food

Hot Toddies and Blathering

/ wvfurandroot / 4 Comments

You had to drink beer. I didn't matter that you didn't like it.

I lived in the great frozen tundra of Milwaukee for seven years. I did, rather painfully, eventually acclimate to the winters, but it was slow process. The first year I was sure I was going to die. The second year I just wanted to. By the third year, I grumbled more than the natives, but could, on occasion, set foot out of the house between October and May without long johns.

Compared to the buckle of the Bible belt that is West Virginia, folks in Milwaukee drink a lot. I think by anybody’s standards, they drink a lot. The cold has something to do with it. Nevertheless, beer is a perennial favorite. No kidding, I went to a church social one time and they served beer.

Milwaukeeans drink beer year-round, but in winter, usually at the holidays, the hot drinks start appearing. Another Milwaukee passion, schnapps is poured into hot chocolate when not drunk straight. Schnapps in one guise or another will appear all year, but Christmas and New Year’s is the time for Tom & Jerrys, hot buttered rum, eggnog and assorted warmer-uppers with a buzz.

Me. Cold and liquored up on something.

I’m not a fan of eggnog, but a nice Tom & Jerry on a cold winter night is sublime. Below is one recipe – for whatever reason, the drink isn’t popular around here and I don’t know why. It’s so ubiquitous up north that you can buy the “batter” in just about any store.

6 eggs
2 cups sugar
1 teaspoon ground cloves
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon nutmeg

Directions:  Separate eggs, beat whites until stiff, add sugar. Beat yolks until foamy. Fold together and add spices. Refrigerate until serving. To serve: fill mug with hot water. Add 1 1/2 tablespoons of mix per mug and 1 oz. liquor (brandy or rum).

Now folks in Milwaukee are also the biggest consumers of brandy in the nation, so anytime I had a T&J it was always made with brandy and not rum. The “not rum” part was important. I once got raging drunk on rum & cokes while eating popcorn and it wasn’t pretty. I didn’t drink or eat either for years.

In order to keep up with all that drinking, there’re a lot of bars in Milwaukee. In quiet, otherwise staid neighborhoods, there’s often a house on a corner where the owners have turned their living room into a bar. These little places were scattered all over the city and put the hop in bar hopping.

One time, on a bitterly cold night, my date and I popped into one to try and get the feeling back into our feet. I had a bad head cold and the barkeep, entranced with my southern accent, was determined to doctor me. He insisted I needed a hot buttered rum. I protested I didn’t drink rum. He insisted. I demurred. He sat one in front of me. I was new enough to the town that I hadn’t yet learned how to impose my will on strong-willed Germans. I couldn’t stand rum and the idea of putting butter in hot rum really turned my stomach. I decided to take a sip to be polite.

Hot damn, that was good stuff. It didn’t just involve rum and butter, but included spiced cider. Knowing my history with rum, I stopped at one and, later, convinced myself the head cold disguised the taste and under normal circumstances rum was not going to go down my throat without bringing up the contents of my stomach.

Years passed. Twenty-five or so of them. My boycott of rum continued.

A few years ago, I arrived in Massachusetts with a bad head cold. Between sniffles, coughs, achoos, chills and general unpleasantness, I told HMOKeefe the rum story. The next thing I knew there was a hot buttered rum in a large mug in my hands. I had several. – muchly much better than Nyquil and I slept all night.

We branched out to mulled cider, which near as I can figure is a more heavily spiced version of hot buttered rum minus the butter.

I’m a fan of mulled cider both with and without rum. The other night the first really cold snap of the year arrived and I pined for mulled cider. I couldn’t find fresh cider, but I did find an old bottle of cider in the pantry. I had a very fine rum on hand (Appleton Estates) and some old, half-stale mulling spices. I decided bad mulled cider was better than none.

I made way too much of the spiced cider and ended up freezing the leftovers in ice cube trays. This was genius! I can now have spiked spiced cider anytime I want. With the cold and rain of the past few days, I have enjoyed my less than stellar cider although freezing did much to improve it.

