The Lunch Encounter

to suffer. By saying that I realize I have just driven off 87.7% of my friends.

Need I list December’s shortcomings? Hours of daylight, disposable dollars and time enough with the ones you miss are all in such glaringly short supply. No one wants to be reminded.

This time of year I suffer. Ghastly. The perfect malatov cocktail of joy and grief. Ghastly only comes in two flavors. So good it’s bad. So bad it’s good.

Proximity has no bearing on intensity in my life. You/it/whatever may be long ago and/or faraway and I can miss you/it/whatever with all my heart.

Could a happy sandwich be the antidote?

Happy Solstice!

Sandwich Soft Book
From The Spoonflower Fabric Designs Pool

Very cute. I can get sucked in just like the best of us. Babies, toddlers, kids. They are cute as buttons and we want them to eat right. And to eat well. And then they make you crazy. About 8 years in you think you will go mad – at least I do – from cooking so plain. Lord how I miss food with green specks.

Here’s how I cope. In your pantry you must keep these things:

Roasted pepper relish
Thinly sliced garlic slowly steeped in olive oil till golden
Red pepper flakes
Preserved lemons, minced
Sriracha
Anchovies mashed with mustard and lemon

And in the fridge it never hurts to have Italian parsley – just tear those leaves up and drop ’em all over your plate, basil – same thing, and horseradish.

Spoon, drizzle, sprinkle, smear these things liberally on foods so plain you want to cry – delicious until the 11148th time – such as mashed potatoes, pasta, pizza, eggs, grilled cheese, white rice and toast.

My not-so-secret kitchen survival tip #103.

Liver Mush:

Pork liver, pork broth, pork fat, pork rind, corn meal, wheat flour, rice flour, salt, spices, caramel color.

It is not that bad, really. All things pork and liver and mush are good with me. Respect the pig and all beasts who die to feed us. The only thing I question in an essential way is the caramel color, although I imagine it is made by caramelizing vegetables and stuff, just like Kitchen Bouquet. Unnecessary, but benign. The rest of it may be largely filler for the body and I take no issue with harmless calories. Working so hard, damn if I don’t need ’em.

And mush…well, mush is one of the best words in the English language. Not used enough in loving descriptions.

I can’t love you enough.
You soak up all of my stuff.
You’re such sponge to my mu-ush.
I can’t love you enough.

PS From Malcolm (this is covered in a comment, but I am reiterating it here for emphasis):
Liver mush is just one name for it … the other may be even worse: Liver PUDDING. They call it scrapple “up north.” But I actually like this stuff. Slice it and fry it with butter, eat between two pieces of toasted Merita white bread. Mustard and lettuce make it great, even a little mayo.

And, he continues

When I was a kid, there were only two brands of bread: Sunbeam and Merita. Sunbeam was pitched as the bread without holes in it, whereas Merita was more coarse (and better) but my mom would only buy Sunbeam. There was also Roman Meal, but that was “diet bread” so we never ate that.

Let us now praise lefse. Potatoes are a food with broad shoulders – delicious, nutritious, easy to grow, versatile. Did you know you can live on potatoes, practically? So says my mother. She even takes it so far as to claim that you can practically live on potato chips. Explains the Irish potato famine. Too much dependence on one crop.
 
1. With a little butter.
2. With a little more butter.
3. With lots of butter.

Which came first, the potato or the cow?

Among the seven of us we have three griddles, six pins, six turning sticks, three rolling boards and countless pin sleeves, courtesy of my mother who shops in the midwest each summer. Pretty much no one wants to roll except three of us. So we do. I like the zen of rolling. Ella has the soul of a lefse roller, very calm and quiet. I store up that part of my soul for an entire year each year, to be milked dry annually when we make lefse for Christmas.

Uff da! You can say that again. Chipped Beef and Cheez Whiz. Saves on pots and pans. Open, heat and eat. Oooooph dah.

A good all meat weiner. Does it really say ALL MEAT? Okay. I’m down with that, although I go for a little filler. Freeze for future use?? Say what? Say why?!?

