Baking can be a little trickier, but most of the time when I try a new savory recipe, I’m pretty sure of the end result.
But, not always.
I got three pretty pork loin chops a few weeks ago. They were thick, but not so thick that they’d be a pain to cook. I got them on sale because they were slightly long in the tooth. Not so much that they were furry, but soon would be. So, they needed to be cooked or frozen right away.
But the upshot was, I bought three pretty respectable chops for $3. And, I had a recipe that I’d been wanting to try. The only thing I needed to pick up was a small carton of half & half.
The recipe was for a garlicky spinach sauce. Then put the meat in it and serve with egg noodles and a green salad.
Sounds like we had a nice dinner, doesn’t it?
Yeah, not so much.
Unfortunately, is wasn’t this type of funk…
Somewhere along the way, the sauce picked up some funk. Not funk like food gone bad, but funk like a whole lot of cheese was in it.
But there was no cheese in anything. I felt like I was in one of those babysitter horror movies, “It’s coming from inside the house!”, only “It’s coming from inside the sauce!”. 
I think the spinach and mushrooms just turned the earthy flavor of the sauce up to about a thousand and eleven. It didn’t work.
So, I am not sharing that recipe. Instead, I’m going to give you a dish that I have been making for as long as we’ve been married. And because I’ve been making it since well before I could cook worth a fig, it’s easy.
Pork and Zucchini Cream
1 pound boneless pork loin, cut into 2 X ½ inch strips
2 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 pound zucchini, washed, left unpeeled and sliced into ½ inch rounds
1 yellow onion chopped
4-6 cloves garlic
½ teaspoon dry thyme
2 cups heavy cream
¾ cup skim milk
Red pepper flakes (optional)
Big handful of fresh parsley
Salt & pepper
Place the sliced zucchini into colander and sprinkle with ½ teaspoon of salt and let sit for an hour. After an hour, pat it dry with towel (paper or clean kitchen).
In a large heavy skillet, add half the oil and butter. When butter’s melted, working in batches, place the zucchini down in one layer and cook at medium-high until there is deep caramelization, flip and cook other side. Remove to towel-covered plate. Repeat until all veg is cooked, adding a bit more butter and oil as needed.
Add the rest of the fat, onions, and thyme into the same pan and cook until the onions get golden. Add garlic, and when it just begins to toast, pour in dairy and add pepper flakes. Lower to medium, bring to boil and let reduce.
After ten minutes season pork strips and add to sauce. Cook for ten more minutes or until it’s is of sauce consistency. Stir in zucchini & parsley and serve over starch of your choice—something unexpected is fun; like Israeli couscous, griddled Texas toast, or grits.
Serves 6.
So, there’s a true yin and yang this week.
On the dark side is the reminder that I’m not infallible discerning the flavor of the dish by reading the recipe.
But, on the happier end of the scale, even when I couldn’t cook, every once in a while, I and my diners would get lucky, and I’d turn out something that was actually tasty.:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc()/cooking_fail-57695a525f9b58346af16b25.jpg)
Thanks for your time.
This week, cats and kittens, have I got some catnip for you.
What traveler from Egypt, and her relationship with a most royal of royals has thrown our Burg into a tizzy? While this personage’s wife is above reproach, his girlfriend is not.
One of the men rumored to be the next pontiff is known to have at least three children, and possibly dozens more. No woman is safe around the men of this family, and if his daughter invites you to a meal, make sure you brownbag it, or you may not survive to dessert.
Many at court have speculated that a change in religion might be in the offing. Some have said that this slip of a girl has so intrigued the older, but still vital gentleman that he is now worshipping at the church of lust, frustration, and wishful thinking.
We’re assured that these mates are as fearsome and bloodthirsty as the men…I mean the rest of the crew.
And if you have a chateau, have lived in a chateau, or been a guest in a chateau, it would be wise to put down that cake, and get out of town, lest you become familiar with an invention by a certain Dr. Guillotine.
We’ve been told that the buyer, a published author and macaroni and cheese aficionado is in talks with French bigwigs to make a “purchase” that may well change the very nature of how we see ourselves.
