Ratatouille Revisited

About nine years ago, I posted about my first time making ratatouille, based Emeril's recipe. I've more or less winged it since then, after quickly checking that initial recipe for reference, achieving decent results several times and screwing up once or twice. (I remember one version being "death by thyme." But I was getting ready to move and I didn't want to have to pack fresh thyme, so ... anyway.)

Yesterday, I made a yummy version of ratatouille that was loaded with ingredients that aren't listed in the recipe. So, maybe it's not really ratatouille. Since it was just for me, I figured no one would judge me if I just put in what I wanted, and that was a lot of stuff. But now I'm telling the internet about it, so I guess I'll be judged after all. Whatever.

I went shopping for the ingredients on Wednesday and started prepping when I got home from work on Thursday. I was unsurprised (having done this before) that the prep took about an hour. I snacked a bit between tasks and while the dish was cooking, since dinner was coming up later than usual for me. And of course, I knew that I'd end up with enough food to feed six, or myself from Thursday through Tuesday, so it wasn't as if saving my appetite was crucial. Nevertheless, when I dug in, I found it pretty darn good.

Of course I got all (well, most) of the orthodox ingredients: a small eggplant, a yellow squash, a zucchini, four Roma tomatoes, a medium yellow onion, bell peppers (one each red, yellow and orange), a couple bulbs of garlic, and a bunch of ... oops. Here's where my brain farted, and I brought home a bunch of fresh rosemary instead of thyme. It's hard to reckon how I made that mistake. But I intentionally omitted the parsley and basil because I felt that the one herb would be plenty.

And then, I went a little mad and bought several things that aren't in ratatouille as it has been transmitted down to me. I figured where you have onions in French cookery, you may as well also have carrots and celery. And on a lark, I also bought some mushrooms that I imagined would be close to eggplant in consistency. That made for a good deal more prep work, though, and by the time I got around to them, I was too sick of chopping to give them due care and ended up cutting them up into bigger chunks than I really should have. And of course, I seasoned everything with salt.

While I'm dwelling on should-have beens, I also wish I had redesigned my mise en place. Going by memory of the Emeril recipe, I divided the chopped ingredients into four bowls, based on what stage of cooking I meant to throw them into the pan. If I recall correctly, Bowl 1 was the eggplant (peeled and chopped into roughly 2/3-inch cubes) and a couple of carrots (not peeled but cut in half lengthwise and then chopped into pieces of similar size). I now think I should have either julienned and more finely chopped the carrots or started them first, by themselves in a pan drizzled with hot olive oil. As it was, I couldn't give them the time they needed to soften without risking the eggplant dissolving into nothing.

Bowl 2, going in a few minutes later, was the onion and garlic. After the onion started to soften and the garlic released its aroma, I threw in Bowl 3, containing the pepper (I ended up chopping only the orange bell, pith and seeds removed), celery (three stalks, sliced in half lengthwise and then chopped to a similar size as the carrots), both kinds of squash (peel on, quartered lengthwise and cut into roughly similar cuboids), and the shrooms (sliced but not too thin). The lid went on the pan, except for the occasional stir.

When I started to worry about it being done before I had added Bowl 4, in went the tomatoes and the rosemary. I'd actually tried, for the first time, the "dip in boiling water for 10 seconds, then de-stem and peel" method before quartering the tomatoes and chopping them into about 1/3-inch dices. Of course, I de-stemmed the rosemary, about 3 branches worth, which I'm sure is quite conservative considering how much food I was adding it to, but I was mindful of "death by thyme" and chose the long way around to avoid repeating that type of mistake. In a more perfect univserse, I would have given more effort to the rosemary, but I was at the end of my resources by that time so I gave up after just a few feeble chops; I would only regret that a litte, later.

Stir. Lid on. A couple more stirs. At the last moment I remembered to grind some black pepper over the pan and to cut off a quarter of a large lemon and squeeze its juice in there. (I actually plated a serving of it before I remembered the lemon, so I had to shake a few drops of the juice onto that, too. I can scientifically say that a little lemon juice really is essential.)

And then I ate. Despite being meatless and untouched by such animal products as butter, cream, cheese, broth or stock, it turned out to be a thick, chunky, savory stew with just the right amount of herb flavor (not death, but life by rosemary); exactly enough salt (if not, in a few bites, just a shade too much – and all that was from the prep stage); a good chew on the mushrooms, yellow squash and zucchini; and some tender, bursting-with-flavor morsels of orange bell pepper and celery. Also, the dish was a feast for the eyes, full of bright colors; and speaking of brightness, that squeeze of lemon brought a welcome shine to the top end of the dish, like a soprano note that lightens an otherwise muddy chord.

Regrets, I had a few – but they weren't big ones. The eggplant pieces were softer than I wished, but they hadn't completely mushed out, so I guess that was half a win. Like I said, next time they'll go into the bowl with the squash, and let the carrots hang out by themselves in Bowl 1. The onions and garlic lent flavor, but they pretty much disappeared in the texture – which I guess is fine where garlic is concerned (and may I also mention, I have yet to perfect my garlic peeling technique; that leg of my prep marathon was the slowest and most miserable). But I kind of missed sinking my teeth into the onion pieces; so, maybe Bowl 2 and Bowl 3 should go in at the same time, another day. I definitely need a separate bowl, however, since most of my mise en place bowls are plastic and I didn't fancy washing garlic and onion funk out of a plastic bowl; ceramic for that one.

My final quibble: as I mentioned before, I should have remembered thyme, rather than rosemary; perhaps that would have lent more success to my herb-chopping efforts, such as they were. As it is, the last few bites of my dinner came with big chunks of rosemary that stayed in my mouth no matter how much I chewed, and I had to spit into the kitchen trash multiple times to get them out. Another alternative might be just to throw whole branches of the herb (or herbs) into the stew and fish them out when cooking was over and their purpose was served. A next time there will be, however; just not very soon, because I still have two multi-serving containers of leftovers from this batch cooling in the fridge.

Last word: Prep may have been a pain, but cleanup really wasn't that bad. I used three nesting bowls for the mise en place, plus a ceramic soup mug for the onions and garlic; one wooden cutting board for everything, which fit nicely over one side of the sink so I didn't have to clear counter space for it; a big, heavy, hardened-nonstick pan and its lid for the stewing; a medium-small saucepan for the 10-second boil on those tomatoes, along with a wire scoop to fish them out of the water; one big chopping knife for almost everything; and a paring knife for just a couple things (like de-stemming the tomatoes and peeling the eggplant). Somehow, a wire-mesh strainer got dirtied, though I can't now remember what I needed it for. And a dinner plate.

The star of my armaments was an old, hard-plastic spoon with a metal handle and a hard-plastic grip, which I rescued from my old office when it was being packed up and moved to a new location that doesn't have a kitchen; the kind of thing you can't seem to get anymore, but that ran circles around the bendy plastic stirring spoons, spatulas, etc. that fill most of my kitchen counter tool jug. I used it throughout the preparation of this dish, from stirring the stew to plating to scooping the leftovers into to-go (into the fridge) containers. This is the kitchen tool I've wanted for years and it finally takes a rushed, office-moving, disposing-of-used-kitchen-junk party to bring it to hand. It's an ill wind that blows no good.

Dinner and a show

The local movie house in downtown Park Rapids, Minn. has been closed for the winter, which is regrettable. A certain sense that one has to get out in the evening builds and builds until it becomes intolerable, and for me, that means the movies. From here, I could drive between 30 and 50 miles each way to visit movie theaters in Hackensack, Wadena, Detroit Lakes, Perham, Cass Lake and Staples (that list is in ascending order of distance). For some odd reason, I've only gone the Wadena route until last night; maybe it's because I frequently head that way to visit my parents, who live one town over. I've never traveled from here to Hackensack, even though it's the closest; I can't say why, other than never having any business there. But work has taken me to Detroit Lakes several times, and traveling to visit family has taken me through it even more often, so it was that direction I decided to drive last night when I couldn't stand not going to the movies any longer.

