A Most Memorable Meal

Creating recipes has been one of my life-long passions.  My mother has a recipe I created when I was nine. It’s hand-written – in cursive – which tells you how old I really am.  I love to try and recreate food I’ve had in restaurants and can while away hours reading a good cookbook.

Experimentation is my favorite way of cooking – trying new recipes, tweaking old one, or just starting with a list of ingredients and figuring out what to do with them.   Luckily, I have lot of friends who like to eat and who don’t care if I break that rule of “never serve anything to company that you haven’t made before”.  Usually, it turns out okay; sometimes great; and the few times it’s awful.  I’ve always had a back-up plan.

On the flip side -- because there has to be a flip side -- I’m married to a man who calls himself a Carnivore.  Just as a Vegetarian won’t eat meat, a Carnivore won’t eat vegetables – especially not raw ones -- or most spices – especially not hot ones – and certainly not anything that wasn’t already in his eating repertoire by the time he was five.  Grains are good, especially when lathered with gravy.  But, the best is meat.  Unadorned, grilled meat works.  Better is crusty, fried meat or slow cooked meat bathed in barbecue sauce.  And, bacon, for my southern Carnivore, has always been a huge hit, even before the recent bacon craze.

I personally don’t eat bacon and I don’t like to cook it.  So, when Bill talks me into it, I get a lot and fry it outside over a propane grill.  One summer day, several years ago, I came home from the warehouse club with five pounds of bacon.  It was a beautiful day, so I figured I’d take a magazine with me and flip through it as the bacon cooked.  About midway through the first pound, Bill showed up with our neighbor, Doug.

“I invited Doug for dinner,” he said.

“Dinner?” I thought wildly.  “I don’t have anything planned for dinner!”

“Um, what were you thinking?” I asked.

He stared at me like I’d lost my mind.  “Bacon.”

Our neighbor Doug is a world-travelling gourmand.  He keeps a beautiful garden, which I’m, thankfully, invited to raid.  He even has a grape arbor that I can pick leaves from to make stuffed grape leaves.  We spent a lovely afternoon together once when I showed him how to make them.  He’s been over for dinner lots of time.  But never for just bacon.

Bill handed him a canned drink and we spent the next hour or so hanging around the grill.  They’d grab hot pieces off the paper towel where I put them to drain after I removed them from the grease.  I think they went through about a pound each before they called it quits.

Doug thanked us for the delightful afternoon and went home, presumable to lie on the bed groaning from all the fat he’d inhaled.  At least that’s what Bill did.

As I said, this was years ago.  But, even now, when we get to talking, Doug often tells me that afternoon scarfing bacon easily made his Top Ten List of most memorable meals.  After all the recipes I’ve invented and all the meals I’ve served, that’s the one that made someone’s Top Ten List. I suppose it is better than getting there because I gave everyone food poisoning.  Or because I made something so horrible no one would eat it.  I will admit, for example, that one of my most memorable meals involved food so bad that several of us, including my very pregnant friend, Connie, had to sneak out to Red Robin to get some food we could eat before Connie passed out from hunger.  I don’t think the bacon was awful.  After all, they both ate a lot. And, Doug insists the meal isn’t on his worst meals list, just his list of most memorable ones. 

 I know the meal isn’t just about the food – the ambience and the company really do matter.  A pound of bacon sitting at a cluttered kitchen table wouldn’t be the same as bacon eaten hot out of the frying pan on a clear Colorado summer day with the foothills as the background and an eagle flying over, hoping for a piece of his own.

Ambience and company.  That’s why people with discerning food tastes still like the greasy spoon joints of their childhood alongside of their favorite five star restaurants.  But, when the food is excellent, so much the better.

So, I’ll keep striving to make someone else’s most memorable meal list, with some other meal. Hopefully one that requires just a little more skill and finesse.  Hopefully one with a little more balance in taste and color.  Hopefully one that doesn’t send the eaters to bed in a grease overload for the rest of the day.

Do you have a list of most memorable meals?  Is bacon on that list?

The Fate of the Free World

The night of the first snow of the season, we lost our water. Within an hour, I realized that the fate of the free world rests on our sewer system.

It took a week to get water running through our house again. A week to find the problems (a broken pipe which lead to a fault in the well pump), dig up the pipe, wait for parts, fix the pipe, fix the pump and test it all. A week of taking showers at work, filling up bottles of water and skulking them home for drinking and brushing teeth and rinsing off faces. A week of lots of eating out and lots of discussions of the form, “no you can’t wear your favorite jeans twice because they are dirty and can’t be washed”.

All that wasn’t horrible. Inconvenient but not horrible. The horrible part was the toilets. You know how bad low-flow toilets can be? Well, no-flow toilets are infinitely worse. And, it’s not like you can just ‘hold it’ until you get to work every morning.

The first day we pulled out some five gallon buckets, filled them with snow and carried them up the stairs. A trip to the bathroom involved pouring the melted snow into the toilet to aid the flushing process. Carrying buckets of snow up the stairs was better than carrying buckets of something else back down the stairs, but as the snow melted, that option melted away along with it.

We broke down, drove the tractor to the neighbors and begged them to let us fill up the 200 gallon water tank we brought with us. Okay, we didn’t really have to beg – they are very nice neighbors – but you still have to admit that it’s not every day that someone comes to your door and asks to borrow water so they can flush their toilets. At least we had a solution. Bill even hooked the tank up to the plumbing so that we could flush without carrying buckets up the stairs.

It all got me thinking, though, about our disaster preparedness. I mean, all of the survivalists packages I’ve seen (not that I spend a lot of time looking, mind you) include food, tablets for clean drinking water, candles, even weapons. But I’ve never seen any that include supplies for a “do it yourself” outhouse or a shovel to start digging. Not that most modern-day neighborhoods would support an outhouse in every yard anyway.

