Dear Loyal Fans

Mail has been pouring in, expressing concern over my absence.  Topping the list of reactions from readers is the following:  "Shape up, Fat Boy.  I want to hear more about this 100 year-old pot.  Does it actually improve with age, or is this just some more hype from you hippy California preverts?"


The fact is, I went away for some cooking lessons from my little sister and returned home with a virus cold.  DaddyDrinks will return.  Thank you all for continuing to check this blog.  Now, I have to go check my traps for meat and blow my "node."

The 100 Year Old Pot

Nobody knows the exact age or the origin of the pot.   It is pitted like ancient pewter, stained like my great-aunt Rosie’s store-bought teeth, and has roasted meat for at least four generations in my family.  Some said it was one of the few possessions brought to America by my grandmother’s mother, but I remember my mother saying it was a wedding gift to my grandmother when she married my granddad.  My uncle, the last of my mother’s generation, turned 102 last November.  Do the math.  The pot is older than dust.  


When my Grandma was a young bride, meat was smoked, canned, or dried.  There was no refrigeration.  There was ice for only as long as it withstood the summer heat in the icehouse.  By spring, the only meat that was safe to eat was twice-smoked German sausage and ham---except for meat that resided in vacuum-sealed glass jars and had been cooked, canned and stored in the fruit cellar.   Whether freshly killed or canned, when meat was cooked in my grandmother’s kitchen, it was either fried to a leathery consistency or was roasted---in the pot.  


Pheasants, mallard ducks, quail, grouse, sage hens (and something that I believe had been hunted to extinction by the time I was ten and deemed old enough to hunt with my granddad) ended up roasted to perfection in my grandma’s roasting pot.  Smoked hams, freshly butchered beef roasts, pork chops and ribs all came from the pot. I cannot remember a Sunday dinner that did not include something from the pot.  Some years before my grandma died, my mother became the caretaker of the pot.


It was my baby sister who first discovered the mystical powers of the pot.  Like my father, she was an inventor whose imagination knew no bounds.  She discovered that a marble, when dropped into the pot and forced to swirl around by swinging the pot with both hands, made a musical note.  Every marble had its own note.  Sometimes, two or three marbles at a time made music that caused our dog to howl and our mom to send us outside until dinner.  


On the weekend while we listened to the radio and, years later, watched television, popcorn popped over the open flames in our fireplace was tossed into the pot. Melted creamery butter would be poured over the top.  Fine-ground salt would be added, and the lid of the pot would be fit tightly into the groove that ran around the upper edge.  Thirty or forty shakes later, buttery salted popcorn would be passed around the room as our dog, Sandra, followed it and did amazing air-borne tricks, leaping to catch a piece of popcorn in flight.  We didn’t need video games or an iPhone to keep us entertained.  We had the radio, popcorn, Sandra and the pot.  


The next morning, my sister and I would run to the kitchen and fight over who would be first to run a small handful of popcorn around the bottom of the pot and scoop up the remaining butter.  Nothing, and I mean nothing, that ever emerged from the pot was as wonderful as the popcorn left from the night before that I shared with my sister (and Sandra, of course) as we stood on the cold kitchen floor in our bare feet.  


Over 35 years ago, after my wife and I stopped “living in sin” and got married, we visited my parents. As we packed the car to return home, my mother secretly added a set of silver flatware that had belonged to her mother – and the pot. The 100-something year old pot has been with us through many moves and now resides in our 130-year old house built by the daughter of a survivor of the Donner Party. 


For the first 20-plus years of pot ownership, I only used it to recreate the popcorn ritual. After I was suddenly thrown into culinary duties, I looked at the pot differently. If I was going to be a successful cook, I would need the guidance of my grandmother and her pot.  

From Russia with Love

The ride home was as silent as the grave I had just dug for myself.  I knew better than to remind my wife that it was Friday and technically her day to “be responsible for meals.”  


When she pulled into Jenny’s Giant Burger, I reached for my billfold and extracted a “twenty.”  My wife glared at me with those dark eyes that used to be such a turn-on.  I extracted another handful of unknown denominations.  It was going to be a two milkshake and double order of fries no-comment kind of night.  “Nudding for me,” I managed to say with seven tissues rolled up into my nose to stop the bleeding when I ran out of nose hair.  “I habba code cube take and Wodder Bread at hombe.”  


By 8:40 PM, her carbohydrate high had worn off, and she started turning off the lights in our living room.  “It’s going to be cold tonight,” she said as she headed up the stairs to where we stored our marital bed and the photo albums of when all we needed was love and a bottle of cheap wine to keep us warm.  “You might need an extra blanket down here.”  


Candi, Randi and Bambi, triplet friends of mine who were tenure-track assistant professors of Human Sexuality at Vassar, happened to be lounging in a private chat room on the Internet when I logged in.  As I explained what had happened to my well-conceived plan to win over to my side of the table our marriage counselor, either Candi or Bambi posted a small mpeg animation of tears flowing from the eyes of a young girl besieged by a huge pod of one-eyed dolphins.  “I know just what it’s like,” she said, “to be ready to make a point and find something stuck in your throat.” Before I could reply, my computer screen flashed a message that my Gold Card account had reached its credit limit.  


“What was it the therapist said,” I asked myself, “about new skills?” She had made it sound almost manly.  I reviewed in my mind the hundreds maybe thousands of times that I had pulled a flaming pot of oil off the stove – so to speak – to save my wife and my children from impending disaster.  But on this cold and lonely night, I was fresh out of answers.  


“Bong,” went my computer, signaling that I had mail.  