I found the movie theater with no problem. It was in a mall that also had some restaurants in it, including a Chinese place that I decided to try for dinner. I hate to judge based on only one visit, and admittedly, I've been to worse Chinese restaurants. But dinner didn't at all upstage the movie, I'll tell you. Upon arriving at my booth, I thought I smelled a barnyard, which is not a really appetizing aroma. The menu was huge and covered in fine print, confronting me with more choices than I knew what to make of. Desperate for a signpost, I asked my waitress for a suggestion. She recommended something called Governor's Chicken that was supposed to be like General Tso's, but its flavor lacked anything interesting or memorable, and the fried rice that came with it had a horrid surprise buried in it for me to spit into my napkin. I was given a choice of rice soup or egg drop, and having never had rice soup before I gave it a try; funnily enough, it turned out to be a bowl of light broth with some rice in it, and about three slices of green onion, and only wanted a couple glugs of soy sauce to taste like anything in particular. The egg roll was above reproach. Maybe I'll give the place another chance, and next time I'll order a duck dish (which I had toyed with for a moment) or something especially spicy, and I'll give the fried rice a good stir before I start shoveling it in.

So much for dinner. The movie theater, directly across the mall corridor from the Chinese place, was called Washington Square Cinemagic and it was pretty nice, although again, I think it could be nicer. I was confused to see cash registers only at the concession stand and no box office; I actually had to ask an employee where I was supposed to buy tickets, because in all my years of going to the show, I don't recall ever seeing the box office and concessions combined into one-stop shopping. My next problem is that I didn't know what the showtimes were, and despite having plenty of wall space for the concessions menu and more, and even a flat-screen displaying promotional video, the management didn't see fit to put a screen with the showtimes inside the theater. I had to go back out into the mall to look at a screen on the wall outside the theater. It was such a confusing place that I dithered around and had to ask staff a couple more questions before I'd figured out where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do.

Once seated in the auditorium where my movie was going to be screened, I found the seats comfortable, but the pre-trailers video entertainment was repetitive and obnoxious. The theater wanted everybody to pull out their phones and download an app so they could interact with onscreen games and take movie trivia quizzes. It was a strange way to begin the cinema experience where, usually, you're encouraged to silence your phone and put it away. And then, after warning the audience in the sternest language to do just that, and to behave themselves, I found their threats to be ineffective because the row behind me was filled with rowdy schoolboys who talked among themselves all the way through the movie.

But now, despite having every reason to give the finger to the entire experience, here's a review of the movie I saw. It was The Batman, a fresh reboot of the DC Comics movie franchise previously headlined by Michael Keaton, then Val Kilmer, then (ugh) George Clooney, then Christian Bale, then Ben Affleck, and a partridge in a pear tree. And that's just since I was the age of the brats in the row behind me last night. Now, after all those films, they've given the role to Cedric Diggory, I mean Edward Cullen – I mean, of course, Robert Pattinson. Before I go any further, let me lay on you One Line That Made It For Me, and it's part of the No. 1 Scene That Ditto, below. The Batman and the Riddler are face to face – well, face to mask; the Batman is there in his professional capacity, but the Riddler has been captured and identified. Otherwise, there's only a sheet of wire-mesh-reinforced glass between them when the Riddler says (and here I paraphrase), "You know, the people who want to unmask us are missing the point. I'm most truly myself when I wear the mask. I'm sure you get that. In fact, I think I'm looking at the true you right now." This quote is literally the saving of this movie, and of Robert Pattinson's portrayal of Bruce Wayne. I'll say more on that later.

But now I come prematurely to Three Scenes That Made It For Me, because I don't think I can say what I mean about this movie without first discussing those.

(1) They've caught the Riddler, a masked lunatic who has been committing a series of heinous murders of high-profile public figures, leaving cryptic messages to "the Batman" (although the guy in the bat suit actually calls himself Vengeance) and posting videos on the internet, claiming to be exposing the lies behind city leaders' promises of renewal. He'd even tried (unsuccessfully) to blow up Bruce Wayne, under the rubric "the sins of the father are visited upon the son." Under the killer's scary mask, he turns out to be a wimpy, bespectacled accountant, played by Paul Dano (There Will Be Blood, Ruby Sparks). Vengeance and the cops are searching the wacko's apartment, trying to understand who his next target was going to be. Venge, a.k.a. the Batman, spots a collage of photos and newspaper clippings, and thanks to a graffito about revealing the truth being right next to a photo of Bruce Wayne, he apparently begins to think the Riddler is onto his secret identity. Then the cops get a text saying that the Riddler wants to see the Batman at Arkham Asylum. So, Venge goes to the interview, all bat-suited out, and after the Riddler does the expected "I knew you would come" thing, he begins to mouth the name "Bruce Wayne," very meaningfully, then say it aloud. He spits it out, like it's burning his tongue. He begins a harangue about how Bruce Wayne was the orphan everybody in Gotham was thinking about, when his parents were killed, even though his standard of living was way above the kids in the orphanage where the Riddler grew up. You see the Bat's eyes darting around the room, observing video cameras recording their interview. You can tell, despite the mask concealing half of his face, that he's bracing himself for his true identity to be outed. Then the Riddler sighs and says something about Bruce Wayne being the one who got away, and then turns the subject toward what he and the Batman have (in his diseased mind) done together. This leads to Pattinson displaying, a second time in the same scene, an amazing feat of acting considering how much of him was covered by the bat suit – a look of relief that passes over the lower half of his face, and his eyes, when he realizes that the Riddler hasn't actually riddled out who he truly is. The Batman's relief is short-lived as he then realizes his "Vengeance" persona actually inspired the Riddler (and others) to don masks and sow chaos, even considering him to be working with them. And then the Batman issues a cruel putdown that shakes the Riddler out of his maniacal gloating and turns him into the whining lunatic that he remains for the remainder of the movie – except for a flash of malice as he realizes that the Bat hasn't solved his last riddle yet.

(2) Police Lt. Jim Gordon (played by Jeffrey Wright, a.k.a. Felix Lighter in the last few James Bond films) is caught between an interrogation roomful of cops and the Batman and has to figure out how to separate them before they tear each other to pieces. After narrowly managing to de-escalate the situation and getting the Batman alone (to a degree), he basically says, "You're gonna have to punch my lights out, steal my key to this room, let yourself out and run up this stairwell to the roof." Pow! It happens, and the next time they meet, Gordon rubs his jaw and says, "You could have pulled your punch," to which the Batman says, "I did."

(3) A tie, because honorable mentions are for sissies: (a) Whenever Selena Kyle/Catwoman (Zoë Kravitz) and the Batman are face to face and close enough to kiss, which they do at least a couple times; these moments always heat up the screen. Also, she always tells him interesting things in these scenes, like when she responds to one of his antisocial comments with an offhand remark about how he must have grown up rich to be able to say stuff like that. But the best instance is at the end of the movie, when Selena urges the Bat to run away with her because if he keeps doing what he's doing in Gotham City, it's going to get him killed. And you sense that she's right. (b) A scene in which the Batman, holding a blazing red flare about his head, leads a group of survivors through a pitch dark, flooded disaster area, which is not only a turning point for his character in relation to the people of Gotham City but also just an awesome image. (c) Any scene featuring the Penguin, because I could never quite recognize the actor under the makeup but I knew it was somebody I should know. I had to watch the end credits to find out who it was, and it blew my mind to see that Colin Farrell played the role. Though I knew it had to be someone big, because despite a ton of prosthetics, he still had a vivid character and an expressive face.

So, now that that's out of the way, let me tell you what I thought about the movie. It's different from all the other Batman films. So, so different. For starters, Gotham City looks lived-in, like a real-world city that has lots of history – unlike the cartoon-Gothic urban hellscape designed by Tim Burton et al. Batman's suit, gadgets and vehicles don't look impractical to the point of campiness; he just comes across as incredibly well-equipped. And with all respect toward Adam West and George Clooney, Robert Pattinson's Batman is about as funny as a landmine. When he stomps out of the shadows with his heavy-soled boots and his impressive bat suit (a bit less constricting of head movement than the Keaton/Kilmer/Clooney versions), particularly to the accompanying theme by Michael Giacchino played in an ominous, low register on the piano, he's terrifying. When he revs up the turbocharged Batmobile and races after you in a death defying chase scene, with the same theme played by a full, screaming orchestra, the terror dials itself up to gut-deep horror. He has a freakish lack of qualms about wading into a fight against superior numbers, and he takes a serious beating and keeps going (though not without feeling the effects, or wearing scars to show for it).

