The Lunch Encounter

When I cooked at the Tabard Inn the mid-eighties I had a reputation among the cooks for being able to make lunch specials out of seemingly incompatible odds and ends. As we cleaned out our reach-ins first thing in the day, drinking coffee, blasting music, shouting “I’ve got a some coulis-this and eggplant-jam-that”, the lunch specials codified in our fertile cook’s minds. “I’ll take it!!”, said I, not to anything, but to lots of things, and they all came together in a lunch collage that made perfect, edibly-understood LUNCH.

Dr. Evermor makes sense to me, other than what looks like a missing e. My mind is dogged by the lack of that e. Good for me perhaps, so says Oprah, to be outside of my comfort zone. Little does she know though, that I have never found a comfort zone. That  in itself, must be one. For Dr. Evermor too, one might surmise.

The lunch special last August at the good doctor’s was made of seemingly incompatible odds and ends. Trash, refuse, leftover, orts, till they are brought together. Imagination’s fairy/troll sanitation worker works magic on the stuff, and it is new. Newer than new.

We had been out to Dr. Evermor’s before, but we wanted to go back. Fresh blood was along, and we knew we would see it with fresh eyes. 

The sanctuary is outside Madison, WI. Not a very long drive. A quiet 4-lane. Seems to me that Wisconsin traffic has not kept pace with the east coast. They are not, I repeat NOT, doing their duty in producing greenhouse gases. Sheesh. What shirkers. 

Eating in Madison, A to Z

We walked and smelled the rust and the sun and the clover-grass. Minerals standing on vegetables in the form of animals. Marvelous to marvel over, on and in. Smaller than a bread box and bigger. Very largely hugely manificently bigger.

Our fresh appetites took us by the nose to the Union Terrace for brats and lemonade, a mythic obsession.

The boy may have been born Korean and raised by a mother who is half (the wrong half) Jewish, but he speaks the universal language of brats. All communication is conveyed with a wide-open mouth and a mustard grin.

And the reveal…

Canned Sardinewich

And when she was good, she was very, very good, and when she was bad, she was horrid. Was every kinda mad today about every little thing. And then we went to get pumpkins. So I was bad, very, very bad, and then we went to get pumpkins. Good then, very, very good.

The little things, well, the little things are microcosms of the big things. Don’t sweat the small stuff, sez they. Okay, I can work with that. The catch is – and it’s a catch big enough to fill the hold of a seafarer – the small stuff is often a microcosm of the big stuff. And that, I can’t work with, around or after. I get mad. Horrid.

And when I am good, I am very, very good. Do so love vague cooking instructions. They are, after all, after all the small stuff and all the big stuff, much more precise than precise cooking instructions. Vague cooking instructions such as “At the right cooking point it must be removed from the heat” are quintessentially precise. Smell, listen, let your sense of time tick away methodically, you will know, or you will be checking often to be sure that you know, when the “right cooking point” has arrived. Precisely. I can work with that.

Today was the day to get pumpkins. We knew. And too early for carving. Sprayed down those blue, white, orange, knobby, smooth, and lumpy beasts with hair spray to keep the squirrels from munch, munching, munching them to rot. Squirrels are on the raw food diet and perfect timing is their MO. The thing drops, THUD, a squirrel appears on cue, stage left, chippety, chippety, chippety, munched to mulch and chips. We have seen our jack-o-lanterns disappear from the inside out, squirrels doing the incisored microwave. Wave. Wave bye bye bye.

All by way of saying, everything must be stirred from time to time, and everything must be removed from the heat at the right cooking point. When it’s getting stuck to the bottom, stir it up! When it’s about to boil over, stir it up! When all the good stuff has settled, stir it up! I can work with that. watchit. Watch it. Watch it! WATCH IT! WHATCHIT!! Remove from heat, please. Done. I can work with that.

“I don’t see what’s so odd about spaghetti sandwiches,” says Hachihiro, the older of the Yonekura brothers. “Japanese like them,” he says, eyeing a pile of left-over spaghetti sandwiches from the lunch rush. “Well, at least, some Japanese like them.”

I had a sustaining lunch from Z Burger, giving me the spark to build this ginger thingamajig. Quite proud of the result, part of a series of eleven. More to come, when I am feeling boastful.

Z Burger is not too shabby.

Among the plethora of reasons that my job is not too shabby is the quality of lunch. Always high.

