Tag Archives: flavor

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Water. The guidance from the medicos is to drink water and then when I think I’ve had enough water to go and have some more. That’s fine. Wonderful. But honestly, if you want me to drink 647 cups of water a day, water should actually have some kind of flavor. I never had any problem drinking copious amounts of tea, or coffee, or gin, but the common factor there was that all three of those things tasted like something instead of just existing as being wet and “good for you.” The amount of things I’ve spent the last nine months doing on the ephemeral promise that it’s good for me yet with no other obvious tangible benefit is honestly just a little bit horrifying.

2. Better living through chemistry. I’m still adjusting to the most recent medication changes. It seems that this round is all about reminding me of the virtue of incremental change, as each day I seem to feel every so slightly better than the day before. The first day or so of the change was downright insufferable and now we’ve moved on to somewhere between annoying and obnoxious. The head fog and general feeling of disaffection is absolutely real. I’m trying to go along and remember that it can take a month or more to really adjust, but frankly sometimes that month really just sucks and it feels marginally better to say it out loud for an audience.

3. All you can eat. I grew up in what I’ll always consider the golden age of all you can eat dining. Within a dozen miles from home we had a Western Sizzlin, a Western Steer, wings at every local fire department on various nights of the week, a Pizza Hut lunch buffet, and a whole damned salad bar at Wendy’s. There were buffets everywhere. I don’t remember them being particularly food safe but I remember them being tasty. I had a dream about a fictitious all you can eat joint that never was – a big neighborhood bar and grill that pulled out all the stops with everything from burritos the size of your head to every carving station imaginable. It was a happy dream… but as it turns out. I’m a little sad that my days of drinking there in this bar of my imagination are over (perhaps temporarily), but that my days of all you can eat are in all likelihood dead and gone forever.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Trash Tech. Now that I’m without a pickup truck for the first time in more than a decade, I embraced my inner suburbanite and hired a trash company. I failed to do my due diligence. Honestly, I looked around at some of the cans sitting out when I walked around the neighborhood and threw a dart. Had I bothered to read the reviews on Trash Tech, I’d have never signed on. By “trash day” on the first week, they hadn’t delivered cans. They didn’t bother to come by to pick up on the second week at all. Their office staff, though pleasant enough, blatantly lied 3x when contacted by phone. So, they were terminated for cause in less than three weeks. I’ve since signed on with a company that’s much better reviewed and had glowing recommendations when I asked some of the neighbors.

2. Cold. For as long as I can remember I’ve been hot. Or at least I’ve felt hot. What no one mentions when you start losing weight is how goddamned cold you’ll be all winter. I’ve got extra comforters in the bed. Two layers of almost everything on and I’m still cold. For the first time in my life, I understand the impulse that leads people to move south. I’m not going to do that, of course, but I increasingly understand why people do. It’s absurd.

3. Food. Not really. I love food. I just still don’t particularly love the kind of food I’ve been cooking for months now. It tastes ok. It’s sustenance. There’s not one drop of joy in the eating, though. That’s the circle I haven’t been able to square yet. Maybe I never will. I want food that tastes like home, but what keeps showing up on my dinner plate is full of fresh veg, low fat protein, and a reasonable amount of sodium… but it doesn’t contain a hint of love. Food should be more than just fuel otherwise I honestly don’t know what we’re doing here.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Shitshow. There’s a shitshow coming. It’s going to arrive in just about seven weeks. Although I’m nominally facilitating this burgeoning fiasco, you’ll find that I have little or no enforcement power. Sure, I can tell people when something needs to happen, but when they blow through the deadline without so much as noticing, I’m allowed no stick with which to beat them. To be sure, I can consult, encourage, and warn, but my powers of making anyone do anything are entirely fictional. As the walls close in, the best I’ll be able to manage is telling anyone who’s interested that it’s not going to be pretty. About the only tool I have in my kit at this point is to try lowering expectations to the point that anything more than not setting the building on fire will be considered a successful showing. Even managing that feels like a crap shoot. If this thing manages not to fall apart between now and the time the certain goes up, I’ll be entirely surprised… but if it shits the bed, at least I’ll have the pleasure of saying “I told you so.”

2. The equal application of justice. Here’s the thing… I don’t care if you’re the former president, the son of the sitting president, conned a bunch of little old ladies out of their retirement funds, or the crackhead who just knocked over the local liquor store, if there’s sufficient evidence that you have committed a crime to convince a grand jury that indictment is justified, I’m all in favor of the case being brought. I don’t need more information than that. I’ll never understand why that’s a contentious opinion just because the individual indicted happens to be from “your” side of the ideological spectrum. God, but don’t I miss the days when disgraced public figures had the barest degree of shame and would slink off quietly and never be heard from again. File it under the headline of “we were a proper country once,” I guess.

3. Snacks. I used to have proper snacks – chips, crackers, big hunks of cheese, pretzels (both hard and soft), the occasional Little Debbie cake, or quality Amish baked goods from neighboring Lancaster County. My “snacks” now are fruit or if I’m feeling particularly froggy, pre-measured portions of nuts or M&Ms. Have you ever really measured to see how small a “1 ounce serving” of peanuts is or how few M&M’s make the ounce? It’s goddamned embarrassing to even call it a snack. I’m not so much annoyed as I am enraged. There simply aren’t enough herbs and spices in the known universe to make a rice cake or a plum taste as good as a Snickers Bar or properly salted soft pretzel. At this point, I’m not sure if I’m actually doing anything to extend my life or whether it just feels longer because bit by bit we’re extracting every small bit of joy from it.