I'm fixin' to snuggle with Babette and read a novel.

I’m getting used to having a hot toddy in the evening. This weekend I may play around with hot chocolate and brandy (Schnapps is just hideous.)  But right now, Babette and I have a date to curl up on the sofa and enjoy some quality time together.  She’s one happy puppy these days and is no longer shy about demanding attention.

Mashed Potatoes and the Internet

/ wvfurandroot / 14 Comments

Today, a Facebook Friend said

 ♥ instant mashed potatoes. Yeah I do.

 Now I haven’t met this person in real life, but one of the wonders of Facebook is that such details aren’t all that important in cultivating a real friendship.  However, I told her that this love of instant mashed potatoes might be grounds for our breaking up.

Mashed potatoes are not just a high-glycemic carbohydrate.  When the tuber is boiled, combined with milk and butter, and mashed, the resultant gestalt is home, family, nurture and nature – in short, love on a plate.  If the potatoes contain a few lumps, the effect is intensified.

Piffle - NOT a great value.

Instant Mashed Potatoes go with take-out Thanksgiving Dinners and gas station champagne.  Just because somebody sells it, doesn’t mean anyone should buy it.  Some things are travesties of the spirit. 

I was a small child during that era that Mad Men is making trendy.  Dinner was at 5:00 and involved meat and potatoes most days of the week.  Sure there were buttered noodles and converted rice as well as fried, baked or boiled potatoes, but mashed potatoes were the norm. 

When we moved to Hawaii in 1967, we were met with the potato problem.  Getting spuds to the islands was expensive and they arrived rotten.  That first box of mashed potatoes entered my mother’s kitchen.  Mashed potatoes were such a norm it didn’t occur to anyone to eliminate such from the menu in the absence of real potatoes.  I suppose if for some reason Thanksgiving found me without a home-cooked feast, I would succumb to Bob Evan’s take-out offering just as I have, on occasion, succumbed to gas station champagne.  Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday and champagne my favorite party drink.  Still.  These are travesties of the spirit.

I cannot stress this enough, I am never going to post in my Facebook status that I  ♥ either one.  Let’s not get silly.

When we were stateside again, the return of real potatoes to the table was a delight.  My brother was beside himself.  He was so young when were in Kaneohe that he had no memory of real potatoes.  He fell in love with Idaho’s export.  The first thing he would do when presented with mashed potatoes was to look for lumps. 

 My mother did not use an electric mixer to mash her potatoes.  We had the tried and true masher.  And those things take work.  Only someone with a great hatred of lumps in the mashed taters would use one of those things long enough to eradicate every potato chunk.  Lumpy potatoes became a sign of non-instant potatoes.  Whoever mashed the potatoes in our house, and we took turns, did so intentionally leaving lumps.  Lumps made my brother happy. 

Lumpy potatoes = good. = great = love =somebody cares about me.

As a family, we talked about this. Lumpy mashed potatoes were explicit in our family culinary lore.  Besides lumpy, we liked our taters with enough backbone  to form a bowl to hold the gravy or the butter – none of this whipped into frothy, drippy frenzy of tortured tubers.  Oh no!  Our potatoes had character and a stiff backbone. 

My dad’s spaghetti sauce was legend.  The homemade pizza pert near.  And we were known for the taters.  Some folks ate them politely, but with varying degrees of puzzlement.  After all, we didn’t look like slovenly folk who would half mash the potatoes and be stingy with the milk.

 As my burgeoning interest in cooking collided with my anachronistic interest in 50’s music, I became obsessed with Dee Dee Sharp’s Mashed Potato Time.  A good friend and I, Charlene, made up our dance we dubbed the La Hava” which we could even do on roller skates.  We had to make up our dance because You Tube didn’t exist and we couldn’t find anybody to teach us the real Mashed Potato. 

