Category: On Food and Cooking

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Sunday Stealing, and an announcement!

First, the announcement: I sent out a new installment of the newsletter the other day! This one was in remembrance of actor/director/playwright Tom Noonan, who died recently. Please check it out and subscribe! I try to send it twice a month, with usually a long piece or essay.

Now, for the weekly quiz-thing that I don’t always do weekly but this week I am because it’s prompt-based, which is interesting. Here’s the details:

This week we’re playing word association as suggested by a blogger named Dawn Camp. She said these words “tickled her fancy,” and let’s see if they inspire you. Feel free to answer with either a single word or a thought/memory. It’s up to you.

Word Association. Share what comes to mind when you hear the word …

OK, this sounds interesting! Here we go!

1. Biscuit

OK, where to go with this one? I love biscuits…here we’re talking about the American kind, the fluffy pastry-layered ones with wonderful buttery saltiness. But I learned quite a while back that this is not what British people mean by “biscuit”…but right now, I’m actually thinking of something I read many years ago in a book called The Musician’s World, which is a collection of excerpts from the correspondence of great composers. One of Richard Wagner’s letters, to poet Mathilde Wesendonck (with whom he was cheating on his first wife, Minna), thanks her for a gift of biscuits. Now, this is in translation, so I’m still fuzzy on what exactly Wagner is describing here, food-wise, but here’s an excerpt of the letter. I like this because it shows how weirdly capricious creative people can be about what enables them to get the work done:

Child, child! The biscuits did help; they suddenly jerked me out of a bad path where I had been stuck for a week, unable to go further. Yesterday my attempts to work were miserably unsuccessful. I was in a shocking humor, and gave it vent in a long letter to Liszt in which I informed him that I had come to the end of my composing days…

When the biscuits arrived, I realized what I had been lacking; the biscuits I had here were much too salty, so they could not give me any sensible ideas; but when I took the sweet ones I had always been accustomed to, and dipped them in milk, everything suddenly fell into place. And so I threw aside the revision and went back to composing, on the story of the woman physician from far away…Heavens, how much can be achieved by the right sort of biscuits! Biscuits! that is the proper remedy for composers when they get stuck–but they must be the right kind.

Richard Wagner was a really strange dude…but I’m lying if I didn’t admit that my own creative juices are not sometimes jump-started by some food or another.

2. Crayon

People my age may remember that the big box of Crayolas (the 64-pack, the one that came with the sharpener in the back of the box) would include a color called “Flesh”, so you could color the people in your pictures with the proper flesh color…making certain specific assumptions, obviously, as to what a “proper” flesh color is.

Well, more recently, this seems to be the way of things now:

Not everything is getting worse!

3. Warmth

It’s late February in Buffalo. Warmth is an envied commodity! My main need now, in terms of warmth, is a pair of gloves that (a) keeps my hands comfortably warm, and (b) allows for easy operation of the buttons and dials on my camera. I haven’t looked too deeply for this sort of thing yet, but I imagine I will sometime next year as the temps start falling again. I have a pair of warm gloves that have fingertips that allow for operation of touchscreens, but they’re not super reliable on that score, and I have another pair of gloves that is super reliable on that score, but they’re not particularly warm. I also have a pair of mitten-gloves: the mitten part is actually a flap that folds back, exposing your fingers if you need access. This is currently my best option. I have seen gloves optimized for photographers where the individual fingertips open up and fold back, allowing for operating camera controls, but I haven’t tried them. We’ll see.

4. Flip

Wilson?

Or the cocktail? A flip is apparently (I’ve never had one) a mixture of a spirit, egg, sugar, and spice. (Add cream and you have a nog.) I don’t know that these are made much these days; I’d have to look them up. But I remember reading about the original flip, in a history book I have that centers rum (God, I love history writers!). The original flip was a mixture of beer, rum, and sugar, and you served it hot after heating it by sticking a red-hot iron in it! Yes, that sounds gross. Yes, I would taste it if offered, but I wouldn’t pay for the pleasure.

5. Slush

This will be the dominant landscape feature of my region starting sometime in the next three or four weeks, and likely remaining so until May. Stupid WNY spring, I hate it.

6. Wing

What else?

These are the wings (well, some of them, I fried up a 5-lb bag containing 40-some pieces of wingy goodness) I made on Super Bowl Sunday. And we don’t even watch the game! But being non-observant doesn’t mean that we can’t enjoy the same kind of yummy not-that-good-for-you food that that day brings to all. No, these aren’t Buffalo-style wings; I don’t make those at home. No particular reason, really, other than the fact that everybody around here makes good Buffalo wings, so why make here what I can get when I go out? Maybe I’ll write a post on how these got made sometime soon…or maybe it’ll end up in video form, I did make some footage. We’ll see. But these were very tasty. The wing is a wonderful part of the bird! (In terms of home wing making, I prefer grilling to deep-frying.)

