Fun Fact: It's Friday
A great sandwich, weekend entertainment, and a desperate plea for you to help me defeat my child in trivia, all in this week's Friday Newsletter.
We have entered an era of Fun Facts in my household.
My third-grader has suddenly becomed enamored of trivia, and of the sharing of said trivia. Hardly a silent moment can pass without my him peppering me with some version of the phrase: “Daddy, fun fact: did you know that ______ ?”
[not eating breakfast fast enough when I’m already late for work] Daddy, fun fact: did you know that Africa is the only continent on four hemispheres?
[driving to school in the morning] Daddy, fun fact: did you know that all horses have the same birthday?
[during dinner] Daddy, fun fact: did you know that reindeers’ hairs are tube-shaped and help them stay warm?
[in the middle of the night, startling me awake from a deep sleep]: Daddy, fun fact: did you know that no number under 1,000 is spelled with the letter ‘A’?
Now, to be clear: I love this.
I’ve consistently believed that every stage of my kids’ childhoods past those harrowing first six months has been The Perfect Age, but I am absolutely delighted by this trivia-rich era. I was the kind of kid who would read the World Book Encyclopedia as a bedtime story when I was their age, and I still dream of one day being on Jeopardy!. That is to say: I get where this is coming from.
There’s only one problem:
I can’t keep up.
I wake up in the morning with a head full of thoughts about work and bills and household duties and The State of the World, and those things are crowding out my beloved miniutiae. I don’t have the necessary backlog of novel trivia to parry back with “yes, but did you know that…?”
I am coming into these Fact Fights dramatically out-gunned, and that can’t stand.
I need new fun facts, and today, I’m turning to you.
Please share with me your favorite fun fact(s).
I am putting no parameters on this.
In the best-case scenario, they’d be things that I can share with my kids, but if you’ve got something that doesn’t clear that bar, send it anyways. I want to hear the silliest, most interesting, most unusual trivia that’s taken up permanent residence in your brain.
While you mull that over, I’ve got some Friday Stuff to share.
Just as I do every Friday morning here on the ACBN, today I’m sharing a full slate of things that I think might make your weekend a little bit better.
Today, I’ve got:
A Kentucky Derby-adjacent sandwich!
A gelatinized Julep!
Great things to read, watch and listen to!
A fine selection of furry friends!
Riders up, friends. It’s Friday.
A late scratch
This weekend is the Kentucky Derby here in Louisville, and whether you love or hate it, it’s hard to ignore it. The town is transformed. Schools are closed today, and all week I’ve experienced colleagues being unavailable because they went to the track.
With Derby so front and central in my daily life, I knew that whatever I made for this week’s food was going to be thematically tied to it somehow.
Then, a few weeks ago, I had a fantastic idea: I’d make Hot Brown Brats.
This would, of course, be a spin on the Kentucky Hot Brown, an iconic dish developed a century ago at Louisville’s Brown Hotel. It’s an open-faced sandwich of roast turkey, crispy bacon and sliced tomato drenched in cheesy Mornay sauce. It’s a gut-bomb, but it’s also delicious.
I was going to make a walkable spin on this dish, grinding up the basic ingredients—turkey, bacon, cheese and tomato (I’d sub in sun-dried tomatoes)—and piping them into sausage casings to grill up like bratwurst.
Then, I got to the last day when I’d have time to do all that, and—I just didn’t want to do all that work.
What can I say? I still think it’s a good recipe idea, but sometimes you don’t have that dog in you, and I very much did not feel like cleaning my meat grinder last weekend. I already had most of the ingredients, though, so I opted to make a quick pivot. Turkey tenderloins would go into a spiced-buttermilk marinade, and I’d assemble a (somewhat) lighter, brighter, fresher take on the format.
The Not-Brown? DerBLT? I dunno. Let’s just call it a “Derby Sandwich”.
1 pound turkey tenderloins
16 ounces buttermilk
1 tablespoon paprika
2 teaspoons ground nutmeg
2 teaspoons onion powder
2 teaspoons kosher salt
1 teaspoon black pepper
Mix the spices into the buttermilk, then place the turkey tenderloins into a ziplock bag, pour the mixture over, and allow to marinate for 8 hours.
When ready to cook, drain off the marinade and pat the turkey pieces dry, then season with a little more salt and some cracked black pepper. Grill over high heat for 5-10 minutes, until it reaches 165F on an instant-read thermometer.
sourdough bread
bacon
sliced tomato
fresh buffalo mozzarella
Oh yeah. Now we’re talking. Let’s see the cross-section, too:
Was it as good a bit as making Hot Brown Brats might’ve been? Maybe not. But it was a delicious dinner, and way less work.
Sometimes, I just need to admit that’s the play.
Hey, are you attending a Kentucky Derby party this weekend, or watching the race in the comfort of your own home?
If so, then it’s my completely unbiased professional opinion that you should make some of my exceptionally good Salted Bourbon Brown Butter Derby Bars, a dessert that has nothing to do with any other dessert and whose resemblance is entirely coincidental.
This is a recipe that has had many satisfied customers.
Tiptoe through the Juleps
Even more so than the Hot Brown—which, admittedly, isn’t so much a Derby thing as it is a Louisville thing—there’s nothing more synonymous with the first Saturday in May than the Mint Julep, that 19th-century cocktail of bourbon, sugar and fresh mint. Tens of thousands of them will be sold at Churchill Downs this weekend, despite an at-the-track price of $22.
Here is a picture of the (1) Julep I had when I attended the 2019 Kentucky Derby as a credentialed media member back in The Last Days of Viable Online Sports Media:
It’s very pretty, and very much on theme.
It’s just… I just don’t really like them all that much.
They need something else? They’re just bourbon, mint and sugar. I don’t know… it either needs to be less or more. It’s 19th-century hooch masquerading as a classy drink, and I think it’s time to rip that mask all the way off.
It’s time to make Mint Jell-ups.