Gluttony is in the Air

I am in the process of making four pones of delicious bacon-grease cornbread.

What are the odds that the entire load will survive long enough to be made into stuffing?

In a very ironic word, slim.

Give us Your Bass Boats and we Will Spare Your Planet

Cream candy. Have you heard of it?

One pleasant thing about having a relationship with my sister is that my dad is no longer the only person I know who is from Eastern Kentucky. My sister and I have memories of a place that might as well be Mars, for all the similarity it bears to most of homogenized America. We have made a couple of trips to north Dade [County], and both times, she requested a stop at Cracker Barrel. This is a chain restaurant that features Appalachian cooking. Years ago, on trips to Kentucky, the family used to stop at a Cracker Barrel in Sevierville, Tennessee (home of Dolly Parton). My cousin managed one for a time. Now they have them in Florida. On our last outing, my sister mentioned cream candy. If anyone outside of Eastern Kentucky makes this stuff, I am unaware of it.

It’s very hard to describe. It’s sort of like chalk, except that it’s made from sugar. It contains cream (butter, actually), or it’s supposed to, but a lot of people cheap out and use margarine. It crumbles and dissolves in your mouth, and it’s extremely sweet.

I wonder if I can find it on the web. Yep, here’s a recipe.

This stuff is extremely temperamental. I have never made it, but according to my sister, women in Kentucky claim you can only make it in dry, cold weather. And you have to mix it on a cold marble slab. Oddly, nobody up there that we knew realized you could cool the slab with ice; my sister saw my aunt or somebody sitting around waiting for the slab to cool between batches, and she came up with the idea of putting a bag of ice on it. When she makes it here in Miami, she turns her air conditioner down as low as it will go.

It’s not the greatest candy on earth. About two pieces will do me for a year. But until my sister mentioned it, I had not thought about it in forever.

As far as I know, the only other candy that comes from that area is the Bourbon ball. You make a white pasty confection flavored with Bourbon, and you cover it with chocolate. They’re not too good. For one thing, no one up there seems to know how to make a non-waxy filling for a chocolate. I am pretty sure I have eaten Bourbon balls made with Gulfwax paraffin. For another, chocolate and Bourbon don’t go together.

I’m sitting here thinking about it, and it occurs to me that cream candy would be a whole lot better if you could flavor it with Bourbon. Then Bourbon balls would no longer be necessary. As I recall–don’t hold me to this–“Gulfwax” was originally one word, and the little boxes had the Gulf Oil logo on them. I see someone is selling a product called “Gulf Wax” online, but I suspect they stole the name and put a space in it. Gulf Oil is gone. I’ll bet Gulfwax was a refining by-product. Mmm…put that on your food and enjoy.

Whoops…Gulf has a website. I guess the brand is still alive somewhere.

My grandmother used that paraffin a lot. She canned everything she could get her hands on, and she used to pour a layer of hot paraffin on top of her blackberry jelly to keep air from getting to it in the jars.

I miss the food we used to eat at Granny’s house. That is not news. I managed to make some okay-looking shucky beans last year, and I may cook them for dinner tomorrow. Some of the beans I dried got mildew on them; the weather here just isn’t right for drying things. I’m considering getting a dehydrator. I’m afraid it won’t be the same. The dried apples Granny used to make were brown and chewy, unlike the ones you see in stores, and there is no way you could get white, fluffy ones to taste the same in a hand pie. Another strategy: put a window screen in my dad’s SUV, spread the beans or apples on it, and leave it in the hot sun. They do that in Kentucky. It makes a car smell good.

I don’t want a machine that will cook the food while it’s drying. That would ruin it.

It would be fun to surprised my dad with a stack cake (they’re made with dried apples) at Christmas. He’d faint. I’m not a huge fan of these things, but he loves them, and he hasn’t had one since maybe 1998.

I have to get off my hind end and get started on the food. I have to make several pones of cornbread today, plus pecan pies. I may inject the turkey today. It’s some kind of silly organic fresh turkey my sister found. I’m worried that it will be dry because it’s not full of the right chemicals and hormones. Maybe I should brine it. Arggh.

Whatever happens tomorrow, the food will be fantastic. I hope all of you have a great holiday.

Cheese and Peppermint Bark?

