No, I Am Not Making This Up

I visited Amazon.com today to look for books.  And here's what I was displayed as recommendations, "Inspired by Your Browsing History."

That recommendation engine is scarily accurate.

All I Want for Christmas is a Sack of Meat

Last weekend my wife gave me my Christmas present early: an Artisan Meat Share from Craig Deihl of Cypress Restaurant.

We've already broken into the pork pate and the summer sausage, and both are terrific.  The pork pate includes, in addition to the obvious coarse-ground pork and spices, rich ingredients like pork liver, eggs, and cream plus onions and garlic, which result in what one might term one of the best meatloafs ever.

I'm even more enamored with the summer sausage.  It's a fermented, semi-dry sausage made from half beef and half pork, and it's blended with a whole bunch of spices that include black pepper, smoked paprika, mace, garlic, juniper, caraway, mustard, and marjoram.

Summer Sausage w/ a Selection of Cheese and Crackers

The fermentation not only helps preserve the sausage but also gives it a delightful tangy edge.  That and the slow smoking results in something that can only be described a deep and complex flavor.  The taste grows and expands as you hold it in your mouth, with very warm, smoky finish.  We've been eating it as simply as possible: sliced and served alongside cheese and crackers--and a dollop of pimento cheese, for good measure.

Also included in the bag is this line up: guanciale, lonza, saucisson sec, salami spread, country bologona, smoked turkey breast, and--if you can believe it--lamb bacon.  This last one is the most intriguing of them all.  It's cured with salt, brown sugar, and spices for 10 days and, the Meat Share's "User Guide" advises, should be eaten without cooking.

These should keep me busy over the Christmas holidays, and you can believe one or more of them will be turning up on the appetizer plates I'll be making for various holiday gatherings this week.

When in doubt, give the gift of meat.

P.S. Did I mention that my wife is the best Christmas gift buyer in the world?

Why My Wife Won't (and No One Else Will, For That Matter) Watch a Movie With Me

We rented the Sherlock Holmes movie tonight--you know, the recent Sherlock-kicks-a-lot-of-butt one starring Robert Downey, Jr..  Four minutes into the film there's this little exchange of action-movie banter:

Dr. John Watson: You remember your revolver?
Sherlock Holmes: Oh, knew I forgot something. Thought I left the stove on.
Dr. John Watson: You did.

Me: LEFT THE STOVE ON?  Are you KIDDING me?  This thing is set in 1890. 

The Wife:  Just let it go, honey.

Me: There were no electric stoves in 1890!!!

The Wife: Maybe he left a wood stove on.

Me: How do you leave a WOOD stove on?

Someone at IMDB have tracked down a bunch of other anachronisms and recorded them here, but I've not seen anyone bothered by the stove thing yet.  Doesn't matter.  After four minutes I was done.  From the few glimpses I got passing through the living room for the rest of the night, it doesn't look like I missed much.

Big Ole Sodas

I went to the movies this weekend for the first time in months, and when my wife made a snack bar run she asked me what I wanted.  "Get me the smallest size Coke they have," I said.    She returned with a squat, fat stubby cup--the diameter of one of those 64 oz Big Gulps but only half the height.

"THAT's the small?" I asked.

"Yes," she said.

Truthfully, though I wasn't really surprised, since the movie theaters have long been the home of wantonly excessive soft drink volumes, and I've long been chronicling the ever-expanding packaging sizes of soft drinks (see, for example, whether you can even afford Coke machine Coke these days.)

So, much to my amazement, when I went to my local grocery store yesterday, did I notice not one but TWO new soda container sizes on the soft drink aisle: six-packs of 7.5 ounce cans and, perhaps most surprising of all, 1.25 liter bottles.

I can understand the market for the 7.5 oz cans.  There are plenty of people--most of them in the higher end of the age demographic--who like a soft drink now and again but don't feel compelled to suck down more than a single glass worth at a time.  This is, in fact, almost a throwback to the 6 ounce glass bottles of their youth.

