… to a de-luxe apartment floaty thing in the sky.
With the help of some very patient friends, I have finally moved.
MichaelProcopio.wordpress.com is dead.
Long live FoodfortheThoughtless.com
I am forever bewildered by technology. There will be details to iron out; curtains and throw pillows to buy; paint chips to ponder.
So please pardon my mess. I’m bell-and-whistle shopping as we speak.
I hope to see you there.
Yours ever so truly,
Michael Procopio
When my brother went off to the south of France for his year abroad, one of the first things he planned to do was take a little side trip to Monaco to visit Princess Grace.
He had no prior introduction to either Her Serene Highness nor her family, but I am almost certain he considered that, since he and she were half Irish and both of their fathers were from Philadelphia, he was a shoe-in for a dinner invite.
Sadly, the houses of Grimaldi and Procopio never got to mingle.
On the 13th of September, 1982, Princess Grace suffered a stroke while driving her youngest daughter home from their family retreat at Roc Agel. The car veered off the road, down a mountainside, and into a florist’s garden.
Princess Stephanie survived the crash, but my brother’s plan to meet her mother did not. When Princess Grace died on September 14, Douglas cancelled his plans.
He never went to Monaco.
Her death, however, became his hobby. He began collecting Princess Grace memorabilia and sending it home to us in boxes– magazine and news articles about the accident, postcards with her image on them, a record of her reciting the story of L’Oiseau Du Nord et L’Oiseau Du Soleil. He was, to put it mildly, obsessed.
One of those boxes included a memorable (to me) letter in which he took enough time out of his deep mourning to mention the cafe sandwich in which he took much solace: the croque madame. “It’s a ham and cheese sandwich, but with an egg on top that looks like a woman’s breast.” He thought it was genius.
Not being particularly interested in women’s breasts or egg sandwiches, I opted instead to try my had at making eggless croques messieurs (I am uncertain if this is the correct plural of croque monsieur but I’m going with it). They came out tasty, but uninspiring– a grilled-up ham and cheese sandwich, but made with something harder to find and more expensive than American cheese: Gruyère.
From thousands of miles away, I tried to share in both my brother’s love of ham-and-cheese sandwiches and his deep sense of loss over an Oscar-winning actress, but my interest eventually waned. I moved onto other, more important things like The Go Go’s and Sun In.
Not long after, my brother traded in his grief over Princess Grace for a much more attainable celebrity-stalking obsession: Pope John Paul II. He blew off the tiny Principality of Monaco for the even tinier sovereign state of The Vatican. I think he believed the less square acreage he had to cover in any country, the better the chance of meeting its head of state.
Like everything else in life, Monsieur Croque and his perky-breasted wife were abandoned and forgotten.
It had been years since I had given any thought to the croque madame, but when my friend Rebecca recently ordered a croque monsieur, I became amused by the fact that I was instantly reminded of Princess Grace. It was like some edible free-association game. She and the sandwich are inextricably linked in my mind. When I think “Grace Kelly”, I think of Hitchcock and High Society. When I think “Princess Grace of Monaco”, I think “ham and cheese sandwich with an egg on top.” Same woman, different associations. It’s really rather maddening.
But I don’t think I would have it any other way.
Croque Madame
The key to a decent croque madame (or monsieur, for that matter) is the Mornay sauce. If you are not up on your sauces and think that, since this sauce carries a French name, it must be difficult to make, you are very wrong. And possibly a francophobe.
If I just said “the sauce you make for macaroni and cheese” it would still, essentially, be the same thing. Since Princess Grace straddled both the English and French-speaking worlds, you may call it what you like. As long as you make it at least once in your life, I do not care what you call it.
Makes one sandwich
Ingredients:
2 slices of bread (preferably pain de mie) I used brioche, which worked beautifully, by the way. If you have access to neither, use a good quality white loaf. And you must cut off the crusts. Must.
2 slices of ham, cut into the same exact shape as the bread slices. We are going for neatness since we are eating this in honor of a dead princess.
1 egg gently cooked in 2 tablespoons of butter until the white has set and the yolk is runny.
Enough grated Gruyère cheese to cover the ham.
2 tablespoons of butter in which to griddle and brown the bread.
As much Mornay sauce as you dare. At least enough to spread on both sides of the bread and top the egg.
