Category Archives: Food

30 Days Minus 2 of Writing, Day 25: Fact or Fiction

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Here are some statements about myself that might be fact or fiction. If you’d like, you can let me know which ones are which in the comments. Think of it as a game without a prize.

1) I am an NRA Marksman, and once shot and killed so many squirrels in a single day with gleeful abandon that my friend, a professional hunter and fur trapper named Dan, nicknamed me “Murderous Mike.”

2) I once had dinner with Suzanne Somers, former star of Three’s Company.

3) I stole a Volkswagen when I was 15, and rolled it down a hill.

4) I was arrested in Vail, Colorado for public intoxication when I was about 17.

5) I once traveled to Zurich, Switzerland with my judo team and lost a bout to a brown belt who flipped me into the air and onto my back before I could react.

6) I once lost more than 30 pounds on the Atkin’s Diet, but slowly gained it all back.

7) I was a founding member of my high school’s debate team, won a city championship and received a small forensics scholarship to attend college.

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And this completes the 25th day of hell in the 28-day competition hosted by Nicky and Mike over at We Work For Cheese. Three more days. May God have mercy on my soul.

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30 Days Minus 2 of Writing, Day 24: Confucius

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Once I finished constructing the machine, I lit the burners, built up a head of steam, spun the dials, pulled the levers, and began my journey back in time.

 

Abraham Lincoln clearly needed more sleep.

Abraham Lincoln clearly needed more sleep.

First stop: 1864, Washington, D.C., to pick up President Lincoln, the wisest and tallest of American presidents.

Second stop: 477 B.C., near present-day Qufu, Shandong Province, China, home of Confucius, the legendary philosopher, statesman and fortune-cookie author.

Third stop: 2013, The Vesta Dipping Grill in Denver. Trendy and expensive, the restaurant is named for the Roman goddess of the hearth, home and family, and relies on themes of warmth, sensuality and dreams to showcase the skewers of grilled meats and vegetables it serves accompanied by about two dozen inventive dipping sauces—the black pepper aioli garlic mayonnaise with coarsely ground black pepper, for instance, or Steuben’s chimichurri cilantro with parsley, onion, chili flakes, and cumin. Diners are encouraged to combine the sauces to create a chorus of flavors, and Vesta’s seemed liked the perfect place for my dinner with two of the greatest orators in history, especially since they could afford to pay.

Abe: Gotta tell you, Mike, you might not have a face, but you sure know how to pick a restaurant. I haven’t had a meal this good in two score and three years. Who would’ve thought you could dip a forkful of succulent chicken into a sweet chili ginger sauce followed by a pistachio mint sauce and create something so damn tasty? This is the sort of perfect union I’ve been harping about back in Congress! America could learn a lot from Vesta.

Confucius: I dunno, Abe. It’s pretty good, but it’s no blintz.

Abe: Blintz?! You’re Chinese! You know what a blintz is?

Confucius: Sure, dude. I once had a chocolate blintz at little deli in Bejing that would’ve knocked my socks off, if the Chinese had invented socks. Paper, ice cream, gunpowder and the compass we invented. Would it have killed us to invent socks? My feet are freezing half the year. Anyway, nothing beats a good blintz.

Abe: I agree wholeheartedly, Fu. There was this little blintz joint near the state house in Illinois that I used to eat at all the time. Made sex with Mary seem boring. Well, more boring. She’s not much in the sack. Hey, what say we wrestle after dinner? You look like a man who could hold his own in the grappling ring.

Confucius: Uhm, no. Hate sports. Kung Fu, karate all that crap. Hurts like hell when you get body slammed or neck chopped. Besides, it is not the man who runs fastest who leads the race, but the one who pauses to think before he reads a book.

Me: I have no idea what that means, Fu.

Confucius had some crazy facial hair.

Confucius had some crazy facial hair.

Confucius: Tough nuggets. They can’t all be gems, my faceless friend. I get tired of having to be pithy and brilliant all the time. Nobody ever just lets me kick back and relax. It’s always, “Teach me, enlighten me, expand my world, tell me a story.” Sometimes I just want to tell everybody to shut the fuck up and figure things out for themselves.

Abe: Same problem here, Fu. Every damn day, a constant stream of people ask me to resolve this conflict and resolve that conflict, like I’m a professional mediator or whatever. Like I care if the world explodes. Sometimes I just want to kick back in my top hat and underwear with a beer and a bag of pretzels and watch the game. But, no!

Me: This meeting of the minds isn’t unfolding like I imagined it would.

Confucius: The superior man understands what the inferior man can’t learn if you give him a bowl of pomegranate seeds.

Me: Still lost here, Fu.

Abe: Let’s just eat. Mind the spicy sauces, tho, Mike. Without eyelids, you could have a hell of time if you accidentally get one in your eyes.

Me: Okay, thanks. I’ll be careful.

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I know it’s hard to believe, but this is my entry for the 23rd day of Nicky and Mike’s blogging competition. If you want to see what other people wrote, please visit We Work for Cheese.

 

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30 Days Minus 2 of Writing, Day 19: Little things

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Some mornings I wake up, groan, get out bed because I have to go to the bathroom, and then go to work because I have to pay my bills.

