Baltimore Diary

UnSafe way

Patty Bouvier: I can't believe Homer ruined another family barbecue.
Homer Simpson: [offended] Hey! Everybody pees in the pool!
Patty Bouvier: Not from the diving board!

—The Simpsons, “Dangerous Curves” (11/9/08)

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Wife and I are planning to take a trip in a few weeks. For the second time, we want to go see the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in the flesh, then have our Thanksgiving Dinner in a restaurant. Friday will be a Tourist Day for us, although given that I’m a transplanted native, it won’t be especially touristy. But I’ve already digressed and the story hasn’t even started yet.

Thanksgiving Dinner is typically hosted at the Parkville Palace (i.e., our house), but since we’ll be away, Wife wanted to do a nice family dinner before the holiday. Everyone’s calendars matched up nicely for last night, so sometime last week she set the date.

This meant some high-speed meal planning for me, but Wife advised that I not make it as fancy and multi-course as our usual Turkey Day offering. Oddly enough, I was more than comfortable with that idea. So when I spotted a Safeway circular in the newspaper that offered up some complete meals for a reasonable price, I said to myself “Hey, this might do the trick.” There was a choice of the turkey dinner, the ham dinner or the prime rib dinner. (I would have loved the prime rib, but Wife’s family has this habit of ordering their meat overcooked, and I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.)

Now, the turkey dinner has all of the typical trimmings, with the mashed potatoes, the gravy, stuffing and cranberry sauce among a couple of others, but the prime rib and the ham have the same side dishes. If you can’t see them in the picture, it’s Scalloped Potatoes au gratin, Corn Medley (what kind of songs do you hear in a corn medley?), Green Bean Casserole, a dozen dinner rolls and an apple pie. All you have to do is warm it up. Simple, right?

On Friday afternoon I called the toll-free number in the ad. This is actually where the trouble started, only I wasn’t smart enough to read the warning signs. The guy who answered the phone was, to be generous, not the brightest bulb on the string. The first thing he asked for was my first name, which is reasonable. My name is not something that people automatically know how to spell, so I immediately spelled it out for him. He didn’t get it on the first try, so I spelled it for him a second time. On this second attempt he read it back to me; it came back as something like “C, R, L, E”. I asked him, “Does that look like anybody’s first name to you? Let’s try it once more.” He finally got my name, then my phone number. OK, says I, we’re sailing smoothly now.

The next question was my zip code. From this information he deduced that I was located in Baltimore City. Based on this fact, he asked me which of the four stores in Baltimore City I wanted to use: Lauraville, Canton, Charles Village or the one out on Baltimore National Pike. I told him that I didn’t want to use any of those; I wanted to use the one in Parkville. This, he couldn’t find. As it happens, part of the reason he couldn’t find it was because he was looking for a Safeway in “Parksville”, but even after I straightened that out, he still couldn’t figure it out. Then he suggested that if I do a Google search, it’ll show me where the four stores he’d mentioned are.

I said, “I know exactly where those four stores are, and I’m not going to any of them when there’s one less than a mile from my house.” Then I asked him if he had Google. When he responded in the affirmative, I suggested that he do a web search for “Safeway 21234”. Lo and behold, he located the store in Parkville. I was kind enough to spare him the necessity of trying to pronounce “Waltham Woods Road”. Then he asked me again if I wanted the store at Waltham Woods Road. I told him “Yes, and if you ask me a third time I’ll probably say ‘yes’ again.”

A few more seconds of typing, then: “And what was your phone number again?”

We’d been on the phone for eight and a half minutes and, of the four pieces of information he’d gathered from me in that time, he’d already lost one of them. “That’s it,” I said. “I need to speak to a supervisor.”

Another eight minutes, this time on hold. Finally the supervisor came on. I’m not going to recount the entire conversation because you probably have that part figured out. It’s all apologies and obsequiousness and “We’re sorry you’re not having an excellent experience” kind of crap. But he did take my order and confirmed that I’d have to go to the Deli to pick it up, 24½ hours hence.

And I went there the next day and everything went perfectly.

Ha, Ha! I was just yanking your chain, there! And so was Safeway, apparently!

At 4:05 I arrived at the store, grabbed a cart and headed toward the Deli. The clerk behind the counter asked if she could help me. I told her that I was there to pick up a dinner. She looked at me blankly. I tried again: I ordered a Ham Dinner for pickup at four o’clock. She still didn’t know what I was talking about, so she turned to a co-worker: “Do you know anything about a Ham Dinner?” The co-worker nodded, then said, “but we don’t have it.”

Excuse me?

She then started saying something about how they have the ham, but they don’t have “the kit”. The kit is apparently a package that contains all the other parts of the meal that aren’t ham. No package means you don’t have the meal. (Remember also that this means they don’t have everything for the Prime Rib Dinner, either.) This second clerk then disappeared into the walk-in refrigerator, but she emerged empty-handed and shaking her head. Again she told me the thing about the ham and the kit. Oddly, I didn’t find a repeat explanation comforting. I saw a sheet of paper in her hand and asked, “Is that my order? May I see it?” I looked at the sheet only long enough to establish that my name and phone number had been correctly recorded. That IS my phone number, and I haven’t gotten any calls from you.” I was getting a little more strident by this point. “I have a bunch of people en route to my house and I have nothing to give them. What am I supposed to do? Calling you guys was supposed to take the stress out of this whole deal.” She suggested that we talk to the manager.

