This week’s column is my new recipe for coconut rice with meatballs and sauteed asparagus. It’s not the prettiest dish, but it’s so tasty.
And don’t worry if you don’t like coconut, I don’t either. In this recipe it just makes the rice silky and a little crispy on the bottom.
Thanks for your time.
Normally, I am friendly and kind.
Normally.
But the North Carolina summer is so malevolently awful that it feels personal. I can’t argue with hot though, because there is no combination of words I can say that will make it cooler and less humid.
And, standing outside, yelling, and shaking my fist at the sky just confirms suspicions that my neighbors have had about me all along.
So, I walk around all summer, every summer, disgruntled. Usually, my gruntle returns in early October about the time the State Fair comes to town. Then that big ole bag of grumpy departs like a hummingbird heading south for the winter.
I strive to stifle my summer-originated rage. But on especially gross days in which I am forced to spend extended time outside, my animosity bubbles to the surface, like a particularly noxious aquifer in the form of sarcastic, smart-alecky questions.
Some are purely rhetorical, some I know the answers to, and some are actual head-scratchers and are the result of honest, albeit cantankerous curiosity.
Do you know what’s unfair? Having gray hair, wrinkles, and acne all on the same head. It’s those infernal masks. Wearing one is a giant pain. It’s punishingly hot and moist under here. I am beyond sick of smelling and breathing my own breath. I’m always forgetting it and having to run back to the car. It makes my glasses fog up.
It’s one of the best ways, though, to protect yourself and others from transmission. But I keep seeing a puzzling phenomenon all over the place and even on the faces of TV reporters. So I have to ask; why even bother wearing that mask if you’re gonna leave your nose outside?
So, those murder hornets that were supposed to invade our shores and spread a swath of death and destruction everywhere they went. What happened to them?
I have a theory. They arrived in the US and saw the news and read a few papers. When they realized what a flaming hot mess 2020 is, they turned around and went back to Mars.
Why can’t I eat ice cream for breakfast, lunch, and dinner? It’s hot!
Singer Sam Smith, Jennifer Lopez, Drake, Madonna, et al, posting tone-deaf videos and photos from multi-multi-million dollar homes complaining about the boredom/anxiety of quarantining.
On behalf of all the people out here who aren’t riding around our private islands on a unicorn while wearing gold-plated underclothes; might you please shut the heck up?
There are actually folks who will gaze at you with a slightly manic look and state with a straight face, that they “love the heat”.
What is wrong with them?
Camping. Leaving one’s comfortable homes full of running water, electricity, and air conditioning for the charms of sleeping on the ground, eating food that’s either half-raw or burned to charcoal, and being feasted upon by any number of insects.
Why would anybody in their right mind do that on purpose?
Would somebody please explain to me why fried dough covered in a honey glaze is so much tastier than a carrot?
Throughout history, different body shapes are in or out of fashion. During the Italian Renaissance, the style was Rebuenesque; plump and ample. In the roaring 20s, it was desirable to be slim with straight hips and a boyish figure. Marilyn Monroe was the ideal in the 1950s with an hourglass figure.
So when are flat butts and big feet going to have a turn?
Finally, somebody, please tell me, I’ve gotta know—how hard is it to actually change a roll of toilet paper?
Thanks for your time.
Contact me at d@bullcity.mom.
This week’s column is out in the Chatham News and Record.
It’s about that magical elixir, brown butter. And there’s a recipe for brown sugar vanilla bean chewies. Chances are, you have most, if not all of the ingredients on-hand.
Thanks for your time.
This afternoon The Chatham News&Record posted my new piece for them.
It’s live now, with no paywall.
It’s two pandemic-related questions with the First Lady of North Carolina, Kristin Cooper.
I hope you enjoy it.
Take care and stay safe,
d
So, on Twitter, people are confessing at what stage of quarantine they currently occupy.
For example, Pigeon Fancier wrote: “What stage of quarantine are you at, me I’m wearing a foofy bathrobe 24/7, drinking everything out of a champagne flute, calling the house spiders “dahling” in a transatlantic accent”
As for myself, I’m at the stage that I’ve grown so used to wearing a mask that once this is all over, I’m contemplating taking a job as a stagecoach robber.
And, I’m at the stage of quarantine where I’ve taken to shouting, “Social Distancing!” at crowd scenes in movies, such as The Ten Commandments, the beach scene in Jaws, and the ball in Walt Disney’s Cinderella.
