for you now that you were like, this is just amazing that now I've got to have it once, you know, like once every two weeks or something like that?
00:43:59
Speaker
There's two things that I've done. One, through the Eating Like America series. So that's a series where I eat like someone, just like an ordinary person from every district in the United States.
00:44:10
Speaker
All 435, so I've got a long way to go. But that's been so cool to see like how other people eat in a given day. was surprised that everyone else was also interested in that, because I wanted to know. i was like, well, how do you eat? How does everyone just go about their day.
00:44:24
Speaker
The Cantonese scrambled eggs, I have gone back to like three or four times. So, okay and it's kind of like this weird like layer. It only takes like 30 seconds to make scrambled eggs this way. It adds like MSG and a little bit of sugar and a little bit of salt and pepper and white pepper, maybe a touch of soy sauce if I remember correctly.
00:44:41
Speaker
And then you do this layering basically like quick layering of the scrambled eggs, like the cooked part over the raw part, cooked part of the raw part. It makes this like folded stack of eggs. Okay. The texture is amazing. It tastes different. It's like elevated from a regular scrambled egg. There's no cheese in it or anything, but it's it almost like tastes like there's something extra in there, that like umami, whatever it is. and man, I've gone back and done those like three or four times. They also look like they're visually impressive looking, so like make them for other people.
00:45:11
Speaker
And then... Flannel cakes, flannel cakes from Ulysses S Grant. I made them a day later. it was like, these are so good that one day afterwards, i was like, i want to make some more flannel cakes.
00:45:22
Speaker
And that the people are begging for the recipe for it. But I'll tell you that basically, the key to flannel cakes is separating the eggs, whipping those egg whites so they get nice and fluffy. Like they're twice as fluffy as regular pancakes and they're delicious.
00:45:36
Speaker
So it's just basically a normal pancake just you know, separated eggs and whipped whites. Yeah, that's pretty much it. You got to be careful when you're folding in the white. it doesn't just like crush all the air that you've created, but it's they're not that hard to
Series Expansion and Collaborative Ideas
00:45:51
Speaker
make. And the results were fantastic.
00:45:56
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, i love a good pancake, so why not? Yeah. Why not make them just that much better, basically, like every single time? And see, I thought I was doing good with mine is most recently I wanted to do like a banana pancake.
00:46:10
Speaker
but I didn't have a banana. So I went and got banana pudding and I mixed the but instant pudding into the, into the pancake and just yeah amazing.
00:46:21
Speaker
I weirdly have leftover banana pudding mix in my pantry right now because I was making it for today's episode that I'm releasing. So, uh, now I know what to do with that. Amazing.
00:46:32
Speaker
Well, if you want some good recipes from myself, you know, just go over to Ohana packers.org and I put some recipes up over there. I've got my famous bread of tenderloin that I do.
00:46:43
Speaker
then I, like I said, I got to into, I got into what you kind of doing, except for I'm not doing like TikTok videos and stuff like that, but I would start creating my own recipes and I've got like some chicken strips over there and I've got bread of tenderloins and There's a couple other things. And then we have had a few people over the years ah ah over the last couple of years who have put their own recipes up over there.
00:47:09
Speaker
Maybe we can get a Bennett inspired recipe put up on the website at some point. I like it. Love that idea. That's great. I'll have to check it out. Sounds pretty good. I love a bread and tenderloin. And, and I will give you the key.
00:47:22
Speaker
And this is the one thing that pisses me off the most when it comes to people making tenderloins is they think they need to take a tenderloin and pound the shit out of it and make it super rail thin. And that'll make it taste more like cardboard than an actual tenderloin because you're getting more of the breading and all that stuff.
00:47:39
Speaker
So you want to pound the tenderloin, but you don't want to make it to where it's like paper thin. My tenderloins are usually about you know, yay big and people aren't going to see this cause this isn't going to be a video, but, uh, you know, it's, it, you know, probably a couple inches in diet diameter.
