Does This Taste Funny? A Half-Baked Look at Food and Foodies

by Dane, Michael

  Despite the swearing and occasional pain I’ve endured when trying the cooking thing, there’s a part of me that enjoys it more than writing.

  It’s one thing to create something that, if it gets published, might become popular. But if I cook something and it works, it feels real on a whole other level.

  I’m not deluded enough to think my writing will have any lasting impact. But The Girlfriend still remembers the Garlic and Mustard Brushed Chicken Breast Stuffed with Spinach that I made two months ago.

  The Girlfriend Draws the Line

  Since I do all the cooking, I usually put together the grocery list, and so far, we’ve only had a few shopping gaffes.

  I think I’ve finally convinced her to stop buying things we don’t need simply because they’re on sale (“Yes, dear, that is a good price for bok choy . . . but neither of us eat bok choy.”)

  Likewise, I think she gets that, for many reasons, if you must buy a chemical-laden industrially-processed fake whipped topping, you get the Redi-wip, not the Cool Whip, if only because you can squirt it directly into your mouth, bypassing the need to make dessert at all.

  I’ve learned over time that, despite my loving partner’s willingness to play along with my faux-foodie aspirations, there are things she would rather not eat.

  Capers received a distinctly tepid response; collard greens were NOT the hit I had expected; she’s not into cucumbers, and despite my belief that broccoli and cauliflower make a perfect veggie combo, the cauliflower part leaves her cold.

  At first I thought she had some rare psychological trauma involving foods that start with the letter ‘c.’ But it turns out, she’s fine with couscous, and that has two ‘c’s.

  Bottom line, relationships are about compromise, so I’ve resigned myself to the fact that she’ll never experience my fabulous caper-cucumber crusted cauliflower, with a side of collard greens.

  We don’t have a lot of extra cash, so I don’t lobby for a lot of cooking gadgets. Besides, with my long history of clumsiness, some gadgets are out of the question.

  I don’t imagine she’ll ever buy me an electric knife, for example, since that would simply allow me to cut myself more quickly and efficiently.

  But there is one food-related device that I have wanted since the first time I saw it. This is a thingamajig so cool, on so many levels, that I would instantly become cooler simply by owning one.

  You probably already know what I’m leading up to here. It’s a jerky gun.

  Some quotes from the catalog:

  “The one and only Jerky Gun” (as opposed to all those knockoff jerky weapons you see on the street?).

  “This item is made to give years of performance” (“Kids, this was your great-grandpa’s jerky gun…”).

  “Load the barrel of the Jerky Gun with lean, seasoned ground meat and shoot out flat strips of jerky or round snack sticks.” Because it’s your Second Amendment right to bear arms . . . that shoot meat snacks.

  In addition, the barrel will hold three-quarters of a pound of meat, Although I’ve heard stories of street gangs that illegally modify these to hold a full pound.

  Incidentally, the gun in the picture comes with three nozzles and enough seasoning for four pounds of meat. ‘Complete instructions’ included, but I’m sure most of us were taught from an early age how to responsibly shoot meat products out of a gun.

  The same company also sells a Jerky Cannon and, for you fans of overkill, a Jerky Cannon DOUBLE BARREL! Now THAT would obviously be ridiculous—the Jerky Gun is all we need.

  Fifty bucks. Yeah, that’s a hard one to pitch: “Hey hon, how was your day? Cool. Listen, I went ahead and put fifty bucks on the card for that jerky gun I was telling you about .”

  I’m not sure exactly what her objection was, but she drew the line. Maybe it was just the ‘gun’ part of the concept–and maybe she was worried that if we had one in the house, according to statistics, someone could break in and use our jerky gun against us.

  Or it could have been the jerky part. In my excitement over FINDING jerky weaponry, I had forgotten that I actually don’t like jerky. The idea just seems wrong.

  Eating jerky is like saying, “I enjoy the flavor of meat, but I’d like it to be all dried out, and harder to chew.” Or maybe if you need food that you can . . . mail in an envelope.