7. Candle

OK, here’s a random Star Trek word association! There’s an episode from the seventh, and final, season of Star Trek: The Next Generation called “Sub Rosa” in which Dr. Crusher falls in love with a ghost who was her grandmother’s lover, or some such thing. It’s a very strange episode that is sufficiently disliked by fandom to often be cited as a good example of the worst Trek stories. I’ve only seen the episode one time, when it originally aired, and I remember it being a really goofy episode indeed. And because this is Trek and there’s nothing truly supernatural in Trek, the ghost is an alien who lives inside a candle. In the first part of the episode, there’s a Scottish groundskeeper–I swear I am not making this up–who tells Dr. Crusher several times, in warning, and also in a really exaggerated Scottish brogue, “Dinna light that cahhhhn-dle!”

To this day I often think of that guy when I go to light a candle.

8. Cinnamon

Oooooh, I love cinnamon! I just love it. It’s probably my favorite spice after black pepper and maybe garlic, if we’re considering garlic a spice. (Technically garlic isn’t a spice, but in most culinary uses it functions as a spice.) I like to add it to the coffee grounds to add flavor to the brew, or also dose my applesauce (we buy the natural stuff with no added sugar) because apples and cinnamon were clearly invented to go together. One reason we love Pastitsio so much is that it contains cinnamon, and I exceed the recipe’s specified amount by a lot. More recently I’ve started taking cinnamon supplements because I’m told that cinnamon is good for blood sugar, and though I’m not generally a fan of black tea, I’ve recently discovered this stuff, following a recommendation by YouTuber Faith Connally:

I really really REALLY love this tea, and I have actually started drinking a mug of this on weekends after my initial cup of coffee, instead of having two cups of coffee.

Goodness, this one turned more extensive than I expected it to!

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The One and Only True Method of Cooking a Proper Pot of Chili. (a repost)

I’ve shared my method of preparing chili several times in the past, but it’s been more than two years since I reposted it here, so it’s time to bring it around again! As I am preparing this post it’s Sunday afternoon on the 29th of December, and the house is nicely fragrant from the pot of chili I have simmering away in the crockpot. There’s another few hours to go until we dish it up, though. Sigh…anyway, I believe that people should have at least some rudimentary cooking skills and a few dishes they can make without even consulting a cook book. Chili, by this method, is one of mine. I do have to resort to a cookbook or an online recipe if I want to make White Chicken Chili…and also, you’ll see below my ambition to try my hand at Cincinnati Chili. That still hasn’t happened. This winter, I…hope!

With the arrival of cooler weather comes the appetite for hearty crock-pot dishes, and a favorite of ours is good old chili! As I write this, the chili is crockpotting away in the kitchen; as you read this, we’ve already eaten a bit of it. With some cornbread!

So here, as a refresher for those who might need such a thing, is my post from roughly a year ago this time, outlining just how I make chili.

(I’ll have to supplement this with a white-chicken-chili recipe I’ve found, next time I make it. And I also want to do Cincinnati Chili sometime this year, which I love and haven’t made in years.)

And now, the post:

 

I saw this pic on someone’s Instagram story last week and it made me laugh, because when it comes to food, I think I may be part-Southerner, in a lot of ways.

Pot of Chili!
I have no idea whose IG account this is from! If you recognize it, let me know and I’ll credit!

The first pot of chili of the season is a big deal for me! I love chili. I love making it. I love how easy it is to make. I love how versatile chili is in the way you serve it. You can do so much with the leftovers over and above eating re-heated bowls of chili for the next four days. So yes, as a Northerner*, I get it!

Now, I make no claim that my way of making chili is “authentic” or “definitive”. Chili is like pizza or sandwiches: subject to enormous variety in how it’s made, from ingredients to flavor profile to cooking techniques used. I don’t even make one kind of chili! I have a recipe that I recently found to my liking (after trying several over the last few years) for White Chicken Chili, and I also love Cincinnati Chili, which is its own thing entirely, being at its root more of a thick chili-like meat sauce with Middle Eastern flavors enhancing sweetness rather than spiciness.

By way of some food history, here’s an excerpt from what Jeff Smith**, the “Frugal Gourmet”, wrote about chili in his cookbook The Frugal Gourmet Cooks American:

Most Americans think that the wonderful rich, beefy, and beany dish that we call chili came from some other culture. Mexico, perhaps, or Spain. Not so. I am afraid that both Mexico and Spain refuse to have anything to do with what we call good old American chili. One Mexican cookbook even goes so far as to scornfully describe chili as “A detestable food with a false Mexican name sold in the United States from Texas to New York City.” Hey, watch that! The rest of the country loves chili, too!

The original dish is truly American, though I have found that a lot of Americans in different locales think that it was invented in their backyard. After much research (two days) I have come to the following unquestionable decision. Chili was invented in San Antonio, Texas, in 1840. It was a blend of dried beef, beef fat, chili powder and spices, and salt. It was pressed into a brick and it was so potent that it would not spoil quickly. It was then taken by the prospectors to the California gold fields. There it could be reconstituted with water and cooked with beans. It was very much like the pemmican that had been used in earlier times but with spices added….

