Home Cookin'

I was a child of the 1970s. Sure, I was born in the 1960s, but the decade that formed my wonderful self was the decade of polyester, Match Game, and Star Wars. That also meant I was subjected to some of the most interesting meal items of the past 100 years. Some of these items pre-date the seventies and some stretched into the 80s and beyond. Still others died out completely, but, in the ever-incestuous culture we live in, some food ideas have experienced a rebirth in much the same way elephant flares, Marcia Brady hair, and wannabe Grateful Dead Heads have slithered their ways back onto the AOL Welcome page.

BREAKFAST

Let's start with breakfast, where most of us used to begin our day. Back then, it was basically cereal with names like SUGAR Pops, SUGAR Frosted Shredded Wheat, and the king of all boastful cereal names - SUPER SUGAR Crisp, with the lovable SUGAR bear. And why wouldn't he be lovable? After all, he had that cool, smoky voice, hipster half-stoned gaze, wore that kick-ass blue turtle neck sweater, and of course wore no pants. He wasn't just pushing cereal on hyperactive kids, he was pushing animal porn. Throw in Porky Pig and Donald Duck and you'd have an x-rated version of Animal Farm. But, back to the cereal. It seemed each commercial claimed their cereal was loaded with "8 essential vitamins and minerals" and was a "part of this balanced breakfast." The balanced breakfast would show half a grapefruit, unsweetened juice, some unbuttered wheat toast, and maybe a handful of blueberries. I never knew anyone who ate all of that crap. The kids I knew filled up a bowl of Trix, Apple Jacks or Frosted Flakes, over-poured the milk, and with all the skill of a Wallenda, navigated their way in front of the television to watch Scooby-Doo. If you were a boy, you did all of this in your underwear.

The more enterprising among us would find a way to bug our parents for a slice of cake, some cinnamon sticky buns, or some other quickly-decaying dessert left to harden overnight when your folks' Pinochle game breached the midnight hour the night before. The right amount of nagging usually did the trick. Go too far and you got backhanded. Yeah, that was still in vogue back then. After breakfast, your mother threw you outside so she could A) get some peace, B) make you burn off the sugar, and C) watch her soaps.

LUNCH

For the sake of argument, let's not include the conveyor belt cafeteria food served in school. In fact, let's just stick to summer and weekend lunches, because, and let's be honest here, the school cafeteria lunch is a subject unto itself.

Lunch was a pretty straightforward affair. It was usually peanut butter and jelly, tuna fish, or lunch meat - usually baloney. We can all thank that damned Oscar Mayer commercial ("My baloney has a first name, it's O-S-C-A-R...") for roughly 30%-40% of our lunches back then. We were also big on deviled ham, Spam, and something called fluffernutters, which sounds like the name of a stagehand on a porno movie set but was actually just peanut butter and brain-shivering marshmallow cream. Now, some kids were particular about how their sandwiches were cut. The ones who didn't care, had theirs cut into four squares. The cool kids had theirs cut club-sandwich style into four triangles. Their bigger kids just went for the single cut into two halves, and the weenies always wanted their crust cut off. But, there was one thing we ALL agreed on: potato chips in the sandwich was the ONLY way to go. Toss in a few Oreos, Nutter Butters or yummy Keebler chocolate doo-dads, and you were a lazy blob until dinner rolled around. Then,mom threw you outside again or you watched reruns of The Flintstones, Gilligan's Island, or The Brady Bunch.

DINNER

Dinner was more than the third meal of the day. Dinner was a ritual. Some would call it "supper" but in our house, it was dinner, with a capital DIN. That's right, it could get downright noisy and boisterous with three boys at the table. Mom could have been part of the U.S. Olympic cooking team while Dad could have captained the Big Pork Chop stare-down squad. I really didn't appreciate the effort and taste of stews, roasts, stroganoffs, au gratin potatoes (or as we called them, "rotten au gratin"), stewed tomatoes on macaroni and cheese, and assorted casseroles. Fondue was big, as was BLT night and breakfast night where pancakes, eggs and bacon ruled the roost and there was Dad, methodically slicing his Jersey tomatoes with every meal.

