BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

I happen to like fried chicken…

I mean, after all, I’m from the South. I would probably be disowned by my kin if I didn’t like fried chicken. You see, much like Texas has the “he needed killin'” law, there’s one of those unwritten little ditties in the original South as well. It’s the “I ain’t eatin’ it” rule. Basically, you are allowed one free pass on a regional comestible. In my case I used my freebie on Head Cheese – that gelatinous loaf of aspic and cranial meat that comes from boiling down a hog head.

Truth is, one would think that having grown up on a farm, and therefore having been physically present (and even directly involved) during an actual “chicken running around with its head cut off” incident (several times, to be honest) I would have been more likely to use my “get out of eating it free” coupon on just that. However, I’ve also seen a hog’s head floating around in a soup pot. And, witnessed my grandmother digging the eyes out of the skull… And…

Well… You get the picture. Suffice it to say, in my way of thinking the crazy, bleeding, headless chicken made a far less horrific impression, believe it or not.

So, now that I’ve whetted your appetite, let’s move right along…

This past weekend I headlined at Festival of Souls in Memphis, Tennessee. FOS is a fantastic alternative spirituality gathering put on by Summerland Grove and held at Meeman-Shelby State Park. Incidentally, Meeman-Shelby is where a piece of my luggage now makes its home, but that’s another story… Thing is, this wasn’t my first time at this particular fest, but it had been a few years, so I have to say it was great to visit with old friends once again.

But then there came the chicken.

Now, as I said, I love fried chicken, so when I saw that it was on the menu for Saturday night’s dinner feast, I was to say the least, pretty excited. Granted, we were in Tennessee and not Kentucky, but hey, it’s still the same geographical area, so they oughta know how to fry chicken. So, all good… I was going to have fried chicken… My mouth was all set for it.

Fast forward a bit to Saturday evening. The feast was scheduled to begin after the main ritual for the fest. Some of us – namely Tish and Patrick Owen, E-Mac, Johnathan, E K, and Moi – who were not attending the ritual had parked ourselves at the Group W book signing table in the dining hall. Here we played with pencils, chatted, signed books, talked about the mysteries of the universe, reveled in the lovely fried chicken smells wafting from the nearby kitchen, and watched E K torturing wayward insects that fell into her “you don’t belong here” category.

(NOTE: E K will rescue insects that belong here, but if they are an invasive species, or are just plain nasty and annoying… Well, let’s say it sucks to be them. See “Mistress Of The Flies,” “Missouri Kat And The Scarab Of Doom,” “Eeek Of Destruction,” etc…)

Eventually, the ritual was over and folks began rapidly filing into the dining hall for dinner, and as hungry people will do, they lined up in front of the window, anxious for a plate of chickeny goodness. Seeing the length of the queue, we all decided to kick back and wait for it to die down. So, we continued chit-chatting while E K continued introducing various bugs to the sole of her shoe as she giggled that cute, intensely evil giggle of hers.

However, the kitchen staff had another idea. Not about E K and her bug crunching, more like about us not eating right away. Because, out of the blue… Well… not blue, really… More like out of the kitchen door if we want to be completely accurate… Anyway, suddenly a couple of tray laden folks appeared and placed loaded plates of fried chicken, mashed ‘taters & gravy, green beans, and glazed carrots in front of us. We were also duly chastised for not having walked into the kitchen ahead of everyone else to be served at the head of the line, since Tish and I were the headline authors and everyone with us qualified as our entourage, so to speak.

Well, truth is, Tish and I really don’t buy into that dynamic. There are many authors and presenters out there that do, but we aren’t them. So, if the staff of an event hustles us into the dining hall ahead of everyone even after we strenuously object, we will go. We don’t always have a choice.  But we are NOT about to jump ahead of paying attendees, and we aren’t big fans of folks who do.

But now I digress…

So… Where was I? Oh yeah. At any rate, we were now in a quandary. We were embarrassed that we had been literally served our dinner while many folks were still waiting in line, but by the same token we were hungry. Fortunately, nobody minded that we had been brought our plates, and they insisted that we eat before it got cold. So, we did… And there were these piles of fried chicken. And the fried chicken was not good. The fried chicken was freakin’ EXCELLENT. So very excellent, in fact, that we just kept eating since they had a surplus and they had provided us with monster chicken pieces.

