wideeyedfunk

Category: Food

Food should only startle in a good way.

  • Packing Beets (Beats?)

    The WideEyedSpouse and I faced each other across a bin full of iced up, dripping beet bundles. Hundreds of other beet bins were slushing around behind me in the warehouse. Always interesting to see what’s on the docket at the food bank.

    We volunteer on Saturday mornings once a month or so. I don’t know why. Maybe because I’m grateful to have food no matter what. Maybe because I think everyone owes society something.

    I’ve repacked macaroni from massive pallet size boxes almost 5 feet tall into small 8 ounce bags. I’ve shifted weird collections of donated dry goods – cereal, cookies, crackers, whatever not-quite-expired off-brand stuff stores donate – into family sized boxes.

    This time, we were repacking beets. I like beets just fine, but let’s be real honest with each other. Beets are not first on anyone’s list.

    While I folded leaves over and shoved bunches of beets into their plastic mesh sacks, I thought about the folks getting the beets. I know they will be healthier for fresh food. Beets are powerhouses.

    Beets can be delicious. Beets also taste kind of like dirt and the root and the leaves require a certain intensity of preparation. With every sack I filled, and I alone filled dozens, maybe a couple of hundred I don’t know, it’s all lost in a red juice, icy water haze, I heard the recipient saying, sort of sadly, “oh boy, beets.”

    Maybe some folks did say that. And I sure put positivity in every sack.

    At the packing table with us, a bunch of kids from a local private high school were packing beets, too. They were quick, and my goodness did they talk. They sounded like a flock of birds, high and quick voices, ceaselessly chattering. It was charming. We learned about their friends, their rooms, their upcoming class trip. So much more and I bet they didn’t think we’d listen.

    They carefully shook all the icy water from the beet leaves – onto each other. The kid who showed up late got the worst of it. Sometimes five bunches of beets got shaken on him. I was collateral damage a lot. Somehow the WideEyedSpouse never got it. He stood clean and tall and inviolate. I was specked with beet sauce.

    Anyway, we packed beets and bounced and nodded along with the radio blaring from across the warehouse. Crunch, crunch – leaves shoved in half. Stuff, stuff – beets pushed into mesh bag. Bounce, bounce – carry empty beet bin over to the trash to dump out remaining ice and leaf waste. Bang! On the dumpster along with the beat to knock it clean.

    The spouse and I sang along, hummed, smiled at each other. The radio was tuned to an oldies station, late 1980s and early 1990s rap. It was wonderful. “I left my wallet in El Segundo. I got to get it. I got, got to get it” we sang together.

    In a lull between the beats (commercial break), I overhead our table mates talking about the music. “This would be waay better if we could pick the music.” I bet you could change the station I thought, but why would you?

     “Man,” the tallish kid with red hair said, “this is such grandpa music.”

    Oh. Sigh.

    Well, maybe I shoved the next bunch of beets into their sack a little harder.

  • The pretentious saudade sandwich.

    “How much bread do we have?”

    I pawed through the rumpled empty-ish but not quite bags of bread on the bottom shelf of the fridge. That’s the anti-mold area. “Four slices.”

    And that’s how it started. Simple enough. Four slices of stale but not yet sticky or fuzzy New York rye with seeds. (Tip: rye bread takes FOR-EVER to get moldy in the fridge. It hardens first. Always edible with some mandibular exercise.) I’m pretty sure the staleness would have been called for if this had been a hipster recipe and not happenstance. Let’s call this the first whiff of pretension. Staled New York Rye.

    The WideEyedSpouse grabbed his refrigerator pickles off the shelf-that-is-not-broken on the fridge door. He made them from scratch with local-grown pickling cucumbers purchased from the youngest son at a family farm stand at the local farmers market. Another pretension aromatic wafting through the kitchen.

    He plopped a few tablespoons of Trader Joe’s something-sickeningly folksy all-natural mayo into a bowl with an assortment of smoked peppery things from the spice cabinet. The mess became home made adobo mayo or some such nonsense.(Do I need to invoke the P-concept?)

    The Spouse crumbed some traditional feta. Come on. Who has a hunk of feta cheese lurking in a slimy brine filled tub in the fridge?

