A Literary Feast

Henry Dreams of Barbecue (A Brooklyn Day)

Posted on January 21st, 2013

I am the Brooklyn guy. Just ask my friends. If I don’t have to leave Brooklyn, good luck getting me into Manhattan. Sometimes, I’ll visit friends in Queens and try a new restaurant there, but since life often requires New Yorkers to go into “The City” for business, school, and birthdays, I get more than my fill of that borough on those occasions. Besides, in a classic case of “anything you can do, I can do better,” Brooklyn has stuck its tongue out at its more densely populated neighbor to the west – and proven herself to be more than a mere braggart. Restaurants, museums, live music of every kind, huge parks – Brooklyn has all of that, plus pubs where the bartender will actually remember your name.

 

You would think that, as someone who is so attached to the borough where he resides, I would have tried every restaurant by now. But Brooklyn is huge – it’s as big as the entirety of Helsinki. And given that one needs to work, keep up a household, and nurture relationships at one’s favorite haunts that eventually earn a patron the title of a regular, there isn’t enough time, energy, or money to try every place that opens.

 

So here is my resolution for 2013: I will visit a handful of restaurants where I’ve always wanted to dine, but for some reason, despite their popularity, have missed out on thus far. This resolution can be broken down into a list of mini-resolutions, where each one represents a restaurant. One thing you’ll notice is that many of these are barbecue places. I have no idea why I’ve waited to visit them this long. Maybe it’s the New York obsession with healthy eating. Maybe it’s the fact that they can get pricey. Maybe it’s the crowds swarming these eateries, and me so wait-averse. (What is this, Manhattan?!) Either way, I plan to cut the excuses this year and finally get my fill of delicious barbecue (and/or other culinary pleasures) at the following joints.

 

Vinegar Hill House– “This place is just full of Henrys. A bunch of bearded guys in beanies and plaid shirts, kinda sitting around, going ‘Hey. How are ya?’” That’s how one friend described this place to me, while another one nodded in agreement. The restaurant is located in the strange little Vinegar Hill neighborhood behind the hulking warehouses of DUMBO, flanked by electrical and sewage treatment facilities, consisting of everything from charming three-story brick buildings to modern condos to – I kid you not – gated mansions. Vinegar Hill House was the first restaurant to serve the tiny nabe. Its modern rustic dining room is where things like chicken liver mousse, wild boar shank, maple and mustard glazed brussels sprouts, and cocktails with names like Dixie Sling and Any Major Dude Will Tell You are served. This may not be a barbecue joint, but it’s at the top of my resolutions list.

 

Pork Slope– The name gives away a lot: this is a Park Slope bar that serves comfort bar food and various American whiskeys. The bar gets pretty crowded, so it’s advisable to go early. The food menu is basic and reliable: buffalo and bbq wings, brisket sandwich, bbq ribs, grilled cheese, and other staples. The whiskey selection does not disappoint. (Order a Pappy Van Winkle, just to hear yourself say it.) Another plus: this is one of the Talde/Massoni/Bush restaurant super team babies. (More on that later.)

 

Fette Sau– The line at this popular barbecue joint is usually long, and much of the seating is communal (never my favorite kind of dinner setup), so there’s a reason I haven’t gotten to it yet. I would like to change that. There is plenty of craft beer and American whiskey to be had, but it’s the meat, proudly sourced from small farms and dry rubbed (they encourage the clientele not to apply any sauce) that’s the main attraction.

 

Pok Pok NY– Ms. Sarah Kanabay, our editor-in-chief herself, wrote me an email when she found out that this offshoot of a Portland, OR, restaurant opened last year. Like its parent, the Brooklyn leg is committed to serving the most authentic kind of Southeast Asian (specifically, Thai) cuisine. That means no Pad Thai, but with dishes like wild prawns baked in a clay pot with pork belly and noodle, I don’t think the Big Mac of Americanized Thai food will be missed. No reservations are accepted, so once again, come early.

