BingoFest

little disappointments, little triumphs

December 16th, 2025

16 December 2025 Tuesday

Benji!! Why didn’t you write a witty and enlightening post about your Thanksgiving feast, absolutely none of you have asked me. As it turns out, I did write a very nice little post about my Thanksgiving adventures, some very nice prose, perhaps the best prose ever written, but it got lost somewhere, a plague that has been chasing me for several months. In fact, I’m sure you’ve noticed that I don’t post like I used to and a big part of that has to do with this platform. I have been having trouble saving and editing posts. I am in the midst of looking for some other way to write my little writings and not be so frustrated with disappearing paragraphs. Still, you would have loved it, my gentle and faithful, long suffering readers, you are the ones that ultimately take the hit.

Until I am able to take care of this issue, a couple of workarounds:1. I will type faster, and 2. write less. the posts will be shorter. So, what do I want to say? Yes, thanksgiving was wonderful, but last week, a revelation. I had not made a pumpkin pie at all this year, I mean just straight pumpkin pie, so I decided to make one last Friday for a little Christmas Tree shin-dig. I’d forgotten that one of our favorite shops in town, The Sword and Rose, was celebrating an anniversary and we went to pick up some things and celebrate. It’s a metaphysical shop, specializing in tarot cards and readings, house blended incense, candles, bath salts, you know that kinda thing. The point is, the pie hadn’t finished baking by the time we needed to get out there to the shop and meet friends.

Wait, I should back up a second, because it really was the recipe that was great too. and the most wonderful canned pumpkin. OK, quick recipe. One par-baked pie crust. one can pumpkin, one can evaporated milk, 3 eggs, 3/4 cup brown sugar, cinnamon, ginger, allspice, nutmeg, clove, you figure out the proportions, that’s my secret. Bake at 450 (!!!) for ten minutes, than dial that baby down to 300 and bake for thirty minutes. After thirty minutes, open the oven door and make sure that the pie is far from finished and get a little worried. Turn off the oven, put on your coat, and go the nearest metaphysical shop and come back in two hours. When you return, you will likely have the best pumpkin pie you’ve ever had. It was so creamy and thick but not curdy.

Thar she blows, and she didn’t blow, she was grand. Anyway, yes. Onto the next thing- I might start thinking about Christmas soon, but whatever, maybe not. Maybe I’m in the mood for pizza this year. There is no reason to be roasting and cooking more meats and beasts and whatever when spaghetti or lasagna or something else a little more whatever, tomatoey, would be fun. I am also going to do a cookbook review for a book I found for free in one of those little wooden “take a book, leave a book” houses. Simca’s Cuisine by Simone Beck. This book is probably fifty years old, depending in part on when you are reading this. I am writing it in 2025, so if I’m correct about it being fifty years old, then you’ll need to add the difference of whatever year you are reading it and 2025 to understand the date of the book, you know, depending on when you are reading it. I wish there were a way to figure out when books were written!

Wait, I just looked in the front cover of the book and find that it was originally published in 1972. So if you take the year it is now, 2025 and subtract from it the year it was first published, 1972, you’ll come DOWN with the number 53. Which is the number of years ago that it was written. So, I was wrong. It is not 50 years old. It is 53 years old. Isn’t that fun that numbers can do that? Numbers is fun!

More to come, maybe
Eatin Greek like the Greek eat Greek

November 11th, 2025
11 November 2025 Tuesday

I know you’ve seen this: An online article with the headline “What California city is the best place to retire?” and above the headline is a photograph of the skyline of Atlanta. Or how about this: an article with the headline “Miley Cyrus fans shocked to hear devastating health news” only to discover that her Pekingese has asthma. Each of these is a manipulation, a lie that is told on purpose presumably because people don’t know what the skyline of Atlanta looks like, or they don’t know Atlanta is not in California, or they don’t care. Someone assumes it doesn’t matter.

In the latter case, a preying on the emotionally confused, who may not have been devastated by Miley Cyrus’ news about her pet, but are now devastated because they assume that all of her other fans must be devastated and you don’t want to come across as either not a great fan or an unsympathetic person, so you are devastated by the news too. The type or types of person that are likely to be moved by this headline also are frequently unable to have a hierarchy of feelings, conflating say, the dog’s asthma with genocide in Sudan, describing both as “devastating”. In the twenty years I have lived in California, I have noticed residents love this word. Here are a few of what I am coining “California sentences”. 1. Neighbors were devastated to learn that the children were found dead in the bed with their parents, all having been shot in the head at close range. 2. The community is devastated to learn that Ernie’s hot dog stand will not be participating in the county fair this year. 3. I was devastated to hear that the children’s pictures would be displayed in the side hallway, not in the main room, where they were displayed when I was a student here and it’s just not the same.