But what about that 1.25 liter bottle?  Is this for the same demographic as the 7.5 oz can, only meant to be kept in the fridge so you can have four or so glasses of your favorite Coca-Cola product over the course of a few days?  Or, is it meant as a single serve for our overcaffeinated, over sugared, ever-growing (and I mean that literally) younger consumer set?  Is this a sign that portion sanity might be returning to the soft drink market, or is it the final proof that the prediction I made about a decade ago--that single serve soft drink containers would eventually grow so large that people would need special contraptions with wheels and handles just to lug them around--is about to come to pass?

There is surprisingly little in the press or on the InterWebs about this new turn of soft drink development, but experimenting with packaging sizes is not a new phenomenon.  The 3-liter bottle was a big thing for a while back in the 1990s, but those have long since faded out, probably because their clumsy bulk was hard to fit in the fridge and difficult to pour when full, outweighing the cost break you might get from the extra volume.

Back in 2004, soft drink bottlers experimented with alternate bottle sizes again.  That year, Beverage Digest cited John Alm, the then-President and CEO of mega-bottler Coca-Cola Enterprises, saying that new sizes--1.5 Liter, 1.25 Liter, and 1.75 Liter--will "reduce dependence on 2-Liter," which one can only take to mean reduce Coke's dependence on getting so much of their revenue from 2-Liter sales.   (Side note: the Coca-Cola Company owns the brand, the formula, and the marketing.  Coca-Cola Enterprises is a separate company that performs the actual bottling and distribution.  This got even more confusing this year when Coca-Cola acquired the North American operations of Coca-Cola Enterprises but not all of the company.)

And why would reducing "dependence on 2-Liter" be important?  For starters, in the New York Metro market Coke and Pepsi were duking it out head to head on store shelves in a price war so fierce they were often losing money on sales.  The plan was to raise margins by introducing the 1.5 liter bottle at a price that was higher per-ounce but conspicuously lower per bottle than Pepsi's 2-Liter, and then to raise the price of the Coke 2-liter, so that there was effectively a lower priced and a higher priced Coke offering bracketing Pepsi's two liter.

The plan backfired out of the gate.  Many stores dropped the 2-liter Cokes altogether, and some didn't even drop the price on the new 1.5-liter bottles, causing howls of protests from shoppers who thought they were getting screwed.   The outrage was exacerbated by the fact that the 1.5-liter bottles were the same height as the 2 liters and had contours that made them look similar in width to their larger cousins.  Coke's share of the Metro New York soft drink market fell from 35.6% in January to 30.1% in June, while Pepsi's rose from 34.1% to 38.2%.  (See details here and here.)

Leave it to Papa Coke to come to the rescue.  The Coca-Cola Company's 2004 Annual Report noted that "the Company worked closely with Coca-Cola Enterprises Inc. to reverse early unit case volume losses in the weeks after the May introduction of a new 1.5-liter package in the New York City area. By working with customers, re-examining price and package elasticity, and overhauling in-store merchandising, the Coca-Cola system regained unit case volume share lead on a full-year basis in the New York City area by the end of 2004."  They did so by encouraging store managers to return the 2 liters to the shelves and put them in prominent positions where shoppers could easily see and compare both sizes and prices.  By the end of the year their market share was back up, and profits were, too.

Although the 1.5 Liter Coke bottle is a very common size overseas, it hasn't been seen in the United States very much outside of New York City.  So what's up with the new sizes?  Is this a fresh attempt on the Coca-Cola company to push up the price-per ounce on us?

Not really, according to this dispatch from Joe Guy Collier at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.  This time around, apparently, it's all about "packaging diversity", an attempt on the part of Coke to boost their sagging North American sales.  Novel sizes and bundles of Coca-Cola products, the theory goes, will stimulate interest and spur purchases.   In addition to the two new sizes I spotted in my grocery store, recent packaging "innovations" include twin-packs of 50 ounce (1.5 liter) bottles and an 8.5 ounce aluminum bottle similar to those things Budweiser came out with lately.

And, hey, it just might work.  It caught my attention enough to snap some phone camera pics and write a blog post about it.