“dear sugarstick, do not attempt to reply to this message.  my manager will kill me or worst if he knew I write.  this thing of yours happen also to my grandson in America when his husband become tired of doing it all.  my grandson he buy what you call slow cooker.  he say it change his life.  don’t buy cheap.  and don’t come back to chatroom.  you know what I saying?   DasveedAnja, Bambi"

Daddy's Intervention

My wife and I arrived for our appointment with her chosen therapist about ten minutes early.  She picked up a magazine from the coffee table, and I went searching in vain for a copy of “Guns and Ammo” or “Saltwater Fishing Adventures.”  I settled for an old copy of “Newsweek” with part of the cover and most of the pages missing except for a feature story on Tom Cruise that was strewn with obscenities written in lipstick.  I wished I had been listening outside the door when the author of those colorful projections was inside airing her relationship challenges.    


I reviewed my mental list of reasons why gender role rules were essential to not only the solution to my pitiful situation but to the future of our children and their tolerance of mates who were raised by parents who still believed that we are all happiest when we live lives exactly as seen in millions of American homes every night on television—in the late Fifties and early Sixties.  


Ozzie never cooked.  Ward Cleaver was never forced against his will to seek help from a marriage counselor.  Jim and Margaret Anderson on “Father Knows Best” had served as role models for most of the residents of the White House for several decades, for crying out loud.  Well, except for when those damned Clintons bought their way into power.  But we all know the truth of that, and it has no place in the future of our America.  


I had no idea how the session would be conducted, but I had come prepared.  I had made a list of my feelings in case the therapist was brainwashed into the Carl Rogers’ school of non-directive counseling and unconditional positive regard.  I had tightly woven logical arguments prepared in case the E.G. Williamson’s “Tell ‘em the fuck what rational people do in situations like this” was her chosen therapeutic framework.  I even had a few dreams cooked up in case Madame Zelda, the psycho-therapist, went Freud on me.  


Most importantly, I had my iPod loaded with Hank Williams tunes---“Cold, Cold Heart,” “I Just Don’t Like this Kind of Livin’,” and “My Son Calls Another Man Daddy.”  


I don’t remember much about the first fifteen minutes.  My wife was fully explaining our “Situation.” Ho hum . . . I had heard all of it before.  When it was my turn to respond, I choked.  I mean I literally choked.  My breath mint had slipped down my throat   Most of our time was used up when I finally hacked up the little son of a bitch.  I managed to catch two phrases offered by the therapist:  “catastrophic life changes,” and “adopt a new set of skills.”  


I looked at my wife, and in her eyes I saw something that in our thirty years of marriage I had never seen before:  disappointment.  She was looking straight at me.  

No Kitchen for Old Men

Okay, I’ll admit it.  I had been somewhat resistant to the idea of taking over my wife’s connubial responsibilities in the kitchen.  And maybe there was a little more to this whole business of meal preparation than I had given my grandmothers, my mother, my first wife and my current wife credit for.  But, dammit, it wasn’t my fault.  These women had always made it look so easy.  And, besides, I could do things with a can of chili and an all-beef sausage that had made many a grown woman cry.  


These thoughts were flooding my mind as my wife and I sat down for what she called a “family conference.”  Strangely, most of our “family conferences” never involved the children.  They frequently were preceded by something I had done ---or had not done—and by lunches involving my wife and some of her like-minded women friends.  I immediately sensed a little tension in the air, but I quite honestly never expected her to immediately toss out the “C” word.  

My aversion to the “C” word started back in the early years of my first marriage.  The first few times I heard it used in reference to me, I found it quite stimulating.  As memory serves, it was my rather attractive professor of child and adolescent psychology who first threw out the idea.  Shortly after that, I heard it again from another professor and a graduate assistant who was on his way to a doctoral fellowship at Washington State University.  “You would make a great Counselor,” they assured me, “and we can see to it that you are offered a full fellowship—with pay.”  


I had always been a patient listener and my advice to others was, without exception, flawless.  Consequently, I found myself in graduate school, surrounded by other people who were preparing to dedicate their lives to the “C” word.  


In all honesty, I didn’t do too well that year.  I aced my courses, managed to also complete a major in sociology, and published my first article in a research journal.  But I didn’t take too well to sitting around in a circle of my peers while we opened ourselves up to group leaders whose primary goal was to make us cry.  I was there to learn how to hone my skills at telling fucked up people how to straighten themselves out.  The only way I made it through practicum was to secretly pull hair out of my nose, which produced the desired effect of causing tears to stream down my cheeks.  


And now, here I was, sitting in a “family discussion” and being told that I needed Counseling.  Before I could get a good grip on a wad of nose hair, my wife announced that we had an appointment to see a therapist the following day at four PM.  “Oh Hell yes,” I said to myself as the tears started rolling down my cheek.  “I can plead my obvious case, get gender role rules put back into place, and pick up dinner on the way home.”  I quickly checked to make certain that I had a goodly supply of nose hair.  All that training in the "C" word was about to pay off.  With interest.  

Mom's Beef Stew (Rated R)

WARNING:  This post is intended for mature audiences only.  Some viewers may find some of the language and content objectionable.  


Thanks to Mom, I had the next two days covered.  Dad never cared much for things like soup and stew for dinner, hearkening back to his days in the Army when all the shit that was left over from half-way edible meals got tossed into a pot and, depending on how mushy everything got, became soup or stew.  Mom, my little sister and I, on the other hand, loved Mom’s beef stew.  And now, thanks to Mom and the instructions on the back of a package of Beef Stew Seasoning, I was about to create my first “made from scratch” family dinner.  


I lined up all my ingredients:  stew meat, carrots, onions, celery, and all I needed for a little toot.  I looked at the clock on the kitchen wall.  It said “Four Forty Four.”  That had always been a magical number because our son was born at exactly 4:44 AM, and every time he and I were together in the car and the clock read “4:44,” we let out a cheer.  It happened more often than one might expect.  And today, the clock on the kitchen wall read exactly FOUR FORTY FOUR.  I poured a little toot, and downed it like a man.  “I love you, Mick Jagger.  I love you, Beef Stew mix.  I love you, Mom.”  