Last Friday was my birthday, with all the obscenely frosted cake that it implies. Then, Wednesday was the first afternoon market of the year at the Durham Farmers’ Market.
She woke us.
And if he switched his sleep to a more conventional schedule every Monday, he’d have to flip it back at the end of the week. And, I’m no sleep expert, but I’m guessing that after a couple months of poking his circadian rhythm with a sharp stick, he’d be insane or dead.
So, have a heart. That person you don’t bug when you think they should be out and about in the middle of the day might be the person manning the emergency room when Grandma falls and breaks her wrist on a trip to the bathroom in the middle of the night.
This year, there’s a plan: each time I visit, I will purchase food that I’ve neither cooked, nor eaten. I will then pick the brains of both the farmer, and fellow buyers as to preparation.
Plate and top with browned garlic and crumbled crispy bacon. Serves 4.
Many aristocratic old European families have family mottos.
The Wedderburn clan lives by the saying, “To behold the sun with sight unhurt.” Bad news, without welder’s glass, there’s nobody that can behold the sun with sight unhurt. So maybe their other motto should be, “To breathe only helium with funny voice and death absent.”
Here is our very own hard-won truism: “Everybody’s a weirdo in their own weird little way.”
And in case you’re feeling a little superior or judge-y, let me clue you, your recently discovered oddball buddy will be looking at your newly detected strange proclivities as well. But of course, your foibles aren’t foibles to you—they are perfectly normal personality traits that make you interesting and distinct.
This hatred extends to blow dryers, ceiling fans, and even sitting across from a person blowing out candles on their birthday cake.
Lady Gaga has spent upwards of $30,000 to paranormal “professionals” to make sure there are no ghosts in her homes.
And they are wrong. I do a Bette Davis that would make you think she’d come back to life. And my Dick Vitale would fool his own mother.
Thanks for your time.
Sometimes an idea will come to me, and I’ll think it’s the smartest, most original notion ever thunk. Then, I’ll google it, and realize that I am at least the seven millionth brain to have come up with this brilliant thought.
You can boil up some spuds, and stir in some store-bought pimento cheese, and it’ll be fine. But to really make it special, make it all from scratch. If there are few elements in a recipe, use the best ones you can find.
6-8 medium-large sized Yukon gold potatoes (2 ½-3 pounds)
This goes really well with Southern summer food, like fried chicken or catfish. It also works with bratwurst or grilled Italian sausage. It’s pretty and tasty to serve this on a bed of lightly dressed greens or topped with a big handful of microgreens. And to be really unique, instead of Yukon gold, use sweet potatoes instead, or combo of both. Just peel and cut up sweets before boiling.
I answered the phone, dealt with out-patients coming in for testing, alerted staff to emergency orders, and carried in-patients’ results to the appropriate floor.
My biggest stumbling block when I started was the lexicon. When I was a newbie and answered the phone, what I heard on the other side honestly sounded like a foreign language. I recognized the articles, and a few verbs, but everything else was totally incomprehensible. When I had to place a call, the message had to be written down, word for word, phonetically.
One is to define the terms that are particular to the group. If you’re a baker, you don’t need a vocabulary for types of blood cells. And if you’re a lawyer, you don’t have a lot of call for the names of different parts of a shoe. That’s the main reason.
The other reason is a snapshot of human nature. It’s done to create an exclusivity. So that outsiders are immediately pegged as outsiders. It’s a verbal secret handshake.
From Michigan, I learned the language of stillness. As a toddler I would sit quietly every afternoon and a fawn which had become a friend would approach me, every day venturing a little closer for a silent chat.
When the Normans conquered the Anglo Saxons, they brought martial words of conquest like jail (spelled gaol in England), armor, and battle. Once the occupation began in earnest new words like tax, rent, and state.
When the new nation of America expanded, they discovered the patois of life in the west, mainly from the Spanish who had already been there for couple hundred years. Words such as lariat, vista (not the Bill gates kind), pinto, and buckaroo.
Thanks for your time.
Who knew death row inmates were so enamored with Pizza Hutt?
