Month: December 2020

Merry Christmas

It’s been a year to remember, a year to forget,
All the plans that were made were suddenly upset.
A plague came upon us, with death and despair,
And there is nothing about it that seems very fair.

So much squabbling and bickering, it’s really sad to see;
Not to mention the fact that on the shelves there’s no TP.
For too many people it was just too much to ask
For them to please wear a simple damn mask.

Wildfires were raging, it was quite an inferno;
And sea levels keep rising, just so you know.
Hurricanes with Greek names; who would have thought?
No wonder they keep telling us it’s getting too hot.

Riots in the streets ‘cause color still matters;
How sad it is that society’s in tatters.
Ignorance and division are the order of the day,
But we’ve got to do more than just sit back and pray.

Politics of hate and lies and fake stuff,
I don’t know about you but I’ve had quite enough.
People out of jobs, lots of hungry mouths to feed,
‘Cause the Scrooges that could help got the votes that they need.

Madness reigns over us, or so it would seem,
The whole year is too much like a very bad dream.
We look for redemption, we look for relief,
But it’s not my fault, says the loser in chief.

Families stay apart, or at least by six feet,
Friends can’t get together, not even to eat.
Kids stay at home, with virtual classes they deal;
The big lesson they learn is that cooties are real.

We are better than this, we have to do more,
We all need to change and our hope to restore.
So spread some love, some joy and cheer,
Because soon to come is at last a new year.

‘Tis The Season To Be Cooking

Well hello, and welcome to my show, Hot Stuff in the Kitchen!

Some of you may remember the previous incarnation of this show that was on several years ago. Wildly successful it was, both episodes, probably a bit ahead of its time.

Anyway, that was then and this is now. I know a lot of you are tired of cooking and being in the kitchen, what with the pandemic and all, and not getting your daily dose of processed food given to you in a greasy sack, but with the Christmas season upon us I thought I’d show you how to whip up a delicious and easy holiday treat: cheese straws!

I’m using one of my favorite recipes that was handed down to me by my mother-in-law, who knew her way around a kitchen, let me tell you. These are simple to make and use basic ingredients, so even a novice cook can turn out these tasty treats that would make you the hit of any holiday party if we still had parties.

So, the first thing I do to get ready to cook is pour me a glass of something to lubricate the process. Cooking, after all, is thirsty work, although people who know me probably would say I don’t work much but am pretty much always thirsty. Anyway, to get us in the holiday spirit, I have selected this fine carton of egg nog to help us today. Let me just top off this cup and take a sip … oops, sorry about the spray, there. Whew, bleh, that stuff would gag a maggot. It says here you can drink it warm; I can’t think of anything I’d least like to warm up and drink. In fact, I think I’ll just pour this down the sink and hope it doesn’t clog up the plumbing.

Okay, now I’ve got to get that bad taste out of my mouth. Fortunately, I have just the thing. I whipped up a batch of martinis earlier as a backup because, seriously, a drink called egg nog is always going to be suspect, isn’t it? Lemme plop a couple of olives in there … you know, as an aside, the nice thing about a martini, other than it packs a kick like a mule, is that it comes with a snack inside. I’ll just take a sip to see if … yowza! That’s some rocket fuel right there.

Enough of that; let’s get started. First thing you need is cheese. Duh, without cheese, obviously, they would just be straws, and who wants to eat a straw? Now, I use a high quality sharp cheddar, but if you want to be perverse about it you can use some other cheese, I suppose. It’s also important to use a block of cheese and not that stuff that comes already grated in those little bags since those don’t have nearly the flavor. I grated this pile of cheese in front of me earlier – honest, I didn’t cheat and dump it out of a bag of already shredded cheese; you’ll just have to trust me on this – because there’s nothing more boring on a cooking show that watching the chef do some monotonous, repetitive chore. I’ll drink to that.