 

I started writing this piece in early January. The retailers have barely had time to strap Russell Stover’s definition of “candy” to unsuspecting teddy bears in preparation for the inevitable Valentine’s Day, but by the time this article was due, I was able to cross the two following entries off the list. So far so good on the resolutions!

 

Fletcher’s Brooklyn Barbecue– This relative newcomer to the Brooklyn barbecue scene is a formidable contender. Located on a quickly gentrifying stretch of Gowanus, the restaurant smokes its fare over maple and red oak, and sources its high quality organic meats from local farm collectives. The seating is communal, but if you get there early, you might snag a seat by the “bar,” affording the view of the kitchen, wherein amazing things happen. The duck and hot links are all flavor, but the real reasons to come here are burnt ends, lean brisket, and honey barbecue pork steak. The beer selection is good, but I washed down my meal with Boylan’s ginger ale, a guilty pleasure. Disobeying my gluttonous impulses and not going for seconds was the hard part.

 

Talde– This Asian/American bistro and bar is owned and run by the Pork Slope team (Dale Talde is the chef), and it took a visit from a couple of Finnish friends for me to finally visit this Park Slope staple. Casual environment and friendly staff are a nice supplement to the relatively small but expertly prepared menu. Pretzel pork and chive dumplings make for a great starter, and both smoked char pork shoulder and wok charred black angus ribeye (separated from the bone for easy consumption and shareability) are a must. On the drinks front, Nine Roses, a cocktail made with bourbon of the same name, was so good that I had two.

 

Bonus resolution: This one has zero to do with barbecue, or restaurants. This one has to do with baking. Throughout 2012, I’ve baked many cookies and muffins – from a box. Trader Joe’s, how easy you make it! Everything is already there for you; all you have to do is add a thing or two, mix it all vigorously, pop the whole deal in the oven, and check back in 20 minutes. Anyone – even me – can be a generically decent “baker.” But this year, I will bow my head to laziness no more. I will bake a batch of cookies, and one of muffins, from scratch. (Quick, get the women and children out of here.) Maybe they’ll come out tasting like Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Vomit; maybe not even the hobos, or my drunk, munchie-starved friends will take more than one bite before spitting the masterpiece back in my face; but I will make the time, and the attempt. Stay tuned.

 

Categories: Uncategorized

10 Justifications for Eating Out: A List of New Year’s Anti-Resolutions

Posted on January 21st, 2013

The new year is, for most, a time of self-improvement. It’s a time to break old patterns and cast away faults. A time to grow and change. But that’s never really been my style. I don’t jog, I don’t diet, I sometimes spend entire Saturday mornings watching 90210 reruns and…I’m okay with that.

I often say that nothing tastes better than a plate of food cooked by someone else and, by god, we all know it’s the truth. I unapologetically love restaurant meals — from grubby diners to fancy cafes. But even I hear that inner neurotic voice, the one that whispers: A good homesteader would cook and bake from scratch, and not lust after that incredible lentil soup from that little cafe. Why don’t you just learn to make it yourself?

So my gift to you (my fellow anti-resolutionites) is this: ten ways to continue enjoying the pure pleasure of a hot meal away from home –conscience be damned.

10
Bargaining: Before taking the turn to your favorite tea roll place, you say to your companion, “Okay, we probably shouldn’t… but we’ll eat at home for the rest of the month. I swear.” Easy to promise, hard to execute.

9
Reward for being an adult: Once you’re out of elementary school, no one’s going to reward you for finishing your work or getting somewhere on time. What better way to say, “good job, champ” than an order of Roasted Pumpkin Ravioli with fried sage? It sure kicks the pants of a gold star.

8
Lunch the next day: Almost anything is justifiable if you can squeeze lunch out of the leftovers the next day. The main risk is losing yourself in the dark romanticism of the cafe and eating the whole entree. Best to make a line of demarcation right down the center and stick to the plan (no nibbling at the edges).

