BingoFest

25 August 2022

When it comes to dishes inspired by US states, we could lay quite a spread:

We’d start with California Rolls, Maryland Crab Cakes, then move on to Kentucky Fried Chicken with Texas Toast, finish with a nice slice of New York cheesecake and wash it all down with a Blue Hawaii.

I can’t think of another state that has several dishes with its name in it, and the one I can think of is Mississippi. Mississippi Mud Pie/Cake. Mississippi Mule cocktail. Mississippi Pot Roast. It is this last that concerns us here, for herein lies a tale, so horrifying, so bafflingly improbable, that I caution you not to read it before bed or after taking caffeine. Proceed with caution.

Last Sunday our family was gathered at my brother’s house for Mississippi Pot Roast, a dish I remembered having lots of Pepperoncini in it, and perhaps some vinegar. I have a recipe in a newish cookbook featuring American Regional food, and I recall not only making it, but inviting a friend from the South (assuming he’d had it before?) to eat it with me.

When our party walked into the house on that rainy Sunday afternoon, our nostrils filled with a rich, savory, marrow scent. I asked the Chef de Cuisine the secrets of her recipe, which was a slight alteration of the “original” recipe, which is itself an alteration of an earlier recipe that dated from the late 1990s. I was surprised to hear that Ranch Dressing packet is a typical ingredient, and something clicked in my head. Something was not quite right. Hmmm….well, maybe the recipe I was using made its own Ranch spices, because I can’t recall buying a packet of Ranch.

The finished product was marvelous. Sapid. It was much more balanced and beefy than the one I’d made, which was piquant and tangy. Hold a moment, just as an aside, if I ever start my own children’s puppet theater, my flagship characters will be called Piquant and Tangy. OK, back to the mystery.

Later that evening, when children and parents were snuggling into their beds, I sat at the bar, nursing a icy glass of Rosé, formulating my thoughts for this very essay. I was concerned, for the Mississippi Pot Roast tasted nothing like what I remember and was so good surely I would have remembered. Then what could I have been thinking of that had beef and pepperoncini and the word Mississippi attached to it? I quickly referenced the website where I keep all my cookbooks organized and indexed. I typed in Mississippi Pot Roast and got back zero results. What? i thought. I have made this dish, I have made a dish like it, right? Mississippi Roast. Nothing. Pot Roast brought forth several dozen recipes none with pepperoncini as an ingredient. Finally, I just typed the word, Mississippi.

This brought up the very cookbook I thought the Pot Roast I made was from. It had two recipes with the word Mississippi in it, mud cake and mud pie. Next to the Mississippi Mud Pie title, was a check mark, meaning I had designated it made, and apparently enjoyed it. I gave it 4/5 stars. I have no recollection of making this dish whatsoever.

The nearest I can come to it, is that I read an online recipe for Pot Roast, intended to make it, described it to a friend and something or other, but Oh my stars and gardens I don´t know what made me think I made that pot roast. So, you see, the moral of this story is that that psychiatrist is right, we do forget things and make other things up in our minds and decide that they really happened exactly the way we remember them happening, but they didn´t really happen that way, right? Get it? Anyway, make the Mud Pie. It´s good.

22 August Monday

I once heard an interview on NPR with a psychiatrist who is an expert on memory. She said that we begin to forget an event around ten seconds after it happens. After that, much of what we remember is invented by the brain. A great experiment is to recall the scene of a movie that you really love and try to play it in your head. Then, go watch that movie. Did you it look like you remember? Were the characters in the same place? Was the furniture arranged correctly, to the best of your recollection?

This psychiatrist went on to recount an amazing story about her being convinced by a family member that she witnessed a tragedy as a child, when in fact she was not there. An amazing story that is hers and not mine, and so I won’t tell it here. In part because, well, I’ve forgotten some of the details. The point is that many of our memories, or our memories of memories are supported by our senses. They can flashback to the very scene.

