wideeyedfunk

Category: Food

Food should only startle in a good way.

  • Desperate times, moldy (delicious) measures.

    The time comes in every household when there’s nothing to eat. Just now, right this minute, it came to the WideEyedHousehold. The Mini and I splashed home from the Bug Lab and the Dry Cleaner through slush and muck and I was starving. The Mini wasn’t starving, it has a nice, expensive full tank of premium in the belly. I was STARVING.

    As I steered around interdimensional pot holes, I worked my way through the cupboards and fridge in my head. Chips, gone. Cheezits – a stale two or three rattling in the box. Cookies. Nope. Chocolate. Nope. Ice cream. Nope. Nothing. Sure, I was shoving ingredients out of my way (in the cupboards in my head) but there was nothing to eat. It doesn’t have to make sense. When a person is feeling peckish only certain eats will fix it. None of those eats were in my house.

    I got home, hung up the dry cleaning, said hi to the dogs, and hit the fridge. Nothing. I dangled there in the open door. Milk. Eggs. 57 stale bread ends each in their own little bag. A couple of lumps of dryish, greenish cheese. Ketchup, and three kinds of French mustard. Chutney. Jars of bacon fat. Because Grandma D always saved hers and I figured there must be a reason.

    And, oh, a treasure – one lonely English muffin with a thin skim of bluey-pink along the edge.

    Ahhh, yes. From the fridge dregs of rejected bits and things I forgot about I found something to eat. Toasted slightly moldy English muffin, buttered. Topped, while still warm from the toaster mind you, with sweet English cheddar with the green parts scraped off and a dollop of precious green tomato chutney we canned last fall. Crunchy. Sweet. Salty. Greasy. All the (important) food groups represented.

    I’m just swallowing the last bite, well, Miss T and Hamish are actually having the very last bites, and I’m here to tell you – aside from the faint whiff of decay and old fridge, my desperation eats were really good. I want more. I wonder if that rock hard butt end of a sourdough batard would toast well? The dogs and I are going to go check.

  • Peckish.

    And then I came across the WideEyedSpouse,
    standing in the dark kitchen,
    eating pickles.

    I left him to it.

  • The House Brew

    Brew pubs offer finely crafted, house made ales and lagers,– more or less hoppy, light or dark, crisp, earthy, or silky smooth. Sometimes a drinking establishment of quality and personality will specially offer a select microbrewery batch, maybe something nutty in the fall, something grassy and bright in the spring. These pints are spendier than the general population beers, they demand the respect of being savored as the goal, rather than acting as the plastic-bottle-bourbon shot chaser.

    The point is, the house beer is generally acknowledged to be something special. Something a brewmaster synergized effort, experience, and science to create. A house brew is a signature accomplishment perhaps, and stands as a signal of the class and quality of the establishment. Even having a house brew evokes the sense that a business has catalyzed a personality from the mystique of the brew and the patrons who love it.

    BigFlatMyDeskMy encounter with Big Flats 1901 Premium Beer was laid on such foundational expectations. Big Flats, brewed in both La Crosse WI and Rochester NY, claims a crisp, fresh flavor with a clean finish, suggesting perhaps a bare hint of mouth puckering and only mild after taste. Big Flats the name is meant to prompt nostalgic memories of early settler times when supplies came via river boat on the mighty tributaries of New York State (BigFlats1901.com). It troubles me only a little that the same rivers today commonly are festering cesspools of agricultural runoff and sewage, not anything you might want to imagine in your house beer, but nevermind, this is nostalgia not harsh reality.

    Big Flats 1901 Premium Beer is the house brew of Walgreens Drugstore. And at $3.33 per six pack, Big Flats is by no means the cheapest beer in the house. I know, who knew Walgreens would make such a significant investment in the general well-being of their customers? Laden with our half price Christmas wrapping paper and clearance rack razors, the WideEyedSpouse and I stood awed and indecisive next to the towering stack of Big Flats case packs. The decision was up to the Spouse, he is our resident beer drinker and the responsibility for tasting Big Flats would lie in his belly.