Meanwhile, unlike the Keaton, Kilmer, Bale and Affleck iterations, Pattinson's Bruce Wayne is entirely lacking in social graces. He couldn't pass for a philanthropic billionaire, even though he has the billionaire part down cold. This Bruce Wayne is so tight-lipped, so surly, so socially non-functional that it tempts you to speculate about where on the autism spectrum he is. Alfred (played by Andy Serkis of "Gollum" fame) has a lot to put up with, though he also halfway admits to being partly to blame for it. The guy's in danger of not being a billionaire for much longer, he's that bad at keeping up appearances even with the company that he (barely) controls. He's got "always been a moody brat and stayed that way even when he should have aged out of it" written all over him, in every scene in which he doesn't wear the bat suit. And yet, when said suit is on, without changing any mannerisms or becoming anything like a sparkling conversationalist, that attitude suddenly works for him and he becomes impressive to the point of instilling awe. It's just like the Riddler said, way back in that approximate quote I dropped at the top of this review: he isn't himself as Bruce Wayne. And though he introduces himself as Vengance in an early scene, stuff happens that ... well, let's just say that he's most who he is when he's the Batman. And you see him working on exactly who that is as this movie goes along.

It's a thinking movie. It's a nerve-rattling movie. It's a psychological movie. It's kind of a hardboiled mystery, with loads of noir and plenty of space (by which I mean, time) to develop a mood without any dialogue intruding on it. It's a movie in which Gotham City doesn't seem like an exaggerated version of the real world; not exaggerated at all. It's a world that goes to your heart because it could be your world, and it needs a hero, and the Batman is the best it's gonna get, and that ain't necessarily good news – and finding out whether it's gonna be good news or not is part of what this movie is about. It risks things that risk-averse studio executives usually wouldn't stand for. It pulls them off, not in spectacular style, but in a dark, brooding, dangerous style that makes you uncomfortable in exactly the way it intends to. It has action – fights, chases, escapes, rescues – and it builds to a terrific climax despite faking you into thinking it's gone to anticlimax hell. It has a visual design that brings Gotham into the 21st century, and a memorable musical score that, unfortunately, is going to ruin Schubert's Ave Maria for the next generation, and maybe the In Paradisum from Faure's Requiem into the bargain (cf. the scene where Alfred opens a letter bomb meant for Bruce). I'll also say of Giacchino's score that it does musically what this film's art design does, stripping away every whimsical vestige of Danny Elfman's gothic cartoon world.

The movie also has a great, if British-centric cast, including John Turturro as a crime boss, Peter Sarsgaard (who played the villainous Walter Duranty in Mr. Jones) as a corrupt D.A., and British soap villain Alex Ferns as a corrupt police commissioner. It has a reboot of the Bat-franchise that doesn't weary us with an unnecessary, onscreen rehash of the whole death-of-Thomas-and-Martha-Wayne thing, although Bruce's bat-quest to find out who was responsible for their deaths is woven into the storyline. Thanks in part to that one line, that made a virtue of Pattinson's morose performance as Bruce Wayne, I admired everything about it except the ignorance and disrespect displayed by the people in the row behind me. I'd watch it again.

Stuffaletta, or Anti-Hero Sandwich

I've never been to New Orleans, but I've lived more of my life in St. Louis than any other single city and it's the next best thing in many ways, including Mardi Gras and the Muffuletta sandwich. Since I moved away, however, the closest I've come to the good old muff is the Italian hero sandwich that was briefly featured at the local Subway restaurant. Today, I decided to improvise with what I had in my fridge and see how close I could come to it, without necessarily having all the required ingredients. So I submit to you the Stuffaletta, a.k.a. Anti-Hero Sandwich.

You're supposed to start with the particular kind of bread for which the sandwich is named, something vaguely like a ciabatta roll. I used two slices of cottage bread, with mayonnaise on one slice and my own, improvised olive salad on the other. For the salad, which I wouldn't exactly call a tapenade but maybe more of a crapenade, I chopped up four jumbo garlic-stuffed green olives along with the garlic cloves they came with, and a small can of sliced black olives, and stirred them together with a flatulent squirt of spicy brown mustard out of a store-brand squeeze bottle. Half of this mixture went on the bread; the rest I saved in a tiny, covered jar in the fridge, so I can do this again tomorrow.

Lacking the traditional Italian meats, I used some deli-sliced smoked ham, a couple slices of Oscar Mayer bologna, and a couple sandwich-sized slices of pepperoni. I also didn't have any cheese on hand except American slices, so I slapped on a couple of those. I didn't feel up to grilling it. Seriously, I'm in a rush here. I have to go back to work in a few minutes. So, I ate it cold. It was good. It was interesting. It had a certain ring of familiarity to it that did remind me of the good old days in St. Louis. It went down, stayed down, and filled the spot I needed filled. So, crapenade-stuffaletta though it may be, and antiheroic as hell, I'm pleased with the result.

Leftover Cookery

I'm not a big fan of keeping leftovers. I'm more of a "heat up what I need right now" kind of guy, and when it comes to those last couple slices of baked-from-frozen pizza, I'm a bit of a "throw away whatever is left when I'm full" guy, too. (Not a fan of leftover pizza.) Considering how little I do in the kitchen these days that's really creative or, apart from heating up frozen stuff, counts as cooking in the strictest sense, it's actually surprising how much use I've made of leftovers during the last week, thanks perhaps to being cooped up in my apartment all alone by COVID-19.

I should note that when I do really cook something – anything that may involve browning meat, boiling water, chopping vegetables and/or pressing ingredients into a baking dish – I do put up leftovers to eat during the next day or two. And this week, I've economized cooking time and ingredients to the extent of using some of the same leftovers two different ways, and combined the "heat up something frozen" approach with actual cookery.

To trace the chain of leftover use, let's start with the jar of spaghetti sauce that I opened one night when I was heating up a couple of frozen, breaded chicken patties. I spread the sauce on a couple pieces of toast, topped them with the oven-hot chicken patties and then added a slice of swiss cheese (sorry, I was out of mozzarella) to each open-face chicken parm sandwich. I zapped them in the microwave for 15 seconds just to put a little melt on the cheese, and I was very happy with the result. I have to admit, those frozen chicken patties tend to taste a bit nasty unless you dress them up. This bit of microwave-aided improv covered that up well.

So, the remaining seven-eighths of the jar of marinara went into the fridge. It was joined the next night by half of a jar of Indian curry simmering sauce that I had picked up on clearance some time ago, and about which I was starting to worry as to how long I should keep it. What did I use the first half of the jar on? Well, let's see. I opened a can of chunk chicken and a bag of frozen "seasoning blend" (diced, frozen onions, green and red peppers, celery and parsley) and browned up half of each in a small frying pan. Then I added the half-jar of simmering sauce, covered the pan with a saucepan lid, and left it simmering on low heat while at the same time preparing a package of Mahatma-brand saffron rice – to which, I'm sure, the word "saffron" applies about the same way as the word "smurfberry" in Smurfberry Crunch cereal. When the rice was done, I stirred in the curry/chicken/vegetable mixture and, by golly, ate it. I may, in fact, have divided it into two servings and saved one for the next day's lunch.

So by now, I had most of a jar of marinara, half a jar of curry sauce and half a can of chunk chicken (covered with cling wrap) in the fridge, and half a bag of seasoning blend (mirepoix?) sealed in a ziplock bag in the freezer, leftover-wise. The next day, I went grocery shopping and decided to get a package of Barilla-brand ready-to-bake lasagna noodles and the ingredients I would need to follow the recipe on the back of the box. These included a pound of ground beef, a 15-ounce tub of ricotta cheese and a 4-cup resealable bag of shredded mozzarella.

Back at home, I sauted the remaining seasoning blend in a larger frying pan, then crumbled in the whole pound of hamburger. But now I realized that I would have to halve the recipe, because I don't have a 9x13-inch baking dish; the nearest size that I do have is a scaled-down oblong, maybe 7x11. So, in a separate bowl, I blended half the tub of ricotta with a small amount of mozzarella and a bit of the grated parmesan that I already had on hand. I pulled out the mostly full jar of marinara that was already open in the fridge, nonstick-sprayed the pan, and layered in the sauce, noodles, ricotta mixture, mozzarella, and meat mixture as directed by the recipe on the box – only, instead of each layer having three full sheets of stiff lasagna, they only had two with the ends broken off and the extra fragments arranged along one end of the pan.

I also had to adjust the cooking time, but the dish turned out great. However, I had enough for three meals on my hands, so two-thirds of it went back into the fridge and got eaten the next day at lunch and dinner. Meanwhile, I still had about a third of the meat mixture left over (which went into the fridge in a spare glass jar). I also put back half of the ricotta and a little less than half of the mozzarella, which I still haven't found a use for, and perhaps half of the lasagna noodles. Maybe I'll just have to get some more meat and do another tray of lasagna; I already have another jar of pasta sauce.