Smell, I’ve been told, has the longest memory of any of the senses. Summer rain may remind us of childhood, or moth balls remind us of a certain aunt’s house. The scent of cured meat like hot dogs remind some people of baseball. The smells of Christmas: cinnamon, orange, mint, the alcoholic breath of old people.

Some cooking scents remind me of certain people. The smell of cooking onions and celery reminds me of my mother. Peppers, tomatoes, and tex-mex spices I associate with my maternal grandmother, buttery pie crust and potatoes with my paternal grandmother. All real things, real and true, for me at least.

End of Part One. Part two is even better, this was a preamble. In Part Two, I’ll discuss the sense memory of cooking a dish, and I will misremember something that is annoying me.

19 August Friday

Having recovered from illness, having managed to fly across country, I find myself at my childhood home and with children no less. A niece and nephew. Fun fact- being in your own childhood home with children can throw a man into a psycho-spritual labyrinth of memories, hopes, fears, and curiosities. The toys that I played with as a child which I had long forgotten about suddenly appear on the bedroom floor, and in the mind, suddenly appear memories of family or friends or events from the distant (to me) past. This is especially true if the kids are playing with something that had been a gift from someone that is now dead. The little ones create new experiences with the toys, and some day they may remember me when their children or grandchildren play with some of the same toys. In the meantime, we all have work to do.

Children and food. How do our food habits develop? When do we go from people that only eat noodles and Cheerios to raw oysters, unusual vegetables, spice? And when, if ever, do kids start to be curious about making food themselves? From pouring milk on cereal to melting cheese on tortilla chips in the microwave to pulling your first turkey out of the oven? Seven is a great age to start to learning to do the interesting things in life. Cooking science included. For a fun beginning, I recommend whipped cream. First timers marvel at the miracle of a liquid turning into a solid, watching Uncle Ben beat and whip the cream with fury, my niece being in charge of slowly adding the sugar. Then, we three take a taste for sweetness. More sugar, more firm, or just right? Maybe the most important thing for kids to learn is to connect their brains to their tongues.

Can you taste a dish and identify the ingredients? We start with yucky and yummy and evolve to salty, sweet, and bland as well as crispy, creamy and chewy. Many palates hit the glass ceiling there. Some grown ups can tell the difference for more sophisticated flavors and textures, but many people don’t think about what they are eating. For instance, when you eat a scoop of vanilla ice cream, can you tell if that scoop has been made with custard-base ice cream or not, or if the vanilla is extract or bean? Once, I was eating a famous brand of “higher end” ice cream and distinctly tasted alcohol. I looked at the label and noticed for the first time that it said, Vanilla Flavored Ice Cream. Indeed, Vanilla Extract. An informed tongue is a good thing, teach the kids while they are young to be discerning. For breakfast we enjoyed Doritos. Cool Ranch. And leftover whipped cream. Heavenly.

12 August Friday

How do you breakfast? Do you like it when people use breakfast as a verb or do you think it is pretentious? Do you do breakfast? Do you take breakfast? Where will you take your breakfast this morning Madame? Of course, getting breakfast is popular. Meeting for breakfast is good, though not as popular as meeting for lunch. I take my breakfast alone in the nook.

I do not like to eat anything “substantial” for a couple of hours of being awake. My appetite is not in focus and nothing sharpens it like suddenly becoming ravenous around noon. Doughnuts and sweets upset an empty stomach. Big Denver omelettes with toast and hash browns? Bring ’em on, but later. James Beard disliked the word brunch because most people ordered breakfast dishes and thought we should just acknowledge that we like to breakfast later in the morning and just call that breakfast. I kind of agree with this. It’s almost as though we view brunch as a slightly-guilty weekend pleasure instead of, perhaps, our body’s preferred way of grazing. Perhaps it’s the bottomless Mimosa.