I use this old-fashioned grater that I think was also passed down to me by my mother-in-law. It’s a classic. Coarsely grated cheese is just fine, so you just methodically grate, grate, grate … uh, oh. Now see, even professional chefs have to be careful when you get to the nub of the cheese … oh, well, what’s a couple of fingernails in your food when all is said and done, am I right?

Okay, we have about two cups of cheese and we’ll just dump that in this bowl. A sip of the martini … aah. Good stuff. Next, we’re going to measure out two cups of flour and add that to the cheese. Be careful when you are measuring flour because it tends to come out … okay, never mind the extra flour I just spilled on the counter, and I’ll just sweep up that on the floor later. 

Then we add two sticks of softened butter, which you can do in the microwave but remember to put it on a plate or bowl first or you’re going to have a real mess. And now comes the secret ingredient: two cups of Rice Krispies. Yes, the very same old-timey snap, crackle and pop cereal. I’ll just open the box and the bag … hmm, I always have trouble with these bags. That baby just won’t tear … I’ll just use my teeth … okay, fine, I’ll just rip … whoa … we’ll be snapping, crackling and popping in here for days. Those guys really fly. Dang. Lemme get these outta my drink; oh, the heck with it, I’ll just suck them on down … hmmm, not bad. Right. Dump what’s left in the bag in there with the cheee.  

Then we add a half teaspoon of salt. Let’s pause here and, well, let’s have another sip … hmm, this martini is getting warm so let me have a bigger ship … sip.  Right. Where was I? Oh, yeah, salt. Many people think salt is salt, but we chefs know better. There are many different kinds of salt from all over the world. My preference is this specially made Himalayan rock salt – you can see it’s slightly pinkish due to mineral impurities which is just a fancy way of saying there are probably some bits of rock in there – but unlike most Himalayan salt this particular salt was scraped off the backside of yaks who live near the mines and sit around on their butts a lot, thus picking up some of the spilled salt. The yak adds a touch of, oh, let’s say a musty flavor is a polite way of saying it.

So let’s add some of that to our mix; whew, if you were here in the kitchen with me now you’d get a good whiff of that salt. You’d see what I was talking about that it has a distinctive smell and taste. Pretty pungent. Kind of reminds me of … you know, never mind, I’m going to need another gulp … sip … and I’ll just fish out one of those olives while I’m add it. At it. Maybe don’t go olive fishing while standing over the bowl, but, hey, a little gin never hurt anybody.   

All right. Finally, the last ingredient. More olives. I’m just going to top off that martini ‘cause it definitely has lost its cool and plop a couple of these bad boys in there. Yep, that is good stuff. Right. Last ingredient. Um, hang on, let me look at the recipe … oh, right. Hot sauce. It adds a bit of a bite and brings out the cheddar taste as well. Any ol’ good hot sauce will do … well, darn, that was supposed to just dribble out. Good thing there was only a half of bottle there. So, these, um, whatever they’re called might turn out to be a tad spicy.

Mix this up and mash it around, take another gulp, do the hokey pokey then stick your hands down in there and start making little balls. Then we flatten them out a little, stick them on a baking sheet … dang. Lemme just wash my hands and find that damn – pardon my French – baking sheet. And where’s that martini? 

Right. Roll ‘em into little balls, lay ‘em out on the pan. Then stick them in the oven that should have been preheated, darn it, at 375 degrees for about 15 minutes or so. We’re going to have to wait for the oven to warm up and I have to make some more martinis but I see we’re out of time. Trust me, these cheese straws are great – just be careful with that hot sauce – and I’m sorry you won’t get to see the finished product but right now I’ve got bigger fish to fry, so to speak, because I’m afraid that I might be out of olives.

Until next time, this has been Hot Stuff in the Kitchen!

Think About The Trees

This is not a good time to be a tree.

It’s about this time of the year that I start feeling sorry for trees. Unbidden urges of sympathy well up from some hidden depths. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I’m vaguely uncomfortable with this business of dead trees cluttering up our hearths and homes during what it supposed to be a happy holiday season. 