Yesterday, I worked out how to use up some of the leftovers still abiding in my fridge. For breakfast, I had an omelette that used up about half of the leftover mixture of browned meat and seasoning blend, plus some cheese (not the mozz, though). For dinner, I heated up a plastic pouch of jasmine rice (90 seconds in the microwave), a steamer bag of frozen peas (5 minutes in the microwave), and meanwhile combined the leftover meat mixture, chunk chicken and curry sauce in the small frying pan and simmered them under a saucepan lid. When the peas came out of the microwave, I combined all the other ingredients in two bowls and, to save myself from more leftovers, ate both bowlfuls then and there.

Imagine if I'd had to put away one of those bowls for later: half of the components had already been saved as leftovers once, and the mirepoix had gone round twice (once while still frozen and once after being cooked).

Have It Your Way

The town where I now live is famous for having the worst McDonald's restaurant in the memory of anyone who has visited it. A few blocks down the street is a Burger King restaurant that, if you can conceive of it, had an even worse reputation before it was suddenly closed, renovated inside and out, and re-opened with an entirely different staff. I was impressed the first time I went into it, and I've "dined in" there approximately four times since it re-opened. Each time, however, I've been less impressed.

One of the first improvements I noticed, when the joint re-opened, was the option of ordering at one of two touch-screen kiosks. The first time I tried this, it was OK. The next time, I had some difficulty getting the touch-screen to respond to my touch. The last time, this problem persisted, plus the machine asked me to pay $107 and odd change for a budget meal deal of two sandwiches, a side and a drink.

I went to the counter with the cash registers to ask for help. Though several employees walked past on the other side of the counter, it took several minutes for a cashier to appear and offer to take my order.

We quickly determined that I was better off placing my order with him than using the machine. So, I decided to try ordering the same budget meal deal, which starts with two sandwiches out of a choice of three. For my first sandwich, I wanted a bacon cheeseburger. The kiosk offered me that option; the sign on the menu board above the counter offered me that option; but the cashier said the restaurant was no longer offering the bacon cheeseburger as part of that deal. I said, "Fine, I'll have the regular cheeseburger as my first sandwich."

Sandwich Two was a classic chicken sandwich; on the kiosk, I had tried to order that with tomato subbed in for the lettuce, but I decided not to press my luck with Mr. Friendly at the cash register. I then requested my preference for the side item, an order of onion rings. The cashier said the restaurant was out of onion rings. Biting off a suggestion involving the sliced onions they put on their sandwiches and the deep-oil fryers that lined the side wall of the kitchen, I just hoisted my hands in the air and said, with the broadest sarcasm ever achieved north of Iowa, "Well, isn't this visit just the greatest?" I decided at that moment to forgo the idea of ordering a dessert item.

I also had to visit the touch-screen drink kiosk, which teases you with the offer of dozens of different beverages. This time it worked OK (other than a bit of that same trouble with the touch screen not detecting my touch). On a previous visit, I couldn't get any of the flavors I was interested in because the machine had apparently run out of practically everything. Apparently the store's new management hasn't caught on to the need to re-order supplies once in a while.

Another thing I noticed was that the place hasn't seen anything like the huge crowd that showed up when the restaurant re-opened since, like, when the restaurant re-opened. Maybe I'm not the first person to notice that Burger King is trying to wrest the "worst restaurant service in town" award out of the grasp of the local McDonald's.

I frankly don't know whether the cashier was telling me the truth about the restaurant no longer honoring the promises on its menu; for all I know, he may have been a lazy git who just didn't want to do any more work than he had to when his boss wasn't looking over his shoulder. But he definitely gave me the impression that I was there for Burger King's enjoyment, rather than vice versa.

I came away from these past few trips to the local Burger King knowing three things: (1) The words "Have It Your Way" have lost all meaning; (2) Even with better-tasting food and a more attractive look, the spectacular feat of exhibiting worse management and poorer service than the miserable McDonald's two blocks away is totally achievable; and (3) Life being too short to waste time, money and digestive juices being insulted by people who don't even know their own business, I will probably be happier if I dine elsewhere from now on. I have no complaints about the town's Pizza Hut, Subway, A&W or Dairy Queen restaurants, to say nothing of all the locally owned places to eat. They wouldn't even have to try particularly hard to win my business. All they have to do is act like they kind of want it. As far as that goes, they can have it their way.

Macatouille?

I tried to make a ratatouille for a church potluck this past Sunday. Not the movie "Ratatouille" version with alternating thin slices of eggplant, zucchini, yellow squash, and Roma tomato fanned out in a spiral formation in a baking dish and broiled in a piperade, but the Emeril version with the ingredients cooked al dente in a pot on the stove. Also in the recipe are sweet peppers, onions, garlic, rosemary, thyme, basil, salt and pepper, a dab of olive oil to start, and a goodly squirt of lemon juice to finish. It's one of those recipes that makes you feel like you're really cooking, because of the amount of time you spend slicing things before anything goes into the pot, and because there's a precise order of battle as to what goes into the pot and when.

I've been making it long enough to do it without looking at a recipe, and it turned out rather well, except that I got a little overenthusiastic with the fresh thyme and rosemary. That, and the fact that some people apparently expected there to be some kind of meat in the dish, perhaps explains why only a couple people at the potluck tried it. I ended up with a potluck-sized potful of leftover ratatouille, which I am still eating at home.

Last night, to shake things up, I decided to combine one of the few dishes I make from all-fresh ingredients with an old bachelor-chow standby, boxed shells-and-cheese macaroni - the kind with the packet of ready-mixed cheese sauce that you can heat up in the same boiling water as the noodles. I've combined a lot of different things with boxed shell or elbow mac and cheese; things everybody has tried, like tuna, peas, and cream-of-mushroom soup, or canned chili without beans; things most people would know better than to stir in, like leftover spaghetti sauce and meatballs; and things few people have even thought of adding, like Italian clam sauce or a spicy Indian entree. Most of these mixers are pretty much on the order of adding junk to more junk. But it turns out that adding homemade, leftover ratatouille to the shells-and-cheese both elevated the mac and broke the monotony of a week of eating a stew of perfectly cooked but over-seasoned summer vegetables.

While I'm confiding my culinary transgressions, here's another bachelor chow tip I just discovered this week: You can make instant oatmeal with the Keurig machine in your office's break room. First, empty two serving-size packets into a soup mug (because, face it, one is never enough); put the mug under the nozzle of the K-cup machine. Then, whatever your Keurig model requires to get it to run 4 ounces of hot water into the mug, do that twice (once for each packet of oatmeal). Stir and let stand for a couple minutes. It's actually faster, less messy, and tastier than the microwave way that you, I, and the wall have been practicing lo, these many years.

Based on this picture, I am apparently not the first person to realize this. But if you're behind me on the Keurig learning curve, you're welcome.

Uplight, Downlight

I've been fostering, and may possibly end up adopting, an adult cat that belonged to a neighbor who had to enter an assisted-care facility. Her name, for what it's worth, is either Priss or Prissy, short for Priscilla (not my choice, but oh well), and she is extremely black.

I'll tell you later how she's getting along with my senior cat Sinead, and what I think about having two cats in the house again, after finally realizing after 14 solid years of two-cattedness that one is the ideal number of cats to live with. But that's not what this post is about.

The late Tyrone was often mistaken for a black cat, though I always hastened to make it clear he was really dark gray - in fact, he was a couple different shades of dark gray, with tabby markings that only showed up under certain lighting conditions. Priss, however, is truly, madly, deeply black - so black, with kind of a matte finish, that even with a light shining directly on her at close range (for example, from the lamp on my bedside table while I'm combing her coat on the bed), it is sometimes difficult to see her in any detail beyond a cat-shaped shadow.

This bizarre phenomenon made me realize that our language has a crying need for two words that, to my knowledge, I am about to coin for the first time right now: "uplight" and "downlight." The conditions in which I can look at Priss and have trouble seeing anything but a black blob, even when I'm right beside her and there's a bright light aimed at us from a few feet away, are what I would describe as "uplight" - i.e., the cat is between me in the light; I'm looking at her uplight, with the angle of light casting hear near side at least partly in shadow.

The problem goes away when I'm viewing the cat downlight, when the angle of light is such that the cat isn't mostly between me and the light source. Then, particularly after being combed and petted and perhaps treated with a little kitty conditioner, her fur gleams and the light brings out her features.