Fast forward again…

Late in the evening we stood about, smoking cigars, chit chatting, watching EKay step on things, and being amused by a field mouse that chased Johnathan around the porch after it had used the restroom. Well, we assumed that’s what it did. It went into the restroom, then came out later and started chasing Johnathan. At any rate, we eventually piled into our room and retired for the night. Sometime during the wee hours of the morning, however, the “incident” happened.

“The Incident”? you ask…

Yes. “The Incident.” We still aren’t positive about the hour of the occurrence, but when sunrise arrived, as usual we climbed out of bed and headed for the restroom. It’s one of those morning things, ya’know. Upon opening the door to the cabin we found “it”…

It being two large pieces of fried chicken affixed to our cabin door with duct tape. We had been vandalized… We had been victimized… We had been the target of a “Drive By Chickening”…

Being a mystery-thriller author, of course I launched a full scale investigation, co-opting whatever I could find in order to process the crime scene. I even interviewed witnesses, one of them being a rather wet and naked young lady in the unisex shower facilities. She seemed to know who it was, but was unwilling to give up the info. Since she was wet and naked, and I really wasn’t all about interviewing her in that state, I was unable to pursue the line of questioning any further.

Later we discovered that we weren’t the only victims. It seemed someone using the very same roll of duct tape had attempted to tape Tish and Patrick into their cabin. Obviously we had a “serial tapeist” on our hands…

While the perpetrator of these crimes still runs free, we are relatively certain we have narrowed things down to a single suspect. During her interview she was evasive, and even offered a rehearsed answer, stating that we had been the victims of Tennessee Hoodoo.

That was when we knew for certain she was lying. Everyone knows that if fried chicken is involved, it’s Kentucky Hoodoo.

So, she might as well just fess up. Otherwise I’ll just have to invoke the Colonel. Trust me, I have a secret blend of eleven herbs and spices, and I’m not afraid to use it…

More to come…

Murv

Actually, to be perfectly honest, I didn’t know Aunt Ida at all. Never met the woman, and were she still around I wouldn’t recognize her if we bounced off of one another at the Galleria… Not that such would be likely, what with the fact that I absolutely despise shopping in malls – most especially the crowds – but, you get my drift.

However, the mysterious (to me) Aunt Ida was apparently ubiquitous in the lives of Evil Kat and all her siblings, and furthermore she left a lasting impression upon them… Well, upon E K, at least.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, my father-in-law is a minister, and therefore E K and her brothers grew up in and around Baptist churches throughout Saint Louis. I’m a bit sketchy on some of the details since I wasn’t there, but if I remember the story correctly, Aunt Ida, who was in no way, shape, or form of any blood relation to E K and her family, was a kindly older lady who often watched after the kids around one of the churches. And, in taking care of them she often saw to their meals.

Sounds like a perfectly wonderful Aunt Ida to me…

Anyway, fast forward several years. E K loses her halo, sprouts horns, and grows up to be an evil redhead. Somewhere along the line she meets up with me and becomes enamored of my Timex-like qualities (punctual, but moreover, can take a licking and keep on ticking.) So, being in need of a domestic servant/doormat/punching bag, E K takes out a contract and before you know it has signed on the dotted line of the State issued paperwork which guaranteed I would be indentured unto her for the rest of my natural life.

Still with me so far? Yeah, we’re coming back around to the whole Aunt Ida thing…

So there we were, about a year or so into my life sentence, when The Evil One began to wax nostalgic. I was in the midst of wrapping and bagging a ham bone from what else, a ham. It was sometime around the holidays as I recall. At any rate, I was wrapping up the ham bone in order to save it for use in a big ol’ pot of navy beans. Alas,  I was soon to discover that legumes of the “seafaring” variety were not to be in my future, because overcome with this attack of nostalgia the redhead proceeded to announce, “I really miss Aunt Ida’s green bean and ham stew.”

To begin with I asked, “Who’s Aunt Ida? Was she at the wedding?”

This was when I was given the thumbnail sketch of the mysterious Aunt Ida that I relayed to you in an above paragraph.

Accepting this explanation, and still being like a new puppy and all, I was eager to please my “Mistress”, so I asked, “Was that all that was in it, just green beans and ham?”

“No,” her evilness explained. “It was green beans, ham, and potatoes.”

Now it made a little more sense to me. However, it wasn’t making the same sense to me that it was making to E K. To understand what I mean, scroll back up and make note of her initial statement – green bean and ham stew.

Stew is quite obviously the operative word here. At this stage in our marriage I had not yet figured out that not only was E K a non-cook, she wasn’t well versed in the nomenclature of the kitchen either. As brilliant as the woman is, kitchen talk simply wasn’t her thing.