Now, that’s a lot of devastation, I’m surprised that people are able to keep going. Which came first, the event, the headline, or the feeling? Sometimes I wonder at my own emotional response to media.

I remember when I learned that what I read in the paper was not necessarily true. “Your family won’t believe how delicious this dish is, or that it is made with broccoli! They will be asking for seconds!!” I was twelve years old and just starting to cook from recipes and go off on my own little directions, and I came across this recipe in the local newspaper. It was a pasta dish with a garlic broccoli sauce of sorts. It was published in print, it sounded lovely, everyone in our little family liked the ingredients, and it promised to elicit a certain and positive response from the people eating it. It did not do this.

The recipe was flawed; all the measurements were off, that much I do remember. It made a tiny amount of burned sauce, and we ended up opening a jar of regular old tomato sauce and pouring it over the spaghetti. But for a twelve year old boy, it was, well, devastating. I followed the recipe to the letter of the law, and it had failed. It took a while for me to realize that the flaw was in the recipe itself, which had obviously not been proofread or tested. It made me wish that they had done both of those things instead of writing the useless and inaccurate claim that we’d love it.

Doesn’t this happen to us all the time? We are lead to believe that something terrible has happened to Miley Cyrus herself, and we open the article to see what it is, and if she is OK, only to be deceived because it’s not about her, it’s about her dog. And yet, to the people that adore everything about her, the news about her dog IS big news. If the recipe doesn’t work and your family doesn’t love it, it’s our fault somehow. You must be moved with sympathy, you must love the recipe. Why can’t we eat it and judge for ourselves whether or not we like it? Or why can’t we decide how to feel about celebrity’s pets on our own, without knowing how other people are feeling, or how the people that write these headlines interpret what they think other people are feeling. How does this stuff get published?

OK, skip ahead thirty six years. I am looking for recipes for things that include pumpkin (excluding the soup served in the pumpkin) that aren’t pumpkin pie. I came across a curious recipe from a cookbook called The Complete Book of Greek Cooking, written by the good yiayias at St. Paul’s Greek Orthodox Cathedral, which must be a wonderful place. I did think it was a little unusual to find a pumpkin cake recipe in a Greek cookbook, I guess I didn’t know they had pumpkins in Greece, but you’re learning something everyday, aren’t you?

I thought I’d give it a try, and maybe make a whole meal out this book, because I had never made anything from this book I’ve had for years, and why not? Lamb shoulder was on sale at the market, and well, it just seemed like it was meant to be. I would make a roast lamb with oregano, and the recipe for Lentil Soup to start.

Well, there she is, that pumpkin cake I was telling you about. Pumpkin, walnuts, raisins, and a little of dark chocolate and cinnamon.

A few people came over for dinner and the announcement was made (I like to make announcements) that we’d be eating Greek food, or rather, that all the recipes had come from a cookbook called The Complete Book of Greek Food. As I was making this announcement, perhaps because I was hearing the words come out of my mouth, my heart sank a little. I felt like perhaps I was not telling the truth, I was being inauthentic. I was wanting my guests to believe that these were authentic Greek dishes because the print had convinced me that they were authentic. The Lentil soup was a lovely normal Lentil soup with nothing that occurs to me as being Greek. Someone asked what was Greek about this Lentil soup, and the only answer I had was that it was from this Greek cookbook, yiayia wrote it, and yiayia doesn’t lie.

The Lamb was a little more understandable. I mean, lamb, right, that’s Greek. Oregano? Yeah, sure.

The cake, as food, was easy to swallow. The cake, as Greek? Impossible. It tasted like an ordinary, dense, slightly dry cake that might be good with coffee, American coffee, and the kind that millions of non-Greek grandmothers might make all across the country. So, the food was good, maybe not too special, and even though I have no authority to say so, not at all Greek.

So, what do I make of all this? I did some research and read Amazon reviews of this cookbook, which was published in 1990. You may well ask why I am not cooking from a newer Greek Cookbook. Well, Greece has been around a long time, and i would think that an authentic cookbook would not have changed much from 1990 (the year I made that terrible broccoli pasta) and today. Of course, some of the reviews were glowing, some of them were terrible, and at least one of them was very thoughtful.

The review that got me thinking was based on the idea that the yiayias who wrote this book were of Greek descent, but had lived in the United States for at least two generations. These yiayia’s yiayias were likely born in the United States, and they were raised on these recipes which, they were told, were authentically Greek even though they were likely authentically American. Is this a lie? Is this manipulation? Who committed the sin if there is any? The writers felt no need to validate their recipes because they believed they were authentically Greek. The publisher didn’t want to either, because then you’d either have to get rid of a lot of the recipes or put a book out there called “The Complete book of recipes that these people know” or “A book of assorted foods compiled for no particular reason” Or “A Complete book of false bullshit.” I probably would have bought a copy if it had been named that! But between these two reasons was another reason: the average person would not have known the difference. It was like looking at a picture of Atlanta and being told that it was a city in California. Most people either won’t know or care, and others will simply believe without question.

