5 Years Later....

Urbsfest started out as a New Year’s party…freezing our high-school asses off in my father’s basement, under trippy colored lights, hiding our low-end liquor in low-end soda bottles. There were maybe 12 of us that first year, using the snow for ice cubes, desperate for the limited amount of fun one can have in the middle of a New London winter.

But we all know what Urbsfest became by the time 2004 rolled around.

So, with all those great memories in mind, I can only say two things. One: I’m sorry I won’t be at Jonaroo. It promises to be something that any friend of the Braunstein would be honored to attend. And with the pouring rain of a Scottish summer falling around me, I’m even more jealous for the sun and pool that are promised in New Jersey next weekend.

Secondly, I can’t help but think of my own 30th. It’s inevitable. But, so should be another Urbsfest. Inevitable. Remember Sean Connery’s death scene in “The Untouchables?” I pose you the same question: what are you prepared to do? Would you brave a weekend in the New England winter for the sake of a comeback?

It’s funny, the crazy ideas the mind can come up with before that first hit of caffeine. But I put it to you, readers…is a winter Urbsfest possible? How dedicated are you?

Klau Kalash!

You asked for it…sticks. A couple stories about things on sticks. First, go rent “So I Married an Axe Murderer.” There’s a great discussion of foods on sticks. And a bagpipe solo. And some great anti-afro redhead sentiment. Why it never got an Oscar nod, I’ll never know.

I once worked with a chef who had an extreme fear of popsicle sticks and mayonnaise. This led to my first experience with mayo popsicles; also to my first experience of a grown man screaming like a little girl at a Backstreet Boys concert.

To me, there’s something great about chewing on a stick after whatever it’s been holding is long gone. You get that latent grape flavor of a long-gone popsicle, the fried aroma of what once was a corn dog. I can’t however, express the same dedication to the fortitude of stick-held food than my friend Jon, who very nearly came to blows over a corn dog’s “wardrobe malfunction” after a night of drinking in Brighton. Jon has never failed a good stick; that night, the stick failed him.

One of the many, many fried foods that has made itself enough of a mainstay of common cuisine here to be featured in the meat cabinet at the local supermarket in the Scotch Egg. A hardboiled egg that’s been covered in sausage meat and deep fried, this is something that would benefit from a stick. Like those blessed Arancinis that were like a small smoldering fire for your mouth on cold Italian days. It would help keep the grease off your hands, and therefore off your ridiculously expensive Italian clothing.

But you’re not in Italy, are you? You’re back in the U.S. of A., where consumerism makes popsicle sticks like manna from heaven, and we can stick them in whatever kind of food we want. Now that’s freedom.

One day you wake up from that sickeningly sweet desire to save money that lures you into the darkest depths of Benny’s, Ocean State Job, or, worst of all, The Christmas Tree Shop. The Christmas Tree Shop is to intelligent Catholics what Foxwoods is to intelligent Mashantuckets: a disgraceful sellout of your culture to the masses. When you get to the cash register, the clerk’s got that look like they’re either counting change in their head, or contemplating how they’re going to kill themselves. And it’s such a misnomer: they don’t sell anything that would pass for a Christmas Tree, besides one that hangs on your car mirror. And you certainly don’t shop there: you suffer. That’s if you even admit to going. They should call it Useless Item Suffering. UIS. Gives me IBS.

Not today. Today, you’re in the back, talking to the 1.99 chalkboard that has the cutest little elves dancing all over it, and you’re about to buy 3, because…well, the elves are talking to you. Also, you’re high. And everyone needs that one thing in their house that makes them a little sick whenever they look at it. For me, chronologically, it was Heathcliff cartoons, my sister, Brussels sprouts, and tequila.

And just as some female linebacker in a sundress larger than the actual sun tries to get her not-so-wee sausage fingers on your elfish hoard, you spy an overlooked box of 10,000 popsicle sticks. And then all you think is about how now, for the next 10,000 times you need to apply ointment to anything, or get drunk enough to make some stupid home-made freezer pops from a Martha Stewart cookbook…well, you’ll be set. You drop the chalkboards, spend a moment watching the “sun” set over the lower shelves as your foe struggles to pick up her new gain, grab the sticks, and run for the door.

