Tag: Food

The good cheese

Over time, my cheese Overton Window has shifted.

For most of my life, the everyday cheese that sat in our refrigerator was the 1 lb. block of store brand “sharp” yellow cheddar. It was the default purchase every other week.

Then one day during the pandemic when things were hard to find sometimes, we bought the Cabot Creamery extra sharp cheddar cheese – which was only slightly more that we were used to paying – and were blown away at how good it was.

And then one day at Costco we came across this Cabot Creamery 3 year aged cheddar, and oh my god. Now we buy a block of this every month or so.

Roosters

Friday night is our date night, and it has been for our whole relationship. Date night sounds a bit hyperbolic for what it is – we go out to eat in a restaurant. But we do it every week – we might miss 3 times a year, usually due to my work schedule.

There is a rotation of maybe six restaurants that are our “normal” ones, and we sprinkle in new places and sometimes, they move into the circle of six and one of the old ones drops out.

But one that has been in the circle almost since we moved here is Roosters. It’s burgers and salads and meat and two entrees with a Louisiana heritage. I love their red beans and rice, Renee their country fried steak.

Mr. Chen’s

There is a surprising number of Chinese people who live in Mississippi, most descended from people who came here as laborers in the “after slavery” years.

Mr. Chen’s is a Chinese restaurant/ Chinese food market/ Chinese restaurant supply store here in Jackson. It gives off street bazaar vibes (that is a good thing) and the food is excellent. It manages a good blend of authenticity but also throws enough American Chinese Food fan service into the mix that your Aunt Edna who loves General Tso’s Chicken can order off the menu.

This post is not sponsored by Costco

I was in a bit of a funk, so I made chili dogs for supper.

Pro-tip: If you only need a little shredded cheese and don’t want to dirty up the knuckle buster grater, use a vegetable peeler and slice off thin slices of cheese instead

Also, if you are a Costco member, their Kirkland hot dogs are amazing. And don’t sleep on the Cabot Creamery 3 year cheddar.

This post is not sponsored by Costco, but if they want to talk, I’m open.

In that kitchen

In that kitchen I learned about alchemy – the practice, if not the word.

If I close my eyes, I can see the light filtered through the handmade green gingham curtains that move with the breeze. I can hear the news being read over the small radio to the left of the sink, next to the snuff box.

It was on those worn linoleum tiles, peeping over the edge of the counter, on my knees on the green vinyl chair, that I watched it happen – the battered aluminum bowl, the scoops of flour, the sweet milk, the knob of Crisco the size of an unshelled walnut.

Done without measurement, the muscle memory made deep by years of daily practice making biscuits, feeding your family for pennies.

In the old days, it was believed that if you knew the right words, you could turn base metal into gold, but in that kitchen, I learned the deeper truth, the even older magic: That with time and intention, you could turn flour into food, scraps into sufficiency, and ingredients into love.

Love as an ingredient.

Not far from my house is a restaurant. It’s sort of a deli, and they have sandwiches there, as well as pizza and salads.

I first ate there with my parents, when we moved to Jackson. Dad wanted to share it with us – he had to come to Jackson regularly, and it was one of his favorite places to eat.

More than the food, he liked how they ran the business. He told me a story of one of their employees, who had been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and was soon unable to work. But they kept her on the payroll until she died, so her health insurance remained intact. That story endeared them to Dad. The food was almost secondary.

We still go there, some 7 years later. A couple of times a month, we eat supper there, and I probably have lunch meetings there at least that often. It hots lots of places for me; cost, quality, and of course, that story, and how it affected Dad. That Dad loved that place is also a huge consideration.

The staff is always a delight when we go there. They are smiling, and welcoming, and the service is always fast, and they have never once messed up my order.

A few weeks ago, I stopped by around 2PM to get a late lunch, and there was no one at the counter. And on the counter, beside the registers, was a giant self-serve tablet, like they have at McDonalds. You scroll through a menu, add items to your order, and customize each item by adding pickles, or extra mayo.

I hate these things with a passion. They cannot be clean, with everyone touching them all day. They are not fast – they are actually much slower than telling a person. They are not intuitive – it’s like getting a brand new cell phone whose settings you don’t understand. And often the ones at McDonalds do not work.

