Mm, Wild Pecan Rice

Posted on April 1, 2020 by admin

Hanging on the wall near our kitchen is an empty burlap bag that once contained 2 lbs. of Konriko Wild Pecan Rice.

I bought the rice during my visit to New Iberia, Louisiana, in the summer of 2009, when I stopped at the Conrad Rice Mill, a local tourist attraction but also a functioning rice mill. I’m glad to say that even now the mill is still in business, producing rice and other products. When I was there, the mill’s centennial was coming up in a few years; now it’s well past.

The rice included no pecans. The bag, and the Conrad Rice Mill web site, are careful to note that. The bag promises a “nutty aroma and a subtle pecan-like flavor.”

The rice is long gone, and we probably enjoyed it, but what I really like is the bag. That’s my kind of souvenir. Other examples kicking around the house include the small can that used to contain some reindeer pate, acquired on the Finnish ferry between Helsinki and Tallinn, and the front panels from some small cereal boxes acquired in Mexico.

Mm, Grits

Posted on March 31, 2020 by admin

There are two kinds of grits in the house. As far as I know, people aren’t hording grits these days, but I haven’t shopped for them since before the pandemic, so who knows.

To the left, the brand I’ve eaten for years. The standard. The go-to. Often the only brand at the grocery store. Easy to make, best eaten after only a few minutes for cooling. Some add butter. I usually add honey, but not always.

To the right, a brand recently acquired. The texture is slightly different, but not enough to put me off of it. Takes longer to make. Naturally, the verbiage on the package tries to make a virtue of that necessity: “You’ll have to hesitate before you eat quick grits again,” it says. Naah.

The standard grits package tube lists the following as ingredients: degerminated white corn grits, plus iron and various vitamins, which are added in the processing. The new grits bag merely lists white corn. Made me wonder if the hull and germ have been removed, which seems essential to grits.

Note this handy definition at Culinary Lore:

Hominy: An endosperm product made from corn, made up of starch, with the hull and germ removed.

Grits: Ground hominy (usually coarse).

I checked the nutrition facts on the new grits package, and indeed it seems that whatever vitamins might have been present in the hull or germ aren’t there, so I assume they aren’t there either.

Anyway, grits and I go way back. As long as I can remember, because my mother made them and I assume her mother did too, though I don’t have any specific memory of grandma’s grits. I learned to make them myself early on.

I also learned that somehow, most restaurants that offer grits serve an inferior version to what you make at home. How is that? Occasionally, though, I find superb grits away from home. For instance, years ago in Mexico Beach, Florida, I had wonderful cheese grits — at a place probably destroyed by Hurricane Michael a year and a half ago.

When I moved to Chicago in the late ’80s, I was glad to find grits in the grocery stores, despite being well north of the Grits Line. I shouldn’t have been surprised, considering how many Southerners, black and white, have migrated to the region over the decades.

Grits aren’t available in Japan. At least they weren’t 30 years ago. We gaijin ordered it by the case from North America, which we then split up. (PopTarts were ordered the same way.) I remember serving them at my apartment in Japan to a Scotsman who also lived in Japan. He liked it well enough.

“Porridge, is it?” he said. I wasn’t sure how to answer. Can porridge be made from corn? Maize, that is. Seems yes, or maybe, since porridge can be any grain, though I think it’s usually associated with oats and not de-germed corn. Porridge isn’t part of my dialect anyway. Growing up I never heard anything outside of children’s stories called porridge, such as what the Three Bears prepared for themselves and Goldilocks pirated.

Yuriko had no notion of grits growing up and still doesn’t care for them. Lilly took to them in a big way, but Ann did not. Different children, different tastes.

Mm, Doughnuts

Posted on March 30, 2020 by admin

Been a while since we’ve gone out to eat, of course, but we haven’t been that keen on takeout lately either. On Sunday morning, I decided to drive to the nearest doughnut shop, an independent, and bring home a dozen. Here they are, a selection of creme-filled delights, since that’s what we prefer.

The siren call of doughnuts is pretty strong, but we only buy them every two or three months. Call this latest box our quarterly ration, then, comfort food for uncomfortable times.

For the first time ever, I bought doughnuts using the drive-through. Not just the first at this shop, the first time anywhere. Not bad, just not my typical method. Given my druthers, and until now I’ve always been given my druthers in the matter of doughnuts, I go into the shop to buy a selection. The rows of cheap pastry, from the alluringly plump creme-filled offerings to the scrawny cake doughnuts, wait behind the counter, available not for self-serve, but upon request of another human being.

