The Cooking and Memoirs of a Curmudgeon Chef

2009-11-14T14:30:00.003-05:00

Please note that the blog, The Cooking and Memoirs of a Curmudgeon Chef' has been relocated and has a new title.

Title: The Dinner Diaries of an Intrepid Amateur Chef

blog address: http://dgrunwald.wordpress.com

2009-10-20T09:11:00.008-04:00

Divorced, I’m Not The Father And They Know My Voice

And so, Swintbn finished school in Philadelphia and we moved to her home state of New Jersey. I’ve married real honest to goodness ‘Jersey Girls’ twice. I’m batting .500 – more than 20 years with Bonnie, she’s a keeper and I am damn lucky to have her love.

I had managed to land a good architecture job in Princeton and, having been raised in the ‘burbs’, I was always more of a ‘burb’ boy than a city boy. I wanted to get back to my ‘roots’, as shallow and suburban as they might be. We were lucky in that we found a small house that we could afford to rent in the Borough. How cool, room for both a garden and a grill. Swintbn was thrilled that I would no longer be hanging the grill from a second floor window.

Life proceeded in a not too happy state as far as the marriage went, unhappy enough that we did get divorced. It was not fun but it certainly was necessary and for the best. The irony is that we lived together without benefit of marriage license longer than we were actually married.

The sturm and drang of divorce found me, initially, with little inclination to do any cooking. This was during the whole ‘woe is me period’ and before the ‘hey why don’t we go out tonight and come back to my place later for a late dinner’ – I had remembered that lesson. So I was depressed enough so that I didn’t want to cook, but still had to eat. The solution – Conte’s Pizza, Princeton. They make an absolutely superb pizza; the crust is thin but not too thin, and crispy, but still chewy – perfect. Couple the crust with a good tomato sauce, good cheese in the proper amount and homemade sausage and I’m in heaven. Oh, did I forget to mention beer and wine? Not only is the pizza perfect, but the venue is perfect too. A good sized room with a looooong bar on one side, glass behind the bar of course, Formica topped tables and chrome edged dinette chairs with red vinyl upholstery, columns in the room are covered with tiny mirrors – good Lord it’s the 1950’s, the perfect 1950’s and it’s real – no Disney Land. It’s good enough to go out of your way for and to wait in the long lines. It was close to where I was living so I availed myself of this wonder on more than one occasion.

One night at Conte’s several of my friends and I were sitting at a table having, of course, pizza and beers. I removed my face from my beer mug to see a pregnant woman at a table near ours fling herself from her chair to get on her feet. A woman so pregnant that I’m wondering how many seconds from now will she give birth pregnant. She begins to waddle (sorry moms, no other way to describe it) in the general direction of our table, no, wait, she’s waddling right towards our table, Sweet Jesus she’s waddling right up to me and saying, “Are you Dave Grunwald?” Here’s this woman: pregnant, looks around my age, certainly attractive enough that I would have been happy to assist her in getting pregnant, I had been tom-catting around as they say to some degree at that time, in the grief of my divorce I did at times drink to the point where I didn’t remember EVERYTHING and she’s asking me to confirm who I am. Me, a father? That didn’t mesh at all with the motorcycle that I was thinking of buying. And I refuse to do diapers – I gag. My friends were of no help. Not a one of them threw her to the floor, yelled fire to empty the place or said that they were me – nothing to help me escape. They sure as hell wanted to see if I was going to be a daddy. For my part, I could have said ‘no’ in a foreign language (if I knew one) or simply run out the door, but I figured – what the hell, let’s see what life has blasted me with this time. So I said, “Yes, I’m Dave Grunwald”. I was ready to immediately cover my eyes with my arms and hands so that when she threw acid in my face I wouldn’t be blinded, just horribly burned and scarred forever. Her response to my admission: “HI! I’m Belle Star (the name has been changed to protect her innocence); we went to high school together in Connecticut. I was just in town seeing some friends, and I can’t believe that I ran into you here!” All that worry about nothing, silly boy! I was more careful after that encounter. More careful in that before I entered Conte’s I would sneak up to the door and peer inside to see if any pregnant women lay in wait.

The frequency or which I was availing myself of Conte’s perfect pizza was driven home with the force of a sledge hammer one night. The evening that found me sitting at a table inside Conte’s and encountering Belle Star wasn’t the norm. As I was still a bit on the morose side about my life and the divorce I usually phoned my order in, picked it up and went home to eat.

That night when I phoned my order in the conversation was somewhat different from the usual.

Me, “Hi, I’d like to order a pizza to go – medium with sausage and mushrooms.”
Contes, “Will there be anything else?”
Me, “Nope, that’s it.”
Contes, “That will be ready to pickup in about 20 minutes.”
AND I COULD SENSE THEM HANGING UP THE PHONE
Me, “Wait! I screamed into the phone. Don’t you want my name!?”
Contes, “Don’t need it Mr. Grunwald – we all recognize your voice.”

Was it time to cut back on the frequency of my pizza orders?
Is it a good thing or a bad thing when everyone at the local pizza emporium
Recognizes your voice when you phone in your order?
It’s a wonderful thing – I consider it personalized service.
And I am grateful.

Peach Daiquiris And Raving Idiots

There is something about putting a Grunwald in a restaurant that for, whatever reason, on occasion, sends things a little out of kilter and creates incidents and situations. Some of these incidents are funny to everybody including the Grunwalds while many of the incidents are funny to you because you’re not a Grunwald As I’ve related, as I child I was taken by my parents to restaurants more often than I expect that many children were. You’d think that I had learned the consequences of bad behavior, the possibility of the ‘Grunwald Restaurant Surprise’, the fact that alcohol does indeed loosen the inhibitions giving way to behavior and words that may be embarrassing in the next days light of sobriety. You’d think that I would have learned to bolt for the door, throwing dollar bills behind me to slow the mob, that I’d have learned not to order the duck a l’orange in ‘Bob’s Beef Hut’. You’d have thought that with my cumulative restaurant experiences, including cooking in one (for however short a time) that I’d have restaurants and me down cold. Don’t I wish that I did.

Parents get really interesting when the fruit of their loins is going through a divorce. There is absolutely no attempt to hide the fact that, in my case, they were 110% in their progeny’s corner, vilifying the ex-spouse Swintbn to a degree that would make the accusers of the Salem Witch Trials blush. And so it was with my parents. My mother was particularly rabid as she was protecting her first born.

I forget what summer celebration brought us to what is a superb restaurant located on a farm in the quiet corner of northeastern Connecticut. I know that it was the early 1980’s because Swintbn and I had just bid each other adios. With Mom and Dad, individually with our own families and with friends’ families we have enjoyed many meals at this venue. Superb and inventive food, cocktails before dinner, peach daiquiris as I recall, sipped (OK, gulped, “May I have another please?”) while sitting on the elevated deck of the dining barn overlooking a tranquil pond with Great Blue Herons stalking the shallows as the sun lazily drifted down towards the fading horizon of farm fields, New England stone walls and rolling hills. That night it was the Grunwald family and, for those of you who may be speculating, yes, it was, shall I say, eventful. Behavior that was out of place in such a genteel setting manifested itself. The food that night was as wonderful as we recalled from the last visit. Even in memories that are peach daiquiri faded and blurred I recall my delight at being here and enjoying this food. Do I remember the specifics of the menu? No. Do I remember Dad holding the empty bread basket above his head? No, but he probably did. Do I remember that the divorce had recently been finalized – you betcha. I remember that in my eyes, at that moment in time, I was a failure. I couldn’t hold a marriage/love together. I would never be loved by anyone ever, ever again and, for that split second, I thought that the divorce was my fault (OK, perhaps I was wallowing a bit). My mother’s timing was impeccable, worthy of an Academy Award, for at the precise instant that I felt responsible for the marriage going south and certain that I would never again be loved by anyone as wonderful as Swintbn, Mom said, “She was never good enough for you, you should have never married her, and she’s a horrible person. I’m glad that she’s gone.” Timing is everything. How could she say that, my Witch was absolutely wonderful – the failed marriage was my entire fault (Of course that’s not true, I was wallowing).

I EXPLODED at Mom, “how dare you say that!” In truth, my drunken defense of the Swintbn was much greater in length and more vociferous than that, but you get the idea. In this genteel setting, uncaring of the other patrons’ comfort or my parents’ love, I did not keep my voice down during my tirade.

Poor Mom, she was only protecting me. Poor other diners, though I’d guess that such a scene had played before mine and will be played again you, the audience, are never really comfortable nor do you absolutely relish it (well, maybe a little) – unless it’s short and sweet or you watch Jerry Springer regularly. Yeah, it’s kind of interesting, like the proverbial auto wreck you can’t look away from as you drive past. You’re trying to be nonchalant, peering at it from the corner of your eye and whispering to your companion, “Wow! Look at the drunken idiot at the side table. What the hell is he screaming at his mother for?” The ranting of the idiot (Me) came and went quickly. I made a very sincere apology to my family, they graciously accepted and the evening returned to normal, more or less.

In the 'Quiet Corner' of Connecticut

The farm restaurant featured sing-along hayrides and I still remember the guitar playing and the dark haired beauty that lead the songfest. We are talking an honest to goodness hayride; hay wagon, sitting on the hay, horses pulling, star filled sky and everybody singing. I know, it sounds corny. Believe me, it was not. My tirade now just a (bad) memory, my brothers and I climbed on board and heartily joined in, singing along to James Taylor and The Eagles. We do three part harmony very well. I tried to get a date with the dark-haired beauty.
How could I not as she was cute as hell and I was now single. Normalcy had truly returned and the heavens breathed easy.

And yes, we’ve returned to the restaurant after this using our real names to make the reservation and have been welcomed back. As the bard says, “All’s well that ends well”.

Please Don’t Tell The Chef That I Cook

By now, you all know that my father often took the family out for dinner. We didn’t go to restaurants every other night, or even once a week, but go we did – obviously, it’s a very strong memory for me. He liked being able to take his family to restaurants because he liked to see us enjoying the experience, he was able to do something to make us happy, and because it served as verification that he had achieved a financial position where he was able to do so, something that his own father could not or would not. He took us to a range of restaurants – Patricia Murphy’s, Avon Old Farms and the local pizza and hoagie joint. Dad ate out often with his business cronies and seemed to be familiar with the whole dining out procedure. Because of that I was always surprised in that he seemed to become a bit uncomfortable, even nervous, when we walked through that entrance door. When I say that he was uncomfortable and nervous I mean that his behavior was the kind that makes a child cringe, to greater or lesser degrees, depending upon the child’s understanding or empathy for the parent. I took a long time for me to mature and gain any empathy (some say that I’ve still got a ways to go) for Dads restaurant persona. As he would wildly wave an empty bread basket above his head while shouting to the room, “Garçon! Garçon! More Bread”, my feelings were conflicted. Here’s this guy who loves his family enough to take us out to dinner and here’s this guy that doesn’t care, or have a clue, that he’s embarrassing the bejeezuz out of his ingrate son. My brothers and I and our wives and girlfriends would discuss upcoming restaurant ventures. Our discussion theme being, “What do you think that he’s going to do this time?” At various times during our restaurant adventures, our family might be found trying to hide under the table or run to the restrooms. I am certain that, at times, the wait staff was running, decorously running, but running nonetheless, from him. Dealing in our own ways with a man who always said, “Don’t fill up on the cheap stuff”. Dealing with a man who loved us – and wanted more bread.

As I started to do more and more cooking, my Dad introduced a new restaurant torture for me. Dad took his Roman Catholic upbringing to heart and he would have been right at home during the inquisition; my nightmares found him dressed in a monk’s dark and shadowy robe, the hood up and covering his face, the long inquisitors table, the too few flickering candles in a dark stone room casting no ray of hope, me naked and hung from ropes that are tied to my wrists and drawn tight to the ceiling beams so that my feet barely touch the cold, blood slick floor. It’s cold and I’m scared to death and I’m embarrassed, because there’s a great deal of shrinkage resulting from all that, the voice of my father screaming at me, “So, Witnesses have professed that you have said that you like to cook. That you have admitted to wanting to be a ………..CHEF! Cast this CHEF in the pit!” In truth my parents were delighted that all of their sons liked to cook. But, Dad had no idea that what he was going to do would make me want to run and hide.

Upon being seated in a restaurant my father would ask to speak with the chef and when the chef would arrive at our table, looking absolutely thrilled that he had had to leave a busy kitchen to deal with yet another nut customer, my father would say to him, “My son is a CHEF too! He’s really good!” Chefy asks, “What restaurant do you cook in?” I mumble my reply, “I cook at home.” The chefs would eye me and get a look their face that I interpreted as meaning, “So you’re a CHEF, an At-Home CHEF! Wowee!” Poor chefy, dragged out of his domain for this. During chefy’s exchange with us the pastry chef has taken chefy’s place on the line and is overcooking the pan-sautéed red snapper, it will have to be redone and Table 4 will not be happy, because the rest of the dishes will be cold by the time the snapper is done again. Chefy will blame us for Table 4’s unhappiness. The chef is looking at me and I know what he’s thinking, “A Real Freakin’ At-Home Chef! Well how about that?! Well, how about I just gouge one of your eyes out and eat it while you watch with your remaining eye! How about you just come into MY kitchen and I’ll brand the side of your face on the griddle! How about that Mr. At-Home Chef!” It’s torture, I’m wishing with all my heart that I were absolutely anyplace but where I am.

I’m not this chef’s equal – he does it for a living, do or die. I do it for fun, do or die too, but I don’t have to show a profit or get four different entrée selections to the table at the same time. The homicidal glaze of the chef’s eyes clearly made a statement, but his parting words were always unintelligible as he would go back to the kitchen. After such an event I would always give close scrutiny to the remaining dishes coming from the kitchen before partaking.

All You Can Eat For $5 And Modesty Flees The Scene

When Dad announced that he was taking the family out to dinner we could never guess where that particular dinner would fall in the range of gastronomic possibilities. Often quantity would win out over quality. Dad was a true yo-yo dieter, often losing and then re-gaining 50 to 100 pounds. He drove his doctors and his family crazy with this behavior. He stated that his philosophy of eating was, “Eat to live, don’t live to eat.” This was running concurrently with, “Don’t fill up on the cheap stuff” and, “I could make a meal out of bread”. What he wanted was to be able to control his eating so that when he opened a bag of cookies, he wasn’t compelled to eat the entire bag in one sitting. He never got to the point where he could do that for any meaningful period of time. So, despite the fact that he enjoyed many restaurants that did not advertise ‘All You Can Eat For $5’, we sometimes found ourselves paying $5 per person.

One night Dad’s philosophy of more, rather than better, for $5 per person bit him, and all of us, on our collective asses.

Three brothers, one wife and one girlfriend were taken out to dinner by my parents, Dad choosing the venue, to a restaurant that was so obviously dirty that it made all of us except Dad want to run out the door as soon as we entered the place. I swear that the soles of our shoes stuck to the floor and the air was hazy, visibility ten feet, with atomized grease. You could feel pimples developing on your face in real time and you knew that you’d have to wash your hair at least three times to get the grease out of it. Of course the restaurant served tremendous quantities of food for a very low price. As soon as we walked in the door Dad began enlightening the owner, whom Dad said was a ‘great friend’ of his, with the story of Dad’s life and accomplishments, while simultaneously saying to the owner things that owners, servers and chefs love to hear; “Please take this back and bring me something else - Bring me more of this - There’s not enough here, bring extra - I didn’t order this – I want more bread” Nonstop and it was becoming obvious to all of us except Dad that the owner was reaching his limit with the antics of his ‘great friend’.

Dad was salesman. When he got wound up there was no stopping him, no off switch, ya just had to let the spring run all the way out. Even though the flavors of one dish were nearly indistinguishable from another dish at one point during the evening a dish tasted a ‘little off’. We had found, and passed, the limits of Dad’s ‘great friend’ and the seven of us returned home to my parent’s house to find out what comes with pissing off the proprietor of the ‘All You Can Eat For $5’ restaurant.

Faint tremors of bodily discomfort flirted with us on the drive home, but we hoped against hope that they would leave unrealized. Cold sweat on our foreheads. Stomachs beginning to ride a roller coaster. I forgot who got sick first, probably Dad, because he commandeered the one and only bathroom, but in very short order all of us became really, violently, sick. Dad would not relinquish his domain in the single bathroom, some host. That left the remaining six of us in self-designated areas in the backyard. Outside, in the dark, each of us in our little dark world of pain, modesty had fled soon after this started (hell, anything in its right mind would have fled that scene), each of us clutching a roll of toilet paper. I didn’t have the nerve to look at the backyard the next morning. You should never, ever, wonder why all of us brothers, wives, girlfriends and Mom always felt a tremor of fear when Dad would say, “Hey! Why don’t I take all of us out to dinner tonight?”

Dessert

Yes, I’ve changed the title of the last entry in the posting. An amuse bouche is most easily described as a bite size morsel that better restaurants will serve, gratis (and well it should be considering that it is quite literally one small bite), soon after you are seated. A little something to welcome you and show off the chefs skill. Though my amuse bouche is a bite size morsel I have been placing it at the end rather than the beginning. Hence, I’m changing the title of this section to ‘Dessert’.

DESSERT: A new, and successful, recipe; Pumpkin Flan

You should know that my addled brain has often written desert when I meant dessert and visa versa. The early readers of the manuscript (much thanks to Alison, Brooke, Mary Carol, Maggie and of course Bonnie) have taught me that DESERT is the dry, sandy, place and that DESSERT is the fun course following the main meal. I won’t make that mistake again.