I followed the clerk over to the manager’s office. In this office is a woman—the assistant manager—and I swear to god she’s eating an entire pepperoni pizza out of the box. I mean, it’s sliced and all, but she’s clearly doing this thing some serious damage. She continues chowing down her pizza while the deli clerk tells her about how “this man ordered the ham dinner and we have the hams but we don’t have the kit, and now he’s yelling at me because it’s not here.” Because it’s apparently my fault that I’m upset about placing an order that A) nobody filled; and B) nobody contacted me about a problem. Between bites, the assistant manager suggests that, rather than looking for a kit that isn’t there, she gather up the discrete pieces and give those to me. Because part of this was said with her mouth full, she wound up having to repeat it to the clerk, who heaved a big sigh and walked back to the deli area.

Hey, you know what? If I’m such a bother to everyone, I don’t need you either. I walked out of the store, not bothering to see if the deli clerk had even noticed I’d left. Given that I stopped immediately outside to text Wife about what had happened, it doesn’t appear that she did.

So here’s the Postscript to this tale: I went to the Shoppers Food across the street and put together a meal of my own: Spiral Sliced ham (about 8 lbs), frozen corn and a red and green pepper for chopping up into the corn and sauteéing slowly in butter; frozen Stouffer’s macaroni & cheese, frozen broccoli for steaming, an apple pie and a couple of tubes of biscuits. Dinner was about an hour later than we’d planned, and the total cost was nearly $10 cheaper than the Safeway meal.

This morning I mailed a letter to the Safeway folks. We’ll see what they have to say.

Night and Day

Prof. Sebastian DeWitt: When you were a student in the department, I could never picture you as a waitress.
Diane Chambers: Oh Professor, you're forgetting I played a waitress in your production of "Bus Stop".
Prof. Sebastian DeWitt: Yes, I know.

—Cheers, “Homicidal Ham” (10/27/83)

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The last several days, Wife and I spent more time than usual eating in places other than home.

I’m sure this happens to every household from time to time. Every now and then your schedule catches up with you or something, and all of a sudden you realize that the last four meals you’ve had spent some amount of time under a heat lamp. Fortunately, it doesn’t happen often with us. However, on Friday we were kind of bushed and, despite the horrific rain, we decided to go out for dinner.

We went to Glory Days Grill in Towson, a place I didn’t even know existed until we stumbled upon it one fine evening about two years ago. It’s a typical bar-and-grill-type place, with numerous TV screens all over the place, nearly all of them tuned to a sporting event. The restaurant, like many others of its type, has a lot of hard surfaces, so it’s consequently pretty loud all the time, even when it’s not especially busy; otherwise we’d eat there more often. Presumably because of the monsoon, we were seated right away.

The waitress came up to our table pretty quickly and took our drink orders: vodka martini with a lemon twist for me, fuzzy navel for Wife. “OK, I’ll put those right in and come back for your food order,” she said.

Several minutes later she came back: she’d forgotten what our drink orders were. She got them again and disappeared.

When she arrived with the drinks, she took our meal orders. We ordered one appetizer to share and two entrées. Given the previous exchange, we should have been nervous that she wasn’t writing our order down, but we were so young and naïve then. Our drinks weren’t especially good, but that’s probably not her fault. After a reasonable interlude, our food arrived.

More accurately, our entrées arrived. The appetizer? Nowhere to be found. At that point you don’t necessarily want it anymore, so we began our meals.

I know what you’re probably thinking: the appetizer arrived afterward, or she suddenly remembered it and offered to bring it. Nope, and nope. It was completely erased from her head. My guess is that her head passed too close to a strong magnet. In addition, her subsequent visits to her table were more like drive-bys: “How’s everything going that’s great…” She was an awesome example of the Doppler effect at work.

When we were finished, she came by and offered to clear the plates, then asked us if we wanted any dessert. We declined, and she took the plates away. Again, it was several minutes before she came back: “Would you like the check, now?” Uh, yeah.

Let me pause a moment to note that I’m not a bad tipper—18-20% is my norm, and I’ve been known to go higher for extraordinary service. (Also for breakfast. Always overtip breakfast servers, that’s my rule. I don’t know where I first picked that up, but it WASN’T “Life’s Little Instruction Book, which seems to be the #1 Google hit for that sort of thing.) I realize that these people ordinarily work pretty hard for the money. So when I leave a bad tip, I’m sending a genuine message. Here’s another rule I have: if you leave no tip at all, they can always rationalize it as my forgetting somehow, or maybe I’m like that guy in Reservoir Dogs. So, for me, bad service = bad tip. In retrospect, I’m not sure it was bad enough, if that makes sense; I left 10%.

On our way out, I asked to speak to the manager. I made a point of telling him that we waited till everything was over because we weren’t trying to scam a free dessert or anything; we just felt it was important for him to know what had happened. We also noted that all of our other visits (maybe four times/year) had gone very well; this was  definitely an anomaly for us. He thanked us for talking to him and asked us to wait a minute. When he returned, he had a couple of gift certificates in his hands. Our next meal would be nearly free. So, good on him. He didn’t have to do anything at all, and we didn’t really expect anything other than acknowledgement at that point.

The next day I decided to surprise Wife with a day trip to the Lancaster, Pennsylvania area. We spent some time at Kitchen Kettle Village (as fine a place as any for Kettle Corn and Shoo-Fly Pie), and spent some time at the outlets (naturally). Oh, here’s a handy tip: if you see any Amish people, it’s considered bad form to wish them a Happy Thanksgiving. That’s not their gig.