00:47:57
Speaker
And then you just bred the shit out of it. And like I said, I got the recipe up. I don't want to go through the whole recipe step-by-step, but gotta get people over to the website. But, that's the one thing that, uh, uh, cooking faux pas for me is to pound the hell out of a,
00:48:13
Speaker
tenderloin to make it as flat as possible. There's a local joint that claimed to have the best tenderloins and that's all they do is they just pound the hell out of it. and it's a huge tenderloin, but it's cardboard. Yeah, I'm sure it tastes i'm fried cardboard, you know, breaded cardboard isn't bad, but it's like, you know, you could do it Yeah, I would rather have the taste of the pork more than I would the breading, even though I do bread the hell out of out of my stuff. But I What have you learned most from the meals you've made so far?
00:48:50
Speaker
I have learned i've learned a couple of things, I think. we A, probably term limits in Congress. Some of these folks are like, my favorite lunch is a horseradish salad with jello in it.
00:49:06
Speaker
but You're alive now and still in Congress? like are you're I think a Chuck Grassley who's a senator. Yes. our guy Right. Yeah. yeah ninety Ninety one. 91. I mean, when I'm 91, like, don't I don't want to be working at 91. Why do they want to be working at 91? And he I did his super fish, which required. I just watched it.
00:49:30
Speaker
So many minutes. I don't know where the hell he grew up at, but that is I. First in Iowa, I don't know where the hell he got cod because, you know, that's it. You know, a stupid catfish or striper or something, but cod, he grew up with a little bit of money. Clearly, clearly did because like, ah ah like you don't go to Iowa and I would assume be like where you're known for our seafood, like a landlocked place. Yeah, you try not to get seafood. You get like the local seafood.
00:50:01
Speaker
So I think term limits, that's definitely one. Second one is that there's some truly unhinged recipes from these politicians and you know maybe they're not just like us.
00:50:15
Speaker
And I think the third one, like as I go further back in time, was just like seeing how much time like was spent at meals versus more modern presidents. You can see like the growth, especially in the presidency over time, where they used to dine for like four or five hours a day. and like it was more casual and you can see as the country grew, the responsibilities grew and it's just like as quick as you can get like peanut butter and jelly sandwich, bowl of cereal, like yeah it became much more condensed and there are less lavish dinners outside of the like state dinners, which I don't eat like the state dinners because that's like they're always like 15 course menus. Right.
00:50:57
Speaker
eat like they do on any given day because they're paying for their own meals otherwise. Right. So i I eat like them on their on their average day when they're not at a state dinner. And it just has become so much less really over the years as the job has gotten more stressful, more difficult. The country's gotten literally larger with population and with geography. And so it's really interesting to go back. And I started to like notice it really in the like 19, really Hoover, right around there. Like, oh, they start to like, the menus just get,
00:51:28
Speaker
massive like it's so long i was cooking way more often i used to do you know these on like a half day and now i'm like if i'm eating like a president now like moving back from like herbert hoover further into history it's a full day it's a full day of cooking it's a full day of prep it's a full day of eating and editing yeah it's it's something else because you know back then that was well i guess after the whole mckinley thing they kind of well maybe it was a little bit more, maybe it was Lincoln assassination, but they used to actually let the American people just come in.
00:52:05
Speaker
So you know they had to kind of prep for that too. And you know just some of these recipes, that's the one thing about the movie Lincoln that was really super accurate was that you know people could just come into the White House.
Exploring New Directions Beyond Politics
00:52:18
Speaker
you know They called it the People's House for a reason because people could just come in. And now it's so and obviously so, but now it's so locked down that, you know, you have to have like passes and and reservations and stuff to get into it. But, you know, you had to be kind of prepared for anybody just to stop by. And yeah so it's amazing. But when you're so this is going to be looking to the future.
00:52:53
Speaker
And obviously, you know, there's only so many presidents and so many politicians that you can do from the United States. And I know you've you've touched into some of the, I think you did like Justinian the first and and and some of and George III and that.
00:53:10
Speaker
But where do you go from here? What's your next step? Are you planning like a different, Once you get through all the presidents, are you gonna work around it and maybe go back to more vice presidents or what's what's the future hold for cooking with Congress?
00:53:28
Speaker
The future is like, it's so exciting to me right now. I'm in this you know phase where I'm, trying to grab on to every single like fun, fascinating idea that comes to me. And so I'm so excited to do a cookbook very, you know, get that in the works.