On a related topic of perhaps paradoxical sensory discoveries, I tried an experiment for lunch yesterday: on one sandwich, I put a little ham, a little bologna, two generously proportioned strips of extra-sharp cheddar, and a couple of those individually-wrapped squares of floppy orange "American cheese," all between two pieces of Italian-style bread with not-quite-mayo salad dressing. And what do you suppose was the flavor that cut through everything and dominated the taste of that sandwich? It wasn't the salty, smoked ham. It wasn't the tangy salad dressing. It wasn't even the sharp, aged cheddar. It was, believe it or not, that bland, pedestrian, "imitation American flavor pasteurized process cheese food" that drowned out everything else.

It reminded me of that time, years ago, when I put a drop or two of sesame oil in a bowl of hot chili-flavored ramen-noodle soup - the kind of soup base that makes sweat pour down your face and that leaves the membranes from your lips downward on fire with a stinging sensation. Guess what? The soup totally left my membranes on fire and my face covered in sweat, but the only thing I could taste was the nice, mild, nutty flavor of sesame oil. It drove home the fact that a flavor can be perceived as mild, or even bland, yet at the same time be an incredibly strong flavor, while one that comes across as sharp, pungent, or even painfully spicy, might actually be very weak in terms of pure taste.

Another thing to learn from two slices of American cheese is that something can be all but disgustingly smooth, while at the same time not being slippery at all. There is something about the unnaturally smooth consistency of American cheese singles that gives me a slight shiver, yet at the same time, you can't rub two slices of them together without the pieces immediately sticking to each other. You can't run a slice of this stuff across a clean plate without the friction grabbing it and practically welding it to the plate's surface. It's like one of those transparent plastic decals that looks like it should be smooth, but that will cling to a glass window until you scrape it off with a razor-blade. The smoothness is all in the consistency of the thing, its internal order; the friction exists, apparently, on a microscopic order on the object's surface.

All these little paradoxes of everyday science leave a body as curious as a cat. Hopefully the curiosity won't, like, kill me.

Yum!

Doesn't this look gorgeous? It's my stepmom's recipe for Italian salad. We whipped it up this morning so I could take it to the office Christmas party this afternoon. It's got cauliflower, broccoli, red onion, grape tomatoes, whole black olives, mushrooms and Italian dressing in it. Simple, but yummy!

Food Stamp Gourmet

You're on a ridiculously tight food budget. Say, you've been on food stamps for half a year because your income dropped to below the amount you pay in rent (just hypothetically). And say your food stamp benefits have been cut by about 10% because the state found out about the $125 stipend you collect four times a year (which doesn't quite cover the overdraft in your checking account after paying the rent). How do you make mealtimes interesting?

Well, not to make a meal of it (ha, ha), you combine cheapo store-brand boxed dinners with crappy generic processed-meat products in creative ways.

The other day, I decided to try cutting up a couple of jumbo Polish sausage links (which I have been dying to get rid of) into a pan of macaroni and cheese (the type with the sauce already mixed in a foil-and-plastic pouch). Results: dismal. Halfway through my dinner, I realized that I didn't like the taste of Polish sausage enough to justify letting it dominate the so-called cheddar flavor of the sauce. Desperate for something to off-set the Polish-sausageness of the dish, I ended up stirring in several spoonfuls of sauerkraut (a jar of which turns out to be a necessary fixture in my refrigerator). Though this improved things a bit, I don't think the experiment was a success.

Today I was discouraged to find lots of Polish sausage still in my fridge. A zip-lock baggy full of the links, even. Why do there seem to be more of them in there every time I look? Is this some kind of perverse recap of the miracle of Zarephath?

Chastened by my recent mac-and-kielbasa debacle, I decided to try cutting up a couple of the links into a pan of instant cornbread stuffing. And surprise! This time it worked! Who would have thought that a preparation mostly of stale bread soaked in water would out-flavor a meat byproduct that had already proven too pungent for mac-and-cheese? I suppose one must never underestimate the power of sage and related spices, combined to excess as they generally are in box dinners of this sort. The flavors balanced perfectly... or as close to that as prevailing conditions allowed.

Bachelor Chow Fish Sandwich

When I see a customer buying an interesting product at the supermarket, I often make a point of asking her what she plans to do with it. That's how I got the idea for this recipe, which I tried today for lunch. The product I spotted and asked about, in this case, was canned mackerel.

STEP ONE: THE MUD
Scoop about 1/4 cup of seasoned bread crumbs or crushed crackers into a bowl. Beat in two fresh eggs, and let the resulting beige gunk sit for a few minutes, stirring as needed to keep it mixed.

STEP TWO: THE STRAW
Drain the brine off from a 15-oz. can of mackerel in brine. Using a fork to pull the fish apart, stir it into the egg mixture. (Option: Add a bit of shredded carrot, onion, celery, or whatever.)

STEP THREE: THE KILN
Heat a spoonful of olive oil in a frying pan over medium heat, to cook one patty at a time; or heat a couple spoonfuls on a large electric skillet, to cook them all at once.

STEP FOUR: THE BRICK
Form the mackerel mixture into four balls (+/-), then squash them down into a flat patty shape, being careful not to spread them so thin that they break apart. Fry each patty in the oil until well browned on both sides.

STEP FIVE: THE WALL
In the meantime, toast enough slices of bread to make the desired number of sandwiches. Spread them with your choice of salad dressing, ketchup, pickle, coleslaw, or tartar sauce. As patties are done cooking, build your sandwiches and enjoy!

This variant of the salmon patty, which I remember my stepmom making for many a family dinner when I was a teen, tastes similar and by no means inferior to the original salmon version. And I'm pretty sure it's cheaper, too. Plus, it is so easy, the children of Israel could have made it when they were in bondage to Egypt. Providing, of course, someone had invented the can opener by then.

IMAGE: Somebody else's mackerel patties. I don't take pictures of my food. I'm too busy eating it!

Shepherd on a Shingle?

You get home late from a gruelling shift keeping watch over your flock by night. You're too tired to peel potatoes, shell peas, brown meat, or even whip up a light roux. Being a working-class bachelor, your other options don't include kicking back while a domestic slave caters to your ravenous hunger. So what do you do? Maybe you make what I made this evening, which might be described as an all-processed-food mash-up of shepherd's pie and S.O.S.—provided that, immediately after the collision, the paramedics took the shingle away, and the vehicle has been shattered beyond all semblance to a pie.

Step 1: Preheat the oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Rip open a 2-pound bag of frozen tater tots. The store brand costs $2.00 these days. There's no need to go any fancier than that. Pour about half of the taters into a rectangular cake pan and pop it in the oven, starting a timer for about 24 minutes. Seal up the rest of the taters in a zip-lock freezer bag and put it back in the freezer.

Step 2: Scrape the contents of a 10.5-ounce can of condensed cream-of-mushroom soup into a saucepan. Refill the can with milk and stir with intent to scrape the remaining bits of soup off the sides of the can, then add it to the pan.

Step 2a: Tear up about half of a 2.5-ounce jar of chipped (dried, sliced) beef into tiny pieces and stir them into the soup mixture.

Step 2b: Heat the soup slowly on a medium flame (or electric whatnot), turning the heat to low as soon as it starts getting simmery. Don't cover the pan. You just want to keep it warm until the taters are done.

Step 3: When the alarm goes off, take the taters out of the oven and use a plastic or wooden spoon to loosen them off the bottom of the pan.

Step 4: Drain a 15-ounce can of sweet peas and stir the peas into the soup mixture. Turn the heat back up towards medium and let it come back to a simmer.

Last step: Spoon the taters into a couple of soup bowls. Cover them with the mushroom soup-chipped beef-peas mixture and serve. A handful of saltines on the side make it just about perfect.

Disambiguation You Can Eat

Now and then, right in the middle of an otherwise enjoyable meal, my headspace has been invaded by a question like, "What's the difference between frankfurters and wieners?" It's like an itch I can't scratch. Only, thanks to Google, I actually can scratch it. And here, boiled down to their essence, are some of the answers I've found to pesky questions about what makes the difference between two equally delicious things. At least now, you won't have to Google them yourself.

Wiener vs. Frankfurter
I guess this is the obvious starting point. When it comes to the two pieces of "tube steak," either of which can form the active ingredient in a hot dog, the real difference is that there is no difference—except, perhaps, whether the manufacturers trace their lineage back to Germany (where Frankfurt is) or to Austria (home of Vienna). Some hot-dog brands, however, market products under both appellations. The distinction, in those cases, probably exists more for marketing purposes. There is a perception, for example, that wieners are slightly smaller, or that franks tend to be made of a single kind of meat (such as all-beef or all-turkey) rather than a blend (such as chicken, pork, and turkey). But in my opinion, that perception is all a matter of carefully-crafted imagery.