In the end, though, it really just comes down to getting more cents per ounce for the product.  "There was a point in time when value was defined as more — more ounces for less (money)," the Journal-Constitution quotes Ralph Kytan, VP of Coke's North American bottling operations, as saying.  "Package diversity is about matching up the benefits of the package with the needs of the purchaser for the occasion they're buying for."  Meaning, in other words, figuring out new ways to get them to pay more per ounce than they would for a boring old two-liter.

And does it work?  In a very unscientific survey, I found the following on the shelf tags at my supermarket:

Two liter: 2.6 cents per oz.
1.25 liter: 2.9 cents per oz. (and on sale, with a regular price equating to 3.5 cents per oz.)
12-pack of 12-oz. cans: 4.3 cents per oz.
6-pack of half-liter bottles: 4.5 cents per oz.
8-pack of 12 oz. bottles: 5.2 cents per oz.
8-pack of 7.5 oz cans: 7.2 cents per oz.

I predict the fairly rapid demise of the 1.25 liter bottle because, it seems to me, you buy a can or bottle of soda for either single-serving consumption, meaning you are going to drink the contents of the container all at one time without resealing it, or for multi-serving consumption, meaning you are either serving a bunch of people from a single bottle or drinking it all yourself over the course of a few hours before it can go flat, the way my wife does, ingesting Diet Coke continually throughout the day almost as if it were connected to an IV drip.

If you're buying single-serve, I would speculate, you'll choose the container most suited to your typical serving size.  If buying  multiserves, you'll want the one that gives the lowest per ounce cost without becoming too large to carry.  The 1.25 liter bottle doesn't seem to serve either purpose.

My wife, by the way, orders the extra large fountain drink at the movies, and she was delighted recently when the snack bar started allowing free refills on the largest size cups.  As for me,  I threw my small cup away still half full and still had a bad case of too-much-damn-sugar stomach the rest of the afternoon.  That 8 pack of 7.5 oz. cans is perfect for me.  Just big enough to wash down my Geritol.

And it might very well last a full year.

From Thrill Ride to Fear Factor: The XLerator Turns Ugly

A while ago I wrote about the XLerator about which I said it's something akin to a bathroom thrill ride for 9 year old boys.  To quote that previous post, "the XLerator is to handdryers what the Hummer is to sports utility vehicles (the original Hummer, not the wussy H3)--extreme, testosterone laden, and completely over the top."

These observation still hold, but now that my younger son (who is four) is fully potty trained and able to use restraurant bathrooms, the old XLerator has taken on a whole new persona: evil weapon of terror.

The four year old is particularly sensitive to loud noises, and especially those in bathrooms, which I imagine is due to the echoing and amplifying effect of all that tile.  Loud-flushing toilets are bad enough. "Is this one a loud one or a quiet one?" he always asks as we approach a new bathroom.  Once inside, he carefully evaluates the standing urinals, which, if they're low enough he can use, or the regular old johns, which are always the right height but more prone to having a very loud flush.  Often I end up doing the flushing for him, once he has backed away to a respectable distance and covered his ears just in case.

I vaguely recall having a similar fear of loud toilets--there was a particular one in the bathroom of our church in Great Falls, South Carolina, that, back through the misty fog of early childhood memories, I still recall being terrified of.

But, I never had to deal with the XLerator, unlike my poor four year old.  The thing roars like an F18 taking off right there in the echo chamber of your local restaurant restroom,  rendering a noise-phobic four year old into a howling, curled up, almost-comatose ball of fear.

So, now we have a new routine when we go to bathrooms.  Upon entry, look first to see if they have traditional paper towels, old school wimpy hand driers, or the infamous XLerator.  If the latter, while the little one does his business, I stand casually and directly in front of hand drier, shielding it with my body to prevent any other bathroom patrons from sneaking up and using it to dry their hands before we can evacuate the premises.

And then there's the question of what to do with the four year old's hands once he's finished, since I'm still working to instill in him the social nicety of washing your hands after a visit to the restroom.  In some bathrooms they have both paper towels and the XLerator, and this works just fine, though the four year old will keep stealing glances at the silver beast out of the corner of his eye just in case the thing might decide to go off on its own.  In other bathrooms, though, the air dryer is the only option and we have to just let the restroom hygiene lessons wait for another day.   After all, I tell myself, which is more unsanitary, a couple of unwashed hands or having a four year old collapse in terror and roll around on a bathroom floor?