I recently had the opportunity to whip up a spread for an appetizer course. It’s tasty and so easy that I hesitate to call it ‘cooking’.
WHITE BEAN SPREAD
Ingredients:
3 Slices Bacon
2 Shallots
1 Garlic Clove
1 Pound Cooked Cannelloni Beans; cooked dry beans or canned
Olive Oil as needed
Salt and Black Pepper to taste
1 ¼ Teaspoons Smoked Paprika – more if you like it as much as I do. Just don’t add so much that it’s the only flavor that you taste. If you make this spread with plain old paprika (which is fine for many other dishes), rather than the smoked paprika, the flavors of this will be lacking.
Preparation:
1. Coarsely dice the bacon. Fry over medium high heat until crispy. Remove the bacon from the pan reserving about a tablespoon of the bacon fat.
2. Coarsely dice the shallots (or onions) and garlic, sautéing them in the reserved bacon fat until translucent (the garlic browns quickly, add it after the shallots have cooked a bit).
3. Place the beans, shallots, garlic and remaining bacon fat in a food processor. Process the ingredients, adding olive oil as needed, until the spread is, no surprise here, a spreadable consistency. Don’t process so much that it turns into an ugly paste.
4. Remove the spread from the processor, place in a bowl and stir in the bacon, salt, black pepper and smoked paprika until incorporated. Taste and adjust flavorings as necessary.
5. Spread it on a piece of baguette or cracker and eat. Actually, it tastes better if it sits in the fridge for a few hours so that the flavors can marry.
6. This should keep in the fridge for at least a couple days.
7. A few shifts with the seasonings and this recipe will takeoff in a hundred different directions. Experiment and have fun.

Next Week: The First Dinner Diary and You F***ing Bastard and yet more Dinner Diaries

You might want to keep the kiddies away from this posting. Adult language and situations.

2009-10-13T09:12:00.018-04:00

Swintbn And Martinis

While in Providence I met a woman that I loved enough to marry. She decided to finish her schooling in Philadelphia, so the late 1970’s found us leaving Providence. It was tough to leave. I’d done so much growing there, so much had happened, I’d learned things, made mistakes and learned not to make them as often and cooking had begun to be so very important to me.

It didn’t take long to see that the marriage was a mistake. I should have taken her mother’s advice. When we told her parents that we were getting married her mother broke into tears, telling me that it would be a mistake for anyone to marry her daughter. Hey, what did I know, I was in love. Her parents always treated me wonderfully and truly made me feel a part of their family and I loved them both. For the purpose of relating this tale I shall call their daughter, my ex, ‘She Who Is Not To Be Named’ – Swintbn for short.
However bad the marriage was it is to Swintbn’s father that I owe a great debt of gratitude. This gentleman was absolutely down to earth, kind, with a great sense of humor and an appreciation for the finer things. It is to this paragon that I owe my eternal thanks for many kindnesses and teachings and for introducing me to - the martini.

Ah, the wonder that is this drink; gin, not vodka, it strikes one as impossible that it could look so crystal clear, the gin kept in the refrigerator, maybe the freezer, pouring not like a thin liquid but with substance, like a smooth polished crystal cord that you could almost pick it up with your fingers, the fragrance of the juniper berries and other botanicals, the ‘just there’ scent of a cedar forest in sunlight dusted with winter snow, the true basic color of the lemon twist or the olive and the vermouth with its delicate fragrance of spring herbs taking just a bit of the edge off the razor sharp gin. Wow! The taste: substantial in texture, for a split second it bites then pulls back and caresses (kind of like love!), the tempered taste of the juniper and the undercurrent of vermouth herbs full in your head. Watch yourself because you will want more.

When I’m talking martini I am not talking about some bastardized, pretender to the throne, vodka thing that has no taste. I am not talking about anything that’s made in a Martini Bar. Martini Bars should all be sent to Cancun; they’re appropriate in that venue. I am not talking about a Green Apple Martini’ or a Chocolate Martini. Who the hell drinks those abominations? I’ll tell you who – 20 year old girls who don’t like the taste of liquor, but want an excuse to allow their loins to be tickled. And, if you’re a guy ordering a martini that’s made of anything other than gin, vermouth, and an olive or a twist of lemon, you should make an appointment with your doctor to have your chromosomes checked. Really, a man ordering a Chocolate Martini what are you? Whatever you are, you should be embarrassed.

The ex-father-in-law knew well the wonder of this drink – not to excess. This velvet smooth, no kidding around, mellow out here, elixir that has calmed me and put the world in perspective and on the other hand has gotten control of me on occasion. In my early martini years I was one of those who merely waved the bottle of vermouth in front of the glass of gin so as to impart the thought of vermouth to the gin. However, with the passage of the years I have come to appreciate, and find necessary, the flavor of the vermouth (always Tribuno for me) to complete the wonder of it all. Not the ten to one ratio that the original recipe calls for, but enough to make it taste “right”. What kind of gin? Entirely up to you – it just damn well better be gin and not something else. I prefer the London style gins, Coates Plymouth Gin, Bombay Sapphire, Tanqueray, Hendrick’s and Gordon’s (my vin-ordinaire). Does a list containing several gins indicate an indiscriminate palette? No way, each has its own nuances and should be appreciated on its own.

Some of the newer gins are way too over the top for my tastes – where’d the gin taste go? Thank you ex-father-in-law. Your place is preserved in my heart of hearts – and not only for the martini.

It is time to pay homage to the only diet book that has ever worked for me: “Martinis & Whipped Cream: The New Carbo-Cal Way to Lose Weight and Stay Slim”. By Sidney Petrie in association with Robert B. Stone, Parker Publishing Company, copyright 1966.

The Grape, The Garbage Disposal And The Hibachi

The late 1970’s and early 1980’s found Swintbn and me living in a floor of a Philly row house. She was in school; I was working as an architect and doing all the cooking, which suited me perfectly. I loved the cooking, but had yet to be hit with the desire to start the Dinner Diaries. So, while various food adventures that I experienced in Philly are lost, there were some pretty interesting incidents that will never be forgotten. Never to be forgotten be me, and I’m certain never to be forgotten by the innocents that also came to be involved.

One of these less than perfect moments found me attempting to make Sole Veronique. This is a pretty damn nice fish dish. As the Master Craig Claiborne says of the dish, “The name Veronique in French indicates that white seedless grapes are used in preparing the dish”. The sole poached in a wonderful broth and served warm with a delicate cream sauce and white grapes – wonderful, clean, flavors and several textures. The singular taste of sole melting in your mouth with a ‘just there’ texture, the sauce countering and complimenting the burst of flavor from the sweet grape, the grape juice creating a new sauce wrapping itself around the flavor of the Sole. What a wonderful imagination someone had to create such a dish. What possessed me to try the recipe; easy, the recipe struck me as elegant and tasteful. And because it’s relatively simple, it’s a challenge to do well.

At the time I was living in Philly every corner had a produce and flower stand manned by an Asian. I walked, or rode a bicycle, to and from work and it was really a joy to be able to go to the Italian Market at lunch for the evening’s entrée and pick up the accompaniments from the corner stands on the way home.

So, I picked up the sole at noon and kept it in the office fridge, nice and cool, until I headed home. Actually remembering to take the fish with me when I left work I stopped at the first corner produce and flower stand. I asked for white seedless grapes and was told, “Just green grapes with seeds, no seedless white grapes”. No problem, I’ll just go to another corner. Second stand – same response as the first. Third stand – same response as the first and second.

At this point those little tingles of nervousness start. I mean, I could make some other dish with the sole but, by this time the thought of making Sole Veronique had become a battle cry in my mind. By God, we’re having Sole Veronique for dinner or, by my decree, heads will roll! One more corner stand – one more negative response. I am willing to do whatever it takes to accomplish whatever I become obsessed with. If the goal requires that I give no quarter and take no prisoners than by God that is the way that it is going to be. So – I bought the green grapes with seeds. I figured what the hell – I’ll just remove the seeds.

I got home and began making the dish. The grapes? I cut them in half and did in fact remove the seeds with my handy little paring knife. Is that extreme? Not in my book kiddo. Sure, some of the grapes no longer looked pristine and perfect and we probably had a late dinner, but it was done and it was a triumph. No, I haven’t made it lately, but I will. Keep it real, but sometimes ya do what ya gotta do. Genius is being able to correctly determine what ya gotta do.

Living in Philly was interesting for a whole lot of reasons. Most importantly the up and coming restaurant scene but also for: the guy that died in the brownstone across the alley from us whose summertime death wasn’t discovered until it became olfactorily apparent; the guy that attacked people with an axe on the bus that I sometimes took (I did not take it that particular day); the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the efforts of the fledgling torturers at Penn’s dental school; Beato’s pizza; the Italian Market; Mummers; many wonderful things. It was also the first time that I had the use of a garbage disposal. You know, one of those things in the sink drain that supposedly will grind up ANYTHING and send it on its merry way. The dreaded garbage grinder into which, from a distance of three feet away, you toss the dinner leftovers into its screaming maw – any closer and it will reach up and seize your fingers and arms. I was enjoying the use of the disposal as it really did send many food items on their way that would have otherwise stayed in the house longer than they should. However, I found out that it would not accept everything.

The fateful dinner that night included – fresh, whole artichokes. I remember that the artichokes were very much enjoyed and after dinner I did the cleanup. What to do with the artichoke leaves? Why, send them down the garbage disposal. I mean there are caution stickers all over this thing saying that it will eat your fingers and hand alive, pulverizing the bone, so how hard could artichoke leaves be to get down? They would be – impossible. Start the water running, turn the disposal on and start feeding the leaves down the drain. Going fine for about 15 seconds and then, sounds from the disposal began to scream my name as if a knife had been plunged into its nether regions, the entire sink and kitchen counter was shaking as if Philly was having an earthquake and the water, ah yes the water, rising higher and higher in the sink. The artichoke leaves? They just sat there, actually they were jammed into a solid mass the consistency of concrete in the opening of the disposal. In retrospect all of this took place in the time span of a very few minutes before I shut off the disposal switch and the water. In those few moments the laws of physics deserted my portion of the universe, with the exception of the water rising higher and higher in the sink time and motion were frozen. It took the rest of a long night to remove all of the leaves to the point where the disposal would run without making death throe sounds. As it is said, “a man’s got to know his limitations”, as do garbage disposals.

Using a charcoal grill also got pretty interesting while in Philly. We were renting the second floor of a three story brownstone. I love to grill, despite my initial experience with hamburgers, and figured that I’d just keep grilling as I had in the past – except that I would hang the grill from the second floor window rather than have it on the ground. How hard or illegal could this be? I rigged up a neat little 50 pound frame from rigid metal conduit and hung this, holding the 75 pound cast iron hibachi, out the second floor back window. This would be great! It was la beautiful late spring evening and I wouldn’t have to miss the pleasure of charcoal grilled burgers for another second. I filled the grill with briquettes, doused it with charcoal lighter (which I stored a gallon container of in a closet in the apartment – cooking and idiocy trumping safety and common sense) and applied a lit match.

Things – unexpected, but I should have anticipated these types of things - got interesting pretty quickly. To begin with, everyone in the building was home – this would make sense as it was dinner time which was in fact why I was cooking at this moment.
Then, the initial 10 foot high Moses In The Desert Wrath of God pillar of orange and yellow flames (later calming down to a moderate 4 to 6 feet,) accompanied by boiling smoke as black as squid ink, got the attention of the third floor tenant pretty quickly; one could say that it immediately got her attention. Her window above the grill was open and she later said, which may have been true, that she could, in fact, see the flames, the smoke was pouring into her apartment and consequently she was somewhat concerned that – THE BUILDING WAS ON FIRE!

She was quite animated and vocal as she expressed this concern to me after I opened our door in response to her pounding upon it and screaming, “Fire! Fire! The Building’s On Fire! Everybody Get Out!!!” Now there’s a good neighbor. When I explained that I was simply grilling dinner she screamed other phrases at me too. The new phrases she screamed did not, as her original exhortations had, evidence any concern for my well being.

By this time I’m beginning to be concerned that I am ‘losing the heat of the coals’.

The first floor tenant had, God knows how, heard this commotion and ran into the courtyard at the rear of the building to see what the situation was. Believe it or not, he was somewhat concerned when he looked up to see a brazier full of red hot coals suspended directly above his head, with flames and smoke erupting from them, held there by my contraption. Little did he realize that I was, in fact, a registered architect and perfectly competent in my ability to design and construct, such a contraption. He too said things to me that I did not entirely deserve to have said to me. Something about removing my head and using my neck for an unintended purpose if I did not remove the ‘contraption’ containing the red hot coals. The literal and figurative fires both died down leaving me without the pleasures of the grill as long as I lived in that apartment. Suggestions to Swintbn that we move to a place where I could grill without attracting the attention of our neighbors were met with a murderous glare. Couldn’t I have seen the divorce coming? Her priorities were all wrong!

The Italian Market And Four Star Hotels

In addition to presenting adventures in grilling there were other wonders to be experienced in Philadelphia by those who worship the culinary arts. The Italian Market. My enjoyment and thrill at going to this market has endured beyond the time of Swintbn; there have been periods when Bonnie and I go there regularly. The market is a wonderful series of main streets and side alleys, all of them packed with people, the streets and alleys narrowed by the bins and tables showcasing the stores wares. None of the shops is too large, some are tiny carrying every available staple and delicacy – if you’ve seen ‘Rocky’, you’ve seen it – but you haven’t experienced it. Spices, coffees, cheeses (Oh my God, the wonderful cheese!), shellfish, fish, meats – there aren’t too many places on the east coast that you can find sheep’s heads and goats heads in the shop window displays, goats/sheep/lambs hanging from hooks in front of the shops (not as much nowadays as they used to), scungili (I make a mean scungili salad), earthy mushrooms, spring green lettuce, baking breads, octopus and rabbits. The song of the Italian Market is loud, turbulent: the duet of vendor and buyer, the stacking of wooden crates, knife edge on sharpening steel, the rolling of the meat hooks on their iron tracks and the paper grocery bags being shot open. The fragrance in the air is like nothing else, most of the time it’s exotic, every once in a while….. well, exotic isn’t the right word. The fragrance is a mixture of the streets, blood, seawater, earth, produce, spices, coffee, hard working men and women, bustle, and dreams of wonderful meals to come.

Not if, but when, you go to Philly you absolutely have to go to the Italian Market on Saturday morning. Even if you’re staying at that four star hotel on the Parkway, buy a small lamb from the market butcher shop for your grill at home. If the Manager at the front desk gives you trouble about it when he sees you carrying it up to your room, or if the other guests on the elevator with you gag as those drops of blood fall to the floor and then run to snitch on you, or if the chambermaid is surprised when she finds it hung in the shower to age, tell them all to talk to the chef. The chef will fully understand why you had to buy a lamb from the Italian Market. I wish that I could be standing at your side to help you when management says that it’s against the hotel’s policy to have a dead animal carcass in your room (little do they know how often this happens, I mean, look at some of these hotel guests and tell me if they don’t look like dead carcasses).

If management won’t bring the chef into the discussion, and I will not be there to help you, I suggest the following. Go ultra pro-active, remember this manager may look better than you, but on his salary, unlike you, he can’t afford to stay at any four star hotels.

Think Rocky Balboa. Play offense, loudly and angrily say, “I want my lamb carcass put in the dry aged beef case IMMEDIATELY and you had better make GOD DAMN CERTAIN that no one takes ANY of the meat from the cheeks!” I have NEVER had my lamb carcasses treated like this in ANY other hotel I’ve stayed in! When I get home I’m writing a letter to your headquarters informing them of exactly what’s gone on here and how poorly my lamb carcass and I have been treated! YOU RACIST! I certainly expected better from this four star hotel!” I’ve found that, usually, they’ll be stunned for a long enough period of time for you to be able to empty the mini-bar and flee with your lamb carcass.

By the way, my scungili salad is nice and simple: scungili (very coarse chop), olive oil, a little red wine vinegar, garlic, salt and pepper, a squirt of lemon juice, a little chopped red onion and parsley – that’s it.

Amuse Bouche

I received several emails from folks that weren’t familiar with the snack treat that I mentioned in the last posting, ‘Screaming Yellow Zonkers’. So here, courtesy of Wikipedia, is the story. Why do I still remember these? A crazy, at the time, snack food for a crazy time.

Screaming Yellow Zonkers

Screaming Yellow Zonkers was a snack food,
first produced by Lincoln Snacks in the USA in the 1960s. Screaming Yellow Zonkers are popcorn with a yellow sugary glaze, in a black box.
Lincoln Snacks asserts that they were the first food item to be packaged in black. The box contained humorous print, such as humorous suggestions about what to do with Screaming Yellow Zonkers, or that 8 oz. (226g) equals 1/4,409 of a metric ton. (This comic content was provided by Allan Katz and Howie Krakow who wrote the copy on the first several boxes, and the award-winning TV and radio campaigns.) Zonkers were geared towards those who enjoy sweetened popcorn without nuts, as opposed to products like Cracker Jack. Screaming Yellow Zonkers were kosher, but did contain dairy products.
While the front of the package was simple and understated, the rest of the Zonkers box was completely covered with absurdist copy, accompanied by illustrations, informing the reader everything from “how to wash Zonkers” to “how to mate them”. The bottom of the box explained how to determine if it were indeed the bottom. “Open the top, and turn the box upside down. If the Zonkers fall out this is the bottom. If they fall up, this is the top. If nothing happens, this box is empty.”

World class illustrators became a part of the Zonkers phenomenon. Airbrush artist Charlie White illustrated the front of the Circus box while Seymour Chwast's
work decorated the rest. White also illustrated a giant Zonkers circus poster, inspired by more of Katz’s copy. The poster was offered on the circus box for “$2.95 to include shipping, handling and profit.” The circus box ended up being displayed in the Louvre in Paris.
The product was discontinued after Con Agra acquired Lincoln Foods in 2007.
And know you know the rest of the story.