For the Mornay Sauce:
2 1/2 tablespoons butter
3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
2 cups of warm whole milk
1/4 teaspoon of salt
Freshly ground pepper to taste (The classic recipe calls for white pepper. I do not believe in white pepper.)
1/8 to 1/4 teaspoon freshly-grated nutmeg (Nutmeg is not optional. Really.)
2 to 3 ounces of grated Gruyère cheese
1. To make the Mornay sauce, melt butter in a saucepan over medium heat. Add the flour and stir constantly until the mixture (roux) is a pale yellow froth. DO NOT BROWN. Slowly add milk and continue whisking until the sauce thickens and comes to a boil (2 to 3 minutes). Reduce heat to low, add salt, nutmeg, and pepper to taste. Let simmer for another 2 to 3 minutes.
Congratulations, you now have a Béchamel sauce.
2. Stir in Gruyère cheese and whisk until thoroughly melted and incorporated into the sauce. This, my good people, is Mornay sauce. Once you’ve finished congratulating yourself, put it aside and place a piece of plastic wrap directly on top of the sauce to prevent a skin from forming. Keep warm. There is enough sauce here for probably 10 sandwiches, by the way. I’m sure you’ll find plenty of uses for it, both culinary and other.
3. In a pan large enough to accommodate your two slices of bread in side-by-side fashion, melt 2 tablespoons of butter over medium heat. Add bread slices and lightly brown their bottoms. Turn bread over and spread enough Mornay sauce to cover each slice. Add your two precision-cut ham slices neatly on one piece of bread, and cover that with a liberal amount of grated cheese. Place pan under the broiler long enough to melt the cheese over the ham. (I had to transfer my bread to a smaller pan in order for it to fit under my broiler, which is why the pan in my photos looks almost Princess clean.)
4. Remove pan from broiler. Place second bread slice over the one laden with ham and cheese to for a true sandwich. Gently place the egg on top of the sandwich, cover it with more Mornay sauce, and return sandwich to the broiler. When the sauce on top bubbles and browns, remove from the broiler.
5. Slide your croque madame onto a piece of your finest china, pop open a beer (but pour it into a glass, please), pop a copy of To Catch a Thief into your dvd player, and fast forward to that scene in which Grace Kelly takes Cary Grant on a wild ride over the same stretch of road where she died 27 years later.
6. Better open another beer.
Well, Gelukkig Nieuwjaar to all you people out there. I’m still under the New Year wire, am I not?
I rather enjoyed 2010, but I am comfortable letting it go. I met a lot of really interesting people, did innumerable fascinating things, and ate an incalculable number of calories.
And I will not list a single thing here, because everyone and their stepmother has already furnished you with end-of-year lists.
But I just wanted to take a moment to thank all of you nice people who deign to grace my site with your visits. Really. You make me not want to be a shut-in.
Here’s to a wonderful 2011. I have lots of stories to (over-) share with you this year.
In the meantime, however, I am going to walk about twenty paces and downstairs to the left, grab myself a margarita, and meditate myself into a stupor with the sounds of screaming monkeys and Twittering food bloggers.
In Cancún, Mexico.
Cloris Leachman and Mel Brooks are almost entirely to blame for this week’s post. Or to thank, depending upon your point of view.
I was curled up in bed one evening, enjoying a scene from the film Young Frankenstein in which Frau Blucher (cue whinnying horses) offers the good eponymous doctor first brandy, then warm milk, and finally Ovaltine before he goes to bed, much to his increasing irritation.
Ovaltine. I hadn’t thought about it in decades. The next several scenes of the film played to a distracted audience because I was too busy (falsely) reminiscing about a malty, vitamin and mineral-infused powder and how delicious a hot, milky mug of the stuff would send me off to sleep at night.
So I went out and bought some then next morning.
When I returned home with my prize (secret decoder ring sadly not included), I heated up some milk and stirred in three heaping tablespoons, just as I was told to do in this commercial. I took a sip and remembered something important:
I didn’t like hot Ovaltine as a kid. Thirty years later, I still felt the same way. Rather than spend the morning being a Sulky Sue, I poured myself a cup of hot coffee instead and remembered the way I truly enjoyed the official beverage of Captain Midnight: cold.
Really, really cold. I’d save my heaping tablespoons for sprinkling over vanilla ice cream and stir them in– essentially making myself Ovaltine ice cream. More correctly, I was making myself an Ovaltine shake in a bowl because I’d stir it so much that it would soften and melt enough for me to ladle it into my mouth like cold soup.
