The Stumbling Gourmet Returns

I actually cut-and-pasted this from my other blog. Hey, if I can't plagiarize myself, who can I plagiarize?

I have just discovered that Tropicana Blueberry/Pomegranate juice makes a great mix with white rum. Next I'm going to try their Peach/Mango juice with a little Bacardi and see how that tastes.

Two weeks ago I learned through doing that you can actually make excellent lasagna in a slow cooker. That's correct. You can make good lasagna in your good old crockpot. And it's not that hard, either.

The recipe calls of course for spaghetti sauce, but I'm proud to say that in the lasagna I made, the sauce was made from tomatoes picked from my own garden. This summer just past I decided to follow in my Dad's footsteps and plant a summer crop of tomatoes, as he used to do every year. And I've gotten a bumper crop: since early August they've been coming in faster than I can eat them. I've already got a batch of spaghetti sauce in the freezer, and I've been passing out tomatoes to my friends and neighbors, as my father and I used to do during those glorious California summers of watching baseball in the living room and tending tomatoes out by the back fence. Truth to tell, the tomatoes have been a godsend this summer; they've helped keep my mind off the stinko year that my San Diego Padres have been having: dead-last place, 17 games out, playing .387 ball.

I have tickets to the Sept. 21 Padres-Nationals game here in Washington, D.C. It ought to be a real Perils-of-Pauline cliffhanger: the Friars and the Nats will be duking it out to see who gets to share the worst record in baseball with the Seattle Mariners over in the other league.

To rub salt in my wounds, every time I turn on MLB Extra Innings, I see ex-Padres all over the tube. Good players that San Diego brain-farted itself out of: Mark Kotsay is with the Boston Red Sox now; Mike Cameron and Ramon Hernandez are both playing for the Milwaukee Brewers; Mark Loretta plays in Houston and Xavier Nady just signed with the New York Yankees. I watched Nady hit the first grand slam of his career against Atlanta three seasons ago. Now he's in pinstripes and the Padres are in the toilet.

Pardon me while I program February 15, the beginning of spring training, into my Microsoft Office alerts, and prepare to hibernate for the winter.

End of digression. You want to know how to make excellent lasagna in your slow cooker, right?

Here's what you do. Get:

A jar of spaghetti sauce (28 oz.)

half-a-dozen or so uncooked lasagna noodles

2 cups mozzarella cheese

15 oz. ricotta cheese

1/4 grated parmesan

1 lb. ground beef (optional)

Spread some of the sauce over the bottom of your crockpot. Bust up the lasagna noodles into 1-2 inch chunks and spread a layer over the sauce. Mix the three kinds of cheese up in a bowl. Sprinkle the cheese over the noodles, then cover with sauce, lay down another layer of busted-up noodles and do the same. If you want meat in your lasagna, brown the ground beef, season with salt, pepper and oregano and lay down a layer of beef between your second or third layer of sauce, noodles and cheese.
Cover your top layer with the last of your sauce and sprinkle with the last of your mozzarella. Cook on low 3-4 hours until cheese melts. When you're getting ready to serve, sprinkle parmesan over the top and cook for another 30 minutes.

I don't know where we all got the idea that Labor Day is the end of the grilling season, even here on the east coast. I walked into my local Safeway over in Hyattsville, MD on Monday, which was Labor Day, and all the charcoal was gone. The check-out cashier asked me, "Are you grilling today?" "I guess not." Labor Day does NOT signal the end of summer, I don't care what any kid moping around in anticipation of the first day of school says. Last year I had a contract job in a government office that required male employees to wear neckties. However they were given a break for the summer: as of Memorial Day you could take your necktie off, but you had to put it back on come Labor Day.

We guys discussed the absurdity of this. Here in Washington, when Labor Day comes around, you're still looking at three or four more weeks of 90-degree heat. We all agreed that Oct. 1 would be a more reasonable date for back-to-noose.

And so it was that last night, Sept. 4, I decided to grill outside. Safeway had replenished its charcoal supply by then. Back-to-School or no, it was 92 Fahrenheit, 33 Celsius here in Washington yesterday and I didn't feel like turning on the oven.

My neighbor Verna Williams, who when it comes to gardening makes me look like Oliver Douglas on Green Acres, gave me two big, beautiful red bell peppers from her garden. Trying to decide how to appropriately honor such a bounty, I decided to try my hand at a simple grilling treat I'd never made before. My Russian friends call it shashlik. We Americans tend to call it shish kebab.

Now, most shish kebab recipes call for beef sirloin tip. That's okay, but I'm kind of a traditionalist: Russian shashlik is made with lamb, not beef. Ideally, I would have found a 2-lb. lamb roast, but all Safeway had were lamb chops, so I bought four of them, trimmed the meat away from the bones and gave my doggies a lamb-bone treat, then diced up the lamb chops.

Another good thing to have handy when you're making shashlik is a box of Band-Aids for when you poke your fingers with those sharp little sticks on which you skewer your meat and vegetables.

But before you even get that far, you should marinate the meat of course. Here's the marinade I used. I can recommend it:

3/4 cup water
5 tbsp. soy sauce
3 tbsp. cooking oil
3 tbsp. vinegar
1 tsp. dry mustard
1 tsp. ginger
1/2 tsp. garlic powder
2 tbsp. brown sugar

Mix it all up in a bowl and toss in the meat for an hour or so.

The rest (after the meat):

Red bell pepper
Green bell pepper
sliced onion
Sliced large mushrooms


After that I skewered, alternately ("as great Malherbes alternates male and female rhymes,") lamb chunk, red bell pepper, onion, green bell pepper, big fat mushroom. Repeat until everything's gone. You ought to have about six shish kebabs when you're done, and two bandaged fingers. Season to taste with seasoned salt and pepper. Grill, turning regularly, about 20 minutes. Serve on a bed of rice.

