Alex George Books » Food and Drink

Get Snappy, Get Happy

Alex George — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 12:50:04 +0000

My recent trip to Maine has got me thinking a lot about lobsters.

You can’t go for more than about two minutes up there without encountering a lobster somewhere – either on a roadside sign, a tea towel, a postcard, or – if you’re lucky – in a restaurant.

I ate a lot of lobster while I was there. Once it came on a roll, but my preferred method is the old-fashioned way – wearing a silly plastic bib and attacking a freshly-boiled beast with menacing-looking tools with a pot of melted butter to dip the glistening flesh into. Many were happily dispatched this way – in roadside shacks, in actual restaurants, and, most memorably, amidst a multilingual cacophony of Italians, Spanish, Brits and Chileans who all found themselves sitting at the same table. That was an evening that won’t be forgotten any time soon. Not by us, and probably not by the bemused Americans sitting around us, either.

But now for the sad bit. I was told last week that lobsters mate for life. I so wanted this to be true, but made the mistake (damn you, cursed internet) of checking my facts before starting this post. And I’m sorry to report that it’s not true at all. Quite the opposite, in fact. Apparently male lobsters are actually rather randy, crustacean Casanovas. This news has saddened me more than it really should. Another illusion shattered. To compensate, here are the Smothers Brothers singing about doomed lobster love.

Anyway, all that has prompted me to re-post the following (slightly edited) lobster-related blog which I wrote some years ago and which, I have to confess, I have already re-posted once. Apologies to those loyal readers who have suffered through this before.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the epicurean delights of last week, now I am sorely tempted to give this another try.

***

LOBSTER PAD THAI

This lunatic quest began some time ago as I was reading an amusing piece by a fine writer named Steve Almond about eating lobster pad thai in Maine. As I read, I licked my lips and pictured myself serving up a similarly ravishing masterpiece to a rapturous reception. The fact that I had cooked neither (a) pad thai nor (b) lobster before did not strike me as much of a problem.

I could not get the thought of that lobster pad thai out of my head. It just sounded ridiculously delicious – perhaps that stands as testament to Almond’s mouth-watering prose more than anything. The only time I could remember actually eating lobster was my first ever visit to Missouri, just after I was married, when we went to a restaurant at the Lake of the Ozarks and my wife ordered deep-fried battered lobster. (I know, I know. So many jokes, so little time.) I wasn’t even quite sure if I liked lobster or not. That didn’t matter. I knew I had to try this dish. I looked everywhere on the internet for a recipe, but no dice. I knew which book the recipe came from, because Almond had been good enough to name the book, but obviously there was no way I was ever going to fork out twenty bucks for a book for just one damn recipe. Such wanton profligacy was needless, and immoral, and just plain wrong.

Once the book arrived from amazon, I spent a couple of months contemplating the amounts of lobster required to feed even a modest number of people, debating all the while whether to re-mortgage the house. My wife asked whether I couldn’t just use frozen lobster tail, or perhaps shrimp. These were good, sensible suggestions, and obviously entirely missing the point.

I dithered endlessly, until, as the global financial markets went into meltdown all around me, I decided to act. Heroically undertaking to rescue mid-Missouri’s ailing retail economy single-handedly, I went into Schnucks and bought three live lobsters. I hopefully asked Walt, who was working behind the seafood counter that afternoon, whether two might not be enough, but he shook his head and told me I’d need at least three of the little fuckers. (Not his precise words, I should add. They’re very polite in Schnucks.) I drove home fast, trying to outrun my guilt at the ridiculous amount I had paid for my salty, snapping booty in the back seat.

Back home, I explained to my son what was going to happen next, and with a morbid streak that I suspect not all seven year-olds possess, he watched silently as the water in the saucepan slowly reached boiling point. When I picked up the first lobster, it began to flail about, eyes bulging, arching its tail upwards in a furious cortortion. I felt like Jason (of Argonaut fame) fighting that fake scorpion, and quickly dropped the lobster back into its box. Hallam did not look impressed. Neither did the lobster. Suitably abashed, a minute later I grabbed the thing again and managed to put it into the water with a triumphant harrumph. We watched as it turned red. I turned and looked proudly at my son. He stared at the creature as it continued to twitch, and murmured, “I’m glad I’m not in there.”

