Tuesday, March 30, 2010.

As a career food service and hospitality worker, I’m always more than happy to answer customer questions about the foods they are interested in buying.  Most questions are related to meat and fish products, and that seems natural. If you were raised (like I was) on tuna casserole, sloppy joes and pork chops, the variety of products is something to be learned over a lifetime. I’ve learned to smile and politely answer most inquires (“What is veal?” “Brown sugar is better for me than regular, right?” “How is Diet Coke different than Coke Zero?” and my personal favorite “What kind of turtle is red snapper? Does it still have it’s snappers?”). There is a growing trend toward cashing in on the lack of food awareness in this country, and shoppers are paying for it. The groceries may be getting cheaper, but so is the quality. This morning, Lyndsey Layton published a story in the Washington Post about food fakery (Layton, FDA Pressured To Combat Rising ‘Food Fraud,’ Washington Post, 3/30/10).

I’m guilty of uninformed shopping recently and am often no better some days than someone running through the supermarket throwing items into my cart. When I gave up processed sugar products, I tried to substitute a little honey into foods. I got a sweet deal on an economy sized container of pure bee juice, only to find out the product was full of High Fructose Corn Syrup. This is one of the hazards of modern shopping. The corn industry would like you to know that there is nothing wrong with HFCS, but in the end it’s a cheap sweetener that doesn’t have a place in many of the foods containing it. Label reading and food education are the best ways to be a better informed shopper. Here are some of the things that I’m doing in my cooking life at home.

→→Read Everything. When you pick up a new product, check the back of the package. Fraudulent companies will mislead, but for the most part everything you need to know is in the ingredient list. Go beyond the label and arm yourself with the knowledge of how your foods are processed. Start with the classic, Harold McGee’s 1984 book On Food and Cooking. For less than $15 a revised edition of the famous Food Lover’s Companion (Sharon and Ron Herbst) can be obtained and will help greatly.

→→Know Your Cuts of Meat. The old Late Show gag is actually instructive. Find out the difference between a brisket and a butt and you’ll never have a bad barbecue again. Search for a chart with the primal and sub meat cuts online and then ask questions of those people in white behind the meat counter. That’s part of what they get paid for.  The same goes for poultry and a fish. A chicken is never just a chicken (but a hen, a fryer or a roaster). You wouldn’t believe what your shrimp and tilapia have been living on. Read, ask, investigate.

→→You Get What You Pay For. The success of many supermarket chains rests on those foods sold in the middle of the store. They’re cheaper, more plentiful and nutritionally suspect. Wheat crackers and breads are made with HFCS, molasses and white flour. The potato chips boasting of being potatoes, salt and sunflower oil are still not great for weight control and digestive health. There is absolutely nothing natural about 7-Up. A box of Banquet fried chicken keels may be comfort food, but for the same price quality fresh vegetables and seafood products can be  obtained. Eat what you like, but like what you eat.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/29/AR2010032903824.html?nav%3Dhcmodule⊂=AR

March 29, 2010

Here at the Spatula, there are two things that are held in high esteem: movies and “borrowed” ideas. In the spirit of honoring (ruining)  both, I thought it would be good to take a few minutes and blog about Hot Tub Time Machine. Apparently, HTTM made 13 million dollars this past weekend and wound up holding down the #3 spot at the box office. Maybe you’ve heard of this film, about John Cusack and friends getting hammered and waking up in a hot tub that has transported them back to 1986. Will I go see HTTM, the poor man’s Hangover? Probably not. I’d like to catch up on Gone With The Wind and the other movies I missed from the banner cinematic year, 1939. I’m not actually making fun of the hot tub movie, because there are certainly lamer ideas being bandied about by studio executives. A musical version of Last of The Mohicans can’t be far from production. A film about four friends arguing over climate change won’t be any lamer than HTTM, even if it’s titled “An Inconvenient Booth.” Keeping in mind the love of movies and cashing in ideas, I set about creating my own slate of feature films using appliances, plumbing fixtures along with tried and true movie standards. Here goes:

→Sex In The Refrigerator: A group of sharp, urbane women lead lives of savvy, style and sexy wit in a thriving metropolis only to find out that their whole universe is the result of mold in the General Electric of a larger sentient being. Will they save their ecosystem before it’s  defrosted and destroyed? No, in the end they just have random sex and blog about it.  While they shop for shoes, the fridge is unplugged…oh the humanity!