This is what parenthood--and the XLerator--has reduced me to.

Are we at a lull?

I always like pondering food trends, and I have great fun trying to prognosticate them, though in reality I am so poor at predicting trends it seems the only safe way to try it is with tongue firmly in cheek.  That's the ultimate "win-win"--okay, sorry--the ultimate cop out.  If I get any of them right I can claim to be a genius; if I get them wrong (and I usually do), well, you see, it was all just a joke, right?

So what's happening these days?  Where is it all going?

Beats the hell out of me.  Right now I feel like we're in sort of a lull, stuck somewhere between the ebbing of "locavorism", which is still the most prominent trend in the food world today, and whatever is going to succeed it.

Don't get me wrong.  Locavorism, despite its ludicrous name, is still hot. Just this week, the National Restaurant News declared  gardens to be the hottest restaurant trend of 2010 (thanks to Robb Walsh via Twitter for the tip).  But, you have to admit, it's starting to feel a little stale.  It seems like something is about to turn, that we're on the cusp of something new and dramatic breaking loose.

Maybe its a reflection of what's going on in the country and the world at large: the pending November elections?  This lingering recession/depression thing?  We got all into the weeds of it back in late 2008/early 2009 and made a big fuss and did a lot of soul searching, and then it seemed for a while earlier this year that things were starting to slowly, inch by inch, get a little bit better.   Then a few months ago it all ground back down to a halt and perhaps even turned back a little in the wrong direction.

Mostly, though, it just feels like we're on hold, waiting in limbo for something to happen, but we aren't really sure what it's going to be or even what we want it to be.

Maybe it's just me and the particular spot I am in in my life, but I feel like there's something looming out there--good, bad, or just different: who knows?  But something is pent up behind the dam and ready to break.  I don't care to speculate about global economics, but in the food world I'm waiting for something exciting and new to happen, too.

The Internet has knocked food journalism into a tizzy, with food magazines on the ropes, traditional publishers struggling, and even a turnover in the old warhouse profession of restaurant reviewing (which really isn't that old of a profession, since we've had computer scientists and astronauts for about long as we've had restaurant reviewers.)  But, somehow Yelp and iPhone apps just don't seem like they're really the way of the future.

Whatever it's going to be, it's going to be new.  We need something different: a hot new trend.  Food trucks have official worn out their novelty, and they were always sort of a mobile locavorism anyway.

So, what's next?  I don't know.  But I have just two words: bring it!

Closing for the Season

No, I'm not shutting down the blog or anything.  But I feel like I should find something to close temporarily, since I'm officially in an "end of the season" sort of mood.

We spent the late afternoon at the neighborhood pool, enjoying the golden sunset that comes earlier each day now.  It was probably our the last visit to the pool this year.  Labor Day is long behind us, the boys are back in school, and September is coming to a close.  And that means autumn, which arrives late on the South Carolina coast, is finally upon us.

Fall is without question my favorite time of the year, and since the summers here in Charleston are long and oppressively hot, autumn always comes as a long-anticipated relief.  But, it's a wistful time, too.

I've always loved going to the beach in the late fall and early winter, long after the last party of vacationers have packed up their minivans and roof-rack containers and headed back to their regular lives somewhere else.  The amusement parks and pancake houses and souvenir stands, idle and shuttered for the season, hold a strange sort of stark, wistful beauty, half melancholy and half sweet.  The bustle and noise and heat of the summer lies behind us, and a cold, slow winter lies ahead.

A new season and all its energy will come again, somewhere off in the distant future, but for now it's time to rest and wait.

Big Arrival

Big surprise today, as a box of the finished BBQ book arrived on my doorsteps ahead of schedule. Kudos to the team at the Univ of Alabama Press: they did a great job with the production.