On the way home we popped into the Texas Roadhouse restaurant in York, PA. There was a short wait for our tables, but what the heck: it’s Saturday night. Once we were seated, we had a waitress who was the polar opposite of the one we’d had the night before: attentive, friendly without being overly chatty, helpful with suggestions. At one point I’d asked someone (not the waitress, someone else passing by) for a new fork because the tines on the one I’d been given were bent and I was getting all compulsive about it, and she was back in a heartbeat with new silverware and lots of apologies. Consequently the meal was enjoyable, the experience was great and, even if our visits to that area aren’t frequent, they’ll likely be seeing us again. And, of course, I tipped well: the two meals were less than two dollars apart pre-tip but when the dust settled, I’d probably tipped five dollars more at Texas than I had at Glory Days.

Do you have any stories of great (or not-so-great) service? Share in the comments section!

Man, That’s Grate.

Bugs Bunny: [pulls out "1000 Ways to Cook A Duck"] Fillet of duck Bordelaise maitre d'butter. Yum-yum. Duck polonaise under glass. Mmm-mm.
Daffy Duck: [reading from "1000 Ways to Cook a Rabbit"] Rabbit au gratin de gelatin under tooled leather. Oh, dah-rool, drool.
Bugs: Barbecued duck meat with broiled duck bill Milanese. Yummy-yum.
Daffy: Chicken-fried rabbit with cottontail sauce braised in carrots. Mm-mmm.

--Rabbit Fire (1951)

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I actually got a complaint yesterday that my posts have been very existential lately, because I’ve been working from the Emerson prompts, and why haven’t I told any fun stories like the one about the gasoline? So here’s a break in the existential action.

Yesterday when I got home I noticed a package still sitting on my doorstep, despite the fact that Wife and Wee One were already home. Why didn’t they bring it inside? I reached down to pick it up and discovered that it weighed nearly forty pounds, that’s why. Hey! My Father’s Day gift to myself had arrived!

Some of you know that I’m a fan of The Mike O’Meara Show, which was once a radio program and is now available as a daily podcast. (It’s still a radio show if you live in or near Coralville, Iowa.) The show is frequently sponsored by a product called the Mangrate, and between the chatter on the show, plus other positive things I’d heard, I decided that I was finally going to pull the trigger and get Mangrates for my grill. Also, I was engaging in a little retail therapy, but that’s for another post.

The Mangrates arrived in about three business days via Priority Mail (ordered Saturday, got them on Wednesday), and the only complaint I’d have about the shipping is that the tracking number they sent me didn’t work. But in the end, that’s a nit, right? If they hadn’t arrived, then I’d have a real complaint.

Because the Mangrates are cast iron, you have to season them before you can use them. I did this by spraying them with cooking spray and putting them in a 400-degree oven for an hour, then just shutting off the oven and waiting for them to cool back down to room temperature. At one point a few hours later, I opened the oven to take them out. I could touch the oven racks but not the grates, because they held the heat so well. The next day I took to the grill with my grates, and I’m just egotistical enough to have recorded it with my POS cell phone.

So here’s my “before” grill. The top rack is really rusty, which is why I have the foil up there. The main cooking rack is porcelain-coated iron, but the porcelain has started to chip and is beginning to rust. And, the porcelain flakes are GETTING ON MY FOOD. Furthermore, there’s all kinds of crud that’s fallen through the grate onto the heat plates and to the bed of the grill. It’s a mess. The grill brush is one of three I bought this season (because they were really cheap). It’s already starting to get the bent-down, flattened bristles. The spray bottle is plain water, which I use to hose down the flare-ups. But you know what the other bad thing is about having to hose down the flare-ups? Now you have a bunch of water in the grill and you’re essentially steaming your food, not barbecuing it.

These are the seasoned grates, before I put them on the grill. They’re meant to go atop the existing grate. I could have used a fifth grate; a sixth won’t quite fit.

 

 

 

 

 

My grill, like so many others, has “hot” and “cool” spots. Part of this experiment was to learn whether the Mangrates would eliminate this unfortunate phenomenon. I put a London Broil over a “hot” area of the grill. This steak was somewhere between refrigerator and room temperature. I confess I may have put it on a few minutes early; the steak didn’t sizzle much when it hit the grate, and I was able to touch a “cool” spot near the front. So, note for the future: give it a little more time than usual to get up to speed.

 

 

After six minutes I flipped the steak over (using tongs, not a fork, natch). Look at those grill marks. You can see that there’s a band where it’s a little more cooked on the outside; that’s over a gap in the heat shield. I was a little worried at this point that the heating wasn’t as even as I’d hoped it would be.

 

 

 

 

This was also the point where I threw on a frozen burger, in a typically “cool” area. I know, I’m a bad barbecue guy because I use frozen burger patties. But it’s my concession to convenience. Ordinarily, once the burger thaws on the grill I season it with a dash of Worcestershire sauce and a few shakes of something called Cavender’s All-Purpose Greek Seasoning. I love this stuff. It’s tough to find in this area, but when I’m in Florida (it’s plentiful near Tarpon Springs, go figure), I usually take the chance to stock up. I may just resort to buying it online, though. I didn’t take any more pics of the burger, so let me just note that the hot/cool experiment didn’t work out so well: the Mangrates don’t really eliminate those spots, but they do provide more overall even cooking. Go figure.

The finished steak, awaiting the last couple of minutes of me cooking the burger. That’s the second side you see; I’d flipped it again putting it on the rack. Again, great marks and a little bit of heat banding.

I should mention that the London Broil didn’t have a lot of dripping to do, which is the other reason I cooked a burger. Once I moved the steak to the top tray, I moved the burger to the hot area. Remember all those flare-ups I was talking about earlier? Gone. NONE. Not a one. The burger dripped plenty (as they do), but there were no flare-ups whatsoever and—AND—the burger remained juicy throughout. I cooked it all the way to Well Done and it remained juicy without overcooking on the outside.