    DeskBeer“I’m having it,” he said, and added a six pack to his armload of drugstore swag. Now the catalyzed personality of a hard-used Buffalo Walgreens and all who patronize that established join our WideEyedHousehold. I don’t think it’s doing us any harm. Ask the Spouse tomorrow.

  • Curse Not the Green Tomatoes, Make Chutney.

    The Fedco seeds Cosmonaut tomato variety yielded fine, heavy fruits in my garden this summer. They failed to ripen. I may have had words about that in past times. I take them all back.

    The knife wielding WideEyedSpouse and I picked, washed, chopped pounds of green tomatoes to make six pints of chutney, six pints of green tomato gold. Five are left. Yesterday, on hearing that I had chutney stored in the basement, WidedEyedFriend W made unsubtle overtures toward getting some of it. I pretended not to understand. There are only five pints left to last an entire year. I am already planning a 2014 green tomato garden.

    I combined two recipes (1, 2) I found on other sites to make my own concoction based on what they said and what I had around:

    • 12 cups seeded, cored, and diced green tomatoes, 5-7 pounds
    • 1 cup raisins (paid no attention to light, dark, whatever)
    • 1 cup Craisins
    • 2 cups mixed chopped onions, shallots, 2 garlic cloves (in exponentially decreasing volume order)
    • 3 cups brown sugar (paid no attention to light, dark, used whatever dregs I had around)
    • 2 teaspoons salt (fine-ground French sea salt, Penzeys Spices)
    • 2 ½ cups cider vinegar (cheap, store brand that I keep in gallons for cleaning)
    • 2 tablespoons pickling spice (grocery store bought)
    • 2 teaspoons chili powder (Penzey Spices)
    • 2 generous tablespoons of old, crusty dried, sugared ginger lurking in the back of the cupboard

    We started with big, green, healthy but unripe tomatoes.clean tomatoes

    The WideEyedSpouse cored and seeded the tomatoes because of the sheer volume of seeds and interior bits that would have possibly impacted the texture and taste.green tomato chopped

    All of the ingredients went into the non-reactive Le Creuset oval dutch oven. Once they boiled, I set them to simmer for an hour and a half while I heated the waterbath and sterilized the pint jars in the boiling water. The lids boiled in a smaller sauce pan for 15 minutes (or so, I sort of forgot about them for a while).boilingchutney

    The chutney was dark and thicker but still liquidy when we spooned it into the jars. The stuff is napalm so if you do this, be careful. I wore a nice new pair of thick kitchen scrubbing gloves so I could handle the hot stuff. We left about ¼ inch of headroom, wiped the extra yuck off and hand tightened the lids down with the bands. The chutney jars boiled away for 15 minutes or so with an inch or more above their lids in our giant scary pot of boiling water. boiling chutney

    Now, except for the one I couldn’t resist opening and eating in the space of a week (squandered!), they are resting quietly on a dark shelf in a cool root cellar part of my basement. I look at them most days. I imagine the chutney on pork chops, on egg and cheese sandwiches, on cream cheese toast…if I ration it, if I guard it from friends, there will be one pint every two months. I need more green tomatoes.FinishedChutney

  • Green tomatoes all over the place.

    Hoist with my own petard. That’s my tomato situation. Although to be fair and correct I wasn’t intending to harm anyone with my tomatoes. Ok, I might maybe have considered throwing the nibbled ones at squirrels and urban skunks so maybe I can use the petard thing. You know, I’m just going to.

    The healthy tomato garden.
    The healthy tomato garden.

    Last summer I planted five heirloom tomato plants: the garden peach and some kind of giant lumpy variety. They grew fast, blossomed well, and produced just a few incredibly aromatic, pleasantly textured tomatoes. The WideEyedSpouse and I made an event of each one because they were so few.