I wonder what else we read and believe because we’ve read it? Is your “trusted” news source the one that affirms your already held beliefs and feelings? Here’s what I do know:
1. I will get rid of this cookbook. Sorry, yiayia.
2. They do have pumpkins in Greece and eat them.
3. Miley Cyrus has a lot of pets, none of whom have ashtma.
Back to school Benji

October 18th, 2025

18 October 2025 Saturday

Is it astonishing that, even when we know our own pitfalls and shortcomings, it is impossible to avoid them, at least occasionally? How many times have I told me, how many times have I written basic rules when preparing food that must be adhered to with religious fervor? A lot. And is it not a thorough schooling when you pull a variation of your own character flaws, half baked, out of the oven. A meal that looked much better than it tasted.

The menu-Pumpkin soup, in the pumpkin

-Stuffed cabbage rolls

-Pears poached in red wine

Sounds wonderfully autumnal, doesn’t it? All things I’ve made before. I was not lacking in attention or care. I allowed enough time, and was enthusiastic about the project. Everything was in good order, except for some reason (or maybe none) I had some anxiety which made its way into the food in a number of surprising ways (or maybe none).

The first thing I did, which I knew not to do, I altered the recipes and some of these alterations resulted in cutting corners. Now look, read, and learn, my friends and see how one decision sets off a cascade of regrets.

For the cabbage rolls, I decided that I would make a version with ground beef and a meatless one. It was ok, because everything else in the preparation is vegan. It starts with a tomato sauce, cooked rice, and of course, the cabbage leaves. So, I’m boppin a long, boiling the leaves, poaching the pears, and I go to make the tomato sauce. I open the fridge and notice a package of bacon I had opened earlier in the week with a few strips left in. I grab it, open it, chop the strips us, and toss them in the pan. I later added the tomatoes and seasoning. A first derivation that meant the sauce was no longer vegetarian. Why did I do this? What possessed me to grab that bacon in the first place? Silly, because now, I had to make another tomato sauce entirely for the vegetarian version. No biggie, but my anxiety spiked when I subsequently approached the pumpkin.

Now this pumpkin was enormous, deep orange, and perfectly globular. A perfect specimen for jack-o-lantering. Painful reminder: the perfect looking pumpkin for jack-o-lantering means it was not bred for its flesh, which was very pulpy and and flavorless, and there wasn’t much of it. So, that. Now, I’ve made this soup before, with stock, cream, and sage. Because I felt weirdly guilty about having put bacon in the cabbage roll tomato sauce, I decided I couldn’t put stock in the soup. Also, I was out of cream, but had a little milk. And I was out of sage, so I substituted it with nothing. Why didn’t I just run to the store and get some? I have no excuse to offer. So, I put in the flavorings, put in the milk which didn’t make it one third of the way up the wall of the pumpkin. So I added. I added……water. Yes, I know. A terrible, terrible idea.

After an hour’s baking. this. Because there was little pumpkin flesh and it was only watered down milk on the inside, this soup was so thin, it broke my heart. It also had the flavor of water. Everything about it was truly disappointing to me. I ate only a couple of bites, and let it go.

Behind the soup in the picture above, you can see the cabbage rolls, which turned out much better, though I only ate one bite because I was tortured by the soup. This is an old family favorite, and I just ate some leftovers for lunch, and they taste better today than yesterday. So, there is some happiness there. I won’t do the bacon again because with the seasoning (which included allspice) made it taste a little bit like Worcestershire sauce.

The pears were fine. I poached them in red wine, cinnamon, and sugar. They turned a beautiful red color like this-

but I don’t remember them tasting too much like pears. I reduced the poaching liquid and poured it over them like a glaze, except then it slid off the pears and candied on the bottom of the dish. So, that.

The pear recipe comes from Richard Olney’s Simple French Food which is a classic cookbook if ever there was one. But I remember a piece of advice that was given in a review of the book many years ago. I paraphrase. Just because something is simple doesn’t mean that it is easy. The ingredients are simple, maybe the techniques are simple, and the flavors may be fresh and honest and whatever, but with food of this nature the devil is very much in the details. If the onion isn’t evenly diced, or the proportions are not correct, it can throw the whole dish off. The pears were successful in this case, but the same rule applies to the pumpkin soup.