  I didn’t push very hard for the meat musket. You pick your battles when you’re part of a couple. And we’ve learned to negotiate—we respected each other’s opinions, and reached a compromise. I agreed to not buy the Jerky Gun, and she agreed to not let me.

  It wasn’t anything like that whole ugly Reddi-wip fiasco. Anyway, I figure if I give up on the gun, she’ll give in on the nifty zester I really need.

  I Baked A Pie!

  Until recently, I had an irrational fear of something most cooks take in stride: baking. And for anyone who thought the answer should have been ‘blowing up the kitchen in yet another experiment,’ that’s not an irrational fear.

  I’m not afraid of baked goods, mind you—there are very few things I wouldn’t eat if they came stuffed inside a pastry. I have been afraid of actually baking, though.

  The shows on the food channels don’t help, because the projects you see on a show like ‘Cupcake Wars’ are a bit over the top for the aspiring home baker:

  “For this challenge, we want you to make a cupcake version of the Louvre and recreate all of its paintings with only frosting and chocolate jimmies–you have fifteen minutes.”

  It’s been said that baking is a science, whereas cooking is an art. Don’t get me wrong—science has its place. My problem is, art leaves room for mistakes, and science, not so much.

  In art, you can make mistakes that end up looking brilliant, as long as people know it was supposed to be art.

  Maybe early in his career, Picasso just couldn’t draw very well, but people thought he intentionally drew misshapen faces (“You wanna call it ‘cubism,’ fine, but that’s SO not what I was going for.”).

  On the other hand, if you make a mistake with a pie or a cake, you can’t just tweak it as you go along, and I’m used to some margin for error.

  So, I acknowledge that dessert scares me. Your cakes, your pies. The kind of baking that seems to require either:

  learning recipes from Grandma that have been passed down for generations, OR

  paying attention to details in following directions exactly as written while using advanced calculus

  Now as for the first approach, though my mom baked cookies every Christmas, and I suppose I ‘helped,’ all I remember is thinking “I can’t believe I have to crack all these walnuts. I don’t even like walnuts.”

  And as for the other method, let’s just say I’ve never checked the box marked ‘attention to detail’ when I’ve listed my strengths on a job application. But I have had enough therapy to know that you should always face your fears, so I decided to bake a pie . . .

  I found a recipe for a ‘Quick and Easy Pie Crust.’ It called for flour and butter (and some mysterious process called ‘folding the butter in.”)

  The whole ‘folding’ deal seemed overly fussy to me, so I opted to just put the butter in the bowl and mix it all by hand.

  In retrospect, this was a mistake, and probably accounts for the reference in the recipe to using “two forks or a pastry cutter.”

  About a half hour later, I had removed most of the gooey proto-dough from my hands and had something in the bowl I could work with.

  At this point I noticed that pie crust recipes seem to always include something called ‘baking soda,’ which I didn’t have. Oh, well.

  For the filling, I turned once again to my little one-button chopper. I threw in a bunch of peanut butter.

  After initially trying to melt some Hershey’s Kisses in a ramekin that turned out to not be ENTIRELY microwave-safe, I finished melting the chocolate in a saucepan.

  Then I added the chocolate to the peanut butter, along with some vanilla extract and a banana.
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  Lastly, I pushed the ‘pulse’ button several times, stopping occasionally to shove the banana to the bottom (I realize that ‘shove’ isn’t a word you find in a lot of cookbooks).

  I tasted it, and determined it was pie-worthy. I also determined that if the crust didn’t come out right, basically, I had made a really good pudding.

  I put the dough in my pie dish and spread it more or less evenly. Then I spent ten minutes repairing holes in the crust, a laborious process during which I grab some dough to ‘patch’ the holes.

  After chilling the crust for a few minutes, I added the filling and put it in the oven. I had to figure out how long it should bake, but I couldn’t find anything online for “Peanut Butter Chocolate Banana Pie in a Crust Made Without Baking Powder.”

  So I averaged how long various pies called for and decided on fifteen minutes at 425 followed by forty-five minutes at 350. Already, baking was feeling like way too much math.

