Celebrity Meat

Dwight Yoakam, hot vegetarian singer loved by ladies the world over, has a line of meat and meat-enhanced products.

That's good enough, but one's called Chicken Rings of Fire, and I thank whoever thought up that name but didn't think *about* it, for leaving it for us to enjoy.

Ancestral Borch Pan

Pop was considered king of the kitchen, even though Mom made 98% of the meals in the home. As I may have said earlier, he had offbeat tastes, was a funny guy, and made us eat weird and often wonderful stuff. Whatever cockamamie diet he was on became ours also, and we went through phases of Lipton chicken soup and hot dogs for breakfast, but real food at night and on weekends.

He actually was a good cook, but the man liked high heat. I don't think that I learned there were other temperatures except high...until I met mrguy, who would chuckle as he turned down the flames lapping the outside of whatever pan I had on the stove.

Today I inherited evidence of Pop's M.O., an artifact mrguy has dubbed "The Ancestral Borch Pan." I have coveted this item so highly that I consider hiding it from MiddleGuySis, who is staying with us.

Witness, the borch pan, from which came the crusty potatoes made by mistake and later cherished as "hard rocks." This is the pan in which I made my first broiled chicken breasts. This is the breadcrumb pan and maybe even a brownie pan. It is primal to my culinary existence.

Pop was the cook but Mom fed us. She knew I needed it, and although this blog is about Pop, it's all about how much I love Mom and she loves me.

You Just Can't Win in the AL East

Oh the woe of being in the AL East and not being NY or Boston :) You just gotta laugh. For years I have lightly followed the Toronto Blue Jays.

It was mrguy who reintroduced me to baseball. It would have been a lonely post season our first year together if I hadn't chosen up, and it was the sweet soulful eye of the bird logo and the Canadianness of the Birds that made me do it. I fell for them pretty hard.

That was the glory year of 1991, when we made the playoffs, followed by two other fabulous years of enjoying Cito Gaston and his team: Joe Carter, Juan Guzman (sigh), Paul Molitor, John Olerud, Pat Borders (that catcher who looked like John Wilkes Booth), and occasional not so nice rent-a-Birds, like David Cone (several times) in the post season. Dave Stewart both on the team and then in the front office? Tremendous.

After that were the years of watching the young crop of guys come up and become awesome. We'd see them play here (as many games in a stand as possible), then follow them up to Seattle, where we'd go to another couple of games with the Big Guy at the Kingdome. That was a lot of baseball, come to think about it.

The last few years we've been at the bottom of the pile. And that's o.k. As long as you're not competitive, a betting person or really kooky for baseball. I like the sound, being at the ballpark, and eating weird carny food.


The Birds will always occupy a soft spot in my left chestular area.

Signs Point to Corn

I may think about corn more than your average person, because I love it so. It tastes good in many of its forms, it's beautiful, and can be pretty funny as a caricature with spindly legs and google eyes. I like corn.

Anyhoo, while thinking about corn I remembered that before I'm too old to enjoy it I want to go to the Corn Palace in South Dakota. Maybe I should devise a corn tour of the state?

Here's my greatest hits of corn:

• Wright's Pink Popcorn, depicting children playing on a see-saw of corn
• Hominy
• The local corn tattoo craze
• Tamal in banana leaf, with olive, chicken and egg
• Big old roadside architecture: Minnesota, Iowa, Ohio

While working at a restaurant devoted to Louisiana Gulf cuisine my bosses received a gift of moonshine, which I assume is corn too. Interesting, but not my favorite.


I also like oats, but they're just not funny.

My Boy

Nose, the cat that my sister once called Jimmy Durante, is deathly afraid of ukuleles. If he hears the sound of one, he runs. If I come home with one in my hand, he stops his usual greeting (crossing me from right to left as I enter the front door) and goes the other direction. If he hears the sound of the case, he slinks away.

How can this be?

Norway Day

Norwegians. My people! My genetic people, anyway.

This year we hit the trifecta: Norway Day, Sis' birthday, Kentucky Derby, all falling on the 5th.

This is the second year Sis and I have watched the Derby on Norway Day. Last year while eating our open faced sandwiches at Cafe Tabitha,
she let it slip that the Derby was in an hour. I had no idea but she's a big fan. So we finished our lunch, ran, and tried to find a place with a big screen t.v., which was risky but not impossible apparently. We found it at Round Table Pizza, and the next half hour was a sitcom episode of not finding the Derby on the gigantic t.v. finding it but not being able to tune in to the channel without batteries for the remote, them kindly running out to buy batteries and us being unable to stop them, and us drinking Bud and watching it in replay. Round table's our place now. This year we brought batteries.

Then back to Norway Day. By the end of the day we'd had cheeses and troll vitamins, sour cream pudding

three kinds of adult refreshment (small slugs of aqauvit, tastings of sparkling mead, uh...a frosty mug of Bud) and salt cured lamb shank. We watched the Derby, the first performance in english of Ibsen poem Terje Vigen set to music, we ducked into the book art and printers fair in an adjoining hall, bought ephemera, handmade paper and learned a little about lead type


then out to Indian dinner with Dog, Cat, Mouse and Monkey.

Whew. We do birthday big!

Arizona