00:53:45
Speaker
I'm excited to get to the end of the presence and I've still got a year until I, you know, yeah and on George Washington. Right. And there's still so many figures outside of the presidents to go into with politics. The nice part is there's, you know, 8,000 recipes sitting over there on my,
00:54:00
Speaker
Library part two, I can't actually fit them all in the the back bar here. And so I've got tons of recipes throughout history and so many strange ones. And more politicians are being elected every single two year period. So it's kind of never ending in terms of that. And then I'm so excited to go international as well. So Winston Churchill will be the first one of like a more modern sense.
00:54:22
Speaker
But I've done, yeah, Princess Diana, and Meghan Markle for the subscriber-only series, basically, eating like royalty. But yeah, I want to eat like all the other like PMs out there and presidents of other countries.
00:54:35
Speaker
And that'll be a new challenge and newly exciting. I i have been so like focused on the US s because US history is of particular interest to me.
00:54:46
Speaker
And so I'll probably go back and still dig up other figures. And There's room for me to eat like lots of other different people. Like people have asked if I would ever do like athletes.
00:55:02
Speaker
DK Metcalf gets so many requests because he eats like just 50 bags of Skittles a day or something crazy. Michael Phelps, I get requests lot. People are like, could you try these things? And to me, that's so fun to get into the, it's all experiential. You know, like I'm not a data scientist. I'm not like, this is exactly the number. Like,
00:55:19
Speaker
It's fun for me to do it and be like, what did this feel like? This felt insane like most of the time. And so I follow the fun wherever I go. And in the meantime, I'm excited to like be working with some presidential libraries upcoming and a few other big collaborators, get this cookbook going and And weirdly I've found that people are entertained by it, but also learning from it. So I've had like educational institutions reach out and be like, maybe we can put together, you know, like a ah course module for ah ah connecting kids to history in this new way. So like eighth graders out there, like the history sucks, it's boring. like What about if it's on TikTok and they get excited about it?
00:55:59
Speaker
So teachers are using the series in classrooms already. And so to formalize that would be really cool. And it'd be a fun way to get people involved because I would have killed for something like this when I was a kid to be able to like see a new way of thinking about history.
00:56:14
Speaker
And so, yeah, there's 55 things on the horizon right there. I'm a big history guy. You know, one of the few classes that I did good in in in school was history and and all that stuff. And matter of fact, my off-season, off-topic episodes, I started out talking to member of the Billy the Kid Coalition, and he does the Chasing Billy podcast. So, you know, I'm a big Old West person, and I and i love history and stuff like that.
00:56:47
Speaker
I do, i agree with the athlete part of it because I even sent in the recommendation when, when we were, I was emailing with your assistant and that, that maybe do a Vince Lombardi type thing.
00:57:01
Speaker
And, and, and I even did a little bit of research on that and it's like, man, I don't think I could, it cause he was another one that he spent so much more time working.
00:57:14
Speaker
that his meals didn't like really coincide with the amount of work that he did. Just off the top of my head, I know for breakfast, it was very common to see him just have cup of coffee, toast, and a bowl of cold cereal.
00:57:30
Speaker
And that was it. ah ah Yeah. Kind of a ah busy man's classic breakfast back in the, you know, 50s and then there's, and I was really hoping that I could get you to do this because there's one recipe that I found that is his, that supposedly he served,
00:57:44
Speaker
on occasions it's called deviled ham and it had a really unique like I don't know if you want to call like a marinade or whatever that would lather on it and bake it and that was his favorite meal and whatever if if I can find the recipe again I'll shoot it over an email for you but Uh, but I, I think that would be interesting to start doing, you know, once you get through all your stuff, obviously you've got a whole lot of, uh, uh, you know, different politicians, you know, what we're at 47 president 47th president.
00:58:23
Speaker
So we're at what 44 total or whatever it is that. you know, you're going to be able to do. And then all the politicians, like you said, we're seeming to elect new ones every other, you know, election cycle. So yeah, pretty set on that
Caffeine, Community, and Conclusion
00:58:40
Speaker
there's lots there to do, but like, I always just, you know, yeah, I think constantly about like what, what happens when I run out of all the most famous politicians, right. Or whatever else and what's next. And and truly it's just what's fun and what's interesting to me. I'm very lucky to be able to have that.
