Category: Cooking

Cheezus

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 14 Comments
Is it just me, or do those look like tiny orange … uh … never mind.

Earlier this month, when Wirecutter ran a piece headlined “The Best Boxed Macaroni and Cheese,” I knew it was only the first course.

Today, behold the return of (drumroll, please) … Hamburger Helper!

Writing in The New York Times, proprietor of Wirecutter, food-industry reporter Julie Creswell tells us:

While most food companies are seeing declines in consumer demand for their products, sales of Hamburger Helper are up 14.5 percent in the year through August, getting an extra bump from its appearance on an episode of “The Bear” in June, according to the company that owns the brand, Eagle Foods.

And it’s not just because people are nostalgic for the good old Seventies, Creswell observes. Now, as then, the cost of food consumed at home is up considerably — 21 percent from four years ago — and the prices of beef, coffee, and many fruits and vegetables are likewise rising.

Thus Hungry America returns to Bullshit in a Box to keep their guts from greasing their backbones. Here’s Sally Lyons Wyatt, who advises packaged food companies at the research firm Circana:

“Cost-of-living expenses are up. Eating and drinking expenses are up. Consumers are looking for foods that fill them up for the least amount of money.”

More reporting like this, please. Americans may not care whether Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel still have jobs, but they might get sick of (or from) eating Yellow No. 5 with Extra Sodium three meals a day.

If you’re trying to cut corners as our “leaders” focus on the culture wars rather than cuisine, might I recommend Pierre Franey’s turkey chili? Herself and I can get three or four meals out of that one, spooned atop bowls of rice and sprinkled with crushed corn chips, cilantro, a sharpish cheddar, and a squeeze of lime.

Likewise this simple bolognese from Giada de Laurentiis. We got three servings apiece out of that one this week, over egg noodles, and then spread the remainder on a couple of corn pizza shells from Vicolo. Topped it with grated mozzarella and parmesan with a scattering of crushed red pepper.

But if you simply must have mac and cheese, well, take a whack at Bob Sloan’s recipe from “Dad’s Own Cookbook.”

And then tell the Dick Tater that he can eat shit. Hell, he already does.

Phone home

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments
The Grand Wazoo meets Elena Gallegos.

Full moon? Two consecutive days of medium-hot posole for dinner? Whatever … Herself and I both had weird dreams last night that seemed to peak around 2 this morning.

In these dreams both of us had lost our phones. Herself was able to borrow one to have an extended chat with her dead mom.

I had a gun, which trumps the phone in anyone’s game. You got a gun, you can talk to anyone and they have to listen. That’s a call doesn’t go to voicemail, y’follow me, Skeezix?

I was talking to someone in a Batman mask without the ears.

Hoo-boy.

To flush that out of my skull I went for a 5K run right after toast and coffee, lifted weights when I got home, and following a more substantial breakfast hit the Elena Gallegos to ride a few trails I’ve been neglecting.

If that doesn’t hit the reset button I don’t know what will.

The usual nightmares continue in DeeCee, of course. But we can’t blame them on posole. Maybe the moon. …

Melting pot

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 25 Comments
Mom’s chili, a staple of my childhood. It’s good … but I prefer Pierre Franey’s version.

I was idly cooking up a pot of Pierre Franey’s turkey chili yesterday when some doglike portion of my brain not focused on the task at hand hopped the wall and came back with a bone for me to gnaw.

It was the Fourth of July. I was preparing a meal of Mexican origin that Texas claims as its own (along with a sizable portion of Mexico) using a Frenchman’s recipe in a New Mexican kitchen.

Mom’s recipe. You can see it’s got a lot of miles on it.

This particular recipe was “fairly traditional,” according to Franey, and not so very different from my Iowa-born mother’s take on the dish, which dates back to the O’Grady family’s stint on Randolph AFB at San Antonio, circa 1962-67. But Franey’s version uses turkey instead of beef, with a particular season in mind — not the Fourth of July, but Thanksgiving, which is when his recipe was published in The New York Times in 1992.

Franey’s journey to a quick, simple, and delicious chili recipe certainly took the scenic route, if we use his biography as our map. As a young man he left France to join “an impressive team of cooks” at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. When World War II erupted a few years later, he took another job — with the U.S. Army.

Offered a cushy berth as personal chef to Gen. Douglas McArthur, Franey declined, saying he’d rather help his countrymen fight Nazis in France. Thus, after boot camp at Fort McClellan in Alabama, he shipped out to Europe as a machine gunner, rising to the rank of sergeant and collecting a Purple Heart for his troubles.

After the war, Franey went on to work with Craig Claiborne on recipes and restaurant reviews for the NYT, and in 1975 hung out his own shingle there as “The 60-Minute Gourmet.” A decade later he was cooking on public television, too.

Imagine that.