→Laundry Mat Ninja Assasin: Trained for one thing his whole life, our Ninja hero sets out to kill those who would throw other people’s garments on the floor at the local suds-orama.  Beware those who don’t separate their whites and colors, for out of the darkness he comes, Woolite in hand. Nothing more cinematic than death by detergent.

→Microwave Oven Christmas: Vince Vaughn plays against type in this heartbreaking tale in which nobody’s mother gets motor boated. Midway through the film, Jennifer Aniston shows up and our hero learns his calling as the greatest microwave cook ever. Only to die of radiation poisoning.

→The Soup Cans of Saint Mary’s: An inspiring tale based on the life of the first person to tie cans to the back of a car on a friend’s wedding day. His empire is nearly destroyed when the first person to tie old shoes to a bumper comes along. Thanks to love, therapy and Jennifer Aniston showing up midway through the movie, our hero goes on to invent the clinking “kiss each other” glasses wedding reception tradition. The final shot in the movie has him keeling over of a stroke  as the chicken dance plays on in the background. My heart will go on, but thank heavens this post is done.

March 28, 2010.

Certain rites of passage and milestones for mothers and fathers raising young children are momentous, universally celebrated occasions. My wife and I have passed through many of the grand events with our little girl. The first words read aloud, start of elementary school and the nervous (for everyone involved) sleepovers at friends homes all come to mind. Dads, I suspect,  place a certain amount of extra weight on cultural milestones in the lives of our kids. The day they adopt sports teams to root for is a coming of age for us (especially when they’re not our teams, or based on the pretty colored uniforms of some far away franchise). I am enjoying one of the oddly joyful rites at the moment. We are sharing Star Wars with our nearly 8 year old child. In the process, I’m learning something about myself and the era I was born into.

Lesson #1: No matter how much they ask, don’t tell them who Luke’s father is. The question came up 20 minutes into the film while Luke was eating husks and milk with Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru. Our daughter begged us for the identity of Luke Skywalker’s father. We held our ground. After all, did we not wait three years to find out this information ourselves? When The Empire Strikes Back came out, did it not shake the Star Wars story up completely? The idea of not telling is along the lines of not spoiling the child. She’s now watching the story, in part, to find the answer to the big question (and we’re answering “Look, it’s not Obi Wan Kenobi, it’s not C3PO. Stop asking).

Lesson #2: Don’t be ashamed of the ’70′s. I was born in 1973, an age of hideous color schemes, gas guzzling automobiles and music on a.m. radio that scarred me for life. Seriously, I hear The Hustle and  get hives. Watching Star Wars with a child of the ’00′s makes me almost not hate the 1970′s. Sure, there are some laughable moments. When the technicians fire up the Death Star to destroy Alderaan, it looks like they were using a mixing console. They might as well have been producing Off The Wall at the same time. All in all,  it’s pretty daggone cool as movies go. Star Wars is a big ’70′s consumerism allegory, at it’s heart. The rebels are all driving around in compact spaceships and here come these galactic bastards in Chrysler Imperials. The rebels are just trying to get by-hippy kids trading with each other, and the Empire is building a Death Star. Looking at the sets and stage craft now is like looking at Art Deco or WPA Murals. Art unique to it’s own era.