Now...For those who missed my, and my friend Chris McDonald's, trip to Kansas City last June to attend the 13th semi-annual Ernest Hemingway conference, here once again is the recipe for Hemingway's famous daquiri known as a "Papa Doble" ("Made a run of 16 in here one night," Hemingway is said to have boasted to an interlocutor at the Floridita Bar in Havana):

2 jiggers (3 oz.) white rum
The juice of two limes
The juice of half a grapefruit
Six drops Grenadine (or cherry brandy)

Fill blender 1/4 with crushed ice. Pour the mixture over the ice and blend until it becomes pink and frothy. Serve in a margarita glass.

Made correctly, these have a fruity taste and are quite delicious. If you find that the grapefruit juice makes the drink a little too tart, you can add more grenadine to make it sweeter. My wife Valerie is a real alcohol wimp, so when I make one of these for her, I cut the rum portion in half. You might want to consider a similar mitigating factor for the alcohol wimps in your life.

I leave you with one of my favorite quotations from Francis Albert Sinatra (1915-1998):

"I feel sorry for people who don't drink. When they get up in the morning, that's as good as they're going to feel all day."

Ring-a-ding-ding.

In Search of The Lost Daiquiri

Would somebody please tell me just when in the heck it was that we Americans got the idea that a daiquiri is a strawberry Slurpee with a little rum in it?

Eric Felten, author of How's Your Drink? might be able to answer this. I don't know. But it's a damn shame.

I walked into Colonel Brooks' Tavern the other day. Colonel Brooks' Tavern is about the closest thing I have to a neighborhood bar. It's a little too far to walk, so it just barely qualifies, but here in northeast Washington, D.C. it's quite a popular little spot. And by the way, the food there is excellent. I highly recommend Colonel Brooks' if you're ever in Washington.

Just don't order a daiquiri. I tried. "We don't make daiquiris," the bartender told me. "We don't do frozen drinks. And we don't have strawberries. We just don't make daiquiris. It's too much trouble."

Well, as the dreary Steve Martin used to say, Excuuuuuse me.

I didn't want to argue with him; it was lunch time and he was busy. I ordered a martini instead. But had it not been lunch time and had he not been swamped with customers, I would have tried to straighten this young man out.

Folks, a strawberry daiquiri is a specialty drink. The original recipe for a daiquiri had nothing whatsoever to do with strawberries, nor did it have anything to do with Slurpee machines. Jeez, the next thing that bartender is going to be telling me is that they don't have any little paper parasols.

A daiquiri is supposed to be one of the world's most basic cocktails. In fact it is one of six basic drinks listed in David Embury's Fine Art of Mixing Drinks. The idea of a cocktail bar simply refusing to make one is unconscionable. Colonel Brooks, send your bartenders back to school!

Okay, class, sit down. The daiquiri, sans strawberry and Slurpee machine, was supposedly invented in Cuba in the early 20th century. "Daiquiri" is the name of a beach in Cuba. The original daiquiri consisted of two or three ounces rum, the juice of two limes and a teaspoon of sugar poured over a tall glass of cracked ice. Stirred, not Slurpee'd. Later it came to be shaken. But the frozen, strawberry-flavored rum Slushee that passes for a daiquiri these days, a contemporary favorite of underage girls and wimps who can't handle alcohol, was not even an abomination in anyone's mind at that time.

Daiquiris became very popular in the United States during World War II. Wartime rationing had made stuff like whiskey and vodka hard to get, but because of FDR's "Good Neighbor" policy with Latin America, rum from south of the border was plentiful. In Evan S. Connell's marvelous novel Mr. Bridge, which concerns a well-to-do Kansas City family on the eve of World War II, when Mr. Bridge decides to have a little fun with his teetotaling housemaid, he "corrupts" her by offering her a daiquiri, which she finds that she likes, a bit too much, as it turns out.

And then there was Ernest Hemingway, the Babe Ruth of drunks. Hemingway drank everything, but there was a special place in his heart for the daiquiri, not surprising as he spent so many years living in Cuba. There are many moments in Hemingway's fiction that I find highly implausible, and one of them is a scene late in his posthumous novel Islands in The Stream. After drinking double daiquiris all afternoon, the book's main character, a painter named Thomas Hudson, still has the mojo to go home and have spirited sex with his estranged wife.

In the immortal words of Dorothy Parker, "And I am Marie of Roumania."

Hemingway was, in fact, so fond of the concoction that he whipped up his own recipe for it. Now, I know I have posted this recipe before, specifically last summer when reflecting upon my pal Chris McDonald's and my trip to Kansas City to attend the 13th International Ernest Hemingway Society clambake and jam session there. But in view of this cultural emergency, I feel compelled to post it again. There we were, Chris and I, sitting in the bar of the Marriott Country Club Plaza hotel, tinkering with graphics for the presentation he would give the next day at one of the conference's breakout sessions.

Suddenly, Chris gets one of those happy notions he gets every now and then. "Let's try a Papa Doble, Hemingway's special daiquiri," he suggested.

In the Age of the Internet, nothing's easier. The hotel bar had Wi-Fi, and within moments Chris had pulled the recipe for Hemingway's special daiquiri off some cocktail website. With his usual panache and southern charm, Chris mosied over to the bar and asked the bartender to make one for each of us. The bartender was obliging, and we ended up having two apiece. They did NOT involve strawberries, and although they were served, according to Hemingway's instructions, with shaved ice, they didn't come out as sissy little Slurpees, either. NOTE TO COLONEL BROOKS' TAVERN: You don't need a Slurpee machine. A blender, or even a cocktail shaker, is perfectly adequate for a Papa Doble.

Sissy little Slurpees, indeed. As if Ernest Miller Hemingway, captain of the hairy-chested team of literature, would traffic in sissy little anything. This is a man's drink. Okay, it's also a woman's drink, if she's man enough. And I know plenty of women who are, by the way. (But my wife Valerie is not one of them. When I made one of these for her, I had to wimp it down by cutting the rum portion in half, and even then she couldn't finish it.)

In any case, here is the recipe for the great Papa Doble Daiquiri:

3 ounces white rum

The juice of two limes

The juice of half a grapefruit

Six drops of grenadine (cherry brandy can be substituted.)

Pour over crushed ice and either blend or shake. Serve in a margarita glass.