 

The next important step in the Care and Feeding of Your Mangrates is brushing the grill clean. Remember the cheap grill brush I had before? Gone. This brush comes with your grates for free, though you pay a little extra for the shipping. I got a shot of it in my hand so you get some idea of the proportions involved. This ain’t yo momma’s grill brush. It’s also pretty good for getting dirt out from under your nails.

 

 

 

This is the grill, after I’d brushed it down. You can see that the area toward the back is already close to the traditional black you find on cast iron. I imagine the rest of the grates will approach that color before much longer.

 

 

 

 

The finished product, perfectly done. And while the banding (as I noted above) had me kind of worried, it was like this from end-to-end, all the way through. Everyone in the house agreed that this was all kinds of awesome steak. Except for Wife, who insists on well-done meat, so I threw hers in the microwave where it turned all gray and stuff, and it went “clunk” when it hit her plate and that was nasty.

 

 

 

So to recap, Mangrates are incredible. Go get some, now. If you’re a friend of mine of Facebook, I’ll experiment with a couple of other foods and report back there, but after one use I’m already a very happy customer. And to any Mike O’Meara fans who may have made it this far: Essadee!

S’meeps? P’ores?

Burton “Gus” Guster: I have peeps, Shawn.
Shawn Spencer: You have two peeps. And one of them is made out of marshmallow.

—Psych, “He Dead” (8/14/09)

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Wife and I were looking through the Sunday newspapers this morning. I was reading the comics first, then moving on to the rest of the editorial copy; Wife was reading all of the sales supplements, what I like to think of as Porn for Women. Because I’m progressive that way.

Wife happened to notice in one circular that Marshmallow Peeps were on sale pretty cheaply. She wanted to get some to send to Daughter up at school. For whatever reason, this got my mind running: Peeps are made of marshmallow, but all we ever seem to do with Peeps is eat them. We never toast them up, or put them in cocoa or anything else; why is that?

I said to Wife, “You know what we should do? We should make Peeps s’mores.”

She gave me that look that most people would interpret as “What the hell is the matter with you?” but I choose to read as, “My god! That’s brilliant!”

Better yet, she actually went out and bought me the stuff to make Peeps s’mores. The bad news is that she came back with the Peeps bunnies, not the chicks, but that’s OK, it still worked out. In fact, it may have worked out better because of the bunnies’ flatness as opposed to the overall roundness of the chicks.

Here’s what I did. I’ve included pictures to help you keep up.

I preheated the oven to 350 degrees.

Then I put some aluminum foil on a cookie sheet. I put them on foil in case of accidental meltdown, just to keep some of the mess down. It’s a typical s’mores setup: graham cracker, then a piece of Hershey bar, then the Peep bunny.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The bunnies spent exactly three minutes in the oven. Two-and-a-half minutes might have been better, since the chocolate was pretty runny.

It’s tough to tell, but the bunnies poofed up a little from being in the oven.

If you look closely at the picture, you can see where the bunnies’ eyes and nose dots dissolved into brown puddles.

 

 

 

 

Finally, of course, I took another piece of graham cracker and pressed it down on the Peep. In the s’more closest to the camera you can see the chocolate oozing out, which is not really what I wanted to have happen, but for a first effort it’s not disastrous, it’s just a little messier than you expect. Especially when you actually bite into the thing and then the chocolate runs in pretty much every direction.

So that was my little foray into Fun Food this week. My next mission is to find something interesting to do with jelly beans.

Eatin’ Doggy Style

Homer: Well crying isn't going to help. Now, you can sit there feeling sorry for yourself or you can eat can after can of dog food until your tears smell enough like dog food until your dog comes back, or you can go out there and find your dog.
Bart: You're right. [Gets up and leaves]
Homer: Rats. I almost had him eating dog food.

--The Simpsons, “The Canine Mutiny” (4/13/97)

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OK, so here’s the scenario:

It’s time to feed the dogs. I know it because of the time of day, and also because the dogs have this obnoxious habit of flipping over their empty food bowls when they want me to feed them. They know it because…well, as far as they’re concerned, it’s always time to feed the dogs. Because they’re dogs, right?

The dog bowls are in the kitchen, but the food is in a closet in the next room, because I buy the big honkin’ bags from the Big Box Warehouse Store. I have this big plastic scoop that I use, and it holds enough food for the both of them. So I typically put the bowls up on the counter, which of course is cause for celebration on their part: “WooHoo! It’s supper time! We’re gonna get fed! Yay!” and they start jumping about and getting all excited and such.

Now I go into the next room and oh, boy, they’re all about that too. "Oh boy oh boy oh boy it’s SUPPER TIME! Food’s a-coming!” They actually start crowding me, as though I’m going to feed them directly from the scoop, or perhaps this is going to be the magic day when I’m just going to overturn the bag and let them have at it.

I have a scoopful of food and I’m heading back into the kitchen. Invariably a couple of bits of kibble will fall out and hit the floor. Or, perhaps more accurately, it would hit the floor if they weren’t there to intercept it. At this point, if they had guns, they’d be firing them into the air because this is the only way left to express their sheer joy. Manna from heaven! Can you stand it?

Finally, I dose out the food into their bowls. They’re practically peeing themselves with excitement. “Oh boy oh boy oh boy, here comes supper! This is the best day ever!” They actually follow my hands with their snouts as I put the bowls down onto the floor.

And that’s when they look at the food, and then up at me, and the attitude is, “Dog food? Really? What the fuck. man?”

And more often than not they actually SNUB their food for at least a half hour. Kills me every time.