STEP ONE:  I knew that I had to trim the excess fat off the stew meat and cut it all into chunks that resembled the chunks that Mom always had in her beef stew --- and which Dad never quite trusted.  The one thing that my little sister and I both disliked about Mom’s beef stew was the fatty gristle that we found in about every third chunk of meat.  By the time we finished dinner, the rims of our plates were lined with pieces of gristle and anything that resembled a piece of mushroom.  I had long before convinced my sister that mushrooms were easily confused with toadstools and that we wouldn’t know that Mom had made a mistake until we were orphaned by a careless slip.  On more than one occasion, a can of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup passed off as gravy had sent Mom away from the dinner table in tears as my little sister tried to make herself vomit into the kitchen sink.  


I trimmed the stew meat perfectly, had another little toot, and looked at the clock.  It read 5:19.  


STEP TWO:  “Dredge the beef chunks in flour and brown on all sides in two tablespoons of vegetable oil on medium-high heat.”  What the fuck was this…..?  What happened to throw everything in the pot and have a toot while it cooked?  I had seen Mom do it a million times.  I didn’t know “dredge.”  Fuck dredge.  I poured a toot and a little vegetable oil into a pot, cranked the burner up to “high,” and got ready to brown the shit out of the meat.  The music playing in the background came to a stop.  I had oil splattered everywhere, but, the meat was browned---somewhat crispy, actually.  Time: 5:46.  


STEP THREE:  “Bring meat and three and a half cups of water to a slow boil.  Add package of Lawry’s Beef Stew Seasoning and simmer for one hour.”  I began to feel a cramp rise up from somewhere between my scrotum and my tailbone.  Spastic colon!  I realized that I had never read beyond the ingredients until now.  An hour to slow-boil the beef chunks; another hour to simmer the chunks of carrot, onion and celery; a half hour to cook potatoes until tender.  That would make it close to 7:46 and given the number of toots, I didn’t have a prayer of making it beyond seven PM, my father’s “magic number.”  


STEP FOUR: “Honey,” I called to my wife.  “Let’s do Jenny’s Giant Burgers tonight.   Stew always tastes better the second day.”  

Playing with Fire

In effect, with her tomato soup and cheese sandwiches for Sunday dinner, my wife of thirty-some years had declared war not only on me, but on the entire male culture.  Nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, had prepared me in this life for becoming “Yan Can Cook” or, even worse, the equivalent of Gloria Steinem’s perfect man.  


I had always followed the gender-rules passed down by my parents, my grandparents and countless generations of men and women who cherished “balance and harmony” in their marriages.  Although there was Uncle Jimmy who seemed happy in the performance of domestic duties, like Erica Jong said, in every family of normal people, you can always find one nut—or something to that effect. Most everybody regarded Jimmy as something of an anomaly. My father once said that he was adopted from someplace where it was still legal to marry farm animals.  


I called my mother who, thank the good Lord, held a firm stance in the balance and harmony camp.


“I need to know how to make pot roast, Mom” I pleaded. 


I could hear pots and pans rattling in the background and the voice of my father, “Do I have time for another toot before dinner?”  


My mother said, “Buy a package of Beef Stew Seasoning and follow the directions on the back.  That will keep you going for a couple of days.”  


In the background, I heard my father say,  “Huh?  Who are you talking to?  Is that Jimmy?”  


Before the line went dead, I heard Mom say, “Oh bullshit, Marvin.”   


Ah, I thought, that’s what Sunday Dinner is all about. Dad mixing drinks in between sessions at the table playing solitaire while Mom bustled around the kitchen putting the multi-component meal together.   Dad played a crucial role in the preparation of Sunday dinner: making sure Mom’s tumbler was never empty yet monitoring her intake to ensure her successful completion of the meal.  It was a delicate juggling act that usually left him exhausted by the end of the dinner and asleep on the sofa by 7 o’clock.


The next morning, I drove to the store and found a package of Lawry’s Beef Stew seasoning.  Following the directions on the back of the package, I headed to the meat counter where I found a pound of meat labeled ‘stew meat.’  Inside were chunks of meat that looked just like the chunks I remembered in Mom’s beef stew.  Some were a little big, but I knew how to use a knife to butcher.  My years when I used to be a man had taught me such essential life skills.  This was frigging simple. What was my wife’s problem? If she thought this was difficult, she needed hormone replacement therapy.  (I made a mental note to ask my obstetrician friend, divorced five times and working on number six.) 


Three carrots, one medium yellow onion, one bunch of celery and two large potatoes later, I was at the checkout counter.  Ten minutes in the grocery store, and I was covered for at least two days.  It was at that moment that I remembered my favorite part of Mom’s beef stew--- homemade biscuits.  I carefully backed my cart through the line of women who were stacked up behind me.  I heard one of them say, “Poor darling, I think his wife drinks.”  


Five minutes later, I was back in line again with Grand’s Home Style Biscuits.  Two of the women who had been behind me were still waiting in line. Each handed me recipes scribbled on scraps of paper.  One included her phone number.   


All the way home, I cranked up the audio in my four-wheel drive SUV, rolled down every window and sang along with mighty manly Mick and the Rolling Stones’ 

“…so don’t play with me ‘cause you’re playin’ with fire.”