7
Crisis Coping: This one’s for the big stuff, when nothing material seems to matter much: breakups, disappointments, grief. See also, It’s Better Than Alcohol

6
It’s Better Than Alcohol: Useful for all manner of minor vices. Sub in cigarettes if you’re a heavy drinker. Sub in meth if you’re a smoker. I mean, aren’t all these things WAY worse than the occasional plate of hand-cut french fries with maple mayonnaise?

5
It’s Cheaper Than Therapy: For those not currently seeing a shrink, this versatile excuse can be applied to almost anything. Hey, if it keeps you sane….

4
Opportunity Cost: Think of all the things you could do with the extra hour or more of cooking/washing up time you bypass with a simple call to a pizza delivery joint. And time is money, isn’t it?

3
Supporting the small business: If you don’t keep this locally owned doughnut shop in business, who will?

2
General exhaustion: Usually stated as, “There’s no way I’m cooking anything tonight.”

1
Celebration: Because happiness is fleeting, and you should enjoy it.

Categories: Uncategorized

Back In The U.S. (peanut butter edition)

Posted on January 21st, 2013

Ten things I resolve to stop taking for granted once I get back to the United States, food and beverage edition:
  1.  Peanut butter
  2. Drinkable tap water
  3. Safely consumable lettuce
  4. Peanut butter
  5. Good coffee (and I’m not even being picky here – by “good,” I mean “not instant”)
  6. Yogurt that isn’t pourable
  7. Bread with some sort of discernibly crust-like crust
  8. Bread of colors other than white (namely: various shades of brown)
  9. Vegetables that haven’t been frozen before appearing on my plate
  10. PEANUT BUTTER
Categories: Uncategorized

Burnt Ends

Posted on January 3rd, 2013

New Year’s Eve celebrations in Orange, Massachusetts, involve a long parade of giant puppets through the center of town.  A farm truck  tows revelers playing Thin Lizzy loudly, and your shirt feels sleeveless, spiritually.  Your sideburns ghost down over your cheeks, regardless of your gender.  A friend has manned the sweaty interior of the broad-assed mayoral figurine in prior years–this year, he’s elsewhere, celebrating with others.  The fog grows in the streets.

But the evening really begins in a parking lot, a church parking lot, where you eat mediocre Chinese food out of a bag in the front seat of a Honda Fit, double parked behind a minivan.  The New Year tastes like MSG.  The New Year is already giving you heartburn.  The New Year promises further gaseous outpourings, at inopportune moments.  The New Year is like that, sometimes.

The church, when you go in, smells like warm wax and peppermint and sweater must.  The light has gone yellow, and the night is already an aged photograph of itself.  Other people’s parents begin to fill the benches.  The New Year has a high clear voice, and a guitar, and you will forgive it for a long interlude where it forgets to sing the songs you hummed in a dark backseat on the way home from countless family outings, and sings meandering love songs in Portuguese instead.  The New Year has a way of breaking promises.

The New Year is fireworks over a midnight river.  And your cold feet, swimming around in someone else’s boots.  The next morning, the New Year will be a fever.  The first coming days are flavored with menthol.

And the months keep coming, waxing and waning in expectation, fattening and lying fallow in turn.  The fields fill and empty.  The foam dries on the inside of the pint glass, and the furnaces churn in their cyclical way through the secret hours of the night.  The next New Year flickers into view, and it is so many missed steps down the long staircase.  Two pots of chili, sitting squat on the spattered stove in the dim kitchen, fat with their own importance, leaking steam the way the dog’s lungs do into all of the rooms.  The New Year piles cheeses onto the dining table.  Red waxed, blue ashed, firm-rinded.  The New Year leaves its boots on the porch.  And blows smoke into your hair.

The New Year puts the hair of the dog into your glass, and a pickle in your cold hands, and demands that you dance in the kitchen.  Your feet recall their motionless pew from eleven months ago, and their gestures are sausage-clumsy across the tiles.

The New Year asks, in a dark hallway, if you are happy.  From somewhere behind the curtains, you hear its clear, high voice from last winter, singing.