Twitter Me this

More and more local chefs and restaurateurs are on Twitter these days, which is a great way to keep your finger on the pulse of what's going on in local kitchens. Their tweets break roughly into two categories: feeds for the restaurant, which tend to announce specials and what not, and the chef's personal tweets, which I tend to find far more interesting.

Twitter is still in that early stage where people are working out what the heck the medium is good for.  I see that all the time at work (a software company), where I have clients who are insistent that they want to be doing 'Web 2.0 stuff, like Twitter," but they aren't quite sure what they should do with it.  The problem is that too many would-be-tweeters are focusing more on "what do I want to say" rather than "what would people want to hear from me?"

Restaurant and chefs tweets provide two good examples of where Tweeting is interesting and useful as well as a counterexample of where it can go bad.

I like restaurant tweets that are occasional and provide the rare piece of news that is out of the ordinary: a special guest chef dinner coming up, for example, or a particularly unusual daily special.  And by this I don't mean a tweet a day announcing "today's special: ribeye with veal demiglass."  Every restaurant has a special of the day.  I may not be in the majority here, but I'd much prefer a restaurant that tweets only once or twice a week with some really good stuff rather than every day with yet another special that blurs into the one offered the day before.

One of the most memorable meals I've had in recent memories started with a tweet, though.  I was out having beers with the food-writing gang from the City Paper and, just as we were discussing where to go get a bite to eat, a tweet came over from Mike Lata at FIG that fresh blue fin tuna was just in.  We paid the bar tab and  hopped over to Meeting Street and had some of the most incredible, melt-in-your-mouth fish I've ever tasted.  Definitely worth a tweet.

Chefs' personal twittering is something I've taken a liking to also.  As more and more local chefs gain national reputations, they're being invited to travel all over the place and cook special dinners, and I love keeping up with whose cooking where and, even more interesting, the kind of places they like to stop off and eat along the way, be it humble BBQ joints and the In-and-Out Burger or high-even places like WD-50 or the Slanted Door.  And, the non-food-related tweets are interesting too, since it helps add a little color to a chef's life--a few slightly-personal but not too personal details that help flesh out his or her personality.

So, that's my recipe for good restaurant/chef tweeting: good scoops and special information, but not too much  of it, and those little personal glimpses and details that help build more of a personal connection.

Interestingly enough, I personally like tweets that pass along the occasional tiny url link to an interesting food-related story on the web.  You don't want to do it.  If you send out a dozen of links a day and 90% of the stories aren't any good, that's a good route to getting "unfollowed."

So, I'll keep watching Twitter and looking to add more local chefs, writers, and other food-related tweeters to my list.  140 characters at a time.

Winter Dining Downtown

The country makes me nervous. There's ... You got crickets and it-it's quiet ... there's no place to walk after dinner." -- Alvy Singer (Woody Allen), Annie Hall

I've had several dinners out downtown in recent weeks, and now that the weather has finally turned cold (and by cold, for Charleston that means the mercury dipping down into the 30s), I'm finding I'm enjoying dinners out even more than I usually do. Having on-premise parking is usually seen as a big plus for a restaurant, but lately I've noticed how much I enjoy that element of dining that you only get in a downtown setting: the walk to and from dinner.

There's just something wonderful about walking a few blocks to a restaurant when it's just gotten dark, and it's chilly enough outside to bite at your ears and make your toes a little cold, and the streets are just starting to pick up with the nighttime traffic.

You pick up the pace as you get within a block or two of your destination, because the wind's picking up and sneaking inside your collar, and your cheeks are starting to tingle a little. You get to the restaurant, pull open the big glass door, and step inside to a transformed world. It's a warm, well-lit room busting with people. They're laughing and enjoying themselves, swapping stories and telling jokes. And, more than anything else, there's that all-encompassing, splendid aroma of good food: roasted meats and seared fish and fresh-baked bread. It's one of the best smells in the world.

And, after dinner, that bracing four block or five block walk back to the car is delightful, too. It helps take the edge off the meal you just ate and the wine you just drank. You wouldn't want to hike several miles in the frigid night, but four or five blocks is just right. It leaves you, at the end of the night, happy and satisfied, with that peaceful sense that, for this evening at least, all is right with thw world.