Detente and the Sunday Dinner

Readers cannot imagine the calm that was restored to our troubled family when the kids and I walked into our kitchen on the first Sunday morning of Détente and saw my wife sitting at the table, surrounded by cookbooks and making a shopping list.  It was never my intent that the Cube Steak War would come to a decisive end with clearly defined “winners” and “losers.”  It was always my dream that we would simply reach an understanding and, with that, “Détente.”  I smiled as I walked into the room, but quickly turned away lest she notice the shit-eating-grin of victory smeared across my face.  


“Are you going to add your items to the list?” she asked.  “Nah, I think I’m covered,” I answered back, knowing full-well that I would need to make a store-run eventually during the week when I ran out of canned vegetables and other side-dishes-in-a-box tucked neatly away in the pantry.  I retired to my recliner in the living room and busied myself watching the Cooking Channel’s  “Leftover Fantasies,” and “Meat on a Stick.”  


I heard my wife return from the grocery store and the Round Man’s Smoke House, and knew by the fact that it took her two trips to the car that Sunday Dinner and a stockpile of meaty leftovers were becoming a reality.  My heart actually fluttered a bit in anxious anticipation of what she would prepare.  Would it be succulent leg of lamb?  I could live with that.  My mental Leftover List began: gyros, Greek salad, a nice lamb stew.  Roasted cage-free chicken?  Even that would be acceptable.  


Ordinarily it was my job to unpack the bags and put away the groceries.  As I called to my wife that I was on my way, she responded by telling me to relax and check to make sure the kids were doing their homework.  “To the victor goes unanticipated spoils,” I thought smugly.  


The kids and I watched a movie and played some video games.  I could hear music playing and smell the aroma of bacon coming from the kitchen area.  I felt a tear form in my eye as I remembered earlier days.  


At five o’clock, my wife called from the kitchen, “Everybody wash their hands. Dinner will be on the table in five minutes.”  


We walked into the kitchen area, sat down at our places, and were each served a bowl of homemade tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich.  Where was the meat? I needed meat!!! I did notice that my sandwich had two measly slices of Round Man’s smoked bacon in it.  “I don’t get it, Dad,” said our son as he dipped his sandwich into his tomato soup, “what’s the big deal in your family with Sunday Dinner?”  


Détente had been broken.  My Leftover List went up in smoke. I ate in silence and prepared myself for the Mother of all Wars.  

Sunday Drives and Sunday Dinners

Okay, I’ll admit it.  After 24 years of marriage, I was struggling to satisfy my wife’s cheap ultimatum: she would no longer cook Mondays through Thursdays.  Not God, nor X-chromosome-accidents, nor twenty-six years of education (which, by the way, included a double-major Ph.D. from Stanford) had prepared me for this.  What really pissed me off the most was that my first wife, in spite of my breaking every rule of being a good husband, never once---not once---insisted that I take over her responsibilities in the kitchen.  I was lost, confused, and betrayed.  


In the pit of my darkness, I so wanted to go back to the days when my family and I could always count on a “Sunday Drive” and somehow miraculously arrive back home just in time for “Sunday Dinner” to be removed from my mother’s oven.  “It’ll be just a couple of minutes while I finish up the potatoes,” she would call from the kitchen.  “I hope the roast got done.”  


The roast or ham or turkey was ALWAYS done---to perfection.  Not only that, but there would be leftovers from which she would prepare several lunches and at least two additional dinners.  There would also be soup.  My little sister and I knew that the bones and scraps of meat left over from Sunday dinner, and Monday, and Tuesday and maybe Wednesday would appear as soup by Friday.  Roast-beef became beef vegetable soup; ham became split pea or bean soup; roast turkey could be turkey vegetable, turkey noodle, or even turkey rice soup.  


Why couldn’t my wife see how freaking easy this was?  


I ruminated on her unfair ultimatum for weeks until I found a loophole.  She was responsible for meals on Fridays, Saturdays and SUNDAYS.  All I had to do was convince her that my starving children deserved a special Sunday Dinner each week. I could use her Sunday Dinner Meat in my weekday family meals! Her leftover pork roast or prime rib or baby goat buried for 24 hours in hot wood coals in our back yard, plus a couple of vegetarian side dishes, would end forever the Cube Steak Wars.  Peace with Honor.  


Sunday Dinners, by their very nature, were special events that required focused time and attention.  She was the one who naively volunteered for Sunday Dinner Duty. The kids and I would even volunteer to “chip in” and help once in a while, in lieu of our Sunday Drive.  


For the first time in fourteen weeks, I felt a glimmer of hope that harmony and balance were being restored to our heartlessly war-torn marriage.    

Mamas Dread They Be Days Like This

It had been a long morning for Mom.  My little sister and I had spent much of it outside in the yard with Grandma’s roasting kettle, an assortment of kitchen utensils and a colander.  At my suggestion, we had been feeding marbles to our dog, Sandra.  I bet her a nickel that the first marble would pass through in under an hour.  


Earlier, I had taken the marbles from our father’s top dresser drawer where he kept his most prized possessions:  a bar of soap that he had earned for being the best-groomed boy in his grammar school class, some coins that I think he got while he was on vacation in the war, a box of weird-shaped water balloons called “Trojans,” and a bag of marbles that he won off a kid who spit in his face and called his little sister a cheap neighborhood Irish slut.  


My sister and I had been out in the yard all morning sifting through Sandra’s poop with the hose and Mom’s utensils, trying to retrieve Dad’s marbles.  We were up to six agates and a doughboy when Mom caught us and made us come inside and take baths.  (Dad found the remaining three when he mowed the lawn the following Saturday.)


When we finished our baths, Mom had lunch ready.  We sat down at the kitchen table as she served us a plate of Armour’s Star Vienna Sausages and a loaf of “Builds Strong Bodies Eight Ways” Wonder bread.  Over our protests that “We want bologna,” Mom started screaming.  


