I’m so used to frozen and canned foods having endless ingredient lists that it’s kind of a shock to see a short one. And you can’t get much shorter than the ingredient list for Trader Joe’s Chicken Perogi:
**Ingredients:** Ground chicken, flour, water, onions, corn oil, salt, black pepper.
And they’re pretty tasty, especially if you fry them in butter.
Scene from Matthew’s future:
*Location: The Pearly Gates*
**Matthew:** I got to heaven? Rock.
**St. Peter:** Not so fast. *[He flips open his PowerBook and logs into YouTube.]* Does this video look familiar?
> **Matthew:** I am not a yuppie!
**Matthew:** I may have said that.
**St. Peter:** Then how do you explain this Whole Foods shopping list from April 3, 2006, which includes such items as duck fat and an $8 chocolate bar?
**Matthew:** Uh.
**St. Peter:** Let me get the down button on this elevator for you.
It’s always a little scary to try a product like [Rancho Gordo](http://www.ranchogordo.com/) beans. Rancho Gordo (which is Spanish for “fat farm”) is in Napa Valley, and proprietor Steve Sando grows a stunning variety of beans, as well as some chiles and corn. My mom brought me back a pound of Gordo’s Red Nightfall beans from San Francisco, and I cooked them today.
It’s scary to try something like the Gordo beans not because they might be bad, but because they might be good. Probably I would have been better off never having tasted a Pralus chocolate bar, because they really are better than my usual Valrhona bars, and they’re three times the price.
Maybe this could be a diet strategy, though. If there’s something you feel you eat too much of, find a rare and exorbitantly priced gourmet version of it to put you off the regular stuff.
Anyway, the Gordo beans were delicious, and I look forward to ordering more. Red Nightfalls are a small, beautifully speckled bean, and when you cook them they turn the beans and sauce brick red. Laurie thought I’d put tomatoes in, but there were none, just mirepoix and beans. We ate them with pork chops. Iris wasn’t eating her bites of pork, so I offered her a bite of mine. She ate it and said, “Iris would like some more Dada’s pork chop.” I pointed out that she had some on her plate, and she made a face like, “I knew that,” and gobbled it.
Some of the leftover beans are going to turn into refried beans. I’ve never actually made homemade refried beans that I thought were any better than canned, but I have a feeling that this time might be the charm.
Have you ever come down with a bad case of first-novelitis? It’s a common ailment for which the only cure is to describe everything in great detail and work through your complicated relationship with your father.
Stanley Park, by Timothy Taylor, has a bad case of first-novelitis, but it’s still a great read. The protagonist, Jeremy Papier, is a chef in Vancouver BC, which puts him in an enviable position. He’s also brash and self-destructive, which is less enviable. Anyway, I’ve read plenty of nonfiction accounts of restaurant cooking (the best of which is Steven Shaw’s “A Week in the Gramercy Tavern Kitchen,” which no longer seems to be online but is available in Best Food Writing 2002), but Taylor’s fantasy trumps them all:
> He turned to Benny’s dinner. He would make something _Ã la minute_. One dish uniquely for her.
> He scooped up a skillet in one hand and let it bang onto the black gridded top of the range. He went to the walk-in and found the few remaining pork chops, which had been put awa. He removed one, then picked a large bottle of Chambly La Fin du Monde. A Trappist-style Quebec beer, one of the best in the world as far as Jeremy was concerned. Benny would never have tried it, and he guessed that she would not believe that such delicate effervescence could come from a beer at all.
> There were still sliced chanterelles and shiitakes, diced onion, cream, garlic, crushed pepper, all prepped and in containers next to the stove top. _Mise en place._ He poured Benny a glass of beer, watching the uneven bubbles forming in the firm head, letting the foam rise a good half-inch above the rim of the glass. Then he poured off a cup of beer into a small bowl and put it next to the other prepped ingredients, put the tall bottle next to the glass on a serving tray, slid them onto the stainless steel pass-through for Zeena.
> “Table seven, sweetie,” he said…
> When the pan was hot he added a knob of butter and some oil from a plastic, red-nozzled bottle, let it heat through and foam while he vigorously salted and peppered the chop. He dusted it with flour, then gripped the protruding bone with tongs and pressed it down into the foaming fat. When it was browned on both sides, he tested its firmness with his thumb, pushing gently on the flank of the hot chop, pulled it out and onto a small plate that he slid into a low oven. A few onions went in to the pan, a grind more pepper, chanterelles and shiitakes sliced thin, some minced parlsey. He tossed the mixture, letting it slide ot the far edge o the pan, pulling it back and up towards him, which made it break loose from the slick surface and turn over before landing. He let it cook through, whistling with the music–they had segued from Tom Waits to Tom Jones. When the mushrooms were starting to brown, he added a bit of garlic and the beer, swirling the contents of the pan to mix them while they boiled. A knob of butter to thicken the sauce. A new dry side-towel before grabbing the chops out of the oven. Back they went into the sauce, half covered and slid just slightly off the flame.
