GEOFF NICHOLSON HAS GONE FOR A QUICK NIBBLE ...

I'll be back soon, don't fret.

ETERNAL SOUL FOOD

I really try not do “guilty pleasures.”   I’ve spent most of my life trying to recover from a quasi-catholic upbringing, and I’ve decided that pleasure is not a thing to be guilty about.  On the other hand I’m well aware that many of my foodie friends wouldn’t be seen dead in an Applebee’s.  Well, that’s there problem not mine. 

When I find myself in Yucca Valley, as I do once in a while, chances are I’ll also find myself enjoying happy hour Applebee’s.  It’s an unsophisticated pleasure for sure, but not a guilty one.  And this time as I sat enjoying my 4 o’clock beer I read my cocktail napkin:

“We see you’re taking off a load and enjoying a nice cold beverage.  Hey, you earned it.  Probably. Just lke you do every day.  So drink up, friend.  The workday will be back soon.  And hopefully, so will you.”  Man, it was like they knew me better than I know myself. 

And to go with the nice cold beverage we had “brew pub pretzels and beer cheese dip.”  I liked all the words in that sentence and I also liked the description: “White cheddar mixed with craft beer and roasted garlic creates a savory dip served alongside warm pretzel sticks seasoned with sesame seeds, coarse salt and crushed red pepper. Comes with Honey Dijon mustard sauce.” Anyway they came and they looked like this.

The real oddity was that they didn’t in any way resemble a pretzel.  They were more like a long stick of savory donut, which is OK if you like that kind of thing, and I could have used more dip, but I wasn’t complaining.

And I did like this message on the menu, “To our guests with food sensitivities or allergies: Applebee's cannot ensure that menu items do not contain ingredients that might cause an allergic reaction. Please consider this when ordering.”  I considered it and I approved.  Hey kid, you’re on your own when you eat at Appleby’s -  it’s the American way.

Next day down the road in Palm Springs I went to the King’s Highway, a faux retro diner, part of the Ace Hotel and Swim Club (yep, that’s what they call it), a place so painfully hip that I’m surprised they let me within a hundred yards.  But damn, they do a good breakfast.  Green Eggs and Ham in this case:

Very Dr, Seuss, though in this case the green is caused by mixing avocado into the Hollandaise, and the ham is Spanish lomo.  It made me vey happy – rather happier than the happy hour at Applebee’s did, but as Pete Seeger would have said, to everything there is a season.

I just read a1982 interview with the late, great Mr. Seeger, talking about his Clearwater Festival that used to go on in upstate New York, “We have a huge iron cauldron, and we make what we call stone soup. You likely know the story about this dish: In the tale, a soldier comes into a small village and—after being refused food offers his dinner of boiled stones to all the townsfolk. Gradually, each of those formerly stingy people contributes carrots, potatoes, meat, seasonings, or whatever to the broth . . . producing a truly delectable stew. Well, we printed the tale in our local newspaper's an old, old folk story-and the symbolism of it came home to my town. Clearwater comes to Beacon once a year, and every year my wife and volunteers serve stone soup to over 1,000 people, free of charge.  We also serve strawberry shortcake ..”  I can’t find a picture of Pete Seeger eating, but here he is instead, facing the House Un-American Activities Commission.

THE HAGGIS AND US

It being that time of year, more or less, four of us celebrated Burns Night at the Tam O’Shanter, Los Angeles’s best stab at a British (ish) restaurant.  Walt Disney was a big fan.

Although it was a Burns Night special, the menu was pretty much as usual, heavy on the prime rib, though with the seasonal (not Burns-related) addition of goose, which I ordered, and it was very good, actually even better than the goose cooked at Nicholson Acres at Christmas.  Everybody else had the prime rib. 

But of course we were really there for the haggis, and to a lesser extent the reading of the Burns poem, and to a greater extent the playing of the bagpipes.  I’ve always enjoyed the sound of bagpipes and I know a lot of people say they sound like a cat being strangled, but I always wonder how many of these people have ever actually heard a cat being strangled.   Up here in the hills I occasionally here a feral cat being torn apart by a coyote and it don’t sound much like bagpipes, believe me.

The only problem haggis-wise: the good folk at the Tam seemed to think haggis was an appetizer or even an amuse bouche, so it came in a small portion on a wee saucer to be shared among the four of us.  It was OK as far as it went but it didn’t go very far, and I’ve certainly had more intensely flavored haggis.