Sadly, Costco was amply stocked with delicious Costco shredded mozzarella today, so I had to bring some home. I already had some inadequate Publix cheese, which didn’t have enough fat. I am thinking I’ll combine them. The Costco cheese is way richer than a part-skim cheese has any right to be, so the Publix cheese should balance it well.

I could not resist an impulse buy: a gallon can of Italian tomatoes. I have low expectations, but at least my curiosity will be satisfied.

Okay, I had a second impulse buy. A two-pound tub of peppermint bark. I made it past the ones by the baked goods, but they had a second wave by the produce, and that was all it took to break me.

It’s not bad at all.

I got my father to go, for the first time. He was impressed by the meat, the wine, and the inexpensive vats of Jack Daniel’s.

Hocks and Greens Age Better Than Sophia Loren

It looks like I am going to have to spray my peppers and fruit trees with copper about once a week in order to keep them alive. The fungus down here is as persistent and unreasonable as Bush Derangement Syndrome. I applied copper today, as well as a foliar mineral spray for the citrus. I fertilized the fruit trees, too. Now I have to go buy iron.

What do you eat when you work like a farmer? Farm food, i.e. leftover ham hocks and cornbread! I nuked a hock and a pile of collards, and I followed up with the cornbread, and I buttered the bread, sliced the second half of yesterday’s tomato, added more Vidalia slices, and I was in business. Well, okay, I was in business after I also poured myself an Inca Kola.

Miami has to be the world epicenter of weird foreign soft drink importation.

The things that happen to ham hocks and greens after a day in the fridge are marvelous. All the flavors mingle and intensify. I didn’t even need Texas Pete when I ate the fat off the hock.

I guess I’ll be ready if it turns out a socialist President can’t revive our socialism-ravaged economy with more socialism. I can eat for three days on twenty bucks.

Pre-Obama Salad Days, Only Without Salad

This is what every man’s dining table should look like.

You’re looking at a ham hock, collard greens, Vidalia slices, a hothouse tomato, cornbread made with bacon grease, and fried apples.

I should lie and say that’s Red Rose tea, but it’s not. I ran out yesterday. It’s GATORADE.

Still.

Here’s how to enjoy a ham hock. Eat the meat parts as is; they taste fine without help, because they’re ham. Eat the fat with a little hot sauce on it. It’s good without sauce, too, but variety is nice.

It seems like the Roegelein’s bacon scraps have a somewhat more subtle flavor than the strips. The cornbread–made with grease from the scraps I bought–tasted almost refined. I kind of prefer the stronger taste of the strips.

That tomato was surprisingly good, for a store tomato.

If you’re not from the South, you may wonder why I have a disassembled rifle on the table, and why I would eat that odd-looking food.

More

Here’s a closeup of the greens and hock, so you can see the lovely, delicious pig grease.

Dinner Question

I have a poll for you.

This Stuff Tastes Offal Good

I went to Winn-Dixie and got some huge ham hocks and a…wad…of collard greens. I don’t know what else to call it. It’s not a head. It’s not a bunch. It’s a wad. It was so big, I couldn’t put it in a produce bag. So it got grocery germs all over it before I got it out of the store, and I had to wash it pretty well at home.

I have a pot which probably holds six or eight quarts, and I figured I would use that to make the greens and hocks. Wait until you try to jam an entire sliced wad of collard greens into a pot that size. No way. I ended up putting the hocks and some water in it, and I put as much greens in as I could, and I got it boiling. As the greens wilted, they sank, and I managed to get the whole wad in there. I’ve added garlic and pepper. Three hours from now, I expect to be in paradise. I considered adding a piece of habanero. I may still do so. I think a squirt of key lime juice would be good in greens, but it’s too far-out for what I’m doing today.

I just looked at a site about ham hocks. They claim “soul food” comes from the “abhorrent tradition of slavery.” Please. What a crock. How long are we going to be subjected to this myth? Soul food is just Southern food prepared by black people. It comes from the abhorrent tradition of not wasting good food, which was shared by all races. What white Southerner in his right mind would look down on ham hocks? One who wanted to starve, I guess. At least until LBJ saved the world with welfare checks. When my parents were kids, people had to be frugal with food. They slaughtered hogs and let nothing go to waste. They didn’t throw out the hocks and jowls or the other “soul food” ingredients. Why would they? They taste fantastic.