Katering To Your Kulinary Taste

Tripper: Attention. Here's an update on tonight's dinner. It was veal. I repeat, veal. The winner of tonight's mystery meat contest is Jeffrey Corbin who guessed "some kind of beef."

—Meatballs (1979)

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I’m pretty sure it’s a law in Maryland that if you come here, you must eat crab.

Restaurants are pretty much bound to have crab in some form or other on their menus. It doesn’t even matter much what the base cuisine of the restaurant is, You Must Have Crab.  Crab cakes, crab soup, crab dip, crab pretzels (big honkin’ soft pretzels with crab dip all over them), and so on. Many restaurants around here actually keep Old Bay seasoning on the tables alongside the salt and pepper. In my head, this whole emphasis on crab tends to dilute its specialness, but what the hell. It’s the local thing.

Crab, however, does tend to get expensive, especially if you’re buying packages of pre-picked meat. A pound of crabmeat costs roughly $15 in the supermarket, although you might be able to get a slightly cheaper version if you’re willing to settle for all claws or some such. The pricey stuff is the Jumbo Lump, which comes from the back end of the crab and is especially prized if it’s removed as one huge chunk. (“One Huge Chunk” defined as being about the size of a gumball.)

But once in awhile you can’t even afford the cheap claw meat, or you just want a little texture, or perhaps you want to use, god forbid, something akin to Alaskan King Crab rather than Maryland Blue but don’t want to pay for the Alaskan, which is even more expensive. What do you do? What DO…you do?

The answer, in this case, is something called Krab (yes, with a K—shut up, spellcheck). Krab, which is sometimes accurately referred to as “imitation crab”, is typically made of a substance called surimi. Surimi is typically made up of hake, whiting and/or pollock, which is rinsed repeatedly to remove unpleasant odors, then it’s beaten and pulverized into a gelatinous paste. Add a few enhancers like starch, egg white, MSG and a few other goodies, then the whole mixture is extruded through a form, like a Play-Doh Fun Factory and then given a touch of food coloring to make it look something like the real thing.

All of the above is just a gateway to get you to understand the story of the word Krab. “Krab” isn’t Crab, dig? It’s Frankenfood, an artificial construct, dig?

After living in Maryland for nearly ten years, I’ve gotten to deal with another food besides an abundance of crab (and Krab). The other food that’s popular around here is something called Scrapple. This is something that, when I lived in New York, I’d never heard of. But Wife eats the stuff, and so did her late grandmother. Scrapple is hard to explain, so let me leave it to Wikipedia, which is about as nice a description as I’ve seen:

Locally called "everything but the oink" or made with "everything but the squeal", scrapple is typically made of hog offal, such as the head, heart, liver, and other scraps, which are boiled with any bones attached (often the entire head), to make a broth. Once cooked, bones and fat are discarded, the meat is reserved, and (dry) cornmeal is boiled in the broth to make a mush. The meat, finely minced, is returned to the pot and seasonings, typically sage, thyme, savory, black pepper, and others, are added. The mush is formed into loaves and allowed to cool thoroughly until set. The proportions and seasoning are very much a matter of the region and the cook's taste.

Seriously…the making of scrapple was actually featured on Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe. And Mike Rowe comes from a neighborhood just a couple of miles from my house. So even some of the locals think this stuff is pretty gross.

So imagine my horror when I found myself in a supermarket, and I came across this:

Skrapple? With a K? Really? What the hell could possibly be going into this product that they can’t legally call it Scrapple?

Grocery Adventure

Miracle Max: There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive. With all dead…well, with all dead there's usually only one thing you can do.
Inigo Montoya: What's that?
Miracle Max: Go through his clothes and look for loose change.

—The Princess Bride (1987)

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So on the day after Christmas, I called my mother, thinking that I could take her and my grandmother out to lunch somewhere. My mom thought that it would ordinarily be a good idea, however my grandmother had been sick the whole night before, so they weren’t going anywhere. OK, I suggest, how about I bring something in? Mom agrees to this, so I toddle off to a Publix supermarket that’s on the way over there.

This particular Publix is on Little Road in Port Richey, and your experience at other stores may vary, but I kind of doubt it.

I took the first entrance into the shopping center, because I’m paranoid about overshooting it and having to turn around, etc. This means that I’m cruising along the storefronts until I get to the general area of the Publix. At this point I have to look for an aisle to turn into so I can park, but this particular shopping lot has the cars angled one way in one aisle and the other way in the next, so I have to find an aisle that’s angled correctly for my entry point. Plus, this being Florida, the parking lot has 156,000 handicapped spaces, so I have to avoid those as well. (It turns out that my being a moral cripple doesn’t get me a placard.) My first opportunity came at the point where they have the big painted crosswalk. I also saw a pickup truck bearing down on me, so I wisely decided to let it pass before making the left turn.

This, of course, meant that he was going to make the right without signaling the turn, and of course now that I’m behind him he’s going to go at a speed of approximately forty feet per year. We pass the blue spaces (they were all occupied anyway) and he finally turns into a parking space. No, wait, make that two parking spaces. REALLY? You’re driving a Chevy POS truck and you need to protect the rust on it somehow? In fact, he wasn’t even parking in the two spaces; he was pulling through to grab another space in the next aisle that was precisely one spot closer than the one he’d pulled through (and that I subsequently grabbed).

In the store, the only hassle I had with getting my groceries involved getting oriented to an unfamiliar grocery store, so no complaints there. However, now it’s time for the checkout. My choice came down to two lanes: the Express Lane and a regular lane, which was adjacent to it.

Before I move into this part of the story, let me give Publix some props for their Express Lane. The sign over it actually reads “10 ITEMS OR FEWER”, which is grammatically correct. If you can count ‘em, you say “fewer”. If you can’t, you use “less”. ‘nough said.

