Are you a member of the

Clean Sandwich Plate Club?

Card carrying? If so, read on.

If no – honesty please – close this tab and get back to your online bill paying.

I was here, at Hoosier Mama, with my mama, in Chicago, after a long walk. Insistence and persistence are one of my most annoying specialties, particularly in pursuit of food. Relentless foraging. My mama, bless her pie-loving, 84-year-old-tomorrow heart, is always always always game. No joke.

She said it was the best banana cream pie she had ever eaten. This from the woman who, as a child, carried pie making ingredients from the basement every morning at 5 am, to her mother who baked them, over the years, during The Great Depression, into 14 thousand pies. Sold for 25 cents each.

The same woman who won a 4-H blue ribbon for her lemon meringue. She just makes pie. Nothing precious about it.

Her dad could sit down and eat pie on demand. “There’s always room for pie,” said he, and put his mouth where his money was. My grandpa was a lovable skinny dude, with a righteous appetite.

In turn my mother taught me to bake pie, and I became adept at it in high school, carrying warm apple pies to the occasional sweet boy who caught my eye. I have no fear of pieing. None. Thank you, Mom. Happy Birthday!

Deluxe!

Having a slow Saturday this holiday weekend at the Lunch Encounter. It is just too beautiful to be inside. So here I am, radio playing, counter spanking clean, orders placed, now what? Let’s clean the walk-in!

Rooting around in the basement, I came upon this post that sprung from a styling gig I had involving Oreo cookies. Wondering about the origin of the word Oreo, I had done a bit of research.

Oreo comes from the Greek root for appetizing as in orexin or orexigenic (appetite stimulating). And while I was at it, online and all, I wandered, uncovering Judith G Klausner, her amazing Oreo art and incredible embroidered toast. Toast!

I felt the need to blog (translate as “blurt), and to alert the Snitters of Knitwitz. Suits–Herself–Cindy, a snitter who does not knit, grabbed the thread and followed it to thisiscolossal.com where she encountered this open-faced sandwich.

Beauty is often found in the most unlikely and overlooked places.

Artist Judith G. Klauser of Somerville finds her inspiration in small, everyday objects that easily recede into the background. In the past, she’s worked with insects, baby teeth and fingernails. She also works with food. Specifically, processed food.

In a series called “From Scratch,” Klauser uses Oreo cookies to make finely detailed cameos (she sculpts the frosting with toothpicks, pins and a sculpture stick); cereal, for her elaborate cross-stitch samplers; toast, as a base for embroidery and condiments, such as ketchup and mustard; and paint, to create wallpaper.

I’ve done some experiments making silhouettes using American cheese and decided I wanted to do something more detailed…the cheese can take it. My experiments involved letting the cheese sit out, unrefrigerated, to see what happened to the slices. It turns out they actually behave like Shrinky Dinks. If you leave American cheese out for months, it shrinks and hardens. It’s a little alarming in a food substance, but it certainly works well for me.

Read more here.

Judith G Klausner is a genius, a brilliant food artist, and I want to be her.

Why Do Sandwiches Taste Better When Someone Else Makes Them?
By Daniel Kahneman
New York Times, October 2, 2011

When you make your own sandwich, you anticipate its taste as you’re working on it. And when you think of a particular food for a while, you become less hungry for it later. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, for example, found that imagining eating M&Ms makes you eat fewer of them. It’s a kind of specific satiation, just as most people find room for dessert when they couldn’t have another bite of their steak. The sandwich that another person prepares is not “preconsumed” in the same way.

From Sorry-Birds Ellen
Thank you! What would I do without you? I shudder to imagine.

Not to be snarky, but is snarky a word?  Let’s say it is. Not to be snarky, but, duh. Really? Don’t ya know that food tastes so much better when someone else makes it? Actually, I don’t always feel that way. After traveling, I like to MAKE MY OWN FOOD.

In a daily drone, done-working, drudgery situation, I want food that I have never seen or touched or smelled. Not that I would eat dinner from 7-11.

I get the “preconsumed” thing, as disgusting as that sounds. Like something a baby bird might eat after momma bird regurgitates it. Ack. Did I just type regurgitate?

At a party recently, standing around in the kitchen with a bunch of “food people”, chefs and stuff, I said, unfortunately, “Aren’t you just so sick of food?” Hahaha. Awk-ward. They all said, with quizzically furrowed brows, “Uh…no.” Whoopsie. I was the only one still working lots and lots of hours, with my hands in food. Smelling it, feeling it, preconsuming it.

Fix me a sandwich, wouldya honey? And make it a surprise.

GOOD

You will click on GOOD if you know what’s good for you.
Funny, I just had the Bobbie at Capriotti’s in Wilmington,DE last week.

Thank you, Michele, for the cool link!

Once upon a time, in my fantasy life, Teddy and I lived in Madison, Wisconsin,

and certain rules applied, my rules.
1. We could eat at Lazy Jane’s any time we felt like it.

2. No one was allowed to use these phrases: broken family, intact family, or a child of your own.  Being PC was so in it was out and it meshed with Incorrect, so none  applied – correct, incorrect, discorrect, uncorrect, or just plain wrong. Or right. And everyone used their turn indicators. For right turns. And left turns.

3. A beauty salon  trust fund was awarded to me. UnLtd.

4. French fries and potato chips became super foods.

5. Video and computer games disappeared forever ~poof~ into vapor.

6. Big hot breakfasts were mandatory.

7. The human population, at large, recognized the genius of comic books.

8. Time stood still, for me only, while the world slept.

We lived in Madison, in complete denial about the sad state of certain aspects of the world,
and our ignorance was bliss.

We were in such a far left dream that we rounded the circle to being right

and we were similar to those who fear anything different,

in that we wanted to only be with people who seemed just like us.

And it felt good.

The fantasy, like most fantasies probably, was extremely flawed. For one thing, one huge thing, we couldn’t figure out who, if anyone, was just like us. Therein lay the rub. Fantasies always have a rub. Phew.

So we stayed. On the east coast, not the midwest. In occasionally blissful reality. The rules push us around and we bend. Living happily and daftly ever after.

Take it! No one has given it to you? Take it!

It’s there all around you, as breathable as air.

Breathable, edible, reliable.

Comfort is a commodity, about like diamonds. No market value without the artificial value bestowed upon it by, um, the market. It’s there.  You are swimming in it all day and night. Take it!

Oh yeah, by the way, I did the styling for this book, and took comfort in going to work, coming home and liking it. Robyn Webb, the author, reigns. Pure professional comfort. Peer comfort.