Farewell 2009, Hello 2010

Well, it looks like we've officially made it through the decade without anyone coming up with a good name for it. The 1990s are the "Nineteen Nineties".  The 2000s are . . . what . . . the "two thousands"?  I never hear anyone actually saying that, but it's the closest thing we have.  (And, yes, I know that TECHNICALLY the decade doesn't end until Dec 31st, 2010, just like the millennium didn't technically start until 1/1/2001, but again, popular usage says the "aughts" are up).

So, now's the time to look back over the last 10 years in food.  For every decade-end retrospective like this one that declares the 2000s  to be the decade of the foodie, I've found another story like this one that shows a decade long trend in exactly the other direction (yikes!  And hattip to NMissCommentator for the link).  You could interpret this as an increasing gap between the culinary haves and have-nots, or maybe just a never ending expansion of variety in the world of food.

I'm not a bit immune to the urge to look back on a decade of trends.  Jeff Allen and I put together our own "top ten of the last ten" list for the Charleston City Paper.  Now, I'm heading off to make sure I have enough supplies to cobble together an old-school Hoppin' John with real red cowpeas and Carolina Gold rice, too (locavore AND heirloom ingredients--it's SO 2009!).

I wonder what we'll be eating this time in 2019?

Happy New Years, everyone!

My Favorite Gift this Year

It's not the biggest gift, but it's definitely the coolest: a salt pig! I didn't even know they existed, but it's hard to believe I've lived without one for so long.

Perfect for anyone who likes cooking with salt by the pinch.

As a gift giver, The Wife rivals Jack Donneghy.

Cracking the Inner Sanctum

I ate dinner recently at a local Italian restaurant that claimed to have authentic Italian food. And, sure enough, as I was eating two very Italian-looking men in aprons came out of the kitchen periodically and chatted up the tables with very authentic sounding Italian accents. But, the menu was pretty much the same old Italian-American classics we've been seeing since the days of the red-checked tablecloths and candles in wicker-clad Chianti bottles: veal marsala, chicken parm, spaghetti and meatballs, lasagna.

I was immediately suspicious. I have become convinced in recent years that there's a whole secret world of dining out there that's denied to the ordinary restaurant patron. This seems particularly likely at restaurants operated by immigrants to the United States but serve up food that has clearly been adapted for American tastes--Mexican restaurants serving taco salads in big crispy tortilla bowls, Chinese restaurants with General Tso's this and that, etc.

I don't have a problem with practical commercial sense, particularly if it lets an aspiring restauranteur actually make a decent living. And--provided it's prepared well--I like a lot of Americanized ethnic food, like lasagna with a ton of cheese and red sauce and enchilada platters strewn with lettuce and sour cream.

But, I still have this sneaking suspicion that I'm missing out on the real stuff--the secret gems of the owner's native cuisine that he or she will cook up just for a select few, the inner circle who knows the secret handshake.

I visited China many years ago, and was struck by how totally novel and wonderful the food was in in Beijing and Hong Kong--and how different it was from any Chinese food I've had in American restaurants, even supposedly "authentic" ones. Several forays into highly-recommended restaurants in San Francisco's Chinatown led to some tasty dinners, but all very different from what I'd had overseas. On my last visit to San Francisco I gave up on the guidebooks and took a tip from a Chinese cabbie who swore this place was "where the local Chinese people eat." It was good, and the tables were definitely filled with plenty of Chinese-Americans, but the food was pretty much the same selection you can get in any number of Golden China Huts in Pensacola, Florida or Lincoln Nebraska.

I recently discovered James D. McCawley's The Eater's Guide to Chinese Characters, which promises to forever free the ambitious eater from the tyranny of the constricted English menu. The next time I'm in San Francisco, I'm going to give it a shot.

Here at home, when I find real Italians dishing up a veal saltimbocca recipe straight out of Newark, I know there's gotta be something I'm missing out on. I'm contemplating an aggressive response, like a crash conversational Italian course, something just intensive enough to learn to say, "Hey, enough of the tourist dishes, already. Give me some of the good stuff." Maybe that Rosetta Stone software that you see advertised in every inflight magazine these days would do the trick.