Highly caffeinated and momentarily filled with energy, I decided to go ahead and make myself some Ovaltine ice cream then and there so that I could save precious time and energy later when I’d return home, brain-fried and exhausted from work, looking for something sweet and comforting when I no longer had the will to heap or stir.
And I thought it would make a lovely little Christmas treat to share with my readers. Something special that wasn’t another god damned Holiday Cookie (Insert apology for my last post here). I made the ice cream in no time, but I let it sit covered in my freezer between the half-finsished bottle of limoncello and 2-lb. bag of pecans to languish uneaten and un-photographed.
Why? It seemed too simple to share. It wasn’t enough. Almost reflexively, I felt that, since this was the Holiday Season, it needed a little extra oomph. I needed to deck this ice cream’s halls with boughs of something. But what?
Marshmallows were the first things that came to mind. It stood to reason that, if one would drink hot cocoa or Ovaltine garnished with cute little marshmallows, why not ice cream? It would make for a nice little trimming.
I thought about swirling marshmallow fluff into the ice cream, but I wanted the option of not having every serving marshmallow-laced.
What about a dollop of marshmallow fluff on top? For no discernible reason, the idea left me as cold as the ice cream shoved in my freezer. Instead, I thought I would make a marshmallow fluff whipped cream. I thought I was being brilliant, but I just wound up giving myself an ice cream-induced headache.
Or, rather, an ice cream garnish-induced headache. I went through five batches, each one better than the next, but still not right. Too sticky, not flavorful enough to match the ice cream, too absolutely irritating. I couldn’t get my dessert spectacular enough. Or pretty enough. I was spending so much time, money, and energy on this whole marshmallow business that I was beginning to wish I’d never made the ice cream in the first place. I just wanted the whole thing to go away. I was stressing myself out over a dessert. I felt ridiculous. And I’ve never been a huge fan of marshmallows to begin with.
Then I made an important connection:
The way I was feeling about my Ovaltine ice cream was precisely the way I felt about Christmas– what was initially a simple, delightful, and comforting idea had transformed into something complicated, annoying, and stress-inducing. This little exercise in making a malted ice cream became, in it’s own way, an unexpected gift– I realized that it wasn’t Christmas (or my ice cream, for that matter) that I had grown to loathe, it was all the other stuff– the irritating marshmallowy fluff– that gets in the way:
The wish lists; the awful sweaters; the cheesy and inescapable Christmas music; the garish decorations; the wasted money; the expectations; the enforced Holiday cheer; the sappy, sticky, saccharine sweetness that has fixed itself to the holiday. What was once a season of good will has transformed itself over the years into an overblown marshmallow world in the winter.
And anyone with sufficient marshmallow experience can tell you that marshmallows are hard, tasteless things when they get cold.
And then I realized another important thing: I’m being terribly hard on the poor old marshmallow. I had burdened an essentially innocuous piece of gelatinous poof with all the evils of Christmas Present. And I’m okay with that because this whole exercise has made me understand what is and is not important about both Christmas and desserts:
a) They should both be sources of comfort and joy.
b) They should both be shared with those you love.
c) Neither of them need an excess of trimmings. They are both at their best when approached simply.
All the rest is just fluff.
In apology to the marshmallow and to show that I bear it no true ill will, I give you a little, fluffy bonus of holiday goo: Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra mincing about together singing “Marshmallow World.” If these to Italians don’t take it seriously, why on earth should I?
Oh, and Merry Christmas. Really.
Ovaltine Ice Cream
Though I thought up this ice cream on my own, there are several other people in this world who thought of it before I did. However, the recipe is my own, with a special thanks to my go-to vanilla ice cream base, courtesy of Mr. David Lebovitz, who seems to know a little something about ice cream making. So I’ve heard. The method for making this recipe I got from him. And I like it very much, thank you.
And p.s. As noted, I do not recommend using mini marshmallows for garnish for reasons already mentioned. They are placed in the photo for purely contrary reasons.
Serves 2 to 4
Ingredients:
1 cup whole milk
3/4 cups light brown sugar
A heavy pinch of salt (think “big man fingers”)
2 cups heavy cream
5 large egg yolks (think “big chicken [insert body part of choice here]”)
1/2 cup Ovaltine
3/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
Preparation:
1. In a medium saucepan, warm the milk, sugar, and salt long enough to dissolve sugar. If the mixture looks a trifle curdled, do not panic, just blame the brown sugar and move on. There is straining involved later in this recipe and all will be fine.