San Antonio has the distinct privilege in history of laying claim to “Chili Queens”. These ladies had little carts and tables and would appear late in the evening and sell chili and whatnot…I expect more whatnot was sold than chili. They were forced to close down in 1943 due to city health regulations of some sort…mostly sort.

I would have thought that all of Texas would have been involved in wonderful chili. But in 1890, when chili arrived in McKinney, a town just north of Dallas, all blazes broke loose. It seems that some wayward ministers claimed that chili was “the soup of the devil–food as hot as hell’s brimstone.” I wonder if these clergy ever bothered to taste a good pot of chili.

Well, isn’t that to be expected. Show me something, anything, being enjoyed by someone, and I’ll show you some tight-assed cleric who thinks it’s evil or the Devil’s work or some bullshit.

Anyway, I fully expect that most of you have your own method for making chili. I don’t say “recipe”, because I honestly believe that one should have a basic chili method that is so ingrained that the idea of referring to a recipe is simply nonsensical. Here is mine. Now, while I note above that I do make other kinds of chili, this is what I make when I simply say that I’m going to make “a pot of chili”.

This is a dish for the crockpot. We own two; for this I use our smaller one. I have no idea what the size is in terms of quarts. Into the crockpot (spray it first with cooking spray!) go the following:

  • 1 can crushed tomatoes (28oz)
  • 1 can diced tomatoes (15oz)
  • 1 can black beans (rinsed)
  • 1 can dark red kidney beans (rinsed)
  • 1 can “chili” beans in sauce (not rinsed; I like Bush’s)
  • Half (or so) of one bottle of commercial chili sauce (I buy my store brand)
  • Hot sauce. No idea the measurement. I pour a bunch in and taste it. This is how hot sauce should always be used in recipes. If a recipe specifies an amount of hot sauce, ignore it.

I try to buy the “No salt added” versions of those first four canned ingredients, but it’s not a deal-breaker.

Here’s what all this looks like, if you want to see a picture of a crockpot full of cans of stuff that’s red:

Chili, stage one!
Chili stuff. In the crockpot.

Obviously you can use a can of whole tomatoes, if you like your tomatoes in bigger chunks, and obviously you can change up the beans. I like a blend of beans and I like a lot of beans in my chili.

Meanwhile, into the frying pan goes:

  • 1 onion, diced
  • However much garlic seems reasonable, and then double that
  • 1 lb ground meat
  • Several tablespoons chili powder
  • (Sometimes I add 1 bell pepper, diced, if I have it on hand. Today I do not.)

Well…hold on. That all doesn’t go in at once. Heat up the pan, then add a few tablespoons oil and then the aromatic veggies. (Add the oil to the hot pan. As long as we’re talking about the Frugal Gourmet, remember his rule: “Hot pan, cold oil, foods won’t stick.” This actually works.) I like to saute the onion, garlic, and optional bell pepper on a high heat for a minute, and then reduce the heat to medium to sweat the veggies for a few additional minutes before I add in the ground meat.

Now: what ground meat to use? Sure, you can use ground beef or pork or whatever, but I prefer hot (or spicy) pork breakfast sausage (Bob Evans is a fine brand, and I’m not just saying that because The Wife and I both worked for Bob Evans at points in our lives), because you get more flavor this way. Remember Alton Brown’s commandment for stews: Never miss an opportunity to add flavor! Get it in there and start breaking it up with your spatula, splitting the chunks up as you go. Oh, and a minute or so after the meat’s in there and has started browning? Dump in the chili powder. A lot of it. The color of the stuff in the pan should noticeably change.

I generally stop breaking up my meat chunks when they’re about the size of a marble, because I like the meat in my chili to be in large pieces. (I’ve even done chili with stew beef, which is quite tasty. If you do that, flour and brown the meat before anything else, then set aside and re-introduce to the pan after you’ve sweated the aromatics.)

Here’s what the action in the frying pan looks like:

The frying pan part of making chili.
The frying pan part of making chili. And really, why don’t chefs wear overalls? I always wonder this. They’re perfect attire for cooking: protective, lots of pockets for stuff, and you can even hang a towel from the hammer loop.

Then what? Well, it’s obvious: Put the frying pan stuff in the crockpot with the rest of the stuff.

Into the pot!
Into the pot!
Stir! Stir! Stir!
Stir! Stir! Stir! (Actually, you don’t have to get super-aggressive about mixing the stuff up. Just a few gentle folding stirs should do it.)