Out of her mouth spewed words that I had never heard before and did not hear again until I met Candi from Polson, Montana when I was a senior in college.  “Eat what I give you, you spoiled little brats.  When I was your age, I had to scratch shit with the chickens.’  


Mom liked chicken.  But she had told us that she almost threw up whenever she had to go out to the henhouse and gather eggs.  I looked at my sister and shook my head.  We both knew Mom had no stomach for scratching shit with the chickens.  She had almost lost her breakfast when she caught us panning for Dad’s marbles.  


Unbeknownst to Mom, one of the Vienna sausages had rolled off the plate and onto the kitchen floor.  As she stomped around on the linoleum floor raging at us, she finally noticed that she had stepped on the sausage.  “WHAT’S THIS???”


I couldn’t resist. “I don’t know, Mom.  Sandra was just there….”


Mom bent over, poked her finger into the mashed sausage and started gagging.  Her gagging echoed down the hallway as she ran to the bathroom.  My sister hollered “Look, Mom, another marble.”  Being the little heathens that we were, we giggled at the sounds we heard coming from the bathroom.  “Don’t worry, Mom.  We’ll clean up Sandra’s dooty,” I yelled as I walked to the refrigerator in search of the bologna.  

Daddy Set the Cat on Fire

The Cube Steak Wars seemed to be going well.  I was really getting the knack of it.  I plastered up a ton of refrigerator art that reminded me of happier days.  I rearranged the kitchen drawers, cabinets, and countertop storage bins so that everything I needed to prepare the evening meal was never more than two steps away from my chilled schooner of draught amber ale.  When those little beads of condensation evaporated from my imported Belgian crystal beer glass, I knew that everything on the cooktop should be done to perfection.


The first thing that caught my attention was that I had not seen my daughter in nearly a week.  Now a self-declared vegetarian, she would avoid the kitchen area entirely to ensure that she would not be exposed to what she called "meat fumes."  Her cat, also a vegetarian, would nibble at "Vegetable Melody" that was placed in his bowl.  I would occasionally find a gopher limb or a robin's feather on the back porch, but for the most part Figgy, short for Figaro, took great care to mask his meaty breath with a taste of Oregano Onion Cheesy Puffs or a Faux-Squirrel Kitty Treat before venturing off into the rest of the house.


One late afternoon, I had decided to spice up my "Cube Steak du Jour" by splashing it with a little brandy while it was searing in a medium-hot fry pan.  Figgy, obviously having missed his afternoon meeting of "Meat Eaters Anonymous," came into the kitchen with a bad case of the meat-tweaks.  I poured a slug of two-dollar cooking brandy into the pan and, as I reached for my Belgian crystal kitchen timer, Figgy leaped up into the middle of the meaty fumes and went off like a bottle rocket.


I ate alone that night.  Figgy was unharmed, but he wreaked of meat and brandy.  My son moved the last of his clothes to the back room at the Mexican restaurant.  My wife joined several boards of women's organizations who featured monthly meetings hosted by local restaurants.  Clearly, something had to change, and I had this sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that the something was going to have to be me.

Daddy Goes Hollywood

The above is a small piece of a video clip from the series "Daddy Cooks" which is scheduled to premier soon on the Trailer Park People Channel.  The pilot episode, "Vienna Sausage Panini," is a sensitive treatment of children growing up without kitchen guidance.  Recent surveys suggest that less than 12 percent of our nation's children know how to make a sandwich or that unrefrigerated meat goes bad after four days.  "Daddy Cooks" targets our next generation of fast-food restaurant managers.  

The Farmer's Daughter

I was so excited when our mail carrier handed me a large envelope sent by my mother that I rushed into the back of our 19th Century Victorian house where God had hidden our kitchen.  The people from whom we purchased the home told us, as they handed over the keys, that we would get used to “eating over the sink” in what they called “the galley kitchen.”  As I had never spent any quality time in that kitchen, I had never really noticed that no matter where you stood, you were “over the sink.”  Just outside the kitchen was a dimly lit, perpetually cold room where we located our kitchen table.  My place at the table was clearly marked, the finish worn by my elbows over years of patiently waiting to be served my meals.  I sat at the table, elbows nestled in their familiar spots and, heart beating fast in anticipation of my return to the “big bed,” tore the envelope open like a boatload of Vikings raiding an English village. 

 Like her mother before her, my mother was an excellent cook.  Mom was a farm girl, and the apple of my Granddad’s eye.  She told me shortly before her death that she married my father on the rebound.  He was a “city slicker” who fell in love with her dimples.  My mother hoped her previous boyfriend would be so terribly jealous by the city slicker that he would beg her to return.  Instead, he became a successful ophthalmologist with a string of offices throughout the Northwest.  And the farm girl became the city slicker’s wife.

For years, I wondered whether my parents had lied to me about my birth date.  I even hired a private investigator to make sure my birth certificate was accurate.  I was certain I was the reason my parents married.  Turned out, it wasn’t me.  I happened about three years into their honeymoon.  It was her dimples, after all.  Then came World War II, and while my father ran a laundry that he built to hide his industrial-grade bootleg still on the island of Guam, my mother and I moved into her parents’ home in a small wheat-farming town settled by the Black Sea Germans. 

 My Granddad was a living legend in the small town of Odessa, Washington.  Wherever he went, I went.  His friends were my friends.  He called me “Kit.”  He was my best friend.  He was my only friend.  He made people laugh.  He knew things that nobody else in town seemed to know:  when it would rain, when and where the fish would be biting, which widow needed her house painted.  But, compared to my Grandmother, Granddad was as ordinary as dust on a dirt road.  My Grandmother made food that made farmhands cry, and my mother, the author of the recipes that were tucked safely inside the envelope on my kitchen table, had learned it all from her.  And now, it was my turn. 