Ritual selection, it is. Eye the doughnuts, determine what the shop has that you and your party might want — it’s always good to know the tastes of your immediate family in these matters — order two or three or four of this or that, until your dozen is complete. Does anyone ever say to the clerk, just give me a dozen of your choice? Do such devil-may-care people exist? It’s a large world, so they must. But I’ll never be that person.

I’ve been ordering doughnuts for 50 years, that’s why. In our early years in San Antonio, we would sometimes stop at a doughnut shop on the way home from church on Sunday. By ca. 1970, maybe even a little earlier, I’d be tasked as an eight- or nine-year-old to go get the dozen doughnuts.

It was a Dunkin Donuts. I mention that not as an ad — that brand hasn’t been a preferred choice of mine for many years — but to note that it must have been a new franchise in those days, since the brand exploded out of New England only in the 1960s. I never associated it with New England, at least not then. It was merely a likable doughnut shop. It did not, as it does now, distance itself from its pastry origins.

That shop, on Broadway near the Witte Museum, is long gone. A meat shop is in the building now.

A meat shop associated with the restaurant next door, Smoke Shack, which hasn’t been there long, though some kind of restaurant has been next to the former Dunkin’ Donuts since I can remember.

If you look closely at Meat Market, you can see its doughnut past — the glass wall showing most of the store interior, where people sat to drink their coffee, and the part of the building on the right behind brick, which is where the doughnuts were made.

A Journey Around My House

Posted on March 23, 2020 by admin

Snow yesterday around sunset.

All of it melted today. Outbreak or not, it’s still mud season.

Last year I read A Journey Around My Room by Xavier de Maistre (Voyage autour de ma chambre, published in 1794, but of course I read a recent translation by Stephen Sartarelli). I found it at the township library completely by chance, and only a few months later now, I can’t remember why it caught my eye.

I’m glad it did. I won’t review it here, but I will say that it’s amusing, and now and then funny. De Maistres was under house arrest for dueling, an aristocratic punishment for an aristocratic offence. He wrote a short volume about some of the objects in his room, which of course involved various digressions and tangents.

“Towards the end of the 18th century, a young aristocrat, confined to his house in Turin for 42 days as a result of a duel (one presumes his antagonist came off worse), decided to both ease his boredom and make a joke of it all by writing a – well, there it is in the title,” writes Nicholas Lezard in The Guardian. “It was Blaise Pascal who said that all the troubles of humanity came about because of the difficulty men had in simply being happy to sit alone in their rooms; here is the result of such an enforced confinement. And it is wonderful.”

His book comes to mind now for obvious reasons. Time, then, to look around my house and find some objects to write about. I’ll never be as witty as De Maistres, but so what. When circumstances keep you at home, best to ruminate on the clutter around the house. Why else harbor that clutter if you don’t do that sometimes?

Such as one my worn t-shirts, the kind you don’t wear any more, but don’t discard. This is the back; the front is a corporate logo.

In 2002, when I worked downtown editing a magazine, Krispy Kreme opened a location not far from my office. The shop was giving away free doughnuts and t-shirts specially made to extol that particular store, hence the mention of the Loop. The doughnuts didn’t last long back at the office, naturally, but I wore the shirt now and then for a few years, one of the few advertising shirts I was willing to wear.

KK was on a growth bender at the time that didn’t end well, but didn’t put the company out of business, either. The brand contracted for a while, including the closure of the downtown store and one near my house in the suburbs. In the 2010s, the company seems to have grown at a more measured, and presumably more sustainable pace.

In fact, now you can buy KK doughnuts in a score of countries on every continent except Antarctica. But I remember when it was a Southern thing. So Southern, as in the Deep South, that I’d never heard of it growing up in Texas. I discovered it when I went to school in Tennessee, and what a discovery. Delicious hardly did them justice. Good eating by yourself and always welcome at gatherings.

(I realize looking at the 2009 posting that I haven’t mentioned Irwin Hepplewhite and the Terrifying Papoose Jockeys in a long time. Someone has to keep that name going, and that someone is me.)

What I wrote nearly 11 years ago about the KK location that closed is still true when it comes to the nearest open one to us, about 20 minutes away: ” I’m fond enough of their product… but the truth was, the only time we ever bought doughnuts at the Hanover Park location was when we got a hold of coupons offering two boxes for the price of one, since a dozen normally comes at a premium to more ordinary doughnuts.”