Lesson #3: Start With Episode IV. We made the decision to start watching the way we did, with the first installment. Not because it was best (I still hold Empire as the franchise high point), but because it just…was. Through the over-the-top dialogue and limited special effects, there remains that Joseph Campbell-ian story of the hero on a quest against overwhelming odds to save his people. This, I suppose is the effect of time and discussion. Just as The Godfather and it’s sequel were treasured, but the later installment missed the mark, so too with Star Wars. Alas, I’m in over my head. My daughter just wants a light saber to beat me with.

I’m not an inventive man. My renaissance of creativity started with attending culinary school and ended with successfully making toast. When asked as a small child what contribution I might offer the world as an adult, I answered that I’d like to create a sandwich that saves humanity. As an adult I realize the foolishness of my pre-adolescent thought patterns. Being a man who puts his trust in the Almighty, I no longer hold any hope that meat and cheese stuck between bread will do lasting good for the human race. Not even a sandwich with really great mustard. Teach a man to fish, he’ll eat fish. Teach him to make a Fillet ‘O Fish and he’ll end up with heart disease, bad breath and low dating expectations. Anyway, that was a long way of saying that my inventive nature stopped between toast and sandwiches (now I’m just hungry). Every once in a while, I get the strange visions given to a man who could change the world with inventions. Flashes of what could be. Not inventions like the flying car, but ideas like pasteurized, processed Gouda in an aerosol can. No cures for cancer, but more inventions like  holographic underwear.   Listed below are a few of the more time consuming inventions that I’d like to have the technical know-how to produce:

→The Universal Hysterics Translator For OnStar. One of the most annoying features about the radio advertising for General Motors’ OnStar global help system is that I can’t understand a word of what the stranded motorists are saying. Sure, the operators always pretend to understand, but they’re following what the satellite link is telling them. Motorist: “Weeeeeeooooooohhh.Wiiiiiioooooohh.”  Operator: “I see that you’re in a Tahoe on Third and Elm. Would you like me to dispatch EMS?  With a hysterics translator, the astute operator could have answered the call with: “I understand that your baby is on top of the Tahoe. There are two Starbucks locations withing 3.8 blocks of Third and Elm. Would you like me to upgrade your OnStar service to full mobile meth-lab coverage? Stop screaming.”

→The Wide Awake Nap For Men: Admit it. Being a good husband or boyfriend means sitting through New Moon at least once. It’s that fourth time that’s a killer. Wouldn’t you rather catch a few hours of quality napping while still being the attentive partner? With the invention of pharmaceuticals to induce “interested catatonia” you can do both.  I’d love to invent the drug that induces wakeful functioning sleep and also allows the user to carry on a conversation. C’mon. It’s not like men contribute a whole lot anyway.

→The American Idol Pitch Correcting Pumpkin Thrower: Are you tired of sad little contestants on Idol not being able to stay in pitch? All the correction software in the world isn’t going to train these future Ramada Inn Sunday Night Guest Vocalists. No, what they need is solid reinforcement. I thought of an auto tuner connected to a hypergolic flame thrower, but violence never solves singing problems. Punishment is just the thing to keep those Idol voices in check. When pitch wavers and goes awry, the computer program senses this and lets loose a catapult armed with 18 pound beauties, launched at our would be recording artists. Also good for rambling bloggers. Onward and…ouch.

I recently gave up my lifelong stand on “the finger.” As I’ve noted over the months of writing this blog, I formerly loooved giving people the bird, so much as to once refer to the finger as “the elegant weapon of the modern Jedi” (Re-Thinking The Finger, 9/22/09). I now believe, for many reasons, that I’ve been wrong and there isn’t anything cool or cerebral about flipping people off. Doing it would just be adding to the bonfire of rudeness and incivility that clouds  modern life with sooty hatred. The last thing the world needs is one more uninformed hate symbol and I’m no longer taking charge of providing it.

