Steve recommends: tripe soup…

Oh yeah I do.  In my world, there is nothing better than a steaming bowl of beef stomach soup.  Summer, winter, fall, spring, it’s always in season baby. 

Four of the best in my world:

1. The current favorite:  pancita, Taqueria Cielito Lindo, 29 East Main Street, Riverhead, NY.  Lindo’s Mexican version is comprised of beef stock heavily reinforced with chile. The depth of the chile infused stock is perfectly offset by the fresh garnish of cilantro, chopped onion and fresh squeezed lime.  Plus, there’s always a nice piece of beef trotters for your gnawing pleasure.  Served with fresh corn tortillas.  A meal in a bowl for $12.  I also recommend a Jarritos limon soda.  It just…goes.
   
   
2. The gold standard, my go to soul food option: mondongo, Mi Tierrita, 340 East Main Street, Patchogue, NY.  A lighter Colombian version without chile.  The chefs at Mi Tierrita use their soups as nature intended: a hearty, delicious home for whatever leftovers happen to be floating around the kitchen, so there is usually a slight variation involved.  There’s always an a-ha moment when you find an ingredient that was not in the last bowl you had: chunks of rotisserie chicken, pork hocks, peas, carrots.  The only constants I have seen so far: tender tripe and potatoes that have soaked up the soupy deliciousness until nearly bursting.  It’s all good and even better when you float some of their signature fresh hot salsa (cilantro, chile, lime) they bring to the table at the start of your meal.
   
   
3. The very good version that’s close enough to work to go there for lunch: pancita de res, Cinco de Mayo, 3725 Middle Country Road, Calverton, NY.  Similar to the pancita from Lindo’s with a somewhat lighter stock.
   
   
4. You will always remember your first: flaki, Mississauga, Ontario, Canada.  Needless to say, this Polish version is lacking the chile reinforcement and bold flavors of the versions from Latin America.  As Agnes is fond of saying, “I have added the secret Polish spices to this dish: salt and pepper.”  But, that does not mean flaki is lacking in flavor.  It has a great sour edge that sidles up perfectly to ice cold beer and rye bread with butter.  I am making a mental note to make a visit when we’re in Canada again.

So, this list needs to be much, much longer, any good tripe in your world?

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Welcome to the 1980’s Steve Kramer!

After years upon years of lobbying from Agnes, I finally broke down this past Sunday, and bought a gas grill.  Water on a rock Steve.  It is futile for the rock to resist Steve.  Yes dear.

She’s a beauty.  A sleek, shiny $99 beauty that is the perfect size for Agnes and me.  A sleek, shiny $99 beauty that also required the better part of said past Sunday to assemble. 

This fact my father, an expert and professional assembler of all things outdoor, found extremely amusing, “We do those in 20 minutes at the shop.”  Yes, but I am neither an expert nor professional assembler of all outdoor things.  Oh never mind.

If you do not know it by now, life is one big trade off.  Buying a sleek, shiny $99 beauty at Aldi, the discount German grocer, means you will spend four hours or more of your life putting the damned thing together. 

You will need to make at least one call to your family’s expert and professional assembler of outdoor things (or the 800 number if your family lacks such an expert professional) to solve an issue with the igniter. 

And you will have to make another run to a local retail outlet to buy a propane cylinder before you are able to fire up your new sleek, shiny $99 beauty.  Which I will forever call our sleek, shiny $99 beauty even though the cost is closer to $160 what with the cylinder purchase and associated taxes.

I will let you do the cost benefit analysis of buying and assembling the sleek, shiny $99 beauty from Aldi vs. purchasing an equally sleek, shiny assembled unit for another $100 or so, possibly with a free cylinder thrown in at one of the other local retailers.  Consider it homework.

Of course I am not a gas grill virgin per se, I had one brief fling back in the late 90’s, a hand me down or hand me sideways I suppose, but that one eventually shit the bed.  

In the name of reduce, reuse, recycle, I re-purposed its base as a fire pit on a camping trip and put the rest of the mess to the curb for the scrapper swarm. The fire pit idea proved a good idea in theory and problematic in practice.  The cast aluminum base melted in the intense heat of the camp fire, but it was mesmerizing watching the molten aluminum drip, drip, drip for hours as we downed ice cold beers from the cooler and swatted swarming mosquitoes.  Good times!