 I disregarded the “$2.58 Postage Due” notice that our mail carrier had stuck on the face of the envelope, reached inside and pulled out a stack of paper---glossy and slick to the touch.  I found several articles torn from “Redbook,” “Better Housekeeping,” and “The Farm Journal.”  They all had to do with what men need to know about how women treat sex in ways that are different from how men treat sex and how to put the excitement back into the bedroom.  There was also a coupon for a dollar off on Ragu spaghetti sauce.  And a handwritten note:

Dear Gary,

 I don’t cook with recipes.  Your great aunt Maggie did, but that bastard son of hers threw them all away when she died.  Kate is a wonderful cook and her potato salad is as good as mine was on my best day.  I’m sure this is just a woman thing that she is going through right now.  Men just don’t understand. 

Love, Mom

Help from Home

By the end of the second week of the Cube Steak War, my children were leaving me sticky-notes on toilet paper rolls, the refrigerator door and our dogs’ food bowls.  “Goddammit dad whatever you did to piss mom off just apologize so she will start cooking again.”  By the end of the third week, we were getting calls from the mothers of our children’s friends, telling us that our kids were all right and asking if they could stay for dinner---assuring us that someone would drive them home after they had eaten.  By the end of the fourth week, our daughter announced that she had decided to become a vegetarian.  Our son had quit the basketball team and taken a job at a Mexican restaurant down in the harbor.  Calls to my Mom to urge her to hurry up with those recipes were never returned.  Finally, on a Sunday morning as I sat at the kitchen table making a menu and a grocery list for Week Five, the phone rang.  It was my mother.  


I immediately turned on the voice recorder that I had attached to my telephone line as a part of a scheme to trap junk sales callers who flagrantly ignored the fact that I had put us on the “DON’T CALL” list.  I was not going to let Mom off the phone until she had read to me at least half a dozen recipes for my favorite childhood meals.  The following is a transcript of that conversation.  


ME:  Hello, Mom?  Where the Hell are my recipes?  I need them, Mom.  This is my family we’re talking about.  


MOM:  Oh, was that you on the answering machine?  I thought it was your no-good Uncle Jimmy out on another bender.  You know, he….


ME:  Mom, stop and listen to me.  I really need those recipes.  Kate is making me cook four days a week while she works, you know?  And the kids, they won’t come home.  And, I’m losing weight, Mom, and you know I have to eat well because of my diabetes.


MOM:  She is really making you cook?  This isn’t a joke?  I’m sorry, Honey.  She seemed like such a nice girl.  


ME:  Look, just give me a couple of the basics…. Meatloaf, potato salad, porcupine meatballs, beef stew…..  My marriage depends on it.


MOM:  Is it the sex?


ME:  What?  Mom, no I….


MOM:  Your father and I, he always liked my cooking, but he really was never very good in bed….  


ME:  Mom, just send me what you’ve got.


Three days later, I received an envelope in the mail.  

The Great Cube Steak Wars

“Just cook the kind of food that you like to eat,” instructed my wife as she pranced around the kitchen like my Uncle Jimmy.  I glanced up from the kitchen table where I had been sitting for two hours trying to make a grocery list that would somehow translate out to four evening meals.  So far, my list included one package of all beef wieners, two cans of chili con carne without beans, yellow onions, one package of hot dog buns, and a six-pack of premium amber ale. Scratched off of my list were “Steak-Ums,” (those packages of individually wrapped frozen deli slices of something that looked like meat that you tossed into a frying pan with a cube of melted butter and stirred around with a fork until you had a browned pile of meat-like matter that you popped into a steak roll or a hot dog bun and smothered in Arby’s bbq sauce).  My wife said that the Food and Drug Administration had forced the removal of “Steak-Ums” from the market when she was still in high school, and that Arby’s bbq sauce disappeared at about the same time as Jimmy Hoffa, and under similar circumstances.  


She made it sound so easy….”cook the kind of food that I liked.”  The kind of food that I liked was the kind that was sitting before me on the table when I came home from fishing, and before that, the kind that my first wife had sitting before me on the table when I came home from work.  And before that, the kind that my Mom had sitting on the table before me when I came home from wherever I was before dinner.  And, of course, I really liked the kind of food that my grandmothers prepared and served every day of their lives.  I was never fond of the food prepared by Uncle Jimmy, but even that was sounding pretty good about now.  I returned to studying my list while my wife disappeared into the computer room.  I could swear I heard her giggling, but it might have been the cat hacking up a hairball.  


Suddenly, out of a set of loosely connected memories, thoughts and experiences, I had what can only be called an epiphany.  DAY ONE: cube steak, Betty Crocker scalloped potatoes and canned green beans;  DAY TWO:  cube steak sandwiches and a family-size can of Campbell’s Mmmm-Mmmm-Good Tomato Soup;  DAY THREE:  what Mom used to call breakfast-dinner, scrambled eggs, frozen waffles and a choice of either fried Spam or cube steak;  DAY FOUR:  Kraft Mac and Cheese with chunks of Spam.  I had four nutritionally-balanced meals, and they were well within my wife’s normal food budget.  Once again, the laws of Nature had prevailed.  If you want a job done right and completed under-budget, place a man in charge.  


Meanwhile, I would put in a call to my Mom and beg her to send me copies of her most treasured recipes.  I was feeling good.  “Simple food for simple folk.”  Yes sir, that’s how I remembered it.  My list completed, I left it beside my wife’s purse as I walked out to the garage to tie a few salmon leaders and oil my saltwater reels.  