It wants you to know that it played real good, for free.

 

Categories: Uncategorized

Without A Title

Posted on January 3rd, 2013

A gibbous smile on

Dimpled skin

Alight over fallow field

Existence on tenterhooks

As silhouette of subsequent orb

For without celestial sol(stice)

Tis’

But a visage of joy.

 

For two spheres tenable and unbound

Pass in night

Intrinsically juxtaposed

Obstinate and flippant

As the aubergines or butterflies.

 

Categories: Uncategorized

The Christmas Pudding

Posted on January 3rd, 2013

A thin veil of fear and mystery, like the snowy fog that half hides slick black tree trunks at the dark end of December, clings to the very mention of Christmas pudding. It rattles like a strange and bony relic of a past half forgotten, one of hams pierced a thousand times with the blunt brown tips of whole cloves, sideboards sagging with tawny port, Armagnac and Amontillado in bottles that glisten like crown jewels or the pride of a dragon’s hoard, and, in the kitchen, a sleeping beast at the bottom of a stockpot snoring on the stovetop since the first glint of Christmas dawn—the pudding itself, belching out clouds of steam so thick you could cut them with a trowel, and dreaming, nestled in its tin bowl, of holly sprigs, flaming brandy, and a family of barristers or street urchins or maybe the Cratchits themselves staring wide eyed with wonder at the final wink of writhing blue fire in the snow-thick Christmas darkness crowding in from fern-frosted windows before hacking it apart, merrily, with the best silver cake knife.

It was a foreign thing to us, a food-worshipping, half-heathen New England family obeying the ancient rites of Gaul and the southern Alps year after ice-rimmed year with humble offerings of fish chowder white for a long eve’s snowbound vigil, meat pies ground from beasts unknown since the Pleistocene, lasagna thick as a family bible, Bûche de Noël left to rot in the greenwood now ripe with marzipan mushrooms, and a little Frangelico at bedtime to make us dream of past years’ feasts and feasts still to come, oven-warm and unchanging until the hungry sun should swell and swallow old Earth for its antipasto.

But Christmases change: feasts blur and merge and marinate in the memories of other feasts from other Christmases, and when a morsel from a distant and mostly imagined land or time makes its way onto our crowded table we stare, shrug, and welcome it with open mouths and stamping champing forks, never quite hungry and always eager. And so we found ourselves, three years ago today, staring down our very first Christmas pudding, hauled by my Irish brother-in-law out of the long memory of a hundred Dublin Christmases, stirred and potted and boiled and left to sit, stewing in its own succulence, for a month or more in a cold, dark corner of their Cambridge apartment.

There may have been a wary murmur from the skeptics among us. We were unused to months-old edibles, and the fermentation or transmutation or dark alchemy involved is as mysterious to me now as it was then. The catalog of ingredients was no less frightening: a bottle of stout dark as the solstice night, a pound or more of butter, a henhouse of eggs’ yolks, currants, raisins, cherries, sultanas, and whiskey enough to wake the dead or floor the living, all bound by a dash of breadcrumbs and a lump of sugar fit for fifty reindeer. But come Christmas Day we listened to it rattle and huff as it boiled again in a great pot on the stovetop till my brother-in-law extracted it with blacksmiths’ tongs and coaxed the pudding, whole, onto a platter, and poured flaming brandy onto it and half the table cloth, and put out the fire on the table cloth, and then we ate the pudding. It tasted like the pith of every Christmas the world had ever known settling warmly into our bellies, and our doubts vanished as we picked the crumbs from the platter, saving a little to fry in butter the next morning.

