Carolina defeats Jersey with two goals in last minute shocker

I was a Carolina Hurricanes hockey fan even before Chapman moved to NC State in Raleigh.

The team is run by former goalie, Detroit Red Wings executive and Beeton, Ontario, native, Jim Rutherford, who’s a few years younger than my parents but went to the same high school in Alliston, Ontario.

When Carolina unexpectedly won the Stanley Cup in 2006, I was hooked. Rutherford brought the Cup back to Beeton; Amy bought me a Carolina Hurricanes coffee mug at the Charlotte airport. I still use it every morning.

Chapman and family went to one of the playoff games this year – we could never do that in Toronto, even if they did magically make the playoffs (and that’s the future of their son, Jack, right, at a ‘Canes game).

So tonight, with 1:20 left and Carolina trailing 3-2, facing who many call the best goaltender in the game or ever – I’ll always defer to Tony Esposito of the Chicago Black Hawks — the ‘Canes pop in two goals to take the series.

I’ll miss film director Kevin Smith’s twitters of his beloved New Jersey Devils, and Kevin, don’t kill yourself.

Oh, and this has nothing to do with food safety. I just miss playing hockey.
 

Quiznos: Toasted tastes better, especially if the safety were improved

There’s no ice hockey in Manhattan (Kansas) but we do get the NHL channel, and a hockey game can make some fine background while editing.

Saturday nights around 6:45 pm (CST), if I remember, it’s off to Hockey Night in Canada for seven minutes of Don Cherry, the 75-year-old former coach and commentator know for his “outspoken manner, flamboyant dress, and staunch patriotism.”

Cherry also lended his trademark staccato yelling to the Quiznos sandwich chain in Canadian ads, and the “Toasted tastes better” tagline.

So I thought of Don today, as I pined for hockey and read that Quiznos has adopted a new animal-welfare policy regarding its purchases of eggs, pork and turkey, developed in conjunction with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

That’s sweet. I wonder if Quiznos modified its buying patterns after tomatoes on its sandwiches in Rochester, Minnesota, sickened at least 10 people with Salmonella in 2007. Maybe Quiznos modified its policies on raw sewage on the floor in its restaurants after a Chicago outlet was closed in 2008. And maybe Quiznos has instituted sensitivity training for its managers after a Toronto spokesthingy said in response to the Canadian listeria outbreak in deli meats which killed 20 last year that, “People are hypochondriacs.”

This video is aptly titled, Don Cherry is crazy.
 

Junk food banned from Gatineau hockey arenas; what’s next, a ban on fighting?

As a kid, my pre-game hockey ritual was to buy a Jersey Milk chocolate bar at the arena before going into the dressing room to get ready. I didn’t really know about sugar and caffeine, but it seemed to wake me up before the game. In drastic situations, a Dairy Milk would suffice.

So I was horrified to read that hockey arenas in Gatineau, Quebec, will no longer be allowed to stock pop, chips, chocolate bars or poutine (actually, I don’t care about the poutine; it’s gross).

The city of 242,000 has voted to cut junk food from hockey arena food stands within three years in an attempt by to reduce the trans fats in the diet of the Gatineau hockey fan.

Canteens will replace the snacks with spaghetti, sandwiches, muffins and sports drinks, but not pop.

Can I get some red wine to go with the spaghetti as I’m strolling into the dressing room? In Quebec, the answer is probably yes.

It’s cold in North Carolina; and there is more Salmonella here

It’s been cold here in North Carolina lately.  The past few mornings it has been clear and sunny, but with temperatures in the mid-teens.  Perfect weather for hockey.

 On Thursday night Dani, Jack and I went to the Leafs/Hurricanes game. We took advantage of the cheap tickets ($25 each, and Jack gets in free until he’s two). My beloved Leafs took a 4-0 lead before almost totally collapsing and pulled out a 6-4 win.  Both teams looked like they might have had some foodborne illness, and left the remnants on the ice. It was a really sloppy game. Maybe they had been eating peanut butter.  

Public health officials announced yesterday that an additional three North Carolinians  have been added to the national Salmonella Typhimurium. It was reported that one of the new cases was a resident who died in November due to a blood infection caused by Salmonella.

Today, the FDA updated it’s information related to the outbreak. The FDA website says:

The FDA has notified PCA that product samples originating from its Blakely, Ga., processing plant have been tested and found positive for Salmonella by laboratories in the states of Minnesota, Georgia and Connecticut.  The state of Minnesota reported to FDA that its samples of King Nut peanut butter are a genetic match to the strain of Salmonella that has caused illnesses in the state and around the country.  King Nut is a distributor of PCA product.