  Here’s the weird thing–about a half hour in, the apartment started to smell like . . . pie! Homemade pie! I’ll be honest–the crust was a little overdone. It was also whatever the opposite of ‘flaky’ would be.

  I felt a little pressure to make this work. I had used the last of The Girlfriend’s chocolate to make the filling while she was at work, and you need to be pretty damned sure of yourself if you’re willing to risk the last of a woman’s chocolate.

  But when it was time for dessert, she and I agreed that, for the most part, it was like eating actual pie. I’m sure the artificially-flavored, artificially-colored, partially hydrogenated Cool Whip helped, but underneath that was a real homemade pie.

  Update: Since this attempt, I have tried to make a pie crust twice, and both times they were slightly off. Then I figured out what I had been doing wrong: I wasn’t buying pre-made pie crusts.

  The World According to Stan

  I’m sure this next statement will cause me to lose any respect I may have gained from actual foodies along the way, but here goes: ‘gourmet comfort food’ is a stupid concept.

  I’ve learned to appreciate the nuances of fine dining, but part of what I love about what’s called comfort food is the fact that it’s NOT a culinary adventure—I want it to comfort me, not make me wonder what it is.

  I want it to evoke memories, not provoke discussions. For me, ‘gourmet comfort food’ is like ‘Congressional efficiency,’ or ‘rowdy James Taylor fans.’

  Let’s look at the doughnut (if you have a doughnut handy, go ahead, and grab it while you read the rest of this). First off, it’s round. There’s the circle of life, right there.

  Some doughnuts have holes in the middle, just like some people’s lives. Some are filled with sweetness, again, just like some lives.

  Not that I’m much of a flag-waver, but the doughnut is also Americana to me. Sure, Europe has its pastries, and some of them are even deep-fried. I’d hate to get angry letters from Dutch people because I neglected their olykoeken, but c’mon—it literally means ‘oily cakes.’

  And yes, I know that the French word ‘beignet’ essentially means ‘fried dough,’ and that the Italian ‘zeppole’ is from an Arabic word for ‘fried dough,’ but these cultures have other food traditions which made them famous.

  But the first reference to the word ‘doughnut’ is in an essay by an American, Washington Irving, so there. America was built on fried dough.

  When I see a doughnut shop, I don’t want to see the words ‘reinvent,’ ‘conceptualize, or ‘deconstruct.’ Likewise, the phrase ‘flavor profile.’ I want to see words like ‘hot,’ ‘fresh,’ and ‘filled.’ Maybe the phrase ‘free refills.’

  The most profound food memory I have is of a doughnut shop (one ‘p,’ no ‘e’) in a part of L.A. called Westwood, a couple blocks from my almost mater, UCLA.

  Stan’s Doughnuts opened in 1965, and between 1978 and 1982, I must have eaten several hundred of Stan’s signature Peanut Butter Pockets. Sometimes I’d go crazy and have the Peanut Butter Pocket with Banana (these were my wild college years, after all).

  When I decided to write about Stan’s, I wanted people to see what the joint looks like, so I called the number I found online, to ask for permission to use a couple of the pictures I found online. At this point, I didn’t even know if there was a real Stan.

  I wanted there to be a Stan. There is something comforting (that word again!) about a business whose name consists entirely of the owner’s name and what he sells. There’s accountability.

  “Who’s responsible for these doughnuts?” “Oh, that’s Stan. I’ll get him for you.” If I could find this mythical ‘Stan,’ I would know that a real person stood behind a real product, and you don’t see that often these days.

  I would always rather take my car to ‘Jim’s Auto Repair’ than someplace called ‘Autopia,’ and I’d trust the calamari at a place called ‘Giuseppi’s Seafood’ over, say, some place called the ‘Shrimp Shack.’ If you’re willing to put your name on the sign, I’m willing to do business with you.

  So I was delighted to discover that there is, in fact, a real Stan. Not only is Stan real, he’s at the shop when I call.

  After a perfunctory introduction (“I’m a humor writer and I’d like to talk with you for something I’m writing”), he tells me I can use the pictures. “A hundred percent—no problem!” Then he added one of those phrases you can only get away with if you’ve really lived, saying “It’s a round world.”

