Kodak Moment

No, this is not my cats' idea of dressing up as illegal immigrants in a car trunk for Halloween. Nor is it a nostalgic attempt to relive their pre-birth experience. You see, this morning was the annual "bring Willie and Lilly to the vet" ordeal.

It's amazing how two college educated adults can spend days planning to out-think two animals with brains the size of a walnut, and only partially succeed. Regardless of what other steps we take, and regardless of the fact that they only see the carriers once a year, at first glimpse of them the cats go into evasive maneuvers that would make a fighter jet pilot envious. (Contrast this to their daddy, who has people in his office that he's seen daily for years and whose names he still can't remember.)

We know to close off all the best escape routes upstairs. (If they get under a bed you might as well cancel the vet appointment.) I thought I'd be cool and leave only the bathroom door open, since it's a dead end and if they ran there their furry little butts would be mine.) Unfortunately, they figured that out a lot faster than I did. Consistent with their personalities, Willie tried to muscle his way out of the problem, and it didn't take very long at all before he was in his carrier. Lilly may be smaller than Willie, but it seems that the human world is not the only one in which girls are smarter than boys.

Lilly didn't outrun me. She out-thought me. After nearly an hour of searching there was no sign of her. I was actually getting worried; we'll never know for sure, but I strongly suspect it was trying to shimmy out of a too-tight spot that led to Skids' life-ending injury a little over two years ago. Then I thought of one more place to look. We have a large sideboard cabinet that comes all the way down to the floor in the front, but that has a small opening in the back; sure enough, I turned the flashlight there and a little pink nose was staring back at me. It meant moving the side-board and several other pieces of furniture, but after a sword dance that included chasing, hissing (by both of us) and other elements of a good western's barroom brawl, eventually she was cornered on the stairs and tried to run past me. Game over.

Frustrated and sweaty, I told my wife I'd caught them both, and cautioned her that if ever I was looking for her, she was never to hide under the furniture. Having put up with this kind of thing nearly every day for the past 27 years, she agreed and went back to watching the weekend edition of the Today Show.

Back to the photo. We finally got to the vet and I pried Willie from his carrier - first you can't get them in, then you can't get them out. I opened the door of Lilly's to get her and before I could stop him Willie scooted past me and into it. There were now two cats - one a little over 13 pounds, the other a little over nine pounds - packed into a carrier that was originally purchased for my previous 5 and a half pound cat. I think I saw this in a Marx Brothers movie once.




I Like Left-Overs But...
It's after 6:00 pm and I've had exactly three trick-or-treaters. (Based on previous years' turnouts, I'm prepared for 200.) If things don't pick up, this week at work I'll be brown bagging Sugar Daddy sandwiches with a side of Swedish Fish.

Back in the Saddle

This past week was my second back at work after four or five weeks - I don't even remember anymore - on Family Medical Leave. It felt good to get back. Everything was right where I left it (which is mostly a good thing, but not entirely), no major disasters on my projects, my building pass still worked, and so far I've still got that rested-and-ready feeling. Structure, like anything else, is good if kept in moderation.

We're still fitting physical therapy into the schedule. If it's ok with some insurance company clerks who've never met my wife and whose medical background consists of putting a band-aid on their Winnie the Pooh doll's boo-boo at the age of four, we'll continue for the next couple of weeks. Progress is slower than my wife would like, but it's there. She's back to feeding the cats (so they don't have to like me any more if they don't want to), and doing most of the cooking again. (I did get to make a decent beef goulash with spaetzle and ginger-glazed carrots last night. At least I think that's what spaetzle is supposed to taste like.)

That ginger-glazed carrot recipe is interesting. It's from Alton Brown on www.foodnetwork.com, and uses ginger ale as the main element for the glaze. (It does benefit from an extra pinch of ginger, but the ginger ale gives it a better flavor than you might expect.) I never envisioned myself using ginger ale as an ingredient, but when you've got hungry mouths to feed you learn to relax certain standards. I've found this to be particularly true when one of the hungry mouths is your own. I draw the line at ketchup-as-ingredient, though. At least for now.