Maybe these were good lessons to learn again again, before the holidays descend on us. I promise I will not cut corners. I promise I will not add ingredients just because they are in the fridge. I will not be consumed by fleeting feelings of panic when all I need to do is breathe deeply, keep moving, and for the sake of all things holy, stick to the plan. Yes, we’re gonna stick to the plan.
Victory at the salad bar

August 21st, 2025

21 August 2025 Thursday

There is an appointed time for everything after all, my friends. A time to be born and a time to die, a time for planting and etc. you know. This summer has been a truly eventful one for me. I’ve had great times in the Redwoods and in Ohio, and San Francisco never disappoints in her offerings. I’ve had personal challenges with friends, a 30th high school reunion, my closest teacher and mentor died, and I sustained a minor injury at work, requiring me to walk with a cane for a few weeks. I’ve seen a lot of family, and friends from other times of my life. It’s been a good time for reflection and assessment, a time to think about the changes we can make, and the changes that visit us.

Throughout all this, I have made it from the farmer’s market to the kitchen many times, enjoyed lots of good food. A few notables:

Sorrel soup. I haven’t seen sorrel before, though I’ve heard of it. Here is the thin potato soup loaded with sorrel straight from the farmer’s market. It is very pleasant and citrusy flavored, bright but not sour.

My best batch of bagels yet. I managed to knead them long enough, boil them long enough, and bake them NOT too long enough, which made them super chewy and satisfying.

I’m getting better with leftovers. Yesterday’s roast chicken is today’s chicken pot pie. Yesterday’s boiled rice is today’s stir fry.

Tuna salad sandwiches with fresh tomatoes. Dark Chocolate cobbler. Eggplant Parmesan. Good food makes us happy.

Good food makes us happy yes, but is there any dish better than being right about something? I don’t mean everyone else said turn left and you said turn right and they did and there was our destination. I mean, the longer simmering right. A theory you’ve had for years, and say even written about on a blog called Bingo-Fest all about food and stuff.

My latest trip to Northeast Ohio coincided with my dad’s birthday. His birthday treat of choice is not cake but pie. Elderberry pie to be exact. Now, if don’t really know what elderberries are, and I didn’t, they are smooth, shiny berries that grow in clusters, they look like fresh currants, and they have a particular taste that is sweeter and more pronounced than blueberries, but not as tangy or seedy or raspberries or blackberries. Very yummy. For some reason known only to the cosmos (see photo above), members of our family have varying degrees of affinity for this fruit. My dad likes it on his birthday, and a cousin, whom I refer to as “Elderberry Bernie”, cultivates the trees in his yard and can’t go three minutes of any conversation with bringing up the damn things. I have never seen them in a grocery store, and I bet you haven’t either. You’ve heard of them sure, but we’ve also heard of Sasquatch, and where is he?

Anyway, in order to get the beloved confections, you have to pre-order them and drive a ways to get them. In our case, we drove into the very heart of Ohio’s Amish country. In deference to local custom, I did not take any photographs while there, so you’ll have to use the “cinema of the imagination” for the next several sentences.

We drove down long, wide streets through a small town that had lots of little bakeries and Amish quilt shops and knick knack bricabracks while horse drawn carriages with bearded lads and bonneted ladies went gliding by all the fat people in gas guzzling SUVS idling in the middle lanes. This little town is a huge tourist destination in the region, primarily for the wonderful, farm fresh food and baked goods made by hands that have never held smartphones. The long procession of cars had a destination in the parking lot of Mary Yoder’s Amish Kitchen. This magnificent cortege pulled in and parked. We got out of the cars, went into the restaurant, and waited in line. The same people, almost the same order, this time out of the car.

We were seated in the large dining room and at the far end of the room were three enormous buffets. The first was a cold salad bar, the second was side dishes, and the third, meat and main dishes. I should mention at this point that our party included my parents, my 10 yr old niece, my 8 yr old nephew, and myself. The children were immediately interested in at least looking at the buffet, so I took them up and they looked at it. Chicken tenders? Check. Mashed Potatoes? Check. Orange jello? Check. A child’s food paradise.

Now some time in the past, maybe a year ago, I wrote a blog post about introducing children to vegetables and my own formative experience at the Brown Derby salad bar, and the joy of putting together my own weird combinations and eating the results. I wondered to you, patient readers, if this were something that I could witness someday with other children.

Well, it happened. I was so so very happy that I got to be the first person to take my niece to a salad bar and watch her put her own salad together. A time sow seeds, and a time to harvest what we have sowed. And so it was, we walked up and looked at all the colorful offerings, and she asked, pointing to the baby spinach, “Uncle Ben, can I have that as my lettuce?” And I said, my heart beaming from ear to ear, “Why of course, my dear, you may have whatever you want.” For a brief moment, I was the Willy Wonka of crudites. My nephew too, not wanting to be left out of the make-it-yourself lunch, got his own plate, chock full of fried chicken tenders smothered in orange jello. Everyone is a god at the salad bar.