Once I had murdered all three of the little critters, I spent the next hour redecorating the walls of the kitchen with shrapnel from splintering lobster carcass and the rather unpleasant brown stuff that spewed out of the lobsters when I cracked them in two. This hideous effluent is called the tammale, but giving it a posh-sounding name doesn’t make it look any less like shit. By the time I had finished with all three beasts I was left with enough lobster meat to fill, oh, a small matchbox.

The actual cooking of the pad thai was uneventful enough. I’d discovered a new Asian supermarket the previous week and had been led through it by a lady who gabbled away on the telephone in unintelligble dialect as I trailed her around the store, meekly holding up my basket as she threw items into it. I’d chopped and diced and measured and poured everything in advance, and the stir-frying was all over rather quickly in the end.

But was it any good? Well, it wasn’t bad. It was quite pad thai-like, I suppose. Everyone made suitably appreciative noises as they slurped on their noodles. But all I could think of was how much I had spent on those tiny bits of lobster meat that flecked the bowl.

I know I’m supposed to extrapolate some sort of neat moral aphorism from all this. Nemesis follows hubris? Don’t cook fresh seafood in Missouri? Both valid points. But I’m going with: sometimes you should listen to your wife. Next time – if there is a next time – I’m going to use shrimp.

In Praise Of Eggs

Alex George — Thu, 05 May 2011 10:58:51 +0000

I have developed a peculiar fondness for making scrambled eggs for my son. I have adapted a recipe I found in Eat Me, the brilliant cook book by Kenny Shopsin, proprietor of Shopsin’s in Greenwich Village. (We were introduced to Shopsin’s by our friend Don, who actually appeared in the hilarious documentary about Kenny that was made a few years ago, I Like Killing Flies. Don knows a thing or two about food – he now owns the wonderful Rabelais Books in Portland, ME, with his lovely wife Samantha.)

There is something profoundly satisfying about cooking eggs. One of the principal characters in A GOOD AMERICAN is a short-order cook in a diner. And – thinking a little bit of Kenny Shopsin – here is what I wrote:

“Each morning Joseph took delivery of dozens of fresh eggs from local farms, and by lunchtime every single one of them was gone. There was nothing he enjoyed more than cracking an egg against the side of a hot skillet and watching it cook. He loved the swift metamorphosis from limpid translucence to opaque, wholesome goodness. Poached, over easy, sunny side up, it didn’t matter—each one slid perfect from his pan, yolks as rich and runny as liquid gold. He produced glistening clouds of creamy scrambled eggs. He created omelets as light as air. He cooked other things during that morning shift—crisp rashers of bacon by the pound, fistfuls of sausage, tottering piles of pancakes, crunchy mountains of hash browns—but he was a magician with those eggs.”

Sometimes it’s easier to write about something than to do it. That’s certainly the case when it comes to playing a musical instrument. You can have your characters play like virtuosi without having to put in all the hours of practice yourself. The same goes for cooking – much as I would like to, I don’t possess Joseph’s (or Kenny’s) deft touch with the eggs. But sometimes I do all right.

A Wonderful Town

Alex George — Thu, 06 May 2010 10:22:53 +0000

We spent last weekend in Chicago. Man, I love that town. Not even a three hour delay waiting for the train in La Plata, MO, was going to dampen our spirits. Why? Because we were on our own. Sunday was our twelfth wedding anniversary, and this was our little celebration. (The children were with their grandparents for the weekend.)

Our trip was prompted by the annual pilgrimage made by some of our friends to Art Chicago, the yearly global showcase of new talent. We tagged along for the ride, arriving in town a day after everyone else for the more plebeian (but no less wonderful) delights afforded by the Art Institute of Chicago (actually I think that should be the Art Institvte) and other places. Among our group we had two renowned artists and two gallery owners, and we knew were never going to be able to keep up with that crowd. Therefore we largely wandered about on our own.

Christina and I have been to Chicago once before, to see the King Tut exhibit at the Field Museum with Hallam, who was about 5 at the time. We attempted to drag him around the Art Institute then, but he (quite understandably) complained throughout and insisted that we go and visit the mummies. We had to hurry past some of the finest paintings in western culture in about ten minutes. So it was an absolute delight to be able to spend several hours lingering over the exhibits.