One final food note: this past week a chef originally from Jersey City (and a graduate of the county-run culinary school where I've gotten to take some weekend adult-ed classes) beat Morimoto on Iron Chef America. Most significantly, despite his Jersey City/Hudson County background, he appears to have won without any payoffs, threats or back-room deals. There's hope for us yet.

Why Bees Are Disappearing

The other day I was in the yard watching three bees working my basil plant. Basil is mostly leafy, of course, but if you let it overgrow a bit the branches grow small, pretty white flowers. The bees were sticking their faces into the flowers, doing whatever it is they do, and moving on to the next flower. A moment later another bee would come to the same flower, stick his face in, and do the same thing. Then the third. It got me thinking: is that sanitary? What if one of those bees has a cold? Maybe if we had some teeny-tiny surgical masks...

With Friends Like These...

It amazes me to think back at how hard it used to be to turn down Friend Requests on Facebook. It's a networking site, for goodness sake. Just because someone doesn't know me or any of the other 1500 friends in their friend list, or their profiles are offensive (defined here as expressing views different from mine) or not even in English, is no reason to risk offending them. But like learning to throw paper junkmail out unopened, it's something that gets easier every time you do it, and you'll get to wondering why it was ever hard in the first place. Enough requests to play Mafia Wars will do that.

I did make a Facebook profile in connection with this journal, and if you are of a mind to take a look, it's found under the e-mail address, totallymentalben@ymail.com, with the name T.M. Ben. And I promise I won't turn down your Friend Request.

Joe Sixpack's Country Fried Late Night Comedian Make-Over

I won't dwell on it, because it ultimately does come down to a private matter between a man and his wife, but let me say this: I'm REALLY glad I'm not David Letterman right now.

That said, a few things to share:

Make THIS Over
Been getting to see daytime tv shows I (mercifully) don't normally get to watch. Maybe it's like when everything tastes salty because you're not used to eating salt, or maybe it's just a guy thing, but it seems as if every program during the day is making some middle-aged woman over. I have no problem with self-improvement, finding a new hairstyle that is more flattering than your current one, etc. Those are normal things, even healthy ones. What I'm seeing on a daily basis, though, is more like a parade of full-grown women who believe in their esteem-deprived hearts that some expert-to-the-stars can provide a new hair cut, make-up or style of dress that will validate their lives with meaning and purpose, and who have the encouragement of a cheering studio audience to prove it. One particularly henious example (won't mention the show, but the host normally does things that are yum-o) had women telling a stylist what "star" they admired, and the stylist made them over in that celebrity's own style. Remember, these aren't 14 year old girls showing up at a Mylie Cyrus concert dressed like Hannah Montana. These are grown women who have families, jobs, and the right, though perhaps not the stability, to vote.

It comes down to one of my favorite quotes, years old but completely timeless, from the funny and brilliant Brett Butler: "If you wait till you're rich and famous to be happy, you're screwed."

You Betcha!
Hard as it is to believe, there is finally something Sarah Palin and I agree on: it would be a great thing for this country if Levi Johnston would just go away, never to be seen or heard from again. It's not an easy thing to emerge as a bigger sleaze (and one less qualified for fatherhood) than Jon Gosselin, but despite the odds Johnston has managed it.

This Isn't a Cooking Blog, But...
For some reason, the other day I found myself wanting some Chicken Fried Steak.

For readers outside of the U.S. (and probably some American readers too), Chicken Fried Steak - also known as Country Fried Steak - is one of the truly great comfort foods of the south. It may be described as follows:

• a steak that has been "tenderized" (a genteel culinary term for having the living daylights beaten out of it by a stressed cook wielding a spiked hammer that looks like something out of a horror movie or fetish shop) then dredged, breaded and fried in the style of fried chicken, and finally smothered in gravy; and
  
• an irresistably delicious meal whose fat and salt content will eventually kill you.

The catch, of course, is that having cholesterol issues, I don't fry. (Truth be told, I've made three or four attempts at frying things. In a cosmic effort to keep me from eating fried food, all failed miserably. Frying is a lot harder than it looks.) My desire for Chicken Fried Steak being strong, however, I set out to find a healthier, "oven-fried" version.