But in time we learned that the ancient rites of pudding are neither simple nor foolproof. Things went right that first year—things went perfectly. Things can, and do, go wrong. Last Christmas my sister arrived in New England exhausted by a late-night flight across the country, suitcase in tow full of presents, packages, bundles, bows, and, carefully swaddled and nearly watertight, the Christmas pudding, which, we discovered when she went to get a sweater—a sweater now coated in a sticky brown gloop that smelled of candy and old beer—had somehow melted in the weeks since its creation, collapsed into a formless pudding-paste and crept like a sentient slime out of its cage and throughout my sister’s luggage. We salvaged the remains and fortified it with crumbs, and boiled it for days on end until it was a pudding again—a pudding good as any, which we ate with the glee of willful forgetting.

This year the lot has fallen to me. Even as I write this, a steel bowl sits on my desk, shrouded in plastic wrap and foil, bound round with twine and weighed down with a stack of thick books to keep the cats at bay. It has been there for a month, and not once have I lifted the veil to peek at my dark creation. I fear what lurks therein. I have trouble believing that it hasn’t grown a long green beard or soured like cider turned the wrong way. My fingers are crossed, and what little faith I have lies in the extra jiggers of whiskey I sprinkled on its forehead before I tucked it in for the winter, which I hope will keep it safe and merry till we set it ablaze again on one more flame-bright, stout-dark, age-old ever-returning Christmas night.

 

 

 

(apologies to D.T. & C.D.)

Categories: Uncategorized

Less Potato

Posted on January 3rd, 2013

Last spring, a friend and I went to see Damaged, an Off-Off-Broadway play by a rising playwright and director Simone Marie Martelle. The production that we watched was her thesis play, wherein she perfected the Eugene O’Neill-quality dynamic between members of a well-meaning but ultimately self-absorbed family who are so shrouded in personal drama that they fail to see their collective lives screeching toward a cataclysm. In the final scene, after the neglected and molested daughter takes her own life, the culprits stand around the darkening living room and the patriarch – masterfully portrayed by Kevin Bohl, one of New York theater’s best-kept secrets – delivers a monologue about potato salad. The character’s mother used to make him classic, cheap potato salad when he was a boy, and despite spending a lot of money on expensive hors d’oeuvres, all he really craved was that salad. The monologue was moving for many reasons, but when we emerged from the dark, musty theater space, I suddenly found myself moved to seek out potato salad.

 

Classic potato salad is boring and often bland; the patriarch in the play admitted as much, and I recalled this myself as I forced down forkfuls of it at an East Village diner while watching my friend put away grilled cheese on rye. The star ingredient is potato, and a lot of it. Hard-boiled eggs and finely chopped celery do little to introduce variety to this starchfest.

 

The same can be said of pasta salad, as well as the two “salads” I was offered years ago at the Christmas dinner of an ex-girlfriend’s Polish family.  The venison, freshly killed by her brother and father on a hunting trip, was divine, but the separate existence of “cucumber salad” (sliced cucumbers, sour cream, salt) and “radish salad” (sliced radishes, sour cream, salt) baffled me: why not combine the two vegetables, toss some tomato and scallion in there, and have a singular, glorious Eastern European dish? I pictured Paul Hogan as Crocodile Dundee, pulling a large hunting knife from his belt, drawling, “You call that a salad?”

 

In almost any salad, when only one ingredient is allowed to shine, everyone suffers. Eastern Europeans usually know this well, and are not shy about piling on the meaty components. By “meaty,” I am literally talking about meat: when my mother makes potato salad, she goes lighter on potatoes and adds diced grilled chicken breast. Then, she tosses in some dill, one of my absolute favorite things in the world. This chicken potato salad went to 11 when, one glorious day, she added a generous helping of bacon. The ingredients fought it out, but it was the guests who won.

 

Categories: Uncategorized

The End of Meals: A Meditation on Eating at the Edge of the Mayan Apocalypse

Posted on January 3rd, 2013

Once, in Spokane, I ate the best snails of my life. The waiter said they were fresh, and I looked at him for a long moment and thought, “Fresh from where?” and then ate them all anyway, soaked in butter and garlic and a little white wine. Another time, my brother and I sat in the innards of a subterranean sculpture on the grounds of an art museum, a round kiva-like space with one oblong hole to the sky, and ate durian together. Some children entered and gathered round the durian, touching its spines and asking for a taste. So we fed them durian pods while their parents looked on, its rotten egg-custard smell making everyone laugh.