Are you nuts? When have you used ten thousand of anything? Those sticks were once a tree that housed those damned chalkboard elves, before they had to sell their images to the Christmas Tree Shop in exchange for a few square feet of space at one of the many, many, many trailer parks in Wareham. Have you ever really looked at how many there are? You’re driving down the strip, and when you look to one side, you catch a glimpse of them through the trees, but you really don’t believe your eyes enough to realize what kind of danger you’re in. Remember when Daniel Day is walking with the English through the field in Last of the Mohicans? Just like that, except replace the Hurons with white trash. You could give one popsicle stick to each trailer in Wareham, and you’d still find yourself running back to that wind milled monstrosity for seconds.

But I’ll give credit where credit’s due. There is in fact one stick that has withstood the test of time, a food focused, stand-alone marvel: the Hoodsie cup. That wood stick tastes good, all by itself! And it’s not all Excalibur’d in the food already…you get to disgrace it as you see fit, on your terms. I have no idea where Hood gets its wood (“Every man wants Hood wood”….a sexually charged marketing scheme for the summertime), but it pairs perfectly with the chemical laden ice cream duo in the cup.

Dryer Sheets

Have you ever heard a boxer fart? I’m not talking about Tyson after too many buffalo wings. Ha, Tyson…buffalo wings. I didn’t even mean that double entendre. I mean a boxer…the dog. 8:30 on a Sunday, and my neighbor downstairs has let out her dog into her gravel, and this thing starts farting so powerfully, I can hear it through my closed window, followed by the gas-propelled pebbles hitting the glass. Impressive.

I stumble out of bed, still reeling slightly from the flu-like systems of the past two days. Striking up a conversation with myself in the mirror, I wait for the water to boil, one step closer to that magical combo of coffee and decongestants, a legalized blast of uppers and downers. The result? I’m contemplating just what kind of advanced stamping machine Campbell’s uses to churn out thousands of doughy letters on a daily basis for their alphabet soup. Would the ever consider producing a foreign-language soup, with umlauts or accented e’s? They could minimize wasted dough by just throwing in some leftover dots and stringy bits, and pass them off as whatever their customer wanted.

And why not abstract alphabet soup? Just random pieces of something, to stimulate creative thoughts in the kids. Rorschach…the soup. Or fortune teller soup. Intuitive AND nutritious. Might not have made much difference in my day, I still would’ve seen Tommy Ellison picking on me in the schoolyard. Red hair, buck teeth, braces, intelligence? I was doomed from the start. Doomed to be SEXY. I just had a couple decade-waiting period. Why do they even give you the option of rainbow-colored bands on your braces? So you can draw even more attention to the metal structure that looks like some junior architect’s sick joke?

And all this from the bathroom mirror. Why can’t I just think about sex like a normal guy? I’ll blame it on the drugs.

Can you guess this product from its ingredients?:

Aqua, alcohol, Benzoic acid, Poloxamer 407, Eucalyptol, Menthyl salicylate, Thymol, Menthol, Sodium benzoate, Caramel.

It’s Listerine. The Caramel bit kills me. In what focus group did they decide that urine was a good color for something that you swig in your mouth on a daily basis? Did they need to round out the ingredients with something that didn’t have an x,y, or z in it? It certainly wouldn’t fly as a Crayola color, that’s for sure.

It’s funny the things we’ll put in our mouths because they’re so nicely packaged and labeled. Take Coke, for instance. In the bottle, you don’t question it. But do you honestly think that if you came across a pool of fizzy black liquid, somewhere out there in the wilderness, you’d start drinking it up? If you have a milkshake, and I have a milkshake….

DRINK IT UP!!!

Neti time. More time with my thoughts, as salt water courses through me. Because I need more time to ponder the outrageous. Like, what the hell is Nancy Kerrigan doing on the box for my Neti pot? She looks like she’s filtering crystal meth through her nostrils. Or signing the papers on a new car. Or both.

But enough about ice queens, their bad knees, and their drug habits. My saline-saturated eyes fall on the one thing that’s been gathering dust in my kitchen since I’ve moved in: the dehydrator. Why the hell haven’t I been dehydrating everything? Forget strips of marinated meat…I wonder how long I could keep a stray cat in there. Can you reverse the effects of a dehydrated cat, like Shrinky-Dinks? You could make tabby throw rugs real quick. Or organic edible dryer sheets, using some dehydrated apricots or something...throw them in with your colored laundry. All the stuff you see in the supermarket looks like it would taste good as a summer cocktail anyways. And why not just have alcohol-scented laundry detergent? Gin and tonic fabric softener perhaps? It’s the perfect scent to bring a harmonious balance to your next AA/sexaholics mixer.

