The Off-the-Cuff Column #4

WHEREAS your host has very little upon which he should like to comment at the moment; and WHEREAS he and the family are preparing to make the annual Pilgrimage of Fun down to Sesame Place^* tomorrow morning in the wife’s new soccer-mom-uber-ride during which time we’ll endure the visuals-free sound of some as-yet-undecided Disney flick playing directly behind our heads; and WHEREAS this lame idea of making the opening to this post seem like some sort of formal announcement is wearing thin, it’s time to put 30 minutes on the clock this fine Saturday morning and see how much pseudo-entertaining drivel I can spill. We begin.

This is a late-to-the-party recommendation, but Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One is a fantastic novel. Especially if you’re an old geek like me who spent way too much time in arcades and playing D&D. Whole bunch of fun.

Let’s have a musical open-mind moment together, shall we? Set aside what you think music is and listen to this example of throat singing by Soriah. Keep in mind that this is one guy, one voice, no augmentation. Listen to what the voice can do. It’s an ancient technique of creating tone and overtone in the same breath. Next, if you want be dismayed by how small-minded people are, click the link to his America’s Got Talent audition from 2010, which (among so many other reasons) makes me not want to watch it ever again, and makes me want to taser Piers Morgan right in his junk. If you kind of dig what you hear, check Soriah out in full band mode here, and read my review of his excellent CD, Eztica, here.

If Pussy Riot were a bunch of guys in a band that didn’t have “Pussy” in the name, would anyone really give a shit?

My Twitter followers, of which there are few, may know that I just started following legendary food writer Ruth Reichl (@ruthreichl). Her feed is like a combination of gorgeous haiku and food porn at once.

Welcome, new readers whose Google search on the word “porn” inexplicably and disappointingly brought you here!

My favorite recent search term that brought someone here: “what rides can fat people fit on at canobie lake park.” Let me give you a tip from the voice of experience, friend: most of them. But then I guess it depends on your definition of fat. If you’re north of 260, my opinion becomes invalid.

This morning’s coffee is black because I had the good sense to sniff the milk first.

My son is very impressed with himself for “creating” barbecued bacon. Fries it up then gives it a dose of barbecue sauce. I have to remember to let him help me more in the kitchen when he’s here. Shows signs of becoming an interesting cook. In a couple of years I’ll advise him that this is a very good way to get laid.

Ladies, we both know that last statement is true. Men cook to get women to sleep with them; women let men cook for them as a benchmark on whether or not to sleep with them. Everybody wins!

When men cook, it gives the impression that we are good providers and caretakers. But really, we just hate to screw on an empty stomach.

Hang on, I’m pausing the clock to get more coffee. I promise it’s not to think of more clever lines.

And we’re back.

My play, Bob’s Date, which started life as a play for adults (and one kid) and took on a life of its own as a high school piece,^** is being performed this month by a group at a senior’s center in Canada. I kind of wish I could see that. I’ve seen it done straight in its casting wheelhouse, and I’ve seen it done by kids, but never like this. Break a leg, friends!

In senior drama circles, is it considered good luck to say “Break a hip”?

Too far?

I babble like this because during the rest of the week I make puns about women’s frigging clothes for headlines. Even I know there’s nothing brilliant about putting something like “Tee Party!” on a spread of soft, versatile pima cotton tees in misses’, petite and women’s sizes. (Fishing for hits. Hi, ladies!)

My company does not say “Women” in their sizing. They say “Woman.” Having grown up in the 70s, I can only hear this word, on its own, in the voice of Animal the Muppet. Try it: “Misses’, petite and WOMAN! WOMAN!“

Holy crap, I just went back to the paragraph before the last one and added the apostrophe to misses’. Leave it alone, Johnny! Work done! Vacation now! WOMAN!

In case they ever come here, I work with some madly talented writers who get me through the day.

I plan to be eating a fair number of hot dogs next week. It is traditional for us, on our Sesame Place foray, to stop for lunch at Super Duper Weenie in Connecticut. On the following weekend my boy and I will be scoping out hot dog joints in Jersey on our way down to pinball mecca, and hitting Coney Island on the way back. Sorry, those of you in the “it’s all lips and assholes”⁺ crowd, I love me a good all-beef hot dog. Whatever you do, never read the FDA’s list of allowable foreign substances in food. You’ll never eat again. Right now the contenders for the Jersey run are Jersey Joe’s (because they boast of their “Italian style hot dogs”) or a place called Max’s, which is closer to the pinball. Last year we hit the legendary Rutt’s, which was just okay. Boy liked it better than I did.

Two motorcycles just drove past. It’s pouring out. That has to suck.