Not a sausage in sight!

Wienerschnitzel vs. Jägerschnitzel
Here's where I begin to cut through some confusion and misinformation. Some popular answers to the question of what separates these two delicious morsels allege that one is made of veal, the other of pork; or that one is breaded, and the other isn't. The trouble is that they can't get straight which is which; reports conflict with each other. The most credible authorities, however, admit that both dishes may be made of pork, but are most authentically and preferably made of veal; breading is optional; and being pounded thin with a meat tenderizer before pan-frying is crucial. But the single factor that really determines which is which is the mushroom gravy. Jägerschnitzel has it. Wienerschnitzel does not. (A twist of lemon, however, would not go amiss.)

Cannelloni vs. Manicotti
The confusion between these two mouth-watering baked-pasta dishes is not helped by packaged pasta sold in grocery stores, nor by dishes offered on the menus of Italian-American restaurants, which treat the two as virtually interchangeable names for all but identical dishes. The only difference seems to be what you stuff the pasta tubes with. But actually, if you're stuffing ingredients into tube-shaped pieces of pasta out of a box, it's got to be manicotti. Righteous cannelloni starts with flat rectangles of dough, which are loaded with toppings and then rolled into a tube or shell shape before being cooked. The former tends to have a cheese-based filling and a red, tomatoey sauce (sometimes with meat and veggies added). The latter tends to be stuffed with the meat and veggies, and the sauce may be either red (marinara) or white (bechamel). And Roberto's your uncle.

Stromboli vs. Calzone
I've looked up the difference between these two delicacies on several websites, and some of the explanations I've found are pure static. Again, restaurants are no help—the products I have seen served under these very different names are sometimes nigh unto indistinguishable. And frankly I don't care what city each one originated in, or whether one of them got its name from a song lyric. What I really wanted to know (and now I can share with you) is that, although both dishes start with pizza dough and come out of a steaming oven, stromboli is conceptually a rolled-up sandwich while calzone is more of a folded-over pizza. So, essentially, it's what goes inside the dough that makes the difference.

Springrolls vs. Eggrolls
Depending on whether you dine out at a Chinese-, Vietnamese-, or Thai-themed restaurant, you may come up with a variety of ideas on what distinguishes these two appetizers. The trouble is that the boundary will seem to change as you go from one ethnic tradition to another. Are springrolls supposed to be fried or not? Are they supposed to be bigger or smaller than eggrolls? Is one more authentically Chinese and the other rather Indochinese? Actually, neither of these questions is quite the right question (though the third one is close). The difference is really in the dough. Springroll dough is made from more of a rice-noodle mixture, while eggroll dough is more egg-noodle based. Thus, whether uncooked or fried, the rolled part of the springroll will tend to be thinner than its eggroll counterpart.

Wontons vs. Potstickers
Again, wontons are made of a thinner type of dough, and they are more likely to end up either deep-fried to a crunchy crisp or floating in a soup. Potstickers, whether steamed, boiled, or pan-fried, are sheathed in a thicker dough and may also be slightly longer in shape.

Which Mexican Soup Should I Order?
You're at an authentic Mexican restaurant. You're thinking about starting with a soup. The first thing you should know is that the difference between a "small" bowl and a "large" bowl is not the same as the difference between a "cup" of soup and a "bowl" of soup at most restaurants. If you order a "small" bowl, you will get an honest-to-goodness bowl. It may even be bigger than the largest size of soup-bowl served at most restaurants. A "large" bowl, on the other hand, will be big enough to drown a litter of puppies in (or kittens, depending on your proclivities). After settling that part of your ordering decision, the only other thing you need to know is that: Pozole is made with pork parts (soup-bone-type pieces, such as the face, knees, and ankles); Menudo is made with with beef parts (and in this case, I use the word "parts" out of delicacy—put another way, the dish will pass through the part of you that the cow contributed to it); and Albóndigas is made with little spicy meatballs. Either Pozole or Albóndigas may also include little balls of hominy, sort of like a maize-based matzo soup. I recommend them all, though it takes guts (pun intended) to chew on the meat pieces in Menudo, once you start thinking about where they come from.

Chickpeas vs. Garbanzo Beans
There is actually no difference. They're the same thing.

Jam vs. Jelly
It's simple. Whole fruit = jam. Gelled fruit juice = jelly.

Whiskey, Bourbon, Rye, Brandy, or Schnapps?
Whiskey is a distilled liquor, usually barrel-aged, made by fermenting a mixture of water and malted grain. Certain types of whiskey, such as Scotch, Canadian Whiskey, Irish Whiskey, etc., are literally named after the country in which they were produced. Bourbon is an American variant of whiskey in which the grain in question is specifically corn. Rye is another version of whiskey featuring a particular variety of grain (which, funnily enough, is rye). Brandy, though similar in color and often aged in the same kind of barrels, is made by distilling wine. And anything purporting to be brandy, but made from fruit rather than wine, technically falls under the broad category of Eau-de-vie, which means "fruit-based distilled liquors." This broad category branches out into narrower ones delineated by their country of origin; for example, Schnapps comes from Germany. Some drinks that ride the boundary-line between brandy and eau-de-vie are the pomace brandies, such as grappa, made in Italy; these are made from what's left of the grapes after wine-making. And even these categories leave out a lot of choices for your next choosy bender.

Two If By Eggplant

I had two days off, back-to-back, after Memorial Day. I decided to spend them with my parents, whom I hadn't visited in a while. I combined this trip with two objectives: first, to experiment on my loved ones with two eggplant dishes, only one of which I had tried before; and second, to get a haircut from my Dad. I totally forgot the second objective until I was driving home on Wednesday. As for the first objective, the results were mixed.

The first eggplant dish—the one I had tried before—was ratatouille. I picked up all the ingredients on my way out of town Monday night, excepting olive oil, salt, and pepper (which I trusted my parents to have handy) and basil (which I forgot about). I actually had to buy a live thyme plant, because it was the only way I could get fresh thyme without making an extra stop. When it came time to cook, I personally hand-chopped the eggplant, yellow squash, zucchini, onion, bell peppers (one each of four colors!), Roma tomatoes, parsley, thyme (not so much chopped as pinched the leaves off the stem), and garlic.

Once the ingredients were prepared, I cooked them as directed, adding a little extra time because I was using up all the ingredients rather than limiting myself to Emeril's measurements, so it took longer for the heat to propagate throughout the dish. The outcome was juicy, colorful, and full of delicious flavors. I was very pleased... except when I realized that my folks could probably make more or less the same dish in half the time, using the vegetable grill basket and a charcoal fire. I liked the dish, but I sensed a lukewarm reception by my parents.

The second eggplant dish was the Middle-East-style dip known as Baba Ganoush. And I'm afraid everything went wrong. For starters, I was counting on my parents using the grill, as they usually do when I come over. Apparently they had no such plans for this time, and I had to improvise using something like a broil setting on their oven. My father and I thought it prudent to line the bottom of the oven with aluminum foil before doing this, to protect the inside bottom surface from eggplant drippings. Disaster #1 was that the aluminum welded itself to the inside bottom surface of the oven. Disaster #2 was that it took ages to show any signs of softening.

Eventually I lost my patience, peeled the eggplant, and tried mashing it as well as I could. Finding this did not answer well, I put the eggplant in a pan on the stovetop and added a bit of water, giving it more time and thermal energy in the hope that it would soften. Finally, I gave it the best mash I could and popped open the jar of tahini that my father and I had found, after I had failed to find any at the store I shopped on the way out of town (at which time I picked up a tub of hummus as a potential substitute), and after we had both failed to find any tahini at a large grocery store down the highway from my folks' place (where I bought some sesame seeds with the idea of making my own tahini). Just for kicks, before returning home from that shopping trip, we poked our nose into the local market across the road from my parents' place. And what did we find? Tahini!

Disaster #3: Upon opening the jar of tahini and sticking a spoon into it, I found that it had coagulated into one very solid lump. I tried to stir it, but the spoon became hopelessly stuck. I tried to scrape out about half of the contents of the jar, but spilled most of it into the mashed eggplant during the attempt. Then I just had to make the best of it, adding more lemon juice than the recipe called for in a hopeless bid to cut the overpowering flavor of sesame. I also added more of the garlic and parsley I had chopped earlier, some cumin, salt, and pepper, but in spite of everything the dip persisted in having an ugly brownish color, clumpy dry pastelike texture, and a flavor strongly suggestive of extra-oily peanut butter, only with an added edge of bitterness. The eggplant would have disappeared into it altogether, were it not for the vegetable's persistence in sticking together in tough, stringy lumps.

