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Charlie Hatton
Brookline, MA
A few weeks ago, the missus and I decided to take a vacation. We were kicking a few ideas around when she said, ‘Hey, how about a trip to wine country?‘
‘Oh, I don’t wanna go there. It’s too hooooot, and it’s so faaaaar. The plane trip would be sooooo loooooong…‘
‘I said wine country. Not whine country.‘
‘Oh. Yeah, that sounds great. Let’s go.‘
‘Ass.‘
“Flushed with excitement (and a celebratory glass of Kroger’s red we had in the pantry), I gave Trevor’s Totally Terrific Tours a call.”
Next, we got down to some serious planning. We’re not exactly wine connoisseurs — not so long ago, my idea of a ‘fine wine’ was a cooking sherry that wasn’t store-brand — so we decided to enlist the help of a professional to help us. A tour guide. Specifically, Trevor the Tour Guide from Terrific Tours. Flushed with excitement (and a celebratory glass of Kroger’s red we had in the pantry), I gave Trevor’s Totally Terrific Tours a call.
TTTT: Hi, this is Trevor at Terrific Tours. How can we help you?
Me: We’d like to see wine country. And we’ve heard that your vans are willing to pick people up a little further out than most tours.
TTTT: Yep, that’s true. You don’t have to be right in Sonoma or Napa Valley for us to get you. Where are you staying?
Me: Uh, Boston.
TTTT: …
Me: Too far?
TTTT: Little bit. Call back when you’re somewhere in the same time zone.
So we loaded up the truck suitcases and we moved flew to Beverly San Fran.
(Cisco, that is. Big bridge. Streetcars. Rice-A-Roni. Y’all make me stop now, y’hear?)
We rented a car and drove up to Santa Rosa, which is a charming little town nestled more or less equidistant to every grape-squeezing outfit in the area. It’s not actually close to any of them, mind you — but it’s about the same short-ish drive from there to Napa, Sonoma, Calistoga, and lots of other little Cali burgs ending with ‘-a’ where you can booze it up on ‘Zins’ and ‘Cabs’ two ounces at a time.
We rang back to Tagalong Trevor’s Totally Terrific Tiptop Tours and, true to his word, he offered to pick us up for a jaunt early in the week. When?
Tuesday. Of course.
I’ll probably have more to say about the actual wine tastings in another post, but I’ll pause here to recommend Teetotalling Tagalong Trevor and his Totally Tremendous Technicolor Tourbus. The wineries he showed us (and four other touristy types on the bus that day) were equal to or better than just about any place we wandered to on our own, or had recommended by more experienced oenophiles back home. Beautiful grounds, very good wines, a nice easy pace, and not a single store-brand bottle of vino among them.
Seriously. And I checked a lot of bottles. From the inside, every chance I got.
(Also, one quick point of order: Trevor isn’t the only person running the vineyard-touring business. There’s also a woman that he partners with, and who conducts tours, as well.
But we didn’t meet her, and her name doesn’t start with a ‘T’, so I can’t really tell you anything more about her. Maybe if she changed her name to ‘Trixie’ and turned tricks in a tugboat up near Tacoma.)
In the meantime, I’d like to talk about olive oil.
Until our tour that day, I thought olives were pretty much like people. Sure, they come in different colors and shapes and sizes, but if you grab one and give it a good squeeeeeze, you’ll get pretty much the same stuff coming out of that one as from any of the others.
Not so, I learned.
Evidently, there’s more than one way to squeeze an olive. And Trevor took us to the Jacuzzi Family Vineyards, where they’ve been draining olives and shaking them twice for quite some time.
(I was thrilled to find out in the lobby that the winery was, in fact, owned by the same family who invented the ‘therapeutic spa’ jacuzzi years ago. And fully deflated to learn that they don’t actually provide jacuzzis for visitors to sit in while sipping their wines.
Seriously? Jeez, talk about two great tastes that would taste great together. One of you Jacuzzis get on that, already.)
It was here that I had my first and only ‘olive oil tasting’, and an accompanying lesson on how to properly sip a fine oil, from our intrepid tour guide Trevor. He told us that you want to warm the olive oil slightly by rubbing the tasting cup in your hand for a few seconds. This ‘wakes up’ some of the aromatic compounds in the oil, which you can then enjoy on the nose. To taste the oil, he explained, you should bring the cup to your lips and suck the oil in over your palette, bringing in air with it to distribute the molecules. Then he demonstrated:
‘*sssscccccchhhhhllllllllluuuuuuupppppp!!*‘
His technique flawless (so far as we knew, anyway), he was able to tell us of the subtleties in this particular oil — not too grassy, a bit of pepper, slightly nutty. Then it was our turn to try.