First I needed a base recipe from which to work; since I was looking for a southern dish whose fat and salt content will eventually kill you, I knew to check Paula Deen's recipes first. Taking her fried recipe as a starting point, I changed it to use the oven-frying methods I've been putting together from various sources and experience. I'm proud to present the result below. It came out right the first time, and that's something of a rarity for me.

When serving, make frequent use of "y'all" (a southern form of the more familiar New York "youse") and the adjective, "big ol' ".

Enjoy!

Country Over-Fried Steak
Yield: 4 servings

Ingredients

4 – 4 oz. tenderized thin cut steaks

¾ cup Panko

¼ tsp fresh ground pepper

Seasoning Mix: 1/2 tsp salt, 1/8 tsp fresh-ground pepper, 1/8 tsp garlic powder

1 cup buttermilk

3 - 4 cups beef gravy

½ bunch green onions, or ½ medium yellow onion, sliced for topping

Method

• Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Place baking sheet in oven to preheat.
• Combine Panko and ¼ tsp black pepper in a 1 gallon zip-lock bag.
• Combine seasoning mix ingredients and season both sides of the steaks. Dredge each steak in the buttermilk, shake off excess, and coat with Panko, pressing crumbs in. Let coated steaks rest in refrigerator for at least 15 minutes
• When steaks have finished resting, spray preheated baking sheet with cooking spray. Place steaks on the baking sheet and spray tops lightly. Bake until coating is golden brown and crispy, about 20 - 25 minutes, turning half-way.
• While steaks are baking, prepare gravy using any preferred recipe. When gravy is ready, add the steaks and bring to a boil over medium-high heat.
• Reduce the heat to low, put onions on top, cover and simmer for 30 minutes.
• Serve with mashed potatoes, smothering both with gravy.
  

The Circadian-Free Life

A couple of weeks into my family leave, the non-schedule schedule has gotten way too comfortable. It isn't so much that the clock no longer is in charge of my life. It's that nothing else has stepped into the power vacuum. I suppose it can be said I feel young again if by "young" is meant "infant with his days and nights mixed up." Or, worse, a college student.

Physically the past couple of weeks haven't been overly taxing. I have to say there's not a lot of mental down-time, though. It's like a chess game where every move is planned three moves in advance. My respect for stay-at-home moms is greater than ever.

Of course, I'm scheduled to be returning to work in a couple more weeks, so it's important to stay grounded as much as can be managed. Through e-mails and phone messages I've been able to keep up with the major issues at my office. I've continued to play an active role in heading off problems and, when necessary, generating effective solutions decisively. For example, just this past Friday there was an e-mail asking for recipes for the office fund-raising cookbook, and I was able to send several.

A few observations at the mid-point of my family leave:

• It may be just my imagination, but I swear the cats like me better now that I'm the one feeding them. I guess my usual cat-job - cleaning the litter box - just isn't as high on the cats-appreciate-it list.
• I don't care if it does make my wife laugh at me - there's a right way and a wrong way to make a tuna salad sandwich and, dammit, I'm going to look up a recipe for it.
• A major discovery: making double portions means not having to cook a meal from scratch the next night. Remember, you read it here first.

Cooking remains an active focus. So far the winner of the truly strange recipe contest comes from www.foodnetwork.com, where the Neeleys posted a shrimp corn-dog. (It's basically a hot dog made of a shrimp mixture, instead of the meat by-products, insect parts, and heaven only knows what else mixture regular hot dogs are made of. You batter it and process as a corn-dog and, voila!) Yes, some of the ingredients are a little expensive, but the look on people's faces when you tell them you've made a shrimp hot dog? Priceless.

Tonight I begin my Yom Kippur fast. Not to worry, though. Making food for others when you're fasting - my wife is not Jewish and, despite their fondness for whitefish flavor Friskies, neither are Willie and Lilly - is just something you get used to.

