Is that mayonnaise on your pants, or are you just happy to see me?

[RMiller]

"Freedom Fries?" ~ give me honest French fries, even if you call them chips, and pass the ketchup or vinegar!

There are a many international members on this site and, with internationality, we get many different condiments to go with them. I can?t recall the last time I willingly ate something with vinegar poured all over it, but not everyone shares my passion for BBQ sauce.

That being said, what do you guys eat fries with? I use ketchup, BBQ sauce and the occasional Wendy?s Chocolate Frosty.

[Tragic Rabbit]

That being said, what do you guys eat fries with?

My fingers.

TR

[blue]

I eat 'em plain (with a little salt) or with ketchup, usually; rarely with vinegar.

...Fries, silly, not my fingers. (Ow, Aie!)

I've also been known to eat fries with BBQ sauce or honey-mustard.

I wouldn't object to eating them with a Wendy's Frosty. I've tried it, it tasted good. Hey, it's chocolate and ice cream... or close it.

Some people like fries with mayonnaise, but that doesn't appeal to me.

Cream gravy or brown gravy or pork chop gravy would work.

I'm very ecumenical and liberal about fries. Curly fries are... awesome, dude.

Onion rings are OK. Dunno why I don't have 'em more often.

Tater tots? Good stuff!

Potato pancakes? Love 'em. Don't often fix 'em.

"They call me Tater Salad." -- Sorry, couldn't pass that up.

Now you know more about my sordid love affair with potatoes than you wanted to know.

[Kel]

French fries and all the fun ways to chow them down.

• plain w/salt only
  
• plain w/s & p
  
• plain w/pepper only
  
• plain w/garlic salt
  
• ketchup
  
• melted cheese
  
• meaty hot sauce
  
• mustard (all diff. kinds)
  
• ranch dressing
  
• blue cheese dressing
  
• bbq sauce
  
• on top of a cheeseburger
  

I've tried them with vinegar, but prefer that on chips (or crisps) instead of fries. I do know guys who will dip their fries in gravy like Blue mentioned, but that's just vile.

[Tragic Rabbit]

French fries and all the fun ways to chow them down.

[*]ketchup

[*]melted cheese

[*]meaty hot sauce

[*]mustard (all diff. kinds)

[*]ranch dressing

[*]blue cheese dressing

Oh, all right, I'll play.

And yes, the gravy thing is vile but it's a Southern US thing, though I have occasionally (mis)used gravy for that purpose when given a trough of gravy for some combined Southern fried food plate that's really, really bad for me, eg. fried 'chicken fingers' (there's another weird Americanism for you, speaking of chicken teeth) and 'French fried' fries ('chips' to you non-Colonials, though they do make bizarre distinctions here between thinly sliced, sliced crossways, cubed and other whatevers...but it's still just fried potatoes.).

Speaking of spuds, I adore potato cakes/potato latkes, which you can't easily get, apparently, outside private homes in the lower States I'm currently mired in. I'm not sure if that's bc it's a Jewish food or maybe Russian/Polish, but you can't get a lot of what's considered unAmerican delicious American foods south of the Mason-Dixon (or West of the Mighty Mississippi). Highly specific, what's here and what's there.

Try finding a decent deli anywhere outside the NE, for instance, it's a disgrace! How I occasionally long for good corned beef sandwich or a real pickle! A few things, natch, are like Apple Pie, you can get 'em anywhere: hamburgers (which aren't from Hamburg), pizza (which isn't from Italy, though what passes for pizza in Texas is sometimes really shocking), malted milkshakes (which do, oddly enough, contain both malt and milk and are also shaken), etc.

Very popular in most of America (I can't stand them) are 'ribs', which are just that, big heaping plates of ribbed sides of whatever (pig, I assume, and not roof rabbit) and dripping with 'barbeque sauce'. There are whole chains of restaurants devoted to nothing else! Yuck, not my thing, though I understand it was popular with the Flintstone family.

Second only to that in my lexicon of inedibles are 'wings', sometimes known as 'chicken wings' but more often as 'buffalo wings' (don't get me started), and again there are whole restaurant chains that specialize in them, and they consist, apparently, of large baskets/plates of tiny little fried/barbequed/shellacked (well, that's how they look) itty bitty tiny parts of chicken legs. They are considered a delicacy in the South (but so are 'grits'), come in all sorts of coatings and styles, and are eaten both as appetizers and as meals. Double yuck. Grits, too. Sorry, James!

My personal French Fry/chip eating preferences are, in order (and always including the dreaded salt): mayonaise, ranch dressing (Rick, I could mail you a selection of dry packaged mixes for it, if you want to try it, it's delish), blue/bleu cheese dressing and cheddar or other cheeses melted atop. Ketchup strictly as a last resort. I'm not a big fan of fries, that is I pretend to try to avoid them, but potatoes, what can I say? Did you know that you can fry 'sweet potatoes' (yams), too, and they're quite good? I recommend cubed instead of strips, though, for those.

I liked malted vinegar on (fried) fish but not on the chips, but hey, I'm a Yank. Lemon on non-fried fish. Actually, the piano-playing bf and I eat regularly at a place that serves only UK/Irish foods and beers, so I do get the alleged real thing now and again. Mother is actually Irish and holds dual citizenship, I may not have mentioned that before. I have a Scots friend whom everyone around assumes is 'English', so that's a source of fun for us, though unrelated to food, I suppose.

Now that I'm feeling peckish, I think I'll go have a bite. Run, Harry, run!

Kisses...

TR

[Graeme]

Plain, with salt, or with salt and vinegar.