Other mornings I wake up, groan, get out bed because I have to go to the bathroom, and then go to work because I have to pay my bills. Proving that one day follows another, each one of them pretty much exactly like the one before it.

But once in a while something unusual happens.

Something……well, something wonderful.

It happened recently.

I’d just trudged home from my dreary job at the bottle factory — I check for chips in the glass — when I thought to check the mailbox. Usually, I don’t bother, partly because I’m afraid poisonous/hairy/jumping spiders might be hiding inside, and partly because I never know when one of my NRA card-carrying neighbors is going to rig the damn thing with explosives as a practical joke. I don’t want to risk getting my hand blown off just to retrieve the latest discount pizza coupon or Hammacher Schlemmer catalog. I have kids for that sort of work.

This time, however, I peeked inside and saw a large yellow box. A box addressed to me in unfamiliar writing. European writing, judging by the careful script. Europeans often have neat handwriting, because they believe education is valuable and happily pay taxes to fund decent schools where kids learn to read and write properly. Americans are opposed to taxation, and prefer hiring people to do complicated things like writing for them so they can watch television.

I don’t get boxes from Europe very often, so I was excited.

Well, not excited. But not as depressed as usual.

After gingerly setting the box on the ground, I commanded my German shepherd, Frau Pfannkuchen, to sniff it for drug and bomb residue. Then I leaned over and read the label closely. And that’s when I realized it was from my dear Finnish friends Ziva and M, who live, oddly enough, in Finland.

I tore into the package like a virgin groom undressing his reformed whore of an Italian bride on their wedding night. Except that I wasn’t, you know, uhm, turgid.

Packages excite me, but not that much.

Inside, I found a beautiful card, and brightly colored packages of Finnish confections. Pounds of milk chocolate, several varieties of salmiakki (also known as salty or ammoniated licorice), and a few boxes of something I’d never seen before called Leijona.

Nicky over at We Work For Cheese will vehemently disagree with me about this, but I think salmiakki tastes great, even the stuff that comes in packages marked with scary flames and the skull and crossbones. And the chocolate was some of the best chocolate I’ve ever had.

But I especially liked the Leijona. I don’t know how to describe these treats to Americans, but they’re little things about the size of a shirt-collar button. They’re coal black, coated in sugar crystals and taste like a combination of sweetened asphalt and herbal cough drops.

I loved them.

Ate them all in one sitting, in fact, because they’re as addictive as potato chips.

Which made me sad. No more Leijona.

I wept.

But you know what? Ziva and M heard my cry in the wilderness, and sent me another package filled with boxes and boxes of Leijona just a few weeks later.

Which makes me smile. Not just because I like Leijona so much, but also because I know somebody out there — somebody in a frozen, faraway land called Finland, where kids grow up eating bizarre candy and knowing how to read and write — cares about me enough to break up the monotony of my days with candy.

Sometimes it’s the little things in life, you know?

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Nicky and Mike at We Work For Cheese urged me to join their writing competition this month, and I agreed, thinking it was a little thing. I was wrong, horribly wrong, but I still love them because they’re awesome people, and because maybe I’ll win an autographed photo of Mike or, who knows, a pair of Nicky’s undergarments, which would be fun to hang from my rear-view mirror. For other entries today, please visit them.

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30 Days Minus 2 of Writing, Day 14: Do you know where I can get a good blintz?

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Look at me.

I am a 53-year-old man, well past middle age, graying, college educated, experienced in the ways of both the wrench and the pen. A man born from two continents. A man who has seen the world from 36,000 feet in the air, and several thousand feet below its surface. A man who has stood on granite slabs overlooking fog-shrouded valleys that were created in the cradle of time by the same inexorable force that also gave me warm, salty waters without discernible horizons in which to swim.

And yet in all my days, and for all I’ve seen and heard and done, for everything I’ve touched or treasured or loved, I’ve never eaten a blintz.

How can that be, I wonder?

Cheese blintzes with black raspberries.

Cheese blintzes with black raspberries.

How does a man like me — somewhat world-weary, with callouses and blunted molars and a left hip that aches at night — awake one morning with the startling realization that there are more meals yet to be discovered than he has enjoyed in an entire lifetime of dining? That something as basic as food is reeling away from him faster than he can comprehend, never mind larger issues like the rapid retreat of dying stars into the distant fraying edges of the ever-expanding universe that houses them?

A blintz.

A blintz is not a complicated thing. It is a staple food for Jews. A handful or two of flour, milk and egg mixed without leavening. A type of pancake or crêpe.

I have seen them prepared many times. The yellow batter poured into seasoned flat pans blackened with heat. Cooked golden brown. Thin rounds laid out with spatulas on white china. Filled with molten chocolate, or warm ricotta cheese, or caramelized apples, or roasted peaches the color of lazy sunsets. Rolled and squeezed until the dripping sweetness oozes out either open end, giving them delicate hourglass figures that would make Emma Stone jealous, and that’s before they’re blanketed with whipped cream, dusted with powdered sugar and cinnamon, or drizzled in raspberry sauce.

