It’s come time to talk about food. I like food, particularly
good food. And what might that be? Well, I’m no food snob. As long as the food
is prepared properly, with attention to its overall taste and look, I’m for it.
Calamari? Yes! A good hamburger? Yes! Steak, fish, omelets, salads, breads?
Yes, yes, yes, oh yes! The real point is I’ll eat just about anything except
certain body parts: brains, mountain oysters, and the like are off my list. But
the rest is okay. I even like a good smoked tongue!
I grew up in a delicatessen environment. That is, my parents
had and/or ran delicatessens in Kansas City, both Kansas and Missouri.
This meant that I ate what I craved at
any given moment without having what as “for dinner.” Everything on the menu
(and specials) was “for dinner.” This must have spoiled me, because I really
like to eat out.
My mother was a wonderful cook. Some of her specials were so
good that customers would come in for breakfast and order lunch to be saved for
them. Her tuna noodle casserole was like that. By the time I asked for some at
lunch I would be told that it was all sold! Lucky for me I could always
substitute a hot corned beef sandwich or her chicken soup.
I also like to cook. I’ve gotten pretty good at throwing
together a meal just based on what’s around. However, I do buy specific
ingredients to make (could you guess) tuna noodle casserole, with plenty left
over for me. Happily, my mother left me a few recipes that I love, and my
sister has filled in some of the gaps for preparing such feasts as brisket of
beef, and matzo ball soup. But so much is lost!
I have a few cookbooks, maybe 60 or so. They are helpful for
learning what works and what doesn’t, and for many ideas, but truly speaking
there are only a handful that are my “go to” books. If I really squeezed them
down I would end up with 10-15 books that I think are invaluable. The rest are
just nice to have for occasional reference.
I adore most of the cooking shows on TV, too. There you can
not only learn a recipe, but actually see how it is done, for the most part. Of
course, You Tube is also a good source for watching actually cooking
techniques, but it suffers from a wide range of excellent to horrible examples.
One must be careful with this.
Of all the things that bother me the most are the esoteric
equipment and ingredient demands these haute cuisine cooking shows use. Okay,
Alton Brown not only uses some professional cooking tools, but he usually gives
a substitute tool or technique if you don’t have what he is using. That’s
pretty fair. But most of them use a piece of gear that you might use once in a
lifetime and is really expensive, so it seems useless to try and duplicate the
recipe. The other weak link in the recipes, both on TV and in books, is the
ingredient that you don’t have. I mean when the preparer says, “And now just
add three drops of yak sweat reduction,” and makes a point of it being a key
ingredient … what are you supposed to do? Acme doesn’t carry yak sweat
reduction, and the helpful source given where you can find the stuff is some
mail-order food supply that sells it for a mere $450 a gallon. It’s a step
above using the ½ cup of butter milk where you will be left with 3 ½ cups of
buttermilk that you are unlikely to use. Careful planning to make a number of
different recipes that use buttermilk would help. And I have found or seen TWO places that give a buttermilk
substitution (it’s lemon juice in regular milk). But I have yet to find a
substitute for yak sweat reduction (trust me, I looked).
Anyway, it’s time to talk about food. I already spilled the
beans (I also like beans) that I like just about everything, so what more can I
say? Well, I can say what food and where I prefer to get it. Here’s my
abbreviated list, biased by my hometown (Kansas City and area*) and where I
have become transplanted (Philadelphia and area**). The places that have
numerous locations are shown with ***.
Steak: Ruth’s
Chris***
Fish and
seafood: Devon Seafood Grill**
Hamburger:
Five Guys** (or Winstead’s*)
Chicken
soup: homemade by me
Steak
sandwich: Geno’s** (or Jim’s***)
Pizza:
Gaetano’s**
Smoothies:
Wawa** (or Maui***)
Hoagies:
Primos***
Barbecue: Arthur
Bryant’s Barbeque*
No award goes to Asian foods, delicatessens, sandwich shops,
etc. There are just so many and they vary in quality unpredictably from visit
to visit.
A stock broker I worked with when I was just getting out of
college once gave me a compliment saying, “Gary is a hell of a man with a knife
and fork.” He could tell even then that I was an eater. (Of course, his advice
to investors was also straight forward and simple, “Just don’t run out of
money.”) And now I have reached the pinnacle of success: I get paid to eat! But
that’s another story…