California Leftovers

Posted on March 12, 2020 by admin

I drove by Randy’s Donuts near LAX, but didn’t stop to buy any. The first place I did go in Los Angeles, practically right off the plane on February 21, was Roscoe’s House of Chicken and Waffles on W. Manchester Blvd. Mm, good. Almost as good as Maxine’s in Indianapolis, which is high praise.

After I ate chicken and waffles there — a late lunch — I determined that I didn’t have time to go all the way to Venice and stroll around the canals before I had to be back in Ladera Heights to check into my short-term residence. So Venice, California, remains an unfulfilled ambition. Like Venice, Italy.

Instead I drove over to Holy Cross Catholic Cemetery, which is on the edge of Culver City. It has everything it needs to be an aesthetic cemetery — land contour, trees and other greenery — except upright stones or much funerary art.

Still, I found Jimmy Durante. That’s something. Inka Dinka Doo.

I had lunch my first full day in Los Angeles at Grand Central Market downtown. Once a market, now it’s mostly a food hall. A popular place. The likes of which will be largely empty for a while now? This pic is status quo ante.

A large selection of eats. With some good neon.Overpriced, though. While I was eating, rain started to fall outside. Heavy for about half an hour. That was the only rain during my visit.

Saw all too many of these on the sidewalks of LA.
I even saw a man kick one hard in disgust.

I was within sight of the Santa Monica Pier when in Santa Monica, but I didn’t have the energy to actually visit the pier. Didn’t want to put up with the crowds, either.
I did see this.
That would be the opposite of the sign in downtown Chicago.

The East Garden at the Getty Villa includes this fountain.
“The enchanting central wall fountain represents a replica of a mosaic and shell fountain from the House of the Large Fountain in Pompeii,” Alice’s Garden Travel Buzz says. I’ll take Alice’s word for it.

On my return from Texas on March 1, I had a fine view of Chicago as we flew in. First to the south of O’Hare, which was visible as a whole, then across the city and over downtown — I didn’t know that was allowed — and out over Lake Michigan, where we turned. The flight back to O’Hare crossed over the North Side of Chicago, so I got a sky-high view of Wrigley Field, and then lower and lower over the suburbs near O’Hare. I recognized some of the larger roads. Some intersections. A building or two. Wait, what’s that pyramid-shaped building?

The guy next to me on my flight home from Texas rubbed his hands with sanitizer three or four times over two hours. After touching the seatback tray table, I think. If one impact of the novel coronavirus is to encourage people to wash (or clean) their hands more, that’s a good thing.

Easy Day in Palm Springs

Posted on March 10, 2020 by admin

My recent visit to Southern California involved a lot of motion, by car and light rail and on foot. By the time I got to Palm Springs, I was ready for an easier time. Steve and Jack’s hospitality made that possible for me from late afternoon on February 24, when I arrived, to the morning of the 26th, when I left.

If you have the means, Palm Springs is a good town for taking it easy, especially in the winter, which is like a pleasant springtime in a lot of other places. The full day I was in town involved getting up late — a necessary part of any easy day — looking around Palm Spring’s main shopping street and some of its neighborhoods, including visits to a few shops, then lunch and a drive out to the town of Indio to see its main tourist attraction.

If I’d been in full-tourist mode, I might have taken a closer look at some of the town’s modernist houses, or visited its art museum, or taken a hike in the hills, or ridden the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway. If I were another person all together, I would have played golf. I hear a lot of people do that in wintertime Palm Springs, and maybe that’s why Gerald Ford spent a lot of time there.

I took in a few sights. Such as the view across the street from Steve and Jack’s.
We took a stroll down Palm Canyon Dr., which includes restaurants, tony shops, tourist shops, design showcases — modernism is the thing, an aesthetic fully occupying a number of shops — and more.
More, as in stars in the sidewalk, featuring celebrities who lived in Palm Springs at least part of the time. Such as good old Adam West.
Sonny Bono rates a bronze on the street, maybe for his efforts in Congress to ensure that his distant descendants retain the copyright to his songs.
Lucy has a bronze, too. Here’s Steve with Lucy.
Lunch, at Steve’s suggestion, was at the Haus of Poké just off Palm Canyon. The small chain’s web site tells us that “poké/poukei is a raw fish salad served as an appetizer in Hawaiian cuisine, and sometimes as an entree. Poké is the Hawaiian verb for ‘section’ or ‘to slice or cut.’ Typical forms are aku (an oily tuna) and he’e (octopus).”