I guess the point that I’m trying to make is that I’ve been seeing a lot of redundancies in the world around me. When the line between cleaners and fruit cocktails becomes blurred, separated by an aisle or two in the supermarket, it makes you look around a bit. In this world of over-production, there should be one or the other. Ok, perfect example: commercial packing peanuts, and commercial Chinese prawn crackers. They look the same, taste the same, and are completely interchangeable. You’ve seen those corn-starch packing peanuts that dissolve in water. Just add a touch of salt, write “great with a sweet chili dip!” on the outside of the box, and you’re good to go.

Honor Among Thieves

Is any food "original" anymore? Is there anything that hasn’t been developed yet, when it comes to producing things to put in our mouths? The heyday of food discovery is long over. Gone are the days of experimenting with everything around us, putting it in our mouths, chewing it, possibly dropping dead soon after. Of course, these days were synonymous with animal skin-centric fashion, and tonal grunts instead of significant language, but that still must’ve been fun times. Now we trust packaging, labels, bright lights and big cities to free us from the stress of possibly dying every time we insert something into our maw.

When we speak of “means to an end,” the window of finding new “ends” is slowly closing…but the window of “means” remains open. We’ve mapped out the world, both geographically and culinarily speaking. How far we can go has been defined; its how we get there that continues to evolve, become faster, more technological.
If you think of food as numbers, there are millions of different permutations, a seemingly endless number of algorithms to get from ingredients X to finished product Y. But there is no π, no endless string of abundance in the food world. An everlasting gobstopper is the closest we’ve come; thank you, Willy Wonka.

Nowadays, you can find one of my dishes in over 1800 locations worldwide. Step inside an Au Bon Pain on any given day, and you’ll find a curried lentil soup, developed by yours truly. But only because after I came up with it at Mantra, Thomas John stuck it in his pocket, and carried it into his next life as the corporate chef of Good Bread. The first time I tasted it, I got a more nostalgic shock than when I heard Billy Joel’s “Storm Front” for the first time in about 12 years (fantastic album.) Here was my recipe, taken, and mass marketed, without even a stray red hair to validate my historical presence.

Of course, I didn’t come up with it. Pierre Franey has a curried lentil soup that he calls “his own.” But who holds true ownership? No one. Every dish, every “idea,” comes from something. No one grows with such a pure, unadulterated mind so as not to be influenced by everything they experience. The cobblestone road outside of the coffee shop I’m writing from could be the inspiration for “chicken under a brick.”

I respect these men, these thieves: Pierre, Thomas, all of the chefs whose influence, ideas and patience have helped me design my own persona, in the kitchen and on the plate. It just simultaneously thrills and intrigues me that we all take, whether respectively or not, from those around us. Dishes get tweaked, changed ever so slightly, but still retain some of the personality of those who cooked it before. But one can’t help but wonder about the thin line between reverence and thievery.

Sweatshop Ketchup

A member of the nightshade family, it’s no wonder that people of past times viewed the tomato as evil, poisonous. Humans aren’t capable of digesting the seeds or skins of this fruit (yes, it’s a fruit,) but it’s infiltrated nearly every culture faster than the Macarena. Heinz (and John Kerry) must’ve been psyched to see that at least one of their 57 varieties had some kind of commercial success. No one ever thinks of the other 55 varieties (people do know the 57 sauce); kind of like the other two guys in the Jackson 5, after Michael, Tito, and Jermaine.

And that must piss off those other varieties SO MUCH. Ketchup doesn’t embrace the positives of the tomato, it just blends the crap out of it. Food should be a physical blend of the two things that humans seem to crave, albeit subconsciously: sex and violence. Ketchup has the violence, but not the sex. The sex comes from eating a raw summer tomato, still warm from the sun, with the seeds and pale juices running down your forearms. It’s a food novel written to embrace the senses. Ketchup is simply the Cliff’s Notes; it exists to “get it done.” We saw that when it was classified as a viable “vegetable” by the FDA during the Reagan years.