Same for the jogger just coming up the street now. I mean, it’s comin’ down out there. I appreciate their dedication as I sit on my fat, unexercised ass and down another round of java.

This just walked into my office. I blame genetics–and not for the Lorax moustache.

Remember that post about corned beef? I’m way overdue for another round.

Weekend, rain, coffee, Jason Sloan’s new release Fall of the Fifth Sun playing, sharing my thoughts with what I imagine to be an appreciative audience, and a visit from the most beautiful Lorax ever. Nice way to spend the morning. And that’s my time, ladies and gentlemen. Thanks for playing.

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^*Newcomers can relive the soggy joy of last year’s trek by reading this lovely post right here.

^**I don’t encourage the high school productions, but neither do I turn them down because royalties are royalties. But as an older person, I watch kids doing a show about getting over deep (and theoretically real) heartbreak and I think, Oh, you have no idea. No idea at all.

⁺Honestly, I cannot wait to see how many hits come in as a result of that phrase.

Forgive Me, Father, For I Have Sinned.

With a name like Shanahan, I understandably take my boiled dinners seriously. Although I have fallen over the years into that habit where I only do a good corned beef and cabbage around St. Patrick’s Day like the rest of the world, until this past week I had always followed certain rules regarding its making. These rules came from my father.

Dad was not a cook, really. The only things I can remember him making are fried dough, banana fritters, and this odd Christmastime concoction involving pimentos run through a grinder, mixed with  softened cheddar cheese. And although he was never the one making the corned beef and cabbage per se, he did expect it to be done just thus and so.

Rule One: Grey corned beef only. So iron-clad was this rule that for years–no, let’s call it decades–I was convinced there was something about red corned beef, something in its nature, its cut or its lineage, that made it a lesser chunk of meat. Irish corned beef, Dad would insist, was grey. Red? Jewish. Red was for the deli; grey was for St. Paddy’s. Imagine my surprise when I learned that the only difference is in the curing. Grey is cured only with salt. Red adds some spices.

The flavor I grew up with, though, was the flavor of the grey. The grey, which you soaked overnight to draw some of the salt out. It sat covered in water in the pot until it was time to start cooking, at which time you dumped out the old water and added new. Not all of the salt went with it, though, and what remained was still enough to bring a strong shot of the brine to the veggies that went in with it. Those veggies had plenty of time to soak up the saline because of Rule Two.

Rule Two: Everything at once. Some recipes would have you cook the corned beef for three hours or so, then add your potatoes, carrots and cabbage. That’s not how we did it, no. One pot, everything in, let it ride. This is the remnant, ingrained dictum of our Irish/New England combined work and cooking ethic. Weren’t nobody going to come in out of the field or home from the factory middle of the day to add the vegetables, no sir. There was work to be done, ay-yuh, and we could eat when the sun set. ‘Til then, let the meat and the veggies boil away nice and slow. So it would all go in and boil along for hours, and the salt would work its way into everything. Not quite enough to form a crust on your skin, but certainly enough to put a pucker on your lips. And that’s how I like it. That saltiness has preserved memories. It’s the flavor of the big table at my grandmother’s house on certain Sundays with all of the family around it. My chair next to my grandfather’s, and this is the only memory I have of him, he and I at the head of the table, me looking up at this smiling giant of a fellow who passed away when I was only six. The salt still tastes of the Sunday afternoons of my simple childhood.

Rule Three: Carrots, potatoes, cabbage, stop. Put whatever you like into your boiled dinner. At the Shanahans’ it’s the Big Three. Oh, sure, we’re familiar with turnips and their friends the parsnips and we like them just fine with a ham, maybe, but they’ve no place in our corned beef dinner. Why do you people need to be so fancy, anyway?

On a recent evening Stace and I took our daughter and got some dinner out at an Irish bar in my town. Thursday night’s specials included boiled dinner and I hadn’t had any in a while,* so I ordered it. This is usually an error of judgement for me. The legacy of my grandmother’s and my mother’s boiled dinner not only has its thumb on the scale, it actually kicks other boiled dinners in the groin if they get too close. The cabbage was undercooked, and had part of the core hanging off it. The meat was cut too thick. It had dried a bit. The small, round white potatoes weren’t fork-tender. I got it down, but it only made me want to make my own all the more. St. Paddy’s Day was coming. Specials on the meat and the cabbage would hit the shelves. (Carrots never seem to get the same honor.) I decided to make one for dinner. Regarding the asterisk above, I decided I would make it for my mother when other people had plans that evening.

