Anger Burger

My family used to have a bustling, microscopic bakery wherein we could indulge our desires to name foods whatever we wanted to.  This resulted in the Foobar¹, an intentional misspelling of FUBAR in order to avoid explaining that the F stood for “fucked”, as well as the Babetart² and the coup de grâce, the Chubby.

Now, my mother is no prude.  She can handle just about anything, but if surprised she can and often does emit sounds of Victorian outrage.  When we began making a super-chocolatey, brownie-like cookie a friend declared that it gave him a chubby, which the immature among us know is slang for an erection.  Jokingly, I wrote out the tag for the pastry case to see what would happen: Chubbies, $1.25 each.  Over the course of the day no one noticed, and indeed over the next few weeks.  I was surprised at first – were we really the only people who used this slang?  Eventually I forgot until, a month after the cookie had been selling like the proverbial hotcake, a customer finally noticed.

“I guess you can get away with saying that, can’t you?” he laughed.

“Get away with what?” my mom asked.

“I mean, I guess ‘chubby’ could be a legitimate word.”

My mother, who is sharp-witted despite spats of deliberate obtusity, said “Wait – what does ‘chubby’ mean?”

You can imagine the sudden stand-off.  I was nearby, and froze.  The customer, who didn’t want to suddenly start talking about boners to the kindly proprietress of a small-time, small-town bakery also froze.  My mother waited.  Finally I broke down.  “It’s an erection.”

Here is where the Victorian squeak went, followed by a monstrous “YOU DID THIS!”

Suddenly all those plump women declaring “I want a chubby!” over the previous week and my stifled giggles made sense to her and she busted out laughing along with the rest of us, precisely like the ending to an only moderately entertaining sitcom, the end.

Why do I bring this up?  Because I am an absolute fucking hypocrite.  I hate cheeky names for food.  Hate it.  I’m that bitch customer who refuses to say “vente.”  Which is why I am definitely not spending money on Dorie Greenspan’s cookbooks.

Greenspan, you should know, is beloved on the internets.  There is a popular website devoted entirely to people who bake something from her cookbooks every single week.  Greenspan is a James Beard Foundation Book Award winner, which is the Academy Award of cookbooks.  When it comes to baking, Greenspan will kick your ass.  So what’s my problem?  She has a cheeky-naming fetish.  To wit:

• Corniest Corn Muffins
• Cocoa-Nana Bread
• Chocolate Chunkers
• Chunky Peanut Butter and Oatmeal Chocolate Chipsters
• Midnight Crackles
• Peanut Butter Crossovers
• Granola Grabbers
• Chocolate Malted Whopper Drops
• Chockablock Cookies
• Ginger-Jazzed Brownies
• Brrrrr-ownies
• Snickery Squares
• Cottage Cheese Pufflets
• Cranberry Upside-Downer
• Thanksgiving Twofer Pie

Mind you, that’s not even all the cutesy names, those are just the ones that bug me.   I was analyzing this about myself, wondering what it is that rubs me the wrong way, and if I had to put a finger on it I’d blame the made-up words like Chunksters, Chipsters, Snickery and Pufflets.  And Grabbers.  The Peanut Butter Crossovers irk me because the “crossover” part?  She’s referring to pressing the cookies down with a fork, something most peanut butter cookie bakers have been doing since dinosaurs roamed the Earth, except everyone else just calls them “peanut butter cookies”.  It’s like calling a chocolate chip cookie a Chocolate Chippy Scooper-Presser.  Or calling a pound cake a Buttery Caker Bunty Bunter.  Wait, I think I’m starting to get the hang of it!

It doesn’t help that the only Greenspan recipe I’ve actually gotten around to baking turned out merely okay – the recipe itself (Russian Grandmother’s Apple Pie Cake) was intriguing enough that I’ll make it again, but the recipe was so off for me that it’s going to take some major fiddling to make it work.  But for now it’s late, I’m tired and I need to Brusher my Toothety Chompers.

¹Which in turn resulted in being called a “Danbar” at a local coffeehouse we sold them too when a manager named Dan still expressed humorless concern over the name.  He then asked us to please rename them from Danbar to something else at which point we informed him that three name-changes is the official limit for a baked good.

²It actually started out as a Babtart, the “Bab” as in “Babette”, but so many customers misread it as Babetart that it stuck.

When I was a child my dad packed my lunches and every morning asked, “What kind of sandwich would you like?” and for three years straight I answered: “Peanut butter and honey.”