 

Or what about when, on a cold night just a few weeks ago, a friend and I constructed the world’s first Goat Nuts? Carr’s water crackers spread with creamy Jif peanut butter, topped by a smear of goat brie and capped off by a thin slice of apple – the sort of thing you only eat with someone who constantly pushes you to the brink of breathless hilarity, after a night of beer and dancing, when anything seems possible and edible. And speaking of peanut butter, there was also that dinner out on the tundra in the rain in the summer of 1997, where I ate nothing but thick blocks of cheddar cheese dipped in a tub of peanut butter, the only thing that could warm my pre-hypothermic body (and did).

 

There’s something, too, about road-trips that requires a grilled cheese in a diner on some rural back road. I’ve eaten these in Massachusetts, Colorado, Oregon, Washington, nearly every place that I’ve lived. Alaska doesn’t have diners but does have roadhouses, which are usually a step up in historic authenticity (creosote-soaked logs, single-paned windows, and thick-planked floors) but a step down in culinary quality. On the Denali Highway last summer, though, my grilled cheese was American on sourdough, pickle on the side and a Coke to wash it down, and it was perfect. I ate it at a table next to a view of the Tangle Lakes soaked in fog, and then I drove away into that fog to look for caribou, who eat lichen, sedges, and moss.

 

One time, I got lost in the woods in the south of France and nearly didn’t find my way out. Shortly before that happened, though, I sat on the wall of a medieval city, looking at the ocean and eating a baguette filled with shredded tuna, olives, tomatoes, and red onions. I could still speak French then, and everything about that lunch – the angle of the sun, the hum of the insects in the trees, the ripped page from Le Monde wrapped around my sandwich, my scuffed leather shoes – seemed so appropriately Niçoise. It was probably that lunch that led me to think I could take the shortcut home through the cow pasture and head into the hills, just like a local, except locals know how to get home and foreigners do not.

 

Home is now a cabin on a mountainside in Alaska, and I live alone. There is no one to cook for except for me, so I make meals that only I would eat. Dinner the other night was quartered Brussels sprouts, fried in olive oil with minced garlic and then laid over slabs of browned Halloumi cheese, the whole thing drizzled with balsamic vinegar. Okay, maybe someone else would eat that, but I wouldn’t have let them, because it was the perfect thing for a quiet dinner for one at the round table by the windows while the snow fell on the birch woods outside and the wood stove sputtered and belched smoke. And afterwards, I ate a Tootsie Pop, just because no one was there to say I couldn’t.

 

Back when I was very little, well before I was allowed candy of any sort, we had two gardens: an herb garden next to the house and a vegetable garden down by a pond that smelled like mud. I’d wander between the two, eating tiny strawberries, mint leaves, green beans snapped straight from the vine. There was a crabapple tree, too, with tiny fruit that made your lips pucker, and a plum tree on the edge of the woods. Summer still tastes like all of those things: fresh, grassy, a little unwashed but in a good way.

 

It’s winter now, though, and this winter tastes like hot toddies, peppermint canes, and double-chocolate cookies. I’m hibernating, I think, because all I want are warm alcoholic drinks and baked goods full of butter and sugar. They’ll put me to sleep just enough to dream of all the memorable meals I’ve eaten. I’d think of more but I can’t, because I don’t have time; the world is supposed to end in a few hours. If it does, don’t wake me up. I’m already dreaming of my last meal.

Categories: Uncategorized

The Perfect Stocking Stuffer

Posted on January 3rd, 2013

When I was 14, I filled my mother’s Christmas stocking for the first time. It was the first time I had filled any sort of Christmas stocking at all, and I suppose there wasn’t anyone else’s I would have filled. She was a single parent and I was an only child, and I’m guessing this was sort of a first for her, too – the first time anyone had filled her stocking since her own mother had done it. I had likely stumbled upon the idea (unprompted) that I was grown up enough for the task, and went about curating the perfect selection of stocking stuffers with an overstuffed sense of responsibility.