Now we come to the confessional part of our post. I knew I wasn’t going to get to it on Sunday because time was getting away and, well…look, I’ve always been curious about corned beef and…the slow cooker. I know people do it all the time, and I’ve made my endless love for the slow cooker quite clear. Looking in my copy of Not Your Mother’s Slow Cooker, I saw the words that sealed the deal: on low for 10-12 hours. How I love that phrase. Forgive me, father, but the time had come to try it. Which is bad enough, but then I went ahead and compounded my indiscretion.

I bought red.

It was late in the day. I was tired. I had already decided not to make the wife try it again, and that evening’s plan had already shifted to burritos and then there was also a great sale on stew beef and she’d mentioned she’d like something like stew for lunches for the week and there was no grey corned beef right there even though I really wanted one, honestly I did, but there were two cuts of the red so I…I…

I can make all the excuses I like. In the end it’s this simple: I went red, dad. But give me credit–I stuck with the Big Three. Spent my Monday morning before work peeling and chopping taters and carrots, breaking down a little cabbage into wedges. I added water, trying not to concern myself that the recipe only called for a half cup. (You can’t boil in that little water!) I sealed the lid. I turned the cooker to low. And I went to toil in the fields of fashion copywriting for 10 hours.**

Click it for bigness.

I got home and popped the lid on the cooker. Things in there looked good–which is to say, the three-pound slab of red meat had shrunk by half and gone all grey like it was supposed to. The cabbage had taken on a nice beige-green hue. The potatoes had clearly grabbed most of the fat from the meat and were holding it inside themselves. I put the meat on a cutting board and brought the knife down. The meat sighed a little and basically fell open, revealing the perfect bit of redness you see in the photo. I had sinned, yes, but I had sinned quite well. The meat was tender and moist, the vegetables right at the point of perfect softness that comes just before they go soggy. In the words of my mother, who quite gladly accepted my dinner invite, “It’s just salty enough.”*** And it was. My only meh moment was a result of me deciding to cut open the spice packet in the morning and rub some of it onto the meat. Whatever was in there brought an odd clove-like aftertaste.**** But as far as red vs. grey or boiling vs. slow cooking, well…I can’t say I plan to repent for my sin, unless voraciously devouring the better part of a pound of really good corned beef is anything like saying four Hail Marys and an Act of Contrition. Sorry, dad, but I think even you would have approved. If anything, now I want to try a slab of grey in the slow cooker because that just might be the perfect combination.

And no, I won’t be waiting for next St. Patrick’s Day.

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*The last time I wrote about the things my wife doesn’t/can’t/won’t eat, I got called out for making her sound boring. So I won’t tell you that a couple of years ago I made her her first boiled dinner and she didn’t care for it. Despite this gaping religious and ideological chasm between us, we are somehow still married.

**I don’t work a 10-hour day. But departure to arrival is about 10. So count it.

***Moments later my daughter would declare that “the meat tasted funny” and, in essence, join her mother on the side of the Rebellion. I pray for their horribly lost and wayward souls.

***My bet is that it was clove.

Visions of Sugarplums

Sugar plum photo courtesy of Kevin Lynch at http://www.closetcooking.com. Go there as soon as you're done here.

Needless to say, your host is a trifle busy this weekend. Getting the place ready for the Big Guy in Red, prepping the tranquilizer gun to get the kids to go sleep at a decent hour, deciding which bourbon daddy wants to use to celebrate the end of all the shopping. You know, the usual.

So with all that and the fact that most of you have plans of your own, no column this weekend. We’ll start fresh on Day 1 of 2012 and have ourselves a Hash ‘n’ Eggs year going forward.

Thanks for taking the time to read, to comment and to enjoy. I promise to keep up my end of the bargain in the weeks to come.

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Happy New Year, peace & prosperity to you all.

With gratitude,

John

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Okay…I wrote that above part earlier in the week. Afterward, a gift came to me which I’ve decided to share with you.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, I used to do a cable TV show. In December of 1990 we did a parody of all those old-school Christmas specials, where your celebrity host is at their house, everyone’s in a sweater and talented friends drop by. (Yes, Glee, we did it 20 years ago.) We put our own spin on it. Like most of the stuff on the show we had a vague idea of what we wanted to do, then we just started improvising. Part of this is the legendary (to me, and to people formerly involved in the show) Nog Song.

The Nog Song came out of nowhere. Ron started singing, making lyrics as he went, and started cracking up. That was clearly my cue to pick it up. Everything in the Nog Song is 100% spur of the moment.

The Nog Song hasn’t been seen for years. It existed only on an old 3/4″ broadcast video tape that sat in a storage vault at the cable studios. Apparently they recently had a flood in their basement and many tapes, including some of our old shows, were lost. By what can only be considered a Christmas miracle, the Nog Song tape survived.