 

There was, of course, the “ceremonial slaying of the haggis” (above and below) and if you think that outer casing looks like tripe rather than a sheep’s stomach, I think you’re absolutely right.

photo by Paul Norton

So when the end of the meal came, after the sticky toffee pudding and so forth. we asked our bus boy, who was of course Mexican, if there was any haggis going begging, and he seemed to find this idea very entertaining, and indeed there was, and he delivered a box of it to go, actually about twice as much as we’d been given at the start the meal.

So what do you do with left over haggis?  Well I made a pie.  This second batch of haggis was significantly different from our starter portion – tastier and way more livery – and all the better for that.  I made my pie in a slapdash sort of way, and zested it up with a bit of balsamic vinegar, Worcestershire sauce, sherry and some gravy we had in the fridge.  And let me tell you – it was a taste sensation!  I wish you could have been there.  It looked like this:

But now wait on, Watson.  If you zoom in on the picture – blow me down, isn’t there a cat’s face looming there in amid the haggis in the pie dish?  Personally I might have preferred the face of Robbie Burns or Elvis, but you have to take miracles as they come.  The fact is, no cats were strangled in the making of this haggis pie.

THE SO-SO GATSBY

I’ve been rereading Scott Fitgerald’s The Great Gatsby.  It’s one of the novels I return to every few years, and although I always think I know it reasonably well, there’s always some surprise, something I’d completely forgotten or didn’t previously take in.  This time I came cross this paragraph describing Gatsby’s parties:

“At least once a fortnight a corps of caterers came down with several hundred feet of canvas and enough colored lights to make a Christmas tree of Gatsby's enormous garden. On buffet tables, garnished with glistening hors-d'oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold. In the main hall a bar with a real brass rail was set up, and stocked with gins and liquors and with cordials so long forgotten that most of his female guests were too young to know one from another.”

Now, call me naïve and indeed British, but I had never heard the term “pastry pig” and I imagined a whole roast pig wrapped in pastry, a sort of giant pork en croute, which would have been very splendid, a bit like Robert May’s pastry stag.  It would have been extremely hard to cook, but I thought that was the whole point.

However, poking around the internet it seems I’m the only once who thinks this.  Anyone who has an opinion thinks the reference is to “pig in a blanket” which in my country are called sausage rolls, and that seems strangely disappointing and low-key and a bit tacky for a great Gatsby party.  Although of course that may be the whole point, that Gatsby isn't as classy as he thinks he is.

Below is a picture of Gatsby from the Baz Lurhmann movie, which I found just unbearable.  I couldn't tell you what those things are on the plates surrounding Gatsby are, but I'm pretty sure none of them is supposed to be a pig in a blanket.  Not much sign of a harlequin salad or a turkey either.

THE TOFU BUSINESS

Some people say one thing, and some people say another, and I only know what I read, and I don’t necessarily believe much of it, but there’s some suggestion abroad that eating too much tofu will feminize a man, reduce his libido and his sperm count, and make his testicles atrophy.  These are good reasons for not eating tofu, though personally I can think of others, and of course the soy bean lobby says it’s not true anyway.

My companion and I went to a cheap and cheerful Indian restaurant on Melrose Avenue, called Anarkali.  Anarkali means “pomegranate blossom” and was the name of slave girl, possibly a real person, who either was or was not ordered to be buried alive by the Mughal emperor Akbar for having an affair with his son.  That’ll teach her.

I had never heard of the restauarant, had heard no reports, but it happened to be there, and in we went, my companion and I.  We had the business lunch for two.  It was that or the executive lunch, and we could just about imagine that we were conducting business but we really didn’t feel we could consider ourselves executives.  The meal was pretty good, in a standard Indian restaurant sort of way: soup, papadams, nan, lamb biryani, chicken tandoori, vegetable curry. All for $20.  However, it must be said that when I think of a real businessman's lunch I tend to think of a steak and a brace of martinis.

Service was attentive, and why not given that the place was more or less empty, but there was some entertainment to be had from our fellow diners.  When we arrived there was a stylish African-American gent, eating alone, and he talked on his cell phone throughout his meal and then argued with the waiter about the bill.

He left, and my fellow-businessman and I were the only two people in the restaurant, then a crazy street person, approached the door, open it, took one step inside, looked around. perhaps saw me, and immediately left.  On balance I was grateful for that.

Then an SUV pulled up outside and a couple of tragic hipsters got out, a young man and a young woman.  She was wearing jodhpurs and riding boots, he was not.  The girl took off the riding boots and put them in the car, and she and the boy came in.  They sat behind me and so I didn’t get to see the full extent of their hipsterism but I did hear much discussion about the menu.  Finally the boy ordered the tofu coconut curry.  We "businessmen" sniggered just a little.