So You Think You Can Dance

While canoodling on Youtube the other night, I came across the clip embedded below. It's from Stormy Weather. Cab Calloway and his orchestra performing Jumpin' Jive is worth seeing on its own merits. But it's the performance by the Nicholas Brothers about 1:36 into the clip that, I'm warning you, may blow out the circuitry on your computers. It is, simply, astonishing. This is about a five minute clip, and if you give it a look I'm certain you'll be very glad you did.

While on the subject of dancing, Dancing with the Stars is normally light fun, the only reality show I like to watch. But that gorgeously human moment last week when Kelly Osborne ran to Ozzy and Sharon after she finished transcended the show, celebrity, and anything else superficial. The famously outrageous and occasionally bizarre rock couple were exposed as actually being a wonderfully ordinary set of loving, proud parents. It took a while, but a little reality finally made its way onto a reality show.




One Day at a Time, Indeed

Waking up in a drug-induced haze to find you've been sleeping with someone who looked like Papa John Philips would be a traumatic experience even if he weren't your father, and so daughter MacKenzie is a good example of how wrong it so often is to speak of celebrity children as being privileged. As often as not, such kids are well-financed but otherwise unprepared for the rigors of navigating life once they're out of their protective biospheres. That said, I'm wondering what develops during a public childhood that leads one to think so intensely personal a matter is best handled in a public forum. Odd thing for a blogger to say, I suppose, but I'm also not here writing about that time I...well, never mind.

Rehearsing Retirement

I find myself unexpectedly on family medical leave for about the next three to four weeks.

No, no one here just gave birth. [Wiping brow in relief just at the thought.] This past Monday my wife fell and injured her knee. Finding the ER waiting room surprisingly empty (I guess you don't get a lot of gunshot wounds at Labor Day picnics), we got taken care of in pretty short order. We received mixed news:

• On the up side, the injury turned out to be a slight break, not as bad as the previous one, requiring an immobilizer but not a cast.
• Also on the up side, I got a lot of compliments on my improvised scrap wood and duct tape leg support-immobilizer attachment for the wheelchair.
• There was some bad news too: due to budget constraints, the hospital no longer validates parking for the lot across the street.

My wife isn't in any pain other than what would normally be associated with having me home 24 hours a day. Mostly she's just understandably frustrated about being immobilized.She'll be laid up for a few weeks and, until she can look after herself, needs someone with her. With the boys away at school and the cats saying they'd like to help but it's not in their cat-union contract, it looks like I'll be home for a while, playing the role of gentleman farmer.

There are adjustments to make and every day we're figuring out work-arounds to manage another one or two normal things. The overall pace of juggling house tasks is constant but not hectic. After several days of me sleeping on the sofa and my wife sleeping in the lounge chair - getting upstairs is not an option at the present time - we finally remembered yesterday that the sofa is the sleeper kind, so last night was actually spent in the relative comfort of a real bed.

The cats, much of whose daily routine revolves around our normal bedroom, are walking around very confused these days. The whole business of us relocating our lives to the living room was disorienting enough for them. Yesterday, when a bed magically appeared there, their bewildered stares moving back and forth over it nearly made everything we've been through so far worth the trouble. I can only imagine what they're thinking, since it's in the very spot that, every December, a tree that blooms cat toys mysteriously grows.

One good part of all this is that I'm getting to do some real cooking. Up until now I've made mostly fun, individual items when I felt like it - baking a pie, things like that - or making a batch of something or other to have for lunch that week. For the first time I'm having to plan out and make contiguous meals - a protein, starch and vegetable that are coordinated enough to seem like they're not the culinary equivalent of a ransom note with glued letters from eight different newspapers. It's fun and interesting and requires a lot of "ok, let's see what we've got in the house and what can I do with it," something the plan-every-step-beforehand cook I've always been never had to do. I'd always been a disciple of Ina Garten for the odds-and-ends stuff, but now that I need regular meal items on a daily basis I'm quickly coming to appreciate Tyler Florence. Great stuff, and not complicated for someone making it the first time. Yesterday alone I made two of his on the spur of the moment: roasted rosemary potatoes, and green beans with almonds and caramelized onions. At this rate I'll be going through his entire list of recipes before my leave is finished, kind of a K-mart version of "Julie and Julia." Other recipes are coming from wherever I can find them; an outstanding (and thankfully simple) baked salmon recipe came from the back of the salmon fillet package. I'm learning a lot, too, from my wife's directions.