And so I am grateful, so grateful. For the first time in quite a while, I had something I wanted to write about. “As soon as I get back to San Francisco, I’m gonna write about this”, I said. I returned renewed and invigorated, and in an appointed season of looking back, I began to look forward.

Now, I settle in for a season. There will be, I hope, many good, sound, new theories to put forward, and many new recipes and techniques to discover. The days are getting shorter, we can see them, as summer begins to dress for fall, and that’s OK, didn’t we savor every moment? And wasn’t it glorious?
the joy of boredom

June 19th, 2025

19 June Wednesday

The cookbook on the chopping block: Market Cooking by David Tanis. The menu: Seared Cauliflower with Anchovy, Lemon, and Caper sauce; Shaved Asparagus and wild Arugula salad with Parmesan slices; Roast Chicken with whole heads of garlic; crisp roasted potatoes; corn on the cob black raspberry ice cream with fresh raspberries atop. The verdict: Keep.

OK, a couple of things: The ice cream recipe didn’t come from this cookbook, it came from a Chez Panisse cookbook. I didn’t serve it because it hadn’t set up before people left. My fault, entirely. I looked at it this morning, and it still hasn’t completely solidified, and it may not. I think I may have put in a little too much sugar because I didn’t know the amount of sugar in the syrup. You see, I didn’t have fresh black raspberries, so I used a syrup. It’s really yummy and more like soft serve. Anyway, it’s whats for breakfast.

I served the corn just with butter, it was good for first of the season. The asparagus was the only bunch I found at the farmer’s market yesterday. I served it raw and thinly sliced. It was delicious.

Yeah, roast chicken. yeah, salad. It was all great. I’d forgotten I’d used this book before. It’s easy to forget because everything in it is really so simple. Anway, whoopdy noodle doo. I did something amazing this week, and not a moment too soon.

I cleaned out the pantry. It was a great feeling. Now, everything in there is good and right and there is most importantly, less. Oh the joys of having fewer choices! What did I do? Well, I gathered some surplus items that I was never gonna use in a year and gave them away. Now it looks so sleek and easy to use and comfortable and blah blah blah. I think I just became an old man. I mean, I’ve written about cleaning the pantry out before, but this time it felt different, like I aged whilst writing the sentences. What a nut!

It’s just a slow summer morning. It’s cold outside because this is California after all, and the coffee is cold and the kitchen floor is cold. And that ice cream is cold. It’s that slowness and joyful boredom that I love and treasure. It has been my life’s aspiration. To be quiet, and have not a lot that matters, and review cookbooks with arugula salads and other boring things that boring people like me do.

So now what do we do? My parents are coming next week and I’d like to have a few little parties. Like for instance, a fondue party. That’ll take them straight back to the 70s. They’ll love it. They were actually eating out of those fondue pots back then. We’ll see.
Authenticity again

May 14th, 2025

14 May Wednesday

It was an evening much like any other. We were strolling around the grocery store, not knowing what we’d have for dinner. I guess because they were on sale and we were getting tired, we settled on flank steak and broccoli for a stir fry. Beef and Broccoli, Broccoli Beef. We’ve done this before, there is nothing to it. Home we go.

Still in the stage of my Chinese cooking where I need to know the proportions of sauces and flavorings, I hied me to the library and found several recipes. Of course, this is not a really complicated formula, it’s the usual combinations of ginger, garlic, soy sauce, oyster sauce, Shaoxing wine, Sesame oil, and spring onions. The only difference really is how and when the ingredients are added. I decided on the one in The Wok by Kenji Lopez-Alt.

This Broccoli Beef begins with a technique of aggressively rinsing the beef in cold water and squeezing it tightly to get all the water out of it. Then, cornstarch is worked in with the hands, then a marinade is poured over. The water is boiled, the broccoli blanched, the peanut oil swirled into the hot wok, the beef added, then broccoli, then sauce, then serve.

Now there were a few little oversights which didn’t contribute to a great dish but certainly an edible one. Maybe the wok wasn’t quite hot enough and maybe the broccoli was a little crunchy. It was something we got right that I didn’t like. It was the washing the beef and working the cornstarch in. It made the beef tender, disturbingly so. I have had this texture before in Chinese restaurants, and I have to confess, I don’t think I like it. It takes a lot of the flavor out of the beef and it’s too soft. It isn’t slices of steak, like we’d have in a steak salad. That’s tender, it’s just tender for beef. Perhaps it was because the wok was a little cool that the beef ended up being super soft on the outside and super chewy on the inside which made it extra revolting, but I wasn’t happy. We need a redo.

As it happens, I bought enough flank steak to do this again if we wanted. Honestly, I didn’t really want to, I’m a little beefed out, but whatever. I would choose another recipe, I thought, and we can compare.