We were an iced tea family, but not the kind made from the sugary powder. Nope, we had this convoluted, mad-scientist formula for making iced tea that involved photosynthesis, the alignment of the planets, and the sacrificing of an annoying neighbor, of which we had many. It tasted awful. The only way my Mom and I could stand it was to drench it in Minute Maid concentrated lemon juice. I put so much lemon juice in my tea that a black hole would form on my uvula.

DESSERT

We weren't a big desert family, but when there was dessert, it was a big to-do. Large hunks of cake and pie and teetering stacks of cookies. For holidays, mom would make ambrosia, which I hated. Separately,I like each ingredient, but, combined, coconut doesn't jive with marshmallows and those tiny Mandarin oranges creep me out in any language. Of all things I do miss, though, it was ice box cake, which my grandmother made. It was simple: a rectangular pan with a crust of graham crackers, about 2 inches of chocolate pudding, then topped with another layer of graham crackers. Chill. Serve into squares and top with an Alpine-size wallop of Kool-Whip. Die with a smile on your face.

Wow. I never really realized how much I have missed ice box cake, or those meals with my family.

Hell, I even miss the rotten au gratin potatoes.

Be a Man!

So, I settled in for the evening to expand my cultural palette by watching some bone-snapping, pupil-dilating, testosterone-boiling professional hockey. Of course, it wasn't on any of the sports channels - instead, it was on OLN (that's the Outdoor Life Network for you 'slickers). Even worse, it wasn't even on OLN like it was supposed to be, but I'll get back to that in a sec.

The OLN is a unique color in the television spectrum. It plays host to the Tour de France, the Boston Marathon and Survivor: Crab Nebula. It also boasts a roster of multiple animal hunting, tracking, and killing shows. This is not a network for vegans. You won't find Moby's Watercress Cook-Off or commercials for Mahatma Gandhi burgers (the "Gand-wich" is a real mover at patchouli-scented festivals). Pick a random time of the day, turn on OLN and you'll inevitably see some once-breathing animal hanging upside down ready for gutting, stuffing, and/or mounting. It's a chest hair network. Watch an hour or so of it and feel your canine teeth stretch and throb like vampiric stalactites. Watch two hours of it, and get ready to eat your meat raw. Watch three hours or more of it and your penis grows five inches. For this reason, I recommend women watch no more than two hours' worth of OLN.

Getting back to the more civilized programming of professional hockey, OLN provides National Hockey League (NHL) coverage every Monday and Tuesday evening. Me? I'm a hockey fan - I've been one all my life. I remember the Broad Street Bullies that were the Philadelphia Flyers of the mid-1970's, I've watched Wayne Gretzky from his first NHL game until his last, I've seen scoring go up down and now back up again. I witnessed the majesty of a Stanley Cup parade. I played it in summer, taping bricks to both sides of my stick blades and stickhandling a tennis ball across a root-laced lawn, I played it on video, banged the hell out of the garage door with the orange Mylec ball, played it in the basement, got the snot beat out of me by the larger Catholic school kids while still beating them on the scoreboard. If a big kid wanted to punch me, I would duck, but if that bigger kid's even BIGGER brother tried to cross-check me during a game, I'd put my stick between his legs and knock his ass hard onto the cement. I was a skinny, scythe-wielding bringer of street hockey death and my Air-Flo stick had more notches on it than a totem pole violently hacked by Crispin Glover.

I sit down with my sandwich and iced tea and wouldn't you know it? OLN is running a Ted Nugent reality show - something called "Wanted: Ted or Alive". Now, I can get down with "Cat Scratch Fever," "Double Live Gonzo," and "Wango Tango" and other prom-theme anthems of Mr. Nugent's rock and roll days, but I had hockey on my mind. Then, a strange thing happened. I started watching it. And watching it. Then I realized it was a freaking marathon - and I was enjoying it! Hell, I was hooked. Now, good old Ted swings from a different branch on the tree of life. He's from Detroit and has never smoked, never drank, never did drugs - he just rocked and rolled. For that, he was dubbed "The Motor City Madman" with such mood-setting lyrics as "...pretend that your face is a Maserati..."