In some ways the hardest part of all this is not having a day-structure provided for me. That kind of freedom is fine for people with discipline, but what about the rest of us? I'm hoping to keep up with what's going on at work through phone messages and e-mails. My goal is to keep them from realizing how well they function without me.

Unrelated Item 1: No Love Lost

Memo to self: Do NOT get Serena Williams angry.

Leader of the Pack

While the nation mourns the loss of Ted Kennedy, I hope the passing of another notable gets, well, noted.

It was an "awww" moment for me this morning when I learned of the passing of Ellie Greenwich. You probably know her name, you unquestionably know her work. If you've spent any time at all listening to the great hits in the years leading up to the British Invasion, probably 80% of the songs you've enjoyed were the work of about four or so songwriting teams. Ellie Greenwich and her husband Jeff Barry were one of them. It's not practical, and probably not even necessary, to list her hits here. Our lives touched once, sorta-kinda, in the most indirect way possible, and it was a small, strange experience I've always found oddly heartwarming.

Years ago, my wife and I belonged to a group of sign language students who, in the spare time we seemed to have in those days, used to get together at our house to work out signed renditions of various popular songs. (I'll put our "Chipmunk's Christmas Song" next to anyone's.) At one point we were working on "Leader of the Pack'" and, as often happened before Al Gore invented the Internet, had a disagreement over one part of the lyrics we were listening to. (Ok, we all agreed on the lyrics except for one of us who had an absurd interpretation of one line that I would even now be embarrassed to say.) I knew that Ellie Greenwich worked out of New York, and thought if I could look up her office address, we could drop her a "note" (a primal form of written communication that existed before e-mails that younger readers can ask their grandparents about) and settle the lyric question. What I found in the NY telephone book was a phone number with no address listed, which I took to mean Ms. Greenwich worked out of a home office. (One of the advantages of working in a profession that doesn't involve large industrial machines, I suppose.) I'll say a lot of things to a lot of different people, but even in those days there was no way I was going to call a famous songwriter at home and ask her about a lyric she'd written 30 years before. Another much bolder member of our group made the call and got to speak to her. Explaining our dilemma, my friend asked what the line after "One day my dad said 'Find someone new' " was. Pausing a moment to think, singing through the lyrics and, most of all, exhibiting enormous kindness, she responded that it was, "I had to tell my Jimmy we're through." My friend thanked her profusely and reported back to us.

I've sometimes wondered what Ms. Greenwich thought of that strange phone call, in the unlikely event she thought of it at all; when you've got her list of accomplishments, things like that probably don't stand out. For those of us on the other end of the phone, however - older now certainly, and perhaps a little wiser - it was a memory, and a happy one at that.

Bam!

A good bit of the early part of this week was spent in some pain due to an earache. It's a recurring thing I've more or less adjusted to but, unlike the ones before, this one didn't go away after a day. After three days of acetamitaphin (I don't think there are any extra "ita's" in there, but I could be wrong) and some homeopathic (Latin for "expensive and doesn't work very well") stuff I got at the drugstore, I was getting desperate.

Enter the Internet. According to, well, I don't know who but it was on the Internet so it must be true, a good treatment for some of the more common forms of earaches is to apply the liquid from a garlic clove to the inner ear. (My wife had suggested warm olive oil and, after reading the garlic suggestion, I though about just pouring some Italian dressing down my ear canal, but couldn't find any in the house.) Not experienced in this type of remedy but desperate for some relief, I got out the garlic press and gave it a try. I made two discoveries:

1. If you're ever given a choice between putting either garlic in your ear, or the fires of hell, go with the fires. It will burn less.
2. I woke up the next morning, and every morning since, free of ear pain. (I hate it when stuff that hurts so much works.)

Just thought I'd share...