The photo on top is the first one, the one I didn’t particularly like. The one below is the recipe from Stir Frying to the Sky’s Edge by Grace Young. Her recipe was very much the same as Lopez-Alt’s except with the addition of Black Bean paste and the subtraction of the beef washing and cornstarch. There is cornstarch in Young’s, she uses it as a thickener for the sauce, not to tenderize the meat. I LOVED this one, and it will be my go-to whenever I make Broccoli Beef. The beef was steaky just like I like it, or like we like it. Strangely, it seemed more, well, what’s the word, American?

I began to wonder which of these recipes was more authentic Chinese. Then I wondered why I cared which one was more authentic. Then I wondered what other people would think if I told them that I liked the recipe that was less authentic. Then I wondered why I cared if people thought I was plebian for liking inauthentic Chinese food. And why is it important?

For the last couple of centuries, new cultures and cuisines have made their way to the USA and became part of our national cuisine. Think Chop Suey, Spaghetti and Meatballs, Pizza, Tamales. All these foods have roots in the flavors of the countries they come from, but they were all Americanized, and some of these became “types” of cuisine on their own, think “Jersey Italian” or “Tex-Mex”. After World War II, people began coming more from Non-European countries like India and Japan, there was more access to ingredients from around the world, and eating became more of a pleasurable pastime for more people. Hell, even mom got in on taco night. Thai restaurants and sushi became very popular and that was it, people were interested in food the way it is eaten in the country of origin. It even became a social taboo to like less than authentic versions of dishes. This was particularly true of Chinese food. Who eats Chop Suey or Egg Foo Young now?

So I did a little research, and found that indeed, it is “authentic” to wash the beef, and only beef, by the way, this should NOT be done with chicken apparently. I usually don’t eat beef at Chinese restaurants, and I would be open to cooking it again the washed way, but I must say, as a Westerner, I am accustomed to enjoying my beef a certain way, and I probably will always prefer that chewy, American steak in Chinese flavored sauce.

Now I feel guilty for having written that. Now I feel like everyone will think less of me for not having kept that to myself. Now I feel horrible for writing that I feel horrible because I’m worried what you’ll think of me now that I’ve shared that with you. Now I feel really awkward because I am thinking that you may have been liking this little essay until this part when I started feeling really self-conscious about how i come across in writing and how you may be judging me for coming across that way, which is not my intention. I just wanted to eat dinner.
Foreign food

April 5th, 2025

5 April 2025 Saturday

I’m laying bed, it’s a warm spring day out, and I am sipping a hot cup of coffee. Strictly speaking, coffee is a foreign food. It is not created domestically, therefore it is foreign. It’s so difficult to tell in this world what is foreign and what is not, some of the most familiar every day items we eat are foreign. So, this word, foreign, has lost a great deal of its meaning. Foreign means for many of us, anything that is unfamiliar.

I think many people would consider the Paw Paw a foreign food, even though it is the native fruit of Ohio. We’d much sooner eat a banana, even though bananas cannot be grown anywhere in the continental United States. With shipping methods, new routes, methods of preserving foods, there is no foreign. Everything is domestic in a sense in this global world. It has in fact always been global, it’s just that we didn’t know it. Many still don’t know it.

One of the best things about being an American, is that everything we eat is part of American cuisine. How many times a week do you eat Italian, Mexican, Indian, Chinese, Thai, German, Korean, or Japanese food? I bet at least three of these make it to the table every week, maybe more than once. I eat Chinese food three or four times a week. When I say, “let’s get Chinese”, I am saying “from our endless variations on world food, I want to taste the one that aligns with the flavor profile of China.” Most of our grocery stores have an Asian and/or Latino aisles with all the ingredients in that nation’s flavor profile. It’s a very American thing. I eat American every day.

Now, I am not saying that all the foods from other countries need to be “Americanized” in terms of flavor or cooking methods, we’ve really come around to eating more spicy and what do you call it, non-Yankee cooking. We eat Chinese food in an American fashion, with napkins on our laps, drinking clean water, with fork and knife, (or chopsticks, made right here in California) and in the context of our own culture. For instance, we are more likely to eat kimchi at dinner when our palates are ready for something spicy. In Korea, kimchi is eaten at all times of day, including a wonderful kimchi soup often eaten for breakfast. Most Americans who love kimchi would probably not eat it for breakfast on a regular basis. We make it an American food by interacting with it on our terms. Kimchi for dinner, not for breakfast.

