My lunches are minimal, as I can prove by this dish. I load up on the other two meals, and this is a chance to eat healthy. However, I still like a sauce that has a good amount of fat in it.
Sweet Sour Hot Dipping Sauce
1/3 cup Mayonnaise
1 tablespoon whole grain Mustard
1 tablespoon Honey
1 teaspoon white wine Vinegar
Pinch of Salt
Sriracha, or other hot sauce, to taste
You can up the quantities as much as you like. I make my own mustard, and should also make my own mayo, as I finally learned how. Creole mustard would be an excellent substitute for homemade, though the basic recipe for making it is readily available. This is also a choose your own veg deal.
MJ has been known to yell “vegetarian” at me when she sees this spread. Not likely–I’m the one who grinds the meat, and makes the burgers.
I fell in love with gas stoves with our first one, which we named “Bertha,” because of the fact that she was probably too big to be moved out of the house we bought. This was in the wild lands of southern Alabama, in Pike county, which had a total population of 14,000 people (many of them students at the University where I worked,) and a literacy rate of fifty percent. In a county like that, cooking ranked as the top form of entertainment.
This stove was made by Home Comfort, and it had two ovens, and a warming chamber. One oven was propane, the other wood fired–not a combo we wanted. Therefore, cogito ergo sum, we never used the wood fired oven. The stove itself sucked down propane like nobody’s business. We had to order propane right after we moved in, and the propane delivery guy was a typical character who could have come out of a Walker Percy novel. He handed us his business card, and his professional name was–Slim Dicks.
Recently, having been rusticated for a year now, my chief form of entertainment has been reading the cooking “experts” on the interwebs. Their latest talking point is about how bad gas stoves are for the environment, and that we should all switch to sweet thing electric stoves. We learned in Physic 102 that the least efficient thing you could do with electricity was generate heat. Then there is this, from al.com:
“Alabama Power’s James H. Miller Jr. plant in Jefferson County is once again the largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the country, according to an environmental policy non-profit organization.
According to the report, the Miller plant produced nearly 19 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions in 2020 – equivalent to more than half of the electricity generated by all of the power plants in California.”
Have a nice warm summer. Welcome to the real coal burning world.
Bertha up Close
Our current gas stove, strangely enough, was made in a Unionized factory right across the river from where Bertha was made. It’s a Premier Pro, and we bought it for two reasons: It was Union made, and most importantly, can run completely without electricity. Not only does Alabama Power pollute like nobody’s business, they also can’t be relied on to keep the lights on.
Bertha Jr, with the same Tea Kettle as Bertha Sr
This is a fine piece of equipment–A simmering burner, and three flame throwers. The oven will hit almost 600 degrees–I burned out the clock above the top on it, experimenting. We have used the cooktop so much we burned out three of the four piezo lighters. Melanie Jane found the following ingenious gadget on the interwebs. I think I like it more than the piezo lighters.
Come on Baby, Light my Fire
That’s an Arc lighter, that works off of a USB charged battery, so I can recharge it with one of my solar generators. Alabama Power charges a fee to people who admit to having solar panels attached to their house (seriously), so I have this to say about that–my panels are not attached to my house. However, the top question on Amazon about this arc lighter is–can I light a bowl with this?
Young people these days. You light a bowl with a Zippo lighter. Everybody knows that. While I don’t smoke, I inhaled enough second hand Cannabis smoke at the honors dorm at UA to give me lung cancer. Which brings me to the best prank I have ever witnessed.
My best friend was 100% Hungarian, as his parents were both born in Hungary, in Budapest. I asked George if they were born in Buda or Pest, and he was amazed that I knew it was originally two cities, separated by the blue Danube. I told him I just knew stuff.
At any rate, George’s problem was that he was 6′ 7″ tall, and our dorm had been a women’s dorm, and the doorways were only 6′ 6″ tall. It was a problem for his forehead.
George could pull some pranks off with perfection. He showed up one day with a huge bag of seeds, which he claimed he found in his dorm room closet. Not likely, as it was all cannabis seeds.
He had a plan–we were right behind the President’s mansion, which was one of the I think four structures that survived the Civil War (UA is almost as old as UVA, the first US public University). The rest of the campus was burned down by Union troops, who started by burning the Library. That’s always the best way to restore trust in Democracy, with a good book burning.
At any rate, he decided to sow all the weed seed around the President’s mansion, and our President happened to have been a member of Tricky Dick’s presidential cabinet. I offered to help, but he insisted that it was a one man op.
A month later, the largest group of gardeners I had ever seen came in for a massive weeding job. It took them days to get rid of all the weed plants. We laughed the whole time.
George went on to Columbia Law, and became editor of their Law Review. I went to Illinois, and both my schools have a chance at the NCAA basketball title this year. Fight, Illini, and Roll, Tide, Roll! Hopefully, we will meet in the title game.
I probably gained my PhD by telling a story about catfish. This is a little convoluted, but it involves an organic farmer, an Auburn student, my dissertation director, who had not allowed any of her students to graduate in 23 years, and a galvanized tub full of catfish. I really like a good fried catfish.
So we found ourselves in central Illinois, at the beautiful University of Illinois, where we were surrounded by literally hundreds of thousands of acres of some of the finest farmland in the world. It really is farm heaven. UI paid me ten grand to go there, with a University fellowship, so there is that also. When MJ went to the financial aid office, they looked at her transcript, and said, “How many scholarships do you want?” She graduated Phi Beta Kappa.