    This summer I decided on a tomato blitz. I tortured myself with descriptions of heirloom and organic varieties in the Fedco catalog. I agonized over which seeds to buy. I settled on a cherry variety, a dense purpley Cosmonaut, and the succulent yellow Garden Peach. I nurtured those seedlings under a grow light in my dressing room for months. It was inconvenient, sure, but we all dreamed of a tomato bounty. Baskets full. Frozen. Sauced. Canned. Salsaed tomatoes.

    Green cosmonauts.
    Green cosmonauts.

    Look at your calendar. It is September. My 15 lush, health tomato plants carry hundreds of turgid, deeply green tomatoes. I counted them.

    If only they were yellow, purple, and red as they are meant to be. Cursed cold Buffalo summer nights. Cursed green tomatoes. Next year I am shoving a couple of store bought Big Boys in the ground and calling it good.

    A sorry week's harvest.
    A sorry week’s harvest.

  • 18 years together | 4,100 miles apart

    “It’s disgustingly hot and humid,” the WideEyedSpouse tells me. I can hear the barest hint of dogs panting in the background of the call. “Huh,” I tuck my cold feet under me and look out the wide window into a chill, gloomy, rainy fall afternoon. “I’m putting the a/c unit back in the window,” he says and I shiver.

    Yesterday was our 18th wedding anniversary and we were almost as far away from each other as we can be while remaining in the U.S. We weren’t the farthest apart we’ve ever been on an anniversary. That was in 1998 when I was living in a Eureka BombShelter tent on the north shore of Attu Island and he was in Madison, Wisconsin.

    The WideEyedSpouse celebrated our anniversary by walking the dogs in the park. As their gift to him, Hamish and Miss Tibbit produced a record setting 11 dookies in one day between the two of them. “Congratulations Boss!” they might have been thinking, “Many happy years to come!”

    ForksI celebrated by huddling at my makeshift desk, crafting careful language into formal documents. In a morning break from the labors, WideEyedFriend D. and I poked at the ever-entertaining frozen pig heads, examined the nori packages, and flirted with new teapots at New Sagaya grocery. WideEyedFriend D. selected a package of the smallest item at the store for closer examination and the bottom fell out. Ten thousand tiny forks scattered at our feet. We stood quietly watching them for a bit. I thought they would go away on their own. They did not.

    My anniversary lunch was miso soup, house salad, and bacon wrapped enoki on a skewer at Yakitori. Crunchy salty fat around fibrous chew. Interesting, and besides, after 18 years I figured I should shake things up a bit.

    5guysFor anniversary dinner, WideEyedSpouse had a Five Guys burger. He sent me a picture. I went to Aladdin’s with Friend D. to feast on perfectly prepared halibut followed by baklava.

    It was a relaxed and happy 18th anniversary. 4100 miles apart.

  • The lunch that wasn’t.

    I sat in the feeble 1970s conference room chair at the lab table in the front of the room yesterday late morning. I was managing the start of six lab projects involving data from Alaska to Western New York, spanning the past 3,000 years. Different student research groups and I trotted from lab to museum to department office to other lab to other lab – up and down steps, across streets, through countless locked doors.

    And I was starving. Empty bellied, weird head buzzing weakness, tunnel-visioned hungry.

    The WideEyedSpouse was home from work and I sent him an email, saying I wished I were there. He replied: “I wish you were home too. Then you could have some of my fried egg, fried ham and cheese sandwich!” – kindly attaching a picture.Full

    I leaned in close to the laptop. I could feel the crusty toast, taste the salty ham. I think I drooled on the keyboard. Bing, another email from the WideEyedSpouse –  “All gone,” it said, with an image attached.

    Empty

    I wept.

     

  • Australian Shiraz grapes make my teeth purple.

    Italian Sangiovese grapes do not.

    WineGlass

    I’ll let you wonder about the testing program that was necessary to come to this conclusion.

    Perhaps you should take a moment to cast your mind over the many other red wines that may, or may not, turn my teeth purple.  I’ll test those too if you insist.