So on this Christmas Eve I give to you, my much-loved readers, not just the Nog Song but the whole, silly, off-the-cuff 13-minute bit.

It’s right through here.

The Shanahan Family Head-Down No-Peeking It’s-Not-Christmas-Yet Bathroom Dash

Now there’s a title that’s bound to attract some attention.

Christmas, as parents all know, is the most wonderful time of the year because we get to lie to our children with wild abandon and liberally use the looming spectre of jolly St. Nick like a whimsical little cattle prod to get them to behave when all else fails. Works like a charm, too. Let’s say your 6-year-old kid is, for example, setting fire to an orphanage and you’d like him to stop. You can tell him it’s wrong, but he’ll just laugh at you. You can say he’ll be grounded for life, but he’ll just crank up the flamethrower. You can appeal to his greater moral sense and human compassion, but then he’ll probably turn the flame on you. BUT, if you shout out that Santa is watching and he won’t be getting anything for Christmas, he’ll not only stop, he’ll actually help you stamp out the flaming orphans. It’s a Christmas miracle.

In the Shanahan household, back in the day, Christmas was a loving time with little to none of that sort of hanging-over-your-head, coal-in-stocking malarkey…

…as long as you didn’t have to pee between bedtime Christmas Eve and waking up Christmas morning. Because if you did, you ran the risk of having all your toys disappear.

Not that my parents were expecting their children to actually hold their water all through that Holy Night. No, you could pee if you had to–absolutely had to–but it was fully expected that you would do the Head-Down No-Peeking It’s-Not-Christmas-Yet Bathroom Dash. Doesn’t sound like a big deal, right? Let me take you through it.

Imagine that you are a Shanahan child and you are in bed on Christmas Eve. From past experience you know that Santa takes your best gifts and puts them, in all their unwrapped, native state glory, out on the couch and the easy chair. One child per cushion. There was no waiting your turn on Christmas morning, no! You flew into the living room and just had at your hoard. Frenzy! Joy! Girlish shrieking! (Come on, I was a kid.)

What this meant, however, was that at some point during the night, he came and he left them and they sat there, out in the open. Everybody could see them.

Except that you weren’t allowed to. If you gazed upon your Christmas gifts before the light of day struck, before dad had gone down to check and make sure Santa was gone, if your eyes even fell upon one moonlight-glistened, cellophane-frosted corner of a gift…poof. Gone.

“I remember thinking it was like life or death if I ‘by accident’ looked or saw something,” says my oldest sister, Kathy. We all felt that way.

But it sounds simple, right? Just don’t go into the living room. This is where we must rely on some visuals to elucidate for the non-Shanahan. Come with me now. It’s the middle of the night and your boyish little bladder, filled with juice and expectation, just can’t hold out any longer. Your sisters have warned you about looking–like they even had to. You know what’s at stake! You start down the stairs and almost immediately hit Temptation Point One:

Through that doorway, that open and unguarded doorway, your presents await. You could lean in and see them but if you do….gone! Dad said so! So you put your head down and sort of tuck it toward your left shoulder as you get near the bottom of the stairs to the hallway that runs back to the kitchen. This way, when you turn, your head is away from the scenic gift vista beyond the doorway. Breathe a little sigh of relief. You passed the first gut-check-point.

“I remember hauling ass down the hallway,” youngest sister Mary says. The hallway put a wall between you and the presents. It was sanctuary…sort of.

All is well as long as you don’t turn your head to the right as you come into the kitchen. Because the hall doorway and the living room doorway are right next to each other. This is Temptation Point Two, but it’s an easy one to work past. Head held still, eyes forward, keep moving. Just…don’t…turn.

Congratulations. You made it. You may urinate at will. The whole time, however, you know…you know that the worst part is yet to come. The next part is like double or nothing, one spin of the revolver’s chamber, the ultimate dare. You know that this is the view from the bathroom door:

What fresh hell is this? your little brain screams. Look familiar? Of course it does. When you came through that door on the right to get to the bathroom, you could keep your back to the presents. But now…now you know perfectly well that the minute you open that door, all of Christmas will be laid out before you, glimmering, gleaming, begging to be played with, yours all yours–but it will turn to nothing if you see it now while it’s still dark outside. Not to mention, how can you be sure the coast is clear since dad hasn’t come down to check first? Dad is still sleeping! What if…  What if the unthinkable happens?

“I never peeked,” Kathy says, “because I was terrified that ‘HE’ might still be in the living room and I would ruin it for everyone.”