I think it’s safe to say most white Southerners don’t eat fried chitlins (I may be wrong), but they have always eaten sausage skins, which are supposed to be the same thing. I’m assuming chitlins are the small intestine. It’s confusing. No one in my family eats them, so I can’t ask them, and Internet “authorities” differ. Some say it’s the large intestine, which is pretty gross, because the large intestine is where feces come from. If it’s the small intestine, fry it up and I’ll eat it. I’ve eaten piles of them already, stuffed with sausage, so what’s the difference?

Right now, I can get in the car and drive two miles and sit down to a plate of grilled cow chitlins at an Argentinian barbecue joint. Oh, save me from oppression.

It must be the small intestine. A health site says chitlins are dangerous when “contaminated with feces.” All large intestine meat is poo-tainted. The Wikipedia entry on chitlins appears to be full of…wait for it…misinformation.

Anyway, the idea that soul food came from slaves in the South is just plain stupid. The word “chitterling” comes from England. I guess they had cotton plantations back in Chaucer’s day.

My mother used to tell me scary stories about the parts of animals she used to eat. The stuff of nightmares. She said that when my grandmother killed chickens for chicken and dumplings, she would separate out the ovary or whatever it is that makes the eggs and serve it on the side, with half-formed eggs in it. Slaves! My mom and her family must have been slaves!

Goooo downnnn…Mo-ses…

Sorry, I got carried away.

In a few hours, I expect to be dining like a king.

Or a slave.

Life is Hard

For some reason, my visit to Wayne Cochran’s church has me thinking about Southern food. I have half a mind to get myself to Winn-Dixie and obtain some collards and ham hocks.

Oh boy. That would be good. Collards, ham hocks, a tomato, a sweet onion, and cornbread.

I can’t plan my menu with Marv yapping at me. He says, “Can I rub your snout? C’MERE! What are you lookin’ at?” His new word: “Well?”

I’m glad I have inadvertently become a master of cheap cuisine. I guess it was inevitable, because I cook a lot of hereditary peasant food. My grandmothers and great-grandmothers didn’t cook this stuff just because it was good. It was cheap. I like cooking Cuban food, and it’s the same way.

If the economy keeps tanking and we all end up eating low-end food, I’ll never know the difference.

I just saw something on the web, where some person is complaining about hard times. The complaint mentions being forced to make a meal of ham hocks, collard greens, and cornbread.

“Forced”?

Adventures in Food

On a whim, I bought myself a cherimoya. I think it may be ripe. It’s sort of soft. I am about to try to eat it.

Here is some troubling text I found on Wikipedia: “Similar in size to a grapefruit, it has large, glossy, dark seeds that are easily removed. The seeds are poisonous if crushed open and can be used as an insecticide.[4] One should also avoid eating the skin as it may cause paralysis from 4 to 5 hours.”

If I don’t blog for five hours, you’ll know what happened.

I have checked my banana tree, and I now have nine hands of bananas, with about 12 bananas each. I thought I would never be able to grow anything except peppers and limes. God’s way of telling me to be less caustic and sour? Dunno.

Wait, I also managed to grow another fruit. On the other hand, it’s grapefruit.

Dang.

It’s a MADDDDDDHOUSSSSE!

I have always loved Bible movies. This was true even before I became more religious. I don’t know what it is about Bible movies. I love watching Victor Mature beat on Philistines. I like watching Charlton Heston race chariots. How can you beat this stuff? It’s like superheroes and Jedis, only the miracles are based on truth.

Today a package arrived from Amazon. A Chuck Heston double feature! The Ten Commandments and Ben Hur! I can’t wait!

I just put a Costco rib roast in the oven at 250. It should be ready right when my McCain/Palin fast ends. What could be better than slow-cooked rib roast, a baked potato, garlic butter, horseradish, and Charlton Heston? Not hardly anything I can think of.

I also made a horrible impulse buy. Sarah Lee now makes little cubes of cheesecake in an ice cream carton. I know it’s not as good as homemade, but fasting has a way of altering your standards at the grocery store.