Just a taste…

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In a lot of ways I’m a simple guy. In a world where celebrity chefs and experimental cuisine are a thing, I’m sure some of my more sophisticated friends would find my taste in food horribly pedestrian. Cooking here at Fortress Jeff tends largely towards traditional – shocking, I’m sure. For most meals there’s a meat, a vegetable, and a starch. With a few exceptions, perhaps on a Saturday or Sunday, my table wine is tap water over ice.

While my menus are not as limited as they once were, there are a few favorites that appear regularly in the rotation. I can make a roast that’s a dead ringer for the traditional Sunday meal at my grandparent’s house. My lasagna tastes like it came straight out of my aunt’s kitchen. I like the tastes, smells, and textures I grew up enjoying. I may not be passing them to the next generation, but keeping them alive in this one is important to me.

Some tastes – mountain bologna from B&B Meats, cheese steak subs from D’Atri’s, and cheeseburgers from Scotty’s – I’ve given up on ever being able to recreate. There are, however, a few tastes of home that I’ve been working for years to replicate. The longest running effort in my kitchen has been the effort to put together a basic ham salad that gets close to the taste I remember coming out of Love’s Grocery in Lonaconing. Finding that flavor has been something of an obsession of mine… and I think I’ve finally managed to crack the code.

I would never claim to have the ingredient list right, but I’ve finally got the flavor – or at least something close to the flavor I remember. The internet is thick with recipes that try to raise simple ham salad to an art form – but simplicity is the soul of the whole “salad” family. It’s a food specifically designed to stretch the budget from an era when people of necessity made use of every scrap of meat in their kitchen. To me, ham salad on white bread is the taste of summer, ranking right alongside the BLT and corn on the cob.

So what’s the big secret? Apparently in my incarnation the missing ingredient was Miracle Whip. Being a Hellman’s household I never considered it before, but switching between the two changed the entire “flavor profile” of my ground ham concoction. I can’t imagine that any scientist anywhere has ever had a more joyful eureka moment.

So this Sunday morning I’ve got that going for me. If I don’t manage to get anything else accomplished today, I’ll still consider the day a wild success.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Pumpkin Spice. I have no understanding at all of the obsession with making everything pumpkin spice flavored. In all my long years the only thing I’ve ever wanted to taste like pumpkin is Thanksgiving pie. Coffee, cookies, doughnuts, scented trash bags, english muffins, beer… all things that are fine in their “usual” flavors. I’ll be pleased when this fetish of the moment passes… except then there will be some new flavor to obsess over. Be on the lookout for eggplant parm yogurt, coming soon to a grocer near you.

2. “Small Government” Conservatives. My friends on the extreme right wing like to say they’re the party of small government. That’s great, except it’s not really true. You can’t really be in favor of small government but still want a government big enough to regulate what services are or aren’t available from healthcare providers. Small government means just that – it’s less intrusive, less regulatory, and less concerned with what legal activities its citizens engage in. A believer in small government is concerned with maximizing personal liberty and limiting how much influence that government has on our day to day lives. My read on most of our dearly beloved members of Congress who claim the mantle of “small government” are really just busybody prudes who think the universe needs to behave exactly as they want it to. I’m sure there’s a name for that but it sure as hell isn’t small government.

3. Apple. God love them. They rolled out a lot of slick looking new kit yesterday. Much of it immediately landed on my want list, but I didn’t see anything that fills the gap as a “must have” bit of equipment. I’m leaning towards upgrading to the 6S+ to get more phone real estate, especially after seeing them in use “in the wild” for a year. And while the new features, most notably the upgraded camera, look like something I’d get mileage from, I’m decidedly underwhelmed at the prospect of getting up at 3AM Saturday morning to drop in an order at full retail price (since AT&T insists I’m seven months away from upgrade eligibility). We’ll see.

Burger…

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There are plenty of places that try very hard to raise the simple and delicious hamburger into something like a high art form. I’m sure there is a place for a gourmet burger piled high with expensive and exotic toppings, but for my money there’s nothing better than a basic cheeseburger loaded down with ketchup, mustard, and raw onion on a buttered and toasted bun. Take one look at me and you’ll know I’m not exactly one to go in for the latest trends in Asian fusion or French cuisine. Those meals are more like an appetizer than a main course. It all boils down to personal preference, but I’m going to lay the blame squarely on the greasy spoon dining of my youth – Scotty’s, Kelly’s, and Marshall’s were all places to go to find a burger that was unapologetic about what it was and that didn’t need to be heaped with extras to taste good.

The real, local hamburger experience is getting harder and harder to find – it’s almost impossible unless you’ve been in an area close to forever. Ask most people where to get the best burger in town and they’re as likely to direct you to Sonic as they are to some mom and pop diner outside of town on the back road. For most of us, those places don’t exist anywhere but in our memory any more… But fortunately, that doesn’t mean the purists among us are stuck with some kind of fancy pants, snob burger.

Enter Five Guys. In my travels a few weekends ago I was lucky enough to spy what appeared to be a Five Guys Burgers and Fries not far away from me in Delaware. As far as I can tell, putting in an order from them is the next best thing to sitting down for one more burger in the battered, stained, and broken booths at Scotty’s. The atmosphere doesn’t even come close, but if you close your eyes and bite, the flavor is right there… Now if I can just talk them into putting brown gravy on the fries.

You’ll have to excuse me, but I need to go change. It’s time to start thinking about crossing state lines in search of dinner.