Well, good old Ted had he had these five people skinning deer, killing and eating chickens, getting plastered with paint balls, being human scarecrows. One guy allowed himself to be shaved bald, another idiot kept dropping his pants and playing the token bad-ass, one girl quit, another girl kept crying - but bless her, she kept at it, and another gal was a Xena warrior with a heart of champion gold. I'm not that big a fan of Ted's music, and his politics are polarizing, but the man sure as hell is entertaining and could probably arm a militia big enough to take down Eastern Canada - or at least Nova Scotia. He's a force of nature...would have made a hell of a hockey player.

On this show, there was so much blood, so much violence, so much sacrificing - hell, I might as well HAVE been watching a hockey game. I must have viewed at least three hours of it.

I'd better stop here. My teeth are sharpening, I crave raw meat, and if I write any more, well, the ladies? - they'll come a-knockin'.

No Composite, No Return

I took some time away recently to get some things in order. Sometimes, even the most enjoyable things in life, such as trimming ingrown toenails, explosive diarrhea, and competitive back-zit popping lose all of their organic romance. You have to step away, toss out the old soy sauce packets in the fridge from the local Chinese delivery shop, finally stack those nickels on the dresser and finally put the toilet paper roll on the spool.

The truth is, I had to reload. Sure, there are always things to write about if you're interested in writing about whether to put the salt shaker to the left of the pepper shaker, how best to do battle with a large spider while showering, or how I lost over 11,000 Roll-Over minutes when I changed my wireless phone plan. That's right, 11,000 frigging minutes! Actually, doing battle with the spider would have made a fun story.

See, our lives are composites of all we see, smell, think, blah, blah, blah and how we burn that fuel towards making our psychic engines sputter along. I simply had nothing in the tank. Oh, I could have thrown some sub-standard bone to my reading audience (both of you), but that would have been as welcome as a beer-fart during an afternoon tea at a Red Hat Society meeting. It's not that there is a dearth of topics to write about. Hell, I could write an ordinary story of walking across a river of lava on the charred corpses of festival mimes and probably even make THAT funny. That's part of the triumvirate of comedy jello: Mime jokes, the outrageous Southern preacher voice, and complaining about the opposite sex. There's always room in one's routine for any and all of those.

I've been having to give blood a lot lately. Apparently, it's a delicacy in some parts of Eastern Europe (I'm looking at you, Transylvania). I've had roughly 10 bath tubs full of blood drawn from me in the past month with needles about as thick as Arby's straws. Apparently, "You might feel a little pinch" is Transylvanian for "You didn't by chance have any garlic recently?" as a smooth-domed, walrus-mustachioed, barrel-chested man in a leopard-skin singlet crashes down on my arm with a 500-lb. mallet so hard that he leaves his feet upon the descent. I have so many holes in my arm that it looks like I had a whole army of drafting compasses River Dancing on my forearms.

First of all, walking into one of those labs holds about as much joy and whimsy as seeing your grandfather naked in the shower - with your grandmother. You walk in with what amounts to other pathetic bastards like yourself, all coughing, sniffling, and playing the "I wonder what disease SHE has" game amongst themselves. The thoroughly uninterested desk clerk hurls the sign-in clipboard at me and tells me to sign in while asking if I had been there before. I say, "Lady, I've been here longer than you have over the past month, don't you recognize me?" She probably doesn't because when I walk into the lab, I'm all pink and rosy and when I leave I look like a cigarette-ash sculpture of Keith Richards.

You might be wondering, "What's the deal with all these tests? Are you dying?" Of course I am. We all are, but, not for a while. To make a long story short, the blood work has detected what was wrong and I'm hunky-dory now. However, when you are being shuttled between this doctor and that lab and this specialist and that pharmacist, you kind of just want to stay home, turn on the National Geographic channel and watch animals kill each other rather than sit perpendicular and slap humorous thoughts out of my head and onto my computer. When something keeps you so focused that you practically ignore all that swirls around you, you lose your composite self and become a singular, iconic slab of meat. Now that I've been able to move my DEFCON to a safer level, I am ready to return to the multi-level idiocy for which I am loved and loathed.

So, put on your Tony Orlando and Dawn records, take down my ribbon, and give me a kiss, a hug, a smile, a handshake, high-five, ceremonial bow, salute, pinch, punch, slap, kick, or set me on fire...

I'm home again.