Hot Hot Dogs

Oh the joys of owning a slow cooker! You just pop in all of the ingredients, turn it on, and leave it for a few hours. When you return, you've got a hot pot full of goodness and you hardly had to lift a finger. We're always looking for great new slow cooker recipes, and we just found this delicious one for Hot Hot Dogs over at the �My Fridge Food� website � it's so awesome, we just had to share! This is really an ingenious new spin on the traditional hot dog. Who woulda thought you could use it as a key ingredient for a rich, yummy stew? We just love folks over at the �My Fridge Food� � they make cooking so easy. Did you know they even have a survey on their home page, where you can submit a list of your fridge contents, and they'll generate a list of recipes you can make from them? How's that for a time-saving life saver? You can come home late from work, open your semi-barren fridge, and still find a few yummy recipes to make. Brilliant!

And how about the hot dog? Where did these little puppies come from? They're not actually made out of dogs, are they? No! In a nutshell, hot dogs were originally frankfurters, hailing from Germany. There was a particular frankfurter sausage that looked like actual dachshund dogs � you know the funny long skinny ones? And so people started to call it the dachshund sausage. When these particular sausages came to America, they were a big hit and were often served in a bun. As the story goes, a sports cartoonist named Tad Dorgan attended a baseball game at the Polo Grounds in NY back in 1901. He heard vendors yelling �Get your dachshund sausages while they're red hot!� This created the indelible image in his mind of a dog wrapped in a bun and voila, the term �hot dog� was born.

Typically barbecue is either a cooking method or a cooking apparatus. The difference between barbecuing and grilling has to do with the cooking times and the types of heat used. Grilling is most often done quickly over moderate to high direct heat with little smoke, while barbecuing is done more slowly over low indirect heat and the food is flavored by the smoking process. There are different barbecue sauces and ways of doing depending where you are in the world.

In America, bacon is most often cured and smoked, and different flavours can be achieved by using a variety of wood, or rarely corn cobs. Sometimes peat is used in the United Kingdom. This process of smoking and curing can take up to eighteen hours, depending on the intensity of the flavour desired. The Virginia Housewife, possibly one of the earliest American cookbooks, gives no indication that bacon is ever not smoked, though it gives no advice on flavouring. American bacons include varieties that can be smoked with hickory or corncobs and flavourings such as red pepper, maple, brown sugar, honey, molasses, and occasionally cinnamon.