Anyway, forgive the digression, I just never replaced that grill.  It’s a pure case of Make Do or making excuses (you make the call):

1. I had my trusty Weber kettle that was and remains in perfectly fine shape,
2. I was too cheap to incur the cost of adding a gas grill to our stable of cooking tools,
3. Sure it’s easier to start a gas grill, but the trade off (that term again) for taking an additional half hour for starting charcoal is that food cooked over charcoal invariably tastes better than that cooked on a gas grill.

And so it progressed for an embarrassingly long time until this past Sunday when I bought the sleek, shiny $99 beauty now in our backyard and I must admit, the convenience is addictive.  Fire it up, grill, eat.  I get it.

But as Agnes said after eating two perfectly gas grilled cheeseburgers the other night, “These are good, much better than when you broil them inside, but they are not as tasty as when you grill them over charcoal.”

To which I said, “Life is a trade off.”  There’s that damned term again.

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The farm to table shuck and jive vs. Make Do…

A couple of weeks ago, I paid $4.00 for a bunch of scallions. I could attempt to justify myself. I could say, “But I needed them for a recipe.”

Which is exactly true, I needed them to make a seafood (OK sea leg) salad I had planned to make for lunch that day. The usually cost effective vegetable vendor at the Farmer’s Market had some skank, too big, wilted, dried out looking green onions that they were only charging $2.00 for, but they were never going to make it anything I cooked.

Not that I am too fancy or too good for skank ingredients, I just did not want to throw away half of what I bought.

So, I bought the cute little, I’m sure they were organic scallions for $4.00 thereby setting my grandparents, both children of the Depression era and staunch defenders of a militant, rural frugality I have come to call Make Do, freely spinning in their respective, yet distant graves.

Make Do would never have justified $4.00 scallions. Make Do would have prescribed a substitution of minced onions, salted to mellow their sting OR using the frozen scallions that are sitting in the freezer even as I type this OR rehydrating some dried onion OR adding a few dashes of onion powder OR worst case forgoing the onion tang entirely and just mixing up the salad with celery and maybe some additional spices to compensate.

Two points here: One: Don’t become so blind to a recipe that you buy an overpriced ingredient just for the sake of adhering to some vision or someone’s recipe on a card or in a book. Be creative and ask yourself, “What do I have on hand that I can use?”

For instance, I used dark rum in a recent country pate in place of cognac. Next time, I would use a little less of it than the cognac because it has a much bigger flavor profile than cognac, but ultimately it worked.

In another case, I recall my grandmother once making macaroni salad using long grain white rice instead of elbow macaroni for a party. I was less a fan of that Make Do effort than the dark rum substitution, but I was young, still subject to recipe dogma, a macaroni salad purist and likely a little embarrassed. Everyone else at the party, devotees of Make Do to the end, thought it was excellent and a creative solution to the lack of elbows in my grandmother’s pantry.

Two: I despise the Farmer’s Market, farm to table organic bullshit shuck and jive that allows some farmers to think they can charge $4.00 for a cute little bunch of scallions.

In these times when people are not eating enough veg and likely do not have a ton of disposable income to boot, farmers should be making an effort to bring vegetables to market at a fair price. $4.00 is just too much for a cute little bunch of scallions, hell $2.00 is also, but you’re getting closer.

Just to be clear, I am not one to begrudge a farmer making a buck. My grandparents farmed the unforgiving, dense clay, rocky slopes of Duanesburg, NY for 50 years. This included four very large home garden plots. So, I am very attune to the time, effort and cost involved in bringing vegetables to the table and I am similarly cool with optimizing the return on that effort, but there needs to be balance people.

And trust me, if the balance is not found, Make Do will crush your cutesy farm to table organic bullshit shuck and jive like Stalin crushed, well, just about everyone.

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My kitchen is jacked...

