Don’t Forget the Founder of the Feast

Tell me you don’t love America. It’s Thanksgiving morning, and the kitchen smells like oranges. And it’s not because I’ve been making cranberry relish. It’s because I used Flush-Out to clean one of my rifles on the dining room table. Are there scenes like this in homes in Europe? Not many, I’ll bet.

I think things are going okay on this end. The turkey is odd-looking, but I think the brining will fix it up. I considered adding baking soda to the brine, because the dark meat of organic hippie turkeys is said to have a fishy flavor that needs to be killed. I changed my mind because I didn’t want to take the flavor out of the white meat.

Because our nation is a mess and we have just elected a socialist President, who will exacerbate things if he succeeds in implementing his policies, this is a very important Thanksgiving. People don’t think of Thanksgiving as a religious holiday, but it’s a day dedicated to thanking God. We have been very ungrateful, and we have insisted on doing our own thing, and my belief is that our current problems are caused by our foolishness and rebellion.

The purpose of this day is to thank God for the abundance and security with which we have been blessed. I hope everyone who reads this will join me in remembering who gave us families, homes, and all this glorious food.

Happy Thanksgiving.

I KNEW It

I decided to log in to the Cook’s Illustrated site to get the lowdown on fresh turkeys, and wouldn’t you know, they turned out to be the worst turkeys available?

Here’s the scoop. Turkeys have to be dropped to 26 degrees after slaughter, even if they’re sold as fresh. At that temperature, the water in the meat freezes, but the meat does not. Supposedly. While your local ripoff upscale grocery tries to keep the bird cold without freezing it hard, it is likely to undergo a bunch of cycles in which ice crystals form inside it and thaw. They break up the meat so it doesn’t hold water when you cook it.

On top of that, fresh turkeys tend to be spoiled. They get more exercise than factory birds, so they’re in better physical condition, and that adds up to tough meat.

Great. I hate it when a turkey turns out to be a challenge. My practice is to buy the cheapest factory bird I can find, and my turkeys are always perfect. Now I have a mutant Greenpeace bird that may taste like a brick.

Yuppies are never right about ANYTHING.

If you can find it, you want a fatty turkey. That means you don’t want the breed most packers use. You want a breed called Heritage.

If you have a fresh turkey, get it into some brine NOW. SCHNELL! And don’t buy one next year, unless you think expensive + bad = good deal.

The turkeys they liked best were Walters Hatchery (Heritage turkey) and Rubashkin’s Aaron’s Best.

Next Year, Bring on the Hormones and Antibiotics

The cornbread is magnificent. I managed to avoid eating more than one slice, and I decided to give Marv and Maynard a piece of the action. Now I’m fixing pecan pies.

I like pecan pie, but there is something basically wrong with eating a pie which is mostly sugar. It’s just an odd thing to choose to do. These should be pretty good. I jacked up the butter, and I added JD. I used Kirkland pecans. So the blessing of Costco is upon my pies.

I am going to brine the turkey. I just don’t trust all-natural meat.

Oh boy. I’m worried. I just read an article suggesting my fears are justified. It says fresh turkeys can be bland and “heavy,” whatever that means. Dang it. I knew better than to take a hormone-free bird grown by filthy hippies at face value.

I may as well get to it.

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.