Little Surprises

How far would you go to make your host or hostess feel comfortable, that is, not embarrassed, by a his or her culinary lapse or anomaly?

Let’s say you are having dinner with your sweet mother, or your dear auntie, and she has served your favorite—meatloaf topped with barbeque sauce and caramelized onions. You slide some mashed potatoes over to join the beef and take a big bite. It’s then that you feel the unmistakable sensation of a hair in your mouth. What do you do? Do you abruptly stop chewing, squint your eyes, stick your thumb and index finger into your mouth and grope around until you find it, pulling it out and then holding it up for inspection? “Oh look! I found a hair in my food!” Or do you discretely spit the bite out into a napkin, not saying a word?

Maybe it’s not a foreign object in the dish, but the dish itself. It tastes weird, not to your liking at all. In fact, you would rather not even try to choke it down.

Perhaps you are eating over at your buddy’s house, or maybe your in-laws. You didn’t know until you took a bite that the chicken was baked with a curry powder crust on it. And the soup tastes sort of swampy. What do you do? Do you say, “I can’t eat this. Do you have any peanut butter so I can make a sandwich?” Or do you politely pick at it and then stop by In and Out Burger on the way home?

When I was a kid, we used to go visit the relatives in another state. One aunt invited all her family over to join us in a dinner, using the “good china” in the top cupboard. As luck would have it, I got the top plate. Which was dusty. The pattern hid it, but when I sat down to my food, I could see the layer. It wasn’t that appetizing, but I did feel very noble about not embarrassing my aunt.

The best story I heard was from my sister. She was visiting her husband’s family and was served pheasant. The host was very proud of his presentation. She was served her section. Crunch! He had forgotten to remove the craw! She ate around it, not wanting to embarrass him by pointing it out. Yikes!

I knew one man who was so terrified and disgusted about the mere idea of a hair in his food that he required his wife and daughters to have very short hair. Does a hair do it for you? Or is it bugs? Grit?

Would you be discreet? Or do you feel like all the participants need to know what you found, or how you think the food tastes?

One Fish Two Fish, Red Fish Blue Fish

Actually it is One fish, Ten fish, Black fish, Gray fish.

Last week my husband went deep sea fishing up the Northern California coast. I’ve always thought it would be great fun to have a whole pile of fish to play around with, and I got my wish. Alas, no salmon! But he did catch his limit (10) of these plain-looking, tasty blackish-grayish fish. He brought home 8 of them already filleted, but left 2 of them whole, for barbequing.

It is sort of amazing how much of a fish is its head. And you can’t cheat and cut a little higher on the neck to add a little more meat on the carcass. There’s a bony thing right behind the gills that you have to go past to cut. You can angle it up a little, but not much. So there is this great big fish head with a little wad of meat still on it right behind the brain. The thrifty part of me was screaming “Fish soup!” But the practical part of me was looking at all the fish meat I had on the counter and, thankfully, beat that idea down.

I stashed the bag of fillets in the ‘fridge and concentrated on the carcasses. I got the briquettes started and then sliced the bodies in thick steaks. I ended up with 5 pieces, and coated them with lemon pepper. I decided that now would be a good time to try out those split apple wood pieces that have been drying, so I laid a couple on the coals for smoke.

After a few minutes on the hot part of the coals, I moved them off to the side to cook more slowly and indirectly. I guess they took about a half hour. Very successful! They were tender, moist, smoky and delicious. The apple wood makes a nice mild smoke flavor.

My next try was breaded and fried for breakfast the next morning. They were very good too, moist and flavorful. The only issue was that we have become unused to breaded and fried things, so there was a lot of *burp!* excuse me!

That evening (you are witnessing fish-immersion here) I tried some fillets out in my Camerons stove top smoker. It did so well with some salmon previously, but these ended up dry to my tastes. Could be because I left them in too long, or because the salmon had more fat… But the family thought they were fine.

The last 3 fillets went back out to the barbeque the next evening. To keep them from falling apart, I laid them on a bed of sliced bacon. So you know they will be good! I thought my husband might be getting weary of fish by now, so I grilled up some lamb steaks for him. And what the heck? I laid bacon over them too! (Bacon is very good in the barbeque!)

This morning I had the last of the fish leftovers for breakfast.
I guess I’ve had enough of fish for now, but I’ll be looking at recipes for the next time!