2. Pour the cream into a medium-sized bowl and set a fine mesh strainer on top.
3. In a separate bowl, whisk the egg yolks. Gradually add some of the warm milk mixture to the eggs and whisk constantly. Pour the now-warm yolks into the sauce pan with the rest of the milk and cook over a low heat, stirring constantly and scraping the sides and bottom of the pan with a spatula as you go. When the mixture looks like custard, it is precisely because that is what you have made. When it is thick enough to coat the back of your spatula, remove from heat and pour custard through the mesh strainer and into the awaiting cream. Stir in the Ovaltine and vanilla extract. Feel free to add or subtract the amount of Ovaltine recommended. It’s your ice cream, so make it as intense or feeble as you dare.
4. Set your bowl of ice cream base into a larger, ice-filled bowl and stir until cool. Cover and refrigerate until completely chilled, then go ahead and freeze it in your ice cream maker (provided you have an ice cream maker. If you do not have an ice cream maker, return custard to your refrigerator until you have purchased one, then proceed) according to the manufacturer’s instructions.
5. If you insist upon garnishing, I suggest adding a light dusting of both cocoa powder and Ovaltine powder for the finish. I do not recommend adding the mini marshmallows as seen in the above photograph. They are to be avoided for reasons twice mentioned or alluded to. If, however you still insist upon using marshmallows, I suggest placing your Ovaltine ice cream in a microwave for 90 seconds on high. When the ice cream is fairly bubbling, add marshmallows, then take a moment to seriously reconsider your priorities.
Last weekend, I was invited to what some people might call a “cookie swap”. The guests were asked to bring three dozen home-baked cookies to share with the other guests in attendance. I didn’t go because I had other plans, but I was intrigued and baffled by the idea of it.
Cookie swap? I couldn’t help but think that it might be some sort of food blogger’s version of wife swapping, but instead of dropping one’s keys into a large fishbowl and leaving the party with someone else’s wife, one swaps recipes online, drops their creation on a side table, and winds up leaving with someone else’s cookies.
Tempting, perhaps, but I don’t need to get any fatter this winter– the Holidays are hectic enough. And I have neither the time nor the energy to bake off large quantities of cookies during the month of December. Hell, I barely have the time or energy to write blog posts.
I did, however, feel as though I were missing something by opting out of Holiday cookie parties and Twitter #cookieweek and all the other cookie-related hullabaloo that happens around this time of year, so I decided I’d do something about it.
I decided to bake one gingerbread cookie*. Just one. Or four, if you’re counting accessories. It’s all I had time for.
I’ve made gingerbread men, I’ve made gingerbread women. They’re delicious, but they don’t make much of a statement. I thought about making transgendered gingerbread persons, but they aren’t exactly exciting — in purely gingerbread terms, mind you– they look just like any other gingerbread men and women, except maybe with slightly larger hands and feet than ordinary. Or smaller, depending.
So I decided to make a gingerbread drag queen.
It makes perfect sense if you stop to think about it long enough. The Holidays are loud, fun, overly-decorated, and in-your-face. It’s a time of year that screams out for a cookie to match it. And gingerbread drag queens certainly fit the bill.
One of the best things about making gingerbread drag queens is that you only need to make one. You’ll spend so much time thinking about her (what she’ll wear, what her drag name should be, etc.) that you simply won’t have time to do anything else. Besides, there are so many accessories to bake along side of her. I limited myself to three: a wig, a cocktail, and a microphone**.
If you have the right amount of time on your hands, you could make different wigs to suit various occasions: A menorah tiara-ed french twist for Hanukkah, a red sequined Santa hat over white-frosted bangs for Christmas, a beehive filled with apple pie filling and corn nuts for Kwanzaa. I haven’t even begun to think about what sort of wig one would wear for Boxing Day. A wig strewn with coins and leftover food? I’m not entirely sure, however, how one might go about creating that effect with royal icing, so let’s just pretend I didn’t mention it.
Perhaps the best thing about making a gingerbread drag queen is that you must name it. I’ve decided to name mine Ginger Breadman in honor of the very last day of Hanukkah. I would have posted her earlier in the holiday, but you know how drag queens are– they take forever to get ready, but once they do…
They are fierce.
And they don’t like to share the stage with anybody.