Mary agrees. “I was always afraid that when I came out of the bathroom, Santa–who, by the way, scared me shitless–was going to be walking through the door. I think I even peed myself once or twice before even making it to the bathroom!”

Okay. Are you ready? Hand on the doorknob, then, head already down and ready to move. You can’t close your eyes, really, because then you might bump into something trying to get across the dark kitchen. And what if you go through the wrong doorway? Catastrophe! No, the idea is to move fast, eyes focused on the floor, not even thinking about what might be in there. You just need to get upstairs. Get upstairs. Keep it safe. Morning’s coming. Make sure the presents stay where they are!

We never looked. Not once.

Well, okay, one of us did once, as it turns out, but not on purpose.

“One time,” my sister Karen says, “there was a bike parked right in front of the doorway. Right there. You couldn’t miss it. And I was convinced that it would disappear because I’d seen it. Dad said so. I was convinced that when I got up in the morning, that bike would be gone.”

Of course it wasn’t, but even so we kept doing the Dash. Not because of some fear that had been foisted upon us by cruel parents but because we believed in the magic of the holiday–and magic has both an upside and a downside. We understood the rules of the Mystery. We got how Christmas worked. I mean, the guy could get into the house undetected year after year, so it was a fair bet that he could whip our toys away with one of those finger-on-the-nose moves that he pulls off in “Night Before Christmas” to shoot up the chimney. The Shanahan kids weren’t having any of that, no sir. We wanted our presents and we weren’t taking any unnecessary chances.

But when you gotta go, you gotta go.

Doin’ It in the Dark

All things considered, we came through Hurricane–ahem, tropical storm Irene quite well at our house. Down the street one family had a tree crash across three cars parked side-by-side in the driveway. My sister, a town over, had an oak tree take a kamikaze run at her sun porch, deck and pool. Me? I lost power.

This would barely be worth writing about if it weren’t for one thing. In situations like this, where lines go down and power goes out, I’m always going to be screwed. I apparently sit at the exact border between power and no power.

This picture was taken from my office window last Monday. See that house to the right? They had power. I didn’t. So did everyone going further away in that shot. From my window back, for literally two miles, it was like the frontier. I wrote the draft of this column on Tuesday afternoon by hand, on Day 3 of electricity-free living, with a mechanical pencil–which holds the distinction of being the second-most-annoying low-tech writing implement, right after the quill pen. (For the record, it has always seemed that the hardest thing to come by in a writer’s house–this writer, anyway–is a working pen.)

I really shouldn’t gripe. It was fine. We took the 2-mile trek one evening to grandma’s house to fuel the kids up with TV and plug in our phones, which were our only outside-world pipeline. But when the sun went down it was candles, camping lanterns and cooking on the grill. Which, again, would have slid several notches up the Scale of Okayness had we not been forced to look at the shiny, warm lights of our neighbor one fence over. It was like being in some odd science fiction novel. At the Whitman Outpost you could stand at the Division and watch night come on. To your left, Powertown, the part that held off the dangers of the Whitmanian night with electric light. To the right, The Dark, where strong prayers and a ready weapon were the only defense against the unnameable things that began to hunt when the sun went down…

But you know, while it was mighty inconvenient (and it was only three days), it weren’t half bad, as dad used to say. No mindless, reflexive dependence on TV. A quiet space in which to read and think. A reason to break out a board game for a change. The calm of candlelight–or just what little light found its way in from outside. One of the nights, after grilling a few meats before they went iffy in the warming freezer, we sat a good long while out at the fire, talking and roasting marshmallows. Fewer lights around us meant more stars above us, the kind of vast night-time canopy that sets a kid talking about the cosmos and what he thinks is out there. I sat quietly and listened appreciatively to the theories.

I recognize that I can do this anytime I like. I don’t have to wait for an Act of God to yank power lines down. But it’s an option that seems to get lost in the rush and worry of the everyday, the lists and need-to-do’s and appointments and post-work exhaustion. However, I think going forward I’d like to find a night here and there to come back to this. To say, let’s turn off all the lights and screens. Find our way around with a lantern and sleep to the flicker of a few candles. Embrace this quiet, this simplicity that we’ve chosen to ignore. I don’t know that it will happen, but I did make something of a start. When our power came back on early Tuesday evening, I rejoiced for a bit, of course. Went inside, checked a few things, turned off a few things that didn’t need to be on. Then I went back out to the deck where I’d been sitting. It was still quiet, a gorgeous day, and dusk was just beginning to find its purples and pinks. There was good light left and no need to be inside. And when the neighbors’ lights started coming on a little while later, I didn’t even mind.