“It starts when your always afraid.” That line was penned by Stephen Stills more than 40 years ago in a song called “For What It’s Worth” by his group Buffalo Springfield. An out of date, out of it’s time tune to be sure, but it may still have the faintest spark of relevance. This past weekend’s health care reconciliation bill debate made the old saw ring true, as much as it did during the Vietnam War era.  “Paranoia Strikes Deep.” We’ve hit the dirty path on which it’s become okay to call an elected official by a racial or sexually biased slur. The right to assemble is now also the right to belittle and besmirch. The right exists, but is it at all right? The question no longer relates to health care passage at all, or whether one is a liberal or conservative. The question is now: can any topic of national interest be discussed without one side or the other being labeled fascist, Nazi, socialist, baby killer, or any number of evil, arcane racial and sexual epitaphs? The answer is no, at least for the time being.

“Hooray For Our Side.” The whole shameful display of arrogance and ignorance during long health reform debate is symptomatic of a nation given to self interest and short term thinking. From the larger portrait of national discourse there’s been a trickle down of misunderstanding and mistrust onto the snapshot of middle America. I go back to my well worn standard here, but it’s failure of imagination as a people. It’s easier for us to slander someone than to study their position. We may be the country that pioneered air travel, space flight, advanced surgical techniques and micro processing technology, but we’ve hit an impasse regarding interpersonal communication that may well slow and hinder that kind of development. We may no longer possess the imagination to look past our own differences and accomplish the great feats required of us.

Vile behavior in all walks of American life won’t stop with the passage of the  health reform reconciliation bill , or even the election of a new Congress and (eventually) President. We’ll find new ways to mistreat each other. Well, I shouldn’t be so quick to say “we.” I’ve given up my feeble vices and started to look at other people as…people.  Onward and (hopefully) upward.

With the arrival of the first calender day of Spring, I stuck my head from the Hobbit hole and decided it was time to get back to the running life. After a year of not being able to do much more than walk the path and step aside for the warriors, I know instinctively that it’s time to put up some miles. Over the winter I lost some weight and most of the migraines. The slightly monastic life has taken hold. With that, I purchased some adequate kicks (New Balance Four-20′s, or what we used to call “stress fracture shoes”) and promptly hopped up and down in fresh mud with them. With my newly dirtied runners, I scoped out my favorite route and got ready to run tomorrow afternoon. You might shrug, but for me just getting back out is a sort of victory. Sometimes there is nothing better than being able to gauge the change in my breathing over a matter of days, the thrill of gaining lung capacity. There are days when I want nothing more than to hear the sound of my own pulse in my head and the rushing of blood.

Four years ago, I started to take 1/2 mile jogs around the neighborhood. Within six months I was doing four and five miles down around Lake Michigan, taking in the scenery around Silver Beach and the local bluff. Maybe it’s because I live in a small town, but there was an overtly obvious quality to my daily travels. The kids from the downtown Catholic high school would shout greetings when I passed and there came the inevitable slowdowns to speak of goals and p.r.’s. By the time I reached 8 miles at a time, conversation at dinners with friends inevitably turned to “Hey, I honked at you the other day on the road. What were you doing way out there?” Somehow, in the whirl of sprint intervals, and making maps of favorite routes in my journal, I lost focus on just plain getting out and kicking some pavement. So, I quit. And started over again.

I took to running in an out of the way park several miles from home. The mile path is 2/3 paved and 1/3 washboard packed dirt. There is also a 1.5 mile trail, which is beyond fun for me. By mid-summer, I have to traverse logs on the trail and navigate swampy spots. The dirt road isn’t much better, and by July is harder than the concrete. The mesquitos are unlike anything I’ve seen since running on Parris Island. Which is where I started running in the first place.

At 23 I joined the Marines. Over the hill and 40 pounds too heavy. The condition for shipping off to boot camp was that I be able to run 2 miles. So, every night at 11:00 p.m. I’d do laps around the 5 acres I lived on. ESPN used to repeat the NFL films about Johnny Unitas, and for some reason I’d watch his story, drink a full pot of coffee and go put in road work. Over the hills I’d go in the dark, sometimes with the deer at my side. It didn’t matter that I’d never run more than a few feet in my life. There was beauty and precision in God’s molding the body one lap at a time. When I blew my knee out on Parris Island, the flight surgeons asked if I’d been running daily at home. The theory was that the drop in daily miles made our limbs susceptible to damage. As soon as the knee was well I went right back to running. Some things in life just burn until you put the fire out.  So, back to the park I go tomorrow. Even if for a few steps. Onward and Upward.