Got it? Colonel Brooks'? Well, in case you need encouraging, consider: I was in Greenville, NC the weekend after Thanksgiving. Chris lives in Winterville, just over the hill across the tracks. While I was there Chris and I dined out at the L.A. Lounge, a high-end restaurant-and-bar that just opened in Greenville last spring. Terrific place, by the way. The decor is Early Rat Pack, and there is a special menu of exotic drinks. I'm happy to report that Chris, who is a schmoozer and a flirt like you never saw as well as being a well-above-average golfer, managed to get friendly enough with the management of this place as to get the Papa Doble on their drink menu.

So, if you're ever in Greenville, NC (and speaking of the Rat Pack, the birthplace of Ava Gardner is not far away) drop in at the L.A. Lounge and order a Papa Doble before you order your steak. I promise you they won't say "Gee, we don't have strawberries." Sheesh.

Or, I should say, cheers.

Of smoked hocks, winter nights and paying it forward

Years and years ago there was a Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon which began with the voice-over narrator, the incomparable Bill Conrad, proclaiming, "Everybody can do something! For example, Homer Noodleman of Sioux Falls, South Dakota can put six flashlights in his mouth!"

Bullwinkle's special talent was that he could remember everything he ever ate.

Well, I can't remember everything I ever ate, but fortunately I can remember how I was taught to cook some of the things I've eaten, and that's where our story begins today.

I have this friend, Holly Inder. Now, when I met Holly many years ago her name was Holly Brayton, and I'm still inclined to call her that, because frankly, I only met her ex-husband once and the encounter was so forgettable that I can't even remember what he looked like, much less anything he said. Everybody can do something, as Bill Conrad said, and one thing James Inder did very well was blend quietly in with the furniture. So to me, Holly will always be Holly Brayton. I don't really know who Holly Inder was. A mistake, would be my best guess.

With that by way of non-sequitur, Holly and I were talking the other day about split pea soup.

Holly and I met in late 1985, when we were both preparing to go overseas with the foreign service for the first time. Now, Holly was a foreign service brat; she grew up overseas, then went to work in State Department telecommunications when she was in her twenties. Her father had been a telecomm technician during his own career; she was more-or-less following in his footsteps. I was 30 when I joined the foreign service and had never been overseas in my life.

Consequently, Holly has been to a lot of places I've never been. She stayed in the foreign service after I quit nine years ago, and continued to travel.

So when I get an opportunity to whip on Holly a place I've been that she hasn't, well, let's just say it's like taking the trick in a gin game. I like it.

So there we were, talking about split pea soup. Holly says to me, "There's a place in California I've heard about, where there's a restaurant that serves nothing but split pea soup."

"Buellton," I said, with an inward gloat.

"You've been there?"

"Yup. The town is called Buellton, the restaurant is called Anderson's, and yes, split pea soup is the premier item on the menu," I said.

Then, unable to resist savoring the moment a bit more, I added, with just a touch of world-weariness, "Buellton. Yeah, it's right off Highway 101 north of Santa Barbara on the way to San Luis Obispo. I ate there with my dad a couple of times on our way to Arroyo Grande to visit my aunt and uncle. Not far away from Buellton is another tourist attraction, Solvang, a fake Danish village. You can buy all kinds of baked goodies there."

I was lovin' this, as they say in the marketing department at McDonald's.

But I was just warming up.

"Yeah, Anderson's makes some of the best split-pea soup you ever tasted," I told Holly. "I don't know if it's available in other states, but in California you can buy it canned in the grocery store. Yeah, it's good." Then, with a pause for effect, I added, "But mine's better."

Anyone out there old enough to remember Walter Brennan on the old western series The Guns of Will Sonnet will recognize how I savored this moment. Remember the scene where Brennan, as old Will Sonnet, has the following exchange with Claude Akins?

Claude: Ah, you Sonnets. I wish I had the third one in front of me right now.

Walt: You mean James? Now that's a foolish wish, mister. From what I hear, James is the third best shot in the west.

Claude: The THIRD best?

Walt: James is darn good. But he's better. (Jerks his thumb at Dack Rambo, his grandson.) And I'm better'n both of 'em. No brag, just fact.

Yesiree Bob, my split pea soup's bettern' Anderson's. (Spit.) No brag, just fact.

And there's a darn good reason for that. Family tradition.

That is correct. My grandmother taught my mother how to make split pea soup, and my mother taught me. And my grandmother was the best cook who ever lived. Ergo, when I make split pea soup, I'm making it the way my grandmother did, and there's no better. Anywhere.

I can prove it. I did. I told Holly that I had put up a big pot of split pea soup just the day before, and that I would bring her some the next time I saw her. Well, I happened to be going down to Landmark Mall a few days ago to do some Christmas shopping, and Holly doesn't live far from there, so I took a Tupperware container of my split pea soup with me in the car, ran it over to Holly's place and dropped it off.

She called me the next day to tell me that it was every bit as good as I said it was. And that's saying something, because Holly is a better-than-average cook herself, and moreover, one of those women who don't mind admitting when a man can cook something better than they can. When she lived in Guam a few years ago, Holly had a boyfriend named Frank, so she told me, and this guy, an ex-Marine, really liked to cook. When he and Holly weren't canoodling, they were cooking. "But Frank was a better cook than I was," she cheerfully admitted.

Well, I can say this with all confidence: not all of my kitchen experiments turn out well. I really screwed up the mashed potatoes on Thanksgiving this year. But I can say with all confidence that nobody, and I mean nobody, makes better split pea soup than I do. Because when I cook this stuff, my grandmother is looking over my shoulder. Dante, steered through Hell by Virgil, had no better guide than that.

So make a list, run to the grocery store, get out your kitchen utensils, follow these instructions and prepare to go to heaven. But don't forget the Beano.

How good is this stuff? When my father was 90 and we were having trouble getting him to eat anything at all, he would polish off three bowls of this soup if I put it in front of him. That's how good it is.