00:58:58
Speaker
when when you're running your own thing, right? And you can kind of be like, hey, like, I want to do this. Are fans on board with this? And I think people would, probably be on board as long as I'm still also continuing in the tradition of whatever I've promised from the beginning to like, you gotta be able to grow and change. And, you know, I grew up a hardcore NFL football fan. And so I think it'd be really fun to explore those things because it's authentic to who I am and the diets are pretty crazy and different and,
00:59:28
Speaker
and distinctly and distinctly american too which again like focuses in on where a lot of my time and energy has been spent on like well what does this american diet look like from this year or this region or this office of the you know of the presidency well and if if you get in the nfl one just with your steelers you know you got like terry bra bradshaw who grew up in the bayou that you know You can imagine just what he ate on a daily basis.
00:59:56
Speaker
The one that I would be really interested in, because I still don't know if he's human or not, is is Mike Tomlin, just because you know he's so intense that I don't know if he even eats, if he just might absorb energies around him. It feels like he he might be one of those guys who like eats for fuel, you know, and that's about it, which is impressive. It's so different than the way that I eat normally. But man, if you get that much done you're that successful, more power to you.
01:00:25
Speaker
So oh I just got a couple more and then and then we'll be we'll be good to let you go because, like I said, I know you got stuff to do. And of course, I got to go to work here in about an hour or so. But um the coffee.
01:00:40
Speaker
How do you get a good night's sleep after after consuming as much as you do
01:00:47
Speaker
Oh, I don't. This is the short answer. The long answer is that I know. i know i plan those days ahead of time. It's always on a Friday. So I know the next day, like I don't have to get up early. going to be able to like sleep in a little bit.
01:01:05
Speaker
My wife is unbelievably kind and accommodating on those on those days, which has happened like three or four times. Like, hey, just so you know, going have to drink. nine to 12 cups of coffee today, so it's not going to be a great night's sleep. 15 Teddy Roosevelt. Yeah, come on, TR.
01:01:22
Speaker
I'll probably be having some coffee again for one of his other meals very soon. excited to go up. I'm going up to Yosemite very, very soon to eat like he did for kind of what really the the food and the meal that birthed the national park system in a way.
01:01:39
Speaker
And even though it was at night, he drinking coffee. So I'll be having some 8 p.m. coffee around a campfire, which sounds pretty fun, honestly. But yeah, I just so i just kind of suffer through a bad night's sleep and try to get my rest the next day, recover.
01:01:55
Speaker
then an insane amount of water is really the ah ah is really the answer to it. I drink so much water in preparation, a lot of water afterwards. There's nothing really more you can do.
01:02:06
Speaker
and And I got to give you props on that because I can't stand coffee. I absolutely I love caffeine, though. Don't get me wrong. I love caffeine, but I get mine more through tea and and ah wish I could get a sponsorship out of it just as much as I drink is sparkling ice with caffeine. Sparkling ice with caffeine. Tell me more.
01:02:26
Speaker
Oh, it's great stuff. It really is. Now, it must be popular around here because every time I go to the store, it friggin is sold out or whatever. So I've had to order cases in, but I love this stuff. It's 70 milligrams of caffeine and everything. So I drink like five or six of them a day, man.
01:02:46
Speaker
but Five or six a day. Come on, Sparkling Ice. Sponsor this show. Sponsor Joe here. I'll get a sponsorship from like Jell-O and the, i don't know, some coffee company and you can get a sponsorship from Sparkling Ice.
01:02:58
Speaker
It sounds pretty good. It sounds right. and And, you know, ah ah that that or like I said, I'm a big tea drinker. I'll order like different teas from Amazon and just the newest one that I got was it's it's the same company and same blend that was served on the Titanic.
01:03:20
Speaker
So ah ah Thompson's tea. So that's been my newest one. I do like Barry's Gold. So. There you go, you can do disasters of, you know, disaster foods.
01:03:32
Speaker
You know, I have like, there's, it's a weird space that exists on, know, on social media where there's like a few of us who are cooking ah ah historical meals, you know, in some different respects, right?
01:03:43
Speaker
Max Miller is awesome. He's got Tasting History, a great YouTube show, and he's on social media as well. I really like Donnie Dodson, and he does Eat History, and so he focuses on, like, more ancient history and Roman recipes. It's super cool.
01:03:56
Speaker
And we all kind of play in the same, you know, pool, essentially, but with a different, our own personalities come through, different kind of take and different production value, but I always am careful would be like, okay, have they done that already? don't want to cover like old ground or something else. I remember, i think Donnie did like the the second class meal on the Titanic or something like that. And i was like, that's cool.