What might an 18-year-old Pierre Franey encounter upon his arrival in today’s America? An immigrant … and from France? Taking American jobs? Willing, even eager, to fight Nazis rather than serve his betters in the kitchen?

He’d be in a Salvadoran slammer before he could get his apron on. And without machine-gunning any Nazis, more’s the pity. If the kid could channel the Pierre Franey from that other timeline I expect his 1942 self would be astonished that 83 years later we’re fighting brownshirts in America as Lady Liberty hides her face in shame.

Me, I’d still be using Mom’s chili recipe. Which is fine. But it takes a lot more time, and runs light on peppers and long on tomatoes.

Summer simmer

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 20 Comments
Scattered sprinkles, widespread haze, sunny and hot, sez the forecast for the first day of summer.

It was already 75° when we got up at 5:30 to greet the first day of summer. Helluva note when you open the doors and windows to let the cool morning air stream in and the air conditioning clicks on.

The wind was likewise in business, too, so Herself and I decided to go for a short trail run instead of a ride. We’d spent a couple hours yesterday cycling through the foothills and saw all the quail, from solos to pairs to coveys with adults herding thumb-sized offspring.

Today was my first run in a couple weeks so I wasn’t exactly crushing it. Still, it felt good to be lumbering along without all that specialized kit and machinery. Just shorts, shirt, and shoes. Put one foot in front of the other and try not to fall down.

CenturyLink fell down yesterday. Or Lumen did. AT&T? Whatever the hell that outfit is calling itself these days. You should’ve heard what we and the rest of its customers nationwide were calling it yesterday when it went tits up for the better part of quite some time and even the minimalist corporate website vanished like civil rights in an ICE storm.

We’ve been trained by bitter experience not to bother fencing with CenturyLumen’s chatbots and “live agents.” Instead we used our Verizon iPhones as hotspots and never missed a beat, even streaming a couple episodes from season three of “The Bear” as preparation for season four, which kicks off June 25.

Speaking of cussing, anybody who thinks I swear overmuch in the kitchen should check out “The Bear.” That crowd makes me sound like Nate Bargatze doing crowd work at a Southern Baptist picnic, even when I accidentally oversalt the arugula pesto, like I did last night.

It wasn’t quite like eating seaweed straight from the ocean, but it wasn’t exactly Michelin-star-level dining either, chef.

Monday, Monday. …

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 19 Comments
Splish splash, I wasn’t takin’ no bath. …

It’s been one of those Mondays.

Monday is a watering day. But the forecast called for rain, so early this morning I went out to shut off the irrigation system.

“Huh,” I thought. “Doesn’t look like rain to me.” So I left it on.

Monday is also Geezer Ride Day. So, naturally about the time the watering was done, the clouds started creeping in and the wind began ramping up.

“Huh,” I thought. “Better bail on the ride.” Which I did.

Monday is not Grocery Day. That would be Sunday. But I blew off Sunday’s grocery shopping for a two-hour bike ride in the wind plus a meet-and-greet with the mayor and a few dozen of his supporters.

So suddenly Monday was Grocery Day. And off I toddled to the Sprouts at Tramway and Central, en route nearly getting croaked by a street racer who roared up behind me in the right lane, then shot into the left and around me, barely missing both me and the dude slightly ahead of me in the left lane.

He then swerved onto the shoulder to pass everyone else in sight at about 25 mph over the 50-mph limit, which encouraged another jackass to do likewise, scattering dust, gravel, and debris from previous eejit-triggered crashes across the traffic lanes.

It happened so fast, in so much traffic, that I couldn’t grab the iPhone for a shot of either license plate. And it wasn’t the first time I’d wished I had some other sort of shooter with a tad more authority, like a Browning Hi-Power or a Colt 1911. I mean, you can’t AirDrop one or both of the silly sonsabitches.

Anyway, I got to the grocery without being killed to death, and only then did I notice that I’d left my grocery list at home.

“Huh,” I thought. “Maybe I can do it off the old internal hard drive.”

And I did! Didn’t miss a single item, and even picked up a bonus packet of ground turkey for a chili con carne in case the weather turned ugly.

Which of course it did, since I’d decided earlier to water the lawn. Our widget makes it 0.08 inch of precip slashing down sideways out of the north, and I expect that statistic does not include the hail.

“Huh,” I thought. “I suppose a run is out.” Which it was.

So instead of running, since a few of you seemed to enjoy our little Tour of Memory Lane, I decided to spend a couple hours collecting and posting PDFs of a few of my Adventure Cyclist reviews.

Naturally, I couldn’t find the one about the Rivendell Sam Hillborne, the bike I was riding in yesterday’s wind-fest (13 mph with gusts to 23). If I recall correctly, that one didn’t make the print magazine, but was posted to the Adventure Cyclist blog, where it languishes behind the membership paywall.

“Huh,” I thought. “I bet I have my original copy on another Mac.” And I do.

But I’m not gonna post it. Not yet. I got chili to cook.