Hardworking farmboys dream of Italian supermodels. Middle aged food nuts dream of secret preparations of savory meats and exotic herbs. Any day now I'm going to crack the code.

Strawberries, Strawberries, Strawberries

I hit the Boone Hall Farm U-Pick strawberry patch over the weekend with The Eight-Year-Old, The Three-Year-Old, and The-Eight-Year-Old's-Friend. Three free jump castles are only part of the draw. We spent about ten minutes picking berries and those little fingers--even The Three-Year-Old's--are surprisingly nimble. I'd barely had time to turn around before we had four buckets groaning with fresh red berries.



I spent the rest of the weekend trying to figure out what to do with all the bounty. Strawberry waffles, strawberry-basil mojitos, strawberry sorbet--and I still had a massive bag left, starting to show those signs of darkening and turning to mush. So, I sliced the rest and macerated them with sugar and put them in the freezer.

If I invite you over for dinner anytime in the next three months, don't be surprised if the dessert menu features strawberries . . .

Finally . . . to Market, to Market

It's been a busy Spring, but I was FINALLY able to make it down to the Marion Square market for the first time this year. Carrots, green beans, stone ground grits, and some gorgeous radishes from Rita's Roots, which I gave the butter and salt treatment. Good stuff.

Thrill Ride

Not too long ago, while dining at The Bucanneer downtown, I took The Eight Year Old to the restroom and discovered a stunning thing: the XLerator.

I thought when I bought my blender--the infamous Black & Decker CrushMaster--that I had found the most macho of non-woodworking electonic appliances. Boy was I wrong,

The XLerator is hands-down the most powerful and loudest hand dryer on the planet. Wash your hands, shake free the excess water, and punch the button on the XLerator. The bathroom is filled with the rushing roar of a fighter jet at takeoff, and your hands are blasted with an F5 tornado of hot air so powerful that the moisture is whisked away in a matter of seconds. You'll leave the restroom with ringing ears, but your hands will be real dry.

The Eight Year Old's conclusion: "That's AWESOME!"

One might say that the XLerator is to handdryers what the Hummer is to sports utility vehicles (the original Hummer, not the wussy H3)--extreme, testosterone laden, and completely over the top.

But, as it turns out, the XLerator is actually marketed as a green appliance--which explains its presence at a self-avowedly green restaurant like the Bucaneer. Not only do you avoid all those paper towels, but the one quick, massive blast of air supposedly uses less electricity than the old traditional model, which puffs warm air gently over your hands while you twist and rub them for a good sixty seconds before getting impatient and leaving the restroom with damp hands.

The electricity savings sounds plausible enough at first brush, but I bet there's one factor the manufacturers didn't consider. During our 45-minute dinner The Eight Year Old managed to come up with excuses to go back to the bathroom THREE more times. I tried telling him that it was a bathroom not a thrill ride, but the young are remakably obtuse in such matters.

So, I figure the go-greeners are now seeing a 4X increase in handdryer usage, which pretty much cancels out any energy savings. But, it was a valiant try.

End of an Era

18 months seems enough. Jack's has left the building.

Scenes from Daily Life (Barbecue Version)

The Wife: "Auugcchh!"
Me: "What?"
"They put SLAW on this sandwich! Gross!"
"Lot's of places put slaw on their barbecue sandwich."
"Yeah, but if they do they should at least tell you that."
"It says right here 'chopped pork with slaw on bun'.”
"Oh, please. 'Slaw' is buried in the middle of the description in the same tiny font. It should say in 24-point red all-caps, 'WARNING!!! THIS SANDWICH HAS SLAW ON IT!!!”
"I like slaw on a barbecue sandwich.  It adds crunch."

"Ew."

She's wrong, of course.  Slaw is absolutely essential to a perfect barbecue sandwich.

Scenes from Domestic Life, Episode 4

If you cook like I do, it takes a little while. And that's part of the whole point. "Not now. I'm trying to cook dinner," I tell the Seven Year Old, who wants me to wrestle or play cards or play X-Box with him, since having the first 11 hours of a Sunday utterly devoted to his every whim just hasn't been enough "play time".