As I said before, I had two lanes to choose from, and each one had exactly one person ahead of me. I had five items, so either one would be appropriate. However, in the Express Lane was a woman who was sitting on one of those scooter thingies, perhaps because she weighed about nine thousand pounds. She also had—easily—thirty items on the belt. And, instead of the cashier asking her which ten items she wanted to buy, she was clearly going to just take the order anyway. So I jumped over to the other lane. In this lane was a woman who was about old enough to have been Jesus’ babysitter, but she had only four items. Piece of cake, says I, and I put my stuff on the belt.

Now, her stuff is at one end of the belt, and mine is at the other. There’s at least two feet of empty belt in between. This, naturally, means that Grandma Moses simply MUST get one of those order dividers and put it on the belt between our orders. The cashier, in the meantime, has already tallied up all of her stuff, and the bagger (yeah, Publix has those) has put everything into the bag. The total cost of the order: Five dollars and eleven cents.

It’s at this point that Jeanne Calment says to the cashier, “I hope you need some change,” and—I shit you not—completely upends a change purse into the bagging area. There’s clearly at least enough money all over the bagging area to cover the $5.11 that she needs to pay for this purchase, but all she’s interested in is the eleven cents. Gloria Stewart has already counted out the five singles and is now handing the bills over to the cashier, who counts out eleven pennies and puts it in the till with the dollar bills. Then she, and the bagger, have to scoop up all this other change and put it back into the change purse. Meanwhile, in the Express Lane, the nine thousand pound woman is cruising out of the store with her completed purchase.

This is why Florida is a great place to return home from.

Breakfast for Dinner

When you’re doing the hard driving, sometimes the trips up and/or down I-95 can be pretty uneventful. My travels to Florida ran much in this vein. I’d packed some sandwiches so I didn’t have to stop for lunch, and in fact I stopped only for gas or to use the rest room. Oddly enough, I don’t think I ever stopped for both. As a result, despite my leaving later than I’d planned, I wound up in Walterboro, South Carolina (approximately Exit 48) for the evening of December 23. This isn’t too bad; I usually stop in Florence, SC for the night and have a pretty long drive ahead of me the second day.

(Naturally, it wasn’t until the next day that I learned that Walterboro is maybe 10-15 minutes’ drive from some relatives of mine; I could have saved some money on lodging for the night.)

Here’s a tip if you’re traveling down the I-95 corridor: there’s just no good way through the Washington, DC area, so just skip it altogether. When you get to Baltimore, take either I-895 or I-695 to I-97 and take that down to Route 301 south, which will bring you back to I-95 just north of Richmond, VA. You won’t save any time at all, but you’ll be spared the madness of the Mixing Bowl south of DC, where there is NO GOOD TIME to travel through.

Anyway, Walterboro.

I stopped for the night around 8:00. I was kind of hoping to make it to Hardeeville (around Exit 10), but I figured, I’m hungry now and why stop twice? I popped into a place called the Country Hearth Inn, which is a small-ish chain, and got a room for the evening for only $31 after taxes and such.

In this part of the country, the location of your room is apparently pretty important. Rooms on the first floor are more expensive than rooms on the second floor. My room was cheaper because it was second floor. Go figure.

Here’s another aside: I don’t really get the mentality that a hotel room has to have fourteen thousand amenities when you’re on a road trip. I’m stopping to eat, sleep, and get generally relaxed for the next leg of the trip. I don’t need a pool, or chocolates on my pillow, or a flatscreen TV. This is a crash pad. I want a clean room, a place to take a shower and a clear picture on the TV. I don’t even need 75 channels, since the TV is just a talking lamp at that point; I’m happy with local TV plus CNN or some such. Everything else is just gravy. So for that little bit, there’s no way I’m shelling out $80 if I don’t have to. And fortunately there are plenty of places on I-95 which are willing to fill this request. Country Hearth Inn turned out to be one of them.

Once checked in, and with my bags and stuff in the room, I got back in the car and wandered the immediate neighborhood in search of food. Most exits on I-95 have lots of places to eat; a few have only a couple of options, and one or two have none at all. This was one in the second group. All of the choices were pretty typical: Cracker Barrel, Subway, Waffle House, Shoney’s, McDonald’s and a couple of others. I didn’t want -fast food, but I didn’t necessarily want the sit-down-meal-with-the-bum’s-rush experience that you sometimes get from Cracker Barrel, so I went to the Shoney’s.

I’d forgotten that Shoney’s had the option of eating via a buffet, so shortly after I’d reached my table I was greeted by a server who pointed out that the buffet was almost entirely breakfast foods. This really appealed to me. “Outstanding!” I said. I rather like having breakfast food for dinner once in awhile. Wife, for some reason, is not, so we rarely do it. The waitress then asked me what I wanted to drink. I ordered a Coke and hit the buffet.

Sure enough, there was a wide variety of stuff available: eggs, toast, grits, biscuits & gravy, sausage, bacon, home fries, cheese (for the grits, I think), pancakes, French toast, etc, etc. I took a look and said, “Yes, please!” When I got back to my table, the waitress was just delivering two glasses of soda to me. I asked her, “Is this Happy Hour?”

She said “Of course it is!” Then, “OK, not really, but I figured you’d been on the road and you looked kind of thirsty.” Smart waitress, that.

And I, who have been eating quite sensibly for the last eight weeks as a side-effect of Wife’s diet, had myself two plates of breakfast for dinner.

Cookies!