Googie-of-the-Month-Club

Algemac’s Coffee Shop + Dining Room |  Googie Style  |  3673 San Fernando Road  |  City of Glendale  |  California
Googie Style

AT JEWISH DELIS, TIMES ARE AS LEAN AS GOOD CORNED BEEF

Dear Lucky Winners Betty and Aaron,

Your email addresses, Betty and Aaron, as indicated was drawn and

attached to Ref:Save the Deli (STD)/968/06 Batch: 409978E

Ticket Number:008795727498

Serial Numbers /BTD/908064830206 Lucky Pastrami

Properly ID’d ham and cheese eaters

Numbers fmDTY14-21-25- 40-47(20.

Amount won ?1,000,000.00 (One Million Great Britain Pounds of Corned Beef) Please Contact your events manager for fast spreading of the mustard and of your winnings with a copy of your international passport and birth certificate as well as the information bellow.

CLAIMS REQUIREMENTS

*Full Names:…………

*Next of kin

*Matzoh ball soup with or without dill……….

*Date of birth:…………….

*Sex:…………

*Address:… ……..

*Country:………..

*Occupation……

*Preferred pastrami condiment…..

*Fax:……. ………

*Telephone………….

*Ticket Numbers:……………

*Batch Numbers:…………

*Serial Numbers:…………

*Lucky Numbers:………….

Note:you are inform that the claim of your

winning should not exeed

more than one week or your sandwich will be quite moldy.

Sincerely,

Mrs. Finela Williams

Head Customer care Service

See you Wednesday!

With warm congratulations and sincere best wishes,

Your sandwich eating pal, Midnight Snack

How do I put it? Ummmm, gotten any awards lately?

Just happened to be standing in earshot recently and, whaddya know, I got an award. Well, it didn’t play out exactly like that, but within spitting distance. Somebody got an award, somebody went to a party. Not me though, nosirree bob.

Not that I’m complaining. Happy to be home in the evening, although I wouldn’t mind knowing when I had a hand in something that got notice. A person’s gotta wonder, after all these years – say, uh, 24, 25 – how many other awards got by her unmentioned. On the other hand, what was I gonna do with ’em preblog? To whom would I boast? And without the boast, does the award exist? If the statuette topples on a desktop after hours, does it make a sound?

I have seen it, been a while, but I have, I have, I have. Got the wiener whistles to prove it. Aaah, all right, they were sent to me from my Oscar-employed cousin. Have seen it though, hauling righteous ass down 95, clocking 85+, sailing by me. And parked once, out fronta the White House, on the Ellipse, dashboard a righteous mess. M-eh-ssssss. Looked to me like some outsider art car artiste was piloting that land yacht, piles ‘o detritus and voyageur’s ephemera strewn from side-view to side-view, dash nowhere to be seen.

I saw it! In the mail! Snail mail! Actual paper. How archaic, how positively earthbound, how sensuously reassuring. A paper cut upon opening. Actual blood. I got a card, a TV dinner card, from my friend. 33 1/3 sent it from Chicago. She sez her fridge sent the sticker to my fridge, but I believe there was human intervention, particularly in the task of stamp moistening. Thank you, from the bottom of my detritus-lovin’, earthbound, ephemera-filled heart.

Do so love the wiener mobile. The name itself incapsulates all that we need to love about human life. Wieners. So basic. So necessary. So essential to human drive. Mobile. Change. Movement. Possibility. So basic for humans to want to drive.

October 8, 2009, 2:57 PM
Ben Ali, King of the Half-Smoke, Is Dead at 82
By SAM SIFTON

There is perhaps no better way to end a punk-rock evening in Washington, D.C., than with a brisk walk up from the 9:30 Club to the bright lights of Ben’s Chili Bowl, home of the chili-laden half-smoke sausage, for a snack. (President Obama prefers it for lunch.) So it is with sad eyes that we report the death of Ben Ali, the Trinidad-born restaurant genius who founded the place in 1958. Order up!

He Added Spice to Our Lives
The Washington Post front page October 9, 2009

Just in from Lunch Encounter penpal David Kmetz:

I took advantage of an early departure from the outer end of Long Island yesterday to stop at a local farm stand I pass every time I visit and they had some monster heirloom tomatoes for sale. I believe these are “Marble Striped”, based on a good match to the photo in “The Heirloom Tomato – From Garden to Table” by Amy Goldman.

Addendum: It is “Marvel Striped”, not Marble Stripe. Still…. one great tom.

Here is my modest photo attempt at capturing the bounty – I picked up some great grape varieties too, as well as radishes. The farm stand is “Latham’s” at the end of the causeway heading towards Orient Point, NY. The yellow one at the bottom weighs in a 1 lb. 4 oz…

Attempting to capture bounty is futile, one would think. That’s just it about bounty, it cannot be corralled. Amplitude is its name, overflowing is its game. Gather ye tomatoes while ye may, and if it be near to a hard frost, take in the green ones. Down the basement, cover them with newspapers. And then comes winter.