After years of familiarity, I’ve put together a list of where on the quarantine spectrum friends and family possibly (probably) reside.
Petey, well-known for his taciturnity, is at the stage where he’s become positively chatty with folks he meets while walking the dog. He actually spoke with a neighbor the other day for a full 90 seconds.
The Kid has been so deprived of human companionship that furniture and accessories around the house have become anthropomorphized. The child spends much of the day breaking up medical disputes between Doc Martens and Dr. Pepper, and refereeing refrigerator brawls between Duke’s Mayonnaise and a bowl of spaghetti that’s gone bad and joined a gang.
My mom is a notorious clean freak, whose dirtiest surface in her house is still clean enough to perform neurosurgery on. She’s at the stage where she’s begun removing the drywall from rooms to, “Really get into those nooks and crannies”.
My father, who gets more done before lunch than I do in a month has begun cutting the grass with a pair of nail clippers, because edging and trimming with them gave him the control he was looking for. Whenever my mother took a bath my father, the former Coast Guard rescue swimmer maintained a constant vigil in case of an accident.
My mother has since switched to showers.
For a couple of weeks, family friend Chef Chrissie has been playing a version of Chopped; a game in which you have a time limit to prepare dishes using four random ingredients. Because Chrissie lives alone, he plays against an imaginary opponent with make-believe judges.
He’s still looking for his first win.
Maxie, one of my oldest and closest friends, and his husband Mark have three dogs. They’re at the stage where they’ve made costumes and backdrops to stage an all-canine rendition of Downton Abbey. The unfortunate effect is that two of the pooches have become unforgivably snooty. And the pup who plays the butler keeps drinking all the sherry.
Another friend of mine has drafted a list of enemies from high school, forty years ago. She has no idea where most of them are today, but if she were to run into one of them, she has a rapier-sharp retort for the sick burn given to her in third-period French class sophomore year.
A young friend of mine who has twin toddlers is at the stage where she’s been thinking about teaching her children to become bartenders, except their little legs are too short to reach the freezer and no matter how many times she shows them, they can’t make a decent dry martini.
I hope you enjoyed what is mostly a fictional list.
But quarantine is awful, and hard on us all. If you’re struggling and need some help, or just want somebody to talk to, contact the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) on their Helpline at 800-950-NAMI. Or in a crisis, text “NAMI” to 741741.
Thanks for your time.
Contact debbie at d@bullcity.mom.
*Warning: If you think Covid19 is a hoax, you use the term, “lamestream media”, or you think this virus is a plot to influence an election, stop reading now. The remainder of this column will only upset you and reinforce any notion you have that I am a deluded fool.
You’ ve been warned.
I’ll tell you a secret. After being married to a nurse for years, and being around many hospital workers, I have learned something.
Medical folk ain’t quite right.
Every single day, they put others’ well being above their own.
When most people are cocooning and withdrawing from the world, nurses, doctors, lab staff, respiratory therapists, and every other human that works to heal and ensure our health keep on going.
And many have family with high-risk factors so haven’t seen or touched their parents, or children, or spouses in months in order to avoid exposing loved ones to the virus.
There are workers who’ve had family members born or pass away, but because they are considered a possible carrier of infection weren’t able to say hellos or goodbyes.
I have a friend who has just graduated as a Doctor Nurse. She has a Ph.D. in nursing.
Throughout her studies, she has continued to work full time as an intensive care nurse at a very large university hospital. There’s not enough PPE. Early on, Petey and I found a box of N95 masks from his own nursing days. We gave them to her.
In intensive care, where the normal ratio is one or two patients per nurse, the new ratio is four patients for each nurse, due to drastic nursing shortages and also hiring freezes, because money is in even shorter supply than protective gear.
Until there is a steady supply of reliable tests, the true number of Covid19 positive patients won’t be known. But what is known is that there are countless untested patients admitted with unmistakable symptoms of the virus.
And before the news was talking about meat processing outbreaks, they were getting multiple admissions a day from the plants—many don’t speak English, had no contact information, and were too sick or frightened to give a medical history to staff.
Right now, my friend is not working with current coronavirus patients. She had worked four straight weeks without a break when her nurse manager made her rotate out. The masks we gave her are currently being used because even when working with patients who have recovered from COVID and are still very sick, there are not enough masks for employees.