More Smokin'

I’ve been having fun with my new kitchen toy, a stovetop smoker.

What I love about thrift stores is that you never know what you’re going to come across. The strategy I use is to have a short list in my head of things that I’m keeping an eye out for, but be open to something totally unexpected. At Goodwill, a few days ago, I found a Camerons Stovetop Smoker still in the box unused, with all the cups of wood chips and instruction manual still there. I got it for $8. List price is $50.

At first I’d been thinking it would replace a smoker like those Little Chief smokers, but then I realized it’s more of a cooker that makes your food nice and smoky. It is nice heavy-duty stainless steel and very easy to use for all types of food.

Here’s how it works: The pan is set up in layers. In the bottom of the pan you make a small pile of the wood chips, then set the drip pan down there. The rack goes on the drip pan, the food on the rack, and then the cover slides across the top. You set the stove burner to medium, and presently the chips begin to smolder, the pan heats up inside, and the food cooks. Any stray wisps of smoke go up the hood vent turned on low.

So far, I have done a pan of thick sliced potatoes, salmon fillets, and homemade chicken sausage. The salmon turned out the best. It was moist and smoky-flavored. Cold, it makes an EXCELLENT addition to a salad. The potatoes were nice, but next time I’ll slice them a little thinner and maybe add some liquid to the drip pan to add moisture. The sausages taste lovely and smoky, but I needed to leave them in long enough to get maximum smoke flavor which left them a little drier than I would have preferred. But a ground patty would take in the smoke in fast order, so maybe I’ll try that next time.

One fun part of this kit is the 4 little cups of chips. I knew I liked hickory, but didn’t know about the rest of the varieties. I’ve used alder and oak so far, and am anxious to try the cherry.

Desserts I have known and loved... Baby Cakes!

Maybe because I am in a low calorie eating frame of mind lately that my thoughts have turned to… Dessert!

I’ve been thinking over past desserts, enjoying their experience from a distance, and seeing them pop back into my life once in a while in the future. So I thought I’d ruminate on a few more memorable ones and post them here. I want to start with a Baby Cake.

A few years ago, we traveled to Arizona for a conference my husband wanted to attend. It was in Phoenix. There happens to be a nice art museum in Phoenix, which was lovely, as I enjoy art museums. My son was a nice companion, and we had a jolly time.

When meal time came, I did something uncharacteristic. Instead of being thrifty and looking for a cheap place to eat off-site, we dined in the elegant dining room of the museum. The food was excellent. And then I did something even more uncharacteristic—I ordered a dessert.

It was called a Baby Cake, a Tuxedo Baby Cake, and it was SO cute! It had one layer of vanilla and one layer of chocolate cake, filled with a cream. It was covered with white and brown chocolate coating and was decorated with little flags of chocolate. A drizzle of chocolate syrup finished up the presentation. We split it, and it was delectable. Good things come in small packages.

The experience reminded me of how we fix good times and new, fun experiences in our minds. Saturate it with all the sensory stimulus you can; sight, taste, touch, smell, hearing. These are the keys to remembering and enjoying those times again, even after they have long past.

Pemmican-Schmemmican

I haven’t been posting for a little while because I have been busy with my other blog that Melinda and I have been setting up, Project Newbery Award. Our goal is to read and review all the Newbery Award books and some of the Honor books.

So, being of a rather bookish frame of mind, I decided to scan my books and see if one made a particular food pop into my mind. One did. When I saw “Two Against the North,” by Farley Mowat, I instantly thought of Pemmican.





Pg. 108 and 109: “…wizened little berries,…partly dried. The drying process was completed over the fire so the berries would not ferment later on. … mixed them with ground-up deermeat (that they had pulverized between two stones) and with boiling hot deer fat. This rather sickening-looking mixture was then poured out to cool in slabs, and the slabs carefully wrapped...”

It didn’t matter, the word “sickening-looking.” I just skimmed right over that. It sounded COOL! The perfect trail food. In my mind, it was not a greasy, mouth-coating, fibrous hunk peppered with sour bits. It was a cross between…

Have you ever had a “peanut patty?” It is an old-fashion candy that is shaped into a round, flat little pat. The sweet matrix is a soft, translucent, pink material that holds shelled peanuts in a nubby suspension. I was never all that fond of them, but they were sure cute, and I could appreciate their novel make up.