    Then the meat. And here is where we hit the pièce de résistance of annoyingly pretentious sandwich. A month or two ago the Spouse long smoked kind of lot of pork loins out in the back yard. Cherry wood smoked them. He portioned them and froze them so that there are wee logs stacked across from the gin-and-tonic-ice trays, under the space stacked with smoked pulled pork packets.

    Well, he defrosted one of those little smokey logs and sliced it super, tissue thin. The whole downstairs reeked of home-smoked meat.

    He layered the stale bread, adobo mayo, tenderloin, pickles, feta, tenderloin, mayo, bread into a revolting looking stratigraphy of irritatingly foody ingredients. I looked at it sideways. It could not be good – all that different smoked, fermented, aged, whatever all over it…

    I took my wine – Bajo (a Montepulciano d’Abruzzo)  – that should NOT have gone well with pickles, and settled at the kitchen table. I prepared to be brave and sipped the wine.

    And then it was over.

    (I’m beginning to weep a little as I write this…)

    The pretentious sandwich was, probably, the best sandwich I ever had. And friends, it can’t be repeated. The second attempt will be imitation. Imitation at best. The pickles will be different. The bread not as stale. The wine not exactly the same. Is this…the Portuguese saudade I’m feeling deep in my heart area? Over a sandwich? Friends, I think it might be.

    I’m going to go rummage in the fridge.Hopelessly.

  • Independence Day.

    Thanks to the bold minds and brave signers of the Declaration of Independence, and their willingness to see it through we are here now:  equal, free of abuses, repeated injuries,  and usurpations from Government, free of a Government which refuses to pass laws, free from the obstruction of justice, free of taxation without representation…er.

    Ok.

    Well.

    Thanks to the bold minds and etc. etc. were here now: basking in a glorious summer day of picnics and simply joys. The people of the WideEyedHousehold came of age in one of the New Jersey shore towns, working to serve the holidays of one hundred thousand city-folk. Now, we wallow in the quietude and privacy of a day of independence, without obligation.

    Sweet Tibbit the Useless-Little-Black dog waits patiently for more raspberries to ripen on the thicket in back yard. She already harvested all within reach using her front nibble teeth, stretching her neck, balancing her dainty toes on the edges of the raised beds to reach more. Hamish watches, pretty sure this is Not Allowed but not sure enough to administer chastisement.  I rescued enough for yard-raspberry French-toast for breakfast.

    SmokedThe WideEyedSpouse hovers over the bounty of his 16-hour overnight pork shoulder smoke. Ten pounds of darkly barked smoked pork await conversion into pulled pork sandwiches, tacos, omelets, pizzas, stews, Shepherd’s pies, burritos, lettuce wraps, grilled cheeses, soups, stir-frys – who knows what desperate lengths we’ll go to.

    The baby-toe cactus and the Venus-fly-trap feel it too, exploding with vegetation regeneration in mad blooms, and yes, picnicking in the case of the fly-trap. A desiccated gnat carcass is revealed as one trap slowly reopens in the morning sun.

    Plants

    I stand on the freshly scrubbed front porch, watching the flag undulate lazily over the bees tending their lavender in the garden. Main Street is quiet for once. Instead of driving here and there, bustling and hustling, the Good People of Buffalo seem to be taking the day. The park was full this morning of bikes and kids and dogs and golfers. We weaved and bobbed among them all on the park loop until my bike chain broke – creeee-clank – and then we walked with them.

    Flag

    Independence Day.

  • Rain Delay

    We lost the Mini to car fever yesterday. The WideEyedSpouse struggled heroically for months. Yesterday he succumbed. Yesterday, a bright sunny day perfect for painting a century home, we spent in the air-conditioned comfort of a car dealer’s showroom. The Mini stayed there. We left to rearrange the snow shovels in the garage to fit the new WideEyedMobile. “Tomorrow we’ll work on the house all day,” the Spouse said, staring dreamily in at his new ride.