Which is what you should tell people when you show up to your next cookie swap with only one, gorgeous cookie.
*No recipe this week, because the recipe I used is not my own. It is Elise Bauer’s of Simply Recipes. I am rather fond of both her and her gingerbread recipe. I did, however, leave out the cracked black pepper, but only because I cared too much about the complexion of my drag queen.
** And special thanks to the eight year-old KVC who unwittingly donated the silver glitter sprinkles to give Ginger the right shade of eyeshadow and a glimmering microphone.
I have this “thing” for Betty White. I always have.
I love this woman so much that I could just eat her with a spoon.
So that is precisely what I set out to do.
Figuratively, of course. She’s a lifelong animal rights activist, so going as far as trying to consume her in the literal sense just doesn’t feel right.
But how does one go about creating a dish to honor someone who plays it:
a) Sweet and (a little too) simple as Rose Nylund on The Golden Girls. b) Tart, over-sexed, and devastatingly cutting as Sue Ann Nivens on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and… c) Smart as a whip on pretty much every game show that required celebrity participation in the 60s, 70s, and 80s.
(Insert question mark here.)
The answer seemed easy: One makes a dessert that is simple and sweet, tart and smart.
The name was the first thing that came to me, like a Wheel of Fortune Before-and-After puzzle. Apple Brown Betty White. But before I could say, “I’d like to solve the puzzle, please, Mr. Sajak,” I realized that I may have had the name of the dish, I wasn’t sure what would go into it.
Oh, I know. The dessert would be required to have bread and apples in it, otherwise it wouldn’t be an Apple Brown Betty, but I kept hearing Sue Ann Nivens exclaim after Mary Richards told her she might have Prince Charles on her show, “Oh, you and he would make a wonderful pair if only you weren’t so old, American, and common.”
Apple Brown Betty might very well be all three, but only the first two adjectives could describe Betty White– she is anything but common. So what to do? I had thought about making a cheesecake (constant companion of The Golden Girls) and adding an Apple Brown Betty topping to it but:
a) The idea disgusted me and b) It was entirely too complicated. It’s two desserts rolled into one. And not worth the effort. I wanted other people to make it and share in my loving cannibalization of Miss White.
I was stuck, so I filed away the idea until the right answer came along. Which is precisely what happened this weekend.
I had prescribed for myself a much-needed quiet evening at home. There was a brilliant thunderstorm happening outside, so I decided that, instead of my traditional martini, I would whip up a batch of glögg— a favorite Holiday time, cold weather beverage. As I sat down with a hot mug of the stuff, I noticed the pile of apples minding their own business in the fruit bowl I keep strategically situated in my living room to trick guests into believing that I eat well. I took a sip of my drink and started to think again about the nebulous Apple Brown Betty White. After several more sips, the answer seemed obvious.
Sue Ann Nivens? She worked, insulted people, and chased men in Minneapolis. Rose Nylund? She told endless stories about her childhood in St. Olaf. Both of these women lived in Minnesota, a state built by Scandinavians. I could make this into a Swedish dessert. With the exception of bread and apples, I had all the ingredients warm in my hands. The answer had been right there in front of me for ages. I just needed a little liquid inspiration to see it.
“Mr. Sajak,” I thought,” I’d finally like to solve the puzzle.”
Though why on earth I thought in terms of one of the few game shows Betty White was never on (to my knowledge) I will never know.
Or why I was calling him Mr. Sajak when everyone else calls him Pat.
Apple Brown Betty White
This really is as sweet and simple as Rose, and tart and easy as Sue Ann. And it’s a perfect dessert to make during the Holiday season when one is either too traumatized from baking Thanksgiving pies or unable to so much as look at another damned Christmas cookie.
Now I know I’m not the boss of you, but the key to Apple Brown Betty White’s success is the finishing touch. The last word, if you will. Instead of adding sweet whipped cream or vanilla ice cream, this dish screams out for crème fraîche tempered by a touch of bee excretion. It’s a tart little zinger of a finish delivered with a honeyed tone like only Sue Ann Nivens could pull off.
And it will make you one Happy Homemaker. I promise.
Serves 4 to 6
Ingredients
3 apples suitable for baking, like Jonagold
4 slices of brown bread, cut into small cubes. Other types will work, but this is a brown betty so I’m sticking with it.