What was much better was a Cadbury “Fruit and Nut Bar.” As far as I knew, they only came family-size, which was good because we always got one as a family. The big milk chocolate slab was scored into small squares for breaking off individual pieces. Nuts and raisins were embedded in the chocolate. With one nice bite, you got the sweet chocolate, the tangy-sweet raisins, and the rich, crunchy nuts.

So I just couldn’t shake the feeling that pemmican was a cross between a Peanut Patty and a Cadbury Fruit and Nut Bar. And what is strange is that even now, I have a hard time imagining that pemmican isn’t a tasty treat. Maybe it’s partly the name. Pemmican. When you say it, it makes you sound like an insider. Like an experienced wilderness adventurer. Maybe it should be called “Rancid Lard and Protein Slabs.”

To keep my fantasy intact, I shall have to come up with my own pemmican recipe. Stay tuned!

Six Things I could not, would not eat...

(Scorpion Soup- not currently on my list because this dish had never occured to me before, therefore wasn't lurking in my mind. I ran across this most revolting photograph on the web)

OK, Who really knows what one could manage to choke down if one were starving? I’ve never been starving. I’ve never even been really hungry, I mean really hungry. So if ever I were in that position, I suppose I may have to eat my words. But gladly. I think I could even eat crow before I could eat, well, lets just have the list now, shall we?

Before I begin, I must admit that there are some awful things that people around the world eat that I wouldn’t even know about unless I started digging around for “weird, unusual things people eat.” (try the Google search yourself!) But I’m not counting it unless it was something I already knew about and had already put on my bad boy list.

6) Termites. We could just expand this to include all bugs. In fact, I could happily expand it outward to include all insects, spiders, ticks, caterpillars—in short, things with an indecent number of legs. But it is termites I can’t get out of my head. Years ago, I saw a National Geographic article on termites that had a big color picture of village folks frying up a mess of winged termites over cook fires. Crispy brown with wings sticking up all over in a big black frying pan. No thanks.

5) Shark Fin Soup. I’d never heard of it before I found a recipe in a Chinese cookbook I’d gotten as a gift. Two whole pages were devoted to the preparation of the fin. The picture of the finished dish showed a big white bowl with a single meaty lump wallowing in a clear yellow broth. Yawn. Later, when I read accounts of how sharks were “finned” to obtain the necessary ingredient, I was repulsed. Never!

4) Brains. My dad would sometimes hanker for exotic things to eat. Various organ meats showed up at disturbing intervals, coincidentally when we kids happened to not be very hungry. Brains were the hardest item to wrap my mind around eating. One day, I couldn’t get out of it and allowed a small portion of scrambled Brains ‘n Eggs on my plate. Okaaaay… it was edible. But… Thankfully, with Mad Cow disease, I don’t have to come up with a polite way of saying, “No thank you, really!”

3) Dog Food. Wait! you say. I thought we were talking about regular people food! Yes, we are, but this one is allowed because I used to eat it when I was a kid. Yum! Just opening a can and smelling it brings my childhood back. Because it was cheap, we used to buy Skippy brand canned dog food for our dog. When we opened each end and pushed the food through, we’d slice off a half inch with a butter knife and nibble on it. Sometimes we’d get lectured because we weren’t leaving enough for the dog. I can still hear our shrill little voices, “Mama! Your meatloaf is good! It tastes like dog food!” Gag.

2) Yak Butter Tea. Yes, I know it is highly unlikely that I will ever be put in the position of having to drink this particular poison, but when you have read the National Geographic as long as I have, anything seems possible in this world. For some reason I can really imagine how this must taste—salty tea with rancid yak butter blobs floating around in it. Congealing even as we speak.

1) Corn Smuts. Yes, smut. Have you ever seen a corn smut? Some years ago when I was raising a few rows of sweet corn, I pulled back the husks to find the invasion of the body snatchers. Instead of rows of demure pale yellow kernels grew huge grotesque gray-purple tumors, wallowing all over the end of the ear. I couldn’t throw it fast or far enough. I didn’t know what it was until I watched a TV show featuring a man traveling around in Mexico, eating various indigenous food items. One strange item was called huitlacoche, which turned out to be young corn smuts stir-fried and served up in a tortilla. Supposedly, it is a delicacy, and folks have been trying to bring this fungus to American and European diets, but with little success. You can see why, if you look on Wikipedia and see the pictures. I don’t know which is ickier, the life-size or the microscopic view.