I can’t totally knock the unctuous lifeblood of good fries, though, because ketchup has seen me through some tough times. The first few years at my mom’s company, I washed far more dishes than I care to remember (as any chef who actually worked their way up will tell you,) and learned some of the miracle properties of tomato paste expertly blended with garlic, salt, and spices. Mainly, that’s it brilliant at shining copper. The low-acid content of ketchup helps eat away at any of the oxidation that builds up on it over time and use, so I slave away in the pits of ATTC for hours, blowing through several #10 cans of the stuff at a clip, and then suffer through my 15-second commute home, only to have my hands reek of the stuff for days. It also works on normal pans, to help clean up the crime scenes of some terrible food murders. Unlike vinegars, it sticks to the sides of things, so you can “marinate” a thoroughly thrashed pan in some ketchup to help remove whatever harshness you’ve developed.

There: some humor, some stories, and some helpful household hints. What more do you want from me?

Malt

Liquor, vinegar, and –ed milkshakes. All these things are pretty good on their own, but adding malt is like bringing pie to heaven…it’s just that much better.

Queso

I’m sitting on my supple leather sofa, waiting for that simple phone call that will deliver the sweet words of “you’re getting paid.” But the past week has shown me that this country and its inhabitants aren’t really that big on work efficiency, and I’ve definitely got some time to kill.

So let’s talk about aerosol cheese products. On the one hand, spray cheese was a truly innovative product in its heyday, the ultimate display of American speed, whereby we were able to get our cheese from point A to point B much faster than by any normal human conveyance. And with a market that only contained spray whip cream, it seemed to help open the door for more spray-possible items. Cream cheese? A nice peanut butter/jelly combo perhaps, designed in similar style to Aquafresh? But on the other hand, it’s cheese….in a spray can.

Now, I know there’s the whole astronaut influence in the design of weird foods like this, but I think the food companies use that as a safety net in case their product totally bombs on the open market. Like astronaut ice cream. Many of my close friends can attest to, though never fully understand, my deep, deep love for astronaut ice cream. But even I know that the stuff tastes like a combination of street chalk and a container of Friendly’s Neapolitan ice cream after it’s been opened, left in the freezer for a few months, so it’s actually passed the “freezer burn” phase, and is now exists in ice cream hell, all tacky and gluey. There’s a reason you can only buy it at science museums. There you’ve got your only viable market: the young kids who don’t know what proper flavor is, and the parents who are desperate to shut them up for a few minutes. So it helps that astronaut ice cream coats your mouth, leaving you both speechless because it tastes so bad, but also because of the artificial flavors have completely coated your vocal cords.

God I love that crap.

But I’ve written a lot about ice cream lately, so let’s get back to the spray cheese. I was first introduced to “alternative cheeses” by my friend Mike back in college. He had a soft spot for this port-flavored cheese spread, which looked like a swirled version of what comes back up after drinking too many pineapple and strawberry daiquiris. It was, however, a disturbingly delicious combo when paired with a Wheat Thin, and it also had the added benefit of not being from the dining hall. If memory serves me correctly, it had to be labeled cheese spread, because it didn’t contain enough natural integrity to be called simply “cheese.” Velveeta comes to mind just now, which I’ve forever memorized as “pasteurized processed cheese food.” That’s a classic in my mind….bricks of cheese the color of A-Rod’s skin, with that ever-so-slight wobbliness, but with a density such that the National Guard could to use them to bolster the levees during floods. Or make some pillboxes out of them if we ever engage with that cheese war I’ve spoken of before. Mexico would be stuck with their pepper-flecked queso, the kind that comes in #10 cans and is forever liquid, no matter what you do to it. Bullet beats queso, but Velveeta beats bullet. It’s simple math.

But like beer that uses geometric shapes as a marketing strategy (why would you buy something because it comes in a cube? Ok, the fried onion loaf (read: brick) at Frank’s Steakhouse in Porter Sq. may be an exception), I believe that graduation from college signifies a graduation from the sophomoric foods as well. Gone should be the spray cheese…we should be forced to cut our cheese. With knives. That we can now afford. Because we have jobs! That we celebrate by eating cheese! With knives! See how it all comes together?

If only my friends felt the same; sadly, they do not. One evening shortly before my move to the U.K., I cleaned out my friend Aaron’s cupboards, which was like looking into a culinary time capsule that dated back to “Ought 1”, as he would say. And low and behold, somewhere between the Ought 2 and Ought 3 layers of food, there was the EZ Cheese, its nozzle crusted over in rust-colored artificial flavor, its NASA-endorsed contents waiting to be released upon the world once again. It was so old, in fact, that it said CFCs were a good thing, and added to the cheddar flavor. I’m kidding. But the scary part? According to the expiration date, it was still good to eat.

Apparently the folks at Nabisco and I vary GREATLY on our definitions of “good.”