Danny Concannon: You keep glancing over like you're afraid I'm going to steal something.
Mrs. Landingham: No. I'm just not used to having members of the print media in here.
Danny: I'll try not to get ink on the furniture.
Mrs. Landingham: Aw, Danny. And I was just about to offer you a cookie.
Danny: And now?
Mrs. Landingham: No.

—The West Wing, “The White House Pro-Am” (3/22/00)

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I mentioned a couple of posts back that I baked up some cookies for the Patti Rothberg concert, and they turned out to be quite the hit. No kidding; I was hearing good stuff about them from people who didn’t realize that A) I was nearby, and B) I was the guy who baked them. And, when I told them what the mystery ingredient was, they said to me “Oh…you have my attention.” It was almost a shame that Wife was there; I could have gotten me some of Patti’s castoff groupies that night based solely on my cookies. (note to self…)

So, being a generous soul, I’m going to share this recipe with you. I’ll note that I did get the original from the Washington Post several days ago, but I see in looking back that they, in turn, got it from somewhere else. I’ll cite that specific detail at the end. I’ll also add in a few of my own notes as I go along. Enjoy! And, if you make these, let me know how they came out.

 

Chocolate Chunk Cookies With Nutella

 

· MAKE AHEAD: The dough can be frozen for up to 1 month. The cookies can be stored in an airtight container for 3 to 4 days.

· Makes 38 to 42 cookies

Ingredients:

• • 2 1/3 cups flour (level off in a measuring cup)
• • 1 teaspoon baking soda
• • 1 teaspoon salt
• • 8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter, at room temperature
• • 1 cup granulated sugar
• • 1/2 cup packed light brown sugar
• • 1/4 cup unsweetened or regular Nutella (may substitute hazelnut paste)—I used the regular Nutella and it makes for a sweeter cookie but basically works great.
• • 2 large eggs, at room temperature
• • Scrapings from 1 split vanilla bean (may substitute 1 teaspoon vanilla extract)—I used the extract. Again, no problems.
• • 3 cups (12 ounces) bittersweet chocolate (preferably 60 to 66 percent cacao content), coarsely chopped into 1/4-inch pieces or larger—with this, I bought a bag of chocolate chunks from the supermarket. Nestlé makes them, but some places now have a store brand version, too.
• • 1/2 cup coarsely chopped walnuts, pecans or hazelnuts (optional)—I used walnuts. This recipe is expensive enough.

Directions:

1. Position the oven racks in the upper and lower thirds of the oven; preheat to 375 degrees. Line 2 or 3 rimmed baking sheets with silicone liners or parchment paper.
2. Sift together the flour, baking soda and salt onto a piece of parchment or waxed paper.
3. Combine the butter and sugars in the bowl of a stand mixer or hand-held electric mixer; beat on medium speed until creamy. Reduce the speed to medium-low, then add the Nutella and beat until smooth. Add the eggs one at a time, beating to incorporate after each addition, then add the vanilla bean scrapings, stopping to scrape down the bowl as needed.
4. Reduce the speed to low. Gradually add the flour mixture, beating just until the dough comes together.
5. Stir in the chocolate pieces and, if desired, the nuts.
6. Drop heaping tablespoons of the dough 2 inches apart onto the baking sheets, flattening them slightly by hand as needed. (At this point the mounds of dough can be frozen, well wrapped, for up to a month.)
7. Bake for 4 to 5 minutes, then rotate the baking sheets top to bottom and front to back. Bake for 4 to 5 minutes until lightly browned (or a few minutes longer for crisp cookies). (When I did 5 minutes, I got cookies that were TOO soft; they were limp rather than chewy. I went an extra minute or two in each period. Of course, this could just be my oven, so your mileage may vary.)
8. Transfer the sheets to a wire rack to cool for at least 10 minutes, then transfer the cookies to the wire rack to cool completely before serving or storing. Repeat to use all of the dough.

Recipe Source:

From The Perfect Finish: Special Desserts for Every Occasion, by Bill Yosses and Melissa Clark (W.W. Norton, 2010).

130 calories, 6g fat, 4g saturated fat, 15mg cholesterol, 90mg sodium, 18g carbohydrates, 1g dietary fiber, 11g sugar, 2g protein.

Just in Time for Autumn

Lisa: I can’t believe you're just going to let your daughter live in a world where this...[waving Malibu Stacey doll]…THIS is their role-model.
Marge: I had a Malibu Stacy doll when I was little and I turned out all right. Now let's forget our troubles with a big bowl of strawberry ice cream.
[Lisa pulls on Malibu Stacy's string]
Malibu Stacy Voice: “Now let's forget our troubles with a big bowl of strawberry ice cream.”
Lisa: That's it; I'm calling the company.

—The Simpsons, “Lisa vs. Malibu Stacey” (2/17/94)

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Not long ago, I got into a debate with someone over the relative merits, and the similarities/differences among various frozen desserts. Because that’s what you do when you’re a few beers into the evening, you know.

The three desserts in question were Italian ices, snowballs and snow cones. One person insisted that they were all pretty much the same thing. I, however, being the least-impaired of the group, noted that they absolutely are not, although there are similarities. After all, we share a lot of DNA with chimpanzees, but that doesn’t mean I spend my day flinging feces at people (tempting as that oftentimes sounds).

So I offer to you my mini-treatise on these three confections. Let’s start with the snow cone and the snowball, since they have so much in common.

The picture to the left is a snow cone. It’s shaved ice and flavored syrup. That’s pretty simple, right? The ice in snow cones is pretty coarsely chopped up, consequently there’s a strong possibility that the ice could freeze back together, giving you a huge, nearly flavorless lump somewhere in the middle. That sucks. Snow cones come in a variety of flavors, but there isn’t usually a wide variety available. You can probably choose from maybe four or five flavors from your local snow cone dealer. Once the ice is shaved, the vendor will usually pour the syrup out of a bottle onto the ice. The ice, being in rather large chunks, isn’t usually affected much by this.