What is your list like? What makes a thing hard to eat; the taste, texture, or is it just the thought of it? Does your conscience play a role? What intriguing things do you eat that others would put on their lists?

A Jaunt in Sutter Creek; subtitle: They did WHAT to the Bread?

Last Saturday I had the pleasure of driving down to Sutter Creek in the Mother Lode Country to see a concert by Old Time Musician Bruce Molsky. I was to meet up with my daughter there and enjoy dinner together before the show. Always keeping in mind the possibility of new material for my blog!

My daughter was running late, so I took advantage of my time to visit a little wine tasting shop that carried wines for three local wineries. One nice thing about these little places is that the tasting is free, so you don’t have to worry about which ones to try or how much it will cost (thinking of Napa Valley 5 or 6 tastes for $25). I know what I like, so I went for the Chardonnay, the Zinfandel and the Cabernet Sauvignon, in that order. I ended up purchasing a very nicely complex and oaky Chardonnay and a fairly intense Zinfandel. While I was there, a younger woman and her mother came in. I knew they were in over their heads when they asked for something “sweet.” The first pour, a blush, was too “sour,” and the next, a chenin blanc was also too sour. They should head straight for the supermarket and pick up some Boone Hill or Wild Vines Peach.

With my daughter’s arrival, I stashed my bag in the truck and we walked the block to the restaurant. I had chosen “Susan’s Place.” It was totally charming. We ate in the patio, though I’m not sure if you can call it a patio, since it was at the front of the restaurant itself. All was rustic with lots of greenery and checked tablecloths and patio lights. Green market umbrellas hung from the translucent roof panels instead of sticking up on poles. At this point, the review will be divided—the food and the service.

The dinner entrees were cleverly designed. You chose the entrée itself, the sauce, and the side that the entrée would be arranged on top of. I chose an eggplant portabella entree, Mediterranean sauce, and a side of polenta slices. It was excellent. The sauce was garlicky and tangy pesto-ish and the polenta was browned on the outside and creamy on the inside. I ate every crumb. A Greek salad came with it. The dressing was another pesto-ish creation. I made a note to myself to copy it at home. Pesto, lemon juice, some sort of garlic seasoning, olive oil, white wine vinegar perhaps. As you would expect in a nice little place like this, a platter of bread and garlic butter was served while we were waiting for our food. More on the bread later…

When we went in at 6:15, the place was about half full. We were seated promptly and cheerfully by the greeter. And then waited. And waited. Now I have been in places that you are legitimately afraid that they don’t notice you, or that you have been placed to make you conveniently unnoticeable. But this wasn’t the case. It was like being at a garden party with the wait staff walking by you every time they have to do something. After about 5 minutes she came by and said she could take our orders in about 2 minutes. She forgot to add a zero, because that was how long it took. In the meantime, she served food to 2 different tables. I kept thinking, if she would just take our orders (obviously we knew what we wanted, as our menus were folded beside us) then the kitchen could get started on our meals!

She came by, with an apology for the delay, and took our orders. About 10 minutes later, the bread came. More on the bread later… With pleasant efficiency, the salad followed and then the entrée arrived. While we were eating, the most astonishing thing happened. My daughter and I were in deep discussion over a topic of personal interest, when the waitress, who had overheard a fragment of the conversation, injected herself into our talk with a mistaken impression of what we were talking about! I was speechless. My daughter managed to stammer out something like, “That’s not what we were talking about.” And then we just waited for her to leave. Now you would think that a new 17 year old waitress might make this mistake, but she was about 45. Hmm.

This particular trait of customer service-type folks to insert themselves into your purchases and your conversations really annoys me. I just had that experience at the Goodwill when a young clerk had a good look-over at the movies I was buying as she rang them up. “Oh, I saw that one, it was good.” “I haven’t seen that one yet, what’s it about?” I thought, what would she say if one of them was a sex movie? And the time I was buying a sack of groceries and the young bagger wouldn’t let up on trying to discuss all my items with me. Maybe some people like this, but I think it is unprofessional.

Anyway, back to the bread…

It was warm. It was microwaved! How do I know? Of course I know! It was chewy, darn it! Rubbery chewy, as you’d know if you ever microwaved sourdough bread! Now that is a crime, when it doesn’t take that much to pop the loaf into an oven!

So out of 5 stars, I’d give Susan’s Place a 4 in food, a 2 in service and a 1 in bread.