Now, just in case some of you fall into the same category – brilliant but not kitchen savvy – allow me to define stew:

A stew is food, generally meat and vegetables, though it can be all veggie, that has been cooked long and slow in a liquid and then is served in a resultant thickened gravy-like stock. The gravy consistency of a stew stock can be obtained by reduction, by adding a starch, or some combination thereof…

Remember that. It’s going to be extremely important later… In fact, the crux of this entire missive hinges upon it.

And so, being eager to please, I promptly… well, within the next day or two… took myself off to the grocery, obtained some fresh green beans, a sack of taters, and then dug out my giant, stainless steel stock pot. I prepped a simple stock, then added the ham bone. After cooking it to death and extracting the inedible portions (gristle, excess fat, and the bone itself), I tossed in the green beans and diced potatoes, proceeding to cook them to death as well, bringing the stew to a healthy boil so that the potatoes would disintegrate and the stock would reduce. See where I’m heading here? I turned it into a nice, thick, stew with bits of potato, ham, and green beans. Then, wagging my tail because I just knew I had done something that would make the redhead ecstatic, I served it up.

She ate it, but never cracked a smile. I began to worry. Finally, I asked what she thought.

She replied, “It was okay, but it’s not right.”

I was devastated, but resolved to fix the problem. “What isn’t right about it?” I asked. “I can change the recipe…”

“I don’t know,” said the redhead. “It just isn’t the same as Aunt Ida’s…”

Of course, I knew all too well that I would never in a million years be able to duplicate Aunt Ida’s stew exactly. After all, I wasn’t Aunt Ida. But, I was certain I could come close enough to bring a smile to The Evil One’s face. So, a few months later I returned to the drawing board. I had a fresh ham bone, so I gathered together the green beans and potatoes. I adjusted my seasonings, added extra ham, cooked it to death, and even did it up as a split batch so I could immersion blender the hell out of a batch of potatoes, heavy cream, and butter before folding the silky mixture into the pot full of ham and green beans. I was not going to allow Aunt Ida to best me, nor my evil bride to pine for something I should be able to easily duplicate. After all, in the kitchen I definitely “gots skillz” if I do say so myself…

With much trepidation I served up the creamy, piping hot stew to my wife. She ate it. Never smiled. Then, at the end of dinner slipped into a leather outfit and ordered me into the basement where I was then severely punished for preparing green bean and ham stew that just wasn’t the same as Aunt Ida’s…

This trend continued for a few years and each time the tortures became worse, with power garden implements, battery chargers connected to jumper cables, and sometimes even blowtorches, all while the Evil One screamed, “It’s Not The Same As Aunt Ida’s!”

I have to tell you, I was really beginning to despise Aunt Ida, and I’d never even met the woman…

So, ham bone time rolled around again and I was dreading a day spent in the kitchen concocting a new take on the stew that would only result in me making yet another trip to E Kay’s Basement Of Horrors. I was already seriously considering fixing up a batch of navy beans instead. That way, if I ended up being tortured anyway, at least I would have a meal that I wanted for a change.

Fortuitously however, the redhead had been ruminating over this whole Aunt Ida’s stew debacle, and was apparently feeling magnanimous.

“Lackey,” she called to me. “Come here!”

I skulked in from the kitchen, wondering if I was about to recieve a pre-stew beating just for good measure. “Yes, Oh Grand High Exalted One?”

“I’ve been thinking. The way I remember Aunt Ida’s Stew it wasn’t thick like you keep screwing up and making. It was brothier.”

Whistles tweeted, horns blared, bells rang, and a 250 Watt halogen bulb ignited above my head as I smiled. “Oh… So it’s not stew, it’s soup?”

She frowned, kicked me in the shin really hard with her pointy toed pump, then grabbed me by the hair and slapped me a few times just to be sure she had my attention as she instructed, “Don’t you dare question me, lackey. It’s stew.”

“Yes, ma’am…” I mumbled while hopping on one foot and holding my cheek (On my face, people. My face… Sheesh…).

“Now get in the kitchen and make me some stew. I’ll be in the basement sharpening a few things for later…”

And so I scurried off, however, being armed with this new and important information I took a quick detour to the store for a different kind of potato.  Something less mealy and with a firmer, waxier texture. Then, I came home, prepped a stock, cooked a ham bone to death, then added green beans. During the last 45 minutes or so, I cranked it and tossed in the diced potatoes and then served up the wonderfully “brothy” green bean,  ham and potato soup, complete with a pan of fresh cornbread.