    But. Rain. Guilt-less, feck-less, fancy-free we fled the Homestead with our Niagara Wine Trail Passports (thanks WideEyedMLB!) in hand and turned left and right for an hour or more, heading east and north into rural western New York. We crossed and crisscrossed the Erie Canal. We skirted Lake Ontario. We saw old houses tumbling down, fixing up, and hovering undecided in a state of quasi-repair. Trucks and Chevys from oldy-time hid half under tarps – rusty butt ends sticking out. Kids played in puddles, trailers huddled in clusters on abandoned farm fields. We breathed deeply of non-city air and wallowed in the joy of the moment.

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  • Pulled pork eight ways since Sunday

    The WideEyedSpouse smoked a ten pound pork shoulder over the weekend. I mean that exactly. Over the weekend. It was a 16 hour process, not including the preparation of the rub, the annual smoker cleanse, the pre-smoke meat rest, the post-smoke meat rest, and the actual pulling of the pork. The smoking aromas were intoxicating. Enticing. I told the Spouse that it was like I had traveled to some city with a BBQ reputation and I was in line for some of the good stuff. All day.

    As it turns out, ten pounds of raw pork shoulder equals about seven pounds of smoked pulled pork. For two people.

    We are now two days out from the initial meal of pulled pork sandwiches, Memphis style. I have eaten:

    • Pulled pork on a plate,
    • Pulled pork out of Tupperware,
    • Pulled pork sandwiches, again,
    • Pulled pork snackies for evening peckishness.

    There are half pound pulled pork packets in the freezer for future delights such as pulled pork chili, pulled pork omelets, pulled pork fried rice, pulled pork tacos, pulled pork sandwiches, again.

    And tonight, friends, the pièce de résistance of pulled pork, a pulled pork pizza.

  • The meatballs are in the crockpot.

    The outside world was a rude -6°F this morning. The dogs wasted no time out there during morning walkies. They failed utterly to enjoy the hard, crystal blue sky and sparkling snow. Fair enough. I am appreciating it from my office window.

    Death dealing icicles are dangling from every house for blocks. One neighbor has glaciers forming in the deep vee swales of his roofline, the forward ends are ten-foot long broadswords aiming for earth. Or his car. Because he parks under them.

    SnowYard

    The snow squeaks under feet and tires. The ground isn’t the ground anymore. We’ve all given up trying to clear sidewalks and driveways entirely – we’ve taken to forming a smooth surface of the trampled up, super frozen mass. My boots thunk on these elevated walkways. Miss Tibbit-The-Useless-Little-Black-Dog pees on them and it all disappears. She can’t be the only one. Melting day is going to be awesomely gross. Bleach down the neighborhood gross.

    CrystalsIn desperation I applied Swarovski Crystal tattoos this morning. They are tiny, wee crystals on adhesive. Now my cheek bones sparkle like the snow. I figure that if I disguise myself as a Snow Sprite I’ll be warmer. I won’t mind the frigid temperatures, shocking winds, and massive banks of snow. Two years of this nonsense ran the WideEyedHousehold out of Minnesota a few years ago.

    In further desperation I made meatballs in marinara sauce. A warm, meaty, herbal aroma ought to make us feel secure, warm, and content in these horrible depths of winter. They are in the crockpot now. Sure enough, their happy scent is wafting up from the kitchen. Later the Spouse and I will run out for crusty rolls and provolone cheese. Of course, we are also going to pick up snowshoe gaiters because we are going out into the cold for a hike tomorrow. Probably I should apply more Snow Sprite crystals and eat lots of meatballs in preparation.

  • What happens when one of your top five take-out places gets a liquor license and installs a bar?

    Nothing good and everything wonderful.

    Last weekend I was starving, STARVING after cleaning the house, doing the laundry, walking dogs, and visiting the car show. Sliding gracefully in and out of dreamy luxury sedans (I recommend the Audi A7 for sheer comfort and interior silence) and climbing into wee-electric cars (the Chevy Spark doesn’t feel real) works up an appetite. We stopped at a newer restaurant that’s supposed to be good  – a two hour wait and hairblowingly loud music in the bar. The WideEyedSpouse looked down his nose. “No. Much No.” We tried a BBQ joint. One hour and 15 minutes. Good food but not that good. Drove past our number one sandwich take-out joint. Closed.