Stir it up, lid it up, set the pot on low for, I dunno, six or seven hours. I like to crank it to high in the last hour, but that’s just me. The Wife makes fun of me for this (“How can I tell you if I like it? You served me a bowl of molten lava!”), but I’ve seen her send back way too many bowls of soup in restaurants for not being hot enough, and I am not making that mistake. Top it with cheese, or not. Sour cream, or not. Guacamole, or not. Chili is the pizza of stuff-that-comes-in-bowls, when it comes to versatility. (Stay in your lane, pizza! I don’t care if Steve Martin’s first movie The Jerk has a joke about the local “Pizza In A Cup” place.)

I’m writing this post, by the way, while we’re still two hours out from eating, so I don’t have a picture of a bowl of chili yet. Stay tuned. My stuff works great for chili dogs, though! And poured atop a bed of Fritos! And though I’ve never tried it, I always think it would taste good as an omelet filling.

And that’s how I make chili. Believe me, folks: a crockpot filling the house with wonderful aromas, be it chili or something else (the natives are already starting to clamor for Mississippi Roast!), is one of the finer pleasures that the autumnal time of year can give.

* By “Northerner”, do we mean anyone north of the Mason-Dixon line, or more along the lines of the Northeast? Because Buffalo is more a Great Lakes area. That’s a thought for another time, I suppose.

** Yes, I know. But I still own his books, I learned a whole damned lot about cooking from his books and his shows, and he’s been dead for years. I grant that he was a problematic sumbitch and will not litigate it here. (I think that link is toast, unfortunately.)

UPDATE: Since I wrote this last year, a lot of the old Frugal Gourmet shows have turned up on YouTube. This is always an ephemeral thing, but I also can’t entirely fathom anyone making this big of a copyright stink over forty-year-old cooking shows featuring a guy whose career was ended by a ghastly scandal. Here’s the episode on chili. (And yes, I’ve watched a bunch of his old episodes. His episode on Philadelphia has me planning on making pepper pot soup sometime this winter, once I get myself to an actual butcher shop and buy some tripe.)

 

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“I scream, you scream, we all scream for non-fat tofutti rice dreamsicles”

MULDER: Did you bring enough ice cream to share with the rest of the class?
SCULLY: It’s not ice cream… it’s non-fat tofutti rice dreamsicle.
MULDER: Ugh… I bet the air in my mouth tastes better than that.

–“The Unnatural”, THE X-FILES

It’s Monday, so I’m going to do a Sunday Stealing quiz that’s a few weeks old. Hey, sue me. Here we go–the topic is ice cream!

1. What is your favorite flavor of ice cream?

Coffee, and going even more specific, coffee Haagen-Dazs. There are a lot of wonderful coffee ice creams out there, but Haagen-Dazs’s is the best. I don’t know what it is about that particular stuff, but…well, let’s just say that one of the most memorable nights of my college career centered on acquiring some.

2. If you could invent a new flavor of ice cream, what would it be?

Wow. I don’t know if I’m that inventive, but you know what we need? We need a pumpkin ice cream that does not have graham cracker crust shit in it. And I’m sure it exists out there somewhere, but I can never find any locally, and that makes me crazy. The problem is that the graham cracker crap doesn’t really add anything to the ice cream that’s necessary, in terms of flavor or texture–but it does add one thing that in our household is very unwelcome: Gluten. I wish I had a dollar for every wonderful-sounding ice cream flavor that we had to let pass us by because the manufacturer just had to put graham cracker crap in it, thus making it inedible for my celiac wife.

3. Who do you like to eat ice cream with?

The Wife, of course! Also the kid. But we love ice cream. In fact, one of the best little dates you can have is to go for ice cream with your significant other!

4. If you were a flavor of ice cream, what flavor would you be?

Ooof. Maybe a really high-quality vanilla bean. People would assume I’m boring, but then if you got to know me….

5. Does your family eat ice cream regularly, or just for a special treat?

Not as regularly as we used to (seriously, ice cream used to be a nightly thing!), but it’s definitely more than a special treat!

6. What is your favorite treat from the ice cream truck?

Hmmmm! Probably a strawberry crunch bar, or a Creamsicle. (I’m the only member of my family that likes the orange-vanilla thing. I do not understand this.) And of course, since I developed a hard-core love of all things Shoresy, I have adopted a newfound love of “sticks”.

7. Does frozen yogurt taste different than ice cream?

Yes, but I don’t hate it. I also don’t seek it out, if that makes sense.

When I was a kid we had a cat who loved ice cream. Now, most cats like it (and the dogs love it), but this cat was bonkers for ice cream. She’d come running as soon as she heard you clinking your spoon on the bottom of the bowl, but only if you had ice cream. Finishing a bowl of soup or cereal or ramen? Nope. Ice cream? There she was…unless you were having this horrible shit called “ice milk”, which my parents bought once in a while because, I dunno, they thought it was healthier or something. Well, Poppie would have nothing to do with ice milk. Wise cat.

8. If you could make a super sundae, what would it have?

You know, it would depend on my mood, but a good base would be chocolate sauce or hot fudge, some peanuts (salted), and maybe a bit of caramel sauce. I’m not big on piling tons of toppings onto a sundae.