Daddy Cooks: The Beginning

  A few years ago, I retired from a major university to become more involved in the world around me.  Our nation was at war with terrorism; homeless people roamed the streets of our major cities; school children were dropping through the cracks of our educational systems; our economy was in the toilet.  To top it all off, my wife had thrown me out of the “big bed” complaining of my snoring, but I knew that in fact she was fed up with working long hours trying to maintain her own business, managing our family finances, overseeing the raising of our teenage children, and being responsible for planning and preparing every meal that our family of four sucked down in-between basketball games, boyfriend crises and a whole shit-load of stuff that happened at home while I was out hunting and gathering on my fishing boat on the Pacific Ocean.  Although I was morally committed to using my time in retirement to help address the formidable problems that surrounded our nation, our community and our family, the only one that I really gave a good shit about was getting back into the big bed.  


Over the course of our wonderful marriage, my wife and I have issued one another very few of what we call “ultimatums.”   Her first to me was that she wanted children of our own.  I had two remarkable children from a previous marriage and felt that I should not spread my “parenting hormones” too thinly, thus depriving my kids of a devoted absentee father.   She stated calmly that she was going to have our children, with or without me.  The next thing I knew, I was clipping the umbilical cord of our newborn son, and three years later, I was looking at the smile on the face (it was NOT gas) of our newborn daughter.  Rest assured, I was wrong.  I had more than enough parenting hormones to go around.  MY FOUR CHILDREN are the core of one of the most amazing multi-generational family groups that I could imagine.  


To this day, I am uncertain where it came from---but I am 94 percent confident that it was something that came out of a Meryl Streep movie.  Guys have known for a long time that when balance and harmony in their marriages are disrupted, it most probably came from a Meryl Streep movie.  Or Dr. Phil.  Or Judge Judy.  There I was, exhausted and dehydrated from a strenuous morning at sea, and irrespective of the fact that it was technically my turn to issue an ultimatum, my wife hit me with another one of her own.  Simply stated, and expletives excluded, (some of which rhymed with ‘cough’), she declared, “You are responsible for meals Mondays through Thursdays.  I will be responsible Fridays through Sundays.”  I waited for the “or else.”  I figured, I can handle almost any “or else.”  While I waited, she simply walked off.  Clearly, grilling my catch after a laborious day at sea with the boys, while oiling my sunburned face and quenching my thirst with a victory-ale, was not enough.  Although it wasn’t quite the same as being welcomed back into the big bed, I was indeed thoroughly screwed.  


I think it was her using the word “responsible” and “meals” in the same sentence that really poached my eggs.  Years of balanced and harmonious married life were being flushed like bilge water.  A can of chili con carne dumped over a wiener on a bun might be okay when I had to cook for myself, but it was not going to provide a long-term solution to being held responsible for weekday meals for a family of four.  The same could be said for grilling burgers, tossing a heated jar of spaghetti sauce over a bowl of pasta, and grabbing the kids to give “Mom a treat” by bringing back a Mexican pizza from Taco Bell.  I was too old to consider re-marrying, too experienced to believe that I could out-wait her, and too young to just sit down and wait for a peaceful death.  

Fan Letters, Week One

Although we seem to be off to a slow start with this blog, failing to reach the mark set by that Zuckerberg fellow from “The Social Network” (2010), I am proud to report that we have received a good bit of fan mail in response to our first week’s postings.  Until the volume of mail reaches a level where it is no longer possible to deal with individually, it is my intent to respond thoughtfully to each one of you. It is my belief that for every reader who takes the time to write to me with a question or concern, there are probably dozens of others with similar questions.  Therefore, I will post a representative sample of these letters each week and invite our readers to comment and offer helpful hints of their own.  

“Dear Daddy Drink,
You can’t fool me.  I know exactly who you are, you son of a bitch. Maybe the law gave up on finding you, but I will track you down like a mad dog and kick you dead.  If you had put as much work into our marriage as you put into that wood-chipping slut down at Quincy’s Lumber, we could a made a go of it.  Leavin’ me with them four kids and a cat what I never asked for in the first place ruint my teen years, you rotten heathen bastard. You are going to rule the day you drove off and left us at Blocker’s Truck Stop.  Burn in Hell, Fornicator.  P.S. If you ain’t Tucker Marvin, I apologize all over myself.  I love your posts and read them over and over.  Like the words of our Lowered hisself, they bring such joy to my heart.  And if your ever up close to Lockjaw Junction, stop in for some good down home cooking.  I’m in trailer 9 out on Road 4.”  

“Dear daddydrink, 
Boy, you got to grow a pair, know what I’m sayin?  We don’t need no more sensitive man role models.  That’s what’s bringing this country to its knees, know what I’m sayin?  My old lady, she reads this shit and gets feeling sorry for herself, thinking that maybe she’s the only one who’s afraid to stand up for herself.  She hammered on me like thump on melon after she read your Introduction.  Next thing I know, I send her out for a twelve-pack and she comes back with a strawberry pie and a DVD of ‘The Kids are All Right.’  I’m layin this on you, man, know what I’m sayin?”  

 “Dear Mr. Drink,
My name is Collin and I am in the fourth grade.  I have a question that I hope you can answer about cooking because I am taking cooking now in school instead of art because I took art already and now it is my turn to take cooking.  I want to do a special report for extra credit in cooking class, and I hope that you can help me.  My report has to be on cooking.  So, like, if you could just tell me something interesting abut cooking, or maybe like a couple of things.  It would be good if you talked about stuff to make with peanut butter, maybe some eggs, and usually a few potatoes and some stuff that looks like meat.  Thank you.”  

Romantic Fever, Pt. 3

I knew that only a mother’s blind sympathy could now save me from a father’s stern hand.  “I don’t feel good,” I sobbed. 


“Where does it hurt?” my mother asked, tugging at my wet clothes. 


“my neck…..  my throat…..  my legs……  my chest……” I sobbed. 


The next thing I heard was my mother on the phone with Uncle Jimmy.
“Hospital……  Hurry……..”