The La Hava was very versatile and worked for lots of the 50’s songs we loved – Leader of the Pack, Why Must I Be a Teenager in Love and The Last Kiss.  We must have been quite a sight – our teeny bopper suburban hippy selves rocking out to my mom’s music.

Joy to the World

But before La Hava and Charlene, there was Nancy and long afternoons in my living room with a Monopoly board, iced tea, and the top-40 radio station.  We were wildly, giggly, obnoxiously in love with Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog as was much of the country.  [I was also wild about Patsy Cline, but Nancy teased me about it and I remember one horrible fight over it.]

I wonder if she remembers the day she and I, my mom and some more of our friends (including Charlene) danced around the living room to Three Dog Night.  My mom had the tambourine.  Nancy and I were using wooden fruit for microphones singing loudly and unabashedly off-key – drunk on happy music and the ridiculous sight of my mother with a tambourine.  Or maybe it was Charlene and I singing off-key.  I have this tiny, incomplete memory that Nancy may have been musically gifted.  [To this day I still don’t know why we had a tambourine – we were not then nor are we now a family gifted with even the semblance of musical ability.]

I found Nancy on Facebook the other day.  Quite by accident.  After 36 years, it will be like building a friendship.  I haven’t spent any of my adult life with people who knew me as a military brat.  Who knew me before life started settling into predictable patterns.  It will be interesting to see how building a friendship with someone I was once close to compares with building one with someone I’ve never actually met. 

Dancing to Mashed Potato Time wouldn’t have been as much fun if we hadn’t had to invent the steps.  I’m grateful You Tube didn’t exist.  I’m delighted that Facebook does so that I could reconnect with Nancy.  I’m also delighted with Facebook’s penchant to bring me friends I’ve never met.  I’ve switched to a Kitchenaid to make my mashed taters these days.  If you time it carefully, the lumps remain.  Technology preserving the old ways in new ways – if you time it carefully.

I can ask Nancy if she remembers.  I can also ask her if she knows where Charlene is.  If the La Hava becomes the next viral line dance, you’ll know we three hooked up in a bar somewhere. 

Redemption

/ wvfurandroot / 8 Comments

Faulkner could have written a short story about this heat – the heat and the spiders and the beer going down like a gulf sunset at 78 degrees past midnight – the t-shirt plastered to my back and the mosquito bites rimming my ankles.

What Faulkner would have done with my character is something to ponder. Maybe I’m more of a Tennessee Williams kind of chick.

Either way, I’m a careworn woman living alone in an old ramshackle house where the heat intensifies my age, coloring it with angry reds and slashes of orange. The arrival of midnight mutes those colors, moonlight softening to pink and tangerine, taking out the hard edges. I might be beautiful in this light.

The house is cooling down and this beer tastes like sweet relief.

The big white floor fan is just behind me. The sweat is drying, gritty and tight. My hair is damp and there’s a blister on my finger from scrubbing the lawn furniture – trying to keep the mildew at bay.

I succumbed and turned the dryer on for want of sweet towels. With the beer, the fan and 78 degrees past midnight, I think I can bear the heat of the dryer.

I can smell the bleach I used in the house to battle the debris of a dirt road, the mold of a wet summer, and the joy of three small dogs.

The beer and the fan are deep pleasures..

The youngest of the old dogs is licking my arm. I lick to taste what she tastes. I’m salty from the heat and work of the day. A tepid shower and straightforward soap will strip my skin of the salt and the dirt and the honesty of a day spent in yard work, housework. Will sluice the worries of a ramshackle house and the cares of a woman who might have been a character in the story of an old, southern writer.

It’s 78 degrees past midnight and this beer tastes like redemption.

Discourse without distraction.

/ wvfurandroot / 7 Comments

Naked lobster at the elephant table.

I have returned from Massachusetts after celebrating HMOKeefe’s birthday.  It was a wonderful time even if I did give him a cold for his birthday (or tried to).  The champagne was Veuve Cliquot, the lobster 2 lbs and the discourse was without distraction.