Sliced apples, cinnamon, and caramel sauce? Oh yeah babe.

A scoop of ice cream on a waffle? Now you’re talking.

9. Can ice cream make a bad day better?

Yes, it can. All good food can. At some point during the whole “weight-loss” craze, probably starting in the 80s or 90s, we started preaching against “comfort eating”. And I suppose I understand, on a certain level, but as usual we Americans took this concept and inflated it to our usual Puritanical heights. Moderation is key and one should try to be healthy and diverse in their food choices, but dammit, enjoying something because it tastes good and it makes us happy to eat it is important. (And then there’s all that stuff the Frugal Gourmet used to say about food and memory. I believe all of it.)

10. Have you ever had homemade ice cream?

Probably? But I don’t recall offhand where that might have been. Hmmmm!

11. When is your favorite time to eat ice cream?

It’s good any time! I’ve even had ice cream for breakfast. There’s a restaurant we love in Rochester called Simply Crepes which is a favorite stop of ours for breakfast when we’re staying overnight in that area. They have a menu item that’s a sweet hazelnut crepe with ice cream on it. The Wife ordered it one morning, not realizing it came with ice cream on it. That was a hell of a breakfast!

But I suppose I would really gravitate to late afternoon or early evening, around sunset or just after. There’s an ice cream joint just down the road that we love that is done up like an old-school gas station from the 1930s, and it just feels right.

12. What is the best kind of ice cream you ever had?

See above, the coffee Haagen-Dazs. But also, Ben&Jerry’s had a wonderful flavor called “Scotchy Scotch Scotch”, which they released in conjunction with the Anchorman sequel, because Ron Burgundy loves Scotch, see? It was a butterscotch ice cream with some other stuff in it, and it was fantastic. B&J is notorious for flavors that are gone to memory, sadly enough.

Oh, and the maple ice cream we get at the County Fair each year. That’s wonderful.

13. Do you prefer your ice cream in a cone or in a bowl?

An edible vessel is a thing of wonder. I love cones. We’ll usually have bowls at home, though.

14. Is there such a thing as a bad flavor of ice cream?

Setting aside all the weird “prank” flavors that some places like to cook up for April Fools Day, I am not a big fan of marshmallow in my ice cream, or banana flavors.

15. They say an apple a day keeps the doctor away. What does an ice cream a day do?

If done to excess, it certainly makes the overalls tighter! But it doesn’t seem to have done President Biden any bad favors, so….

16. Is ice cream better when it’s fresh or slightly melted?

Honestly, I’ll take it either way, but if it’s in a cone it should be harder. (Unless we’re talking soft-serve, which is different entirely.)

17, What is the craziest flavor of ice cream you’ve ever seen?

Probably the stuff that had Gummi Bears mixed right in. Not a fan.

 

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Phil!

Last night we went to see Phil Rosenthal at Buffalo State University. If you’re unfamiliar with Phil Rosenthal, you need to watch Somebody Feed Phil on Netflix, and you need to do so now. Right now. Go watch, I’ll wait for you.

[waiting music here]

OK, now that you’ve watched…well, if you went on without watching, Somebody Feed Phil is a travel and food show starring Phil Rosenthal, a comedy writer and television producer who is best known for creating the classic show Everybody Loves Raymond. In the show, Rosenthal travels to a city and, well, eats. He visits beautiful places, eats wonderful food, and meets wonderful people. Rosenthal is an evangelist for the idea of travel and food in terms of making connections between peoples of wildly divergent backgrounds. He is not unlike Anthony Bourdain in his approach to this sort of thing, though Rosenthal is more focused on humor and joy than Bourdain was in his explorations.

The night was a delight, with Rosenthal discussing the origins of Somebody Feed Phil and his life in television and in food in a guided conversation with a Buff State professor as emcee, before he spent the bulk of the evening taking questions from the audience. Most of the questions were good an insightful–especially three by children!–but a few were unfortunately undermined by the fact that several times someone saw their question answered before their turn, and despite their best efforts at rewording things, you could tell it was the same question.

(There were also a couple of strange dudes who used their time at the mic to execute a kind of weird performance art of their own, and Rosenthal was graceful in managing his clear desire to get these two guys away from the mic. That was embarrassing, honestly.)

Did I ask a question? I did not. I don’t know what I would have asked, in all honesty…though today, I think I know, so…maybe next time. Rosenthal deeply believes in travel and food as avenues to broadening horizons and cultivating empathy; what I’d ask is his thoughts on how we overcome the fact that as good as travel is for connecting peoples, it is still something that is reserved for people of certain levels of privilege. I do get frustrated with people around me, though: I know people who go to the exact same part of Florida each and every year, at the same part of the year, and I wonder, “Why not take a year or two off from Florida and go someplace new? Why keep going there and seeing the same shit, over and over again?” (The answer, in a lot of cases, backs into the “privilege” area because they’re going to Florida to visit retired family, which means they have lodging built in. But still…doesn’t the siren song of someplace other than Jacksonville or Orlando make itself heard once in a while?)