Oh, by the way, I wouldn't dream of serving split pea soup without cornbread on the side. You know cornbread. In some parts of the east they call it johnny cake. In a future blog posting I'll tell you about the time I introduced a roomful of Russians to cornbread. Anyway, included with my split pea soup recipe is also my cornbread recipe, for those of you who don't mind going the extra mile rather than just grabbing a box of cornbread mix at Safeway.

MY GRANDMOTHER'S (AND MOTHER'S) SPLIT PEA SOUP

Ingredients:

Two 8 oz. packages of dry split peas

1 large onion

4 large carrots

2 smoked pork hocks or smoked ham hocks

Salt

Pepper

Garlic powder

6-8 bay leaves

Soak the dry split peas overnight, or at least for a couple of hours. They will expand, and you'll need to add more water. Then dump them in a soup pot and bring them to a boil. When they come to a boil, turn the heat down low and let them parboil until they're soft, usually 45 minutes to an hour. A whitish foam will arise from the boiling peas. Skim it off and throw it away.

Dice up the pork or ham hock as best as you can and put it in a saucepan with about two cups of water. Start it boiling too, then let it simmer on low until you have soup stock.

When the peas start to get nice and mooshy, drain some of the water out of them and add the soup stock. If you're using smoked pork hock with a bone, fish it out and chop as much meat off of it on a chopping board as you can. Throw the meat in with the peas and stock. Then dice up the onion and carrots and add them to the soup.

Then add the seasonings. salt and pepper to taste, maybe a tablespoon of garlic powder (less if you don't like garlic) and then add the whole bay leaves. Just let the bay leaves float in the soup.

Simmer on low heat for about another hour. Then turn the heat off, cover the soup and let it cool for three hours. When it cools, it will be thick -- almost as thick as soup that comes out of a can, Add as much water as you need to get it to the thickness you like, re-heat and serve. Remove the bay leaves before serving.

One great thing about soup: the more it's re-heated, the better it gets.

KELLEY'S CORNBREAD FROM SCRATCH:

Ingredients:

1 cup white flour

1 cup yellow corn meal

1 tsp. baking powder

1 tsp. baking soda

1 cup milk

1 egg

1/3 cup sugar

1 tbsp. cooking oil

1 tsp. salt

Pre-heat oven to 375. Combine all the ingredients in a mixing bowl, whip or mix until you get smooth batter, pour the batter into a greased 8 X 8 square baking pan, and bake for 20-25 minutes. I like to spice my cornbread up by adding such things as salsa, grated cheese, diced jalepeno or bits of bacon. Experiment with your own ingredients, but the basic batter stays the same.

And for making a kitchen smell wonderful, nothing rounds this meal out like a freshly-baked apple pie. I'm back in my mom's kitchen on a November night just thinking about it.

Home On The Range

When it comes to the war between men and women, I'm usually ready to do battle. And my most frequently-fought battle is against the cliches women toss around about men. You know, like the one that says we're all slobs. I'm actually rather fastidious, prefer monastic neatness to clutter. And my pal Doug in Reno, hoo boy. This guy makes Felix Unger look like a bear in a cave. When we were roommates years ago, we had the tidiest apartment in Vacaville, CA.

By contrast, my last girlfriend before I moved in with Doug was a slob's slob. Fruit bats keep the eaves of the buildings where they hang out cleaner than Jamie kept her half of our place.

But there's one cliche about men I will not argue with. Every guy in the world thinks he's the best chili-cook on the planet. I don't get it. Does it have something to do with the atavistic notion of the chuck wagon on the cattle drive? Beats me, but there are two things every guy thinks he makes better than every other guy: meatloaf and chili.

I once participated in a chili cook-off in Brazil. I lost. Yeah, well, this "cook-off" was fixed: the guy who won was passing out free shots of tequila. How sneaky is that? My chili was better than his. I was using real beef, for one thing. The guy who won was using hamburger. Puh-lease.

Chili purists do NOT put beans in their concoctions. That's for amatchoors. What I usually do, if I'm trying to impress a crowd, is cook up a pot of pintos and put it alongside the no-beans chili, and anyone who wants beans can add them.

Okay, now that I got all that off my chest, I made a huge pot of chili last Thursday for my wife Valerie's office Christmas party, which I am not going to call a "holiday party." The village atheist around the corner can kiss my big fat hairy French-Canadian ass if he doesn't like it.

Now, I was preparing this chili for a party, not a cook-off, which means two things: (1) I had to make a LOT of it, and (2) Of course I was going to cut corners. What does a roomful of Washington, D.C. real estate agents know about chili?

For one thing, I did throw in beans. When you're making chili for that many people, you need an extender, and anyway, knowing what I do about these east coast people, e.g. that most of them are "spice wimps," I wanted to add something that might take the "edge" off the crushed red pepper that I wasn't about to leave out completely, east coast spice-wimps be damned.

I didn't follow any recipe; I just threw this chili together. But it was one of those miraculous mornings when everything does indeed seem to "come together." When my neighbor Donald L. Williams came by around noon, as I was putting the finishing touches to this pot of chili, I asked him to step inside and taste it. "I'm afraid it might have just a touch too much 'heat' for this D.C. wimpy crowd," I told him. "Taste it and tell me what you think."

Donald took a bite. "You done GOOD, son," he said. "This is mother!@#$%n' good."

Donald's native eloquence, not to mention his honesty, warmed my heart, as I'm sure my chili warmed his.

"Great. I'll save some for you," I said.

The party crowd seemed to agree with Donald. I hauled more than a gallon of this stuff into the condo where the party was being held, and when the festivities broke up about three hours later (I was also tending bar), I think I had maybe a quart left to bring home. The revelers went through my chili like locusts. Even the wimpos who thought it was a tad spicy finished off their bowls of it nonetheless.

"Well," I said to myself, "You'd better get this concoction codified." And, by the way, when I was scraping the leftovers into Tupperware the following morning, I couldn't resist plunging my spoon in and tasting, tasting, tasting. Even COLD this stuff was good. Whatever I did, I did it right.

So, here, one mo' time, is one mo' guys' chili recipe. Trust me on this one. Just trust me (he said, taking off his Indiana Jones hat).....