It’s true.  Witness:

- There are exactly two square feet of work space for food prep,  

- The cupboards are small, inconveniently distant from the stove, their doors removed in a long ago renovation and never replaced,  

- The stove is old, small, the burners on the right side moody and frequently uncooperative,

- There is no range hood or exhaust fan for the stove which is definitely problematic when getting that certain, deep rich brown on these lamb neck bones I am going to braise in da’ag curry,

- The fridge is cluttered mess that becomes a cluttered soggy mess in the summer when its sagging door lets in the warm humid air which condenses, freezes on the ceiling, warms just enough to drip and drip and drip until we have to mop up a pool of condensate,

- We do not have a dishwasher, I am not exactly sure given the current configuration of the kitchen where we would put one,

But we have a great sink; a big old porcelain farm house number with one deep basin that is perfect for soaking greens and vegetables, and a shallower one, set at just the right height for shucking shellfish and after the meal (or during a break in the cooking action) washing the boatload of dishes resultant from my every foray into the kitchen.

It's true.  My kitchen is jacked, it is also a teaching kitchen.  It teaches me every day:

- To properly plan ahead, get my mise squared away no matter how big or small the meal because I just can’t stop cooking, slide everything to the side and quick chop, mince or slice something I forgot to prep, there is NO fucking side to slide things to,

- To not just sit around while things cook, but to police up my work space, to wash the dishes resultant from the most recent cooking step because again I can’t leave a pile of dishes on my 2 square feet of work space because I will have NO work space and for the sake of marital peace and glad tidings I just can’t leave an immense pile of dishes to be washed after we eat.  Agnes has previously and effectively employed this Euro-gypsy death curse thing (soon to be a poem, I am sure) that I am doing my best to not be on the receiving end of,

- To be patient.  I am still working on this.  There are more than a few times when I cannot find a key ingredient in the refrigerator’s cluttered, soggy mess or one of our “cabinets” and want to throw something CRASH into the wall as a statement of my frustration, but then I remind myself, take a deep breath and try one more round of searching before calling Agnes to find the missing ingredient,

- To never underestimate the importance of a good, deep and voluminous sink to any working kitchen.  I can work around all of the other jacked shit, but I do not know what I would do with one of those 2 gallon six inch deep stainless steel piece of crap wash basins they pass off as sinks these days,

Above all, my kitchen has taught me to persevere, to find creative solutions to the lack of space, to be (increasingly) patient with old, jacked appliances and cabinets and to continue cooking the best fucking food I can.

My kitchen is jacked.  Fuck it.  Dinner’s at eight.  Bring wine and a good story.  

I have been cooking all day in my jacked kitchen.  I need both.

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Die foodie die!

Whenever the fact that I have a food blog comes up in conversation, I am often confronted with the following response or a variant thereof, “Oh.  You’re a foodie!”  At that point my eyes narrow and if I had super hero laser vision, I am hard pressed to keep from boring a hole through the offender’s head and dropping them like a pile of fresh, bleeding meat at my feet.

I despise the word “foodie.”

Discounting the fact that it just SOUNDS stupid, I despise the behavior it implies.  Based on what I have observed about the culture these days, a foodie thinks that what they eat is somehow important and they are a unique and special flower as a result.  Thus, a foodie takes a photo of everything they eat.  A foodie writes snarky online reviews of the places they eat at as if their undifferentiated palette were somehow relevant.  A foodie drones on about farm to table, sustainability, technique, terroir, nuance.  A foodie will turn the simple and basic into the purposefully complex.

While foodies annoy the snot out of me generally, my larger gripe is that the word implies that that food is the focus, a solo artist and not a participating player in a larger ensemble.  Make no mistake, it is pretty clear I love to eat, but from where I sit the word excludes two important aspects of living: enjoying one’s food with a suitable, complementary beverage and that both food and complementary beverage are best enjoyed with other human being types, preferably people whose company you enjoy or have not yet bored a hole through their heads with your super hero laser vision, but that is not necessarily required.

And so, I reject the word “foodie,” its ugly, narcissistic implications, its loneliness, its very existence and I hereby propose replacing it with: bon vivant.  I will not bore you with a dictionary definition as many would; it is far too easy to look things up these days, so please go do so. Suffice to say, the Gallic tradition of "good things" and the inclusive, cultural nature of the term more fully approximate my views than some nouveau, made up bullshit term.  

So, if you feel the need to label please use the bon vivant (BV or beeve are suitable diminutives) label and please never, never, never call me a foodie.  I have conducted preliminary experiments related to the attainment of super hero laser vision and I will use it.

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