The Wife and I made a whole date of things, of course; we went to one of our favorite local eateries, Frank Gourmet Hot Dogs, a little miracle of a place that makes wonderful food that’s almost entirely gluten-free. We had High-Five Fries, which are French fries (and Frank has the best fries in WNY) piled with melted cheese, pickles, slaw, their special fry sauce, and Nashville chicken bites. The Wife really wanted this, so I let her eat most of it. Of course, I didn’t want to go hungry, so I got a hot dog: the Modern Chicago dog, which is one of my favorite things on any menu ever.

When we got to Frank, I briefly thought, “Hey, Phil Rosenthal needs to eat before his show tonight, wouldn’t it be cool if we run into him here!” After all, Frank Gourmet Hot Dogs is well-known in the area. Alas, Rosenthal ate at the West Side Bazaar last night. Maybe on his next visit to Buffalo, though!

 

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Mmmm, noodle soup!

Noodle bowl with MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO art. Note the holes for chopstick storage!

Not really soup, actually, but it’s fun to use a relatively obscure Friends reference to title a post. Anyway, last night I finally got to use the noodle bowl I got for Christmas!

How did we get to almost April without having an Asian noodle dish? I am honestly not sure, but more such dishes are on the menu; I want to start exploring the world of ramen, and not just the sodium-laden stuff you get for $1 a pack at the store. I also need to investigate gluten-free ramen, so we can both use our nifty noodle bowls. (I bought another really cool noodle bowl for The Wife not long ago when The Store was selling a line of Asian dishware.)

Last night wasn’t even supposed to be our first Noodle Bowl Night in the first place! Our original dinner plan was going to be Make-Your-Own-Pizzas. I got a crust for myself, and I picked up several choices of toppings, and it was going to be great! Only, The Wife’s gluten-free crusts turned out to have started collecting mold in the sealed package. This led us to postpone the pizza night thing, and off we went to Asian Star, our favorite local Chinese restaurant. We were both wanting the Pad Thai, though, so that’s what we got: one order of chicken Pad Thai, and one of pork Pad Thai. Out came the new bowls, and lo, it was good! There’s something truly pleasurable about eating an Asian noodle dish from a deep bowl like this. It’s an entirely different experience from eating an Italian pasta dish from a wide and shallow pasta bowl. Not better, necessarily, but different, and still a pleasure.

And if I’m going to use a proper noodle bowl, it’s probably time I start learning to eat noodles with the proper utensils:

Mmmm, noodles! (No soup)

I had to look up “How to eat noodles with chopsticks” to make sure I had the idea right. The key here is to abandon any Western/American notions of table manners that insist that food should be consumed quietly and without any slurping. You don’t use the chopsticks to deliver a nicely-wound packet of noodles to your mouth for silent chewing; you use the chopsticks to guide a messy clump of noodles to your mouth for slurping the rest of the way, and you then use the chopsticks to keep the noodles from falling onto your chin as you lean over the bowl. This is another pleasurable thing to do, and honestly it seems much more sensible to me than some of the other weird table-manners things we do if we’re being all proper and stuff.

Anyway, time to start researching recipes for ramen and suppliers for GF ramen noodles!

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My culinary curiosity has limits….

While discoursing about food over on Threads earlier, I learned that in some Chinese eateries–probably the ones in bigger cities, with proper Chinatowns–you can order a plate of duck tongues.

Yup.

I had no idea this existed. Apparently this is what they look like:

I’m generally of the “I’ll try anything once” camp, but…I can’t tell a lie, these do not look appetizing to me. If someone at the table ordered them and offered me one, I think I’d be like, “Cut a bite off one for me.”

However, I do very much like the look of that dipping sauce! Now that intrigues me.

Moving on….

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From the Books: On Jeff Smith, problematic people, food, and memory (a repost)

This is a repost that first appeared three years ago, on the old blog. I’m reposting it now, because of the season and because I’ve been thinking today, prompted by discussions elsewhere, about problematic people and what to do with their work. I also have the subject of food and memory on my mind, particularly this year, as this will be the first Christmas of my life without my mother’s “cheesy potatoes”, which are basically potatoes au gratin. Yes, I’ve looked around at some recipes, and yes, I’ve found some that sound good that will probably be pretty close. But will they be close enough? Of course not. Mom’s not making them.

As I write this, it’s 4:45pm and the light is fading. The long darkness is settling, and even for someone like me for whom “belief” is deeply difficult, it’s hard not to think of that darkness being pierced by the most unlikely of births….