01:04:19
Speaker
So I would probably steer clear of disaster meals in terms of like producing something for cooking with Congress. But also I want to try it. I mean, like I still want to eat it. I just may not make an episode about it.
01:04:32
Speaker
Well, like I said, I don't know if it's true or not, but according to everything that this is the same blend as the Titanic. So if you, if you do decide to do it, you know, it's Thompson's and I just got it off Amazon. So, you know, Amazon is great to get a lot of that stuff off of.
01:04:48
Speaker
Uh, I forgot what my last question was going to be, but, do you, how do I want to phrase this? Do you, uh,
01:05:02
Speaker
nevermind. It wasn't a big question. Anyway, I can't, I can't come up with it my head, but, uh, uh,
01:05:12
Speaker
now I'm completely blanking because we went off the rails on it. But anyway, oh we're at the hour six marks. So like I said, we need to probably wrap up here in a minute, but you know, why don't you tell everybody where they can find you? And, you know, obviously we know what you're up to, but, uh, what, what's your,
01:05:31
Speaker
drop schedule and where they can find you and how they can get ahold of you if they've got an interesting recipe and all that good stuff. Yeah, absolutely. So you can find me on Instagram and TikTok and YouTube at Cookin' with Congress. No G in cookin', like old-fashioned cookin'.
01:05:47
Speaker
And reach out, info at cookin' with congress.com if you've got any ideas. If you want me to eat like you for a day, which has been such a fun series, the Eating Like America series, so it's for paid subscribers just to kind of keep out the trolls and the insane diets and to limit it a little bit because, man, otherwise I'd be...
01:06:06
Speaker
eating like other people for like the next 25 years. um um um um But you can totally become one on Patreon or any of those other platforms I just mentioned. It's pretty easy to sign up there and just send me your day of eating and I will add you to the big calendar.
01:06:21
Speaker
Still got lots of districts to 435 and we're through about 30 something. So tons of time, tons of districts and it's a lot of fun for me. Have you hit Iowa yet? I didn't pay attention to that. Have you hit Iowa yet?
01:06:35
Speaker
I think we did. Let me see. I think Iowa's second. I believe we did already. Let me see. Or it's like upcoming. Iowa 2 is like coming to mind for some reason. And I'm pretty sure, yeah, Iowa 2 is coming up very soon. So in the next several weeks, excitingly. Otherwise, no Iowa yet.
01:06:58
Speaker
Okay, well, going heavily critique that one when it comes through because I'm going to call the yes on the recipe if if if they if they put something in there that's not Iowa specific. you're gonna call BS on there if it's corn in there know there's too much corn for me in here and it's gonna be incredibly authentic and I think the thing is is people overestimate the amount of corn that is in an Iowa diet so it would not surprise me if there's not if they put too much corn in there then I'll know to call BS on something because
01:07:32
Speaker
then they're just kind of messing with you and say because there's nobody that eats that much corn here in iowa i don't care what they say but thank you for joining me again you know it was a pleasure to get to talk to you it was amazing to be able to get something scheduled in and fit it around both our busy schedules at the moment so thank you for joining us Thank you to everybody else who was a guest on the show who, you know, came on and did this off-season off-topic thing with me.
01:08:03
Speaker
You know, it was a fun, you know, Bennett just said with the cooking with Congress thing that, you know, he tries not to trample over what other people have done. That's the same thing we were doing with the off-season stuff. We were, you know, there's only so much news going around during the off-season that I didn't want to do the same stories as every other podcast. So,
01:08:25
Speaker
this is what I decided to come up with. If you guys enjoyed it, hopefully we can do it again next year during the off season, have a better schedule laid out, you know, maybe get Bennett back next year, catch up with him, see what he's doing.
01:08:39
Speaker
Bennett, I hope we can also get you on during week eight eight and discuss the Steelers Packers game, see how that goes. But follow us on all the usual socials.
01:08:50
Speaker
Do go over to ohana packers.org for our are You know, recipes, articles by Carlos, merch. We got a ton of merch over there. I'm plugging away at Photoshop, trying to get things up.
01:09:04
Speaker
Go over, support the show. As Mike would say, pack, go, and aloha.