Next Week: Divorced, I’m Not The Father and They Know My Voice; Peach Daiquiris And Raving Idiots; Please Don’t Tell The Chef That I Cook; All You Can Eat For $5 And Modesty Flees The Scene

2009-10-06T10:28:00.013-04:00

Deerflies and Dave’s Vegetarian Dinner

I wrote in the last posting that at one point in my life I was a vegetarian. At another point in my life I stopped being a vegetarian. So, why did I stop? I really missed hamburgers, I wasn’t certain of my commitment to the goals of vegetarianism in light of my consumption of ‘Snickers’ bars and Jack Daniels (not necessarily at different times) and I found that you could mix Red Zinger Herbal Tea with Yukon Jack for a truly comforting drink appropriate to three seasons of the year (yes, it could be stretched to four seasons).

I also used to backpack, rock climb and cross country ski. Looking at me now you would
never believe this. You would give more credence to my being a vegetarian. I along with friends and family backpacked a lot in the 1970’s. On these expeditions I discovered that I really hate deer flies. The northeast plague from God three seasons of the year. They swarm around you with this horrid buzzing sound. I recall that I would start to whimper when I heard that sound because I knew what was to follow. A gazillion flies would swoop and dive at my head from every direction, trying to distract me from the main attack. My hands would flail about my head but I was powerless from keeping them from attacking the back of my head where I couldn’t see them to swat them. They would land on the back of my head and one would take a huge freakin’ bleeding bite out of my scalp with a mouth that, when only slightly magnified, looks like a razor sharp pair of hedge shears. Then, after that one has bitten and started the blood flowing, several gazillion ADDITIONAL deer flies swarm into a feeding frenzy that makes a shark feeding frenzy look like Disney World. As I’m swarmed by fifty gazillion deer flies I find myself running, falling, stumbling blindly through the woods. My hands flailing around my head, child birth like screams issuing from my mouth. I run until I hit that tree trunk head on, fall to the ground and am eaten alive by the deer flies. Honest injun.

So, I did my backpacking in the late fall and winter, often going out for several days with my trusty Kelty D4 pack on my back, and my feet strapped onto a pair of Bonna 2000 wooden cross country skis. On one of these expeditions I drove from Providence, Rhode Island to the White Mountains of New Hampshire, got to the trailhead, strapped my skis on, got my pack on and headed into the mountains. It was full blown winter, with lots of nice snow on the ground and no deer flies.

I probably skied about seven miles in to a campsite by a river. It was getting late in the day, and dark. I set up my tent and started to prepare dinner. This was so long ago that most of the rivers and streams in the higher elevations of the White Mountains were safe to drink from without any water treatment. So, not wanting to waste time and stove fuel melting snow for water, I went to the river bank to get water to begin to prepare the vegetarian food fest that I was planning on having for dinner. Yep, still a practicing vegetarian at the time. At the river bank the ice extended a little ways out from the bank before you could get to flowing water.

Being cautious and woodly wise I got a fairly big branch and pounded the ice with the end of it to make absolutely certain that the ice would hold me as I reached for flowing water. Of course, when I stepped onto the ice I crashed through up to my knees in freezing water. This should surprise none of you readers, but it sure as HELL surprised me.

I was so surprised that I sprang to the top of the river bank in a single leap – that whole adrenalin thing. Shivering more than a little, I went for a dry pair of socks. None to be found. Dry long undies? None to be found. Didn’t I pack those? OK, at least we can have a nice vegan dinner. Dinner was to be reconstituted with boiling water, which was actually near boil before I knocked it over into the cold snow. OK, I can boil more water – and I did! I don’t remember exactly what dinner consisted of, probably: dried lotus root, dried onion, some dried seaweed, and maybe rice or buckwheat groats, LOTS of seasoning. And before too long, dinner was actually ready to eat.

This dinner tasted absolutely foul. I give this spawn of the devil an undeserved compliment by calling it dinner. Its taste was so foul that to this very day I have nightmares about it. In these nightmares executioners are holding on my back on a table. They keep promising to feed me canned peas and spam, things that taste good in comparison to what I had made. Just as they’re about to feed me the peas and spam, they whisk in the vegetarian mistake and put a shovel-sized serving in my mouth. That’s how bad the vegetarian dinner tasted – canned peas and spam taste better.

I wouldn’t have fed that mistake to my worst enemies (Yeah, I have a list). New Hampshire Fish and Wildlife would probably have fined me for leaving this foulness out for the wildlife to eat if the wildlife had dared to even approach it. So, I am wet, I’m cold, it’s dark and it’s the middle of winter, I’m stuck with food so incredibly bad that I wouldn’t eat it and I’m wondering what the hell I’m doing here. It was good weather, but it was winter in the mountains and a damn cold night was coming on.

I DON’T HAVE TO STAND FOR THIS! It was a beautiful full moon that lit up the mountains and the forest like the lights that they have on search helicopters when they’re hunting you down (not that I’d know anything about that). I packed up camp and headed back. It was a nice, gentle, downhill ski back to the car. I loaded everything in, started it, turned the heater to HIGH and in the dead of night drove four hours back to Providence. Several of the incidents that day were bad. But, none were as unforgivable and terminal as the bad vegetarian dinner.

When Snow Turns To Slush, Thoughts Turn To Food

In addition to the backpacking, my brothers and I, with our wives and girlfriends, spent a lot of time cross country skiing together in New England, in the 1970’s. Of course, as with all things Grunwald, what would the skiing be without food! For hot drinks we had a mulled red wine seasoned with Constant Comment tea; a Vino Caldo, which was perfect for the occasion, actually perfect for any hot mulled wine occasion. The Vino Caldo - Constant Comment Red Wine Punch became a staple for the Grunwald family in the North Country winter and to this day holds a place at out winter table. Of course, there were other libations; man cannot exist on mulled wine alone. The food? We stayed, as I remember, at relatively nice Inns and enjoyed their breakfasts and dinners. It was the outdoor lunch cuisine that was of ours to develop. We were skiing, physically exerting ourselves. The usual sitting in the grass listening to a concert menu would not suffice. The food had to sustain us in our winter skiing workout and, therefore, had to be appropriately hearty. In addition to the thermoses filled with the hot mulled wine there were ‘Bota Bags’ filled with wine or Jack Daniels, gorp (raisins, M&M’s and peanuts), hard sausages, pepperoni, Screaming Yellow Zonkers, cheeses and crackers, maybe some dips and spreads. I’m sure that brownies and baguettes were in there somewhere. We carried packs of substantial size. We knew that we absolutely needed this food to carry us through the heavy duty exertions of cross country skiing in the mountains and valleys of New England. We disdained, unless we were tired or hung over, the groomed trail. For us it was breaking trail through virgin snow! We had been schooled well in winter lore. We knew that without these large quantities of calorie laden food there was the distinct possibility of, dare we say it, death on the winter trail. I am certain that the Appalachian Mountain Club (AMC) will attest to this. It is a documented fact that in certain areas of the White Mountains of New Hampshire a full grown man can, in the winter, starve to death in twenty minutes. In the three hundred thirty five years that the AMC has been keeping records of winter deaths, no dead body has ever been found carrying a pack full of food and two or three ‘Bota Bags’.

THE CONSTANT COMMENT RED WINE PUNCH

In that pristine and Godly countryside evil found us when the weather changed for the worse. When blue skies, fluffy clouds and sun glittery snow gave way to pouring rain, sleet, ice and more pouring rain, we confined ourselves to the rooms at the Inn. I’m not skiing in the rain any sooner than I’d eat a bad vegetarian dinner. What to do, what to do? Turn on the 1970’s television that got two or three channels, bring out the board (could be spelled bored) games, break open a book, relax and enjoy the kinship?

Evil manifests itself to those souls imprisoned in this room by the unskiable weather. Oh, it initially showed itself in a guise of innocence, but start it did and it would not leave until it was done with the devils’ work. One of us would say, at about nine o’clock in the morning, fifteen minutes or so after breakfast, “Does anybody know which backpack the gorp is in, I think I’ll have just a little bit.” Ah, the beginning, so innocuous, so utterly normal. About three minutes later someone else would be infected by the evil and say, “Why don’t you just put the gorp in this bowl. I’m sure that everybody wants a little.” When evil was certain that it had, to greater or lesser degrees, touched all in that room, the true madness would begin with someone saying, at about ten o’clock in the morning, “What the hell, I’m going to crack open one of the thermoses of mulled wine.” The mulled wine was followed by the pepperoni, than the cheeses, then more mulled wine, then the Screaming Yellow Zonkers, the Jack Daniels and then it was noon and time for lunch.

At this point in the day we were all a little bleary eyed, the boards for the board games had been ripped in half so that we could ‘ride’ them down the mattresses that were piled against the wall to replicate a ski slope, the television was tilted on its side so that the picture was properly aligned with your head when you were lying on the floor and the toilet had stopped working. Evil, evil, evil.

The Bacchanal continued through the day. We were in fact eating all of the food and drink that we had planned on consuming if we were skiing and burning 1,000 calories an hour for the entire day rather than sitting on our butts in our nicely appointed room maybe, and I’m being optimistic on this thought, burning 10 calories an hour reading a book. OK, truth is that we were not burning ANY calories an hour. We were in fact gaining about 5 pounds an hour as we wolfed down all of the food and drink that we had meant to partake of to insure our survival while skiing. Evil had done its work and was ready to administer the coup de grace – always - the inevitable question, “What time do you guys want to go have dinner?”

And Sometimes Nothing Horrible Happens

Yes, we Grunwald boys do like to eat. If you’re wondering, one brother’s in great physical shape and the other brother and I are our own persons. Many of our family events, while not centering on food, have managed to include a goodly amount of food. I recall a day-long concert at Tanglewood in the Massachusetts Berkshires that featured Willie Nelson and Emmylou Harris. Great Freakin’ Concert! The family attendees: the three brothers and one brother’s wife. Beautiful weather, great music and, of course, enough food to sustain for the duration of the concert and into the next decade if necessary – be prepared.

You may be picturing in your mind the beautiful, genteel lawn dining of Tanglewood patrons during the Boston Pops Concerts: cloth tablecloths set on the green sward atop hand woven cashmere lawn blankets, perhaps two or three directors chairs for the older folks, cloth napkins, silverware, fine crystal and candelabras. It was a different scene at ‘Willie and Emmylou’s’.

A blanket on the ground (no lawn chairs, as we were still in our 20’s and our hip and knee joints were still flexible), paper napkins, paper plates and plastic cups. I’m quite certain that we smuggled in something alcoholic, had to have. Probably not a martini at that time in my life, but I sure hope that it wasn’t one of those ‘Midori Things’.

The usual menu of cheeses, crackers, dips, smoked oysters, nuts, pepperoni, meats, Screaming Yellow Zonkers (come on folks, some of you’ve got to remember those), sandwiches, chips, cookies, cake and candies. As it was summer, there was no hot mulled wine. We brought all of this in a full-size portable cooler, oh and backpacks too. The kind of cooler that you might put 3 or 4 days worth of food and drink in. Some people were outright staring at us as we commenced our bacchanal. Staring at us? These folks just didn’t understand the finer points of picnicking. The finer points of picnicking being that it required food. We assumed that they staring at us because they were jealous of the bounty we had brought – in comparison to the meager amounts of food they had brought. So what finally happened? Who got caught skinny dipping in front of 1,000 concertgoers? No one. Neither Kev nor Mitch, not Shawn and not me.

Nothing out of the ordinary happened except for my trying to pass myself off as the photographer for the RISD student paper so that I could take photos of Emmylou and Willie (my press credentials – my college ID card - were not found to be acceptable). We had a great time, lots of food, beautiful weather, a gorgeous venue and the music of Emmylou and Willie. The Grunwald Event Disaster that usually hovers over us did not make an appearance the beautiful day. And, dare I say it? Food may not have been the prime factor that day – but it sure wouldn’t have been the same without it.

TANGLEWOOD: Beauty and the Beasts

Amuse Bouche
A few weeks ago four of us had the pleasure of being invited to dinner at the home of a couple who are mutual friends of us four. The circumstances of how the four of us met the other couple bear telling. K., J., Bonnie and I were slowly meandering our way back to K. and J.’s for a glass of wine after a town fest on a spring soft late afternoon when we happened to fall in step with R. and A.. K. is one of the most outgoing and vibrant people I’ve met and she easily engaged R. and A., folks that we had never met before, in conversation, inviting them to join us. And they did.

I probably wouldn’t want to invite folks that I’d never met before into my home. I admire K. for being able to do so; to be so willing to engage with the unknown. I sometimes wonder what I’ve missed by not being particularly spontaneous.

The upshot of all of this is that R. and A. have become friends and A. did serve of us a spectacular dinner; opening their home and themselves to us. Again, it gets back to my pet theme. That theme being that life is best when we all sit down around the table to share both the food and who we are with others. I'm thrilled when a friend invites me to their home for dinner. I would like to think that A. enjoyed preparing the dinner as much as I do. As long as you want to do it you just can’t help but enjoy it. The menu:

- Empanadas stuffed with confit of duck, corn relish and butternut squash puree (courtesy of Dave)
- Heirloom tomato tart (courtesy of K.)
- Spicy seared scallops on a bed of wilted spinach.
- Butternut squash soup.
- Homemade fettuccini with garlic, basil and cheeses.
- Pork tenderloin with baby red onions.
- Chocolate cake with strawberries.
THANK YOU R. AND A.!

Next Week: Swintbn and Martinis; The Grape, The Garbage Disposal and the Hibachi; and The Italian Market and Four Star Hotels

2009-09-29T08:50:00.016-04:00

Wheat Germ, Lots Of Wheat Germ

Cooking while in RISD wasn’t all fun all the time. Every culinary escapade was not the birthday party that the cranberry orange tea breads were. Remember Adelle Davis? I mean, I’ve still got the cookbooks, so maybe I should give the recipes another try someday. What I do remember about the recipes of hers that I cooked in the hazy 60’s and 70’s is that they resulted in some pretty damn heavy food. She espoused natural unprocessed foods way before many other Berkeley California restaurateurs (Alice, are you reading this?) and I love her for that. But, wowee zowee the Adelle Davis recipes that I cooked weighed in at about 35 pounds per serving. Granted, you might be able to attribute that to my skill level. I remember that many of the recipes called for a lot of wheat germ, which in my memory made for the mother of all sauces (I don’t know what else to call it. Glop?). This glop was an amalgam of the wheat germ and the cooking oil – sunflower oil. We were trying to eat healthy food and be in tune with the planet – the planet being Earth. I specifically state the planet Earth, because someone told me that one night I woke from a deep sleep, sat upright in the bed and said, “It’s my turn to be space cadet”. So, I just wanted to be clear as to which planet I want to be in tune with. My companion and I tried several of the Adelle Davis health food recipes; said companion got sick to her stomach – and it wasn’t because of my cooking. Of course it may have been my cooking – sometimes - maybe.

Adelle Davis circa 1925

I distinctly remember an Adelle Davis baked bean recipe that included, as the primary ingredients, beans and red wine vinegar. There may have been cheese in there as well, but that would just be so wrong! Yes, the recipe called for red wine vinegar. Well I thought that it called for red wine vinegar – 3 CUPS! Any chef that was as practiced and competent as I was at the time knows that many recipes call for multiple cups of red wine vinegar. I mean, it just tastes so good going down. Smooth and full like a classic vintage wine from Missouri or Nebraska. So, I made the recipe with 3 cups of red wine vinegar. Throughout the entire process of making this dish there was this teeny, tiny voice way in the back of my head saying, “three cups of vinegar?”
I ignored this voice as I have always ignored the voices that are in my head. To listen to these voices would be to invite peril, so the voice was ignored. As the dish baked in the oven its fragrance wafted through the apartment. Yes, I thought that I noticed the wallpaper peeling in the room closest to the kitchen, but it was an old apartment with old wallpaper so I just locked that observation away with the voice. And when it was done baking, I ATE THE DAMN THING. I mean sure, my poor terrified, and much wiser than I, companion took a nibble of it and refused the rest. Probably, because the aroma truly made your eyes water. Oh wait, the phrase is ‘mouth watering’, not ‘eye watering’. I continued to eat this insisting that it was absolutely great, and with a flavor like this probably very healthy. As I continued to wolf this down my companion was frantically searching through the phone book for the poison control center number. In hindsight it was not so much ‘great’ as ‘pretty damn interesting’ – for a short period of time. When I was at last able to crawl from the bathroom I reread the recipe discovering that some fiend had cleverly deleted the word ‘vinegar’ from the recipe. It now read, “3 cups red wine”. As I’ve grown older I have found peace with the fact that there is no dishonor in tossing away, by any means, a particularly inedible THING that I’ve created. In fact I’ve done this on several occasions with my cooking and would have liked to on several occasions with other people’s cooking.

David Versus the Hibachi; Guess Who Wins

My culinary triumphs, and failures, continued. I remember the day that I bought my first hibachi. Yeah, I know, you had one too. Everyone in the 70’s and 80’s had one! Cute little 75 pound cast iron hibachis that took two people to move were eventually replaced with Weber grills of all sizes that only took one person to move. The first thing to be cooked on that hibachi was – hamburgers. Of course, the iconic American grill item. Don’t argue with me about hot dogs, the burgers were first. For what ever very odd reason I had never made hamburgers before, never even grilled a burger. So, I got some good meat (not knowing much about meat at the time but I’m sure that it was good) made burger shapes with it and fired up the hibachi. Friends arrived, my girlfriend was there and drinks were poured. I can still picture all of us on the deck of the apartment that I was renting. I’m sorry that I don’t have a picture of us, but if you want to know what it looked like just take a look at a late 1970’s Budweiser commercial. Actually, a rock concert photo from Rolling Stone would be closer to the truth.