    I also suggest that you think about the kind of week a person might be having to make such testing seem like a Good Idea.

    Wine1

  • My school bag smelled like the 1970s. Heh?

    It was entirely accidental.

    The WideEyedSpouse and I have been streaming the old Julia Childs off of the PBS website. They are rasty and sketchy and black and white. And in them, Julia wastes nothing. She made a French onion soup and tossed in the butts of the onions. I was aghast. I thought those were for the worm bin.

    Another time she made a French tart crust. Pie crust to you and me, but she used a different technique, evidently a French one. What really caught my eye and stayed with me all through the week and into my errand run to Target, was her masterful use and reuse of waxed paper.

    She made the crust dough and then wrapped it in waxed paper to chill in the fridge before rolling it out. Apparently this gives the gluten some time to relax. Whatever. Because it was t.v. and none of us had then or have now the time to sit around and chat with Julia over coffee while we waited for the dough to chill (unfortunate), she grabbed an already prepared and chilled dough mass out of the fridge.

    It was half-ass wrapped in the wrinkliest mess of waxed paper I’ve even seen. Even Julia looked unnerved by it. She patted the mass once or twice as if that would smooth out the situation. That wax paper sheet looked like it had been wrapping pie dough lumps for a decade. And I thought, yeah, waxed paper.

    So I bought some.

    Sandwich1And I made a pbj to take to school for lunch and wrapped it in the waxed paper like a little present. Ends folded in on themselves all tidy like, clean creases. That pbj became a sandwich packet with dignity.

    The waxed paper sandwich packet sat in my bag all morning during lab. The students diligently studied fish bones all around me and I prepared my lecture on bird bones while wafts of 1970s sandwich reek crossed my nose for hours.

    Sandwich2At first I didn’t know why it was comforting or why I thought it was 1970s sandwich reek. I just kept sniffing near my bag and smiling. I clackety clacked away on my laptop and in a rush of odd recognition, I remembered that when I was a kid the WideEyedMom packed our school sandwiches in waxed paper bags. The bags had a little gusset and were just big enough to fold over the bread slices twice. The waxy pbj aroma wafted out of my kiddie lift up desk all morning, taunting me with lunch and recess ideas every time I went for a pencil.

    My school bag reeked of the 1970s. And it was wonderful.

  • It simply isn’t possible to give thanks without cranberry sauce. And stuffing.

    WideEyedSpouse and I sat in the Mini in the only remaining spot at the far, littered end of the suburban Wegman’s supergrocery last evening. The teeming swarm at the city Weg’s where we usually shopped had been too scary to brave. I figured suburban families would already have their feasting supplies and we’d be ok out here in the hinterlands. I watched a grannie yank the last grocery cart away from a hapless young man a few car lengths away. I had a bad feeling I had miscalculated terribly.

    The Spouse held up the list. I held up the grocery sack and the tire iron. We bumped fists and rolled out of the Mini in good formation. Evaporated milk, stuffing mix, jellied cranberry sauce -in-the-can, Reddi-whip, condensed mushroom soup; the critical essentials of a classic Thanksgiving. The rest of the ingredients were already at home, but without these final pieces it would just be a nice dinner, not THANKSGIVING dinner. Problem was, the ten thousand pushing into Weg’s up ahead were after the exact same items.

    We squeezed into the store and passed the fresh vegetable section, thank god we didn’t need celery. Two men were down over there, their wives standing on their bodies to reach the celery remaining on the highest shelf. I saw a roiling mass of women at an endcap about 5 meters away. I could see cans behind grabbing hands and pushing bodies so it was soup, cranberry sauce, or evaporated milk.