Haus of Poké is on the Chipotle model — seems like a long time ago that that was novel — in which you pick a series of ingredients for your meal from a limited selection. Step 1, size. Step 2, base: brown rice, white rice, chips or salad. Step 3, protein: octopus, tofu, ahi tuna, salmon, yellowtail or shrimp. Step 4, mix-ins: edamame, cucumber, red onion, green onion or mango. Step 5, a selection of sauces.

I can’t remember exactly what I had now, though it involved white rice and salmon and other things, and it was delicious combo. I can see why Steve’s a regular.

Also not far off Palm Canyon: The Church of St. Paul in the Desert, Episcopal. Unfortunately closed.
That afternoon, we went to Shields, a date farm that’s also a tourist attraction in Indio, California. The sign has been a fixture of the road since the 1950s.
We stayed for a short film — Romance & Sex Life of the Date — which was something like a film you (I) might have seen in elementary school, and at times a little hard to stay awake for. But I can’t say I didn’t learn anything about date agriculture. I didn’t know, for instance, that about 90% of U.S. date cultivation is in the Coachella Valley (Wiki says more than 95%, but I’m citing the movie.)

Steve said that Shields used to offer a selection of date samples on a table, as many as you cared to eat, but we didn’t see that. Turns out you have to ask for a sample now, which includes two dates. Is a new private equity owner clamping down on the freebies?

We bought two date shakes, which were good, and looked around a bit. You can’t wander around the date-growing grounds any more, either, Steve said. Used to be able to. The best view of the Shields date trees turned out to be from the edge of the parking lot.
After Shields, we returned to Steve’s house to loaf around (now there’s a verb we shouldn’t let die). I wasn’t completely idle, however, since I spent time writing postcards. In the evening, we had a pleasant dinner and then sat around and talked and watched TV. The Food Network, I have to say, is a whole other world I knew little about.

The Perfect Man

Posted on February 18, 2020 by admin

Yesterday I visited one of the major drug store chains for reasons unrelated to chocolate, but also took a look at the discounted Valentine’s Day candies. Among the supply, mostly Russell Stover, I found The Perfect Man.

Not something I’d ever seen before. There was one left, so I bought it for the reasonable price of 34 cents. It’s one ounce of milk chocolate made by an outfit called Treat Street.

The About Us page on Treat Street’s web site is one of those long on marketing and short on actual facts, but there seems to be an affiliate (parent company? subsidiary?) called My Favorite Company, which is based in Los Angeles. Anyway, the two entities’ specialty is novelty chocolate and other confections.

The Perfect Man, as you can see from this 9.5-oz. version, is wearing only boxers with hearts on them. (What, no version wearing gold briefs?) The package also says Made in Germany, but I have my suspicions that the real makers are a breakaway faction of Oompa-Loompas tired of working for that slavedriver Wonka.

The Bears’ Cookbook

Posted on February 13, 2020 by admin

The pit of winter hasn’t been very deep this year, but on Wednesday night, snow fell and today temps have been sliding all day. As of this evening, it’s about 5 degrees F. above, with subzero expected by dawn tomorrow. That’s the classic harsh winter pattern we’ve mostly avoided so far this year, when temps have actually risen after snowfall, enough to melt most of it each time.

Then again, forecasts call for above-freezing air by Sunday. The pit still seems pretty shallow. Suits me.

One more unusual book around the house: The Bears’ Cookbook. In this case, I didn’t nab it from my mother’s house. Rather the authors, Steve Freitag and Jack Garceau, gave it to Yuriko and me as a gift in 1998. I knew Steve back at VU; in fact, I was a senior staff member at Versus magazine when he was editor in ’82-’83.

The Bears’ Cookbook was a spiral-bound, privately published effort by Steve and Jack, who produced about 100 copies. As they explain in the book:
“What could be a better Christmas gift for our loved ones, our friends and family, than a cookbook of our favorite recipes? Welcome to our table. Sit, eat, enjoy.”

And so we have over the years. Yuriko and I have used the book, especially her, but so have Lilly and Ann, as soon as they’ve gotten old enough. Just a few weeks ago, Ann made chocolate chip cookies using the recipe on p. 97.

Besides cookies, subjects include breakfast, appetizers, soup, salads, breads, pasta, chicken, other meat, seafood, vegetables, condiments, and cakes and pies. Sources — one given for each recipe — are as diverse as “Ivan, a friend from New Brunswick who now lives in Vermont,” Alice’s Brady Bunch Cookbook, “Mayflower Restaurant in Albany, NY,” “Some men’s magazine Steve read long ago,” Julia Child, and “lost in the mists of time.”

