The kids are still in school and the weather outside is
tolerable, but summer officially kicked off this past weekend.
The kids are still in school and the weather outside is tolerable, but summer officially kicked off this past weekend.
As someone who loves food a little – OK, a lot – too much, summer is the season for hot dogs. Sure, I’ll take ice cream or watermelon, but hot dogs are the quintessential summertime food.
They’re at the heart of all those holiday barbecues. They’re the perfect, albeit expensive, fare at the ballpark.
My hankering for hot dogs goes back to the halcyon days of Gilroy summers past, and what kid hasn’t eaten their fair share? Moms everywhere cut them up into little pieces to be flung off high chair trays, add them to macaroni and cheese or even casseroles. By the time my youngest sister was a toddler, baby food manufacturers were making kid-sized dogs that were ready to go.
On family trips to the mall, my sisters may have headed to Taco Bell, but my lunch was almost always from “Hot Dog on a Stick.” I loved watching the hot dogs get dipped in batter and thrown into the fryer to be cooked at lightning-fast speed. And there’s something about lemonade freshly pounded by teenagers in silly red, blue and yellow hats that makes those corn dogs unbeatable.
When I was in elementary school, my mom went back to college to get her master’s degree and the rest of the family got to divvy up “dinner night.” On Wednesdays – my night to cook – my dad and sisters knew to expect hot dogs, usually in the form of pigs in a blanket (dogs wrapped in ready-to-bake biscuits). That was the extent of my culinary creativity as a pre-teen.
I used to dream of going to Coney Island to compete in Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest, held every July 4. That dream was crushed following staggering performances by Takeru Kobayashi, a rail-thin man from Japan who has won three summers in a row, setting a record of 51 1/2 hot dogs eaten in 2002.
Maybe my love of hot dogs is a throwback to my German heritage: According to the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council, German immigrants started the hot dog craze, bringing sausages and Dachshunds to America in the late 1800s.
The council also says the name “hot dog” was first used on college campuses, as they were a staple of the undergraduate diet. They still are.
College is often a time for trying new things. It was then that I discovered they make hot dogs with cheese inside! At every USC football game were vendors hawking bacon-and-onion-wrapped dogs that smelled too good and too unhealthy. Plus, L.A. is home to the world-famous Pink’s. When my attention could be diverted from my all-beef hot dog, I often glimpsed celebrities hanging around the Hollywood hot spot.
When a Wienerschnitzel opened in Gilroy a few years back, imagine my excitement. My friends didn’t see me for days, while the restaurant employees got to know me on a first-name basis. These days, you can’t beat Costco’s deal of a hefty dog and a soda for slightly more than a buck-and-a-half.
A few years back, my older sister and I applied to be – get this – a Wienermobile driving team. I probably shouldn’t have let her handle the application, though, because we never heard back from Oscar Mayer.
Because it is summer and everywhere one looks there’s another fad diet promising a “bikini body,” I’m proposing to launch the “Hot Dog Diet.” Think about it, it could work.
Though I’ve never tasted them, there’s a plethora of low-fat, low-sodium dogs out there. Grab a healthy-carb wheat bun instead of a white one. Replace fried chips with baked. Low-fat cheese, diet soda, sherbet; the healthy hot dog picnic options are endless.
And given the fact that the hot dog council reports that Americans eat 7 BILLION hot dogs each summer, I think it will catch on.