The only thing more devastating than having to dump most of the dip into the trash (especially considering the money spent on its ingredients) was bearing the derisive sniffs of my father (who obviously considers me a fool for even trying this) and the studied nonchalance of my stepmother (when I would have fully understood her being furious). I got the distinct impression that I am not welcome to foist an experiment in Baba Ganoush on their kitchen again... Bummer.

Tonight I recovered some of my self-esteem by making a successful veal Parmesan sandwich on ciabatta bread. I felt particularly gleeful about the fact that the bread (a clearance item), the breaded veal cutlets (four in a package), the cheese (pre-sliced mozzarella), and the spaghetti sauce (a jar of the generic brand), added up to a mere $10 at the cash register. With perhaps a side of steamed veggies and noodles in a warm sauce, a restaurant could sell one of these sandwiches for about what I paid for the makings of four of them, plus extra rolls and cheese. Beam with pride, ye bachelors!

Alex Cross

One day not too many weeks ago, I treated myself to a meal at Mike Duffy's Pub and Grill and a movie at the AMC theater in Clayton, Missouri. Dinner was a nice, cozy crock of chili accompanied by an order of an appetizer that, in spite of being named after one too many cities, could become a threat to Applebee's and T.G.I. Friday's: Buffalo Chicken Rangoons, with a side of sweet-and-sour sauce. Flaky, crispy, creamy, tart, sweet, and tipped with a peppery sting that added a sheen of sweat to the glow of pleasure on my face, those little gimmicks made my evening. And the movie Alex Cross, featuring Tyler Perry as the detective created by author James Patterson, didn't.

The problem with Alex Cross is that it's not one movie, but four movies crammed into the running time of one. First, it's a family melodrama, like a retelling of Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry set in present-day Detroit—what with Cicely Tyson playing the lead character's mother who stops him on his way out the front door with a duffel bag full of sawed-off shotguns and says, "If you walk out that door, you'd better think about who you will be when you walk back in." Naturally there is also a scene where Tyler Perry comforts his daughter as they grieve over the death of his wife. "I'll never play the piano again," this infant petulantly whines. I would almost swear I saw a "Thank God" pass behind her father's tear-filled eyes. But that might have just been the Buffalo Rangoons stirring up gastrogeographical confusion inside me.

Next, the movie was an evil fitness video starring Matthew Fox, late of Lost, as a cold-blooded assassin who carries out stages of a ludicrously complex murder plot in between sets of fiendishly shirtless pull-ups. And it's all so very sad, because most people within 10 or 15 years of my age (+ or -) can remember when Fox was a nice-looking young man, whereas now, after riding a physical-fitness mania into his mid-forties, he just looks scary. Dude needs to put some body fat back on, that's all I'm saying.

The third movie within the movie is a buddy-cop flick featuring Tyler Perry (again?!) in a role previously played by Morgan Freeman, and Ed Burns as a sidekick who violates the canons of cops-and-bad-guys actioners by surviving to the end of the film with little more than a black eye to show for his jeopardy. In fact, it is Burns's character who does a Sam-and-Frodo and pulls his partner out of the crack of doom (here depicted as an abandoned theater repurposed as a parking structure). It just isn't right. At best, Burns should be last seen being loaded onto an ambulance, bravely hanging on and jonesing for Gummi Bears. The partnership between these two cops is especially awkward because: (1) they both lose their main squeeze at the same time, so neither gets a clear shot at comforting the other; and (2) after turning dirty to get the killer, they move on in tandem to a career at the FBI without suffering any consequences. I mean, couldn't there be an apoplectic captain to yell at them? OK, they do have John C. McGinley for a while—but he gets blown up before the buddies give him a really good reason to nail them.

And finally, squeezed into about a quarter of the movie's running time, there is the mystery-thriller in which a brilliant psychologist/detective (that's Doctor Cross to you) slowly gains ground on the equally brilliant monster he is chasing, using only his powers of observation, deduction, psychoanalysis and solid police work. Which ultimately proves to be a cheat anyway, since the case isn't solved until Dr. Cross and his partner steal evidence from their own precinct and use it to make a deal with Giancarlo Esposito. The bastards!

Bad Taste, Good Taste

Please forgive the omnibus post. Since my computer went the way of all silicon, I've been storing up ideas to blog about, and while I have a few minutes of screen-time on the computer in my pastor's office, I've just got to clear the buffer. First, here's a message lately seen on the neighboorhood ELCA Lutheran Billboard of Tackiness:

HAVE A FACE-TO-FAITH TALK WITH GOD.

Eurgh. Suddenly my breakfast isn't sitting so securely in my stomach.

Meanwhile, on the same page of the notebook I keep in the center island of my car in case I need to scribble something to blog about later, here's a quote from The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, which I recently finished "reading" in audio-book format:

"If one's lot is cast among fools, it is necessary to study folly."

And finally, here is a list of pizza joints in St. Louis that I mean to try, as time and funds permit. I was dining at Talayna's one night in Chesterfield last week, enjoying my first-ever bowl of paella and thinking about using my $25-off-of-a-$50-minimum-purchase gift certificate to buy their 30-inch pizza for my 40th birthday party (coming this September), when I struck up a conversation with the couple in the next booth. Big pizza aficionados, they agreed with me that Talayna's serves some of the best pizza in the St. Louis area. But they ranked the following restaurants right up there with it.

• Three Monkeys (on S. Morganford in the city)
• Ferraro's (out by Ronnie's Plaza in Sappington)
• Pizza-A-Go-Go (at Ivanhoe & Scanlan), and
• Black Thorn Pub (at Wyoming and Spring), which serves exactly the same pizza as Lemmon's (at Gravois and Dresden), since they have the same owner

All five of these places are surprisingly convenient to the area in which I live, move, and have my being. All of them are reputed to specialize in serious pizza—the kind that has a thick, full-bodied crust and lots of stringy, stretchy mozzarella cheese. I am encouraged to think there may be so many top-shelf alternatives to the toasted-crackers-and-cheese-substitute that passes for "Saint Louis-style pizza." Feel free to comment if you have experience with these places; perhaps you'll influence the order in which I try them.

PHOTOS: Examples (found online) of the pizzas served at Black Thorn Pub (top) and Pizza-A-Go-Go. Nummmm!

Early Adams & Late Breakfast

+++ This post about "Adams Week" at the Symphony has been delayed pending the replacement of my 10-year-old computer, requiescat in pace. +++

A Very Absinthe Christmas

How did I spend my Christmas vacation? Well, teacher (and fellow classmates), I applied myself energetically to accompanying three Divine Services, complete with vocal solos, choir numbers, and more than the usual quantity of hymns. Then I set the cats up for a few days on their own (putting out extra food and water), gathered up a few things, and hit the road.

Sunday the 25th was a beautiful day to drive from Saint Louis to the Lake of the Ozarks. Ideal, in fact: the temperatures were cool but not cold, the sky was a bright clear blue, the traffic was within mental-health tolerances, and I managed not to get ticketed for speeding this time.

I arrived at my parents' lovely home around three in the afternoon. I enjoyed playing Santa Claus, contributing to their nicely-stocked minibar a bottle of Glendronach 12-year-old single malt Scotch and a selection of beer bottle bracelets to help keep track of whose beer is whose at any reasonably-sized convivial gathering. I also brought along a bottle of 110-proof absinthe, a box of sugar cubes, and a slotted spoon designed to rest on top of a glass, so that we could experiment with that oft-romanticized, and sometimes demonized, herbal spirit.

Well, I'm no wiser as to what wormwood tastes like, but the herbal blend of which it is a part tasted to me a lot like licorice. Licorice with a kick. After sipping it straight, mixing it in the wrong proportions, and then mixing it right (with two parts absinthe to three of water and a sugar cube), my father and I both concluded that one was too many, and two was not enough. We were pretty well buzzed after having two absinthes each for lunch on Tuesday.