The book actually has three covers. Flip over the first one, and you encounter this amusing, all-text cover.

A note inside the book explains: “We wound up with several covers, each with different titles, and we couldn’t decide which one to use. So we decided to use them all! Well, actually, just a few of them…

“Pick the cover you like best for a cookbook that may very well grace your coffee table, bookshelf or nightstand for years to come. Fold back the other covers (one of the few advantages if spiral binding), so that the excess covers become mere interior pages. Voila! The cover you prefer graces this lovely book.”

The third cover.

The inside cover of each of the covers includes biographical notes about Steve and Jack, such as under a cartoon of them:

Steve Freitag and Jack Garceau are not cartoon characters by a real flesh-and-blood couple who live high above San Francisco in an 18th-floor apartment they never call the ‘Treehouse of Justice.’

They’ve since moved to Palm Springs. Under a photo of them decked out in Western duds:

Steve Freitag and Jack Garceau — known far & wide as two of the orneriest, grizzliest old hashslingers in the West! — started out as mama’s-boy East Coast fops…

Under another cartoon of them with oversized heads:

Enormous heads like these require plenty of food! So it’s no surprise that Steve and Jack like to cook. Like to eat and like to read — and now, write — cookbooks.

I’m no judge of cookbooks, but I know this one is fun to use and fun to read.

Chicago Chinatown ’20

Posted on February 3, 2020 by admin

One of these days, I might pop into the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Museum on S. Wentworth Ave. in Chinatown. It has to count as one of the more obscure museums in metro Chicago, and that adds some interest right there.

But when we went to Chinatown on Saturday, we took a pass on Sun Yat-Sen and had lunch next door instead, at a newish-looking place called Slurp-Slurp. Had some tasty noodle soups there.
Chinatown wasn’t the main destination that day, but it was more-or-less on the way, and always a dependable place to find something good to eat, and things to see. Even if there isn’t a parade.

We arrived at the Cermak-Chinatown El Station and saw something fairly new, visible from the stairs leading to the ground.
Done in hand-made ceramic tile by Indira Freitas Johnson, installed in 2015.

“The centerpiece of the upper panel features Fook (Fú in Mandarin), the symbol of good fortune or happiness,” the CTA says. “According to custom, the symbol is placed upside down and against a diamond-shaped background. Within the context of the stairway Fook (Fú) may be translated as ‘good fortune arrives.’ ”

Not far from the station is a screen wall.

It looks like there had once been a small sign in front of the wall to explain it, but that’s now completely blank. Not to worry, a very short amount of Googling tells me that it’s a Nine-Dragon Wall, a miniature version of such a wall in Beihai Park, Beijing (the Winter Palace).

Wiki tells us that there are various other walls of this style, including one at the Forbidden City that I have no recollection of seeing. Then again, it’s a large place. There’s also one at the Mississauga Chinese Centre in the Toronto suburb of that name.

Besides lunch, we did a short walk on Wentworth Ave., since the weather wasn’t too bad for the pit of winter. Not pit of winter-ish at all, with temps above freezing, though sometimes winds would kick up. Wentworth is the original hub of Chicago’s Chinatown.

There’s evidence of continuing cross-cultural pollination.

About a half block off Wentworth is St. Therese Chinese Catholic Church. Unfortunately, the sanctuary was closed.
Some distinctive Chinese features are visible outside.
Later I learned that the church had been built just after the turn of the 20th century as Santa Maria Incoronata, to serve an Italian congregation. By the 1960s, the demographics of the neighborhood had changed enough for it to become St. Therese, serving a Chinese congregation.

7 & 17

Posted on February 2, 2020 by admin

What’s good about February? Just that we’re shed of January, though winter so far this year hasn’t been that bad. Also, you can sense by now, even if you aren’t paying close attention, that the days are getting longer.

Ann got two confections recently for her 17th birthday. One was a pie. She asked for that, along with the question-mark candle. After all, who knows what comes after any particular birthday?

The usual suspects came over to celebrate and help her eat the pie.

The event was on the Saturday ahead of her birthday. On her birthday itself, her mother made her an artful creme-and-fruit cake. The pie was just a fond memory by that time.

This year being 2020 and all, I decided to look at my 2010 photo file to see what I had in the way of birthday pics for that year that I didn’t post at the time. The cake was a little different, I discovered.

So were the usual suspects, though most of them aren’t pictured here.

One thing that hasn’t changed: the essential cluttered nature of our dining table. But what’s a table for, if not to clutter it up?

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Food & Beverage