It must have been our Puritan ancestors that instilled the idea that breakfasts should happen early and soon after waking. I am convinced it is the Protestants that did this. The Catholics encourage fasting before Mass, making the Sunday dinner pretty important from a blood sugar stand point. Second breakfasts have become popular. Breakfast for dinner is great. I think we should breakfast whenever we want, the only point being that we’ve not eaten for a long time before whenever we do it.

So what can I eat first thing in the morning? I am a toast and cereal kind of a guy, and today I stand in front of you as an advocate for homemade granola. First, it’s easy: 6 cups of grain, 1 cup honey, 1 stick’O butter, 1 medium-giant pinch of salt, used sparingly, nuts and raisins and whatever else. 325 15 mins, mix it around, another 10 mins or until it starts to brown slightly, take it out, cool completely (this is when it gets crunchy), and eat it.

This is what my breakfast looks like.

Second, granola (and its kissing cousin, Muesli) are the perfect balance of boring and filling and slightly flavorful and pleasantly crunchy chewy. Oats, either dry rolled or steel cut work in this, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Wheat germ, buckwheat, flax, pumpkin seed, Raisins, currants,walnuts, pecans, pistachios, orange peel, nutmeg, cinnamon, cardamom, all or none of the above. Everything is elevated by tangy cold yogurt, this is well known.

11 August Thursday

I imagine that one of the most unfortunate things about being wealthy is that the world can bend to one’s every whim. There is no sense of relationship with a world that sometimes requires its inhabitants to change behaviors or make different choices. For instance, I imagine there are many people who are not thinking about the contents of the fridge the day they leave on vacation. Most people must. I must contemplate the contents of my kitchen to imagine what I can eat and invent to make the most of these ingredients. The rich eat the same things over and over. A world without necessity is a world without invention, seems. So, what’s cooking?

In my refrigerator at present, I have half an onion, six cremini mushrooms, one egg, half a container of buttermilk, a little regular milk, a few fresh herbs, three carrots, and that’s it. Also, that stub of bread, an avocado, and some granola. It actually sounds like a day’s eating. For breakfast: I’ll make a teeny omelette- mushrooms, herbs, egg, and toast. Perhaps some granola on the side. For lunch, a final swap at the tuna salad with a little granola for dessert. For dinner??? Granola with carrots and onion on top with tuna salad, drowning in buttermilk.

Yes, I’m right. Being of limited means is really a joy.

10 August Wednesday

I wrote yesterday that I was going to making tuna melts for no reason. I now know the reason. I have a lot of tuna salad. Instead of making a melt tonight, I decided to have a simple tuna salad sandwich on the bread which was as amazingly fresh today as it was yesterday when I baked it. It was so soft and chewy, made with fine ground red wheat flour, bread flour, buttermilk, and honey. I’ve also discovered that slicing the bread in uniform sandwich thickness is quite easy. The bread tastes fresher sliced to need. There have been better things since sliced bread.

Tuna salad is another thing which settles with a night in the fridge. It doesn’t last much longer however. The tuna in this salad is a herring, if you will, for the dish’s true star ingredient, celery. There was once a wonderful produce market near the Church St. MUNI stop in San Francisco. Among its many wonders was the most beautiful, young, pale green celery I’ve ever eaten. I once took a bunch of this celery to a friend’s party and MY were they skeptical when I produced, if you will, my contribution to the antipasti. Well, look who’s laughing now! Seriously, celery is good and important in many things, and if you want to the make the world a better place with regards to love and appreciation of celery, you peel it on its arched back. You’ll be glad you did, and the kids will eat it up like gangbusters, perhaps.

The tuna is tuna. Canned tuna. Water packed, in this instance.

9 August Tuesday

What an amazing word. A word we all know what means even though the word itself doesn’t suggest the object it represents. Sandwich. Whenever I hear this word or read it, I feel like eating a sandwich. Saying the word sandwich gives the same mouth feel of eating one. I can hear my fourth grade teacher saying the word SANDWICH very slowly, very deliberately. Or my dad, mouth half full nodding his head. “That’s a pretty good sandwich” he’d say, and he really knows from sandwiches. Sandwiches.