It’s all wonderful, of course, but I made a few especially magical discoveries this trip. I loved “Barbershop Chord” by Stuart Davis, since there is a lot of barbershop singing in The Songs of Our Fathers. What a book cover that would be!

Galleries can be excellent places to find inspiration and ideas for stories. I like to go into “sponge mode”, drinking in everything I see waiting for lightning to strike. Sometimes it does. For example, I discovered this extraordinary painting – “The Pardon” by Gaston La Touche. I’d never heard of the artist before, but was mesmerized by the work. The bonnets of the women in the crowd seemed to merge into a sea of choppy waves, and the effect of the candles they held was extraordinary. There is a palpable sense of tension as everyone is gazing off at some unseen drama unfolding off to the right of the frame. Naturally, my iPhone does it all less than justice, as do my hobnailed attempts at description. But it left me thinking that there are worse places for a writer’s imagination to jump off from when setting out on a new story. Who was being pardoned? And for what??

On Sunday we visited the Museum of Contemporary Art, which was, perhaps predictably, more of a struggle. Exhibits of popcorn in wheelbarrows and piles of dirt on mirrors did not do it for me. When it comes to conceptual art, I’m used to recherche concepts which I am rarely able to grasp, but when the little label pompously says that the popcorn in the wheelbarrow “juxtaposes opposing concepts of work and play”, this struck me as facile beyond belief. If you’re going to be pretentious, at least make an effort. I wandered about, feeling slightly resentful, until I discovered that the more experienced members of our group felt a similar sense of bafflement. Still, I did enjoy this sign that was posted by the entrance:

Done. (Well done.)

Alex George — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 11:34:21 +0000

It’s over.

I realized last night that my last meaty meal would have been on the previous Tuesday evening, so technically my little experiment could end earlier than I had originally anticipated. Therefore, after a tomato, pesto and cheese sandwich for lunch (with hummus on the side) yesterday evening I ate some bacon. Interestingly, although I enjoyed it very much, there wasn’t the blind carnivorous craving that I had anticipated. As I contemplate lunch today, I’m no longer thinking about the bloodiest, meatiest dish imaginable. (Although I’m not making any promises that I’m going to have a salad, either.)

As for the future, it will be interesting to see what happens now. After a week of going without meat, I at least know it can be done, and I am in hopes that henceforth I will be more able to choose the meatless option more frequently. Just as importantly, when I do need meat, I want to do my best to ensure that it’s locally grown and properly reared.

To celebrate the end of my meat-free week, here’s the funniest You Tube video I’ve seen in ages. Thanks to my friend Joel for sharing. I still giggle every time I watch it.

Nearly There…

Alex George — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 11:52:29 +0000

Tofu pad thai for lunch.

Lentil soup for dinner. Really.

It was delicious.

What is happening to me?

Chris Allen, one of an army of sympathetic commenters about this little project, was right: the yearning for flesh soon goes. I am no longer burdened by the yoke of meatless suffering that was getting me down a few days ago. I suppose that’s good news. Perhaps I’ll be able to forego quite so much of the stuff in the future, and enjoy what I do eat more.

Of course, none of this will stop me going out and ordering a Super-Happy-Fun-Time-Burger for lunch on Wednesday.

Whose Countin’?

Alex George — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 10:55:34 +0000

Two days to go.

Lunch was a homemade (= wife-made) cheese and tomato tart. Delicious.

The trip to the parents-in-law was successfully negotiated, because we ate out. I had two grilled portabello mushrooms and some French fries, and a slice of “Texas toast”. I’m still not quite sure why Texas got the credit for it, but it was good. I had a wobbly moment when my wife and children all ordered cheeseburgers, but stood firm.

I believe I can do this.

In other news, yesterday I had what may be a wholly new and possibly decent idea for my next book. Fresh worlds of research are opening out in front of me – I’m tempted to say like a flower’s petals, although I suspect a more exact analogy may be like the skin of an onion. Much more liable to make me weep.

No Meat Defeat: Days 3 and 4

Alex George — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 19:22:20 +0000

That it should come to this.

I’m eating so much fish my wife is worried I’m going to come down with Mercury poisoning.

I’m so full of grains and pulses and assorted greenery that my digestive system appears to have gone into temporary shutdown.

Apart from that, it’s all going swimmingly.