Soon the coals in the hibachi were ready. When I say that the coals were ready, I’m talking hotter than the center of the sun hot, ready for branding hot, ready for the Inquisition, let’s show God to these Saracens – WHITE HOT. There may have been some fool in attendance who suggested that I might want to let the coals “cool down a little” but, hey, what did they know. In retrospect these 1970’s first time burgers were different from what I make nowadays in that they were about an inch and a half in diameter before cooking – about the size of the top of an aluminum beer can (maybe I was poor when I bought the meat or over optimistic on how many it would serve). The mini-burgers reacted strangely when they hit the hibachi’s grill that rested a scant hairsbreadth above the white hot, incandescent, look at them for even a fraction of a second and you’ll go blind coals. The burgers simultaneously contracted into a patty about three quarters of an inch in diameter and – carbonized. I had become a ‘Magic Chef’! The burgers had morphed into lumps, small lumps, of charcoal (it seems that early on in my cooking journey I had a propensity for transmuting food into charcoal). Friends circled around as I placed these ‘things’ on a plate.

One cute young woman, whom I secretly lusted after, started to laugh and pointing at the ‘things’ saying, “God, they’re so small!” If I didn’t have such a thick hide, good ego structure and absolute ignorance of just how failed this effort was I might not have cooked ever again. But hey, we were young, had something to drink and still had potato chips, and empty burger rolls, so I survived to grill another day.

I have told you of the tragedies but let me remind you that there were triumphs too. In particular a honey almond mousse that was to die for. Well, not die for, better than that – you would kill or maim to get your share of it.

My culinary skills continued to progress. While living in Providence I shall also claim credit for creating and hosting the first ‘Under $4.00 Per Gallon Wine Tasting Party’. Think back to the mid 1970’s, wines were just beginning to be popular and there were a lot of odd bottlings out there. At that time you could in fact purchase a gallon of wine for less than $4.00. I’m not saying that it was a premier cru; I’m saying that it was a gallon of wine, or something close to wine, for less than $4.00. I know that there were some Gallo wines in the tasting, also Cribari, Yosemite Road Red and Yosemite Road White and some too odd or hideous to even remember. The likes of Mateus and Blue Nun were ruled out because they cost more than $4.00 per gallon. The rules of the tasting were not the gentile, actually taste a little of the wine, spit it out, cleanse you palette, and write down your observations that some of us follow today. This was more along the lines of, ‘Can You Survive This Event?’ Wines were consumed by the glassful and the winner was, not a wine, but that person that was still standing at the conclusion of the event. I still remember that a half consumed gallon of the Yosemite Road White sat under my kitchen sink for about six months before I finally gave up and threw it out.

Moussaka (Meatless)

My cooking, to say nothing of the rest of my life, has taken a couple of twists and turns. There was a time during and after college years that I was a practicing vegetarian. Oh my God! A Vegetarian! How cute is that!? But wait, this recipe has cheese so does that make me a ‘Lacto-Vegan’? I know, you’re saying to yourself, “how could he have possibly been a vegetarian – he’s much too loud, opinionated, obnoxious, crude, vain, and the list goes on. But, I was! Lots of grains, veggies, brown rice, regular trips to the health food store, herbal teas, dried lotus root, dulse (I still love it), picking and eating day lily bulbs and yoga. Brown rice continues to be one of my all time favorite foods.

The Meatless Moussaka is from those days in the 70’s. I don’t remember where this recipe came from, maybe a magazine, maybe a friend, maybe a crude takeoff on a real Moussaka recipe without the Béchamel – or lamb. As I recollect, pretty hazy days as they were in the 70’s, it’s a good recipe. Let’s be honest – It’s not Moussaka.

Honest to goodness Moussaka is a wonderful layering of eggplant, lamb and Béchamel. I’ve grilled both the eggplant and the lamb (shredded the lamb for the dish) to get a nice smoky tang to it. I am certain that there are a million great Moussaka recipes out there. This recipe should be titled Eggplant and Cheese Casserole. Very good in its own right. I do recall that my friends and I always enjoyed this dish. Serve it with a green salad, a nice light fruity red and some ripe fruit drizzled with honey for dessert - it’s a wonderful evening.

The Kitchen Sink Casserole

Last night, whatever leftovers that were in the refrigerator and cupboards, that made sense in combination, went into a Kitchen Sink Casserole (i.e., everything except the kitchen sink). I firmly believe that no food should be wasted - if it ain't moldy - eat it.

- Leftover roasted pork shoulder, cubed
- Leftover roasted chicken breast
- Red onion
- Carrots
- Sweet potato
- Celery
- A bit of corn relish
- Red pepper
- A sauce Velouté; the liquid in the sauce was white wine, chicken stock and coarse mustard (the seasoning). Don’t let the name of this sauce scare you off. It’s a white sauce made from a roux (cooked flour and butter) in which a light stock (the chicken broth and wine) takes the place of milk or cream (a Béchamel sauce).

Sauces are wonderful. Made well and properly incorporated they can make many dishes appear more dazzling, and tastier, than they otherwise might be; a breaded and grilled paillard of chicken breast or the same with a nice Béchamel seasoned with herbs? As Julia writes there are just a few basic sauces: Béchamel and Velouté (cousins – the Béchamel with milk and the Velouté with white stock) and Brown Sauce (with brown stock; beef or demi- glacé). Some food authorities consider those three to be the Pantheon. Others, including Julia, go on to include tomato sauce, egg yolk and butter sauces (Hollandaise), oil and vinegar (vinaigrette) and flavored butters. All the other million sauces are simply variations on these themes. None of these are hard to make. Go try one tonight and dazzle the respective other!

The Kitchen Sink Casserole tasted and looked great. I’ve done it before and look forward to doing it again.

Next Week: Deerflies and Dave’s Vegetarian Dinner, When Snow Turns to Slush Thoughts Turn to Food and Sometimes Nothing Horrible Happens

2009-09-22T09:29:00.017-04:00

Plastic Rats, The Bank And Cranberry Orange Tea Breads

Nearing the end of my fourth year at RISD I was fortunate enough to get a job with a New York architect who was responsible for a 30 story bank building in Providence. Lucky, lucky me. The job continued through my fifth year and after graduation. To be working with a New York Architect, while still in school, part time, 30 story building, making a couple of bucks, guaranteed a job after graduation – Very Cool. I don’t usually get that lucky. Maybe there is a balance in life.

Yes, there is balance. The architectural position was preceded by my working in a knitting mill, Atlantic Knitting Mills, where I ran knitting machines. Working at the mill was a huge step up from my previous job. The previous job found me sitting in front of a buffing wheel in a plastic paper weight factory – the opposite end of the balance of the architects’ position. In my hands were clear plastic paper weights the size of index cards, about one half inch thick. These paperweights were a give away to doctors from some pharmaceutical company. Inside the paperweight was a cross-section drawing of a rat in vivid color showing the course of some drug as it wound its way through a lab rat’s body. I sat in front of this buffing wheel polishing the front, back and four edges of these paper weights for eight hours a day, five days a week, for more than two months. I swore that my brain had turned to a thin mush from the ceaseless boredom of this work and was leaking out of my ears. I would catch myself with my mouth open; slack jawed, drooling onto these paper weights as I polished them. I quit two days earlier than I said that I would. I absolutely could not, would not continue with this torture. Almost in tears from the mind melting labor I called the factory owner and explained that I just could not and would not buff those rats anymore. He didn’t seem too upset. He was probably thinking, “Oh God, another one’s gone over the edge. I hope that he doesn’t come back and force me to call the police like the last one did.”

The work at the knitting mill was part time during the school year and full time during the summer. It was a really nice job and I remember it fondly. The owners treated us workers nicely; nobody cared that my ponytail might get caught in the knitting machines. I learned to run a knitting machine and to tie the proper knots between the bobbin of thread that was almost empty and the waiting full bobbin and during lunch I got to sit on the roof looking at huge rooftop ventilators that looked like the helmeted heads of Roman Legionnaires, the armies turning in unison with each gust of wind.

The mill gave its workers free turkeys at Thanksgiving and Christmas and I thought that was pretty damned cool. It was the early 70’s and by God I was actually cooking those turkeys. I had begun to invite friends over to cook dinner for them. The details are lost. I’m sure that there were good turkey dinners and less than good turkey dinners. I suspect that some of the dishes came from cans or the frozen food section of the market. I suspect that some of the dinners were ‘potluck’. But, I do know that meals were cooked and shared with lovers and friends and that cooking was on its way to becoming an increasingly important part of who I was.

I was a bit surprised that the bank agreed to the architect’s hiring me considering that, at the time, my hair hung down to the middle of my back when it wasn’t in a ponytail and I had a full, full beard. This was not the look one normally associated with anyone remotely connected with a bank in the 1970’s. A great photo from that time shows the back of five people looking at the horizon from the roof top heliport of the newly constructed bank building. All dressed in suits – only one with his hair down to the middle of his back in a ponytail. My suit came from the Salvation Army. The bank asked me to wear it for whatever ceremony we were having on that day.

The ‘Custom House Tap Crew’: George G., The Curmudgeon Chef, Frank T., Robert M. and Peter R.

The bank people could not have been nicer to me and I, believe it or not, I even made some good friends. It was a time in our great country when the lunches that we - architects, contractors and bankers - went out to daily included three or so drinks with our meals. We’re talking wine, yes, and beers and gin and tonics and lots of other concoctions. Then, with lunch over, we would actually go back to work. As out of place as it may be today, this lunch menu was considered absolutely normal – nothing out of the ordinary. Of course there was the fact that my architect boss kept a quart bottle of scotch and a quart bottle of antacid in his lower desk drawer and that was considered normal too. God, I miss those days.

The gourmet in me was growing. I was occasionally cooking meals for friends and the bankers were initiating me into the world of their private clubs. We are not talking about strip clubs here, though as I recall that was the case a couple of times. We’re talking about the type of club that is located in the understated mansion, the club that announces itself with only a beautifully aged mahogany front door and a small brass plaque upon which was engraved the club’s name or just the street number, the kind of a club where four or five courses were routinely served for lunch and the wine selection was modest, but impeccable. There were so many pieces of silverware at the place settings that I knew whichever piece I chose it would not be the correct one. Multiple courses, cloth table cloths and napkins, candles and impeccable service. I’d seen this level of service a few times with Dad as my guide, but now it was me being treated as an equal (more or less) by my employers – Wowee Zowee! I was about 23 years old, in Capitalist Pig Heartland – and I loved it! Revolution? What Revolution? My Chassagne-Montrachet is losing its slight chill. There were people in these places whose names I’d seen in the newspapers many had been on TELEVISION: mayors, the governor, senators, bankers and the television weatherman. The club members were men. Rarely one or two women guests might be seen. These were also the type of club where a dress code was in place and rigidly upheld requiring, at a minimum, a sport coat and tie – a suit and tie were preferred. My co-workers dressed to the code, but I was just some hippy dippy kid in school wearing jeans, a gaudily colored shirt and Vasque hiking boots. The suit in the photo was a rare change from my usual outfit, hanging forlornly in the closet, waiting for a suit emergency. So, most of the time, upon entering these clubs I was whisked away by the maitre’d before any of the Club members could catch sight of such a derelict and given a sport coat and clip on tie that I’m sure they bought for fifty cents at the Goodwill store. The sports coats that the maitre’d loaned me never fit. They came in only two sizes; too large or too small. If the jacket was too large, the bottom of the jacket came down to my knees and the cuffs had to be rolled up to the elbows. The too small version found the bottom of the jacket at my waist, the cuffs at my elbows and the back seam threatening to split open if I took a breath. I looked like an organ grinder’s monkey.

All of these coats were of an indeterminate color and fabric. I always wondered what the person whose coat I was wearing had died of, how long they had left the coat on the body after he died and if he had died of anything that was contagious. The ties were usually black or maroon and always stained. The net effect of my own clothes, the borrowed jacket and the clip on tie was to make me look like a derelict clown. No, with my hair and beard I looked like a young Santa on skid row. I gotta love those bankers because no one ever laughed or made me feel out of place.

The construction of the bank reached completion and the night before the grand opening found all of us who had been responsible for this building caught up in the proverbial whirlwind of attending to last minute details. The bankers, being above all sensible-buttoned-down-trust-your-money-to-folks, came up with a plan for our remaining sensible while attending to the completion of the final details. The plan being that the group of us would attend to ‘a detail’ after which we would retire to The Custom House Tavern (AKA the Tap to regulars like us) to restore our energies so that we could proceed to accomplish the next detail whereupon we would retire to the Tap to re-energize ourselves and so on and so forth – you get the besotted picture. There were many, many details we had to attend to that evening. The Custom House Tavern is a venerable institution. I remember it as wood paneled without being over the top, quiet, no live music the way they have today and it was here that on a cold, bleak and rainy day I was introduced to the wonderful combination of Amontillado Sherry and walnuts – perfect.

At the time I was living with a young beauty who, when we graduated, had become an art teacher in a public school, a career path that many RISD graduates before and since have followed. She was having a bake sale at school the day of the bank’s grand opening and I had agreed to bake some cranberry orange tea breads for the sale (the recipe is very good, better than yours, try it – but use butter, not margarine – I knew less than I do today – I hope).

The timing of baking the tea breads and ensuring a sufficient retirement fund for the Tap owner required that I use all my skills to successfully balance both these Herculean tasks. To this day, I have no idea what time I jumped, or stumbled, out of the Custom House Tavern – Finish The Details – Custom House Tavern – Finish The Details loop. The sun had not yet risen so I had plenty of time to make the breads. I managed to get home and assured a very dubious companion that I would in fact make these breads and that she should go back to bed (I guess that I did wake her up when I stumbled in. Yeah, I was stumbling a bit) and sleep pleasant dreams. It was HARD making the damn tea breads! To begin with I really strained my eye in this task. Yes, eye, singular. I found that if both eyes were open, I had twice the images that I actually needed. I repeatedly damaged any remaining brain cells to make certain that the quantities were correct, that I hadn’t already added that particular ingredient, that the pans had been buttered and floured, that only a minimal amount of skinned fingertips and blood had gotten into the orange zest, and that the temperature was correctly set on the oven, that the oven was in fact really ‘on’. I got the batter made, into the pans and the pans into the oven AND set the timer. Now it was time to close my eyes for just a few moments for a little nap.

WHAT THE BLOODY FREAKIN’ EARTH IS ENDING HELL?! What’s this roaring in my head like a jet engine?! A plane’s landing on my head! The world’s ending! And in a sense it was in fact – for me. I shot out of bed, actually fell out, opened my eyes and found my companion holding a hairdryer that was going full blast in one of my ears (I know that if she had a second hairdryer I would have gotten it in both ears). She turned the weapon off and sweetly said, “David, David, your breads are done”. I had slept (not passed out, I’m certain of that) through the timer alarm. The breads looked like large charcoal briquettes. No, she didn’t leave me that day. Not that day anyway. Boy, you try to do something nice for someone and it just gets you nowhere. It took a very long while for the psychic toxins of the slightly over baked breads to depart our abode. You know that saying, “It’s the thought that counts”. It’s a bullshit saying.

Next Week: Wheat Germ, Lots of Wheat Germ; David Versus the Hibachi and Moussaka (Meatless)

A Diversion: The Cape 2009
Bonnie and I were on the Cape last week enjoying beautiful weather, gorgeous bay and ocean, old friends, great seafood and several good and one not so good restaurant. Hatch’s was as ever and that pleases me very much.

In previous postings I wrote about EATING the lobster and Hatch’s free lobster bodies. It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words. So, I’ve titled the following photo ‘The Remains of the Day’. My apologies to Kazuo Ishiguro and to those of you with weaker stomachs than I imagined.

THE REMAINS OF THE DAY

The good restaurants are the ‘Blackfish’, Moby Dick’s’ and the ‘Karoo Kafe’.
The ‘Blackfish’ (no website) has a wonderful menu, perfectly cooked food, great service and a close darkish comforting ambience. The appetizer menu items include such dishes as a confit of pork belly with hoisin sauce over white corn polenta (virtually the same as I dish that I serve at home. Who was first and does it matter?), rabbit ragu over fresh Pappardelle ( excellent and one of Bonnie’s favorites), seared foie gras on toasted brioche with strawberry rhubarb compote and a wonderful homey dish; Provincetown mussels with fennel, sweet Italian sausage (I would use Linguica) and a savory cream broth. Entrees included a tuna ragu over fresh Pappardelle finished with mascarpone cheese and lemon confit (I thought that the shredded tuna would be dry, but it was creamy and wonderful), Panko crusted sole with lemon and caper beurre blanc, Braised organic veal with wild mushroom jus and a variety of Niman ranch burgers. Yes, wonderful desserts.

Moby Dick’s is a classic clam shack; screened on all sides of the dining area with views of the salt marsh and picnic tables and benches for seating. Bonnie and I invariably order the same thing all of the years that we’ve been dining there; a fried clam platter (with the bellies) and a fried oyster platter. If it’s cool we’ll get some clam chowder. The platters are simple, the shellfish expertly cooked and the quantities huge. Each platter contains the fried shellfish; crispy hot and not a bit greasy, French fries and a good coleslaw. We leave stuffed to the proverbial gills and extremely satisfied.

The ‘Karoo Kafe’ in Provincetown is new to us this year. We were introduced to the chef/ owner, Sanette Groenewald (Yes, the same name, Grunwald in the South African Boer language), by a friend of hers. Elyssa told us about the ‘Karoo’ when I asked her about a spice that she had mentioned, Peri-Peri. Elyssa suggested that we go to the Kafe and talk with Sanette. It was an intro from a Graham Greene novel. We walked in, walked up to this woman and said, “Elyssa told us to talk to Sanette about buying the Peri-Peri”. The women looked us up and down, broke into a smile, laughed and said, “I’m Sanette. I’ve been expecting you.” Sanette is a native South African woman who has been living in the states long enough so that she’s become an American citizen. Her laugh is easy and contagious. Though we did not eat in the Kafe (scheduling with full bellies didn’t allow it) the menu is intriguing and the food that we saw coming out of the kitchen made us tear-up at that the knowledge that we had just eaten and couldn’t shovel in another fork-full. Sanette also sells the spices and sauces, the ingredients and flavors of which are based on her South African upbringing. Very, very nice flavors. We did serious damage to the budget so that we might bring these flavors home with us.