    Friends, we were now out of our milieu. We were in downtown Buffalo after dark. Unusual. We were looking for food without a plan. Rare. We weren’t calling for pizza. Shocking. In fact, we had given up on the very notion of take-out. The universe shook and I was cast adrift, hungry, helpless, sad.

    The Mini motored us up Elmwood Avenue past trendy food joints. Nothing looked right. A kale salad at home was, I feared, inevitable. Then we saw it. Joe’s Deli, our number two sandwich take-out option and a top five regular. They’re in my phone. But this was a new location, with neon beer signs and open past 8pm. The Spouse cranked the emergency brake for a mid-traffic bootleg turn and slid into a snowy parking spot less than 20 feet from the door. At least that’s what it felt like. That’s how it should have been.

    It was wonderful. A long list of crafty tap beers for the Spouse, a Dark and Stormy cocktail for me. A short list of bar snacks  – not enough to baffle and just enough to provide multiple tastes. We ordered one of each. Who needs a sandwich when there are Bar Snacks? I smiled over the table at the Spouse. Reasonably decibeled music played. Kids ate with their parents. Everyone looked happy, no one was especially hip. It could not have been better.

    Which is no good. Because now, instead of take out in sweatpants, glasses, and end of the day poor attitude I’ll have to decide – do I want a quick and easy sandwich or do I want to be out in the world, smiling at the Spouse over a table full of snacks…

  • The dogs will not have the last peanut butter cup.

    The vastiness of the cosmos has been replaced by wonderment at the intricacies of mammalian interiors around here lately. The WideEyedLaundry is full of gored up shirts and khakis. My mind, in moments of distraction, traces ropey muscles, rubbery tendons, and white bones rather than the sparkle of faraway stars and dark matter. I imagine muscles flexing, tendons pulling, and mighty bison hooves stomping on dusty ground.

    A buffalo died at the zoo a week or two ago. The strange nature of my job calls on me to transform this creature from fur and flesh to clean, white skeleton. The process involves waterproof shoes, a U-Haul van rental, several students, many scalpels, and protective gloves.

    BisonDefleshing a bison used to be normal. Well, not yesterday normal, not for me. But most of our human past required the ability to make dinner from something that used to be walking around. Personally make dinner, not abstract-grocery-plastic-wrapped-into-a-frying-pan-dinner. Now, it’s a little strange for most people.

    I just can’t help but notice the way things go together in there, under the skin. I can’t help but marvel that it all works. I can’t help but realize that the bison and all of the creatures who passed through the lab before it this past year smell like food. Except the woodchuck. He had been on the side of the road for a bit too long and he smelled greenish. Not grass greenish. Bile greenish.

    Smelling dinner all day, being up to my elbows in what is now biological waste rather than forthcoming meals, makes me want to dine on things that didn’t once have perceptions.

    Yesterday after the bison I was standing in line at Trader Joe’s buying pizza dough, cheese, and beer. (Not, you’ll notice, plastic wrapped meat). My eye fell on the impulse buy shelf at the checkout: “Perfect for the ride home!” the little sign said. I peered closer – ah, a little bag of dark chocolate peanut butter cups. Perfect indeed!

    20141104_191555This evening there was one left. One. I poured myself a glass of wine and shuffled the little guy out of the packet. I don’t know what happened but it flew out of my hand. I heard it ping against the microwave door, knock against the front of the fridge. I saw a gleam of the foil wrapper as it spun to the floor. To the Dog Zone. That peanut butter cup is safe in my belly now, but I’m telling you that there was an ugly period of fending off Miss Tibbit and Hamish and scrambling around to beat them to it. We won’t discuss that further.

    For better or for worse, I know what the inside of a bison looks like. Therefore, I, not the dogs, get the last peanut butter cup.

  • Chickens three ways.

    Chickens. The WideEyedSpouse won’t let me have any. We have the space for a microflock and someone has to eat all of those extra worms in the worm bin. Which, if you recall, was also forbidden by the Spouse. He believes he has some power over the goings on of the WideEyedHousehold. Funny.

    Chickens were in my life three ways today.