There are lists of the actual last meals of celebrities—not planned deaths, but spontaneous. Some are mundane to the point of sadness (JFK: boiled eggs and toast, Jimi Hendrix: tuna sandwich). Some possibly hints at the “why” of the death (Elvis: four scoops of ice cream and half a dozen cookies, James Gandolfini: lots of liquor, two orders of fried shrimp and a full plate of fatty goose liver). 
And some are their personalities on a plate (Princess Diana: Dover sole, and an asparagus omelet, Julia Child: French onion soup). And some are just head scratchers; I never would have pegged John Lennon as a Reuben fan.
But the whole subject is a real bummer. Under normal circumstances, my personality and outlook could give Shirley Temple diabetes. So, I think a better and happier question that sheds even more light on a person is their birthday dinner. It’s usually a combination of childhood favorites and flavors and foods discovered along the way.
When I have food chats with folks, almost everybody smiles and has a menu already in mind, as well as the dessert (overwhelmingly it’s chocolate cake).
Crispy-fried boneless chicken breast smothered in extra lemony Hollandaise, potato salad studded with lots of crispy bacon, and fat fresh asparagus steamed and drizzled with butter.
My dessert is a large corner piece of Dewey’s cake with extra frosting. And you’re welcome to a piece, but don’t be coming around looking for another corner, ‘cause it ain’t happening, and the request itself would very likely end a friendship.
I know this all sounds really bad, but if you ask anyone that knows me well, they will tell you that this behavior is a true deviation of my normal personality. I am normally the soul of generosity.
Thanks for your time.
This week, Gentle Reader, you will learn many unsavory facts about me.
All of this means I know from guilt.
Years ago, in the grocery store, a little old lady asked me to read a label for her as she had forgotten her glasses. I felt impatient with her. There was no way anybody’s vision was that bad. She just wanted conversation.
When The Kid was elementary school-aged, my child had been sick for a week. My mom was convinced a doctor was needed. But my mother’s a nervous Nellie, and I knew better.
Once, when a college term was up and a lengthy break commenced, The Kid was driving home from school—a seventeen-hour trip. We were expecting our little scholar on Saturday afternoon. Saturday morning the dog began barking like crazy. I groggily glanced at the clock, and decided that Petey was home from work, in the bathroom, and our pooch was eager to go for a walk. I rolled over and went back to sleep.
Only I’d misread the clock. It was earlier than I thought, and the dog wasn’t barking at Petey, he was barking at The Kid, who’d come home early to surprise me, but had lost the house key. I never heard the knocking. I was woken later by my spouse telling me, “Hey. The Kid’s downstairs.”
There are tens of thousands more regrets, but due to space constraints, I shall only name one more.
Thanks for your time, and I’m so very, very sorry.
My soufflé is easy; everything is thrown into a food processor, and it’s pretty, and even folks that aren’t crazy about carrots are crazy about this dish.
1 & 1/2 pounds carrots, peeled and sliced
Yield: Makes 6 servings.
2 pounds sirloin tips, in bite-size pieces
Thanks for your time.
Now we walk for hours and hours crossing and re-crossing the creek at various points and never cover the same ground twice. In the years I’ve been going back there I’ve probably walked close to 300 miles, and even now I still stumble upon places that I’ve never been.
Last January Crowley and I were having one of those extended constitutionals. The afternoon was slowly transitioning to evening, and we were just about to cross the creek once more.
I began to panic but thought that surely if my glasses had fallen off, I would have noticed. Without my specs, I’m blind as a bat wearing shades in a dimly lit room. I must have come out without them. I’m not blind and an amnesiac as well.
It would be dark within twenty minutes or so; I needed to find them quick. As dim as chances of finding them were, I could only retrace my steps and hope for the best. I urged my canine companion to, “Find Mommy’s glasses, boy!”
So, there I was, in the middle of the rapidly darkening forest, bereft of both dog and sight. It was shaping up to be a banner day. I did not want to return home and reveal the depressing situation to Petey. I briefly, but seriously considered making my home out there among the trees, or possibly taking up work as a troll, and living under a nearby bridge.
The handle had gotten caught on a sapling, but just. One gentle tug from the dog and it and he would have been free.
This just proves, once again, that my woods are magic, and only good things can happen back there.
Thanks for your time.
bull city mom 