I’m not nervous at all about the election. In fact, I’m having a great day. Does that mean God is going to answer our prayers, or just that he helps Christians relax right before their countries go socialist? Hard to say. Whatever the explanation is, I’ll take it.

I think I’ll do the Ten Commandments tonight, with my rib roast. Oh, YEAH.

I Need a Standing Eight Count

Here’s a tip for people who are fasting and praying for McCain. Do NOT work with food during your fast. And don’t do yardwork.

You can guess how I came across these bits of advice.

I moved a huge planter full of wet dirt, from one end of the yard to the other. Then I salted down a rib roast and applied minced garlic to it. It’s obvious why doing manual labor was a bad idea. The food thing is harder to explain. I’ve noticed this before. If you fool with food during a fast, your blood sugar will drop. I knew better.

I plan to enjoy the hallucinations while they last. And I’m satisfying my hunger with a delicious glass of iced water! MMM…tasty water! What a treat!

Hurry up, sundown.

Chili!

My yard has been sprayed with copper. The garage door has yielded to my efforts. To reward myself, I have decided to commit suicide with chili.

I made my famous Unauthentic White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Chili today, only I made a change. I took out 2/3 of the beans. I am trying not to be a giant obese hog, and the beans are what make chili sit in your guts like mashed potatoes. With the beans cut down, the chili isn’t so carb-heavy.

Believe it or not, I’m low on peppers. I have some white habaneros, but they’re all heat and no flavor. I managed to scrape together three habanero golds and one yellow habanero, and I made my own chili powder, which contained chipotles. I think I did okay. I put the cutting board and a few other things in the dishwasher, and after it had been running a while, I opened it to add something else, and I started coughing. The pepper residue from the dishes was rising up with the steam. It was like being maced.

Usually I don’t go for internal blistering, but today I felt like I needed some heat in my chili, so I am not playing. I got some cheddar to put on the top and some sour cream to go on the side. This should be tremendous.

Cream Puffs

It is impossible for me to go to Costco without buying something stupid. Today’s crime? Creampuffs.

I’m sure you’ve seen them, frozen in their big white bucket. Like me, you must have had an almost morbid fascination, wondering what a frozen creampuff in a bucket would be like.

Anyway, I bought them.

The verdict? You will not mistake them for fresh creampuffs. On the other hand, you could slop some raspberry sauce or chocolate sauce on them to cover the bucket flavor.

I managed to resist the odd-looking P’tit Basque cheese.

Griddle Beats the Broiler

Last night, I was spirited off to Ruth’s Chris for a free dinner. And I was scared. Why? Because I keep saying my steaks are better than theirs. What if my memory was wrong? Ack.

Today I am feeling smug, however, because I was right.

I had the cowboy ribeye (bone-in with the meat removed from the skinny end), a baked potato, a Caesar salad with anchovies, and a Chopin martini. I’ll give you my evaluation.

First off, the meat was more tender than my ribeyes. I think. It may have been that it was just juicier. I dry-age, and maybe Ruth’s doesn’t. Dry-aging reduces the water content somewhat. They may be wet-aging; women like it because you get a really wet steak. Regardless of what the deal was, the texture was a little bit like a big piece of Jell-O.

I wasn’t too excited by that. People who don’t know anything about beef think tenderness equals quality, but that’s wrong. A steak should be tender, but it shouldn’t be like eating tapioca. It shouldn’t jiggle. That’s a little off-putting. A steak should be juicy, too, but that doesn’t mean it should be so juicy that it tastes watery.

My rib eyes are very tender. They come apart with very little effort. And they’re juicy; a gorgeous red-brown fluid comes out of them, inviting you to dip bites of potato in it. But they still resemble meat. You can feel something in your mouth when you chew. In my opinion, that’s how steak is supposed to be.

The flavor of the Ruth’s steak was not what it should have been. They use some kind of strange seasoning; I can’t tell what it is. It’s all you can taste. The flavor of the beef doesn’t really come through. Furthermore, they serve the steak on a hot plate (very nice) surrounded by added butter (very nice) which burns (not nice at all) while they bring the steak to you. The flavor of burned butter is very strong, and it’s not pleasant. I’ve used tiny amounts of burned butter as a flavoring, but generally, you want to avoid letting butter brown too much.