Now, Trevor did a good job of explaining the procedure, and we could clearly watch and see how it was done. He’s been around wines and olive oils in the Sonoma region for close to thirty years, and sucking liquid through your teeth and over your tongue isn’t exactly rocket science. We’ve all used sippy cups before. Some of us more recently than others.
However. I’ve been a doofus now for nearly forty years, so there’s clearly no way that I could possibly execute a simple maneuver like this one without mishap.
So, I took my cup, warmed it in my hand, wafted the aroma toward my nose, tipped the cup up, and sucked.
‘*sssscccccchhhhhuuuNNNNNNGGGGHHHHHH!!!*‘
I don’t know whether you’ve had the opportunity to suck a really high-quality, peppery, nutty, hand-pressed olive oil across your tongue, into your throat, and backwards all the way up into your nose. But while it’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience — good god, I hope it is — I can’t say I’d recommend it.
I spent the next little while trying to clear the offending foodstuff from my schnozz, with little success. Oil and water may not mix, but once entangled, oil and noses seem to be perfectly happy spooning together for the long term. Meanwhile, I felt like I’d just had a very, very dirty martini. Snorted, not stirred.
My nasal woes finally cleared up at lunchtime, when I sneezed on the piece of bread I was eating. On the bright side, it was delicious. Peppery, nutty, a bit grassy — really high-quality product. I could finally see what Tourguide Trevor was talking about. We went back and bought two bottles of the stuff.
Just don’t ask me to taste olive oil again. Or for that matter, to dress your bruschetta at a dinner party. Neither of us wants that. Trust me.
Permalink | 1 CommentI watch an awful lot of Food Network. I’m not sure how the obsession developed, exactly.
(Though I suspect the FDA should classify Alton Brown as a ‘gateway chef’. A couple of hours a day watching him, and you’ll spiral down into the hard stuff.
You think I’m kidding. Just wait until you’re sitting on your couch at 2:30 in the morning, watching crap involving some spiky-haired surf punk driving around the country looking for chili dogs to shove down his goateed gob. Then you’ll know you’re ‘on point‘. Not so much.)
In spite of my curious epicurean affliction, I’m no good in the kitchen. Couldn’t cook my way out of a paper cupcake liner. My notion of ‘blanching’ food involves taking it to see ‘A Streetcar Named Desire‘. If the recipe doesn’t begin with ‘Microwave for…‘ and end less than four words later, I’ve got no business reading it. And frankly, I’m okay with that.
(In fact, the very pinnacle of my questionable culinary career to date was managing to make scones a few months back which were neither immediately poisonous nor required a jackhammer to pry open.
Not that I made them from scratch, mind you. From a bag. Even that was touch and go. And met with considerable skepticism, as you might imagine.)
My wife, bless her little whisk, can’t reconcile this apparent paradox. How can I enjoy watching shows about food, and the preparation thereof, but display absolutely zero ability, interest or initiative in throwing my own spatula into the ring to learn?
It’s simple, I tell her. Cooking shows — the good ones, anyway — aren’t actually about cooking, per se. They’re entertainment. I can watch 24 without wanting to become a ruthless, reckless, occasionally-dead counter-terrorism agent. I can sit through Family Guy and successfully quash the urge to have three kids, gain sixty pounds and move to Rhode Island. I can catch a rerun of Three’s Company and still have no desire to live near the beach in sunny California with two young single women and… well, okay, fine. Bad example.
(Oh, who am I kidding? I don’t tan well, California’s too damned hot, and I don’t have the looks to fit in or the wardrobe to convince Mr. Roper I might be gay.
Also, within a week they’d find Suzanne Somers gagged and tied up in the storage locker. That grating blonde shtick of hers made Pamela Anderson look like Niels frickin’ Bohr.)
“Is there some contractual obligation that says I can’t TiVo Iron Chef, unless I run immediately to the kitchen afterward to try my hand at their sardine smoothie? Lord, I hope not.”
So why can’t ‘food TV’ be pure entertainment, too? Can’t I just watch Everyday Italian already, and forget about learning to make the Fettucine alla Whatsamattayou? Isn’t it enough to simply enjoy Good Eats, without storming off to find a snarky Asian lady to sell me a waffle maker? Is there some contractual obligation that says I can’t TiVo Iron Chef, unless I run immediately to the kitchen afterward to try my hand at their sardine smoothie? Lord, I hope not.
My wife sees it differently, of course. She makes the point that these shows are meant to get viewers interested in cooking, to make us more self-sufficient, and to unfold for us the wonders of exotic flavors and aromas made possible with a few culinary skills.