1/2 cup butter, melted
3/4 cup dark brown sugar
1/3 cup slivered almonds, lightly toasted
1/3 cup raisins soaked in brandy
2 tablespoons of said raisin-soaking brandy
1 tablespoon grated orange zest
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground cardamom
1/8 teaspoon ground cloves
A pinch of salt
As much honey-tinged crème fraîche as you dare
Preparation:
1. Place bread cubes in a food processor and pulse a few times until there are both small chunks and finer crumbs. Spread them onto a baking sheet and bake in a 350ºF oven until they are dry to the touch and lightly toasted. Remove, toss with melted butter, and set aside. Turn oven up to 375°F.
2. Peel, core, halve, and slice the apples into 1/4″ slices. In a large bowl, toss them with raisins and brandy, then add all the spices, brown sugar, almonds, and salt. Mix gently with clean hands, which is always much more satisfying that mixing such things with a spoon. Take a scant handful of the finer breadcrumbs and toss in (this will help absorb some of the liquid during baking, but said liquid is really nothing to be afraid of).
3. Rub the bottom and sides of a 1 1/2 quart baking dish with butter. Spread apple mixture more or less evenly along the bottom of the dish. Cover with remaining breadcrumbs and bake loosely covered with foil for 40 minutes. After this time, please remove the foil to let the bread crumbs brown. You will know your Apple Brown Betty White is done when the crumbs are sufficiently dark as Miss White’s humor and the apples start to bubble like her darling television personality.
4. Remove from oven, and serve as hot* as this 88 year-old woman’s career with a generous amount of honeyed crème fraîche.
*This dish can be warmed again but, if you are a diehard Sue Ann Nivens fan, feel free to tell your guests you’d rather flush it down the toilet than see it re-heated (See: Veal Prince Orloff).
I hate everything about this word. I hate the look of it, I hate the hard sound of it, I hate the power of it.
I hate the hate of it.
There is nothing pleasant about the word “faggot”. Even when taken to mean “a bundle of sticks tied together to be used for kindling”, the relative innocence of this definition has disappeared, thanks to the idea that, in a time when people were burned at the stake for unorthodoxy, people like me were thought of as so unworthy– so beneath contempt– that they were denied the simply dignity of their own bonfire, but rather, bound together and set afire en masse.
Like a bundle of faggots.*
In cooking, a faggot is something made from the ground up guts and off-cuts of pig or lamb; a lowly dish made from the cast-off animal flesh. Faggots are made from things that would have otherwise been thrown away or fed to the dogs.
I have spent so many years confused and angered by the word. I have been held back by the power of its shame; irritated that anyone would think I am worthless by virtue of the simple fact that I was born gay. I have avoided writing for weeks because, every time I sat down to think about this word and the recipe associated with it, I would walk away mad and surprisingly frustrated. It was clear to me that, after all these years, the word “faggot” still made me angry.
This first time I can remember hearing the word, it was whispered to me in the library of my elementary school. I was looking for a book on the lives of U.S. presidents when a boy cornered me in the stacks. He kept repeating the word over and over again as he hit me hard in the stomach and arms and chest.
“Hey, faggot!” He smiled when he said it. “You think you’re a smart little faggot, don’t you?” There was a tone of disgust in his voice that surprised and hurt more than any of the punches he was throwing. “You like that, faggot?” I didn’t, so I did the only thing I could think of to make it stop.
I punched him in the face.
He walked away from the fight with a bloody nose, but I walked away with an understanding that there was someone in the world who wanted to hurt me because of what I was and—more frightening to me at the time—what he correctly perceived me to be: gay.
I felt humiliated, loathsome, and fearful of exposure. There was no one I could have turned to at the time; no friends or parents or priests I would have trusted with such a thing.
There was no escaping from the idea that what I was was wrong. In the rare instances I saw a gay man depicted on television or in film, he was the sassy neighbor, the outrageous drag queen, the psychotic murderer. He was the butt of jokes, the object of scorn, the source of evil. I learned to hate myself from the words and jokes I heard from the media, adults, other children in school. I’m certain that’s where the boy in the library learned to hate me, too. He had to have learned it from somewhere.
He was the first, but he certainly wasn’t the last person to call me a faggot.
From then on, each time I heard the word, I tried to ignore it or pretend it didn’t bother me. I kept quiet and swallowed the shame and pain of it like little bits of lead that slowly ground up my guts and poisoned my brain into believing that I was as disgusting and ugly and unlovable as the word itself.