Thirty minutes later, I was sitting on an examination table in a doctor’s office.  I heard the doctor say to my mother something that sounded like romantic fever. 


He had looked into my throat using one of those tongue depressors that are about the size of a wooden spoon, asked me to say “AH,” and then looked away.  My throat was sore from having 20 pounds of frozen snow shoved down my throat an hour before.  He grabbed my head and twisted it around.  “Does this hurt?” he asked.  “Yes,” I replied (an hour earlier a 140 pound girl had been sitting on it).  He pulled my arm.  “Does this hurt?” he asked.  “Yes,” I replied (an hour earlier a 110 pound high school girl had wrenched her beanie out of my hand.)  He pulled my legs.  “Does this hurt?” he asked.  “Yes, ouch,” I replied (an hour earlier two high school girls had lifted me up by my legs and stuffed 100 pounds of ice up my pants.) 


Mind you, this was a time in American history when parents were more afraid of polio than they were of the Communists and fluoride.  So, I could tell immediately by the look on my mother’s face that she was thinking “polio.”  She seemed relieved when the doctor told her it was only romantic fever. 


While a nurse was giving me 500,000 units of penicillin in the ass, I heard the doctor say to my mother, “heart damage…..   complete bed rest……  no school……..  strep throat……  only time will tell……”


For the next six months, I lay on the sofa at home, listening to a radio that my father had brought me home from a local furniture store where he worked.  It had a built-in record player, and to this day I can sing the songs that I listened to over and over and over as I recovered from romantic fever.  I had learned to read at age four, and so my mother assured me that I would be able to start second grade in the fall with my classmates.  


My friends came to visit me often after school, my parents having assured their parents that romantic fever was not contagious but a side effect of an untreated strep infection.  Rita was not allowed to visit and I never saw her again.  Nor did I ever see again either of the two girls who had given me a beating and romantic fever.  


For years, I checked the box on medical intake forms indicating that I had had rheumatic fever when I was a child.  

Romantic Fever, Pt. 2

There she was, towering above me like a stone gargoyle, a blond ponytail frosted in the subzero temperature of the late afternoon.  Her friend, walking with her, was huge.  But I was young, and fast, and knew where the small holes into our tunnel were hidden in the ice-packed mountains of snow that lined the streets.  I was dead certain that I could rush them from behind, leap up to grab the coveted beanie, and dive into a tunnel-hole that was much too small for either of them to get through before I could navigate my way home and hide myself in the safety of my room while my mother brought me fresh baked cookies, a cup of hot chocolate and playfully scolded me as she removed my snow-caked coat, galoshes, and mittens.


Seconds after snatching the beanie from her head, the gargoyle and her friend were upon me.  I felt pain as they threw me into a frozen snow bank and while one sat on my back, the other crashed down on my head, driving my face into the snow.  Cursing and calling me names that I had only heard when I secretly listened to my father and his brothers talking about Uncle Jimmy, the two behemoths stuffed snow down my shirt, down my pants, into my boots, and up my pant legs.  Then they rolled me over.  Looking up, I saw the great cross that stood above the entrance to the Presbyterian Church.  “Where are you now, Jesus?” I sobbed, as they rubbed icy snow into my face and mouth and ears.   And then, beanie in hand, they walked off---laughing.


I don’t remember arriving home, but I was crying, and cold, and humiliated.  Somewhere in-between my sobs, I heard my mother ask me “what’s wrong?”  She was feeling my forehead, hot from running all the way home carrying at least 200 extra pounds of snow and ice in my underwear.  “You have a fever,” she cried, alarmed.  “Your face is beet red and you’re clothes are soaking wet.”


Now, right then, I realized that if I explained that two high school girls had tackled me, thrown me into the snow and beaten the living shit out of me because I had stolen their beanie, I would find myself in even more trouble than when my mother caught me playing doctor with Rita, a third grade Catholic girl from across town who had come to visit her father who rented a room in our house and was drunk most of the time and thought that it was cute how we two children got along so well.  (Rita is another story for another time.)  So, I lied.

(TO BE CONTINUED)

Romantic Fever, Pt. 1

It is a new year and the winter season when the days are short, the nights are cold and our bodies naturally crave more fat.  For me, it is also that time of year when I reflect back on my childhood and remember with frightening clarity the Winter of Forty-Nine when I got “Romantic Fever.”


I was in first grade.  It started snowing in October and briefly stopped in mid-December.  We had three unseasonably sunny days when the sun melted the top layer of snow that blanketed the city and left a two inch layer of ice above the mountains of snow that lined the sidewalks that led down the street to my school.  


Christmas vacation was spent tunneling from yard to yard, block to block across snow-blocked streets until we reached a park that was almost a mile from my house.  I was one of the younger kids, eager to prove that I had what it took to survive in my neighborhood--which was referred to as “the dead end” by long-time city residents.  By the time school resumed, it had started snowing again.


During our vacation in the snow tunnel, one of the older kids who was home for Christmas on furlough from a maximum security juvenile detention center somewhere along the border between the State of Washington and British Columbia taught me how to leap out of our tunnel and snatch off the heads of high school girls these yarn beanies that they wore proudly, knit in their school colors and displaying the initials of their respective schools:  LC, NC, CV, and so forth.  


My mentor claimed that he lacked only one beanie to complete his set of all the high schools in Eastern Washington.  He needed the beanie worn by the girls from the high school that was located in the only neighborhood in town that spawned more convicted juvenile felons than our own:  JR.


By late January, it stopped snowing again.  I left school at three o’clock and dove into one of our tunnels.  Three blocks from home, I poked my head out to get my bearings---and there they were, two high school girls, and one of them was wearing a JR beanie.

(TO BE CONTINUED)