Right. If I want ‘exotic flavors and aromas’, I’ll suck a big strawful of that unholy fishshake up there. No, thanks. I’m just trying to kill an hour or so in front of the tube. And Baywatch isn’t on right now.
(Hey, I said Pam Anderson was dumb. I never said I couldn’t watch her with the sound turned down. Fair’s fair.)
So I decided to prove to my wife that sometimes cooking shows are meant to be emulated, and sometimes they’re just pretty pictures and ‘Bam!‘ noises you use to pass the time. To really get the point across, I’ve tried to think of other examples of cooking-as-just-entertainment. It hasn’t gone well.
First, I appealed to her visual sensibilities. I choreographed a little number, worked up a costume and showed her my impression of making pasta. As an interpretive dance. Sadly, just when I got to the crescendo where the water boils, I slipped on the placemats I was using to represent lasagna and went down in a heap. I think I sprained a fusilli.
(My wife did report that she found the show ‘highly entertaining’. But probably not in the way she was supposed to.)
Next, I tried to convince her using a more traditional art form. I gathered a few of the vegetables we had in the pantry, set up a camera, and took pictures of myself slicing, peeling and chopping them. Black and white shots, very artistic and classy. Or so I thought. Until I got a call from the local cops, after the guy at the Photo Hut called them about some ‘disturbing’ images he’d developed.
Finally, I was able to sort everything out.
(“No, officer, that’s just a carrot. Yes, I’m certain. No, I had no idea a zucchini would look that way in grayscale. Sorry for the trouble. And I hope you catch that ‘Mad Grater’ sex offender some day, but I’m afraid I can’t help you.”
If I had it to do over again, I’d probably use less suggestive veggies. And color film. And I’d opt against the ‘tasteful nudes’.)
That’s when I stopped appealing to my wife’s visual sensibilities. This carrot knows when he’s julienned.
As a last resort, I turned to cooking as poetry. Surely, a flowery description of food preparation could be seen as pure art, without any need to get the kitchen involved. Just what I needed to prove my point once and for all.
Sadly, the only material I had for inspiration were my past experiences in attempting to cook. Which were rarely successful, often dangerous, and universally regrettable. Also, about the only poetic form I know is the limerick. So the results of my ‘artistic’ stabs at food prep poetry turned out something like this:
“The secret to pudding, they say,
Is getting lumps out of the way.
So I pressed mine out thin
With my best rolling pin,
But most of it slithered away.”
Or worse:
“I once made a tomato soup,
With a cup of salt ‘stead of a scoop.
Dry like the Sahara,
Chunky as marinara,
It pretty much tasted like poop.”
Don’t even ask about the rhyme involving ‘crispy duck’. Just don’t.
I give up. I just couldn’t back up my claim that cooking shows have nothing to do with cooking. So the next time I sit down to watch a nice Unwrapped or Molto Mario, I’m just going to sigh and silently hand my wife this last attempt at artistry, my concession haiku:
Convinced by your words,
I shall now provide food; hope
You like Papa John’s.
A large loaded pizza, with garlic sauce for the crusts? Made by someone else and delivered to our door? Now that’s art I can watch all night long.
Permalink | 6 CommentsI made a visit to the optometrist last week. It’s never a particularly comfortable experience, but this time they managed to make it even more squirmy than usual. I think maybe they’ve been practicing.
As usual, the first thing they asked me to do was remove my contact lenses. It’s a reasonable request, I guess — except that I showed up twenty minutes early for my appointment (for once). So instead of effectively blinding myself and being led in to see the doctor immediately, I was dumped — myopic and defenseless — back in the lobby where normal, mostly-sighted people were shopping for eyeglasses. I’m sure they were all staring and pointing at the doofus meandering along the wall like a drunken spelunker to find a chair — but how the hell would I know? It’s not like I could see them or anything.
(For the record, I don’t object to being stripped of my corrective lenses while I’m in the joint; if they need my eyeballs to be unfettered for their crazy optometrical eye-xperiments, well, that’s what I’m there for.
I’m just suggesting that maybe we could disrobe my peepers in the exam room, privately — and during the actual doctor’s visit. That way, I’m not stuck all squinty and pitiful in the waiting area where people might get the wrong idea. One time, I went in wearing sunglasses and drinking a soda. People kept dropping change into my cup on the way by.
I swallowed two nickels and a parking meter slug before I realized what was happening. Freakin’ cheapskates.)