Another use of the word foreign is with regard to things that shouldn’t be where they are. Foreign actors you may hear them called. Traces of a foreign substance were found in a sample of cereal, for instance. There are food cops out there all the time blowing the whistle on things found in food that shouldn’t be there. The Girl Scout cookie thing recently, where they were found to contain heavy metals, and all sorts of other not-Girl Scout cookie things. Everyone went nuts for a few hours, until the next paper concluded that you’d need to eat 73,000 cookies a day for those metals to harm you, so you’re in the clear.

No, this picture was not taken on another planet, this is Earth. You can’t see the pollinators, the foreign invaders that are the bees, but they are there in full force, making life continue.

Anyway, don’t forget to savor and enjoy all of those everyday, normal foods that are a “foreign” part of your daily domestic diet. The climate may not be able to sustain them, and you and I may no longer be able to afford them. And if you’re in Ohio, maybe start eating Paw Paws.
Baking for Spring

March 31st, 2025

31 March 2025 Monday

Like the opening of the baseball season, which also happened this week: Hot Cross Buns. Now, you all know I love these babies, and I make them every year without fail. I am completely pleased with this recipe, which I have developed over the years. A mix of bread flour and AP flour, allspice, cinnamon, cardamom, raisins, currants, candied orange peel. Bun wash after baking. Cross made with icing drizzled on after cooling. Bingo bango bongo, there are many ways to bake a bun.

There are the freshly baked rye loaves from Friday.

I don’t say this enough, but I love things smothered in seeds, in this case, caraway. Hmm, these loaves were dense, bitter, tangy, and really yummy.

There is a little of the rye bread left, and that puts me in mind of a bread pudding. A savory one, perhaps with eggs, cheese and sausage. Spinach, bell peppers. Hmm. A strata. Now, you’d think somethin’ with a fancy pants name like Strata would come from Europe or some fancy place. But apparently, strati are kind of an American thing. Now, of course, dishes like this were originally a way to dispose of stale bread, like French toast (poor Knights of Windsor), Pan Perdu. Or Panade, which was stale bread soaked in water with salt. If you were lucky, there was an onion in that water. If you were really lucky there was a beef bone with that onion and salt in that water with that stale bread. Thus, French Onion Soup.

In what ways, is a strata different from a frittata? The principal ingredient in strata is bread, whereas a frittata is a strange cross between an omelette and a quiche. OK, my strata is in the oven. eggs, milk, stale rye, sausage, onion, green bell pepper. Muenster cheese. Let’s see.

Looks gorgeous, doesn’t it? Well, it didn’t taste that way. It was too bready, not seasoned enough. I am going to keep until tomorrow, and cook it with braise lamb shank in tomato sauce. That should make it great.
Spicetown revisited again

March 29th, 2025

29 March 2025 Saturday

It’s good to let go of things sometimes. I have too many books always, and have practiced the art of giving away ones I care about to others, to open the door for a new opportunity, a new slice of life for me and the books. I always tell myself that if I ever want to see that book again, it’s always at the library or book store. Generally, when I get rid of a cookbook, I forget about, never giving it another thought. Sometimes, I am delighted to get rid of a book. I remember one cookbook that was meant to be “healthy” and every recipe was a total dud, not one thing worked. I don’t miss that one. There was another book, by a famous chef I shall not name as Jacques Pepin, and it too was low-fat, low-sugar, low-everything, low-flavor, low-joy. Every recipe I tried tasted the same, like nothing. I remember one egg white pudding with blueberry syrup, which, according to Pepin, was blueberries soaked in water. Jacques, please!!! Licking stamps is more flavorful.

There is one cookbook that I gave back to the world many years ago that I have thought about and thought about and always said to myself that if I ever found it in a 2nd hand book shop, where I buy most of my books, I would get it again. Cut to ten years minus one week later, and I saw a pristine hard covered copy of the book on the shelf at Community Thrift. It’s A Book of Jewish Food by Claudia Roden. It’s a thoroughly researched history of the evolution and dissemination of the foods of this (these) culture(s). It divides into two main sections: The Ashkenazy cuisine that originated in Eastern Europe, and Sephardic cuisine which has its origins in the middle-east.

I made two loaves of Rye bread, which was deliciously tangy and bitter. I didn’t make the dough the day before, which would have made it more sourdoughy, but i did make it in the morning. I put in a can of peanut butter stout beer, which is the perfect use of the stuff. It went beautifully with the mushroom soup I served next. Mushrooms, a potato, water, parsley, lemon juice. So yummy.

Amazing and mind numbingly simple red cabbage and apples: Let them soak and stew in red wine, apple cider vinegar, SandP. then steam it on up. So so good.