The restaurant that disappointed us is ‘Mac’s Shack’. We’d been here before and really enjoyed the food. The menu is catholic including seafood, shellfish, burgers, sushi and sushi rolls. This year the menu, and the cooking, seemed to have been ‘dumbed down’. The oysters on the half shell that I had contained a lot of shell fragments, little oyster liquor and had not been completely shucked from the shell. The clam fritters were absolutely raw inside, the sushi rolls were, for the most part, based on California rolls with a ‘squiggle’ of something on top. Bonnie’s Caesar Salad had anchovies, but no dressing. Her burger was cooked as ordered, but that’s about the best that we can say about our meal. Ah well.

Friends sometimes ask me what my favorite restaurant is. The answer is simple. There isn’t any one restaurant that’s my favorite. As I eat just about anything (no tofu or veggie-burgers thanks – eecchh!), hamburgers and hot dogs to foie gras and sweetbreads, I have several favorite restaurants. If the ingredients are good and the chef and staff love what they’re doing, it usually works, that is, you’ll get good food and enjoy yourself. Yes, many favorite restaurants.

And what did David cook while we were on vacation? Very simple dishes; French Toast made with the Portuguese Bakery sweet bread, steamers (piss clams) with hot broth and melted butter on the side (this was not served with the French Toast), fettuccini with tomatoes, shallots, garlic, olive oil, little neck clams and mussels in a red wine sauce, smoked shellfish in pasta with just a little garlic and olive oil, lobster risotto, the requisite lobsters and of course Bonnie and I canned 14 jars of rose hip jelly. A great vacation.

A Vacation Dinner - Lobster Risotto with a Salad of Boston Lettuce and Honeydew Melon Dressed with a Balsamic Reduction

2009-09-15T10:36:00.007-04:00

Childhood’s End

Elementary school, junior high school and high school came and went. While there were a lot of incidents, I don’t recall many of them as being related to food. The ‘Coffee And’ continued as did my absolute fear of the holiday hard boiled egg and faux communion wafer. I guess that experimenting with alcohol consumption and mixology might be considered a mere hint of the cooking that was to come. In these experiments I learned that you could not drink huge amounts of screwdrivers (vodka and orange juice) without getting very sick for what seemed to be a very long time, nor could you substitute, simply because they were the same color, root beer for coke, mix it with whiskey and create something that would stay in your stomach for any length of time. One of my girlfriends, Diana, gave me a chocolate bar that was flavored with a hint of oranges for a birthday present. She asked me to guess the combination and of course I did. It was a wonderful present.

All of us went to McDonald’s and got hamburgers that cost us, if I remember correctly, about fifteen cents in the sixties. Everybody sat in their cars to eat; the first McDonald’s in our area offered window service only. We would go to any number of Dairy Queen type places for milkshakes and when we were old enough to drive down to the Rhode Island beaches for the weekend we would eat potato chips all weekend because we only had enough money for gas, potato chips and beer. We were honest to goodness surfers and surfing was the only thing that really mattered. And I continued to eat without giving a thought to cooking.
Through it all Mom and Dad loved their three sons very much, worked hard to do their best for us, kept us clean, tried to teach us right from wrong, showed us some of the world outside our hometown, taught us the importance and beauty of books and writing, continued to ‘make bread’, taught us to eat in a restaurant and, yes – taught us to EAT lobster. And, now, I wanted to get out there and walk that wire without a net.

Who says that you can't mix them? Granny Smiths and Navels.

He Did Get Into RISD!

In 1968 I was free of home, away and in a college and a city which I came to love. I would eventually graduate, work as an architect and carpenter in construction sites throughout New England, meet a woman and marry her for better or worse – turned out to be the latter. But most importantly, finally, I began cooking.

I was absolutely thrilled, just couldn’t wait, to get out of my home town and go away to college. I just wanted to be away, not to have Mom and Dad over me – the same plea that a gazillion other 1960’s teens wanted. Hometown wasn’t bad but, parents were parents and I was a teenager so that’s all you need to explain the testiness between us and my desire to go. I had no thoughts of going to a school to learn how to cook, no thoughts about cooking anything. I didn’t even know that there was such an institution or career path as the Culinary Way (why weren’t guidance counselors telling me about arbitrage and other Wall Street careers in the 60’s?).

I was absolutely certain that I wanted to be an architect and, despite my high school teachers actually trying to discourage me from it, I applied to colleges with architecture programs. One of my high school teachers thought so little of my aspirations that when I asked this art teacher for some advice about some drawings that I had to do as part of the entrance exam she told me, “You should just stop wasting your time with this. You won’t be accepted”. Maybe I misheard her. Maybe she said, “You’ll shoot your eye out kid”.
Well, I was accepted, attended and actually graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) with a degree in architecture (a huge FU to the high school teachers that told me to forget architecture school). So if I’ve got a degree in architecture, why aren’t I doing that instead of writing this? Real simple answer – because sometimes people change. They change because as you travel your merry path, if you’re lucky, you come to know yourself and this world better. Maybe you find something that you didn’t even know existed. Maybe you come to want more. Maybe you come to want different. Maybe ya just gotta do something else.

I will always be grateful for the education I received at RISD (I could have gotten so much more out of it if I had really APPLIED myself) because the most important thing they taught me was to be able to tap into my creativity and use that creativity in every aspect of life. How can you do anything without creativity – especially cooking?

In the RISD of the late 60’s you could only live in the dorms during your freshman year. After that you had to get an apartment where you could, in addition to sex, drugs and rock & roll, COOK. It was great! The sun rose, skies were blue, birds sang, gentle breezes blew and I began to cook. I don’t remember what I was cooking to start, probably packaged and frozen things, steaks, hot dogs, I would not be surprised if I had used canned things – the usual college student fare. But, somewhere along the way the cooking began to evolve and take over my soul. Somewhere is that early summer walk home with Ellen, when I cooked us dinner.

Joe’s, Haven Brothers And How The Other Half Live

It’s been said by some, even my wife on occasion, that I’m impossible to live with (I won’t even begin to go into that) so pretty quickly I got my own apartment and lived alone or with a girlfriend who cared about me enough to tolerate me. No dorm life, all the better to be cooking. I thought that Providence, Rhode Island was great even in the 60’s and 70’s. Hell, I didn’t leave the city until about 1979. It had a rawness to it, a ‘real’ place that was ready to explode into something spectacular. Even then, you could feel the vibration of this huge engine that is the city growing stronger as it accelerated towards its current renaissance. And even then it had FOOD. God bless the Italians, good pizzas, Casserta’s spinach pies, scungili salad, the restaurants on Smith Hill and, not Italian at all, Haven Brothers food wagons and Joe’s Sandwich Shop on Benefit Street.
There was nothing the likes of Joe’s in my boyhood hometown. Sandwiches that had names, crowded with college kids, foods that I had never heard of before and it wasn’t run by Joe – it was run by Dewey. People eat tongue sandwiches? Not in central Connecticut. I recall Joe’s sandwiches as being phenomenal. They didn’t close until late on the weekends and it was located in the middle of the RISD environs so after a night of 1960’s debauchery, or in the middle of it, you could go to Joe’s with minimal money in you pocket and get Swiss cheese on a good hard roll with tomato and lettuce and dress it with Nance’s Mustard – chase it down with Mountain Dew. God that was a great sandwich. In my memory I remember the ingredients of those sandwiches being absolutely perfect – the Kaiser roll had taste and texture to it, it was chewy maybe with a hint of the tang of yeast, the lettuce was Iceberg (no 90’s Frisée) with crunch, moisture and a taste of greenness, the Swiss cheese nutty-sweet, not toooo soft, the tomato was ripe and tasted like a tomato – YEAR ROUND – (probably not but, that’s what I remember), and the Nance’s Mustard - I never knew about Nance’s Mustard until then; a sweet mustardy gift from the Gods. And - it was wrapped in a wax paper with a pickle, something that this lad had never seen. The Mountain Dew chaser – bubbly light, citrusy, chartreuse in color and a different flavor. The first faint beat of my gourmet heart: I found the Mountain Dew much more of a compliment to this sandwich than the too sweet Boone’s Farm Apple Wine. Ah, Boone’s Farm Apple Wine. A youth wine crafted to be swilled down in copious amounts while listening to Led Zeppelin and Santana at full volume and dancing with your girlfriend, and everyone else in the room, as if you were a demented Dervish. As with all food and meals, it wasn’t the sandwich alone that made it great – it was the context. The times, the people, you. A friend pointed out that I had forgotten to add drugs to that small list. I don’t dare try that sandwich today. Why chance to lose such a great memory?

And there were the Haven Brothers food wagons. In the center square of the city right in front of city hall, about mid evening or so, the food wagons would begin to arrive. They would not relinquish their domain until the very wee hours of the morning. We’re not talking a push cart with an umbrella over it. We’re talking wagons the size of small diners – they are small diners. I vaguely remember that they had a few seats inside, but I took the normal route and placed my order at the outside window. Sometimes I thought that I was ordering by yelling at one of the windows that was not in fact the order window – we’re not always where we think we are. You had to be a hardcore regular to rate an inside seat. It was grimly rumored that to be knighted a hardcore regular there was an initiation that involved used frying oil and the gorilla at the Roger Williams Park Zoo. The food wagons were the carnival come to town. The wagons loomed above you as they rested on what seemed like R. Crumb cartoon tires: oversized, midnight black, over shiny, with Mr. Natural truckin’ along beside you. The silvery stainless steel bodies of the wagons gleamed and blinded and pulsed in the mid-summer sun bright arc lights set up to light the area in front of the wagons, I remember the sounds of amusement ride gasoline generators, or maybe it was just the truck engines, and the crowds of people of every description, some scary as hell. The aroma of frying Italian sausage, hamburgers, hotdogs, pizza, French fries, coffee – It Was A Carnival! Some nights, a real honest to goodness freak show. In the world of Haven Brothers, it never rained, was never too cold, was never too hot and it was always arc light bright. We ate standing around these wagons, sitting on the street curbs or City Hall steps and sometimes we brought the food back to our nearby studios. The Haven Brothers should receive an honorary degree from RISD for sustaining many a student as they pulled an all-nighter to get their projects completed for the next days ‘crit’. These food wagons were so absolutely cool to this eighteen year old kid. I had never imagined that you could go to the carnival every night of the week without Mom and Dad yelling at you to behave.

I only realized how small my boyhood world was when I stepped out of it to go to RISD. I guess that there are no surprises in that. My cloistered central Connecticut schoolmates’ included no one of the Jewish persuasion. It did include one African American girl (her mother was the cleaning lady at the small private school in town), WASP’s, Irish, Italians, Scandinavians, Polish, Lithuanians, Germans, Dutch, Mongrels and I’m certain that a couple of the families were from Mars. We kids didn’t notice any of these ‘distinctions’. You were nice or a bully, you could hit a baseball or not, you would or wouldn’t tell if I snuck a kiss from you while riding in the Kindergarten school bus – it didn’t matter what your ‘ethnicity’ was (ethnicity is a horrible word, responsible for way too much hatred).

In talking with the African American woman at one of the two high school reunions that I’ve ever attended (God I hate those things) I discovered that she was now an insurance potentate working in the DC area. I was compelled to ask her how she felt growing up as the only black girl in town. Her response surprised me. She said that, ”I never felt different”. Her memories were that we had always treated her as just another friend, just another kid. No more than that and no less than that. I suspect that there were too few of us in any one ethnic category for that category to claim the scepter of ruler and lay waste to the minority, consequently we just didn’t care. Sure, there were bullies, but they came from every ethnic category.

Can you believe that this was my central Connecticut in the 50’s and 60’s? You could get more isolated, but you’d have to work at it. The fact that the world was much larger place than my home town was brought home to me with a jolt when, upon waking up one morning not long after college had started, I found one of my roommates, a guy, in bed with, another guy. I’d never seen this before. Even at Boy Scout camp. I had much to learn about the world outside my hometown. Wow! So this is how the other half lives (that’s what Dad was always saying). Hometown and boyhood were receding at warp speed.
So Haven Brothers food wagons, Casserta’s and Joe’s Sandwich Shop figured mightily in my culinary awakening. Amidst such plenty neither the body nor the mind would starve.

A note: Several of you have asked when the Dinner Diaries make their appearance. The answer; at the proper time. Hang in there.

Next Week: Plastic Rats, The Bank and Cranberry-Orange Tea Breads

2009-09-08T09:49:00.015-04:00

The stories told in ‘The Cooking and Memoirs of a Curmudgeon Chef’ are, in fact, chronological. If you haven’t read this before you’ll enjoy it more and understand it better by beginning at the first posting. As the King said to the White Rabbit in ‘Alice in Wonderland’, “Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop."

‘EATING’ The Lobster

Among the many things that my parents did for their three sons was a ritual that my father observed on his sons’ birthdays. He would take each of us, individually, on our birthday to a good restaurant. How cool was that! King of the World was how absolutely cool it was. Dad and I alone, being treated as a grownup, a real restaurant: candles on the table – lit! Cloth tablecloths and napkins, menus, a waiter, Shirley Temple drinks, Dad had something stronger and a relish tray. Oh my God the relish tray above all! As I recollect, in the 50’s and 60’s Connecticut restaurants always had these relish trays. They were a little tray, usually stainless steel, with several small sections that had canned olives, corn relish, cottage cheese, celery, maybe a dip or spread, mini breadsticks or Melba Toast in plastic wrappers. I know, today it’s odd, but to a kid such as I relish trays were just about the crème de la crème, Christmas!. It had stuff that we didn’t eat at home, you were supposed to eat it before your dinner came and you could still get dessert too!

For our birthday dinners
WE COULD ORDER ANYTHING THAT WE WANTED!
EVEN
THE LOBSTER!

That statement had to be made in big, tall bold letters. Many times I did order the lobster. Actually, I can’t remember ordering anything except the lobster. The lobster dinner came with a price, perhaps a small price or perhaps not, but most certainly with a price. A price that, though we didn’t realize it at the time, would serve my brothers and me, and our families, faithfully and commendably throughout our days on earth. The price was – ritual and form. You couldn’t just eat the lobster – you had to EAT the lobster. You could not leave the smallest bit of meat uneaten.

This of course from the man who admonished his entire family, at any dinner that we ever ate at any restaurant, “Don’t fill up on the cheap stuff”. He was absolutely convinced that if we ate too much from the Relish Tray we wouldn’t be able to absolutely finish – decimate – leave no crumb of what we ordered for our meal. If we didn’t eat everything that we had ordered then the restaurant would have won. They, the restaurant, would have sated us with the free relish tray and yet – we wouldn’t have finished the food that we actually ordered and had to pay for. The restaurant would get this food back, uneaten, and God knows how, but they would make money on it. Didn’t this guy ever hear of a doggy bag? In Dad’s later years the battle cry changed from, “Don’t fill up on the cheap stuff” to, “I could make a meal out of bread”.

The Grunwalds dressed up to go somewhere in the late 1950’s

The Grunwalds EATING of the lobster was, as Bonnie has likened it, similar to the scene in the movie ‘Splash’ where Tom Hanks has taken Daryl Hannah to a beautiful restaurant; she orders lobster and absolutely annihilates it – eats the whole damn thing: meat and shell! The Grunwald way of eating lobster isn’t quite that extreme – but it’s close. Of course the main pieces of meat in the claws and tail are easy – for amateurs. BUT, how about getting those pieces of meat that are located in the fins of the tail – HOW ABOUT THOSE PILGRIM!
How about the meat in all the legs! Put those legs in your mouth, crack ‘em and suck that meat out! Forget the claw knuckles and you will be damned by Poseidon. Don’t Miss Them! – Miss What? – The HUGE pieces of meat in the base of the legs and claws where they go into the body! Crack that body shell in half and get the meat on the sides of the body.
And by God you just better attend to the coral (red stuff) and the tamali – I don’t care if the tamali is greenish, somewhat gelatinous, and has supposedly soaked up every bit of toxin that the lobster has ever ingested – it tastes great!

All my brothers and I continue to have a lifelong love affair with eating lobster the way Dad taught us. We are so absolutely certain that this is the way to EAT lobster that our revolutionary zeal has made it easy to enlist our wives and families in this fraternity. This is not to say that the path to lobster eating enlightenment has been easy. The Grunwald method of eating the lobster was a lot for a young kid to absorb. There were moments at the lobster table when we faltered in our commitment and resented not be able to take the easy path of just the tail and claw meat. However, we eventually understood that the truism of ‘anything worth doing is worth doing well’ could be applied to every aspect of our lives. For this, if nothing else, I owe Dad eternal thanks and love.

Our commitment goes deep and we take no prisoners. On one of my brothers’ wedding anniversaries he cooked lobster for himself and his wife. While they were eating the lobster my sister in law sliced her hand open while cracking a claw open (an accepted hazard in the course of EATING a lobster). The cut was deep enough that they had to go to the hospital to get her stitched up and ‘pain-killered’. When they returned home the wife went to bed, basically passing out from the drugs, whereupon my brother went back to the table and finished his lobster – and hers. Well what was he supposed to do?

You really do have to cook the lobster yourself. It’s so easy to steam or boil it that you should never entrust this task to some eyebrow pierced and tattooed 16 year old in your local food store who will boil your expensive lobster to the point where it has acquired the chewy-ness of a car tire. And for those PETA folks out there that are reading this and ignoring the realities of evolution and the food chain I want you to know this. Know that before I put the lobster into the pot of boiling water or plunge that knife into its back I give thanks and I give that crustacean a chance to live. The lobster and I actually have a conversation, though to date it is one-sided. I say, “hey little lobster. If you can say one or two words of English I will let you live in splendor for the rest of your natural days.” So far, the lobster always says – nothing. I give him a minute or so to respond and then – the end. I will alert everyone when the first lobster speaks to me.