E K ate the soup. E K smiled. E K purred. E K looked and acted like a little kid again. And, I didn’t have to go to the basement… (Well, not that night, anyway…)

To this day, her supreme evilness still refers to this dish as Aunt Ida’s Stew, even though it is in point of fact a soup, not a stew. Well, I am not about to correct her, because we know what will happen if I do. All I can say is that it is far less work than I had been putting myself through before the serendipitous revelation, and when you consider the fact that Aunt Ida was watching after a whole raft of kids – the young version of her supreme evilness included – it’s no wonder she employed the KISS principle. I should have recognized that from the outset, but back then I wasn’t a parent, and well, we all know that hindsight is 20-20.

The long and short of it is this – Aunt Ida’s Stew is probably as close as it gets to number 1 on E Kay’s hit parade when it comes to comfort food from my kitchen.

Aunt Ida’s Green Bean-Potato-Ham “Stew”

(Serves 8 – 12 Adults or 1 Evil Redhead)

You will need: Tongs, a 20 quart stock pot, large colander (preferably stainless steel), large mixing bowl to accommodate colander, patience

Ingredients:

1 Large Ham Shank and Bone (The shank and bone from a good sized spiral cut ham works famously)

4 Cups Ham, Diced (Reserved from the cut ham at the outset, or purchased separately – I’ve done both)

2 -3 Lbs Fresh Green Beans, cleaned, stemmed, and snapped into 2 inch pieces

3 Lbs Waxy Red Potatoes, Peeled and cut into 1 1/2″ to 2 ” Cubes

1/2 Cup Apple Cider Vinegar

6 Cloves Garlic

2 Medium Yellow Onions

6 Ribs Celery

3-4 Large Carrots

2 Tbsp Olive or Vegetable Oil

Cooking Directions:

Begin by chopping carrots, onions, and celery into 1/2 inch to 1 inch pieces. Those of you who have taken a turn or two around the kitchen will recognize this as Mirepoix – the holy trinity of aromatic veggies that is the basis for many dishes, especially stocks and broths.

Crush the garlic cloves.

Heat your stock pot and add the cooking oil (olive or vegetable). Coat bottom of stock pot, then add Mirepoix and garlic. Sweat the vegetables over medium heat until they begin to become translucent – 5-7 minutes. Raise heat for a few minutes and stir until they begin to caramelize. Add Ham Shank and Bone to pot, then pour in cold water until bone is completely covered. Raise heat and bring to a rolling boil. After 10 – 15 minutes, lower heat to a simmer and partially cover, making sure to leave a gap for steam so that it doesn’t boil over. Salt and pepper to taste, add apple cider vinegar. Allow to simmer for 3 to 4 hours, checking occasionally, and adding water to return to near original volume when necessary.

After 3 – 4 hours, remove from heat. Remove bone and shank, set aside to cool. Once broth has cooled somewhat, strain out cooked Mirepoix and return broth to stock pot. Once bone and shank have cooled sufficiently (you can place them in the refrigerator to hasten the process) use a fork, or your hands (my preference) to pick off the edible meat and return it to the pot with the broth. Discard cartilage, excess fat, and bone.

Return broth to heat, add green beans – these should have already been cleaned, stemmed, and snapped into 2 inch pieces. Bring to a boil for 15 minutes. Then, carefully add cubed potatoes and diced ham. Allow broth to return to a boil for 10 minutes, then lower heat to a simmer. Cook for another 30 to 40 minutes.

Re-season with salt and pepper.

Serve with a pan of cornbread or fresh yeast rolls.

Notes:

Sometimes when it is necessary for me to prepare this – i.e. the redhead needs a fix – and I don’t have a ham bone handy, nor do I wish to purchase a large ham in order to obtain one, I will fix up a smaller batch using a small ham shank and 2 or 3 smoked hocks, which are readily available in most supermarket meat departments and are fairly inexpensive. It’s not exactly the same, but the resultant beating is far less severe than it would be otherwise.

More to come…

Murv

PS. I feel compelled to throw a random disclaimer in from time to time, so here it is: If you are new to this blog and are unfamiliar with the satirical bent with which I portray my gorgeous, redheaded bride of 22+ years, don’t take things so seriously. Simply click on any highlighted E K link and read about her. She’s an absolute doll who deserves a halo just for playing along, and furthermore, for putting up with me.