Honolulu Lite
Honolulu Lite
Perfect recipe: Roast over
pile of burning cookbooksI spent six hours the other day making Osso Buco which became Uh Oh Buco as soon as my daughter learned the prime ingredient was baby cow. How was I supposed to know that she knows what veal is? Why don't they just teach chemistry and history in high school instead of telling our kids where their food comes from. I tried to reason with her. Honey, veal doesn't come from baby cows, it comes from Safeway. Look, here's the receipt.
She wouldn't touch the Osso Buco. Which was aggravating, mainly because it was the first thing I had cooked in years following a recipe. We've got 47 cookbooks in our house. Why? We end up eating the same things over and over things that don't need recipes, like cereal or chili.
Here's a recipe for chili: Take everything that's been sitting in your refrigerator for the past six weeks not covered with a furry growth, throw it into a large pot and add chili powder. Olé!
How did we all become so cookbook crazy? Nobody actually uses them. I don't remember ever buying a cookbook. Where do they come from? Here's a sample of the cookbooks in our house that are never used: "Italian Regional Cooking" (we're stuck in that well-known Italian region "Spaghetti"), "Cuisinart Cooking" (I haven't even SEEN the Cuisinart in years), "The Great American Cookie Cookbook" (great pictures), "Crisco Cooking" (there's one the Heart Association has to love), "The Hawaii Heart Association Cookbook" (I keep them next to each other on the shelf for ironic effect), "Sushi at Home" (which is where our sushi is after we bring it home from the restaurant), "Low Fat Living" (which has a recipe for "whole wheat monkey bread. And you think making banana bread is hard), "The Popular Potato Cookbook" (which helpfully explains that to bake a potato you put it in a hot oven for a while), "Picnic Gourmet" (just in case messing up your kitchen isn't a big enough hassle, take the whole mess into the yard!) and "Too Busy to Cook Cookbook" (if you're too busy to cook, aren't you too busy to read?).
We have Korean, Chinese, Mexican, Guamanian and Japanese cookbooks. We have books with recipes from the southwest, northeast and northsouth. We've even got "Lobscouse & Spotted Dog," a collection of recipes from the old sailing days of Admiral Nelson, which includes "Boiled Baby" pudding and Millers in Onion Sauce. The first contains no babies but the second actually calls for millers, seaman speak for rats. I'm pretty sure we've got an Arctic "Too Busy to Hunt" cookbook with a recipe for blubber salsa.
We've got "The New McCalls Cookbook" and "Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook," both circa 1970 so no longer "new." from 1968. And, of course, we've got the granddaddy of them all, "The Joy of Cooking."
"The Joy of Cooking" doesn't mess around. It tells you how to cook anything including porcupine (mind the spikes), opossum (feed it only milk for 10 days before killing), beaver tail (hold over flame until rough skin blisters) and armadillo (run over with car).
Maybe I will try another recipe. The Fricassee of Woodchuck doesn't look too difficult. For my daughter's sensitive palate, I'll make sure Safeway's woodchucks are past the legal age of consent.
Charles Memminger, winner of National Society of Newspaper Columnists awards, appears Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. E-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com