This one did not either. Ultimately, after messing with it for at least 5 minutes, an employee came to the counter to rescue me.

I get that it probably saves payroll. But it felt off-brand for this company. Out of character. It was jarring, in the same way it would be jarring to go to a steakhouse and be served surf and turf on paper plates.

And what’s worse, it ruined that story I know about them – the one where they prioritize their employees. Because the decision to replace people with a machine is not the act of love for the employees.

I’ve only been back once. The food tastes different to me now. It’s in my head, I know. But once I had believed they loved their employees. And food always tastes better when love is an ingredient.

Chicken and Dressing – Free Download

Considering the holidays, and some folks, due to no fault of their own, not knowing how to make cornbread dressing properly – I saw where one lady said she was gonna use Jiffy Cornbread Mix in hers! – my members are making a draft chapter of my narrative cookbook, Food Is Love, available for free download.

It gives you the story behind my memories of Chicken and Dressing and includes recipes for Southern AF cornbread, as well as Chicken and Dressing (and a variation if you want to use pork sausage, like my momma does, instead).

I’m working on a book full of meals and stories like these, and if you want to know how to support that work, get early draft copies of chapters like this in your inbox, and more, you should become a member – you can learn more about that here. If you just want to thank me, you can buy me a cup of coffee or share this post with a friend.

You can download the free PDF file here – no tricks, no spam, and no need to surrender your email address. It’s a pure gift.

I hope your holidays are marvelous, and that you get to celebrate them with the people you love.

Things That Endure

Jerry was a salesman of the old school, straight out of an episode of Mad Men. He was dapper as could be, with creases on his pants that would have cut you, and I never saw him without at least a sports coat, even that time I met him and a client at a ball game.

Jerry was my mentor when I was in financial sales, and he took my somewhat more casual approach to my appearance as a personal challenge. He also tried to teach me the finer points of the business lunch.

Jerry was a big one for lunch. We always lunched together on Fridays and always at one of several restaurants at least as old-school as Jerry himself was. They all had bars, tended to be dark paneled, and had pretty waitresses and generous bartenders. And, without exception, the food was always good.

I remarked on this once when we went to a somewhat shady-looking oyster bar whose dated decor did not fill me with high hopes going in.

“Of course the food is good! I’ve been coming here for 30 years. That doesn’t happen if the food is crap. You have to respect things that endure.”

One of Jerry’s favorite places was Mr. B’s. It was a steak and seafood house in Germantown, an affluent suburb of Memphis. The walls were raw brick, with a small bar along the wall, and the steaks were huge, and so were the cocktails.

Mr. B’s made their reputation on supper but had a strong lunchtime crowd, and being early in my career, my budget leaned more to the blue plate special than it did the porterhouse steaks. And one of the things they did really well was their country-fried steaks.

At least, that is what they called it. If you are used to a large piece of meat deep fried until crispy and then covered in milk gravy such as one may eat at a Cracker Barrel, this was not that.

Instead, it was a tender piece of beef, obviously pounded thin, then fried in a thin batter, and then cooked in a thick brown gravy until it practically fell apart. It was my favorite thing on the menu.

When I was a little boy, the elderly lady next door made something she called steak and gravy that my mom tried and tried to replicate but could not. This was very close to that.

We don’t eat a lot of beef – mostly because of the cost. But also, because we didn’t eat much of it growing up, it just isn’t something I crave. But the other day, the meat department at Kroger had their cubed steaks on clearance, and so I decided to whip up a batch of steak and gravy for dinner one night.

I got home from my last meeting today at 4, so I decided to make today the day it happened. I got out the deep skillet and put four tablespoons of shortening in it to melt and turned the oven on to 350 to preheat.

While waiting, I put a half cup of flour in a shallow bowl and added a teaspoon of black pepper, a teaspoon of salt, and a half teaspoon each of garlic powder and cayenne pepper. I stirred it well.

After dredging the cubed steaks through the flour mixture, I put them in the skillet to brown – about two minutes a side until the flour had formed a crisp crust, but the interiors were still not finished. I did them in batches, putting them on a cooling rack as they finished.

