Wings For Wheels

There aren’t many celebrities or media personalities that I would like to be friends with. I don’t need that type of validation. True, there are a lot that I would like to meet and/or interview, but very few whom I not only admire, but feel similar in personality enough to wish that I could call up at will an get their take on things.

Maybe it’s because, like me, he’s from the South Shore of Long Island, but one such person is Mike Pesca, sports reporter for NPR. He finds the most bizarre angles in stories and proceeds to dissect them in ways that nobody else would. His work on Slate’s weekly Hang Up And Listen podcast never fails to crack me up. His Twitter feed is a must for any sports fan.

Recently mentioned that a couple of friends of his, Dan Pashman and Mark Garrison, had started a podcast about food called The Sporkful (motto: Where Sacred Cows Get Grilled). I had to check this out. I mean, Pesca-like discussion, about food? How could I not?

It didn’t disappoint. Each week they take a different food and debate the optimal way to enjoy it. They’re not swapping recipes, but rather concepts like utensils for eating pasta and other noodles, sauce-to-cheese-to-meat ratios in chicken parmigiana, and sandwich construction (a recurring theme – today’s episode is Part 1 of a two-part series on peanut butter and jelly). They’ve even devoted an entire episode to ice cubes!

Even if you, like me, subscribe to more podcasts than you have free time, (I get somewhere between 25-30 hours a week), The Sporkful breezes by, with episodes roughly 15 minutes long (as opposed to some podcasts *cough* mine *cough*). So if you’re into geeky food conversation, you have to give The Sporkful a listen and read their Test Kitchen blog, which parodies Andrew Sullivan’s View From Your Window feature in hilarious fashion.