    Chicken1The Caribbean chicken spends most days with me. I carried that one from his home rolled in a tube. I took the Caribbean chicken to a frame shop here in Buffalo and I’m pretty sure that when we unrolled the canvas, sunshine and cheer glowed out at us. The framer laughed, couldn’t help herself. Sometimes I worry that I brought only one Caribbean chicken home. There were a dozen or more – we were left in the back room of a little gallery to flip through the canvases and pick which chicken would be moving to Buffalo with us. Do the others miss our little red chicken? Have they moved to homes in Paris, Kansas, Toronto, Heidelberg?

    The next chicken in my life today simultaneously was glorious and wretched. Chicken 2, yeah we’ll call it Chicken 2, was a well-picked over carcass reeking of Myron Mixon’s smoked chicken rub. Except that that happy delicious reek which originated in our backyard smoker was overlain by the stink of rotting meat. And visually, I can’t even begin to explain the nightmare of the appearance of Chicken 2. See, Chicken 2 currently resides in the flesh eating dermestid beetle colony in the lab at the university. We’ve taken to roasting whole chickens around here so that I have food for the little beetle guys when our road kill supply runs low. They ate the Canada Goose and we haven’t skinned the raccoon yet, so bony little carcass Chicken 2 is squatting in the tank under a shroud of moving black beetle carapaces. Looking at it is mesmerizing, like watching the tide but less comfortable than that. You can really feel them creeping around on your own person, a gift that keeps giving for hours of psychological twitches. So that was Chicken 2.

    Probably the last chicken in my day, Chicken 3, arrived just before dinner. I sort of hope this is the last chicken of the day, because otherwise we are moving into weird territory. Chicken 3 is printed on a chair in the Anthropologie catalog. I instantly wanted it. If I can’t HAVE chickens, I should be able to SIT AMONG chickens, right? This makes perfect sense to me and perhaps you can understand why the WideEyedSpouse’s life is made complicated sometimes. Chicken 3 is going to haunt me and there’s a good chance that when I have the new yard sale settee recovered, it’s getting chickens.

    Settee

    Yeah, chickens.

  • Sweet Tibbit gets her money’s worth out of a jelly bean.

    Hamish the Corgi and Miss Tibbit can’t stop thinking about jelly beans.

    DogsI’m looking at Sweet Tibbit now and she’s laying on the window seat gazing into the middle distance. She seems vacuous, blank-eyed, awaiting stimulus. I assure you she is thinking about jelly beans.  Hamish is lounged on the sofa, chin propped and contemplative. He is also thinking about jelly beans.

    Because they are dogs, they both like, or rather, don’t dislike, every color jelly bean. I believe that there is a slight preference for pink, red and purple jelly beans over black, orange, and green. It is hard to tell with Hamish because he crunch-gulps so swiftly that the experience is over by the time his Corgi brain has the opportunity to form an opinion.

    Tibbit (2)Sweet Tibbit, she savors a jelly bean. She snuffles the bean with her strangely mobile little black nose.  If it proves acceptable (and it always does but certain colors are approved more quickly), if acceptable Sweet Tibbit takes the bean with her tiny front nibble teeth and pursed lips. It disappears into her maw. Her catfish-like whiskers twitch as she repositions her prize to her molars. This is a mistake Sweet Tibbit makes every time. Really, every time.

    The bean embeds into Miss Tibbit’s molars.

    We all watch Miss Tibbit make rictus faces and chew with great exaggerated jaw movement. Her awkwardly too-big-for-her-mouth tongue flaps around. She pauses and looks at us. Makes a little test chew. Nope, not done. The rictus, chewing, flapping tongue scene starts again.

    Hamish feels an injustice has been perpetrated. He glances from Sweet Tibbit eating her jelly bean to me to the jelly bean bag. His meaning is quite clear. Miss Tibbit’s jelly bean was obviously better than the cheezy little one he got.

    As I reach into the jelly bean bag for another one, Miss Tibbit abruptly stops chewing and looks pointedly at my hand. She is trying to demonstrate that she is ready for another bean.  I hold my hand in the bag for a moment. Tibbit stares. I wait. I can see her lips trying to pull back into a rictus for more chewing. She is forcibly restraining them. I wait. Ricuts, flap, flap flap of the tongue.

    Miss Tibbit gets more out of a single jelly bean than anyone I have ever seen. Sweet Tibbit, so simple, so sweet.