KELLEY'S SURE-TO-KEEP 'EM COMING BACK CHILI

Ingredients

5 lbs. ground beef (you can cut back on these proportions of course. Remember I was cooking for 30.)

1 large onion

1 large green bell pepper

3 cans of Hunt's tomato sauce

1 large can of Hunt's tomato paste

3 cans of diced tomatoes with green chiles.

2 tablespoons salt

2 tablespoons pepper

2 tablespoons onion salt

3 tablespoons cumin

1 tablespoon crushed red pepper

3 packages pinto beans

2 cups water

Start parboiling the pintos before you do anything else. They need to simmer until they're almost mushy. Then start browning the ground beef, adding the seasonings as you go until all the meat is cooked and seasoned. (Be careful with the crushed red pepper. A tablespoon will be too much if you're only making this for four people.) Take the browned and seasoned ground beef and dump it into a pot. Dice and add the onion and green bell pepper, then throw in the tomato sauce, tomato paste and diced tomatoes with green chiles. Once the beans are reasonably soft, throw them in too, stir and let the whole mess simmer for about an hour. When it cools, it's going to get thicker. That's when you'll want to add water to achieve whatever degree of thickness you prefer. Re-heat, load in the car and head for the party. Make sure the lid is on tight in case you run into cross-town traffic.

Wine suggestion: a good cold Sam Adams lager.

The Canning Watch

I live in Washington, D.C. But my home town is Chula Vista, California, today a paved-over nightmare the size of Cincinnati, but a sleepy little coastal town surrounded by tomato fields and lemon groves when my grandfather moved his family there in 1929.

My mother grew up in Chula Vista, as did her sisters and brother. All of them, including my mother, are dead now. I grew up there too.

When I was a small child my grandmother still lived in the house at 235 Madrona Street in Chula Vista which my grandfather had bought in 1941, eight years before he died. When my grandmother died in 1967 my family moved into that house, and it remained the "family homestead" until we sold the place after my father died in 2005.

The house had a fairly large backyard until 1970, when my father built a granny flat out there for me to live in, which I did, all through high school and college and for some time afterward. But in my early childhood days when my grandmother still lived there, at least half the backyard was given over to her garden. We kids played there, and there was a porch swing in the middle of the backyard where we liked to rock in the sun.

Grandma Winrow grew all manner of stuff out there: squash, tomatoes, guavas, radishes. It goes without saying that she did a great deal of canning. To my dying day I will remember her guava jelly, put up in Mason jars and sealed with wax. When we stayed overnight at Grandma's house, as often as not for breakfast we would be served her delicious, creamy oatmeal with a generous dollop of guava jelly sitting right in the middle of it like a big, glistening ruby.

Despite the fact that the granny flat with which he filled half the backyard the year I started high school severely restricted his space, after my father retired he decided to continue the tradition of backyard farming that had begun with Grandma Winrow. Dad's annual tomato crop became as much a summer tradition as following the usually-sorry fate of the San Diego Padres each year. He would plant in May. It doesn't rain very much in southern California, so once a week he would give the tomatoes a generous soaking with the hose, using a little system of irrigation canals that he dug. By late July the tomatoes would be coming in, often thick and fast as they used to say. During my years overseas, when my sister's children were growing up, my mother would often write to me in her letters that Dad had such a bumper crop of tomatoes this year they were giving them away to the neighbors, or that my nephew Ricky was selling them on the street.

Dad taught me how to cultivate tomatoes just before he died. I laid in the last two crops at Madrona Street. When I moved to Washington, D.C. last year I decided that come spring I would pick up the tradition, and so I did. Last May I went to Home Depot with my neighbor Donald L. Williams and bought four Better Boy plants. (Better Boys were my father's favorite breed of tomato.) I planted in May, as had my father before me. No weekly hosing was needed, however: here on the east coast, during the summer anyway, it rains almost every damn day. In D.C. I swear you can set your watch in July by the three p.m. thunderstorm, which sometimes knocks out the power as well.

By mid-July, sure enough, I had tomatoes coming in every which way. I was proud. Dad would have been, too. And just as in old times, there were far more tomatoes than my wife and I could eat, so I began making the rounds of the neighborhood, handing out bags of them. My next-door neighbor Myrtle was delighted. I think my friend Holly's son Mason, down in Springfield, VA, is still scratching his head and wondering who that character was who knocked on the door and woke him up on a Saturday morning when he was the only one home, handed him a bag of tomatoes and drove away.

The tomato crop usually begins to peter out late in September, but mine was still going strong. However by the second week of October when I was preparing to leave for a family reunion in Reno, NV which would coincide with my 53rd birthday, I decided it was time to pull up those tomato vines, which by then had crawled halfway to Pennsylvania, and prepare for the next year's crop. I paid my neighbor Donald $50 to yank them out for me, but told him, "If you find any more tomatoes, set them aside, don't throw them out."

I might have regretted that. Because when Donald was finished pulling up those tomato vines and hauling them away, I was looking at roughly 30 pounds of leftover tomatoes, most of them still green.

What do you do with 30 pounds of green tomatoes?

What you do in the 21st century is, you jump on the Internet and type into your browser, "Recipes for green tomatoes."

And so it was that I made an enormous batch of green tomato chutney.

Then I had to decide what to do with an enormous batch of green tomato chutney.

Obvious answer: follow in the footsteps of my wizard-grandmother and can, can, can.

I had never canned anything in my life, although I had watched my mother do it, as she had been taught by her mother. Not one to be daunted by the mere fact that I had no idea what I was doing, I ordered up some Mason jars and rolled up my sleeves.

Well, the first thing the canning instructions that I pulled off the Internet tell you to do with Mason jars is wash them thoroughly with hot water and soap. No problem; I ran them through the dishwasher. The lids too.

Then, conventional wisdom says you sterilize the Mason jars by putting them upside down in a pan of boiling water, on some sort of rack so that the steam can get up inside them. This was where I had to get creative: I had a wide pan, but no "sort of rack." I went down into the basement and rummaged around, finally coming up with the roasting rack that I use for Thanksgiving turkey. It's slanted, but would do the trick if I carefully positioned the jars so they wouldn't fall over.