Here Comes Treble

An entry or two ago I wrote about the tattoo my son James got. Now my son Jacob has joined the club. His is a g-clef, about 4 inches or so in height, on his right shoulder blade. I don't have a picture yet, but will post one when it's available.

I mentioned this to a (non-tattooed) friend today, and she told me of an interesting question she'd once been asked: if a law were passed saying you HAD to get a tattoo, what would you get and where? I'm still considering the question, and would welcome anyone who cares to sharing their answer. Could be wonderfully revealing.

A Dash of Catch-Up

A warm welcome to new reader MrsSchlereth, who raised the question of whether my son's tattoo was his own design. It's not. In fact, it's currently a popular tattoo design with some minor variations here and there. (Not that I knew this when he first talked to us about getting it. I thought it was the name of a band I never heard of, which would be true of any music group formed after about 1964, the year my musical tastes went into suspended animation.)

It's been a bad couple of weeks for electronics here. First, the hard drive on my desktop computer blew out. Ok, says I wistfully, I've got a laptop and fairly recent backups of everything except the 500 songs on my ipod, and since the songs are already loaded on the ipod, no big deal. A couple of days later, I turned on my ipod and found the screen was cracked from the inside which, if you are familiar with ipods, you know means they're pretty much destroyed. (It is with no small irony that I remembered feeling terribly smug and smart about not spending $15 to buy a protective plastic case that, while probably worth about fifty cents, would have saved me from having to spend $150 on another damn ipod.)

Ok, says I, a bit less wistfully, I still have the music cd's I got the songs from the first time, and that nice set of backups of my other files, so it's just a question of loading them onto the laptop. And by laptop, I mean the computer that, a couple of days after the ipod debacle, happened to be near where some idiot (ok, it was me, but don't tell anyone) set down a cup of coffee. The coffee did what coffee always does when placed in the general proximity of electronic equipment, creating what computer service people genteelly call a "liquid spill." Twenty four hours, one can of compressed air, and a whole lot of guilt-ridden prayer later, the laptop was able to function completely again. Well, almost completely; the letter that comes after "y" doesn't work. This wouldn't be a big deal, except my normal isp is veri[letter after y]on.

Harumph.

And Now For Something Completely Different

Canoodling (I love that word) around You-Tube a few days ago, I came across a Monty Python clip in which they performed Eric Idle's brilliant song, "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life." I've heard it countless times, but for some reason a portion of the lyrics really jumped out at me this time and have continued to rebound in my head. Not quite haunting me, but something close. I won't think about why.

"For life can be absurd, and death's the final word.
Always face the curtain with a bow.

"Forget about your sin, give the audience a grin.
Enjoy it. It's your last chance anyhow."


Let Me Say This About That

I watched the Frost-Nixon movie dvd a couple of days ago. What a great pleasure to watch a well-made movie that relies on cerebral, grown-up concepts instead of visceral reactions to loud noises and visual stimulation. Frank Langella as Nixon was astonishing. And the irony of putting a dvd into a player to watch a movie about Nixon and having it start off with an FBI warning: priceless.

Living the Dream

Having reluctantly abandoned my life-long ambition of having someone walk up to me on the street in NYC and ask how to get to Carnegie Hall, before it's too late I wanted to set down in writing a couple of things I still want to accomplish before they're singing "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" at a memorial service for me:

• Every day in NYC I see those double-decker sight-seeing buses filled with camera-carrying tourists. And every time I do, it's impossible not to think about how much fun it would be to moon them. ("Hey, I got your sights, right here!")
  
• Have you ever watched those morning shows where grown men and women get up at heaven-only-knows what time so they can stand behind Matt or Meredith or whomever and wave a "Hi Mom" sign on television for three seconds? (Heaven help me, I once saw the Today Show's Ann Curry do a remote from Antarctica and there were people behind her doing this. IN FRIGGING ANTARCTICA!) How cool would it be to hold up a sign like that and, when the camera's on, let a flap fall open that says something deeply crude and grossly obscene? Just wondering...
  

Wanted to Mention

I don't care whether that camping picture with the squirrel is real or not. It's the funniest thing I've seen in a long time.