Category: Food

Tarting up the rice

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments
Fresh from the Yonsei University candy kitchens. Photograph: Yonsei University/PA

One of the fathers of the Pop-Tart, a staple from my childhood, has gone west.

William Post, who died Saturday at 96 in Grand Rapids, Mich., led the bakery plant that developed the first Pop-Tarts for Kellogg’s in 1964, according to his son, Dan.

Post was a hands-on sort who used his kids to test-drive the early prototypes — some good, some not so good — and once he got them dialed in, well, it was off to the races. Today, for good or ill, sales are in the billions.

One wonders what Post might have done if some Suit brought him the idea for “hybrid rice” — traditional rice grains slathered in fish gelatin, seeded with skeletal beef muscle and fat stem cells, and then grown in a lab.

Professor Jinkee Hong, who actually brought this Frankenrice to life at Yonsei University in South Korea, was hoping to develop a protein source more affordable than traditional beef, with a smaller carbon hoofprint.

After cooking and tasting his creation the professor said it “retains its traditional appearance but carries a unique blend of aromas, including a slight nuttiness and umami which are characteristic of meat.”

“While it does not exactly replicate the taste of beef, it offers a pleasant and novel flavor experience,” he added. “We tried it with various accompaniments and it pairs well with a range of dishes.”

Hm. Maybe so. I suspect it might have been one of those tough sells around the Post family table. But as a perpetually famished skinny-ass kid who inhaled everything from Tang to Space Food Sticks to Hamburger Helper to sammiches of Wonder Bread, pasteurized/processed “cheese food” and Oscar Meyer braunschweiger (in a tube!), I might have given it a go.

Hold the Beef-Rice Pop-Tarts, though. Ain’t enough Taster’s Choice in the world.

Tea time

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments

Getting mugged.

My morning routine changes with the seasons.

Come autumn, the first part of the day is always the hardest — getting out of bed.

Hey, it’s dark out there, man. What am I, a farmer?

Stagger to the bathroom, dispose of the next item on the agenda, pull on some clothes — the past couple mornings, with temps in the low 40s, this means a T-shirt and lightly trail-shredded Patagucci joggers, not my ancient, decaying Columbia shorts — and shuffle into the kitchen to mumble “Hell’s goin’ on in here?” to Herself and Miss Mia Sopaipilla, who do not object to early rising and consider Your Humble Narrator a hopeless slacker.

Next there must be strong black coffee, and the morning news, which is mostly what you might expect from an afterlife peek at the front page of The Lake of Fire Cauldron-Inferno (“The Hell You Say!”).

A slice apiece of homemade whole-wheat toast with Irish butter and French jam helps soak up the acid (avoid those stomach ulcers, kids!). And then breakfast gets serious.

This time of year it’s likely to be hot oatmeal with a dash of brown sugar, maple syrup, cinnamon, dried fruit and nuts, plus a tall mug of tea. Yogurt, müesli, and smoothies are generally summertime fare, while eggs with taters and chicken sausage have been more of a lunch than a breakfast in recent years.

Just now as I was finishing my tea I heard a thunk! in the living room that couldn’t be attributed to an old house slowly warming as the sun peeks over the Sandias.

It was a dove taking a header into the picture window — they will do that, especially if the neighborhood Cooper’s hawk is clocked in and on the job — but this one apparently augured in without assistance.

Dazed, the bird squatted on the landscaping rocks, blinking like an old computer slowly booting up. Slowly, the frantic breathing became more regular; next, the head swung first this way, then that; and poof! Liftoff, straight up into the backyard maple.

No harm, no foul. Fowl? No, the sun may finally be up, but it’s still too early for cheap jokes.

April fuel

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments

Half of the ingredients for guacamole toast, plus the obligatory mug of joe.

We were down to one avocado and it didn’t look good.

I had just sliced it into halves when the dreaded brown spots made their presence known.

So I showed it to Herself, our resident avocado whisperer.

“Doesn’t look good,” I ventured. She agreed. What the hell, Miss Mia Sopaipilla is not into the morning guacamole anyway. She prefers a lick or two or three of a butter-smeared finger.

But when I went back to the kitchen with the dubious avocado I thought, “No, goddamnit, avocados cost, what, five bucks apiece? There’s gotta be enough edible flesh on this bad boy to spread on a couple pieces of toast.”

So I performed some reductive surgery on it, tossed the salvageable bits into a bowl with lime, salt, onion, and tomato, and hey presto! Guacamole for toast. No foolin’.

Oh, snap

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 24 Comments

An iPhone camera on full zoom is no match for a backlit hawk at daybreak.

Now and then I wish I still had a real camera. Like this morning, when I saw our friendly neighborhood Cooper’s hawk perched in a tree across the arroyo from El Rancho Pendejo.

He was looking for breakfast, and I was looking for … well, for what, I’m not certain. I wander a bit in the morning, peering through windows without my glasses on while muttering to Herself, Miss Mia Sopaipilla, and the voices in my head between large mugs of strong black coffee and small doses of the news.

Yesterday afternoon I was looking for dinner, and it was surprising how many basic items I was having trouble finding, even with my glasses on.

Eggs were back at Wholeazon Amafoods, so that long national nightmare seems to be at an end for the moment.

But the seafood counter was bare. Emp-ty. As in nothing atall atall. Maybe all the delicious fishies were booked on Southwest? Beats me. But I needed a half pound of shrimp for jambalaya and I waddn’t gon’ get it, me.

Also, the only andouille available had already been tried and found wanting; there was no basil for bolognese, unless you like your basil in huge plastic tubs when what you need is eight leaves; and there were no radishes for the salads, in tubs or otherwise.

Wow, this is really blossoming into a First World Problem, I thought. Someone should write a stern letter to the editor.

Somehow I managed to drop a couple hundy anyway before shoving off to Sprouts, where they had a single packet of basil, but in an unattractive shade of brown. Still, their sausage and shrimp were suitable, so, winning.

Sans basil, the bolognese is on the back burner for now. But the jambalaya turned out fine, lots better than what the Squeaker of the House is going to have to eat for the next two years.

But then again, maybe he likes the taste.

Bugged

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments

Tea and oatmeal. Yum, yum. Maybe not.

Have you ever noticed that when you get sick, there’s no restorative food in the house, especially if you feel like maybe you could eat a little sumpin’-sumpin’?

If you’ve caught a stomach bug and have trouble keeping air down, as was the case the last time I fell ill in November 2019, you have all manner of delicious items rotting in the fridge because you dassn’t even think about food or it’s back to The Big White Telephone for another call to your old pal Ralph. Or worse.

But if it’s a case of Snotlocker Surprise, like the one Herself fetched back from Maryland via flying aluminum test tube, the cupboards are practically guaranteed to be bare.

I thought I had dodged this particular bullet, but nope. Shortly after the sis-in-law flew home I was hacking in harmony with Herself, thankful that the gals had loaded up on Kleenex during a trip to Costco and sleeping — well, “not sleeping” would be more accurate — in the spare room.

The Boss is past it now, it seems, and has toddled off to work. But I’m stuck here, making “Andromeda Strain” noises, slurping cups of hot tea, and wishing I had made a pot of chicken soup instead of turkey chili, which is pretty much it for medicinal purposes around here unless you count the bottle of Herradura Silver tequila hidden away behind the breadmaker, which I do not. I don’t think there’s a lick of chicken in there.

In case you’re wondering, given the events of the past couple of weeks, yes, indeed, I did take a COVID test and it was negativo, as we say south of the border. This means exactly jack shit, of course, but I’m going with it because this bug feels familiar. It has caught me between grocery trips before.