Next you're supposed to go ahead and shovel whatever it is you're trying to preserve into the jars. But the rim of the jar has to be absolutely clean; there can't be any food stuck to it, so they tell you to wipe the rim with a clean, wet cloth after you've poured in your preserves. No problem. But after that is when you actually put the lids on the jars, and I don't know about you, but cross-threading is my bete noir. Many swear words are still hanging in a blue cloud over my kitchen because of cross-threading.

Now came the real challenge. Once you've put the preserves in the jars and screwed down the lids, the next step is to submerge the sealed jars in boiling water for about 10 minutes. But, as when you're sterilizing the jars, they cannot be permitted to touch the bottom of your boiling pot. Something has to sit between the bottom of the jars and the bottom of the pot.

My turkey rack was too big to fit in the pot. Couldn't use that. Time to get creative again. I went hunting. Trivets? We didn't have any. What I finally ended up doing was, I found some Christmas cookie cutters in the back of a drawer. Each one was about an inch deep. I had half a dozen, shaped like stars, doggies, Santa, what have you. What the heck?

I dropped these Christmas cookie-cutters into the pot of boiling water. They landed on the bottom and together made sort of "rack" for my jars. Gingerly, one by one, I dropped the jars into the boiling water, hoping they would land upright and by the way remembering vividly the time when I was living in west Africa and, while boiling some drinking water, spilled it all over myself and burned my right foot so badly that for a week I was hobbling around on crutches with my foot wrapped in a bandage.

I think the purpose of this exercise is to make the jars and their contents expand under the heat, so that when you take them out and they cool, the jars and their contents will contract, completing the sealing process. You know it's worked if the seals on the jars are tight. They're not supposed to pop up. After I had fished the jars out and let them cool for a few hours, I tapped each lid to make sure the seal was tight.

Proud as Aunt Bee at the county fair, I then made some labels: "Green Tomato Chutney, October, 2008."

Now comes the fun part: annoying people with green tomato chutney. You know, handing out jars of it to people who probably don't really want it but are afraid of hurting your feelings.

But not so fast. I want to make sure I did this right. I mean, giving somebody botulism might be embarrassing. In fact I'm sure it would be.

And so I am now in the period of the Canning Watch. Several jars of green tomato chutney have been sitting on my kitchen counter since before Halloween. If they don't start smelling awful by Thanksgiving, I'm going to assume they're safe to give away. So far so good.

Still, go ahead and call me paranoid if you want to, but I think most of my friends are hiding.

Ballad of a Lost Cafe

The photograph above shows the Mea Kwan Thai restaurant in Chula Vista, CA, my home town.

It is not your imagination that this Thai restaurant has a slightly Bavarian look to it. In my youth this restaurant was called The House of Munich and featured German cuisine. The new owners changed the menu, but not the facade.

I shall refrain from making any obvious jokes about going in and ordering spring rolls with Wienerschnitzel.

Actually, the only reason I wanted to show you this facade is because I couldn't find a photo of the restaurant that this posting is actually going to be about, which, last I heard, had been closed and boarded up. It is, or was, a couple of blocks south of the Mea Kwan, on the other side of the street.

It's where I got the name for this blog, Red Wine with Fish. No; that wasn't the name of the place. It's what I usually had when I ate there.

It wasn't a particularly special place. The food wasn't even that good. But I'll always have a special place in my heart for Ernie's 50's Diner, which, if the truth be told, wasn't even much of a 50's diner. No old-fashioned counter with round stools or anything like that. Just regular tables. The 50's ambience was restricted to a few posters on the wall, people like Elvis, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe. Not even an old-fashioned jukebox, just a regular one with the same junk you'd hear almost anywhere. In fact when the music system was left in continuous-play mode, it had an annoying habit of pealing out Christmas tunes at any old time of year.

But for about two years more or less, Ernie's was "my place." It was a short walk from both home and work, the waitresses knew and liked me and it had an outside patio in back, nice for enjoying the California sunshine, January or July. Okay, the patio faced the alley and had a dumpster behind it, and the owner of the place, Carlos, was a real jerk, (who I think is hiding from the IRS at this moment) but Ernie's had style, (somewhat crummy style, I'll admit.) It had character. And it had me.

The saga of Ernie's begins way back. Now, I'm "old Chula Vista;" I grew up there, as did my mother before me. In my childhood Ernie's was a German delicatessen called Sausage King. (Yeah, German-themed eateries never seemed to do too well on Third Avenue. Is it because we were eight miles from Tijuana? I don't know.)I do remember that my mother used to occasionally go there on a Saturday and buy cold cuts and such.

Plenty of people have tried to make businesses run on that corner, usually restaurants. I don't know what the problem is. It's right downtown, not a bad location at all.

"Ernie" owned the place before my time. I guess when Carlos bought it he decided keeping the old name would be a better idea than calling a '50s diner "Carlos'." Either that or he was just too damn cheap to change the sign. If you knew Carlos at all, you wouldn't rule that out. This guy wasn't above watering the ketchup.

My association with Ernie's began when I was a reporter on the local weekly newspaper, the Star-News. My editor for most of my tenure there was a Briton named Michael Burgess. Thursday morning was our busiest time of the week because that was when we were actually putting the paper together. It went to press on Thursday afternoon and came out on Friday morning. Michael would be in his office furiously working away with QuarkXpress getting everything laid out. I'd be at my desk as often as not tapping out a last-minute editorial for Michael to put his name on. (I was a much faster writer than Michael, and often called upon to pinch-hit.) Then I'd be standing behind Michael's chair like Mr. Spock on the bridge of the U.S.S. Enterprise, kibitizing: Michael and I often put heads together to decide what should go where or how a headline should read.

Usually, some time between noon and 1 p.m. the button would be pushed and the paper would go off to the printer up in Orange County somewhere, to be returned on trucks in the morning. That's when we could all breathe a sigh of relief and start thinking about the next week's issue.