Friday lunchtime was spent at 9th Street vegetarian institution, Main Squeeze, and very good it was, too. I had a Catalpa Tree Burrito, described thus: “organic brown rice, seasoned organic beans, monterey jack, organic red onion, tomato wrapped in an organic whole wheat tortilla, topped with spicy organic enchillada sauce, organic sour cream, sunflower seeds, sprouts.”

That’s six organics in one menu item. Six. Count ‘em. And man, it was good. As I ate the thought occurred to me that maybe this wouldn’t be so bad, after all. That night Christina cooked delicious fish with a mango salsa, also excellent. Saturday lunch was one of my favorite things, Christina’s tuna melts. So far so good.

And then last night we went out to a fundraising gala for Rainbow House. Food was served buffet style, which mean I was able to pass by the chicken sate and went instead for the little baked brie thingies and California sushi rolls. (Long-suffering martyrdom index: off the charts.) It was only as we were driving home that I thought about the delicious little baked rolls that I had enjoyed at our friends Mark and Holly’s house before the party, which another guest had brought. I had eaten a couple of them without thinking – they were delicious – and now a horror crept over me. I realized that there had been little slivers of prosciutto in them.

The irony was delicious, if you’ll pardon the pun. After all this effort, I’d accidentally eaten some meat – but I hadn’t even realized until several hours later. I’d always thought that my next taste of flesh after my days of deprivation would be met with a chorus of saliva-drenched Hallelujahs, but it slipped by unnoticed. Is this a sign?

Anyway, it was an unintentional mistake, so on I go. Three days left. Tilapia, ahoy.

Carrot or Garrote? – Day 2

Alex George — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 16:32:46 +0000

Still here, people.

Here was yesterday’s menu:

Breakfast: Special K again

Altoids

Lunch: Subway “Veggie Delite”

Supper: Christina’s delicious homemade bean soup with sausage removed

More, please. Not really.

Yesterday was always going to be tough, as I spent all day down at the Lake, first meeting with a client and then doing Big Surf stuff. Hence the Altoids – my preferred method of remaining awake while driving for three hours. (That and listening to This American Life podcasts.) I was expecting a barrelful of mockery from my friends and colleagues at the waterpark, but they hid their sniggers well. I like Subway sandwiches, but unsurprisingly I usually have ‘em groaning with meat. The Veggie Delite really wasn’t bad at all. It’s a simple concept: every non-meat item on the Subway menu is stuffed between two bits of bread. There were black olives and Jalapeno peppers flying everywhere. I admit I did eye Darin’s meatball marinana with some degree of wistful longing, but not as much as I would have expected.

Supper was delicious, all the more so for being eaten after the children had gone to bed, watching Weeds on DVD from Netflix. (We had a temporary halt in our viewing while my parents were here. If you’ve watched the show, you’ll know why.) I always thought that the kielbasa sausage that I mournfully scooped out was the best thing about the soup, but it turns out I was wrong. I loved every beany mouthful.

But.

For all that the day was satisfying enough from a gastronomic point of view, this whole no-meat lark has started to get me down. At some point during the evening I opened the fridge and my gaze fell upon a plate of ham, and there was something unsettlingly visceral in my desire to stuff the lot into my gob. Perhaps two days without meat has caused some strange chemical imbalance inside me. Aren’t I supposed to be feeling healthier? I just feel a bit sad.

Alex’s Neat Meat Feat – Day 1

Alex George — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 11:33:47 +0000

Well, I made it through ONE DAY.

Breakfast was easy enough: Special K poses no real threat. Sunday bacon will be a different matter, but let’s cross that bridge, etc.

Lunch was slightly harder. I met Christina at Sycamore, one of our regular haunts for lunch. One of the most magnificent meals in all creation is Mike Odette’s utterly wondrous patchwork pork loin sandwich, which has about sixteen different varieties of swine in it (perhaps I exaggerate slightly.) I sometimes feel bad about routinely ignoring the rest of the menu, at which point I indulge in a spot of existential/gastronomic angst before ordering the same thing yet again. Man, it’s good. Today, though: beer battered fish and chips, which was very nearly as delicious.

For supper Christina had conjured up a spinach and rice casserole thing, and very good it was, too. But it had chopped up Canadian bacon all the way through it. Heroically, and with only small, barely audible sobs, I picked out the meat and pushed it on to Hallam’s plate. He was bemused, to say the least. I think I got every bit.