There’s an absolutely wonderful seafood market on the Cape – Hatch’s. Just one of the things that make this emporium so wonderful is that they give away free lobster bodies! The first time that I saw the small sign that they had posted saying, “Free Lobster Bodies” I nearly fainted from the huge number of happy thoughts that were running through my head. The cooked bodies are the unappreciated leftovers from the lobsters that the store cooks up for undeserving amateurs who just dine on the claws and tails. Not only is there a good amount of meat in these bodies, they also form the base for wonderful broths and stocks.

I went in one day and there were several people in the store. When my turn came to be waited I noticed that THE sign was posted and when it came my turn to order I asked the counter guy to fill a bag for me. I have little hesitation in being a pig about this, few people avail themselves of this delight. Maybe, if I could get cheap lobster on a regular basis I’d approach this differently. Maybe. As my bag was being filled with the bounty of other folk’s laziness a women standing by my side waiting to order some fish looked at the lobster bodies being piled in the bag, turned to me, smiling, and asked, “What will you use them for? An art project, or decoration?” I smiled back and said, “Why no ma’am, I’ll be eating them”. You never have a camera with you for that Pulitzer winning photo. Her look said that her stomach had been turned inside out and the fact that you could see the blood draining from her face summed it up - Amateur. Dad would not have approved of her inability to EAT the lobster – and I certainly agree with his assessment.

The Frontiersman And Patricia Murphy’s

Let’s Let loose the Hounds of Hell right here. Virtually all young children should be banished from the better restaurants until they reach the age of eighteen. Rather than defining what a better restaurant is, let’s just say that children younger than eighteen years of age should be confined to the likes of fast food restaurants, national chain restaurants or the dining room of any third rate, or lesser, national hotel/motel chain. While there are children capable of acquitting themselves appropriately in an upscale setting the majority cannot. I was one of those golden children, as was my cousin, Claudia, who joined me at our parents’ wedding anniversary dinners at Avon Old Farms was one and later in my story I’ll introduce you to the third golden child. I wrote that my parents took my brothers and me out to good restaurants so you may think that I’m contradicting myself. Understand that my brothers and I were golden children because we knew that if we were not we’d be dealing with Dad’s belt. I’ve always felt that a little fear is a good thing.

I know, you’re reading this page and screaming, “My child’s perfect you asshole!” The truth is that your child is not perfect. Truth be told you love your child and maybe, just maybe, the grandparents love your child. No one else cares the slightest about them. Your child is loud, runs around the restaurant like a Chihuahua on uppers, screams loudly and sharply enough to split eardrums, throws food and silverware to the floor, and is a mind-boggling irritating pain in the ass to someone who’s gone to a good restaurant to be cosseted in the lap of culinary luxury.
You have absolutely no idea as to how irritating your child is when they’re misbehaving and in need of a ‘time out’. I was out to dinner with a friend of mine who has children. There was a child in the banquette next to ours screaming, putting their head over the top of the partition to look at us and throwing food. I said to my friend, “We have to get our seat moved because in another minute I’m going to injure the child and the parents”. He looked at me and said, “What’s the problem?” Wild eyed I replied, “Can’t you hear that screaming kid. I’m not going to eat dinner with that crap going on!” His response was classic, “Gee, you know I didn’t even notice it. When you have kids you pretty much learn to ignore it.” With those words I entirely understood the parents’ situation – you’re deaf and blind.

Central Connecticut Hoodlums – I knew these kids and in 1957
none of them should have been granted entrance to a good restaurant

If you’ve calmed down enough to appreciate what I’ve told you should be asking yourself, “How will they ever learn to behave in a good restaurant if I never take them to one?” Try eating dinner at the table as a family, with something that you actually cooked rather than poured from a box or gotten from takeout. Have the kids’ help you make dinner, at least have them set the table if not cook (maybe they’ll remember which fork to use when – a skill that I’m still working on), have the family sit together and talk politely for the entire meal and cleanup together. Teach them the wonder and magic of food and cooking. It doesn’t have to be expensive and it doesn’t have to take long. Buy ground beef (not the pre-made patties), good hamburger buns, make some of Dave’s Roast Potatoes – or even potato chips and make a green salad. And when I say make the salad, I mean make the salad. Do you know how long those ‘pre-made salad mixes’ have been sitting around and what chemicals they’ve been dosed with to keep the lettuce green? Make meatballs instead of hamburgers, the recipe is only a little bit more work. Make a marinara sauce; one half hour tops. Cook up some pasta. There, in less than 30 minutes you’ve made pasta with meatballs in marinara sauce.

I’m convinced that soccer is a communist plot intended to destroy the American family. You don’t need to go to practice and games 24/7. What do you think is better for your kids’ upbringing? Being together as a family or being shuttled to an endless round of soccer games? Was our family together most of the time? Yes we were. What did being together do for us? I’m not sure; I just know that it was right. Was it perfect all the time? Of course not, silly. But the few perfect times do stick with you.

I wrote that I was one of the golden children who consistently behaved perfectly in all restaurant settings – I lied. I recall an incident where Dad had taken us to see a Yankee’s game in New York sometime in the late 1950’s. After the game we went to ‘Patricia Murphy’s’ for dinner. In my preadolescent memories, I think that I was somewhere around eight or nine years old, maybe 10, I recall ‘Patricia Murphy’s’ as a pretty damn opulent restaurant with incredible popovers. A restaurant that may have been out of my league except for the fact that it was here on this day, after seeing Mickey Mantle play baseball in Yankee Stadium, that I ordered for the first time – duck a` l’orange. Mickey Mantle and duck a` l’orange as equals? Absolutely. Mickey Mantle, a boyhood hero of mine to this day and I loved the duck, crispy sweet and tangy, rich tasting and served in a beautiful setting.

And then the demons cast their spell on me and I became just any other pain in the ass child in a restaurant. It being the 1950’s I recall that I was dressed in some sort of cowboy outfit. If you’re puzzled by that, than you don’t know the 50’s. In those days every boy was dressed in a cowboy outfit or a Superman cape. Not only was I wearing a cowboy hat, or a Davy Crockett coonskin hat (actually, I believe that the coonskin hat was made of vinyl and squirrel fur), but I was also wearing a holster with two cap pistols in it. Being the 1950’s you could get away with parading around with a holster with guns in it. Even with the guns and holster this outfit is fashionable today in certain neighborhoods of New York City, Dallas, Houston or Provincetown.
We were seated at the tables and well into our dining when the incident occurred. As a child I never relinquished my guns to the maitre’d, one never knows when one will need to protect kith and kin. Consequently I had stuffed my Husky Boy Bubble Butt, holster and cap pistols into a very elegant chair not large enough to accommodate such large example of youthful 1950’s virility. And then – one of the cap pistols fell from the holster to the hard marble floor causing it to fire (hair trigger you know) and letting loose a humongous bang that echoed through the restaurant for 20 minutes. The fragrance of cordite from the exploded caps did not ‘work well’ with the duck. I was surprised as anyone else in that room and my first thought was that I hoped I hadn’t damaged my pistol, my parents were so surprised that, at least initially, they hadn’t even thought to swat me, the other diners were surprised, but not to the point where any of them dove to the floor. That is to say that the other diners did not seem unduly disturbed with one exception. The exception being an older woman (to my eight or nine year old eyes she looked ancient, probably somewhere around thirty years old). This old lady was sitting at the table next to ours, her seat just to the side of mine. I recall the scene visually and as a series of loud noises. When the cap pistol fired (the first loud noise) I heard her shriek (the second loud noise) and saw her grab her chest as if she was having a heart attack, she jumped up knocking her chair over (the third loud noise), knocked her meal to the floor (the fourth loud noise) and angrily confronted my father about the hoodlum that he was raising (the fifth and possibly loudest noise). Boy did she confront him. I remember that I was absolutely astonished that a woman would scream at my Dad like that. I honestly don’t recall a punishment for this, but the worst thing is that I was too young to truly appreciate the humor of the situation.

NO CHILDREN IN GOOD RESTAURANTS

Christmas 1952 – The cowboy outfit preceded the Davy Crockett
Outfit by several years. However, the inclination towards firearms is obviously present.

Next Week: Childhood’s End, He Did Get Into RISD and Joe’s, Haven Bros. and How The Other Half Live

2009-09-01T09:30:00.011-04:00

The Parents Make Bread

My parents made bread from scratch. It was one of the holiday rituals, for both Christmas and Easter. Though not done consciously, they have passed the tradition to me. I love making bread. I’ve been making it since college days where I would give fresh, hot loaves away to friends. I remember one of the financially impoverished moments during college found me selling hot, buttered slices of freshly made bread to the students for one dollar a slice. Any recipe secrets? Well, not secrets since I’ll tell you, let’s just say that it’s what I do: Make a sponge as directed in ‘The Tassajara Bread Book’, before the loaves go into the oven and if I want a glaze I’ll brush the tops with a mixture of beaten egg and a little water and make a shallow slit in the top, use a baking stone rather than a bread pan if you’re not fussy about the shape of the loaf, when the breads go in the oven throw some ice cubes on the oven floor to create steam. For me this all works.

Every aspect of bread making and fresh bread screams sensuality. If the sex police ever made a loaf of bread they would ban anyone from making bread by hand ever again. The wonderful way that the gooey sponge transmutes to a wonderful shining silk as more flour is incorporated, this silken feeling of dough beneath your massaging hands, the elasticity of the dough, the push and pull of your hands and arms and upper body as you knead this dough, the warmth of the oven, the resting between risings, the fact that this can’t be rushed if you want it done well; wait for it, wait for it. The aromas of the yeasty bread and finally the finished bread. This finished bread; aromatic like nothing else, hot, the crust hiding the chewy interior. You and your lover should slather butter on a slice from a loaf just taken from the oven, share bites, gently, slowly, kiss that drop of butter that’s at the corner of your partner’s mouth and see where this all goes. Primal babe, very primal. On this earth it’s as good as it gets.

As I grow older some of the childhood memories that I have of Mom, Dad and Food are beginning to take on a strange and frightening aspect. My childhood eyes would widen in horror if I knew then what I think that I know now about certain ‘rituals’ that Mom and Dad kept. It starts, as all good horror stories do, so innocently.
The ritual began on Holiday eve. Oddly, I remember this being coupled with my Mom scrubbing the kitchen floor clean. All of this done the night before family was coming to visit. In making the bread Mom’s responsibility was to gather all the ingredients and make sure that they were added in the correct order. Dad’s responsibility was to knead the dough. OK, this doesn’t sound strange or frightening up to this point, but I have acquired a credible knowledge of bread making and looking back I perceive that the weirdness of their ritual begins with their approach to kneading the dough. It was Dad’s job to knead the bread because, according to my parents, this took several hours, if not all night, and required the body strength of Hercules! I’m not Hercules and I make damn good bread. Bonnie’s not Hercules and she makes damn good bread too. My Dad damn well wasn’t Hercules. What’s wrong with this picture? You do not knead it for several hours at a time – yet my folks said that you did. Several kneadings sure, but hours and hours? No way.

Mom and Dad approached the bread making evening with something of a grim attitude and for some reason they started later in the evening and continued into the wee hours of the morning. I remember that as child, an innocent, I would eventually drift to sleep to the grunts and groans of my Dads’ endeavors with the bread, kneading the dough. HEY, WAIT A MINUTE HERE! Maybe that “hours of kneading” line was bullshit, a red herring, a ruse. Maybe my Mom and Dad were actually………… Oh!, Oh! Please God tell me that my imaginings are not true. Say that the ‘ritual’ of cleaning the floors and making bread was exactly that, nothing more, nothing less. The late hour, the children asleep in their beds, the freshly cleaned kitchen floor, my Mom so breathily silent, my Dad grunting and groaning for what seemed to be hours as he kneaded the dough. I beseech you to assure me that as a young child I did not drift off to sounds of my Dad and my Mom – “making bread”.

A Classic Summer Salad – Jersey Tomatoes, Basil and Shavings of Parmesan Reggiano. Dressed with Olive Oil, Red Wine Vinegar, Salt and Black Pepper

Polio, Strawberry Shortcake And Uneaten Green Peas

In truth, the Grunwald family dinners were usually pretty uneventful. Watery tomato sauce on the walls was not an everyday occurrence. But, there is that one dinner in particular that I will never forget. One of my brothers contracted Polio in the early 1950’s. Very, very scary stuff back then. We wondered if he was going to die or be left paralyzed. Scary enough that the kids in the neighborhood kept their distance from me that summer. Nobody was sure how you caught the disease. The local newspaper printed a report of my brother’s illness without giving our family name. I wasn’t allowed to see him in the hospital; he was in an isolation ward. Thankfully, it did not leave my brother with any permanent damage, but I will always remember those frightening days, talk of the possibility of my brother being in an iron lung, crying parents, time in the hospital and a lot of painful rehab for him later. All very tough on a kid that was 4 or 5 years old.
School had finished and summer vacation had begun. He didn’t feel well during that particular early summer day, pretty lethargic and feverish, but in the late afternoon it took only an hour or two to go from not feeling well to the panicked frightening call to the doctor, the doctor coming to the house and the trip to the hospital. I remember that, suddenly, we all realized that he was very ill just as we were about to eat desert after dinner, all of us sitting around the small kitchen table, humid and still light outside. What I consider very weird is that I will always remember what we were having, what we were supposed to have, for dessert – strawberry shortcake. Didn’t Proust have something to say along these lines? Do I have any neuroses about cooking, serving or eating strawberry shortcake these days? – No. But, I will always remember. I find it perfectly understandable, but strange none the less, how certain aspects of a moment will stick in your head and forever bring you back to that incident. Again; the context of the moment. Actions and components forever preserved in a singular memory simply because they were all present when that moment occurred in time – Polio and Strawberry Shortcake.

On a lighter note, in regards to the shortcake, I alternate between the ‘biscuit’ and the ‘sponge cake’ styles for the recipe and I always add a little Cointreau or Triple Sec (depending on what I can afford) and a bit of sugar to the strawberries as they are macerating. Never, never, never, use anything but real whipped cream. You will never get into heaven if you use any ‘non-dairy products’. Those fake whipped cream people belong right up there with the Spam people. It just ain’t that hard to make whip cream! Simply, whip the cream! Whip It, Whip It Good! Of course I add a little sugar and a dash of vanilla. There is an exception to the non-dairy rule – ‘Reddi Whip’ sprayed directly from the can to your mouth. Manners dictate that you cannot let the spout come in contact with your mouth. There are several other things that one can use ‘Reddi Whip’ for – I’ll just leave it at that.

In addition to watery tomato sauce and polio at our dinner table we had fun too. At one dinner the middle brother decided that he would refuse to eat his peas. From what friends with children have told me I am given to understand that the whole ‘children/refusal to eat thing’ is not uncommon. However, when you’re a kid, the scene unfolding before you seems scary, fraught with peril and certainly not everyday.

It began so easily. My brother toying with the peas, but not actually eating any and the rest of us have finished dinner. Dad: “you’re not leaving this table until you eat all of your peas!” Brother: “I’m not eating them!” And so battle was joined. The four of us, the youngest brother not having made his appearance yet, sat at that table, not eating, not moving, waiting for the next salvo to be unleashed. Waiting to see what strategies were employed and who would emerge triumphant – My brother or Dad. What seemed like hours passed. At this point I wouldn’t have touched, let alone eaten, these peas if they were the last food on earth. They were canned peas and in the passing hours they had taken on a gray color and begun to shrivel, looking like a virus molecule viewed through an electron microscope at a magnification of 5000x. After several go rounds of eat or else/I’m not eating my Dad played what he thought to be the winning hand – “If you don’t eat those peas RIGHT NOW you’re going to the orphanage for the rest of your life”. Holy Shit! He had never used this threat before! The usual threat was along the lines of, “I’m going to get my belt and spank you until you can’t sit down”. And my brother STILL refused to eat the peas. At this point, I suspect that it was a matter of pride for both parties. My butt is numb from sitting so long and I’m probably missing ‘The Wonderful World of Disney’, but I wouldn’t dare leave.

This being the same brother who, a year or two later, when what was left of my youngest brother’s umbilical cord dried up, fell to the floor, and for some absolutely unfathomable reason was put on the kitchen counter by our mother - ATE IT – mistaking it for what he said was a raisin.

This umbilical raisin eating brother was unmoved by the threat of merely a possible call to the orphanage. Then, Dad doubled or nothing. He went to the phone, dialed and said into the handset, “I have a boy here that I want you to come and pick up and put into your orphanage for the rest of his life”. My brother sat in his chair stone faced. I on the other hand was freaking out. Jesus, they’re going to take my brother away; I don’t like him, but I sure as shit don’t want him in an orphanage for the rest of his life! I screamed, “PLEASE, PLEASE, EAT THE PEAS – I’LL GIVE YOU MY BICYCLE!!!!” What the hell had I just said - my bicycle!!!!??? He still wouldn’t eat the peas!!!! “I’LL GIVE YOU MY NEW BASEBALL GLOVE TOO!!!!” I said that!!!???? Why the hell were these pleas coming from my mouth? Why did I care? If they took him away I’d get our bedroom to myself.
It was over more quickly than it started when my mother said, “Oh Chester!!! If he doesn’t want to eat his peas, then he doesn’t have to”.

You got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ’em, and my brother knew.