I have tried them with mayonnaise and they were yummy, but I'm a traditionalist, sometimes. I know a lot of people who like them with tomato sauce (ketchup for the North Americans), but I don't. I'll eat them that way, but it's not my preference.

[RMiller]

Very popular in most of America (I can't stand them) are 'ribs', which are just that, big heaping plates of ribbed sides of whatever (pig, I assume, and not roof rabbit) and dripping with 'barbeque sauce'. There are whole chains of restaurants devoted to nothing else! Yuck, not my thing, though I understand it was popular with the Flintstone family.

Ribs are one of my favorites. I was raised in Atlanta on such delicacies. And they are usually pork, for my dad would always stack the used ribs on a plate and say he was building a monument to a dead hog.

And there are different varieties, too. Carolina ribs are boiled then grilled and seasoned with a rub of herbs and spices with a sweet sauce on the side, where as Texas ribs are just grilled and smothered in a smokey flavored tomato based sauce with liberal molasses content. *wipes drool off keyboard* Dang, I shouldn?t be writing about ribs when I?m this hungry.

And barbeque sauce is very easy to screw up. If you accidentally but Craft or Heinz you will end up with spiced vinegar or ketchup, respectively. My personal favorite is KC Masterpiece. I can?t think of an animal I wouldn?t eat it with.

[Trab]

Geez guys. I'm not sure if I want to go eat, or just barf. Some of those foods sound great, and other sound quite horrific.

I like my fries plain. I don't even like the curly fries. The first time I tried them curly I thought they were cute, until I tasted those vile puppies. OMG. I didn't know how to get the taste out of my mouth fast enough. There are markedly different ways to make them though, with temperature being of critical importance. To get a nice fry you need to use LARD, not oil, but this is so politically incorrect nowadays that I may be arrested for even saying it here. I totally hate it when they sell you fries that haven't been peeled and you get bits of skin. Sure, the skin tastes okay, but it is usually crunchy (ugh) and sometimes has sand imbedded in it (double yucky).

My father grew up in the Netherlands and he always had to stop at street vendors to eat pickled herring and/or salted eel. (I'm just about heaving now.) He would also go into the Chinese sections of towns we'd visit on vacations and each whole little fish. They're dried and supposed to be a delicacy. They look a bit like those black goldfish you sometimes see in aquariums. He tried frying up his own batch one day, and we couldn't force ourselves back into the house for several days. (retch, to the power of 10)

One sad thing for me is the tendency is to put onion into those potato patties you can get at places like McDonalds. I love the patties but cannot physically handle the onion.

Oh yeah. In Silverton CO we found a place which served real buffalo, not that stupid hot chicken shit. Very awesome.

[rick]

Okay, so no one mentioned my favorite way to eat fries....with hot sauce. Pace doesn't quite work in this application, but a good Louisiana style hot sauce, like Franks Original Red Hot, will work just fine.

The Southern thing with gravy is okay, as long as there is some chicken, turkey, or roast to go along with it.

Fries with chili and cheese are pretty good, if a bit on the fattening side.

Chips (fries in Britain) with vinegar are fine, as long they are fresh from the Chippy, properly salty, and wrapped in newspaper (which I gather is illegal now).

I have to admit that while I like barbeque sauce, it doesn't always like me. Funny, I can eat flaming hot chili without issue, but commercial barbeque sauces use a chemical based liquid smoke additive, and it gives me heartburn in the worst way.

I spent some time in the Netherlands, and could never quite get used to the idea of putting mayo on fries....yuck. Of course, I'm not a big fan of mayo in the first place.

In the northwest US, many restaurants offer what they call 'fry sauce' which is basically a blend of ketchup and mayo. It's OK, but needs some hot sauce.

Fry's with spicy remoulade sauce are good too!

The bottom line is that fries are a great sauce vehicle.

Hot wings are a good thing. Especially the habanero hot wings over at Bahama Breeze!

To follow up on Trab's comment on real buffalo/bison, he's right. If you're ever in Denver, try a place called the Buckhorn Exchange. Its been in business since the civil war, holds liquor licence #1 from the state of Colorado, and serves the best piece of bison prime rib you've ever seen or heard of!

Ribs are good, but give me a pepper crusted elk steak over ribs any day!

[Tanuki Racoon]

To follow up on Trab's comment on real buffalo/bison, he's right.

Buffalo Burgers rock. My local supermarket now sells Maverick Farms Buffalo. It makes great spaghetti sauce too. A chain called "Smokey Bones" now has buffalo burgers too.

If you want real fries, go to Belgium (which is where they were invented, not France). I don't do Mayo though because I hate Mayo. Pommes Frites, c'est tres bien.

[EleCivil]

Fries are those scrawny things that the burger chains use and the heathen's from across the English channel. They are often processed too; made into pulp and forced through a sieve-like thing ending up as long thin strands and cut to a uniform length once set. God only know's what you are getting with this sort of crap.

I'm with ya. Not a fan of deep-fried potato mush. Can't improve on nature, man - just cut 'em up and bake 'em, skins included, no need for oil/lard/goo. As for sauces, either soy sauce or cayenne hot sauce.

[Trab]

This discussion reminds me of the disaster known as potato chips in the US and Canada, and potato crisps in Britain. Have you noticed that some of them are 'real' potatoes, and others are that extruded mush? Makes like Pringles are formed into perfectly shaped pieces which taste much like salted cardboard.

What bugs me more though, is that when they add ANY flavouring at all, like vinegar, black pepper, BBQ, etc., they don't just add that, but completely change the formula so that it is formed mush and/or about 10 other artificial ingredients are added. You'd think they could simply sprinkle vinegar on it, but nooooo...