In the melted shortening still in the bottom of the pan, I sauteed a small amount (maybe 1 /4 cup?) of diced onion until brown, then added a few tablespoons of the flour dredge that was left over. After it was all browned, I added enough milk to make a thin gravy, into which I slid the breaded steaks. I put a lid on the skillet and slid it into the oven, where it sat and bubbled away for an hour and a half.

When I pulled it out, the gravy had separated – a danger of using milk gravy for something like this. I removed the steaks, put the skillet on the stove again, added a bit of half-and-half, and whisked quickly until the gravy was thinned out and reconstituted. I slid the steaks back in and let them simmer over low heat as I set the table.

Had I served it with mashed potatoes and English peas, this would have been my favorite meal of my childhood. But instead, we served it over white rice, making it my favorite meal today and still damn good.

The Ice Cream

I have written before in these pages about my Aunt Louise. My great aunt, really – Dad’s mom’s sister – she died when I was 12, but until then was one of my biggest influences.

She lived on 40 acres, 10 miles from a town of 800 people, and while she owned a car, she could not drive. It never occurred to me at the time, but she was intensely lonely out there.

Lonnie was her second husband, and he owned land out in rural Desoto County, Mississippi so when they got married she moved from Memphis to his house. It had been his parent’s house, actually. Lonnie had grown up in it and then had lived in it with his first wife, and when he moved Louise in, she insisted on major changes. The kitchen was moved to another room, the bathroom was upgraded, and she turned the old kitchen into a storage room.

I asked her one time why she moved the kitchen.

“There wasn’t anything wrong, really, with the old kitchen. But it wasn’t mine. It was hers”, she said, meaning the first wife. “I told him if I was moving in there, he was going to make the house the way I like it. “

And he did. Aunt Louise took no crap.

She had lived in town all her life – in Dyersburg, and then in Memphis. And so moving to the middle of nowhere was a big deal for her. And when he died in 1971, she was alone in that house, with her two dogs – Festus and Princess.

I only knew her alone. We would go over on Saturday and take her grocery shopping in town, and occasionally we took her into Memphis to her doctor’s appointment, and often I would spend the night there when Mom and Dad went out somewhere and would be home late. I loved staying at Aunt Louise’s house.

Virtually every woman I knew was in some way defined by a man. Mom was married to Dad, and did things that benefitted him. Monty was married to Mr. Doc, and cooked and did his laundry. But Aunt Louise just took care of herself. She was the most independent woman I knew growing up.

Sometimes she ate cereal for supper. I told her that everybody knew that cereal was for breakfast, and she told me she was a grown woman and could do whatever she wanted to, and that the worst reason to do anything was that everyone told you you were supposed to do it that way.

She had a 4 cup coffee maker, but she only drank three cups of coffee every morning. The remaining cup she mixed with Pet milk, and poured it over a handful of crushed crackers after it had cooled down, and she served that to her dogs. Yes, her dogs got coffee for breakfast each morning.

She kept a gun in her purse, drank whisky like water, and would, when she got down, drunk dial her friends back in Memphis. She read Earle Stanly Gardener and Agatha Christie, watched Barnaby Jones and Perry Mason, and cooked for herself and her dogs.

Once, when I was staying over, Mom had dropped me off after supper, and so we were sitting at her table, watching Barnaby Jones waiting to go to bed when she announced she was hungry. I told her I had already eaten, and she told me that she had too, but that a nice thing about living by yourself was that you could absolutely eat two suppers if you wanted to.

She got up and rummaged around in the pantry, and pulled out a can of Showboat Pork and Beans. She put them on the stove to warm, and then she pulled a package of hot dogs from the freezer and took two out. She sliced the frozen dogs directly into the beans, and then covered them as they simmered.

After we had eaten, she got out a half-gallon of vanilla ice cream and a can of Hershey’s syrup, and we gave a scoop of ice cream to the dogs, because of course we did, and we ate ice cream and watched Perry Mason and I told her I was always going to live alone, so I could stay up late and eat ice cream whenever I wanted.

“You don’t have to live alone to stay up late and eat ice cream whenever you want”, she told me.

“It’s just easier if you do.”