One of Mom’s Recipes This is my Mom’s recipe for Jewish Coffee Cake. I believe that the name derives from the fact that the recipe incorporates sour cream. I mean, if it has sour cream in it, it has to be Jewish – right? There’s a weird ethnic thing that, growing up in a family where my grandparents weren’t born in this country, I came to realize pretty early on. It’s the fact that, out of ignorance, people will generalize and fabricate truths about other ethnic groups. No surprise there right? Since time began it’s been the case. It even manifests itself in food. Hence, if the recipe’s got sour cream it must be Jewish. Hell, everybody generalizes, regardless of ethnicity, usually not for the best. So you get older and come to know the world beyond yours and you simply deal with this and you understand that sometimes the generalization is not intended to harm. So, let’s not get too PC – sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, nothing more, nothing less.
This dessert, Jewish Coffee Cake, is one the iconic ‘Ands’ of ‘Coffee And’. What, you’ve never heard that phrase? I’ve never heard that phrase used anywhere in the United States except in the central Connecticut of my boyhood. I have always asked people that I meet, from across the country, if they ever heard the phrase, ‘Coffee And’.
To date, no one has so I have to presume that it’s a central Connecticut, 1950’s, Polish, thing. How’s that for a generalization? It is defined as joining with friends to have coffee and a dessert. Mom would say to us, “After church we’re going to Uncle Dick and Aunt Terri’s to have Coffee And”. The ‘Coffee’ was immutable. No, tea, no juices, no alcohol. Simply coffee with cream and sugar if you liked. The ‘And’ was never defined, elaborated on, specified or divulged to the guests prior to its being served. It could be anything from doughnuts to cookies to Jewish Coffee Cake. On some occasions, if the time of the gathering was close to meal time or if the ‘Coffee And’ host wanted to show off, the ‘And’ became a full blown meal with ham, kielbasa, beets, bread, everything. However, the etiquette of ‘Coffee And’ was usually maintained. Outrageous ‘Ands’, while not to be avoided, were not considered true ‘Coffee And’.
My mother has a singular trait that is marveled at by all family members at the ‘Coffee And’s’. She can make a single cup of coffee last forever. Lots of cream and sugar it will take her three to four hours to finish that cup of coffee – if she finishes it at all. Does she want some warm coffee added, maybe just a little. Does she want a fresh cup, no. Also, she never takes notice of whether or not the cup is level, whether or not the coffee was in danger of spilling over the rim. The entire family will, out of the corner of their eyes, watch the angle of the cup. The understated inhalation of the room full of people signaled the closing proximity of the remaining coffee in the cup to the rim. My mother’s hand will move the slightest bit, drawing the coffee edge a miniscule dimension back from a disastrous spill and the entire room of people will exhale. This is repeated many times. The anticipation of disaster finally wearing her audience out. She is a master entertainer. For Mom the ‘And’s’ were a matter altogether different from the coffee – keep ’em coming. My mother survives, basically, on a diet of sweets and that single cup of coffee.
Mom was wonderful enough to give me the old aluminum tube pan that she baked her Jewish Coffee Cake in. The pan, and the recipe are treasured and I continue to use them – it’s a very good recipe – the perfect ‘And’.

The recipe reproduction is tough to read. So, if you care to try it here it is.

CAKE

1/4 pound butter (no oleo!) 2 cups flour

1 teaspoon baking powder 1/4 teaspoon salt

1 cup sour cream 1 cup white sugar

2 eggs 1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon almond extract

TOPPING

1/4 cup sugar 1 teaspoon cinamon 1/2 cup chopped walnuts

- Cream butter and sugar. Add the eggs to the mixture.

- Sift flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt.

- Add the flour mixture alternately with the sour cream to the butter/sugar/egg mix.

- Add almond extract.

- In a separate bowl mix the topping ingredients (I've alway increased the quantity of ingredients).

- Pour 1/2 of the cake batter into a greased tube pan (this is what you buy Crisco for).

- Sprinkle half of the topping over it.

- Add the remaining batter to the tube pan.

- Sprinkle the remaining topping over the batter and swirl batter with a knife to barely distribute the topping through the cake.

- Bake at 350 degrees for 45 minutes to one hour - until a cake tester comes out clean.

- Make the coffee and invite the family and freinds for Coffee And.

Next Week: ‘EATING’ The Lobster and The Frontiersman and Patricia Murphy’s

Watery Tomato Sauce, Inedible Soup and the Faux Communion Wafer

2009-08-24T22:07:00.023-04:00

Watery Tomato Sauce And Inedible Soup

My childhood and food wasn’t all rainbows and four star restaurants – like all of yours have been. My Dad had this thing about watery tomato sauce (well, I can understand that). Thinking back, my Dad had a thing about many things. I believe that he was uncertain of himself to some degree and, consequently, tried to govern the household through bluster and yelling. Not all the time, but maybe more than I felt necessary. I’m still trying to understand my Dad. Anyway, back to the watery tomato sauce! Dad’s need to hide his insecurities took the form of an out of proportion reaction to anything that might displease him. I remember one, actually more than one, family dinner where he yelled at my mother because the tomato sauce was watery and threw his plate full of spaghetti and watery tomato sauce at the wall. Watery tomato sauce is one thing, throwing it at the wall is altogether another. See, when a family eats together you make memories, and psychiatrists bills, which last a lifetime. If you’re a father – DON’T EVER DO THAT! It scares the shit out of a kid and as written here, that child will always remember it. In those memories you will be a bit diminished and a bit of our love for you will be lost by such actions. I vaguely remember that he grilled, but even those memories are very, very faint. He was a salesman and because of his job, and the fact that he loved eating, he ate in restaurants a lot and he made a point of taking our family to restaurants more often than other families may have gone.

The fact that Dad ate a lot in restaurants is possibly, along with the family being together for meals, another clue as to my obsession, my attitude and my approach to cooking. He was perhaps, more obsessive than passionate about his food, especially when it came to dining out. Perhaps I did pick up this passion - or the obsession. Perhaps I’m not entirely clear where the line is drawn between the two.

Dad took his family out to eat at restaurants where we found cloth tablecloths, multi-piece place settings and candles as compared to a slice of pizza on a paper plate. We learned table manners, the fact that there were several courses, how to order, we dressed up in sport coats and sometimes ties, I probably learned which fork to use when (though I can’t remember that to this day and Bonnie continues to make fun of me for it). My parents and one of my mother’s sisters were married in different years, but within days of one another. I remember the absolute HONOR AND THRILL that my cousin Claudia and I felt when we, being the eldest children; were invited to join them at their wedding anniversary dinners at the Avon Old Farms restaurant (looking at their website it is not as I remember it). With these restaurant meals I learned that there was a world of food out there that I had could never have dreamt of. It being the 1950’s and 60’s in central Connecticut it was a relatively small world of food, but certainly larger than I would have ever known if Dad hadn’t taken us out. Not to say that we didn’t go to pizza joints and McDonald’s too, not to say that all of Dad’s instruction regarding restaurant behavior could be considered normal and certainly not to say that there have been some pretty interesting occurrences that the Grunwald family experienced in restaurants.

Dad’s responsibilities to the family excluded virtually all domestic tasks (Hey! It was the 50’s!) with the exception of mowing the lawn and eventually mom ended up with that chore too. However, I have a single, emblazoned on my psyche forever, memory of Dad ‘cooking’, doing something with Campbell’s Condensed Soup. Mom was out Christmas shopping. I vividly remember my brother and me in the late December afternoon darkness laying on the linoleum floor of a multi-family house that my Dad’s parents owned, sharing it with Mom and Dad (much to my Mom’s joy) and looking through the Christmas toy catalogs that came in the mail. What could possibly be more wonderful to a kid at Christmas time than a toy catalog?

Dinner time. Oh my God, Mom’s not home and we have to eat. She’s not Home! We’ll never eat!! Not to worry, Dad had made us soup for dinner. In making this soup, which required only the addition of water or milk and heat, he had done something that made it absolutely inedible. Beyond the grave foul. To this day I can’t imagine how he took something so very simple and turned it into a disaster. My brother and I tasted one small spoonful each and refused to eat any more. The bluster and yelling of those insecure in the command position, “You two just eat that soup! There’s nothing wrong with it and that’s all that you’re getting for dinner!” I think that I was about four years old, my brother two years younger – and, at that moment in time we were Motherless, certain that we would never see our mother again and that we would have to eat dishes as foul as this soup until were old men. So, we started crying. Not loud and bawling, simply the low mewling whimpers of motherless innocents condemned to slaughter. “Eat that soup now!!!” Dad was not at all pleased, orders were not being followed. This was just before Christmas. Can you imagine how bad this soup tasted that we refused to eat it, even though the probability of Dad’s reporting this uprising to Santa would result in our finding no presents for us under the Christmas tree? The Christmas Angel arrived in the guise of my mother. All was set right with the world, edible food was brought forth and served and presents were found under the tree on Christmas morning. Maybe Dad asked Santa to taste his soup.

One of Mom’s Recipes
No, not the chopped ham and pickle recipe – I’ll keep working on that. This is my mom’s recipe for Angel Wings (in Polish, Chrosciki). It’s a nice little bit of light, thin and flakey dough, fried and dusted with confectioners sugar. Very nice.
I suspect that you can apply this recipe’s origin to all of the eastern European countries and beyond. Locales get so territorial about recipes, but when you dig around you find that very few places exclusively developed a particular dish. Regional differences- absolutely. But as for the origination point I’ll just keep wondering.
Mom probably sent this to me while I was in college, sometime in the late 60’s or early 70’s. She knew that I had begun to love cooking and she was pleased. Mom did well with this dish. Of course, as she got older, they were store bought and certainly not as good. I tend to associate these with Christmas and Easter – Holy Days – Angel’s Wings – makes sense to me. For all of you out there that have that proverbial drawer full of Grandma’s recipes don’t you ever throw them away. You have to pass them down.
I don’t believe that Mom knew where cooking for someone could lead. I take that back, she probably did as the fact is as old as time itself. Was she encouraging me?

Easter’s Faux Communion Wafer And Hard Boiled Eggs

My obsession or, my passion regarding food and cooking did not come from Mom or Dad’s parents. Hell, some of these folks had died long before I was even born. However, there was my Dad’s mother. Ah, yes, the grandmother who seldom, if ever, raised her voice to her grandchildren in anger or, for that matter, took any interest in the lives of her grandchildren. Oh, she was there for our First Holy Communion, our Confirmation and our High School graduations, but beyond physically being there she expressed virtually no interest in us. To this day I remember that what she also had no interest in cooking.

I’m certain that my Dad’s ‘love’ of cooking, altogether different from eating, was instilled by his mother’s attitude towards it. I, to this day, want the ‘television portrait’ of a grandmother. We’ve all seen the television commercials, and I know that all of you out there except me actually have grandmothers cooking wonderful dinners, baking pies, cakes and cookies, teaching the grandchildren how to cook, passing on the age old family recipes. All the while grandmother laughing, smiling, beaming a wonderful smile at her grandchildren and the sun shining through spotless/streakless windows while bluebirds trill the theme from ‘Snow White’. It’s a wonderful picture, and I know that every one of those children in the commercial, and in real life, will grow up with a love of cooking - maybe a serial murderer too, but with a love of cooking. My grandmother, on the other hand, didn’t come anywhere close to that commercial. I never saw her cook anything - maybe hardboiled eggs (not deviled eggs, just plain old hard boiled in the shell) during the Easter holidays - but those could have been done by someone else.

OK, those memories were supposed to have been buried very deeply in an unmarked grave, yet here they are, back to haunt me – The Communion Wafer and The Easter Hard Boiled Eggs At The Grandparents. At Easter time all of the aunts, uncles and grandchildren would gather at my paternal grandparents’ house to celebrate the holiday. Being ethnic, immigrants and Polish Roman Catholic, there was some kind of symbolic gesture, still unknown to me, that was manifested by eating a ‘faux’ communion wafer and a peeled, hardboiled egg.

The thought of having to deal with the wafer left me in a cold sweat. We gathered together and my grandfather said a prayer, we said Amen and he came to each of us breaking off an index card sized portion of this wafer and placing it on our extended tongue. It had to have been a faux wafer, couldn’t have been the real deal because a Priest wasn’t holding it. In the 1950’s it had been drilled into us, actually beaten into us in some cases, in our religious classes that the ‘Body of Christ’ (I am not making this up) could only be handled by the Priests. And when it was placed upon your tongue and your tongue drawn back into your mouth, you could not, under any circumstances, chew this wafer. You had to let it sit on your tongue until it dissolved. The nuns had made it absolutely, and in many instances painfully, clear to us that to chew this wafer was to disrespect God and invite the eternal fires of Hell upon our souls. The problem was that when this wafer was placed upon your tongue it immediately sucked every single last drop of moisture from your mouth. I’m certain that it had plans on desiccating your entire body, but it began its dastardly work in your mouth. I suspect that the ancient Egyptians used communion wafers in their mummification practices. As this wafer adhered itself to the surface of your tongue and upper palate you found yourself unable to breath, you could not swallow, your airway began to close, your vision was tunneling and there was a ringing in your ears – you knew that death was reaching out his bony hand to grasp you and take you. You had a choice. You could chew this wafer and death would withdraw, for the moment, to be replaced at a later date with the eternal fires of hell - or you could let the wafer complete its nasty work, die and immediately enter Heaven. Every kid that I knew chose to chew and postpone the inevitable. And that was exactly what I did; surreptitiously, gumming it, moving my jaw in tiny increments until I had broken its grip and was able to breath again.

As bad as the wafer was, for me, the hardboiled egg was much, much worse. The battle with the wafer left me exhausted, covered in the sweat of battle and ready to leave the field. And yet the battle was only half played out. The hardboiled egg slowly rose on the horizon, soon dominating what had been my view of earth and sky, eliminating any hope of escape, replacing my exhaustion from the Wafer War with fear of that battle soon to come. All the Easter revelers were expected to say a prayer in unison and at the end of that prayer to eat a portion of a hardboiled egg. As the end of the prayer approached the monster fear took me: I broke into a sweat, nearly peed in my pants, was trembling, and was ready to jump out a window.
For, as a kid, I could not take a bite of this egg without gagging as if I were about to die (maybe this speaks of the relationship that I perceive religion and I to have). Gagging with a force that should have given me immediate esophageal bleeding, gagging to the point where tears are streaming from my eyes and I’m rolling on the floor unable to breath. The only thought in my mind was that this hardboiled egg sitting in my mouth, clogging my throat and scouring my nostrils with its scent had the foulest flavor I could ever have imagined. The colors and textures played their parts too. The rubbery, stained, dirty looking white and the powdery grey-green-looks like death of the yolk. How did they get the eggs to look this ugly? My hardboiled eggs don’t look like this. I knew full well that if I were to attempt to swallow this I would throw it back up. And yet, that’s what my parents are demanding that I do – swallow it! My mother saying, “Please Honey. Just try to eat a little of it”. Eat a little????? It was in my mouth and throat and God help me my stomach and I was near death. How could she hate me this much? How could I eat the potato salad with these eggs and love it? What had I done to offend her to this degree? Meanwhile all the relatives are eyeing - not me - but my parents, wondering where they went wrong raising a Polish lad that couldn’t eat hardboiled egg that manifested who knows what. After much gagging and heaving on my part I managed to palm the slimy remnants and close my hand around them (as gross as that may seem it’s not as gross as swallowing this mess), moving towards the bathroom as quickly as possible, but no so fast as to attract attention. With the bathroom door closed I furiously washed my hands and mouth. Returning to the family group my thoughts weren’t of Easter, redemption and rebirth; but only the fact that I wouldn’t have to go through this again for another year.

So, that’s what grandma cooked, maybe – hardboiled Easter eggs. Maybe. She had other culinary talents though. Whenever her grandchildren were at her home we were offered – consistently – are you ready? Flat, room temperature ginger ale and some absolutely nondescript, stale, store bought cookie. A cookie so dry that it crumbled like Dust Bowl Dirt, if you had the nerve to bite into it. Every single time that we visited her. Not much of a culinary legacy Grammy. Where’s June Cleaver or Fannie Farmer when you need them?

Next Week: The Parents Make Bread and Polio, Strawberry Shortcake and Uneaten Green Peas

A Brief Bio, A Great Mom and Dad and Jean's Potato Salad

2009-08-18T12:54:00.000-04:00

A Brief Bio and A Great Mom and Dad

Very simply, my life’s journey began in central Connecticut in 1950. A baby boomer with, eventually, two brothers and parents who loved us very much and fed us three meals a day all the days that we lived together. Dad taught us to ride bicycles and play baseball and football, Dad and Mom took us car camping throughout New England and taught their three sons to behave well enough to eat in restaurants without causing a scene – most of the time. The life that I was living was, as far as I knew then, the same life that all of us kids were living at that time; school, church, cap guns, marbles, baseball cards, sneakers, skinned knees and cut fingers, “please don’t tell Dad”, flavor straws, every other week I dropped and broke that damned fragile glass lined thermos bottle that was in our metal ‘Davy Crockett’ lunch boxes, orangeade for special parties at school, “I just bought those pants for you and ALREADY you tore a hole in the knee!?!?!?!?”. We all came to know that it wasn’t the same for all of us and, yes, there were dark days too. But throughout it all I didn’t have a thought in the world about cooking – though I did love to eat. As a child I kept hoping that my few extra pounds and bubble butt that had my mother searching through the pants racks in the Husky Boy Clothing Section of Raphael’s Department Store in New Britain was caused by a glandular condition and would go away. I still have that glandular condition, and I’m large boned.