And I know I’m not the only one who did that.
I’ve watched others destroy themselves trying to kill the pain of this word– and all the cruelty behind it– with drugs and alcohol, sex, anger, and suicide. I watched the gentlest man I’ve ever known eaten alive by AIDS yet go to his grave denying he was gay because his shame was so deeply rooted he could never let go of it. I don’t know a single person like me who has not been scarred in some way. Some people never get over it.
Fortunately, there are multiple, overlapping paths that lead us away from that pain if we can simply find them. Maturity, coming out, therapy, our friends and family, the gaining of a broader sense of the world, an understanding that the disgust some people feel for us is their shame and not ours —if we let all of these ideas and people into our lives, we get a clearer sense of ourselves and our worth. We discover that we are not unlovable; we are not awful and disgusting because we happen to be gay.
Things can and do get better , even though there are times in our lives when we think they never will. It may take a lot of work to get to that point in our lives when we love ourselves enough– and grow brave enough– to take on that word and punch it so deservedly in the face. But when we do get there, our lives are so worth living.
It takes courage to live our lives openly, unashamedly, and unapologetically.
It takes guts to be a faggot.
Faggots
I wanted to make this recipe for months but was uncertain how to go about it. How does one write about an essentially unappealing dish whose name evokes pain and anger in some of us, hate and contempt in others? I filed away the recipe—and the idea—until I felt I could deal with it properly.
Every time I sat down at my computer, I’d see the bookmarks for faggot recipes staring me in the face, taunting me like so many elementary school bullies. I knew I needed to do something about it, so I finally decided to take them on.
I have a habit of taking the bits and pieces of my life, turning them into food, and then eating them. It’s my way of digesting things– therapy on a plate, if you will. Neither this activity nor this particular recipe is for the faint of heart.
It takes guts to make. For some of you, it may take guts to eat as well.
Whatever the case, I would like to thank Tony Cervone for supplying me with the literal guts to make this recipe and all the wonderful people in my life who help give me the guts to be what I am and like it ( Yes, Tony, you’re included in that group, too.)
Ingredients:
1 lamb heart, cut up into thick chunks
½ lamb liver, sliced into large pieces
½ of a yellow onion, sliced into quarters
2 cloves of garlic
5 to 6 sprigs of thyme
Equal parts water and red wine (about a cup each) or enough to just cover the entrails for braising
½ cup freshly ground beef or lamb fat
½ to ¾ cup of fresh bread crumbs
1 egg
Salt and pepper to taste
2 tablespoons each of olive oil and butter for frying
Preparation:
1. In a meat grinder, grind your fat into a fine grind. If you do not have a grinder, ask your local butcher to do it for you. When I asked the man behind the counter if he had any fat I could buy, he told me he didn’t sell that sort of thing, but that he’d just thrown a pile of beef fat in the garbage. Since this dish is essentially about making something out of what most people consider unworthy of eating, I asked him for some. He looked confused. He didn’t think it was even worth charging for. Wash thoroughly. Set aside, covered.
2. Preheat oven to 350F. In a large sauté pan, place onion, garlic, heart, and liver pieces in a single layer. Pour over water and wine mixture over until everything is just barely covered. Add thyme sprigs to the top, then place pan in the oven, where it will stay until the onion and garlic have softened and the heart and liver have been thoroughly cooked through. About 45 minutes. Remove the organs and other solid matter from the liquid to let cool. Reserve liquid. Keep oven on.
3. Place the organs, onion and garlic into the bowl of a food processor and pulse until the everything has been broken down into small pieces then transfer to a large, clean bowl. Add fat, egg, and bread crumbs. Mix thoroughly using your hands. Add salt and pepper to taste, then mix again. Form the ground-up gut mixture into balls and set out onto a plate.
4. In another sauté pan, heat olive oil and butter until just sizzling. Add the faggots to the pan and brown them, top and bottom. Add the braising liquid to the pan, then place the pan into the oven and cook for 15 minutes. Remove them from the pan and serve with pride hot with the pan gravy over mashed potatoes. Fearlessly.
* The accuracy of this etymology is highly debatable, but the idea behind it has taken hold. For an interesting take one this, watch this poker scene from the television series Louie. Warning: contains (very) adult language.
Finally.
Okay, I simply forgot to post the winner because I’ve never done a giveaway before and I am perfectly imperfect.