I don’t remember much of what I chose; probably some lilac soap from Crabtree & Evelyn, a couple of magazines, and maybe a scrunchie from The Limited. Those were pretty common mom gifts, at the time. But I do remember the two things important to this story: a bag of individually wrapped Kraft caramels, and a small bottle of Beano.

The caramels were a straightforward choice. I believed then as much as I do now that a person’s favorite candies or other small treats make the best stocking stuffer, whether it’s a bag of Swedish Fish or some fancy handcrafted truffles. Everyone loves getting a treat in their Christmas stocking despite the gastronomic blitzkrieg of the holidays, and it’s especially exciting if correctly chosen as one of the recipient’s favorite things. It is perhaps the easiest gift-giving ever gets. My mother loved those milky, melty, cellophane-wrapped cubes of Kraft caramel, so they were in.

The Beano, however, came from an entirely different part of me. I wasn’t a particularly witty teenager, especially in my early teens, but somewhere inside of me I developed a vision of how hilarious it would be for my mother to unearth a bottle of Beano on Christmas morning.

So it was with the Beano. Fourteen-year-old me was experimenting with being funny, and decided that putting Beano in one’s mother’s Christmas stocking was the funniest thing one might ever do. So determined was I, so utterly committed to this vision I had of my mother unearthing the little green and white bottle from her stocking on Christmas morning, that I went alone to the drugstore by our house, the one where I could be seen by any number of people I knew. I was a nerdy, self-conscious 14-year-old girl buying Beano in the light of day, risking all of the little social clout I had to go buy an over-the-counter anti-flatulence medication. The purchasing act went smoothly enough, though I can still remember my heart beating in my chest and the strength I used to suppress my nervous giggles as I went through the checkout.

By the time I was 14, it easy for me to get the stocking up on the mantle in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve. All pretenses of Santa Claus were gone, my presents had been under the tree since they’d been purchased, and my stocking was hung in front of my eyes when my mother went to bed, long before I did (this being the heady early years of late-night AIM socializing).

Late in the night (or perhaps early in the morning hours) I collected all of the gifts and started by pouring in a bag or two of the caramels. They almost filled the foot of her green and red hand-knit stocking, the same one she’d had as a child. Then I unboxed the bottle of Beano, disappointingly small compared to the size of the box, and nestled it among the caramels. I filled the rest of the stocking with the other items I’d purchased and hung it on the mantle in the living room, nervously noting how long it stretched toward the floor, heavily laden with the caramels and other goodies, and went to bed.

On Christmas morning, I remember waking to the sound of my mother yelling in the living room. I remember cellophane. I remember hundreds of pieces of clear cellophane, spread across the carpet looking like the scales on a fish.  I remember strands of red yarn hanging from the toe of my mother’s childhood Christmas stocking, and a few random stocking stuffers lying on the tiled hearth of the fireplace.

I knew the toe of that stocking had been hanging too close to the floor, but I went to bed anyway, and in the night our dog – our short-legged, dawdling, sluggish and normally well-behaved dog – had found his way through threadbare layers of 1960s red yarn and into all those caramels. At least he’d still had the decency not to eat the wrappers, and to lick each and every one clean so they didn’t leave bits of caramel stuck to the carpet.

My mother wasn’t too upset about the stocking, thankfully, and after a quick (and costly) holiday call to the emergency vet we knew not to be too worried about the dog, just to watch him for the rest of the day and note any weird behavior.  We set about normalizing our Christmas morning, and I was at the bottom of my own stocking before I realized the Beano was gone. It hadn’t been among the other stocking stuffers on the floor under the frayed open end of the stocking. I assumed (prayed, really) that the dog couldn’t have gotten through the thick, hard plastic of the bottle, and spent the rest of the day hoping he’d just stashed it under a couch or in his basket of toys. I figured we’d find it eventually, and didn’t mention a thing about it to my mother. I quickly realized it was a joke not quite funny enough to be explained verbally without falling like a dud, and in all my infinite teenage-ness I must have thought that if I ignored my failure it would fade away into the ether.