What was it in my upbringing that started the cooking thing? I honestly don’t know. There must have been something there. I know why I started cooking – I had to eat while I was in college, but it’s not that simple (found out about the cooking/sex thing soon after) but survival isn’t enough of a reason to go to the lengths that I do when it comes to cooking. Do I remember anything about growing up in that tiny ranch house with two brothers, Mom and Dad that would set me on the cooking course? Nope. Of course there are a million memories, but what I remember most isn’t about the cooking and food. What I remember most is that Mom and Dad would do anything, make an extraordinary effort, for their children. Not to the point of spoiling us, though some might argue that, but just whatever we needed to “do” things:
The special type of paint for the school project, encouraging us with the Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts, making sure that we found the right baseball glove and that it fit, Mom didn’t tell Dad every incident that occurred, Dad played catch with us, taught us the rudiments of batting a baseball, had us rake leaves and mow the lawn (though we couldn’t mow it HIS way), they went to our little league games and PTA meetings and Parent Teacher Conferences and they encouraged and praised our efforts – that type of “do”. Thinking back, I would stay awake the nights of the parent/teacher conferences, waiting for my parents to come home. I wanted to be able to run from the house as quickly as possible if the teacher told them about everything I did at school.
The other strong memory is that there were always lots of books in the house: The Hardy Boys and Tom Swift, Life Magazine, money to buy books at the school book fairs, Weekly Reader, newspapers, Reader’s Digest Condensed Books and honest to God real hardbound books that were not condensed. Only a few years ago I purchased a used copy of a book that I signed out at our town library many times, ‘Mystery At Long Barrow House’, by Nancy Faulkner. It was interesting to read it again to get some idea of the child that I was. While this book had little to do with food it was heavy on Christmas, so there is that connection – I love Christmas time.
I don’t remember Mom or Dad reading a lot while we were kids, maybe they did and I missed it; at one point in his life Dad said that he could read the first and last sentence in a book and know the story (maybe he was right), I don’t remember Mom reading much then, but she reads a lot now. They did read to us, taught us to treasure books and instilled the proverbial life long love of reading in all of their sons.
Maybe the most important memory was that we did a lot of things together as a family – a lot of yelling and screaming, but done together. Together things like all of us sitting down at the table for the meal, all of us at the same time, virtually every day. As I write this, I’m seeing shimmerings of the beginning of my wanting to cook for people in the ‘togetherness’ aspect of my childhood. We did go car camping, take Sunday Drives, visit the relatives, go to drive-in movies (as Roman Catholics we were required to see ‘The Ten Commandments’ and ‘The Robe’) – all of this together as a family – whether we wanted to or not. Was this togetherness all sweetness and light? Of course not, but nothing tabloid horrendous, rip your soul open forever, either.

Paella on the Cape with the addition of Linguica from New Bedford

Jean’s Chopped Ham & Pickle And Potato Salad

I usually didn’t stand by Mom’s side as she cooked. She cooked nothing spectacular in the 1950’s, but there are two dishes that are absolutely memorable to me, dishes that I did watch her as she prepared them – her ‘chopped ham and pickle’ and her ‘potato salad’. Mom was THE cook in the house. That’s the way it worked in the 1950’s. I don’t think that Dad knew how to turn the stove on. From Mom all culinary delights flowed. God, I can still taste those two dishes, still see her making them, ‘MOM’S CHOPPED HAM AND PICKLE’ and ‘MOM’S POTATO SALAD’! Those mere words set me salivating. Dishes that I still work to replicate (I’m 99% there on the potato salad). Maybe it’s that question of context. The chopped ham and pickle was made of: ham, veal loaf, pickles, mayonnaise, God knows what else if anything else. Best served on fresh, seeded rye bread. Bonnie had never even heard of ‘veal loaf’ when I first mentioned it. It’s available in central Connecticut, actually many locations, but you have to find the ‘right’ kind of neighborhood to get the best, one of my favorite stores, Illg’s, Chalfont, Pennsylvania, make their own.
Chopped ham and pickle was a staple of my childhood and Mom made it for me while I was in college and continued to make it until the day that she was no longer able to. One of my great childhood memories was THE WAY that mom made it – an old cast iron meat grinder was clamped to the kitchen counter or the table. All the ingredients, no silly not the mayo, were placed in the hopper with a practiced hand and steadily, not quickly, ground together to the perfect consistency – not too mushy – not too firm. The individual ingredients still recognizable in this wonderfully colored, green, pink, reddish mélange. The taste is the taste of Mom’s chopped ham and pickle salad. No one ingredient overwhelms or stands out, they all work together for this meaty-smoky-salty-sweet-sour-creamy taste with a consistency of a good coarse pâté. Despite the fact that Mom served it year round, I shall always associate it with summer winds, blue skies, white clouds and sunshine.
I don’t even remember if I got to turn the crank of the meat grinder, it doesn’t matter whether I did or not, the picture in my mind and the memory of the tastes is satisfaction enough.
I keep trying to replicate Mom’s potato salad and I have not – yet – I’m close. I know potato salad is a very personalized taste. Green peppers or no green peppers, onions or no onions, how much mayo (Please God don’t tell me that you use Miracle Whip. If you’re going to use the spawn of the devil’s concoction Miracle Whip – which is fake mayonnaise with lots of sugar - spread it on your Spam sandwich), hardboiled eggs? Absolutely! Creating this dish didn’t require such accoutrements as the meat grinder. It was a simple, thin aluminum pot to boil the potatoes, another aluminum pot with a black, chipped, Bakelite handle to boil the eggs in, an old white ceramic bowl to mix it in and a wonderful knife with a carbon steel blade that had taken on a black patina from years of use to prep the ingredients. In Mom’s potato salad the potato pieces were small but, still distinct. They created a chunky and creamy wonder. There was the hardboiled eggs, again small pieces, no onions, no green peppers, there was celery, potatoes and the mayonnaise. Again – HEAVEN. The seasonings? As I remember, simply salt and pepper. Creamy potatoes with a wonderful egg sauce.
I consider my childhood absolutely wonderful if for no other reason than the constants that were Mom’s Chopped Ham and Pickle and the Potato Salad.
When Mom dies I want to have a huge oval sign placed above her grave. Not the grave monument of cold, hard lifeless stone, but a brilliant sign with gold gilt letters, a deep forest green background and a bright, shiny, red border proclaiming,

JEAN GRUNWALD’S
CHOPPED HAM & PICKLE
AND POTATO SALAD
THE BEST!

A sign proclaiming that through these dishes, and so many other things, her warmth and love will continue.

Of course, I also consider my childhood to have been absolutely wonderful because one fine day, on the bus to Kindergarten, Sandy and I ducked down behind the seatback in front of us and kissed (yes, at age 5 or so, I know that with today’s PC nuttiness I’d be in jail). I believe that we were caught by the bus driver and reported but I don’t remember the punishment, so it couldn’t have been bad or else the kiss was spectacular. I prefer to think that the kiss was spectacular. A kiss as spectacular as Mom’s chopped ham and pickle and potato salad.

My initial thought regarding the presentation of the dinner diaries in this blog was to do so in the same manner I’ve done in the manuscript; they’d make their appearance at the proper point in time. However, I cooked a nice, for the most part as you’ll see, dinner this weekend in honor of a friends birthday. And so, I’ve decided to present this diary out of its proper place in time. For those of you that know me you can appreciate the struggle that my thoughts waged in presenting this out of order. The dinner diaries are now on the computer rather than being handwritten. If I handwrote them, you wouldn’t be able to read them. By the way, I plan on presenting new postings to The Cooking and Memoirs of a Curmudgeon Chef on a weekly basis. That’s the plan today, we’ll see about tomorrow.

Dinner Diary August 15, 2009

B., A., BB and me

Appetizers

- Baguette
- Green grapes
- Asagio and Fontina cheeses
- THAI CURRY SAUCE SHRIMP CAKES ON SEAWEED SALALD: the shrimp was processed in a food processor until it could be molded into cakes. It was mixed with scallions, green and yellow peppers, salt and Red Thai Curry Sauce. The cakes were then pan sautéed in peanut oil. The seaweed salad was courtesy of one of our neighborhood sushi restaurants, Ota Ya.

- PAN SEARED DRY SCALLOPS SERVED OVER A BACON, CORN, TOMATO CREAM SAUCE: The sauce also contained pan sautéed shallots and fresh basil for seasoning. Very easy to make; dice and cook the bacon. When’s it’s done put it on some paper towels to drain, reserve some of the bacon fat in the skillet ad sauté the diced shallots, add the cream, bring just to a boil and turn the heat off. Add corn cut from the cob and chopped tomatoes (drained). Cover and keep warm. Pan sear the scallops in butter. Add the bacon and chopped basil to the corn tomato mix. Plate. Put a scallop atop the sauce and serve.

Soup

- TOMATO LIME GAZPACHO: Tomatoes, green peppers, cucumbers, red onion salt and pepper and enough lime juice so that it has a distinct, but not overwhelming taste of lime. A portion of the mixture was pureed in the blender with a little chicken stock and the diced vegetables were added to this.

Salad

- ONE OF DAVE'S SLAWS: Shredded red cabbage, carrots and Granny Smith apples with walnuts. The dressing was cider vinegar vinaigrette seasoned with smoked paprika and honey.

Entrée

- BARBEQUED BONE-IN COUNTRY PORK RIBS FROM ELY'S: Ely’s has the best ribs. Dry rub using salt, brown sugar, dry mustard, paprika and smoked paprika. Barbeque sauce from one of Craig Claiborne’s New York Times cookbooks. I kinda cheat with this in that I put the rubbed ribs in a tightly sealed roasting pan with a little beer in it and leave it in the oven at 300° for about an hour and a half to two hours; until the meat can easily be pierced with a fork. Then it’s on the grill with the sauce.

- B. is a dedicated vegetarian and I made him a serving of pasta with a basil pesto sauce.

Accompaniments

- JEAN'S POTATO SALAD: One of the classic recipes. Peeled russet potatoes, bacon, onions sautéed in bacon fat and celery. Seasoned with mayo, a little cider vinegar and a little tarragon and mixed with mashed hard-boiled eggs. Honestly, I don’t recall that Jean ever added bacon to her potato salad.

Dessert

- A PEACH SOMETHING WITH VANILLA ICE CREAM: Pit and peel the peaches. Sauté them in butter, brown sugar, vanilla flavored rum, a little lemon juice and a dash of salt. Make spoon bread dough and bake it. I thickened the sauce with a little arrowroot.

The Autopsy Report

A belated birthday dinner for A. As to be expected with some of our oldest friends we had a nice evening. Bonnie made the house and table setting quite beautiful. However, I absolutely blew the peach dessert. In an effort to get things done, never enough time, I made the peach filling earlier in the day. When I topped it with the spoon bread dough the filling was room temperature. A. kept saying, “The filling has to be hot”. I should listen more often than I do. The result of the room temperature filling was dough topping that was nicely crusted on top and absolutely raw on its underside. I ended up scraping the spoon bread dough off of the peaches and serving the filling with the ice cream. It wasn’t bad, but it most certainly wasn’t what I had in mind.
Looking at the menu a little more closely I wonder what the shrimp cakes are doing on the menu. The rest of the menu says United States of America Summer; plain old grilled shrimp might have been a better idea.
I had a lot of possibilities for the menu, but when the ribs were selected it had to be slaw and potato salad. A classic summer meal on a hot summer eve.

Next week: Watery Tomato Sauce, Inedible Soup and the Faux Communion Wafer Battle

2009-08-12T10:56:00.000-04:00

AND SO THE STORY BEGINS ..............

The First Time He Cooked Her Dinner

In the summer of 1969 Ellen and I were both in Providence at the Rhode Island School of Design. We had finished our freshman year and the both of us were staying in the city for the summer rather than going back home. Our timing getting out of work for the day was such that we always ended up walking together on our way home. We were friends and enjoyed talking with each other on these walks home. We would discuss our day, friends, music, the world and, it being the 60’s, how we were going to change the world.

At this point I was living by myself in a small apartment, a couple of rooms in what had been a mansion in better days and like much of the off-campus student housing, it had been partitioned into a rabbit warren maze of apartments. I remember what the interior of those apartments looked like: a slab of foam instead of a mattress, day-glow rock concert posters on the walls (if you were really cool a poster of the ‘Super Session’ album cover), masonry block shelving, tiny kitchens with virtually no cabinets, the secondhand couch covered with an ‘India Print’ thin cotton spread, with luck an old table and mismatched chairs, incense and incense holders, and always - the iconic stereo (Marantz, Phillips, AR, Design Research components) and the record collection. Ah, and the bathrooms. Not something to linger in, it held a toilet that you used trying not to think of it, an age stained sink and the metal shower that always was rusting at the base. I recall that women’s apartments always looked more inviting: cleaner with freshly washed bed sheets.
One soft early summer evening on our walk home, with no malice or forethought on my part, I said, “Why don’t you come to my place and I’ll make us dinner”. I’ve always wondered what possessed me to say that. Prior to that monumental moment in time I had never made dinner for anyone other than myself. At the time I believe that my repertoire consisted of some kind of steak, frozen green peas and one of those ‘Uncle Ben’s’ flavored rice dishes (my memory, flawed though it may be, remembers these as pretty tasty). She looked at me incredulously and said, “You can actually cook dinner for the both of us? Really? You’re not going to just order pizza?” My response, “No problem, I like to cook.” We got a bottle of wine from ‘Rozz and Jack’s’ before we got to my place (Rozz and Jack, God bless their souls, owned a dingy hole in the wall liquor store and would sell liquor to you without an ID if you weren’t picky about the label, the price or falling down drunk). In the fashion of those times the wine was probably Lancer’s, Blue Nun or Mateus (red or white – I hope that I was savvy enough to get the red). I like to think that even at the moment of creation of my cooking odyssey I would select a real wine rather than Boone’s Farm.
Ellen was thrilled that someone, me, was actually cooking her dinner. She told me how really nice it was for me to do this. She asked where I learned to cook (with the exception of the steak, the other two ‘courses’ had cooking instructions on their containers – that’s where I learned to cook the meal). The meal was nicely done. I am assuming this because I don’t remember it as a disaster. I mean really, it wasn’t a hard menu to master. I don’t remember the detail of the meal other than it was a nice little, end of day, relaxing, domestic scene, the soft summer evening melting into night.
As I started cleaning up she came up to me, put her arms around me and with a twinkle in her eyes that I will never forget said, “That was sooooo nice of you. None of the guys that I know have ever cooked me dinner. Now ……. . her, kissing me so softly……….. what can I do for you?” At that stop the earth moment in time I believe that I began to comprehend the full import of knowledge that caused Archimedes to leap from his bathtub and run naked through the streets shouting, “Eureka!” and I began to understand the full import and power of cooking and food.
It really was the start of it all. The proverbial ‘click’. It was that moment when all the gears and all the planets were in the right placement. It was that moment when all the memories and tastes of food events past and the knowledge that this was something that was going to carry into my future took the first beautiful step. Did I know the depth of it? Of course not, but I did feel that ‘click’, that feeling of something discovered.
Men, women! See, if you perform an act based in sincerity, without expectation of reward, you may, as the Bible says, get paid back tenfold. Actually, I don’t think that the Bible had my particular experience in mind with that statement. When you have cooked for the sheer joy of cooking and been paid back in a most unexpected and wonderful manner, not necessarily sex, please kneel and ask the Lord to bless me for putting you on this path. I’m curious to see what the Lord’s response to your requesting a benediction for me, in this particular regard will be – better make it just a short silent prayer for the salvation of my soul. Have I and my cooking traveled beyond the whole ‘cooking yields sex’ thing? Absolutely, but it’s sure nice to remember where it all started.

Rose hips from the Cape about to become
Rose Hip Jelly

Who The Hell Is This Guy?

What is this book about? So what, so what, with all this love of cooking? Who the hell is Dave Grunwald? Dave Grunwald, me, I am an architect, I have built homes with my own two hands (draft it up at night and go out and hammer the wood together in the day with Jim and Paul), I have been a real estate developer, I’ve designed and made custom furniture and I am a musician (a musician, not a drummer – old joke). But, more constant than anything else I have always been a cook. This book is an orderly ramble, but a ramble nonetheless, through my life as defined by my cooking and food. It is the tales of those food memories that are so much a part of my life. It is about my ‘Dinner Diary’: the diaries of menus and dinners that I have kept since 1983. It’s about me getting so wrapped up in cooking and food that I can relate virtually all of my life to it – and yet it’s not how I make my living. This, my, cooking and food has represented all aspects of my life; survival, humor, sorrow, failure, achievement, tradition, family, need, friends – and love. Nothing, absolutely nothing in my life, has been as constant as my love of cooking and food.
Ask anybody who has ever cooked anything and cared about it and they will tell of the ‘rush’ of bringing it to the table and having this dish, this meal, oooh’d and aaaah’d over by the seated ones. You get addicted to it. It is a magnificent obsession, a compulsion, the core of me.
The narrative, the food stories describe the incidents of my life that are related, in some cases obliquely, to food and the cooking journey: good food, bad food, dinners served by friends, crap served by people who said they were my friends but weren’t if they served me crap, good and bad and horrendous restaurants, absolutely wondrous food stores, old ladies selling the best jams and jellies in the world by the side of the road from a shack.
My love of cooking and my innate obsessive compulsiveness led me to keep the ‘Dinner Diaries’ – a diary that I started in 1983 that tells the stories of the meals that I’ve cooked, the friends and family that I’ve shared them with, what went right and what went wrong, how I’d do things the next time and our musings on those things that were so important in our lives at that moment .
I enjoy journeying through these diaries and seeing the flow of people in and out of my life, how the menus shift, or remain the same, based on the times, the seasons, the weather, whether or not we had any money, the amount of time that I could give to the meal, the repeat recipes, the times when I wasn’t cooking as often as other times, the friends that have been, or once were, major fixtures in my life. How the remembrance of a particular dish or menu is affected by the mood of that moment in time in which it occurs – the context of the moment. I’m sorry that I didn’t start the diaries when I started cooking in college in the late 1960’s. It would be nice to remember with some degree of accuracy (I can’t even begin to tell you what I can’t remember from the 60’s and 70’s) many of the menus and friends that it all started with but, hey! How did I know that I was going to LOVE cooking as much as I do!

Next week ...... A brief bio of a great Mom and Dad and Jean's chopped ham and pickle and potato salad