On my journey through Texas I stopped at a Whataburger. Aficionados of American roadside food will know how exciting that is. I had a single cheese with bacon and jalapeños.
Category Archives: Food and Drink
STEAK
At the Saltgrass Steak House, a favorite stop on any cross-country drive that takes me through Amarillo, Texas. Just across the way is a Country Inn that has smoking rooms and good wifi.
I was served by Kelly, an adorable young lass who was working her first night as a waitress, hoping to land a permanent position at the restaurant. When I told her she was doing a great job she pumped her fist and said, “Yes!”
Texas.
BETTY CROCKER’S PICTURE COOKBOOK
You would have been hard pressed in the 1950s to find a middle-class American home that didn’t possess a copy of this book — it sold even more copies than The Joy Of Cooking. Its recipes were illustrated with hundreds of step-by-step photos, and decorated with cheerful drawings of modern living.
Betty Crocker was a fictional person, the face of General Mills, a flour company, so her cookbook was heavily weighted towards baked goods, especially desserts. It emphasized brightly colored confections, compensation, it has been suggested, for the diminished taste of foodstuffs designed to be prepared quickly, often from mixes.
First published in 1950, the book had a spiral notebook design, so pages could be removed for easier perusal while preparing dishes. Like The Joy Of Cooking, Betty and her cookbook served in the place of mothers and grandmothers for women who had moved to isolated suburbs after WWII, cut off from their traditional kitchen mentors.
Its emphasis on convenience helped free women from time in the kitchen so that they could serve meals yet still join in the nightly gathering around the new American hearth — the television set.
Popular around the same time were table-top appliances that allowed women to prepare hot snacks or meals in the living room within sight of the television set. Swanson’s TV Brand Frozen Dinners, appearing first in 1953, took this idea to its logical extreme. The frozen dinners came in brightly colored packages which depicted the food inside the frame of a television screen. Collapsible table-trays, for eating such fare in front of the television, became standard fixtures of the American home in this era.
MONO+MONO
Behind this intriguing facade in New York’s East Village my friend Jae Song discovered an even more intriguing establishment. He writes:
I was in a real bad mood the other day. My motorbike broke down and I had to get it towed — AGAIN! — and it’s costing me a pretty penny.
I didn’t want to do anything but stay home by myself and watch a movie but I forced myself out to a birthday party — it was at a place called MONO+MONO . . . a Korean-ish restaurant (owned and run by all total hipster Koreans) that also only plays analog music (thus the name.)
It’s ALL VINYL — they have 30,000 vintage records — they take up the entire wall, up to the 20′ high (or more perhaps) ceiling of the place, behind glass. Only the DJ can access them of course.
And the spicy fried chicken . . . it is . . . insanely crazy good. It’s not fried chicken as we know it — it’s that super lightly buttery double-fried Korean style chicken . . . outside layer that is impossibly thin and crunchy and juicy inside — and it’s dry to the touch yet has tons of saucy flavor, tastes like it’s dripping with sauce.
I have to say the music was great all night long. You see people moving in their seats — if they had a dance floor everyone would have been dancing by the end of the night — warm fun upbeat jazz on vinyl, coming out of tube amps, I suspect (they had old tubes as decoration.)
So . . . I was glad I went out — it made me happy.
AT THE BOILING CRAB
. . . with my sisters Libba and Lee after eating huge amounts of crawfish, shrimp and clams, with our fingers.
MY NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTION
. . . to drink at least one well-chilled bottle of Tavel per night only lasted two nights — but what splendid nights they were!
APALACHICOLA, FLORIDA
This summer — Lee and Nora at the Up the Creek Raw Bar, by the docks where the shrimp boats come in.
MARY'S PIES
My friend Mary Zahl is a master pie maker. When we stayed at her family's cabin on Lake Butler, Florida this summer she made pies for us. I'm dreaming about them now.
LEXINGTON STYLE
Lee and Nora in front of what is reputedly the best barbecue joint in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. It features Lexington-style barbecue, common throughout the North Carolina Piedmont. Like the barbecue I grew up with on the North Carolina coast it consists of shredded pork in a vinegar-based sauce or marinade, but the Lexington style adds a liberal dose of ketchup to the sauce. This makes the dish a bit too sweet for my taste, but it's still damn good.
THE BEST
. . . barbecue in Wilmington, North Carolina. They cater.
MARY TAKES THE CHALLENGE
My friend Mary decided to “take the challenge” at a strawberry shortcake restaurant near her home in Florida. The deal is simple — eat twelve pounds of strawberry shortcake within five minutes and the dessert is free.
Mary managed the feat with only seconds to spare. “I don't even remember eating those last few pounds,” she said. “I was just on automatic pilot at that point.”
EARTHLY DELIGHTS
As a run-up to National Strawberry Shortcake Day next Tuesday, my friend Paul decided to go into training early.
STRAWBERRY SHORTCAKE
Next Tuesday, as everyone knows, is National Strawberry Shortcake Day. Stores all over the country are already running short of the berries and the fixings as folks scramble to stock up for the big celebration.
Restaurants which specialize in the magnificent treat, like the one in Florida whose sign is shown above, are gearing up for the biggest crowds of the year.
There's a reason that millions agree — National Strawberry Shortcake Day is the most delicious day of the year!
MISADVENTURES IN DINING
The day after our Red Lobster experience, my nephew Harry and I decided to treat ourselves to some superlative seafood, in its purest form — sushi. We had an early dinner at Hamada, the Las Vegas branch of a noted Japanese restaurant. It's a cool place, a bit off The Strip on Flamingo, with traditional Japanese decor and waitresses who wear kimonos.
We sat at the sushi bar and ordered ambitiously, but I failed to realized that each “piece” I marked on the order card was actually two pieces — so we were served twice as much food as I expected. Of course, it's hard to find yourself confronted with “too much” octopus or tuna or salmon sushi, or too many salmon-skin rolls. We took home eight spicy tuna rolls, out of the sixteen I had inadvertently ordered, which we polished off later that night.
As dining disasters go, this was a very pleasant one.
RED LOBSTER
Recently I began to be seriously disturbed by the fact that I had never eaten at a Red Lobster. I did not expect that the experience would be a good one, but avoiding the experience seemed . . . well, it seemed un-American.
My nephew Harry's current visit to Las Vegas offered a rare opportunity to enlist a companion for a visit to a Red Lobster, because Harry is mad for seafood. Despite his profound lack of enthusiasm for this particular venture — he had eaten at a Red Lobster once before and had found it underwhelming — he agreed to it in a spirit of scientific inquiry and patriotism.
The results of the inquiry can now be reported. The decor of a Red Lobster is predictably generic. The service at a slow hour was acceptable. An appetizer plate of fried calamari, clams and broccoli was appetizing. The recently-live Maine lobster I had was red, and perfectly fine. The crustaceans on Harry's Ultimate Feast platter, a lobster tail and snow crab legs, were tasty — the fried shrimp edible, the shrimp scampi not so much.
So . . . o. k. seafood in a boring setting at a stiff price. I wouldn't revisit the place here in Las Vegas, where there are so many great seafood restaurants, but I can imagine being grateful to find a Red Lobster in a desolate strip mall somewhere in the heartland, not too far from a desolate motel one happened to be stuck in for one reason or another.
At any rate, I feel that my credentials as an American have been honorably renewed.