Cheezus

September 20, 2025 ~ 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.

Melting pot

July 5, 2025 ~ 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.

Chili today, hot tamale

January 27, 2022 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 2 Comments

I don’t remember when or where I first heard that old gag. “Chili today, hot tamale.” It sounds like something the old man would’ve said.

He picked up some Spanish down in Panama and he’d toss fragments of it at me and my sis as a call-and-response joke come bedtime. We had to repeat each phrase after he uttered it. (“Repitan ustedes.”)

“Hasta la vista.”

“¿Como se llama?”

“Buenos noches.”

This last became “Buenos snowshoes” at some point. Lord, what white people will do to someone else’s language.

Anyway, it’s chilly today, so I plan to make chili today, from a Pierre Franey recipe. No tamales, though. Eso es demasiado como el trabajo.