3/17/10

Spoilers within.

The last decade of television programming has all been a dream. Viewers around the country will wake up one evening soon  and find all of the loose ends that have been  hanging from their favorite shows neatly tied up. Explanations will be forthcoming and we’ll rest assured that each and every character has continued on into re-run perpetuity with all of their back stories sorted out. Well, at least I can hope that’s what will happen, although I know deep down that nothing of the sort will take place. Seinfeld, The Sopranos, The X-Files all have shown us dismal finales that don’t answer much of anything and leave us with a mixed bag of feelings toward once beloved programs. Will Lost follow suit? Signs point to…maybe.

Lost has filled it’s final season with a great big Easter egg hunt in which viewers are treated to small clues toward the finale and visits by departed cast members. Now, if you haven’t watched Lost at all up to this point, let me fill you in. There was this plane crash and then….Just kidding. I could write a Lost blog (one of thousands) and still never be able to explain this phenomenally weird TV series. Watch the previous seasons and e-mail me (sometime in September) with thoughts. Last nights big Easter eggs were the return of Charlotte Lewis and the kinder, gentler James Sawyer/LaFleur Ford. We are now set up a little better than last week for the final eight episodes of Lost. Sawyer is pitting Smokey and Widmore against each other in a battle reminiscent of Survivor. What makes Lost so confoundingly strange is the way the producers have managed to lob more questions at us with two months to go than real answers. I find myself going back several weeks. Why did Keamy have Jin in the meat locker? What’s the significance of the watch? Is Benjamin Linus really so meek? Why is he acting like Wormtail to Locke’s Screwtape?  How does LA reality connect to Island reality? Did alternate Sawyer find alternate Anthony Cooper in Sydney, or is Tony stuck in 1977 driving Squad 51? Who is infected among the Oceanic Six? Will Claire ever clean up and ditch the Courtney Love look?  I fear no answers are coming.

There are as many ideas about Lost as there are methods for cooking eggs. Here are my prevailing theories:

→Jorge Garcia will replace Jennifer Love Hewitt on the CBS series The Ghost Whisperer.

→Jacob was never alive in the first place and will put the smack down on Smokey.

→Juliet was right when she died and the bomb did “work.” They’re all dead in the LA reality and on the island, trapped in TV purgatory.

→Ben is still in charge, despite the humility engendered by Smoke Monster Alex. Richardus Alpert will give up guyliner in the next episode.

→Sawyer will sleep with every female member of the cast, including Stewardess Cindy from the temple.

→Despite Sun’s new level of hotness, her island persona will reunite with Jin. Her LA persona will speak English and divorce freezer Jin.

3/15/10

One of the themes of the Spatula blog has been reporting the joys of my daughter’s first grade homework assignments. The very idea of even having first grade homework is a little foreign to me. After all, I really wasn’t assigned much of anything at that age. I was responsible for making it the mile and a half to school and returning (although my parents were kind of vague on that part) each day. Most days I’d wind up hanging around the Mighty Midget liquor market, scoping out Wacky Packages, and then hightail through the adjacent cemetery to make it to school on time. Homework would have been a lot to ask. Her current assignment involves writing down how school and life are different than they were thirty years ago (when I was supposed to be in school and not at the Mighty Midget). The differences are striking. For starters, if my parents had been able to locate me with global positioning, there wouldn’t have been a running phone dialogue between my elementary school principal, the convenience store clerks and themselves.