We enjoyed food as much as drink. For Christmas Day's supper, Stepmum cooked up a wonderful shank-cut, hickory-smoked ham and served it with crusty bread, scalloped potatoes, and an off-the-beaten-path green bean casserole made in the style of cauliflower casserole (with cheese and biscuit crumbs and... heck, I'm going to need to get that recipe!). Monday night's feast focused on homemade pizza whose crust was made with beer, and topped with a generous mixture of shredded mozzarella and fontina, plus a sprinkling of Grana Padano. One pie was dressed in black olive which we all found very yummy, the other in a combination of pepperoni, onion, and mushrooms which might be frankly dangerous. And finally, Tuesday night we dined out at a Mexican joint that served $1.50 margaritas and cuisine that sets one's mouth on fire so that it isn't hard to down three margaritas in an hour.

Besides watching whatever was on TV, we spent our time in a variety of amusements. Dad and I went out to see the new Sherlock Holmes movie and to consume mass quantities of popcorn. One day we also watched a DVD of District 9 while Stepmom was at work, and we agreed that she wouldn't have liked it. I particularly enjoyed the cheese flight we shared over lunch on Monday, and the return flight on Tuesday, when the main attractions were taleggio (a soft, strong-flavored Italian cheese), manchego (a hard, flavorful Spanish sheep's-milk variety), and a nice safe English favorite, Double Gloucester. Cut into hunks, they all went nicely when eaten alone or on a cracker.

The days I spent relaxing with my folks were very restorative. I didn't mind being indoors while it rained, froze, and frosted up over the successive days and nights, so long as it always seemed to be sunny or at least clear when we went out, and I had good weather for driving home again. I got a bit of reading done too, both in audio-book form (with a couple of Neil Gaiman novels on my CD player) and on paper (as I've been working my way through The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. And I'll soon be spending more time reading books in electronic format, now that my boss & his wife have given me a sleek Kindle for Christmas. I've already "bought" a couple dozen free books in Kindle format.

But, after all, it's nice to be home. I started to miss my cats, painfully, last night when something on my parents' TV reminded me of them. And I've been missing my very own, familiar bed on which I seem to get more sleep, and better sleep, than anywhere else on average. I had fun with my parents, and their hospitality is wonderful, but there's no pillow like your own pillow!

Tahoe Joe's

I have had a lot of interesting food adventures lately—so many that I don't have time to do justice to all of them in writing.

For example, I would like to rhapsodize about the chicken tikka masala and onion kulcha at the Taj Palace in Chesterfield MO, where I dined on linen table cloths one cold, drizzly evening within the past week; but there have to be many still-more-spectacular dining experiences awaiting me in that little storefront restaurant, since tikka masala is merely the gateway dish to many other delights, hardly even Indian when you get down to it. I mean, I've read somewhere that the dish was invented in Scotland; so it's about as Indian as General Tso's chicken is Chinese. But still, it was a really good dinner.

Then there is the shrimp po'boy sandwich I had last night* at the Schlafly Tap Room in downtown St. Louis. I thought it was something special, but what do I know? I had never even had a po'boy before. I wasn't even sure how to go about eating it, a task that seemed equally a matter of picking bits off with the fork as of hefting the entire hoagie-bunned, red-sauced extravagance with both hands and biting into it. I was equally at a loss today* at Denny's when, for a brunch-break during a walk in perfect hoodie-sweater weather, I ordered a Bacon Slamburger, complete with ground beef, hash browns, hollandaise, and an egg cooked to order, in my case a poached egg whose yolk burst and ran all over the plate when I tried to pick the sandwich up. In the end I just picked off the sesame-seed bun and went at it with a knife and fork, finishing by mopping up leftover yolk and hollandaise with the remaining bread and crinkly steak fries.

But the honor of a full restaurant review, with enough stars to grace a fireworks show, goes to the new Tahoe Joe's steakhouse that opened in Chesterfield two weeks ago. A few nights ago* I stopped there for dinner and learned that it is the first restaurant of its small chain to open outside the state of California, which is quite an honor for the Chesterfield Commons shopping area, even if it is the largest open-air mall in the U.S. (Document that for yourself. I don't remember where I read it, and I'm too fat and happy to go researching it now.) But what you want to know is that Tahoe Joe's is exactly like a restaurant that you might see featured on the Food Network, from its distinctive look (based on glossy wood paneling and columns trimmed with smooth rocks cemented together) to its chatty wait staff, all the way to the unusual but staggeringly delicious signature dishes which come to your table in architecturally stylish arrangements.

I started with an appetizer called "Railroad Camp Shrimp," which was ten large, peeled shrimp, breaded and fried in something of a tempura style, and formed into a sticky tower on top of a salad tossed with fried wonton chips, crispy chow mein noodles, and an Asian-inspired dressing. All of this was arranged on a funky pedestal-shaped device and accompanied by a cup of sweet brown dipping sauce, similar to the stuff you dunk pot stickers in at a Chinese-American restaurant. I was literally still savoring the flavors of this dish when my waiter presented me with an unsolicited cup of chicken noodle soup, which (I must admit) tasted a little funky coming down off a mountain of sticky-sweet Asian tempura shrimp salad, but improved vastly after I cleansed my palate. With what did I cleanse it, you ask? Have I not mentioned the mason jar full of tart-sweet lemonade that came with my meal? I instantly pegged it as one of the three best lemonades I have ever tasted, its flavor so profoundly tangy that I almost suspected a hint of rhubarb in the recipe.

But all that was prelude to the main dish. My waiter explained that Tahoe Joe's signature dish of all siganture dishes, notwithstanding their excellent ribs and pork chops, is a number known simply as Tahoe Joe's Steak: a juicy sirloin steak that is first slow-roasted for 19 hours before being grilled to anywhere between medium and well-done, more or less just to add that final touch of charcoal-smoke flavor. But a little lower down on the facing page of the menu is what I actually ordered: the Tahoe Joe's Steak Sandwich.

This sandwich came, first of all, with a pile of fries so huge that I groaned when I saw it. I picked at only a few of the fries. The waiter was nice enough to bring me a cup of horseradish sauce that I requested before I tried the sandwich, but after tasting it I couldn't bring myself to change a thing about it, so I used the horsey sauce to dip the fries in and that proved to be an excellent idea. Nevertheless, the pile of fries remained pretty much untouched when my meal ended, and it ended simply because I was too full to eat one more bite.

The sandwich itself was huger than I expected, sliced into two halves that overlapped each other on the plate, each mounded high with slivers of beef cooked in such a way that it seems equally right to call it a pot roast as a steak. The meat was delicious, tender, and juicy, and the bread was that really crispy type of grilled bread that probably has parmesan cheese grilled right into it, forming an especially stiff crust on the outside of the sandwich to complement the gushy goodness within. In with the meat in that goodness were large slices of grilled pepper, long strands of grilled onion, a stretchy layer of melted white cheese, some kind of tangy sauce, a couple of slices of bacon (which I discovered with a guffaw of disbelief), and slices of little round grilled mushrooms and of one big juicy tomato.

This is a sandwich whose awesomeness cannot be sufficiently described, or if so described, believed. It must be experienced. So when you get to the bottom of this post, close your browser, grab your wallet and keys, and drive with all the speed that public safety and the Missouri Highway Code allow to 17258 Chesterfield Airport Road, a wee bit east of the Boone's Crossing ramp off I-64. Don't tell your waiter I sent you, because that won't add anything to your experience. Just take my advice: order the sandwich I described, and save room for dessert. I'm going to have to use one of those "call this number to tell us what you think and we'll comp you a slice of cheesecake" gimmicks before I get to try their New York-style cheesecake. The one thing I regret about my first visit to Tahoe Joe's is not having enough room even to think about ordering dessert. In fact, I was so full after the shrimp, the chicken soup, and a second mason jar of lemonade that I only managed to eat about 88% of my sandwich, and that in spite of having passed the point of pain & being obliged to pick bits out of it with a knife and fork (which seems to be a keynote of my sandwich-eating career, lately).

I explained to the waiter, as I fished for fragments of bacon amongst the remnants of congealed cheese, that it is a sin to leave bacon uneaten; I don't think he got the joke, but the restaurant got my enthusiasm and, I expect, will keep it at least long enough for me to try everything on its menu. There aren't that many dishes on it, a good sign if you salivate for the kind of gourmet-quality comfort food you see regularly on the Food Network, but rarely in real life. I'll keep you posted if any more of Tahoe Joe's menu offerings change my life the way that sandwich did.

* Timeline: I started writing this review the night of my visit to Tahoe Joe's, as the date stamp on the post shows; my visits to Schlafly's and Denny's took place on Friday and Saturday respectively. Because I dragged out completing this review until Saturday afternoon, the verb tenses and time tags throughout the review are kiddywumpus. But what is a journal for, if not to make virtual time travel possible?