On one of these fine Thursday afternoons, Michael put on his sportjacket (he always dressed up for work in jackets and ties) and suggested that we "nip over to Ernie's" for some lunch. Michael was a heavy smoker in those days (he has since quit). In the finest European tradition, he rolled his own cigarettes. He once tried to show me how to do it; I couldn't get the hang of it. But Michael liked Ernie's for precisely that reason: it had that outside patio where he could smoke. His smoking didn't bother me, in fact I was a pipe smoker myself in those days. Michael and I often took smoke breaks on a bench behind the office, facing the parking lot. My late younger sister drove by and saw us more than once. "So that's what you do all afternoon," she told me. "I saw you and Michael loafing on that bench."

"That was an editorial board meeting," I replied.

Michael's and my Thursday lunches at Ernie's soon became something of a tradition, part of Thursday. We put the paper together; we went to Ernie's. Michael always drank coffee and usually ordered the country breakfast for his lunch: eggs, sausage, hash browns. "It goes down easy," was his comment. I was trying to keep my carbohydrates in check, so I tended to steer away from sandwiches. One Thursday I ordered the grilled white fish, which came with fries but I'd usually just pick at them, and a salad. The grilled white fish eventually became my "usual," as the country breakfast was Michael's.

Then one Thursday I decided to get crazy and order some wine with my meal. What the heck, we were finished with the paper for that week; the afternoon was going to consist of nothing more brain-jamming than reading e-mail. So I went ahead and ordered a half-carafe of Carlos' cheap burgundy. (Yes, he didn't get a lot of requests for wine, so he only served the box type.)

And there you have it. Red wine with fish. That, too, got to be a "Thursday thing." The two waitresses, Timoko and Pamela, got to be friends of Michael's and mine, as they were seeing so much of us. Neither of them liked Carlos, and Pam in particular liked to spit in his coffee so to speak, to the point where she would sneak me extra glasses of wine when he wasn't looking. One more reason to keep going back.

Michael and I would have long philosophic discussions over our sunny lunches in back of Ernie's Diner. For example one day I asked him to explain to me what "bubble-and-squeak" was. On another occasion we discussed the root causes of World War I. Then there was the time I insulted the pastor of the Congregational Church next door, who happened to be sitting at a nearby table and heard me.

"Now, don't insult Dr. Freeman!" Michael said to me the next time we walked in.

And then there was the time I had lunch at Ernie's with my friend Charlie Berigan, and while we were sitting there eating, my car was stolen. At three O'clock in the afternoon.

When my fiancee Valerie flew out to California in 2005, I took her to Ernie's. She married me anyway.

After I left the Star-News, Ernie's sort of became my "office." When I was doing freelance work I would often tell people to meet me there for interviews. I'd take my laptop over there, order coffee, plug in and go to work. My friend J.D. Hawk sometimes joined me there. He would order wine in much greater quantities than I, but when Pam asked him if he wanted anything to eat, he'd never order anything but "frings," a nauseating combination of french fries and onion rings. Ditto my cartoonist friend Jennifer. I took her to Ernie's one afternoon.

"Frings," she ordered.

"Where do you keeping finding these people?" Pam asked me.

I had lunch one afternoon at Ernie's with Mary Salas, who is currently a member of the California State Assembly but was then on the Chula Vista City Council. I was quite fond of Mary, but she had what as far as I was concerned was a blind spot: she liked Congressman Bob Filner, God only knows why. He has all the endearing young charms of a dock strike. And for his trademark toothy grin, well, all I can say is that it's a good thing he's a Democrat, because that stupid grin makes him look, as my father used to say, "like a jackass eating shit in a briar patch." But Mary liked him, and after listening to me make cracks like that one for about 10 minutes she got up and walked out of the diner, leaving me to finish my meal alone.

It took me weeks to patch things up with Mary.

Ah, memories of Ernie's.

I was genuinely saddened last year when I got an e-mail from home informing me that Ernie's had been closed and boarded up. It shouldn't have come as a surprise, I guess. Carlos managed that place as if he were every bit as determined to crash and burn as Major League Baseball's owners. If I had been there, I would have tried to round up the gang and have a memorial service out on the patio. Michael, J.D., Jennifer, Brett Davis (who sat there and told me his life story for an autobiography I was going to ghost-write which never got written), Pam, Timoko, and the cavalcade of people with whom I sat at Ernie's and took notes while they were talking.

We'd have speeches, reminiscences, a eulogy by Dr. Freeman from the Congregational church next door, (where, by the way, my parents were married in 1950) and of course, for me, my "usual," one last time.

In the course of my life I've dined in some of the finest restaurants of Paris, Vienna, Brussels, Geneva, Munich, Moscow, Dubrovnik, Amsterdam and Rio de Janeiro, not to mention Baltimore, Washington and San Francisco. (I leave out New York because most of the places where I've eaten there are pretty low-rent.) But nowhere, nowhow will red wine with fish ever taste the same. It just ain't Ernie's.

Kitchens are great places to hide

Yesterday, on my other blog, Night Thoughts At Noon, I outlined how I plan to survive four years (or more, God help us) of Barack Obama in the White House.

The short answer is: hide. I've unplugged the TV, canceled the newspaper and intend to pay absolutely no attention to the news or to politics, or to national affairs in general, until this queasy period of wannabee socialism in America has passed, you know, like a kidney stone.

I listed some of the things I intend to do: Read Proust, study French, finish my novel, memorize Shakespeare sonnets, paint.

What I didn't mention that I'm going to do is cook.

I already do that, you see. My wife Valerie is a high-powered, successful real estate broker. Such women don't cook. Actually, that's not true. Valerie likes to cook, is good at it and used to put on dinner parties occasionally. But that was before she went into the real estate business. Now she's usually gone from late morning to early evening. I'm a freelance journalist; I do most of my work from home. By default I also do nearly all of the cooking at our house. The grocery shopping too.

I don't mind. Of course a certain amount of static goes with it. Last March when I threw my annual St. Patrick's Day party, Valerie's friend Linda, who is also a high-powered businesswoman (she does people's taxes) walked into the kitchen, saw me cooking corned beef and cabbage and with a big, smarmy grin, congratulated Valerie for having such a "good little wife."