And this devotion to caring for complete strangers at their own detriment is not new. The very last day Petey ever worked before his career-ending illness, he was so sick, that after his shift, they had to bring him off his unit in a wheelchair.
Everybody knows frontline medical workers. They’re the same kind that devoted their lives to their fellow man back when Petey was nursing, and it will be the same type of humans caring for us when Covid19 is just a horror story in our rearview.
So, give them some love. Buy them some PPE. Carry homemade dinner to their families. Make a batch of cupcakes for them to take to work. Or just stand six feet away, and say, “Thank you. I am so grateful to you for your devoted service.”
“To do what nobody else will do, in a way that nobody else can do, in spite of all we go through…that is what it is to be a nurse.” – Rawsi Williams, Nurse and Attorney.
Thanks for your time.
Contact debbie at d@bullcity.mom.
*This column was originally written in 2011. But The Kid’s birthday is next week, and this week I’ll be working on gathering the ingredients to cook the sauce this weekend. So, I thought it was appropriate to re-run. I hope you enjoy, and try making this wonderful, versatile sauce.
So, The Kid came home a few days ago, finished with six months of summer internship and first-time completely independent living. Petey and I filled the fridge with childhood favorites like Clementines and RC Cola and counted the hours.
I made a big pot of childhood’s favorite guilty pleasure; pink sauce.
Despite being the child of an Italian girl from Jersey, I have never liked red sauce (called Sunday gravy by my mom and her sisters). Consequently, I never made it. If Petey or The Kid wanted spaghetti and meatballs, they had to leave home, and get their fix on the streets.
Because I wanted to make some kind of spaghetti for the family, but mainly because I’m always looking for something thick and yummy to ladle onto carbs, I came up with this coral-colored, indulgent concoction.
I invented this recipe before I could really cook, and The Kid has loved it for years. This sauce is not for the faint of heart. It should be no more than an occasional treat if you want to fit into your jeans or look your doctor in the eye. Fat is flavor and can be the culinary equivalent of false eyelashes and push-up bra for the novice cook.
A big pot of this bubbling velvet starts the day before the finished dish. I make a batch of meatballs. My walnut-sized offerings are made with a mixture of ground veal and pork. Before the meat even comes out of the fridge, I make a panade. A panade is a bread ripped into tiny pieces and soaked until saturated.
My soak is egg, cream, shredded Parm, finely chopped garlic, chiffonade of basil, a splash of both olive oil and marsala wine, and salt and pepper. When the bread and the soak are one, I break the ground meat into small pieces and lightly mix, almost folding the mixture together. If you go nuts and mix your meatballs too much, they will be rubbery and dry.
I can’t fry a spherical meatball to save my life. So, I bake them, on a cooling rack over a cookie sheet, at 350 for twelve minutes, and a few minutes under the broiler flipped once. This gives them some color that translates to flavor in the finished product.
To get them uniform in size, I use a smallish cookie/portion scoop. I roll them into balls, sprinkle them with salt, pepper, and a little bit of freshly ground nutmeg. About eighteen or so go in the sauce, and any extra goes in the freezer for future use.
The sauce itself is pretty simple. I brown 10-12 Italian sausages that I’ve cut into one-inch slices. I remove them from the pot and carmelize about 1 1/2 pounds of sliced mushrooms, a small onion chopped, and five or six chopped cloves of garlic. Then I add back the sausage and a can of tomato paste. When the paste has cooked to a deep burgundy, I deglaze with a cup of marsala. When the wine is almost gone, I dump in a quart of chicken stock and 2 cups of cream. Into it I put a couple of tablespoons of sundried tomatoes, 1/2 cup shredded Parmesan, a tablespoon of sugar, 2 tablespoons of chopped basil, a drizzle of olive oil, and salt and pepper to taste.
When it comes to a boil, I thicken it slightly with a peanut butter-colored roux and add the meatballs. It then slowly cooks for hours on the stovetop.
When we’re ready to eat, I toss in another handful of chopped basil for fresh flavor.
I serve it on spaghetti, bake it into ziti, and use it on a ton of other things. The Kid is convinced it would be tasty on an old tennis shoe. Tonight, we’re having leftover sauce on rice, my personal favorite.
Thanks for your time.
Contact debbie at d@bullcity.mom.
bull city mom 