> He chose new potatoes for her, much better with the beer. He laid down a bed of the browned mushrooms in their sauce, nestled the chop on top, triangulated with three of the waxy yellow potatoes, sprayed the plate with more parsley and carried it out himself.
> “Grenadin de porc au beurre La Fin du Monde,” he said, sliding it on to the table in front of her.
At the time I read this, I’d never had La Fin du Monde, so I sought it out, and it has become my all-time favorite beer. Whether that’s because of its innate goodness or because it whisks me away to Jeremy’s kitchen for a few minutes, I couldn’t say.
The best deal in literature is Daniel Pinkwater’s 5 Novels. For twelve whole bucks you get _Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars_, _Slaves of Spiegel_, _Young Adult Novel_, and _The Last Guru_ (although, frankly, I thought _The Last Guru_ sucked). You also get _The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death_.
Pinkwater’s best known book is probably The Hoboken Chicken Emergency, which was made into a Wonder Works episode in the 80s. But the prolific Pinkwater has written dozens and dozens of books, nearly all of which are worth reading and some of which are genuinely great.
Many of the places featured in Pinkwater books are thinly disguised actual places from the author’s past. The Snarkout Boys, for example, are three kids (one of whom is a girl) who sneak out every night to watch B-movies at the Snark Theater. Apparently the real theater was called the Clark, in Chicago.
That means that it’s possible that Beanbender’s Beer Garden was a real restaurant. If so, I don’t want to know, because surely it no longer exists, and that would mean I missed the greatest restaurant in the history of the world. See if you don’t agree.
> Beanbender’s was a strange-looking structure. At first, it was hard to get any idea of its shape; it just seemed to be a collection of odd-looking dark lumps in the night. Then we could see that Beanbender’s was made up of a number of dead trucks and a couple of railroad cars arranged in a circle, like covered wagons in the movies, made into a circle for protection against the Indians.
> All the dead trucks and railroad cars were covered with wooden shingles and banked with earth and gravel above the wheels. A number of kerosene lanterns were fastened to the outside of the circle. There was a door, with a lantern on either side, lighting up a sign painted on a board. BEANBENDER’S, it said.
> When we walked into Beanbender’s we were smacked in the face by a whole lot of warmth, light, and good smells. There were lots of people in the open areas made by the trucks and railroad cars. They were sitting at tables made of old giant cable spools and old doors laid across sawhorses. The whole place was lighted by candles stuck in bottles and kerosene lamps, and together with the wood shingles that were tacked onto the trucks and railroad cars, the dozens of flames made a warm, reddish glow under the dark sky.
> In the middle of the circle was a big iron thing–sort of a basket–and some logs were burning in it, making more friendly light, good smells, and crackling noises.
> There was a guy playing a little accordion, and some people were singing along with him. People had big mugs of beer and big, crisp-looking sausages and baked potatoes in their hands. They held the sausages and the baked potatoes wrapped in a paper napkin and took bites of them between swigs of beer. Even though it was late at night, three or four little kids ran around among the tables.
> It was the greatest place I had ever seen.
> Winston Bongo thought so, too. Rat, of course, had been there before. “Have a beer?” she asked.
> I had tasted beer before, and I hadn’t liked it. It was sour and sort of soapy tasting. I never understood why anybody wanted to drink it. However, in Beanbender’s it seemed that holding a mug of beer in one’s hand was the thing to do, so I went up to the bar and got one along with Rat and Winston and Captain Shep Nesterman.
> Beanbender’s beer was nothing like the stuff in cans that my father drinks. It had a nutty taste, and it was cold and good. The guy at the bar was Ben Beanbender, the owner of the beer garden. He didn’t ask us for identification or anything. He just filled mugs from a big barrel and handed them to us. I also got a baked potato. Ben Beanbender poked a hole in one end with his thumb, slapped in a hunk of butter, salted and peppered the potato, wrapped it in a napkin, and handed it to me. It was great! The potato was almost too hot to hold, and the salty butter dribbled onto my sleeve. It tasted just fantastic with the beer. The beer and the baked potato cost fifty cents. It’s the best deal in Baconburg.
In case you’re worried that I just gave away the best part of the book, trust me that this book leaps from highlight to highlight, and there are plenty of other parts that are just as good, if not always as appetizing.