Because identification of products subject to recall is continuing, the FDA urges consumers to postpone eating peanut butter-containing products until further information becomes available about which products may be affected. Efforts to specifically identify those products are ongoing.

At this time, there is no indication that any national name brand jars of peanut butter sold in retail stores are linked to the PCA recall.  As the investigation continues over the weekend, and into next week, the FDA will be able to update the advice based on new sampling and distribution information.

Food Safety Network year-in-review

I was walking around the vet college at Kansas State the other day with baby Sorenne strapped to me, and was telling anyone who would listen that Kansas State now had the foundation of a NCAA woman’s hockey program, if only they would build an arena in Manhattan.

Someone asked me, what is it you like about hockey, and I said it’s so fast and violent and requires skills like no other game. Don Cherry, right, agrees.

You can see that on display right now as Canada and the U.S. are playing in the World Junior Hockey Championships in Ottawa. I’m in Manhattan, Chapman is in North Carolina, and we’re both watching hockey on the NHL channel. Nerds.

Daughter Braunwynn, below, – herself a great skater and hockey player – arrives tomorrow for a visit.  And while I’m all nostalgic, here’s the year in review.

I’m not sure what to make of these statistics. Like media hits, I had thousands if all the media appearances are counted, and I’m not sure what to count anymore. And am too busy doing to count what I’m doing.

The listservs have peaked and I need to exploit new technology to get the news out. That will be happening soon enough. For this year, I developed 2 on-line courses which will start being offered in Jan. 2009, and got together 16 journal articles and book chapters. So I was doing that academic thing.

Turkey tips: do not thaw in the pool, and cook to 165F

A food safety friend wrote me over Thanksgiving to say that his wife was visiting family in Florida, and had gotten into an argument with mom over how best to thaw the Thanksgiving bird.

“Her mother decided that there was no room in the fridge, so she did the next best thing, throwing the turkey into the swimming pool to thaw. It wasn’t heated, so the water was in the low 60s. The good news is that we convinced mom to rescue the bird from the pool. The bad news — we did not get a picture of the floating turkey.”

Then there’s my friend Steve, who is a moustache aficionado. The more we say he looks like an extra in Super Troopers, the more he defends the facial hair.

Steve works for the Ontario government arranging hockey times for about a dozen different teams and reading FSnet. He also does something with fish.

Steve noticed that a CSPI press release said to cook poultry to 180F, when the correct temperature is 165F. CSPI also parrots government by saying never thaw on a counter. Show us the data.

Here’s Steve in action with some visiting Russian team. As Chapman correctly notes, this photo perfectly exhibits Naylor:

• opposition has puck;
• puck is in Naylor’s defensive zone;
• Naylor has his head down, breaking to the other blueline ready to get a pass; and,
• Naylor is playing defense.
 

Top Chef, E. coli and girls’ hockey

This is what I hate about Top Chef.

When it comes to eliminations, the hosts all look like they have to pass a huge stool as the camera goes for pregnantly pregnant pauses.

The dramatic music. The looks. And then, Collect Your Knives. Bye-bye.

Heidi Klum on Project Runway is so much more Germanically efficient. You have been eliminated. Get out.

Every time I watch one of those shows I’m reminded of coaching rep or travel team girls hockey back in Canada. Imagine, you’ve got 40 little kids vying for 20 spots on a hockey team, and you call them into the dressing room, one-by-one, with the coaches there, cameras rolling, dramatic music, the knowing stares, and then, you tell a 10-year-old, your risotto, or your skating, sucked, go home.

I asked Amy if she wanted to blog weekly about the food safety mistakes that occur on Top Chef as I attempted to feign interest in the show.  She looked at me like I had just been cut from the family. After all, she’s pretty pregnant (that’s a double entendre, one of those fancy words I learned to use in my school).

That’s OK. Others are already spoofing the show.

Last night’s season premiere of "Top Chef" may be the only episode you see all year!

Production on Bravo’s popular reality cooking show has been shut down by the New York City Department of Public Health after an E. coli outbreak was traced to the "Top Chef" kitchen.

"It seems that some of our more eager contestants may have cut a few corners in the ‘Make a meal out of raw meat in 8 minutes’ quickfire challenge," said co-host and head judge Tom Colicchio. "In hindsight, we probably should have more thoroughly checked their work before letting them serve it at a Brooklyn street fair."