She got the Hawaiian good-luck symbol from me. You know what that is, don't you? That's what you give somebody who just cut you off in traffic.

Let's get one thing straight, all you Gloria Steinem fans out there. I like to cook, but I also smoke cigars and spit in wastebaskets. Don't mess with me.

Speaking of which, Valerie's friend Lisa never comes over without bringing me a cigar. Kudos to Lisa; she's a real pal. Also cute.

Anyway, as I was saying, kitchens are a swell place to hide. My pal Tony Tiscareno out in California got mad at me a few months ago for admitting that I hide in the kitchen when the Jehovah's Witnesses come to the door. Tony's a Witness; he didn't like that especially. I had to explain to him that it isn't just the JW's I dodge; sales people in general tend to chase me into hiding. And the kitchen is a good place to hide. I have a radio in there (which stays off until 2012) and of course there's plenty to eat. Sometimes even wine. (The whites live in the fridge; the reds have a cubbyhole in the liquor cabinet around the corner.)

So last night we had a little dinner party. By little I mean two guests. It was the first meal I'd hosted since last summer when my friend Mark Chalkley and his wife Debbie came up from Fredericksburg on their motor scooter for lunch. I don't remember what I served, except that Mark and Debbie being Baptists, they don't drink, so I served them a non-alcoholic wine. Now, Baptists and I don't agree on a whole lot generally, but we three were in total concurrence that that non-alcoholic wine was truly vile. I poured most of it down the sink.

Last night my guests were Assistant Secretary of State Tom Shannon, who had come directly from work and looked like someone had just beaten him with a frozen leg of lamb, and my old friend Holly Inder, nee Brayton, who came up from Springfield, VA with a dozen yellow roses for Valerie and went home later with a jar of my homemade (and home-canned) green tomato chutney to give to her mom.

Now, lest you think that I'm putting on airs here, name-dropping about rubbing elbows with senior diplomats, let me point out that I knew Thomas A. Shannon when he was just a punk from the neighborhood. He and I are both from the San Diego area. We met at the U.S. embassy in Brasilia about 20 years ago. He was a junior officer then. I was a State Department communcations puke, dragging pouch bags around the compound when I wasn't shredding paper or taking crap from snooty, self-important suits who think the world is supposed to stop when their printer gets jammed.

Tom wasn't like that. Regular guy, that was Mr. Shannon. Still is, by the way. But with two grown sons and much more responsibility now, well, let's just say it shows. I did what I could, gave him a margarita and a fairly good meal I think. After that we guys retired to the library for cigars (hear that, Linda?) while Valerie and Holly stayed in the dining room and discussed whatever it is women discuss while the menfolk are off with their liqueur and cigars being he-guys.

Holly still works in the field I gave up nearly a decade ago: State Department information management. She and I came on board as government employees at exactly the same time more than 20 years ago. We dated briefly when we were both new hires; eventually we both married other people (on the same day, on different continents. No kidding) but we've sporadically stayed in touch over the years. She's currently raising teenagers in the suburbs, and by the way is no slouch of a cook herself. She likes chopping, Holly, something I hate. I'm thinking of asking her up again on St. Patrick's Day to deal with the onions, carrots and cabbage while I'm out buying the booze.

Since we were having company, I wanted to put on the dog, so I got a little adventurous, for me anyway. The menu included:

Tomato Soup with dill. Now, this soup did not come out of a can. I made it from scratch, from a recipe I pulled off the Internet. The recipe did not call for cream sherry, but I threw in about a half-cup of it, and it really improved the taste.

Spinach salad with feta cheese and bacon. Holly's dad was in the foreign service, and she grew up overseas. She lived in Greece twice, once as a small child and again in her late teens. I like to add little Greek touches like feta to my cooking when Holly's around, just as a tip of the hat to her travels.

Pan-broiled salmon in brown sugar and bourbon. This is delicious, and it's VERY easy. You just melt some butter and brown sugar in a pan, sear the salmon steaks in it for maybe five minutes, then turn them over, dump in about 3/4 of a cup of Jim Beam and, in my case, cover the pan and turn down the heat for about another five minutes. Really good.

Broccoli with hollandaise sauce. I had intended to serve asparagus, but Safeway didn't have any. Oh, well. Broccoli works.

Yellow saffron rice. No particular reason; it just happens to be the kind of rice I like best with seafood.

Dessert was a bit of a skateboard stunt. I had intended to serve my own creation, Apples Fulbright (named after my best schnauzer pal) which is basically apples cooked and then marinated in applejack brandy overnight, served on a waffle and topped with my own special sour cream sauce. But I ruined the apples. I cooked them too long. In a fall-back-and-regroup move, I decided to make creme brulee instead.

But I had never made creme brulee. Serving something you've never made before to guests is dicey. But what the hell, I'm a live-on-the-edge kind of guy. And creme brulee really is easy to make; the only tricky part is after you've let the custard cool and are putting the topping on it, you have to be careful -- the topping is brown and white sugar mixed together, which you then broil to make a sort of crust on top of the custard. You have to be real careful not to let it burn. I almost blew it. The topping came out partly black, but fortunately not all. It tasted okay, anyway.

Ever since I vacationed in Spain way back in 1995 with my then-girlfriend Nadya, I've been partial to Spanish wines. Now, despite the title of this blog, I don't serve red wine with fish to guests. That's a personal foible which I will explain in my next posting. For Tom and Holly I went to Calvert Woodley and picked up two bottles of Marques de Cacere dry white table wine from Rioja. It's very light and crisp, but has more body, I think, than a chardonnay. Salmon is a savory fish and I didn't want to serve chardonnay with it. Of course I looked like a damn fool trying to apply a bottle opener to this stuff -- it comes with a screw cap.

Well, there you have it. Obama's coming in and I'm checking out. Maybe I'll send him a jar of my green tomato chutney as an inaugural gift. He can dine heartily on it. After that I'll be either in the kitchen or the library. But if it's the library, knock firmly on the door. I'll have the music turned up loud so I don't hear the news.