I was fascinated today by the lead story in the tech section of the New York Times. Apparently, there are a growing number of people who want to be found. More precisely, monitored and tracked.  Jenna Wortham has a feature story called Telling Friends Where You Are (Or Not). Wortham writes about the emergence of “checking in” at this past week’s South By Southwest conference in Austin, Texas.  Beyond Twitter (and way beyond Facebook, which our seven year old told us was “so last year”) is the trend toward constant positional updating to a network of friends, via services like Foursquare. Checking in is a way of telling everyone exactly where you are at all times. In many ways it promotes a sense of security. For example, the way many people first heard about Facebook was in 2007 during the violent rampage on the Virginia Tech campus. Now, if a system like Foursquare had been popular, that would have just added another level of “I’m okay” reassurance to a horrendous situation. Call it the OnStar revolution. You never travel alone in this day and age.

I may invoke my Grandmother’s technology cut off on this one. Grandma told me once that she was halting the march of future information convenience in her home with the VCR. She didn’t want to hear about personal computers or e-mail. The CD player was too much. Nope, the VCR would tape the Young and The Restless and that was a good place to stop. I like to still believe there are wide open spaces on this planet where I can shuffle off to in peace. As much as I love seeing electronic progress, there is still a six year old in me that just wants to schlumph over to the Midget and hang around for a little while without telling anyone. Then again,  I blog my every thought and sneeze. Who am I kidding?

It’s a pretty safe bet to assume that I’ll never meet Mr. James Crudup of Forest, Mississippi. That’s alright. I’ve already learned something.  Jimmy Crudup pioneered surgical techniques and educated the men and women who would use them from his lab at the University of Michigan. Not only did Mr. Crudup teach generations of future surgeons, but he was a forerunner in the humane treatment of laboratory animals. His job before coming to U of M? He was driving a truck for the Clipert Brick Company, which operated during the 1950′s out of Inkster, Michigan. Mr. Crudup needed a job in 1959 and U of M needed someone to run the newly established animal research lab. With a high school education and a lot of hours of dedication, Crudup built up the research lab, but also taught himself the principles and techniques needed to perform complex surgery. By reading medical school surgical texts and observing surgery in action, Jimmy Crudup built a unique career as not only a lab researcher but mentor and educator to three decades of surgeons. He retired to Mississippi in 1989 and now looks after his neighbors and fixes the things in life that need repair. His name appears on numerous published studies and the University honors it’s most accomplished chief surgical residents with an award bearing James Crudup’s name and likeness. All of that after going from truck driver to having to quickly learn the names of the basic surgical instruments. Could you or I do that? A question for the ages, that points toward Mr. Crudup’s character, work ethic and intuitiveness. After seeing a Bob Dotson MSNBC feature on Crudup and reading his story, I began thinking of the way we look at mentors, silently thanking those who schooled me, and looking toward what I can do for others with the gifts God has bestowed upon me.

When I graduated from culinary school, I was invincible. For several minutes, in fact. I suppose many people feel that way after college. Walking into a first kitchen (and second and third), I learned the time honored lesson: make friends with the dish washers. Seriously. Nobody knows more about the kitchen than the salty dishdogs behind the pot sink. Learn their language, watch how they hold a knife when someone calls in sick and they’re pressed into service as prep cooks. It took me a long time to get this, because I was hung up on my rinky-dink Le Cordon Bleu diploma hanging on the wall at home. I might have thrown it into the drawer, because people teach cooks, not diplomas. I learned from the day prep cooks and dishers that it doesn’t matter who you are, life provides great teachers in plain clothes. Jimmy Crudup wasn’t in my industry, but the lesson persists: Learn, Create, Work, Mentor, Give.

I have been committed for the past several years to lending an ear to younger employees and giving unsolicited wisdom that comes from working with food (off and on) since I was 11 years old. I no longer worry about the success part. It’s all about the quality of work and wisdom, using the gifts I’ve been given.

http://www.medicineatmichigan.org/magazine/2008/spring/genius/

This is a trailer for what could be the greatest movie of all time (Thanks to Mother Jones/MoJo Blogs):