Congratulations to Rebecca of Foodie with Family! She is the soon-to-be proud owner of a dead person’s cake comb. Why? Because she intends to brandish it in front of her male offspring in order to look as menacing as possible in a frilly apron.
I just can’t think of a better reason to own one, can you?
Thank you, everyone who entered. I hope the rest of you aren’t too disappointed. I’ll have more giveaways in the future. Ones that will be unlike any others you’ve seen.
And that’s a promise.
A little while back, I was ranting about the epidemic of food bloggers giving away free stuff in order to entice people to their websites.
Win a free immersion blender! Win a free sous vide machine! Win a free kidney!
All you have to do is leave a comment on my blog telling me why you love blenders/gummable meat/kidneys and you could win!
To me, it seemed like a dead giveaway that these bloggers had no real substance to them; that they had to resort to bribery to get people to visit their sites.
Comment whoring, I thought. Pure, unadulterated begging. Like a grandmother enticing her children’s children with promises of cookies and savings bonds if they’d just come visit a little more often. Bloggers who might ordinarily receive 10 to 20 comments can find themselves bloated with 600 of them, if the prize is a good one.
And who provides these gifts? Sometimes it’s the makers of said blender/sous vide/human organ products. These bloggers are just grabby, corporate pawns.
I rather enjoyed the view from my high horse.
And then I saw that The Pioneer Woman was giving away an iPad, so I entered her giveaway contest.
Yes, I am a hypocrite. I’d spell it out for you, but it’s already spelled out there, 13 words ago.
Why was it okay for me to enter her contest and look down upon those of others? Well, for one thing, she made her readers work for it by taking a pop quiz, which I loved. For another, she disclosed that the gift was purchased with her own money and offered as a token of thanks to her readers. Oh, and because it was an iPad.
Even though I lost the contest due in part to the fact that I am terrible at mathematics, I enjoyed taking the quiz and browsing a part of her site that I’ve never browsed before. Her giveaway was delivered with good will and good humor. And I like to think it softened me up, just a little.
I looked around at other blogs with giveaways. There were a few that did, in fact, annoy the hell out of me, but I noticed something else– there were people out there whom I respect immensely (and like personally) who were doing it as well.
I climbed of my high horse as quietly and as meekly as I could.
What was my beef with giveaways? Was I mad that no cookware company was sending me merchandise to pawn off to my readers? I think there was some of that in the mix. Was it my issue with shameless self-promotion? There was some of that, too, but my therapist and I have been working on that one for a little while now. I’m sure the reasons are myriad and complicated, but let’s just say that I was feeling more than a little ashamed of myself for being so judgemental.
And I’ve reconsidered.
If you’ve got a product, you might as well promote it. Often times, that product is you– your blog, your image, your brand. If your aim is to attract people to that product, you might as well dangle the shiniest, most valuable carrot in front of people to get them to where they can see it.
So today, I thought I’d finally join that chorus of giver-awayers and do my own, special kind of giveaway…
A Dead Giveaway
Because it’s almost Halloween. Which that means that Day of the Dead isn’t too far off, either. And I just like the sound of it.
The prize? Well, it’s more than likely from a dead person (I have no absolute proof of this. In fact, I can scarcely remember where it came from. Given its approximate age and purpose, I feel I can safely say that it was originally purchase by someone who is either currently dead or is not far of from that Big Sleep some people like to call “Eternal Peace.”
Okay, so do you still want to know what I’m giving away?
It’s a cake comb. Yes, I said “cake” and “comb.” Some people refer to it as a “cake breaker”, but I think that– all gory Halloween talk aside– “cake comb” sound much nicer, don’t you?
Enter to win!
I realize that there are many of you out there who will not put forth the effort to win this beautiful free item. For example, my friend Jennifer has stated that she will never purchase any previously-owned item from a thrift store or online auction site that could have in any way been used to dispose of a dead body. Just how a cake comb could be used in such an activity is uncertain to me, but I’m certain that, if anyone could come up with something, Jennifer could.
However, if you just feel you can’t live without this beautiful, arcane, and slightly menacing-looking, free kitchen tool, here’s how you can win it!
Just tell me why it is you don’t think your life is complete without one of these babies and what, precisely, it is you plan on doing with it. The most fascinating answer gets the prize.*
ENTER TODAY!
*Judged by me, of course, because I’m looking for a healthier forum in which to be judgemental.
Food for the Thoughtless 