That is a picture of a sandwich. A tuna melt to be exact. My goal over the next few days will be to nail the Tuna Melt, for no particular reason. Here is the buttermilk bread I made before the sandwich was made.

This bread is so tasty and sturdy; it’s the best for sandwiches. It’s very simple to make too. I’ll tell ya about it.

Nah, later. I’m feeling sentimental.

7 August Sunday

I did it, I ate the cake. It was simply amazing, and I’m sorry if I was, you know, complaining about anything. The cake was dense and short bready, and the meringue was light and crisp and the pecans added made it seem like a brittle. The strawberry whipped cream was literally the icing on the cake, and it was absolutely amazing. The dessert was amazing. And yes, the biscuits were amazing, the corn and tomato salad was also amazing. The food was delicious, and gone.

9 August 2022 Tuesday

Like a dried out Christmas tree in your fridge, days old desserts are a poignant reminder of the inevitability of decay. The end of all joy, innocence and youth. That sweet fluffy cloud of whipped cream with seasonal strawberries at the height of flower on Sunday is now deflated, craggy, withered. The berries have turned bitter and are weeping. The whipped cream is toppled rubble like a grand, old, movie palace after the wrecking ball.

Salads and desserts have the shortest shelf life of any foods. By salad I mean the typical American green salad with lettuce and chopped carrots and other crap. Salads should not be kept. I notice at meals made for family and friends there is an occasional insistence that there be “something green” on the plate. It is healthy, and it assuages any guilt caused by the other ingredients in the meal. I notice, however, that guests usually only take one or two leaves of greenery as a kind of garnish. They nibble at it, but mostly the salad is there for show. At the end of the evening, when the ritual of leftover storage takes place, some helpful person will try to store the salad because it is claimed that this salad will be delicious later on. Perhaps they don’t understand that your salad is in a state of decay and will not be desirable after tonight. A dressed salad will not last the evening, it must be thrown out. It doesn’t get better than this, friends. If you want a salad tomorrow, make it tomorrow. Tell the truth. You don’t want to eat this salad. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever.

Desserts are slightly more tricky. People don’t pretend to like desserts, they do. They think that they will want to eat it later. Sometimes, they are right. How about cake? Puddings? Hmmm…..what else? Ice Cream? There’s not much that keeps. Maybe some cookies. Most pies, pastries, and breads don’t improve at all with age. Pastry must be crisp and do her dance.

So this moment has come for our dear Strawberry Meringue Cake. There isn’t much left at all, but it is no longer worth the calories for flavor. The kitchen is emptying out. I will be away for a couple of weeks, and when I return it will be closer to fall than the beginning of summer. It is good to clean the cupboards, to reset and start over. The summer has been beautiful, and it’s getting time to move on.

8 August 2022

Bevelyn, your Strawberry Meringue disappointed no one. It was magnificent. The cake, which in the making was more of a dough than a batter, ended up being a thick, gooey, sweet, eggy bar. Above this, a layer of crispy meringue with toasted pecans gave us richness, nuance, profundity. On top, a fluffy mountain of whipped cream enrobed the macerated strawberries in loving embrace. Everyone enjoyed it heaps, Bevelyn, and for that I thank you.

There it is, gang. This is the post-baked, pre-strawberry whipped cream topping cake. This picture doesn’t quite sizzle and snap the way I hoped it would. I will do a little research on ideal food photography angles and lighting and design and composition. It definitely looks like something your grandma would pull out of the oven. In a good way of course. Some people’s grandmothers pull horrible things out of their ovens. This comparison is not inclusive of them.

The salad with freshly shucked corn, grape tomatoes, lime juice, avocado, and olive oil was really delicious. Corn and lime are a good combo.

Here’s a question topic:

How soon before leaving town ought one to go shopping for fresh food? At what point do we just starting eating out because “I’m going out of town on Thursday”? Monday? I’d think Monday could be the latest. I am going out of town on Thursday.