Sunday, April 27, 2008

What to put on a hot dog.

I've recently discovered that Heinz 57 sauce is a great topping for a hot dog. An all-beef hot dog, anyway. I also have discovered that it's very difficult to find a decent, public-domain (or copyright-available) image of Heinz 57 sauce (feel free to share if you find one; I found a couple on Flickr, but one is a poor quality picture (with some alcoholic beverage in the background I'd rather not promote), and one is "all rights reserved" so I can't legally post it here; there is an image on the Heinz website, but the Heinz site doesn't allow you to use their images without written approval, and I don't want to wait for that before posting this blog). I also discovered I'm too lazy to grab the digital camera, walk into the kitchen, take a picture of the container, and upload it.

We had hot dogs left over from our recent M & M night at AWANA. That is, Missionary & Movie night. It's a pretty neat event where we have a missionary (this year it was a church member who regularly goes on short-term mission trips overseas; in the past, we've had both active & retired full-time missionaries), lots of great food (like "gourmet" all-beef hot dogs, chips, and tons and tons of both plain and peanut M & Ms, and popcorn for the movie), and a movie (this year we went back to the old faithful "The Prince of Egypt"). We overestimated the attendance and had a lot of hot dogs left over (better to have too much than too little, though), so we all got to take home hot dogs wrapped in aluminum foil.

Put 'em in the fridge, pull 'em out later, swap the foil for a paper towel, pop it in the microwave for a minute ("quick-on, 1" - fast, easy!), allow to cool. Apply Heinz 57 sauce. Really good! Interesting tidbit: the "57 varieties" was merely a moniker - they actually had over 60 varieties at the time they came up with the slogan (see Snopes article). They have over 1000 products now-a-days.

Other great hot dog toppings? Chili, of course (the cheap, 60-cent cans from the grocery store); onions; ketchup (or catsup, depending on your preferred spelling); possibly mustard; but I don't really care for relish or sauerkraut. I've also never put chocolate syrup, ice cream, or candy sprinkles on a hot dog, and probably never will (let me know if you try that), although that reminds me of a pizza I made and ate once (I'll spare you the details, unless you ask, but I'll let you know that it did have cat food on it... and cat food, especially when cooked at 500 degrees for 15 minutes, is really, really hard to bite & chew; there were no ants on the pizza, in case you're wondering, but there were things like chocolate chip cookies, peppermints, the aforementioned cat food, breadsticks, an entire bottle of oregano, other candies, pretty much whatever we could find in the kitchen).

Enough for now... go enjoy yourself a hot dog with Heinz 57 sauce!

3 comments:

Jane said...

Ummm.... that is just wrong.

Heinz 57 sauce should not even be put on steaks. Why ruin a good piece of meat?

But, for more odd pairings...

My 10yo son asked me to make him a sandwich for lunch the other day. He only wanted sliced cheese and ketchup on it. I made it. He loved it. Where he got the idea for that, I don't know, but it has become his new "favorite" sandwich.

To each his own.

Christy said...

When I was about 10yo (Maybe the magic age)a favorite snack of mine was a dill pickle spear wrapped in a slice of American cheese. I gag at the thought of it now.

Tony M said...

"Why ruin a good piece of meat?"

Note the kind of meat to which the sauce was applied. Typically I don't put any type of "steak sauce" on a steak (the exception being if I get a lousy steak, then I might put some A1 on it or something).

Just home for a quick lunch (the last of the leftover hot dogs, and yes, I put H57 on it) and thought I'd comment on a comment or two.