The meat itself was low on flavor. I don’t know why. Maybe wet-aging is to blame. They failed to brown the beef properly; that would have helped. Steak should never be served grey. It should be dark brown, and it should not be brown here and there, but all over. Browning means flavor. Another thing: a cast-iron griddle or skillet used only for steak will develop a seasoning on it that flavors the meat in a way no gas broiler can imitate.

They also put way too much salt on the steak. I was dipping it in the burned butter, trying to rinse the salt off. And I salt my steaks very heavily at home.

I know I sound like I’m ripping their steak to shreds, but it was very good. Ruth’s is a wonderful restaurant. You have to understand, I’m comparing their steak to steaks that are so good I actually make moaning noises while I eat.

They served me a baked potato with butter, sour cream, and chives. I asked for butter, sour cream, and salt, but that’s not a big deal. I tried it. Guess what? Not nearly as good as my potatoes. Not even close.

For one thing, they soak the jackets with some kind of lube. Butter, I suppose. The jacket seemed very, very thin and delicate, and it was completely wet. On the inside, the potato itself seemed wet. I don’t know how they do that. Maybe they use a steamer. It wasn’t airy and light; it was heavy. My potatoes are sort of fluffy. Also, they chintzed on the toppings. If you’re not going to put at least six ounces of sour cream on a potato, don’t waste my time with it.

Another problem: they don’t burn the potato at all. My potatoes typically have a little bit of browning inside the jacket on one side. This is marvelous; it adds complexity, and it goes great with the sour cream and butter.

The butter Ruth’s uses doesn’t have garlic in it. Arggh. MISTAKE.

I didn’t finish the potato. It was very nice, but compared to my potatoes, it was sort of civilized and limp and bland. I admit, I was trying not to be a pig, and I didn’t want to finish it. But with one of my potatoes, I would have been helpless. Willpower would have wilted before it. It always has.

I like Ruth’s, and I would never turn down a Ruth’s meal. The food last night was great. But their dinners can’t compare to a home-aged steak cooked on a griddle, next to a baked potato cooked with no foil, with salt water applied to the jacket before baking. Ruth’s is not in the same class.

One more thing: my steak arrived at the table sizzling from the heat of the plate. Looks like the unfortunate “resting” fad hasn’t spread to every cook on the planet.

Try my recipe with confidence. If you like the flavor of beef, not burned butter or herbs, and you like your potatoes fluffy and light with dry, salted jackets that cry out for garlic butter, sour cream, and beef juice, you will not be disappointed.

I feel tremendous satisfaction, having succeeded in beating the pros. I worked a long time on this, and I’m thrilled at how it paid off.

Approaching Perfection

Mike and I collaborated on a pizza the other day. I was anxious to watch his tossing technique, because he is completely fearless with the dough, whereas I feel like I’m juggling a greased baby over a terrazzo floor.

We used 2 cups of flour to make a 14″ pie. I made the dough, and he plopped it on the glass stove surface (my tossing area) with no worries at all. It stuck, but he was still able to get it loose and work it. Weird.

He stretched it on the stove, pressing his hands down into it and out. It somehow worked, even though the dough should have welded itself to the surface. He tore it once, but when he does that, he just pinches the edges together and pulls them up into a flap, which he folds over onto the pie.

It’s always scary, moving the crust onto the screen. I wanted to see how he handled it. It turns out he usually tosses dough that has been in the fridge, so it’s not as fragile. He was worried about handling the warm dough I made. And he said the warmth made it more likely to get stuck in the screen. That has been a concern of mine; I didn’t know he was using cool dough. My solution has been to spread the sauce with my fingers, which lets me use very little pressure. The more pressure you use, the more likely the dough is to bond with the screen.

I’ve been making insanely thin crusts lately. Usually, there are areas you can see through. So you can imagine how easy it would be to make them stick to the screen. But it works. I used this technique on the pie I made.

The pizza was amazing.

It seems like the pies are better if you let them rise really high, mash them down, and let them rise again. Also, I’m considering putting a tiny amount of olive oil in the dough. I like a tough crust with a little fight in it, so I usually use oil only on the outside.

It’s remarkable how cheap pizza is. Between the Costco cheese and the virtually free sauce, it’s ridiculous. You could make big cheese pizzas every day for a week for something like twenty bucks.

I believe I’ll have one now.