Now, I liked other foods, I really did.  I was a peculiar eater, disgusted by foods generally liked by children (eggs, candy, ketchup) and ravenous for foods children revile (onions, cabbage, sardines).  There’s a theory about Crohn’s that’s been going around for a few years about how early exposure to bacteria commonly found in soil results in lower instances of the disease, a statistic that at least for this single example is totally, utterly wrong; if I were ever missing, my parents need look no further than the garden where I would be hunched over the spring onion beds like some kind of deranged rabbit, stuffing my loam-covered face without bothering to wipe the onions clean of their soil.

Anyway, my most recently obsession reminds me of these memories, and more:

There’s a scene in Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro where young Mei pulls a freshly picked cucumber¹ from a stream bed where it has been submerged and chilling, biting into it with such a satisfying crunch that each time I crave, desperately crave, a whole cucumber chilled nearly to freezing.  But American cucumbers being what they are, it never tasted (I imagined) nor had the texture of Mei’s.  Until now!

Persian cucumbers are hitting the market with increasing regularity, and while still quite expensive at Ralph’s and other stores, Trader Joe’s has a pound of them for something like $2.29.  Put into the fridge they emerge super-crunchy, goopless and practically animated.

After timidly eating the third one of the day a few days back I was certain my bowels would be gearing to fuck my shit up, but nothing!  Everything is normal!  Whatever it is about raw vegetables my Crohn’s can’t handle is not a problem with Persian cucumbers. I fear I might turn into one of those ladies, where I get a hungry tummy grumble and reach for a cucumber as though it were actual food.  And yet, here I am.

Paired with my Jane’s Salt fixation, I’ve already polished off two pounds this week.  AND.  So far it looks like we aren’t going to have a repeat of the Two Pounds Of Rainier Cherries Episode from a few years back.  Everyone’s happy!  Especially people who use the restroom after me!

¹The internet being what it is I thought I could find a clip of just this scene, but no luck.  Oh well, I guess we’ll all just have to watch the entire thing again.

It’s a not-great photo of an even worse dinner, and yet, I’m showing it to you.

I have an entire tier of comfort foods made complicated by voluminous sub-categories, but somewhere in there is a good old-fashioned baked potato.

Now, I don’t believe that a baked potato is a side-dish to anything else, especially not a steak or – aesthetics forbid – a lobster.  It’s the most fucking dense conglomeration of carbs you can come by, and you want to serve it along side the protein glut of a filet mignon?  Oh hell no.  Steaks are for steaks – I’ll grant a few slices of fresh, buttery, garlicky bread and definitely suggest a clean-tasting salad of some kind for balance, but the baked potato gets its own damn pedestal.

I have only two recipes that call for the use of the insipid russet “baking” potato: a baked potato and stew.  For the stew I chop the potato up very fine in the hopes that it’ll totally disintegrate and add to the overall richness¹, while the baked potato should be self-explanatory.  Something about that big, dry flavorless heap that can only be made palatable by a half a stick of butter, finely shredded sharp cheddar, a pint of sour cream, salt, pepper and a liberal handful of green onions just makes me swoon with comfort.  I could be eating a pile of sand for all I care, it’s all a delivery system for fat and salt.  Hell, I can’t even be bothered to take a decent photo of it.

¹An easier way of doing this would be to use instant potato flakes, of which both the very cheap versions and the very expensive (organic hippy brands) have no other ingredients than potato.

It is fitting to start off a fresh new website (always so full of promise!) with a bowl of overcooked spaghetti sauced with my least favorite¹ lubricant: vodka sauce.  But that is how it always ends up working out; you stay up for hours past your bedtime because the CSS is making sense and all of a sudden it’s after midnight and the last substantial thing you ate was a baloney sandwich while sitting on the sidewalk outside your work during the lunch break.

But of course, this wouldn’t be a Sunday Williams joint if I didn’t feel compelled to reveal something embarrassing about myself, so here it is: I like my pasta overcooked.  Not just cooked beyond the de rigueur crunchy al dente, but to the “is this from a can?” Spaghetti-O stage.   I suspect the habit was borne from reheated leftover pasta and its dry, flavor-saturated gumminess, but admitting that part isn’t going to win me any points.  Three-day-old lasagne?  Divine.

Now if I could just remember why I bought that jar of vodka sauce, my world would finally start clicking into place.

¹Actualy, second-least favorite.  I’ve never had a plate of alfredo that I’ve genuinely enjoyed, which I think we can safely deduce means that I don’t like cream sauces.