I have seen them mostly in port cities, where there were Jews and Jewish neighborhoods and Jewish bakeries to serve them.

I have seen them winking salaciously at me from wooden trays in shop windows. I have heard them whispering my name from curved glass display cases, where I found them reposed like lovers in beds of crocheted lace and lit like golden tourmalines plucked from the diadems of heaven.

I have have watched blintzes slide from red-hot ovens onto shiny white plates that were whisked away by white-gloved hands and dramatically placed onto white-clothed tables set with polished silver and crystal decanters and hand linens bound by circlets of gleaming rosewood.

And I have lusted for them. For many, and for one.

Just one.

Just one small bite.

Just once.

Oh please, please, please just one, just once, just one small bite, please I beg you, just one, just once, just the tiniest taste, please, please I must, just once, I beg you, please.

But I never tasted one.

Not one.

Croquembouche -- mini cream puffs -- with a spun- sugar cloud.

Croquembouche — mini cream puffs — with a spun- sugar cloud.

Time always seemed to be slipping away from me. Or I didn’t have enough coins in my pocket. Or I’d already eaten the easy thing. The sticky Napoleon. The buttery croissant. Or one too many of the bite-sized croquembouche laced with wisps of brandy-colored, spun-sugar clouds that had to broken and lifted away in order to get at the custard-filled globes temptingly arranged into edible pyramids.

I saw them all right, mostly in port cities. Now I don’t travel very far, don’t live near a port, and can’t find a bakery with a curved-glass case.

I have not seen a blintz, not for a very long time.

But I remember them. Still long to taste one, just one bite, just once.

Do you understand me?

Do you know where I can get a good blintz?

Do you?

And if you do, is there still time for me? Or has time raced too far ahead of me?

Is that it there, the loping black wolf of time with its ragged head turned back to glance at me angrily from the bloodshot corner of its ever-hurried eye? Is that it growling at me even as I shrink and shrink behind it until I am merely a speck, and then just a iota among millions and billions of other iotas, and finally just part of something huge and formless that shimmers grey and all but forgotten in the background far behind all the other objects that still retain some vestige of the rainbow hues that distinguish them from the black-velvet curtain of inscrutable existence?

I hope not.

Oh please, please, please, I hope not. I want one, just one, just once, just one small bite I beg you, just one, just once, just the tiniest taste, please, please I must, just once, I beg you, please.

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Howdy, and welcome to the 14th day of Nicky and Mike’s blogging challenge, which I’m enjoying enormously despite having an actual life to attend to. Today’s prompt was entirely my fault. Regrettable as that may be, you will find other entries in today’s category over at their blog, We Work For Cheese.

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30 Days Minus 2 of Writing, Day 4: Friendship

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Friendship is hard to come by. Even if you’re lucky enough to find another loser to hang out with, the slightest differences can separate you. You love action movies, he loves comedies. You love fast cars, he loves fast women. You love your girlfriend, he loves her, too, mostly because she’s fast.

So imagine how hard it would be to make friends if you didn’t have a face. That was my dilemma after mine unexpectedly fell off at Nancy and Bob Turk’s wedding last year.

There are no advantages to being faceless except that you don’t have to shave. At parties, for instance, people irritate you to death by offering you useless advice.

“Have you considered superglue?”

“The juice of a fresh aloe plant is very good for the skin.”

“My sister had a friend whose second cousin knew somebody who had her face reattached by a forensics expert who used to reconstruct the faces of murder victims for the FBI. Maybe I can get his number for you.”

Eating with people is also a huge problem; You can’t fully appreciate the value of cheeks until you don’t have any. I recently asked a beautiful woman out for lemon-drop martinis and chili, and ended up soaked in a tangy mess of beans and tomato sauce that horrified her so much I abandoned my plan to kiss her goodnight.

Not that I could’ve kissed her anyway. Not without lips. We would’ve had to settle for sucking tongues.

Co-workers can be friends and they try their best to treat me nicely. But it’s challenging because they feel like I’m always staring at them. Plus, they can’t decide if I’m grinning or grimacing when we’re making small talk around the cooler. And if I hear a good joke and make the mistake of belly laughing, the clattering of my teeth can sound like gunfire, sending the office into a panic.

Not that work matters much, because the best jobs for skullheads like me are already taken. There’s not as much call for hot-headed, crime-fighting Ghost Riders as Nicolas Cage might lead you to expect. Haunted house work is strictly seasonal, and in Hollywood talking skulls take a distant backseat to vampires, werewolves, zombies and mummies.

About the best employment a faceless person can hope for is stocking shelves late at night at Wal-Mart, and it’s damnably hard to find a friend there you’d want to keep. Most of them already have skulls tattooed on their arms, and it’s disheartening to be constantly reminded you weren’t their first best friend.

So what do I do for friends?

Facebook is out. Too ironic.

Maybe I should get a kitten for company. At least it won’t be able to wake me up in the morning by sitting on my face.

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Well, it’s day four of Nicky and Mike’s blogging challenge, and I’m exhausted. Craving pizza, too, although I doubt it’s related. To read what others are writing, please click here.

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