The longer I can draw that process out the better. Some men play golf to get themselves out of the house for a good four or five hour stretch. I cook overly complex meals. And hence this little drama:

Scene 1: A kitchen in a house in suburban Mt. Pleasant, SC. A father is preparing a chicken to roast in the oven.

[Enter Seven Year Old, wearing a down vest, plastic space helmet with visor, and plastic raygun]
Seven Year Old: Daddy, send me on a mission!

Father: Okay [thinks for a few seconds]. Trooper, the evil turtle has set a bomb that will go off in three minutes. To defuse it, you need . . . um . . . a pink shoe, a bridge, and . . . um . . . an article of clothing with a "B" on it. [sets kitchen alarm]. You have five minutes. Ready . . . GO!!!

[Seven year old exits stage left, hauling ass.]

[Father mixes a mai tai, listens to a little music on the stereo, enjoys the relative quiet downstairs.]

[Four minutes and fifty three seconds later, the Seven Year enters stage left, hauling ass and sweating in his down vest, which is much too warm for a South Carolina October. He's clutching a pink flip flop, a wooden bridge piece from the Thomas the Tank Engine train set, and a Boston Red Sox cap.]

Father: Great job! You defused the bomb. And with just seven seconds left!

Seven Year Old: Give me another mission!

Father: Okay [thinks a minute]. This time, the bomb is set for SEVEN minutes. And to defuse it you need to find five things that start with the letter 'Q". Ready . . . go!

[Seven year old exits stage left again, still hauling ass.]

Father: Parenthood is easy.


Scene 2: An upstairs family room in a house in suburban Mt. Pleasant, SC. A mother is sitting on the couch, trying to watch her favorite TV show while her two year old crawls all over her, demanding attention. She turns on the closed captioning so she can follow the dialog over the toddler's screeching.

[Enter Seven year old, hauling ass.]

Seven Year Old: MOMMY! I NEED A PINK SHOE! RIGHT NOW!

Mother: What? What are you talking about?

Seven Year Old: A PINK SHOE! A PINK SHOE! A PINK SHOE! RIGHT NOW! PLEEEASSE! IT'S URGENT!

Mother: I'm trying to watch my show! WHAT do you need a PINK shoe for?

Seven Year Old: A MISSION! I NEED A PINK SHOE!

Mother: No, you don't, I'm . . . fine, whatever. There's a pink shoe in my closet. Just leave me alone!

[Seven Year Old exits stage right, hauling ass. Fifteen seconds later's he's back.]

Seven Year Old: MOMMY MOMMMY MOMMY I NEED A BRIDGE RIGHTNOWRIGHTNOWRIGHTNOW!

Mother: I'm TRYING to watch my show! WHAT do you need?

Seven Year Old: A BRIDGE! A BRIDGE! A BRIDGE! RIGHT NOW! I HAVE THIRTY SECONDS LEFT!

Mother: Oh MY GOD!


Scene 3: A bedroom in a house in suburban Mt. Pleasant, SC.

Father: Man, aren't the weekends great!

Mother: [feigns sleep]

Lost in the Icebox

My refrigerator is generally pretty orderly, since I tend to throw out food when the expiration date is passed and/or it's starting to look mushy, fuzzy, or dangerous. (This is not native behavior, The Wife will attest, but a result of domestication.)

The freezer is a different story. It's an icy Sargasso Sea of old leftover meals, odd chunks of variety meat, vegetables, tubs of duck fat, and bags of heirloom grains. I know it's impossible, since we moved into this house just a year ago, but some of the meat looks downright prehistoric.

So, today, out it all came onto the kitchen counter for a good sifting and sorting:



About a third of it went into trash, and the rest is now back in the freezer, fussily arranged on the little racks (it's one of those side-by-side models with four wire basket/racks). Meat on the bottom, vegetables and grains next, then premade food and leftovers, and miscellaneous stuff like bread and sauces on the top.

The good news: I discovered I have several weeks worth of meat on hand. The bad news: two weeks from now it will be a complete disaster again.