Snow cones usually come in one size, maybe two. And it’s a little tough to see from this picture, but they’re also served literally in paper cones, hence the name. Snow cones are usually eaten like ice cream cones, without utensils, so you have to squeeze the cup to push the ice & syrup upward in order to eat it. When you’re done, you have a flat triangle of paper because you’ve squoze the whole thing out. Often, when you’re a kid, you’ll invert the cone over your mouth and squeeze the last of the juice into your mouth. Snow cones are, as I said above, a very simple pleasure.

Then there’s the snowball. Snowballs seem to be largely a Baltimore phenomenon, although I’ve seen it suggested that they’re also popular in New Orleans. I’ve never been there, so I couldn’t tell you.

The snowball is also shaved ice and syrup, however there are other differences as well. Snowballs offer a somewhat wider variety of coarseness to the ice; this depends on the stand that you go to. Some places have mechanical shavers that give you the same consistency every time; at other places the ice is manually fed and it’s going to depend upon how much pressure is placed on the ice plunger. For the most part, however, snowballs are a more finely-chopped product.

Once the ice is delivered into the cup, it’s usually heaped way up beyond the rim of the cup. This is because, once the syrup flavoring is applied, the ice usually starts to melt right away under the stream of syrup (which is often pumped out of a gallon-size jug rather than poured out of a fifth-size bottle, but this depends on the popularity of the flavor). Snowballs are also served up in styrofoam cups of different sizes. I’ve seen up to five different sizes of snowballs at some stands. Snowball stands also tend to offer a huge variety of flavors. If you look at the picture to the right, the sign in the right-hand window is the list of flavors. This place has something like fifty different snowball flavors. And, of course, some kids will ask for combinations so that the ice is striped, or dotted, or some such. That can happen with snow cones, but not often.

Because the snowballs are served in styrofoam cups, you can’t squish them out of the container to eat them, so you have to use a spoon. The other reason you need a spoon is that you might have to put a topping on them. This is a huge debate among snowball aficionados—to top or not to top. The two most popular toppings for snowballs are chocolate sauce and marshmallow. Some people also like a blob of marshmallow somewhere in the middle, so it’ll be marshmallow/snowball/marshmallow/snowball as you work your way down. Finally, snowballs are also prone to re-freezing, but at least you have the spoon to keep chopping at it while you eat.

The beauty thing about snowballs is that A) they’re ridiculously cheap—even the biggest ones are maybe three dollars; and B) they’re absolutely everywhere in Baltimore. Remember when you were a kid and you had a lemonade stand? You’ll see snowball shacks all over the place. But besides those, you’ll also see people who have set up a table, an ice shaver and about ten bottles of syrup out in front of their house. (This is usually in the rowhouse neighborhoods; I have to go to a shack for my snowballs unless I’m traveling while at work.)

Finally, we come to the Italian ice. I don’t even know why these are part of the debate because they’re so different from the other two, but what the heck. Italian ices (you’ll also hear the phrase “water ice”, which is just redundant and dumb) are finely shaved ice blended with syrup and/or juice, and sometimes actual bits of fruit, and then put back into the freezer to ensure that the juice is frozen, too. The ice to the right is hand-scooped into the paper cup and can be eaten much like a snow cone, including the part where you smoosh the cup to get the last of the juice out of it.  However, you can also buy Italian ices in individual serving cups in the supermarket. Try that with a snowball. These have a couple of cultural issues that don’t come with the hand-scooped type of ice. First, if you bought it off an ice cream truck (common when I was a kid), they usually gave you a wooden spoon to eat it with.  And because it was frozen a little harder than the scooped stuff, you had to take this spoon and essentially scrape up the Italian ice in order to get enough to eat. So someone listening to you eat an Italian ice, at least at first, would hear scrape, scrape, scrapescrapescrapescrapescrape, scrape, slurp. Repeatedly. I’m sure it’d make you crazy if you weren’t the one eating it. As the whole thing softened, you’d start to break it up with the spoon and start eating it in chunks. But the best part—THE best part—of eating Italian ice came when you got about halfway down.

Let me digress for a minute. When they make a cup of, say, Marino’s Italian Ice, they’d blend the ice and flavoring at the factory, then they’d put it in the cups and then they’d freeze it. Then someone takes it out of the freezer and puts it on a refrigerated truck for delivery to a wholesaler. Then it comes out of the truck and goes into a cold storage at the wholesaler. Then it goes onto another truck and gets delivered to a store, or your friendly neighborhood ice-cream man. This means that there are numerous opportunities for the Italian ice to melt just a teeny bit each time. And every time it melts, the melt would settle to the bottom of the cup and re-freeze when it went back into the cold storage. So, more often than not—especially when I was younger and getting this stuff from the ice cream trucks—every cup of Italian ice has about a quarter-inch layer of ice crystals infused with the flavoring.

So we all knew about the change in texture and more intense flavor at the bottom of the cup, although at the time we didn’t know why, of course. But that meant that when we got about halfway down the cup, the whole thing had softened just enough that we could get the spoon underneath what remained and flip the whole thing over. Now we’re chopping into the ice crystals and eating them along with the Italian ice. It’s like two treats in one cup!

So once again, I’ve gotten you to waste several minutes thinking about some of those stupid little things that bring so much pleasure to our lives. Hope you enjoyed the ride and I rather look forward to comments on this one, since everyone’s got some insights into these desserts.