So, here’s my first meat-free day, rated on a scale of one to ten:

Social awkwardness factor: 0 – thanks to everything being done in the presence of my understanding (well, sort of) wife and family. There was no jeering. Tomorrow, I fear, will be a different matter.

Pork yearning factor: 6. I won’t lie. The fish and chips were delicious, but I do love those pork sandwiches.

Smug self-righteousness: 3. Frankly, this was a little disappointing. I had been hoping to feel much more superior. Perhaps this is linked with the overall suffering index (see below).

Overall vegetable-induced misery: 2. Apart from feeling strangely hungry most of the day, this really wasn’t too bad at all. So it’s downhill from here. Watch this space.

Eating Animals.

Alex George — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 11:58:48 +0000

It's what's for dinner. Only not this week.

I love meat.

Growing up in a family of devout foodies, I have always eaten meat, lots of it, and always with relish. I like my steaks still mooing. (Hell, I’ll even eat cows raw, when I’m in Paris. Bring on the steak tartare.)

So I knew it was always going to be something of a gamble to read Jonathan Safran Foer’s new book, Eating Animals. Safran Foer is an astonishingly gifted writer who could write about anything and make it compelling. When his son was born, he found himself wondering about the ethical implications of the various food choices that he, as a parent, had to make when deciding what to feed his child, and this set him off, as they say, on a voyage of discovery into the bloody netherworld of factory farms. And while he’s written a gripping book, it’s not a pretty read.

Foer explains, in nauseating detail, the repellant things that are done to animals in order to put food on our plates. The gruesome fact is, it’s more economically efficient to raise sick animals for slaughter than healthy ones. The creatures raised in factory farms are pumped full of chemicals from birth onwards, and have been genetically modified to grow unnaturally fast. By the time they’re big enough to kill, their bodies are so screwed up that they are incapable of reproducing naturally and many can’t even walk. That hardly matters, though, since most of them spend their entire lives in cages so small they cannot even turn around.

Now, this is nothing new. Other authors have been here before, and movies such as Food, Inc. have made these unsavory truths (excuse the pun) part of a wider conversation. In interviews Safran Foer points out that his book is not a tract in favor of vegetarianism. Rather, it’s an attack on the practices that the agricultural industry has adopted to maximize their profits at the expense of our health and the well-being of the animals they slaughter.

I was appalled by what I read, but my concerns were less to do with animal welfare and more to do with the potentially adverse health effects of my children eating, for example, chickens whose body mass has been artificially increased by soaking them in water that is infested with the fecal matter of other sick and dying poultry. Then there’s also the appalling environmental impact of factory farming (food stock emissions are a larger cause of global warming than all the vehicles and airplanes on the planet), the human rights abuses that are perpetrated upon the largely immigrant population who work in slaughterhouses, and the gross inefficiencies inherent in feeding the world’s population so much damned meat. (For every unit of protein we get from eating an animal, twenty-six units are employed to feed the animal before it’s killed.)

Safran Foer’s reaction to his investigations was to become a vegetarian. In his eyes, it was the only rational response to all that he had seen, and perhaps if I had witnessed everything that he had, I would feel the same way. But even after reading his book, I can’t make that leap. I don’t have an inherent moral problem with eating meat, as long as it’s healthy to do so and doesn’t harm the environment (the bit about how the largest hog processing plant in the country deals with its vast lakes of pig manure is eye-watering.) Still, from now on we will do everything we can to make sure that the meat we buy comes from local farmers, who don’t do all that bad stuff. Happily we have an excellent farmers’ market in Columbia.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, all this has got me thinking about my relationship with meat, and I have it mind to do a little experiment: I’m going to try not to eat any meat for a week, just to see what happens.

Now, you might think – with some justification – that this is a facile and futile thing to do. But this isn’t about the morals of factory farming, even if that may be where the idea began. We live at a time and in a place where there are few meaningful restrictions on our diets. If I choose not to eat meat on a whim, it’s simply a question of what I select off a menu, or what my wife and I decide to cook each evening. But that’s rather the point. When everything is so very available, I’m curious to see whether I can exercise enough self-control to curb the unthinking habits of a lifetime of omnivorous grazing.

Watch this space. Daily updates guaranteed.