A hundred pieces of brown-spotted, translucent, noodle-tender lefse later…

…we sat down….

…for hot tea and stollen, as any Scandinavian worth their weight in potatoes would do.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

Artware Editions makes a lovely self-adhesive Christmas tree that stores conveniently in a tube from year to year. Appropriate, and reusable, trimmings includethis realistic sandwich sticker and this breakfast biscuit sticker which is not so tiny in real life. (Seeing as I have the patience of a flea with things computer, the miniscule image is my best effort.)

Quite sure my short patience span has been registered in bold for decades at the north pole. Not expecting a motherlode under my tree. The beauty of a flat tree? Under-the-tree gift domain does not exist.

Aaaaaiiiiiieeeeeee!

Man Vs. Food is a funny name, sorta, and not. Don’t like to think of food as part of a battle, but must admit food often presents a challenge. Too big, too weird, too expensive, too, too, too. Sometimes, as my friend Jane says, “It is all too much”. (She wasn’t talking about food, but no point in splitting hairs.)

At any rate, Man Vs. Food is a Food Network show that I am supposed to be watching. Monday night they featured a middle-of-the-country size sandwich, the Dagwood at Ohio Deli in Columbus. In my house it is Humans Vs. TV so we do not have cable. The humans were ahead at last count.

My eyes were opened to Columbus by That Tall Handsome Sandwich Man in Ohio who posted about the Thurman Cafe a while back. Columbus has Nancy’s, Jeni’s Ice Cream, Pistacia Vera and Rosendale’s, for example.

When the Olestra chip was debuted, focus panels were run first in Columbus. Those smart Ohioans rejected Olestra and that is good enough for me.

It is!
Especially when country ham is on the menu.


Finch’s is the sort of restaurant about which I fantasize. When my car is pointed down some freeway, tearing towards a work gig, I imagine continuing on and on and on, radio stations easing from static to clear and back to static again. Well, I’ll be darned! Before coming to my senses I’ve pulled into Finch’s parking lot, seven hours from home.

When you walk in to my fantasy joint you are neither ignored nor acknowledged, you are just there, as though you have been a well-oiled, solidly performing fixture for a decade. Heads don’t turn away from their grits and eggs. Comfort in that.

Photos by Heidi Leech, weekend partner in crimes and dishdemeanors.

During the week Heidi is working her fingers, brains and the TV tubes. All that industry will produce an appetite in a girl, making for a superb traveling companion. We were in Finch’s together, a trio with Coffee Monkey, the morning after a Bottle Rockets show at the Berkeley Cafe in Raleigh.

While I can’t say for sure Finch’s pulls a strong draw should you crave a sandwich, I can promise you that your thick, oval breakfast plate will yield a large enough ham harvest to cover two meals. Got some bread on ya around noon? You’re all set, darlin. Dig around in your pockets for a bit of onion to stand up to the salt and that sandwich will turn you inside-out with yakkety yak good taste.

Were I to serve a
BLT Cocktail
someone might say I am a F**d**.

Could never live that down in the household of my snobbish, no-trend-too- precious-to-disdain, prideful self. Althoououugh…..a post-modern, chI-cHI-CHI-baby, BLT Cocktail sounds tas-teeeee.

Baconsalt rimmed glass, icy tomato-lettuce coulis and a crunch-diddy-um-delicious toast point on the bevnap. Okay! But we’re gonna have to wait till next summer.

No way. No how. No chance. Nosirree.

In December I will return. With an agenda.
The Duck Room.
The St Paul Sandwich. At Park Chop Suey perhaps.
Gioia’s Hot Salami Yowza.
Toasted Ravioli.
The Slinger, an entire breakfast covered in chili. I believe this can be had at the Diner Grill on Irving Park Road. The word is, it it’s the drunk’s late night friend. Sounds it. Double yowza.

Lord have mercy, it’s December already. December 2008! The year evaporated.