  He seemed so accommodating, I decided to push my luck, and I asked him if I could call him back with a few questions. I didn’t take any journalism classes in college, but I had a feeling this guy might have a few stories to tell, so we set up a phone interview.

  I called on the day before he turned eighty-two, as it turned out, but as soon as we started recording, I knew he had at least ten times as many stories as he’d had birthdays.

  You need to know that Stan opened “Stan’s” in a part of L.A. that was known for college students and movie glitz (studios have for years premiered important films at the theaters in Westwood Village).

  It was also a time when psychedelia was just starting to seep into pop culture, and pop culture was getting a lot less ‘white bread’—1965 gave us hits by the Mindbenders and the Strangeloves, but it also gave us James Brown.

  There was a lot of heady stuff going on, and a man less sure of his vision might have given in to the temptation to be trendy, but not Stan Berman. He opened a doughnut shop.

  I asked him how he got started in the doughnut biz, and he told the story of approaching the owner of a well-known grocery store in L.A. (Gelson’s) about putting his doughnuts in there. Gelson’s, of course, now has a bakery, but they don’t have a Stan’s . . .

  “We approached Bernie Gelson, and (he) said he couldn’t give us three parking spaces to build the doughnut shop, because those three parking spaces would produce so much income. . .”

  He was born in 1929 in Philadelphia; his father and grandfather both were bakers, but Stan also studied accounting. He was drafted into the Marine Corps in ’51, and

  “Believe it or not. . . I wound up being a baker in the Marine Corps, which never really happened–usually a baker became a machine-gunner, or whatever else…

  I wanted to know the strangest request he’d ever gotten from a regular customer, and here’s where Stan was way ahead of the curve…

  “Now this was forty-some years ago, this happened. Somebody came in, and said they loved peanut butter, and (asked) if I could make a doughnut with peanut butter.

  And so I said, “I never heard of such a thing.” So she went to the market and bought me a jar of peanut butter.

  We played around with it, first, like a jelly doughnut (which he explained meant frying it, THEN filling it), and it just didn’t have it. So I decided to try and seal that . . . to make a pocket, put the peanut butter in, and then fry it.”

  This ‘weird’ idea became Stan’s most famous creation, which for years he has called a ‘Reese’s Pean
ut Butter Pocket.’

  Here was my chance to earn my reporter’s stripes–my Woodward-Bernstein moment. Playing it a bit coyly, I said I was “a little confused about the ‘Reese’s’ part–you’re not connected to the company that makes Reese’s, are you?

  “No, are you kidding? That’s the reason I did that! I was hoping some day they would come here, and tell me they’re suing me, and that I should stop using their name–and they never did!”

  Stan also revealed that, for a while, he called his creation Al’s Peanut Butter Pocket. Apparently this ‘Al’ would park his limo in front of the place, sit at the counter, eat half a dozen, and take half a dozen to go.

  A few days later, Al was back and placed the same order…

  “He was a New York character, and through this doughnut we became friends. Eventually I found out who it was, and after about a year, I decided to change the name to ‘Al’s.’”

  “The guy’s name was Al Goldstein. He had his headquarters in New York, but he came here to see all the porno people.”

  Not surprisingly, I didn’t have a follow-up question ready.

  I hadn’t expected to learn that Stan was friends with the publisher of Screw magazine. Then I got it! Fried dough has the power to bring people together! Preppie or a pornographer, Stan didn’t judge.

  ‘The Reese’s thing’ wasn’t Stan’s only brush with trademark issues. The building he took over in ’65 had been an Orange Julius, but though he had the five grand for the building, he didn’t have the twenty-five grand to renew the franchise.

  Undaunted (and I can’t imagine Stan ever being ‘daunted’), he simply changed it to an Orange Jubilee.

  “I had a food chemist friend, and we took the Orange Julius powder, and we reproduced it. We put a hat on the little figurine they use, and we dressed him up a little, and I think instead of a sword, we made it, like, a broom, or whatever. . .