When I was in elementary school our menu was extremely one-dimensional, relying on a handful of staples rotated throughout the week in a failed attempt to keep things fresh. We did not eat well. Fish sticks were prominent, and I remember watching in disgust as some of the other kids at my table slathered them with absurd amounts of ketchup so they could choke them down. And every Thursday was pizza day.

I'll never forget the Thursday menu, which was not-so-carefully portioned into a partitioned Styrofoam tray. A small rectangle of flaccid, bready pizza sat in the large rectangular quadrant. Canned corn and a small cardboard container of milk had their own sections, too. And in the little partition directly adjacent to the pizza, which I thought was so great before I learned that it wasn't, sat the arch nemesis of my entire epicurean childhood: canned red beets.

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When the pink slime fervor began, Beef Products Inc, the largest national producer of what it prefers to call Lean Finely Textured Beef, halted production at a few of its plants. They claimed that free-falling demand, caused by Kroger, McDonald's and other large scale retailers' rejection of the ammonia-treated beef, forced them to stop production.

BPI ran full page ads in national publications and said they planned on waiting till the smear campaign died down -- they were hoping the negative publicity would just go away. Instead, more large-scale restaurants and grocery chains jumped on the bandwagon and shunned the processed meat paste.

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Alice Laussade

Yesterday the Huffington Post reported that 7-Eleven is nationally debuting Slurpee Lite. Slurpee Lite will be made with Splenda instead of real sugar and promises to be "50% fewer calories, 100% awesome taste."

Give me a summer-fucking break. Seems to me that if you're inside a 7-Eleven at all, you've lost your stupid calorie-counting privileges. But, you really want 50% fewer calories than a regular Slurpee? GET YOURSELF A SMALLER REGULAR DANG SLURPEE.

HuffPo says 7-Eleven is "hoping to target females in their 20s" with this Slurpee. Ohhhh, so you're making Lady Slurpees! Why didn't you just say so? We think that's a great idea. But, why stop there, 7-Eleven? Here's this list of Other Stuffs 20-Something Chicks Like At Places. We promise that if you stock these things in your 7-Elevens, you'll definitely bag all them chicks.

20-Something Chicks Like:

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Fort Worth Food Park

DFW Food Truck Foodie reported last night that the Fort Worth Food Park is opening its own cantina, which sounds great until you realize the rub: The park is no longer BYOB.

Food truck dining can be a little, well, not cheap. But the BYOB aspect made it completely pleasurable. You could hang out at a picnic table and sip on a few beers under the trees with the scent of bacon wafting through the air. It was nice. I'm sure it'll still be nice, but I'd rather keep it BYOB then have to pay too much at a cantina.

Dallas, take this as an opportunity to open a food truck park and for once one-up the Fort Worth scene by making it BYOB.

Alice Laussade

Other people in line in front of me count: 8
Days I've been thinking about this chicken since I ate it: 3 (whole)

As I yelled, "Elaine just popped my jerk-chicken cherry and my goat-curry cherry and I really liked it!" in the parking lot of Elaine's Kitchen, I realized how awesome that would be on a T-shirt. I didn't just yell it out of nowhere -- that would've been weird. I yelled because a lady in the parking lot asked me how my meal had been and I couldn't not smile-yell in her face about how much happy was in my body.

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Flickr

As previously noted on several occasions, last year the Texas legislature passed a law that allows home bakers to legally sell their goods from home under some very specific guidelines (Senate Bill 81). And each time I type out another article about this issue, I think, "Well, that should do it." It's pretty cut and dry: It's cake and now it's law. And you can't really argue with cake.

But ridiculous issues keep popping up. Like when Plano made an infomercial warning of the hazards of buying from a home baker.

Now we've learned that the City of Frisco created a zoning ordinance banning cottage bakeries. Last week KXAS ran a story about a home baker who received a notice from the city that she was in violation of the ordinance. Which raises an important question: What do so many people have against cake?

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Sara Kerens

To prepare for this fall's Best of Dallas® 2012 issue, we're counting down (in no particular order) our 100 Favorite Dishes. If there's a dish you think we need to try, leave it in the comments, or email me.

I was worried I wouldn't be able to include this dish in our 100 Favorites list since Michael Ehlert, the chef responsible for the plate, recently flew the coop. I just called The Chesterfield, though, and the devils on horseback remain on the menu.

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I'm pretty sure there is a holiday honoring some sort of food product every single day, with overlapping weeks and months to celebrate others. They reach a saturation point at which I tune them all out. But American Craft Beer Week, which began yesterday and runs through Sunday, is an exception, naturally.

There are too many items for me to track down, but Brian Brown at the Plano Craft Beer Examiner has done an admirable job compiling the most comprehensive list I've seen.

A few I'd recommend:

Tuesday, Peticolas Brewing Co. (Michael himself, one presumes, as it's a one-man operation) will be at the Addison Flying Saucer.

Deviant Dale's, a really nice amped-up double IPA version of Dale's Pale Ale, will be featured at the Fort Worth Saucer.

The Pub in McKinney is tapping Dogfish Head 120 Minute, though I can't find the tapping time anywhere (no answer when I called) and it will probably sell out in the time it takes you to read this sentence.

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BrewRiot

Oh it's just another beer festival, that's all. 'Cause that's how we roll here in Dallas. Beer festies every weekend. This one even involves running, which is great because there's such satisfaction in digging a hole just to fill it right back up.

Sunday brings the Third Annual BrewRiot Homebrew Beer Competition on Bishop Avenue between 7th and 8th Streets from 4 to 8 p.m. The event will feature more than 50 homebrew teams competing against one another. Plus there will be more than 150 different types of beer to sample. The lineup includes lagers, IPAs, Belgian & French ales and specialty brews.

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FarmSanctuary via Flickr

Confining sows in small gestation crates has come under great scrutiny lately. Major companies like McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's and most recently the nation's second largest grocery chain, Safeway, have announced a phase-out of pork supplied by farms that use gestation crates.

However, recently Domino's Pizza shareholders rejected a resolution suggested by the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) for a ban.

The HSUS dabbling in the pig business drew the ire of the Texas Farm Bureau publications director, Mike Barnett, who posted a letter on the bureau blog praising Domino's for "showing some backbone to the animal rights activist group," while others "caved to their demands, fearing HSUS will stir public outcry and reprisal if they don't."

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