And Chicken Paprikash. Oh, boy, yet another dish mired in saucy controversy, and I do mean sauce. People go bonkers, the paprika must be Hungarian, it must not have tomatoes in it, it must have tomatoes in it, there is no fresh pepper in it, it must have fresh pepper in it. And why must everything Hungarian have sour cream in it? If I think about it, it might be the most divisive issue in the world today. Well, here’s something wack-a-doodle, the recipe in this book has both fresh tomatoes and fresh pepper, and NO SORU

No sour cream. Forgive the strange typo above, which I am unable to delete for some reason. Anyway, no sour cream. Actually, no dairy of any kind. Absolutely delish. Here’s a tip when cooking from cookbooks of other cultures, I think I’ve written this before: You usually want to triple the amount of spice in almost anything. So, 4 heaping tablespoons of paprika at least, at least, to get a good taste on that.

Now, a large pot of chili is simmering on the stove top. And on PBS, speak of the devil, Jacques Pepin is cooking salmon in water. I don’t really understand him, honestly. He clearly knows how to cook, and he must have a very sensitive palette his is food is so lacking in flavor. Not like my chili.

It was purely coincidence that this chili ended up clearing a pantry. I bought a freshly ground pound of beef chuck, and the meat man asked if I wanted another pound for free. Why yes, Mr. Meat Man, I would love more meat at no cost. But wait a minute!! What’s the catch? Well, Mr. Meat Man said that is was the tray of meat that he’d taken out of the window only a moment ago, and that it had lost its pink, youthful color and had grayed. No one would buy it, Meat Man saith. I will take the rejected meat and provide a home for it, I said.

Come on now, this is exactly what I mean. Jacques just put these strange little strips of salmon into a dry non-stick skillet with no seasoning or anything. It just looks so weirdly unsatisfying. With sorrel leaves soaked in light cream. blah.

OK, back to the chili! Having secured a large envelope of surplus beef and, having walked it home, gently, I was now in a position to decide what to cook with it. I’ve been “in the mood” for lasagna lately, but chili won. So, more beef=more spices needed to give it the good flavor. I pulled my signature blend: lots of cumin, lots of Italian seasoning, lots of smoked paprika (it’s a real paprika fest around here lately!), lots of red pepper flake, medium amounts of cayenne, medium amounts of garlic powder ( I like this sometimes because it has a little toasty flavor distinct from fresh garlic), black pepper, salt, and i think that’s it. I ended using up all of most of the above things. I know have a small army of empty spice jars. Spring cleaning means eating out the spice rack. It is not a cemetery, the spice jars are not tombstones. And Colorado Green Chile!! I’ve written about this before, the greatest of all chili blends. What a dish. What a day.

OOh, I just snuck into the kitchen for a taste of that chili. it sure is good. When I was a young fool, I would smother my chili in crackers and cheddar cheese, but now that I am an old fool, I think I like it plain. Which is, of course, not plain at all. OK, maybe a few crackers.

Finally, an editorial note before I hit publish. I always proofread this memo before sending it out and try to catch as many boo boos as I can. Lately, I’ve hit a problem: Word Press does not permit me to change anything after I’ve written it. So, the above text is completely unedited and I know there are mistakes. I regret not being able to change them. I might have even changed my phraseology or syntax and stuff. I was able, mercifully, to add this additional paragraph clarifying the reason for unaltered errata. Have a good day now.
Hungry for surprise

March 17th, 2025

17 March 2025 Monday

Perhaps because everything went smoothly, perhaps because I’d done something like this before, I forgot to write to you, dear reader. But don’t worry, I probably spared you a boring story. It would be more exciting if I were writing this from a hospital bed, recovering from third degree burns after a cauldron full of hot oil exploded in every direction after I put a rare cut of exotic meat, covered in searing hot, eye-watering chiles and spices took me to the floor, fully engulfed in flames. But I’m not. I’m just a man with an empty wok, walking the indifferent streets cold and windy. I realized recently that everything is completely meaningless, and I haven’t quite felt the same since.

Interestingly, this horrific picture was something quite lovely. I know it looks like someone dropped their doggy bag in a oil slicked drain, but it is actually pork belly simmering a marvelous stew of garlic, ginger, soy, and a new to me ingredient: Mushroom Soy Sauce. Have I not written of this elixir already? It is wonderous. Thicker and more umami than regular soy sauce, it’s also quite smoky, which makes the Chinese pork belly taste like, you know, bacon.

I braised that pork for four hours, worth every second. I have another whole pork belly in my freezer, am gonna make this again for guests.

Last week’s full moon, shortly before it eclipsed, seen over Mission Street. That’s the name of a song, appearing shortly: Moon over Mission Street. OH, the skies are playing tricks with us these days, so many changes, nothing to stop them.

Ginger, apple, upside down cake. Good, yes, good. Not enough ginger. maybe not enough spice in general. Lots of Molasses, maybe a little too molassesy. Still, good. I’m restless. I need a bigger project, maybe something with a little failure or at least risk involved. Spring is almost here, I’m ready.