My fellow grad students thought I was insane when I said I was asking Dean —- to be my Dissertation director. She was infamous for her denying student’s dissertations, and degrees. I just said that nothing can stop a charming Southern farm boy. It didn’t hurt that she was the general editor of The Norton Anthology of American Literature, which is something of a good thing to have on your CV..
At any rate, there was a good deal of tension between us, as I am something of a stubborn farm boy as well. I strategically decided to let her make all the big decisions about my dissertation, while I insisted on making the ones that actually mattered. Then I met the organic farmer, an old hippy, at the Urbana Farmer’s Market.
He was the coolest dude I had ever seen. He had the good fortune to inherit an enormous farm right out side of Urbana, and chose to turn the whole thing organic. His vegetables were some of the best I had ever eaten. We became friends as soon as he found out I had grown up on a farm. Then his brother came back for the summer, from Auburn U. in Alabama. Enter the catfish.
I asked the old hippy why his brother had gone to Auburn, instead of UI or Cornell, which are probably the best Ag schools in the country, and he said that he had gone there to study aquaculture. He wanted to introduce catfish farming to Illinois. I did my best to not laugh.
I didn’t know that the joke was going to be on me. One Saturday, right after the brother came back from Auburn, I found that they had a giant galvanized tub full of catfish–live catfish. Once again, I tried not to laugh, but the old hippy said he and his brother had to go do something, and left me to run the booth, and deal with the locals, as I had sold produce since the age of six. He told me to push the catfish.
The punters were fascinated by the tub of catfish, but none were ever going to buy any. One finally asked me:
Punter: “What are those?”
Me: “Catfish”
Punter: “What do you do with them?”
Me: “You could make them pets, but most people fry them and eat them.”
Punter: “How do you do that? Do you fry them whole?”
Me: “Well, you normally clean them, and then fry them.”
By now a crowd had assembled, to hear this combination interrogation/ lecture.
Punter: “How do you clean them?”
Me: “The best way is to cut through their spine right behind the head, and kill them. Then you nail them to a wall, like a barn wall, through the head, and skin them. You don’t scale them, you skin them with a pair of pliers. Don’t forget to take out the guts first.” The whole crowd went “ewwwww.”
Punter: “Can you just nail them to the barn while they are still alive?”
Me: “You can, but they’ll grunt at you while you’re doing it.” The crowd thought that was really funny.
We all had a good laugh, and as expected, nobody bought a live catfish.
Then I turned around, and there was my Dissertation Director, in her PJ’s, robe. and fuzzy slippers. She lived across the street from the farmer’s market. She had obviously heard my entire lecture, as she had an abject look of horror in her eyes. She had to be thinking, what kind of barbarian have they sent me? A guy who nails fish to a wall?
I just smiled at her, and kept selling veg.
After that, things were different. She took my side during the preliminary exams, after one of the members turned out to be a total hole. She also took my side during my dissertation defense after another prof questioned my main tenet. So after 25 years, she finally allowed someone to graduate.
The yearly competition for the biggest dope stick in a Gulf coast state is always fierce.The perennial favorite is Florida Man, like the one who drowned a couple of weeks ago looking for a golf ball. A tie for second place is who can be dumber–Florida Woman or Texas Politician. Texas is going for the gold this year.
I am giving the early lead to a newcomer, Alabama Woman. Stealing livestock is a felony in the state, and we are an agricultural state ( I already have artichokes and tomato seeds germinated). Said woman saw an adorable pet kid in a yard, and decided to steal it. This is where keeping it real goes wrong.
After getting home with it, and showing it to her little daughter, she decided it wasn’t cute enough. It needed to be blue, she thought, and so dyed half of it blue. Second felony–cruelty to animals. No goat wants to have the blues.
This was on our Gulf coast, Baldwin county, and the spring break insanity had not even started at that time. Why not get ahead of the competition? I hope the Stones write a new song about this. I have the first two lines of it, gratis.
“I see the White Goat and I want to Dye it Blue,
I See the Jail Door and I Want to Walk on Through.”
Mick can send me just a fraction of the royalties.
US vs Germany again, but in this case it is all good. The two old guys on the right are Stanley, while “die grünen” or the greens, on the left are Kunz. They all required a little tune up to work properly, but they are cutting machines now.
The double cutter spokeshave is the old Stanley Number 60, which has a concave and flat sole. It can be fiddly to adjust, but cuts fine. The top one is my favorite, the flat sole Number 54 Adjustable Mouth Spokeshave. It will cut shavings that are from thick to see through, and I paid a whopping two bucks for it.
The bottom two on the left are all-arounders. The small is the Kunz Light Flat Spokeshave, which means it has a flat sole. It’s great for spoon work. The obviously concave shave makes anything from spoon and spatula handles, to chair rungs and legs.
The top two are more specialized. The second from the top is the round spokeshave number 151R, a near exact copy of the same models made by Stanley and Record. The most specialized, the Number 65, also has a round sole, but is designed to make chamfers–hence the two adjustable fences. I’ve only had it for a couple of months, but it looks very promising.
The tune up is simple, get the blades as sharp as possible, and file flat the beds that they sit on. After that, learning to use them is the same way you get to Carnegie Hall–practice, practice.
Southern Fusion Cooking 