Eventually, they retrieved me and led me in to see the doctor. She ran through a few tests, squirted unnamed liquids of various colors into my eyes — Kool-Aid? Antifreeze? ‘Hey doc, how come this one smells like asparagus?’ — and let me put my lenses back in. As crisp precious clarity swept away the graymorphous blobs of the past hour’s existence, I looked at the optometrist, smiling at me from her chair.
And searched frantically for an excuse to tear the lenses back out.
It’s not that my doc is ugly, mind you. Far from it — she’s an attractive lady, in her mid-forties, probably, with dark hair and the sort of skin tone that suggests at least one of her parents grew up sipping olive oil somewhere along the Mediterranean.
(Or she’s Native American. Or Pakistani. Or maybe she’s a compulsive tanner, or dips herself in a vat of shellac every morning. Who knows?
Clearly, my ethnicity-based-on-skin-tone deductive powers are lacking when I can’t tell the difference between Northern Italian heritage and three coats of Thompson Water Seal. Fortunately, that’s not the point. This time.)
No, the only problem with my doc is the look. She’s somehow developed — carefully crafted, even, over years of patient interactions, no doubt — this… this look that she fixes you with while you’re in the chair. It features a slight smile — just an upturn of one corner of the mouth, really — with wide-open eyes and just the hint of a playful twinkle. It’s clear she’s worked long and hard on this expression; I suspect it’s her own personal ‘Blue Steel’. It’s meant to convey to her patients that she’s here to help us — she’s friendly, and open, and not overly serious when she doesn’t have to be. As a doctor, she can be trustworthy, a confidant, a partner in eye care. That’s what she seems to be going for.
“I’ve always had trouble reading Pakistani-Italio-Cherokee women. Especially the varnished ones.”
What I get from it is that she’s mulling over stabbing me with a saline dropper and stuffing the body in the dumpster out back. Which is really not the sort of vibe you want to be getting from someone who just pumped your eyeballs full of chemicals and has you trapped in a dark room. Alone. With medical supplies.
Of course, it’s possible I’m misinterpreting her look. My continued survival after several trips to see the woman — or to squint toward the sound of her voice, mostly — would suggest that her intentions are less than homocidal. And frankly, I’ve always had trouble reading Pakistani-Italio-Cherokee women. Especially the varnished ones.
Still. That look is one I’ve only seen on the likes of Law & Order baddies, and the sorts of calmly psychopathic killers they show in horror movie trailers before you’ve had time to avert your eyes. I’m not sure what that means for me — but I do have a follow-up appointment next week, for a “fitting”.
Only, I didn’t order new contacts. And they told me to park in the alley behind the office this time. And to ‘come alone‘.
You know, if it weren’t for the $10 co-pay on my insurance for going to this place, I would seriously think about finding a new optometrist.
Permalink | 2 CommentsI wouldn’t want to seem lazy so soon after my return to writing — I figure the honeymoon period on that is at least a week… maybe five days… three? Can I take tomorrow off? We’ll see.
In the meantime, with Thanksgiving looming a mere seven days away, I thought new and returning readers alike might find something of value in a cautionary tale I penned last November:
The Turkey Timeline: A Thanksgiving Day Misadventure
Consider it my public service announcement to you this holiday season. A ‘how NOT to’ guide to gaffing, gutting and grilling a gobbler. A comedic opera penned by Giblets and Silly-man. You get the idea.
And it’s already written, which is a bonus. That leaves me more time to plan for the gustatory festivities in store for this Thanksgiving.
“She still won’t let me near her wishbone, or her ‘dark meat’.”
Which will probably involve ordering Chinese food or something. I don’t think the missus is ready for another turkey terror; she still wakes up in a sweat sometimes, mumbling, ‘gobble… gobble gobble… gobble…‘. She still won’t let me near her wishbone, or her ‘dark meat’. Hell, these days I’d give thanks for a little snood action, maybe some carbuncle petting. Anything.
So maybe we’ll just skip Thanksgiving altogether this year. Which means I’ll have to go a whole week without making a ‘stuffing’ joke.
That’s a tough one. But I’ll give it the old turkey try.
Permalink | 1 CommentYou’d think something might have changed while I was away the past few months. With all that free time spent not writing, I should have been able to pick up a skill or two. You’d think I’d emerge from my hiatus a new and better man — wiser, craftier, savvier.
Yeah. You’d think.
Meanwhile, back on our own planet…
Yesterday, after I’d made up my mind to resurrect this little den of drivel, I drove over to a local pool hall for league night. Just as I was parking, my old roommate from college called. He was on a business trip, watching my favorite college hoops team on TV, and decided to give me a call to rub it in that they were down seven points at halftime at home to a team whose mascot is a goddamned arachnid reminisce.
Aw. How sweet. Sort of.
