So, I love to cook. Hence the food blog. But cooks aren't just born that way. In order to love cooking, you need to fall in love with food, and in order to do that, you need to eat. A lot. Which I have, over the years. And one of the things I love to eat is the Coney Dog.
It's a regional specialty. Don't be fooled by the fact that its name is derived from Coney Island -- it's actually a Detroit thing. And as I learned from my dad (himself a tremendous source of food knowledge), Michigan has stricter meat laws than other parts of the country. All their sausage has to be made from skeletal meat. So, no snouts in the hot dogs.
So you take a high-quality, natural-casing hot dog, and you put a not-too-thick meat-based chili on it, and slap on cubed raw white onions and a few squirts of yellow mustard. That's it. If you want to get fancy with it, you brown the bun in a little bit of butter beforehand.
I could eat a zillion.
Silly things I have done in the name of the Coney:
1. while flying from Philadelphia to Knoxville connecting through Detroit, stopped at the National Coney Island stand in the Detroit airport and asked for two dozen raw dogs and a brick of chili to go, to deliver to my parents. The manager was puzzled, but gave me what I needed, at an extremely reasonable price. Mom and Dad were extremely appreciative.
2. while making the same trip in reverse, stopped at the same National Coney Island stand to place the same order and take dogs and chili to my husband, who is also a fan. Quoth the manager: "Oh, it's you."
3. for my husband's birthday, placed an order for a Coney Kit, which includes the dogs, chili, buns, onions, and mustard. And a hat.
4. wore the hat.
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