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.