I sat in the car and chatted with him for awhile, until it was league time. As we wrapped up the call, I instinctively patted my pockets to make sure all the usual pants suspects were present and accounted for:
Back right pocket: wallet, check!
Front right pocket: keys… not there. Oh, but they’re in the ignition. Of course. Check.
Front and center: everybody’s home, zipper all the way up, checkamundo.
Front left pocket: cell phone…. missing. Shit. Where the hell did I leave the cell phone?
As my friend and I said our goodbyes (yes, that’s right, over the phone, I know you can see it coming and there’s nothing I can do now to hide it), I mentally walked through when I’d seen the phone last.
‘I had it when I left the house this morning… played with it during the staff meeting, yep… three hour bathroom break to play tetris, and then… oh, right — I had to plug it in to recharge the battery. Oh dear lord, my phone’s still at the office!‘
Thank the gods I have the one feeble brain cell still churning, or I’d have said all that out loud. Which means the end of our conversation would have gone something like this:
Me: Sorry buddy, I’ve got to run. I just realized I left my phone at work.
Him: Okay, sure– wait. Your phone?
Me: Yeah, and it’s new, too. I’d hate to lose it.
Him: Your cell phone, we’re talking about?
Me: Right. I’ve really got to go and look for it, pronto.
Him: Dude. How the hell did you ever make it out of freshman year?
“You ever seen a neuron commit seppuku? It’s not pretty.”
As it was, it took me another full minute or so to realize that the phone wasn’t in my pocket because, obviously, it was in my stupid hand. Another few seconds and I would have had the unenviable dilemma of trying to put the car back in gear to go find my cell phone while figuring out where to put my cell phone so I could drive.
And I don’t think that last brain cell would have stood for that. You ever seen a neuron commit seppuku? It’s not pretty.
In my defense, all I can say is that last night is one of the first times in the month I’ve had my new phone that I’ve actually used it as a phone. It’s one of those fancy new Googly doohickeys, and though I use it for plenty of other nonsense on a daily basis, it’s rare that I make the actual wireless talky-talky on it. So I was as surprised as anyone to discover that the phone missing from my pocket was, in fact, plastered to my cheek. What a novel concept.
Come to think of it, I’m a little surprised that I have the phone in the first place. I’m not exactly what you call an ‘early adopter’ of new technology. I had the mobile phone it replaced for a number of years — it was a rotary-dial model and the size of a small doghouse, if that tells you anything. The phone before that, I picked up cheap sometime in the Cenezoic era; if the string hadn’t broken completely off the tin can handset, I probably would have never traded it in.
But the draw of the Googly phone was too much; I bought it the very day it went on sale. Changed carriers to get it, too.
(Technically — this is merely technically, now, understand — but technically, I ‘camped out’ to get it.
Which means I accidentally showed up twenty minutes before the store opened and had to wait in line behind some Asian kid and his mom, a gaggle of RenFaire rejects and a guy whose nickname at some point in his life, I’m certain, was ‘Jughead’. And probably still is.
Rubbing shoulders with royalty, I was. And I wonder why I don’t ‘camp out’ for things more often.)
Anyway, the thing that really drew me to this phone is how open it is. Without getting into all of the mumbo jumboterica, the key is that people who want to write nifty little programs for it can have access to just about anything they want. The address book. The GPS. Wireless connections. Credit card numbers. Your DNA sequence. Pretty much everything.
And what a load off an already-taxed mind, let me tell you. Oh sure, they said at the store, this little baby doesn’t do anything now. Nothing at all, really, but sit there and look not-nearly-pretty-enough-for-some-picky-people. But some day… some day Real Soon Now™, the world will be your cell phone’s oyster.
You want to surf the web? You got it. Pinpoint on a map where someone’s calling from? They’ll figure out a way. Play a nice game of Global Thermonuclear War? Greetings, Dr. Falken.
Why, in the not-so-distant future, they said, you’ll be able to program this system to ring an alarm to wake you in the morning, bring you Eggos and juice in bed, and toss a pair of fresh underpants in the dryer to warm to your liking.
(Of course, you’ll need a hardware upgrade for that last bit of functionality. And additional carrier charges may apply, if your laundry room happens to be in a roaming area.
Also, I’d probably get the phone with a software glitch, and wind up with my Fruit of the Looms covered in syrup and wrinkly waffles stuffed down my pants. And I’ve long said I’m never letting that happen. Again. Not after the Great Denny’s Fiasco of ’06.)
So I suppose my mistake was not thinking of my phone as an actual phone. I should really write myself a note to remind me of that. Hey, maybe the phone has some program that can help.
Now where the hell did I leave that damned thing this time?
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