It strikes me as a somewhat barbaric custom not entirely proper for a civilized society. I’m quite sure we would frown on such a practice if our roles were reversed; imagine the popular outrage if trees suddenly were to start draping human bodies about their forests – and then decorating them while young oaks and maples and beeches and other saplings oohed and aahed over the magical beauty of the elaborate displays.

Still, I have to admit that few things are lovelier than a Christmas tree in full decoration, so every year one goes up in my home, and I simply try to ignore the feeling that I’m operating some sort of medieval torture chamber for tall woody creatures: “Tighten those screws down there. I think we’re going to have to lop off a branch or two up here. What? It wants more water; why, I just gave it some last week.”

Oh, I’ve gone the live tree route, but the feeling that some poor adolescent pine is merely dying a slower, more painful death (a couple of weeks being scorched by a furnace followed by interment in frozen soil seems a fate we shouldn’t wish on even the lowliest shrub) tends to dampen the holiday spirit.

Too, I must confess that I have sap on my hands: A few years back I went out and felled a tree myself. I don’t know what came over me; it was when my children were younger, and I guess I felt they would somehow equate arboreal assassination with wholesome family fun. Needless to say, it was not a pretty sight: Needles flying everywhere, sawdust spilling out onto the cold, hard ground, and the chilling image of a small stump sticking forlornly out of the snow. My guilt was not assuaged even by my smug acceptance of congratulatory comments from family and friends as to its beauty. “Yep,” I would proudly proclaim while inwardly wincing, “got that baby myself. Just went out in the woods with only a chainsaw and came dragging it back. It put up quite a struggle, I don’t mind telling you, but as soon as I saw it I knew I had to have it mounted in my living room.” 

It was with an especially heavy heart, too, when later I returned the tree to nature, albeit in a living-impaired state, and I couldn’t help but wonder at such capricious use of even brainless life. 

This remorse, I think, is an important distinction, although maybe not for the tree. No doubt there are your more remorseless types who would join organizations, if they existed, such as the National Ax Association, to embrace the belief that there is absolutely nothing morally wrong with mindless tree massacre, and earnestly maintain that it is a constitutional right to indiscriminately wield axes, hatchets and even machetes while hacking down anything with roots. It is groups such as NAXA that spend millions annually lobbying the government against blade control, persuading politicians that axes don’t kill trees, people do.

I suspect they’re right, given the number of trees lost to cold steel each year, but I think motive should matter, too. I try not to think about the trees that gave their lives to become the paper used in newspapers and magazines and books, but I’d like to think they died for a worthy cause.

Christmas tree growers probably feel little guilt about the ultimate fate of all those little pines they have carefully nurtured since seedlinghood, and they shouldn’t, since they are merely supplying a demand and, more importantly, perpetuating the life cycle; every tree they cut down, remember, was one deliberately planted. Growers understand that while trees technically may be renewable resources, they can also be finite ones.

Curiously, this simple fact is not universally known. Vast forests the world over are being slashed and burned into treeless plains with little thought given to the consequences: If we lose all our forests, we lose more than some irreplaceable species of flora and fauna that just might hold the key to the cure for cancer, we lose the very air we breathe and – in this age of global warming – any chance of maintaining the precarious balance of nature.

Yet too often trees are cut down in their prime for trivial reasons; in the Third World, where you can still find trees growing in the wild, it is common for people to eradicate entire forests just to try their hand at a little subsistence farming, never realizing without the benefit of some high-tech soil sampling apparatus that the dirt wouldn’t sustain a shopping mall. These poor souls simply can’t be made to understand that they’re playing with the planet’s climate control and should leave the trees alone, but then hunger can give one a distorted view of geopolitical niceties.

It’s all depressingly clear that too many among us can no longer see the forest for the trees. As long as we have Christmas, I am confident we’ll have trees. I’m not so sure about the forests.