Saturday, July 27, 2013

Eating for fun and profit



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…

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