By the evening after Bravo finished shooting at the street fair, local officials reported that 24 attendees who sampled "Top Chef" contestants’ food had been hospitalized and three were dead. The next morning, health inspectors raided the "Top Chef" kitchen just as co-host Padma Lakshmi was explaining that guest judge Rocco Dispirito had been delayed at his weekly plastic surgery session.

"All I have to say is that anyone convicted of spreading E. coli will likely find themselves in danger of elimination at our next judges’ table," Lakshmi said when asked for comment.

Do professional football players barf during games – yes

Like National Hockey League legendary goaltender Glenn Hall, I used to puke before hockey games when I was a kid. Seriously, that’s how serious hockey was when I was 11-years-old in Brantford, Ontario.

A few years later I decided to abandon my destiny as a NHL goaltender and started playing high school football. I played linebacker because after all those years of being shot at with pucks, it felt good to be hitting someone else.

One of the other schools in town had this tank of a fullback – this was old school, when teams had halfbacks and fullbacks. He ran over me so hard once I didn’t move for about a minute. And then I barfed on the field.

The Washington Post has decided to follow up on the hit heard round the Internet – the one where the kid was hit so hard in a college football game that he vomited – and has asked the Washington Redskins their best vomit stories.

This is no Jamie Fox on Any Given Sunday; this is the read deal.

Player Casey Rabach says,

"Oh yeah, I’ve thrown up on the field. That happens a lot, yeah. Guys puke all the time. It’s funny when the guy across from you starts puking, that’s the best part. Oh my God, so funny. You’ve never seen a player who puked on the field? It’s pretty funny. The guy’s sitting there puking in front of you, and you KNOW you’re just gonna kill him the next play. It’s awesome. Jansen, you ever puked on the field," he called out to Jon Jansen, one locker over.

"Yeah," said Jansen, who was in the middle of interviews at the time.

Tampa Bay is in the World Series cause they let fans bring their own food to the ballpark

Baseball is incredibly boring. Anytime someone gases on about the mathematics and how literal it all is, I’m reminded of the time Homer Simpson was sober for a month and agreed that watching baseball was the most boring thing ever. At a hockey game in Sweden last night the crowd littered the ice with dildos. Hockey’s a great game.

But I’m forced to write about baseball because the World-Series bound Tampa Bay Rays did something somewhat astute: as reported in the New York Times, “The Rays are here (in the World Series) because of the outstanding good karma of allowing fans to bring their own food into the dome.

“In the vast majority of sports arenas and stadiums in this great land of freedom and opportunity, anybody caught transporting edible contraband through the turnstiles is immediately taken under the stands and beaten with rubber hoses.”

Tell me about it.

A pregnant Amy and I went to a Kansas State football game a few weeks ago. The dude doing the bag check found a wrapped energy bar and confiscated the offending carbs. I said, ‘She’s pregnant, she needs food.”

He grunted, which was as persuasive as K-State’s terrible football defense.

And unlike airport security, where an empty water bottle will be allowed through, K-State only allows full bottles of water. No one would ever fill a water bottle with vodka.

Back in Tampa, the Times reports that,

“Under this sane policy, fans can actually bring carrots and apples and cereal to the ball park and not have them wrestled away by gristly guards. I know what you are thinking: “There’s no healthy eating in baseball,” what with the mandatory calories and salt and sugar laced into the junk food sold in the corridors of American arenas.”
 

What would Sarah Palin do? Peas in Alaska source of campylobacter, 18 sickened

My mom was a hockey mom. She and dad drove me all around Ontario to play hockey. I still remember the brawl between some of the hockey moms when we played Galt (before it was Cambridge). The cops were called. I may have been 13. My mom wasn’t involved (at least she won’t admit she was involved).

I coached and helped out with my four girls playing hockey, so I guess I was a hockey dad. I’m not a pit bull and don’t wear lipstick.

Sarah Palin may be a hockey mom who thinks the Flintstones are an accurate representation of human-dinosaur co-habitation and is open to war with Russia, but what I’d really like to hear about is how the vice-presidential candidate responds to foodborne illness in her own backyard.

The Anchorage Daily News reports that a farm in the Matanuska Valley has been called the focal point of a campylobacter outbreak that has sickened at least 18 people in Southcentral Alaska after they ate raw peas.

Mat-Valley Peas in Palmer sells the peas in 5- and 10-pound bags with cooking instructions that would have prevented the outbreak, but some retailers and sellers at farmers markets have repackaged the peas in smaller quantities and left out the cooking instructions, said Joe McLaughlin, state epidemiologist with the health department.

The first of the 18 cases, including one person who was hospitalized, occurred Aug. 1.

And my mom, she never had to brag about being a hockey mom. She was the real deal.