    I’ve got your back, the Spouse said in my ear as I handed him the grocery sack and tested my grip on the tire iron. I plunged in, yelling excuse me’s and ducking under arms. I saw stars when I took an elbow to the eye, and blacked out for a moment when a spikey boot heel drilled my left foot. I had no time to think, but I realized this situation was too serious for manners. I shoved the tire iron through a gap in the bodies and propped it on a shelf edge making a wall for me to squeeze in against. Something battered my shins, and I looked down. A toddler was down there sent in low, his mom pushing his diapered bottom to get him closer to the goods. I planted my foot in front of him, leaned on my tire iron prop, and grabbed a can of soup. I lofted it high and in my peripheral vision watched the Spouse’s long arms snag it. While he fought off scavengers in the back I snared a can of evaporated milk from a lower shelf and tucked out. I handed the can to the Spouse for safekeeping in the grocery sack.

    We trotted quicktime past the dairy cases along the back of the store. The Spouse used his height to reach into the open door above a dithering shopper. He grabbed the first can of whipped cream he could get. I checked it as we jogged up the baking aisle. Fat free. Huh. Too bad. I looked along our back trail and considered revisiting dairy to try again. Reading my mind, the Spouse took the whipped cream and shoved it in the sack.

    My foot skidded in something on the floor near the end of the aisle. It was red – cranberry sauce, we’re close I told the Spouse, pointing to the smear. He looked past me and paled. Blood, he said. I turned my head in time to see a fit woman in a Barbour jacket toss a hank of hair and scalp to the floor next to an unconscious woman in a suit. She grabbed one of the final bags of stuffing mix and a can of cranberry sauce. I wanted to send the Spouse into the hole she made in the crowd before it closed and we lost the chance at the supplies but he wouldn’t go. It’s all women, he argued, I can’t go in there hurting women, I’ll be arrested. He looked at the crowd. Besides, they’re scary.

    Fine. I bounced on my toes and limbered my tire iron arm. Best to be quick, I thought, in and out. I grabbed the back of the True Religion jeans in front of me and yanked upward, hard. The woman in them shrieked and fell back, pulling at her wedgie. I rapped a khaki-clad knee lightly with the tire iron and that suburban mom went down whimpering. I stepped over her and the shelving was almost in reach. I pushed off the ground and jumped high, coming down with my arms on the shoulders of two wiry yoginis. They should have collapsed. They didn’t. They were clearly far stronger than me and I didn’t want to get into a wrestling match with these rubber bands disguised as affluent and good-looking suburban moms. I backed off and applied the tire iron: ribs on the right, ribs on the left. Hah! Both went down! – yoga doesn’t make ribs stronger. I reached for the last bag of stuffing mix with my right hand and with my left cracked the tire iron down on the wrist of a husband who had been brave enough or stupid enough to battle women for a can of cranberry sauce on Thanksgiving Eve. He screamed like a little girl and dropped the can. I caught it on its way to the linoleum floor.

    I crouched low and backed out of the fray, feeling the Spouse pulling me along by my belt. I shoved the tire iron into my pants and we stepped out into the main front aisle, smiling and walking slow – acting normal so that the howling crowd didn’t sense the value of the swag in our grocery sack. We weaved through a jam of laden carts and I worried about folks buying 25 pound frozen turkeys only hours before they needed to be cooked to safe temperatures. Spouse grabbed a sack of frozen French cut green beans from one of the carts and held it to my eye. It was starting to swell shut and that along with my injured foot made us vulnerable in the crowd.

    We cleared check out in only 17 minutes because Weg’s had an armed officer enforcing the 10 items or less rule in the last two checkout lanes. The Spouse zipped the grocery sack inside his coat and we headed for the Mini, frowning with deep concern. These expressions were camouflage. Thousands of hostesses still flocked the entrance to the store and we had the last of two of the essential Thanksgiving ingredients. We never would have made it to the car if we had appeared triumphant and relaxed.

    The Spouse put the Mini in Sport Mode and we fled home. Now, on Thanksgiving, my eye is less swollen, the pie is in the oven, and dinner is scheduled for 5 o’clock this evening. I am smiling across the room at the WideEyedSpouse and thinking grateful thoughts about my world. Happy Thanksgiving friends. May you have much for which to be thankful.