Which it kind of did, actually; we never found the bottle of Beano and still haven’t to this day. My mother has changed the furniture and the floor coverings and almost everything else in that house, but as far as I know she’s never found it (or if she has, she hasn’t called me to tell me so – and now that I think about it, that’d be kind of a weird thing to call to tell me). Perhaps she’ll find it one day, in some forgotten corner of the house, an old green and white bottle of Beano she doesn’t ever remember purchasing.  That thought is kind of funny in itself; the closest I can come to salvaging my big Christmas flop.

Each year now I fill my husband’s Christmas stocking, and each year I think about what might be the perfect gag gift to nestle into the bottom. I haven’t found it, yet, but there’s still time.

Categories: Uncategorized

Boxed, Canned, Or Frozen

Posted on January 3rd, 2013

Every family has traditions and I hope every father/daughter duo has their own.  My father and I have many, born out of the few years that we lived on our own during my early adolescence. The obvious difference of my dad being a dude aside, our relationship mirrored “Gilmore Girls” much more than “Blossom.” He was in his early thirties, in a band, and had a home recording studio–I was a brainy adolescent making pancakes for the touring bands sleeping on the living room floor. By day my father is a chef, and like most in his trade lost the inspiration to cook by the time he made it home from work.  Regularly at dinnertime I would ask “Dad, what’s for dinner?” he would respond, quite matter-of-factly, “Whatever you make.”  In all likelihood, this is probably part of how I became a chef myself. (Between the two of us we ate pretty well as I listened to dissertations on how the eighties’ style of popular record production overshadowed the genius of Richard Butler, and how as influential as Nirvana was they wouldn’t have been able to exist without the Pixies or the Modern Lovers paving the way.)  Alternatively dinner was eaten in front of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and on occasion, when neither of us felt like cooking, we would declare “Freaky Food Night.”

The rules of Freaky Food Night were simple: go to the grocery store and purchase anything you want for dinner as long as it comes out of a can, box, or the freezer case.  Dinners of cereal, boxed mashed potatoes, or Velveeta macaroni and cheese with canned tuna were a given. Sometimes our visions of the meal we were preparing differed, as in the famous “Canned Hash Incident” when my father declared he wanted “his hash sliced and pan fried.” I refused his insane request because frankly, who could possibly slide a cylinder of corned beef hash out of a can and effectively slice it? This required a phone call to my future stepmother to settle. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about sliced hash. The only item I refused even in the spirit of Freaky Food Night was Hamburger Helper, which did not stop my father from making it for himself.

The deeper you look into convenience foods, past condensed soup and frozen meatloaf and onward to frozen cheese blintzes and buffalo flavored mozzarella sticks you begin to wonder who is purchasing these products in earnest? Who is buying canned Franco-American Mushroom Gravy to grace their Sunday dinner table? Is anyone actually eating potted meat? I’m pretty sure we tried to feed it to the cats once and even they weren’t interested. Years later at I dinner where I was awarded a scholarship from the Institute of Food Technologists my father informed the chairman that part of his design in Freaky Food Night was to round out my food education, because he believes that you cannot elevate food unless you understand its lowest and/or most basic forms.

Motives aside, Freaky Food Night has stuck with me. My husband and I observe it together and share it with others. Trader Joe’s is a prime starting spot for Freaky Food Night. Friends of mine bought me a Trader Joe’s gift card for my birthday this year in recognition of the tradition.  I used it to purchase turkey meatloaf “muffins”, Korean short ribs, masala dosas and frozen chocolate covered banana slices.  I invited my father and stepmother over that night to partake in the evolved tradition.  You may have noticed–there was no Hamburger Helper in sight.

 

Categories: Uncategorized