 Back when I was in college, I decided that I needed to start learning to cook. One of the cornerstones of that effort was to buy all the cookbooks by Jeff Smith, also known by his PBS brand name “The Frugal Gourmet”, and read them cover to cover while also cooking quite a few of the recipes. I learned a hell of a lot about cooking in that way (“Hot wok, cold oil, foods won’t stick!”), and while I think Smith’s notions about food and peacekeeping were a bit out there (one of his last cookbooks has a very odd passage in which he envisions Bill Clinton and Saddam Hussein cooking together), I very much agree with his insights about food and memory. There’s a reason why, when a beloved elder dies, a lot of times those left behind despair over being able to replicate their best dishes. “It’s good,” we say. “I’ve got it pretty close, but there was something she did that I can’t quite get my finger on.”

I still own most of Smith’s output to this day, and a few of his recipes are in my permanent rotation. I have never stopped reading them or even watching some of his shows which have shown up on YouTube, even though…

Sigh.

Smith, it turned out, was really not the kindly pastoral gentleman he portrayed on his shows. I don’t really want to get into that here, but suffice it to say that there were accusations of sexual improprieties in the late 90s that brought his career to a slamming, screeching halt. If you search around the Internet, you can find other testimonials about Smith that are, shall we say, less than flattering. He may have spent many years not even living with his wife (speculations as to why that may have been abound), and he seems to have been an unpleasant fixture in the Seattle food scene toward the end of his life. Again, I don’t want to get into that.

It all comes back as we have discussions in society today, quite repeatedly, about what we do when people we admire, especially the creative folks whose works have touched and shaped us, turn out to not only be very human, but very disappointingly human, at that. JK Rowling turns out to be transphobic to a deeply creepy degree. Isaac Asimov…well, rumors abounded about his conduct at science fiction conventions for years, and they don’t seem to have gone away despite his being dead for nearly thirty years. Marion Zimmer Bradley’s private life was appalling, and Orson Scott Card turns out to be deeply homophobic. Michael Jackson.

We all have to struggle with to what degree our artistic heroes were real people who committed acts ranging from missteps to simply awful deeds. I’ve known this for years, since I obsessively read about music history as a kid. My favorite composer, Hector Berlioz, was an addict and a manipulative stalker weirdo. Robert Schumann obsessively pursued a girl who today would be a minor and basically forced her to give up almost all of her own musical career outside of helping to perform and advance his works. (Clara Schumann was, by all accounts, an amazingly talented woman who might well have become a beloved composer in her own right, had husband Robert not dominated her so completely.) Richard Wagner? Well, as David Dubal writes in The Essential Canon of Classical Music, in reference to Wagner’s “Siegfried Idyll”, a gorgeous piece he wrote as a wedding gift for his wife, “That this man, capable of such emotion, was enraged at Bismarck for not burning Paris to the ground will always tantalize and disturb.”

So…back to Jeff Smith, among whose cookbooks is the one pictured above, a quite wonderful volume of Christmas recipes and ruminations about our modern Christmas. (Well, not quite our modern Christmas! This book is almost thirty years old.) Smith presents an entire Christmas menu, based on those present at the Nativity: dishes for Joseph, for Mary, for the Innkeeper (whom Smith believed has gotten kind of a bum rap over the years) and the tax collector. There are dishes for the Wise Men, for the angels, and even for the donkey (who gets “Straw and Hay”, which is now one of my best pasta dishes). The book has cookie recipes, recipes for mincemeat pie and two kinds of fruitcake–I want to like fruitcake but I can never get there!–and more. He finally presents several complete Christmas dinner menus…and the photographs throughout are wonderfully colorful, as well. There’s a reason I love this cookbook: it’s the kind of cookbook you can thumb through with pleasure, in addition to having good insights on food.

In the middle of the book comes this section, about Christmas traditions. This has been one of my favorite pieces of Christmas writing ever since I bought this book in the 90s, and if it is coming from someone who would later turn out to be quite a lot less than the sum of his parts, well…that’s frankly the case with most art, isn’t it? It’s up to us to decide how much these things bother us, and which things are our personal dealbreakers.

 

Our Family Christmas

From THE FRUGAL GOURMET CELEBRATES CHRISTMAS

 

Our family traditions came about in much the same way as did your family traditions…they just sort of happened.

Patty and I originally made a prime rib of beef for Christmas, and then the boys came along. Somehow Patty got into the roast goose routine, and we enjoyed that for years. As the boys grew, we began to celebrate one of the Christmas menus that follow, and then on Christmas Day I would prepare a full Norwegian smorgasbord with baked beans, potato salad, several different kinds of herring, luncheon meats, special breads, fish balls in cream sauce, cold salmon or lox, lefse, Christmas bread, and, of course, the leftover roast beef or goose from the night before. We still do that.

Last year I did a Swedish meal of pickled pork. The Paulina Market in Chicago makes a Swedish pickled fresh ham that is just terrific. So, now we all have a new favorite dinner. The boys side with the goose, Patty with the roast beef, and I go for the pickled ham. Now what do we do?

One year I suggested to Jason that we make some changes in our Christmas dinners. Try something new. He was quite young at the time, but his response meant that we had established some family traditions that he wanted to maintain. I was so touched by his insight that I wrote the following letter to him, a letter that was circulated by the Roman Catholic parish in Chicago. You will probably recognize your own family in this letter.