I understand that things would have been much worse if everyone had lost water the same time we did. If we were melting snow for drinking instead of toilet flushing, our situation would have seemed much more serious. But, still, just today on Facebook, someone posted the following: More people on our planet have a mobile phone than a toilet. So what? The majority of illness in the world is cause by poo. And we are definitely not set up to handle our own poo.

When I was a kid, my great-grandmother lived in a house that had indoor plumbing added as an afterthought. She still had an outhouse in her backyard and when they had big gatherings, some of the older folks continued to use it. Can you imagine going to your backyard today and starting to dig the hole? If war or a terrorist act wasn’t what sent you out there in the first place, it might be the result of you appearing with your shovel. And all those folks living in high-rise apartments are totally screwed in that sort of situation.

The day we turned back on the water, I made a spaghetti dinner, using lots of water straight from the tap. The washing machine and dish washer provided the background music and I ended the symphony with a couple of celebratory, non-rationed flushes.

We are a little better prepared now, the 200 gallon water tank always filled with water. I still worry. I don’t know about you, but I’d much prefer to live without a cell phone than indoor plumbing. Think about your answer to that question the next time you are perched on your throne, blissfully unaware of just how lucky you are.

The joy of doors

It turns out that old saying about the cobbler’s children having no shoes applies to ‘do-it-yourselfers’, too. Sure, we have shoes. Doors – now that’s a whole ‘nother thing.

The definition of ‘do-it-yourself’ really should include a picture of my husband. Bill’s the guy everyone calls when they have a home construction or repair question. And nothing makes him happier than rushing to the scene and giving advice – or even doing the work – to fix the home crisis of the day. When we visit friends, he’ll walk around the house looking at walls and doors and floors. Later, at home, I’ll ask, ‘Didn’t you love the decorations they had in the living room?’ and he’ll shrug, “I didn’t really notice, but did you see the crack in the kitchen tile? It must have been at least an inch long!”

Over the years, he’s acquired a vast knowledge of all things construction. And what he doesn’t know, he figures out. Good for the most part, but on the downside, this means no one else’s work is ever up to his standards. Which means he insists on doing all the work himself. Which really means with a helper. Which, unfortunately, means me. And, although our work is excellent, if I do say so myself, it is not quick.

Years ago, when we finished the basement in our first house, we hired a tile guy. The only reason is that we were bumping up against the deadline for the construction permit. Construction permits are good for a couple of years and no one ever bumps up against the deadline, except for us, of course. When the county issues new permits, new regulations come into play. Work that was “good” five years ago often doesn’t meet the regulations of today. In our case, if we had to get a new permit, we would have had to rip out work we’d taken months to complete and start over. Like a hamster on a wheel, we’d just keep running and never finish.

So, we hired a tile guy. He estimated three days for the work we needed done. I left him alone with Bill for a couple of hours thinking how nice it would be to return home and find work done that I didn’t do. Instead, I found the tile guy sitting on an overturned bucket, while Bill was on his knees putting in tile. The professional offered advice every minute or so, but looked quite comfortable sitting on his bucket. He said it was the easiest job he’d ever had. Now, we know how to do tile.

But back to the doors. Who lives in a house with no interior doors for two and a half years? The ultimate DIY guy, that’s who.

We’d picked out some beautiful doors during the framing stage of our house. Unfortunately, years later, when we were finally ready to put in the doors, the company we’d planned to make our doors had gone out of business. And, in the meantime, we hadn’t framed the openings to a standard dimension, so we couldn’t just go down to Ye Olde Door Shoppe and load up the pickup truck. Much as he hated to admit it, Bill knew we couldn’t actually make the doors, although installing them he wouldn’t leave to anyone else.

He shopped around. One place would make them but not finish them and you needed to have them finished and installed within thirty days or void the warranty. Like I said, we aren’t quick. Other places couldn’t make them exactly to spec. “I’ll figure something out,” he said. So I waited.

I waited two and a half years. And, in spite of what Bill might try and let you believe, a shower curtain does not take the place of a door. Have you ever tried to lock a shower curtain? Or knock on one? Or tell your dinner guests that they can either go to the barn for a bathroom with a door or use the one behind the shower curtain? I didn’t think so.

But, finally, he found a place to make the doors. We ordered them, keeping our fingers crossed that they wouldn’t go out of business while they made them. And, just a few weeks later, a truck pulled up – they even delivered – and some wonderful men carried them into the house and even up the stairs.

I admired the doors and after practicing on a couple of rarely used closet doors to make sure we knew what we were doing, we installed a real, live, solid, locking bathroom door. The joy. Like Christmas and your birthday all rolled into one.

Months later, we finally installed the very last door. I sit behind one now, still reveling in my ability for privacy. Although, I do wonder – when the cobbler’s kids finally get their shoes, do they ever get laces? Because I’ll probably be long dead before anyone gets around to the trim.

Meet me

In my professional life, I'm a manager in a large technology company. I joined up long ago, when men still dominated the field. (Who am I kidding? Men still dominate the field). In this capacity, I've had years of daily exposure to the male psyche.

In my "real" life, I have a tween daughter who is the Queen of Charisma (according to a quiz she took in a book last week). I took the quiz and ended up in the boring middle. It said I needed to take more chances and go beyond my comfort zone to get the most out of life.

In this life I don't get the most out of, I also spend way too much time acting as the side-kick for my husband's home construction and repair projects.

In my imaginary life (the one inside my head), I'm a world-renouned chef with my own line of cookware and at least two shows on the Food Network. Or, I'm a best-selling author with a cult-like following and I do most of my writing on the beach in Hawaii. Either works.

In this forum, I hope to share my experiences and observations. I hope to make you laugh and sometimes think and maybe even make you hungry.