My dear Jason,

I probably came very close to violating the meaning of tradition when I suggested that we try something a bit different this year. You are happily bound up in memories of Christmases past, and I expect that I will hear you say, “Dad, can’t we have real dressing? I mean the old kind. After all, it is Christmas!”

You are right, son, it is Christmas. And on the day of the Mass, the feast of Christ, I should not go around breaking family traditions.

But I must consider anew the meaning of the Feast of the Christmas, and I think you and I should think about it together.

The term feast is very much involved with the meaning of memory. We feast because we remember certain events in our lives; sometimes wonderful events, sometimes painful events. That seems to be the way it has been with man- and womankind for a long time.

Christmas for me as a child was very different from our Christmas now. We would travel to greet my father’s family at his mother’s house, your great-grandmother, Nettie Smith. Oh how sad I feel that you did not know this tough old girl. She was a member of the state legislature and she was a left-winger from the start. But in the kitchen she was just terrible. She cooked turkey in the Old Testament style, burning the poor thing on the altar until smoke drifted up to heaven. Then, to the table it would come, though it was so dessicated, so dried out, so tasteless, that I could not understand why someone else in the family did not cook the bird instead. You know why they did not? Because it was job traditionally reserved for Gramma. To this day, when I eat dried-out turkey, I think of her…and how much I miss her.

Christmas morning in my family was wonderful. World War II was in the midst of every event, and candy and sugar were hard to find. One Yule morning my mother, your Grandma Smith, brought us to the table and presented us with marzipan candy shaped like eggs and bacon. My brother, Greg, sister, Judy, and I were amazed that Mom could find such things.

Some of our Christmas traditions are a bit strange, I will admit. But they are our traditions, our family. Each year we carefully unpack the papier-mache manger figures we made together when you and Channing were tiny children. And each year we spend precious time gluing the poor shepherd boy back together. Would it not be much more practical simply to go out and buy a new creche, a new king, a new Christ child? Ah, now, my boy, we are speaking of utter heresy, of violations against the meaning of our past…and I suppose therefore, our future.

A true feast actually has nothing to do with what you eat…but with what you remember. Many families in this nation have no traditions at all, few roots, and thus, few feasts. I am for feasting and celebrating in such a way that we will always remember we are a family. Sometimes I know that it is tough having me for a father, since I always want to add sherry to a gravy that you find perfectly in order already. Or I want to put mushrooms in a dressing, and you claim that they taste like dirt.

So, now, back to the kitchen. We have much to prepare before the star grows bright over the manger and you and I come to the creche, dazed by what we find, but carrying two gravies. One with mushrooms, and one without.

I love you,

Dad

 

Christmas is as much a time of memory as it is of anything else, and food is memory.

 

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Adventures in Hot Booze

The Tom and Jerry is a beloved holiday cocktail in these parts. And I knew nothing about it until just a few years ago.

The drink is basically a kind of boozy eggnog, with extra spices, served hot. It’s really not the kind of drink you can have more than one of–at least I can’t, because a well-made T&J is really rich and decadent and sweet. Drinking one feels like dessert before the entree arrives. At least, that’s what it felt like to me, because I ordered one first when we went to dinner the other night. We were at a place called, believe it or not, The Place. It’s in the city of Buffalo, and the restaurant was a delight.

The Tom and Jerry is an old-school drink. Restaurants that serve it can’t just dish it up in any old mug! You apparently need a white mug with “Tom and Jerry” on it, and some places have their own special sets that they’ve used for years and years. They’ll actually mix up a large bowl of it and dish it up into matching mugs. Here’s a representative example of a Tom and Jerry punchbowl and mug set:

That’s from an eBay auction. No, I did not bid! I wouldn’t need something that large, and in any case, I’d be the only one drinking the T&Js if I were to make them at home. The Wife and The Kid are, ahem, unenthusiastic about the prospect of drinks where eggs are a major ingredient.

And besides, T&Js aren’t exactly a quick drink to make, either. You have to make the batter first, and then some of the batter is put in the mug with booze and hot water. Here’s a typical recipe. Note the ingredients and the steps involved: separate a dozen eggs! Whip the egg whites! Fold with spices and…yeah, I’m not doing all of that. Not for just myself, anyway. I’ve read that you can buy pre-mixed T&J batter in some places, but I’ve never looked for it.

No, for my own home hot rum drink enjoyment, I’ll stick with Hot Buttered Rum (which I will be mixing up probably this weekend). I sure do like a Tom and Jerry, though. And I miss the place I first tried one: a restaurant and bar in an old farmhouse in Concord, NY, called Mary’s Fireside Inn. This wonderful place did not survive the pandemic, sadly (and a debilitating fire probably was even more damaging in that regard). We loved going down there, especially at Christmastime…and not just for the Tom and Jerry’s.

 

 

 

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