There have been growing legions of non-Hispanic groups who feel they’ve been slighted in the recent immigration

Who's Gonna Make Your Pierogies Now, America?

 debate. Some have feared that with the waning of the previous administration’s Mexican Witch Hunt their hopes for Federal acknowledgment have also been lost. To address these concerns, the current administration has granted “illegal alien” status to virtually all non-resident residents in the U.S.

“The President has said again and again that we are an inclusive nation,” stated a White House official. “President Obama strongly believes that all races and ethnicities, especially the Irish, are entitled to the same rights of equality even when it comes to discrimination and scapegoating.” 

 “This is great day to undocument Caucasians,” said one Eastern European man who claimed to have illegally remained in the US after gaining entry with a Canadian tourist visa. “I work in Pennsylvania coal mine and have leg crush in tunnel collapse. I abuse ambulance, emergency room and American blood supply. Nobody even sneer at me – hospital peoples too busy ignoring Honduras boy dying of West Nile virus. This was very hard for Polack pride. Now we have equal disrespect we deserve…”   

Reaction among South East Asians was unclear as most were busy working and keeping low profiles. 

Attempts to interview Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and Greta Van Susteren (to see if they felt the broader definition of “illegal status” diluted their own Brown Scare platform) were declined.  Spokespeople for the four popular Conservative pundits said they were out for their regular “Boy’s Thursday” of pad thai and man-waxing at their favorite Laotian boutique.

June 19th, 2009 | Tags: alien, Greta, Hannitty, Illegal, immigration, Limbaugh, Mexican, O'Reilly, pierogies, Polack, undocumented, White House | Category: Sorry...politics | Leave a comment

   I’ve got a bunch of backed up ideas to catch up on in the Red Frog perfect universe, so allow me to mash a couple or three in that are loosely tied together by themes of food and parenting. 

Granite State Glory

   Firstly, we got May’s Bacon of the Month installment last week and Holy Crap…it wasn’t bad at all. North Country Smokehouse’s Applewood Smoked Bacon, and it was not only not bad it was really nice. Which was deflating in a way, as three consecutive months of hinky, hokey and horrendous examples of bacon had gotten me geared up for new rants on the inexplicable insanity going on at BOM headquarters. Even little Jack is now tuned in to the potential for carnivorous catastrophes. When this latest pack arrived he asked, “Is that Bacon of the Month? Uhhh-oh…”

   Blog-wise it was a letdown but at least we didn’t choke or murder any mouth parts eating it. It didn’t quite reach the supersexy magic of January’s Vande Rose Farms stuff but it was still a hell of a delicious slab. The actual, classy retail label should have been reassuring – the meats of tragedy either had no label or ones that could’ve been made at home on an Epson Crummy-Print XL. One might also attribute the quality of North Country to the fact that it comes from New England, NH specifically. Given the tendency to associate smokehouses with BBQ, and thus the Southern US, it’s easy to forget that we have some impressive smoking and curing traditions here in the Northeast. Keep that in mind next time you’re shopping for hams, briskest, sausages, smoked salmon or even hot dogs. 

   Unless you have children. Because you’re not supposed to feed them hot dogs, according to an article written by a local “child expert” in the Mansfield News a few weeks back.  The piece centered around a Top Ten Worst Foods for Kids list taken from the Center for Science in the Public Interest – http://www.cspinet.org/nutrition/10b&w.html  

• 1. Soda
• 2. Hamburgers
• 3. Hot Dogs
• 4. Ice Cream
• 5. Bologna
• 6. Whole Milk
• 7. American Cheese
• 8. French Fries
• 9. Pizza Loaded w/ cheese & meat
• 10. Chocolate bars

   Since my daughter is good for a wiener a day, on average, it’s pretty damn obvious I could give a flying fuck about her health. With her consumption of American cheese, occasional bag of fries, Jack’s crazed enthusiasm for making his own pizzas and all the ice cream they get hooked up with for eating all their veggies, well, looks we’re just trying to kill the little bastards.

   It ain’t that I take much interest in these things or will even suffer diet advice from any direction. That part of parenting doesn’t need much external assistance; we should already know how to feed our children: balance their meals, easy on the candy, lock ‘em out of the house when it’s nice outside and you’ll wind up with healthy, lean offspring. If you can’t figure that out then have fun taking your fat kids off to their colonoscopies. 

  I looked into the list anyway because I just had to know why some of those things were on the list. I know hamburgers, American cheese and whole milk aren’t ideal foods but among the ten worst? That seemed a wee bit fucked so I moseyed over to the CSPI site to see what the hell was up. Took a while to find the actual list as the site has a shitty layout and the scribe from my local paper had gotten the title wrong.  It wasn’t “Top Ten Worst…” it was merely “10 of the Worst…” Still, inclusion on such a list is just idiotic, especially when a site touting “science” doesn’t actually provide any explanations for their reasoning. But if you look at the “10 of the Best” below it it’s apparent that they’re targeting childhood obesity. Again, you shouldn’t need one more list to figure this shit out. My two apes are skinny, busy spazzes who love clementines, asparagus, broccoli, berries, etc. and nothing in the garden grows to full size before they descend like locusts and prematurely eat my crops. Caffeine-free soda is an occasional perk and neither really cares for chocolate bars, so in my book Elsie has earned her hot dogs, Jack’s entitled to all the cold cuts he wants and ice cream is in no short supply here (which may lead to me needing a few Top 10 lists to assist w/ the fatherhood fatfuckerness.)

   Obesity is as much, if not often more so, a behavioral issue as a diet one. If your kids are getting plump then cut a few pizzas off the menu, shut down the sugar pumps and get them to a playground.  Otherwise just keep it balanced and don’t sweat the notion that a hamburger is a horrible, hatred-packed threat to a kid’s health. Whole milk is NOT worse than no milk, cello-wrapped cheese slices beat calcium-deficiency and if you get your brat to swallow a garden burger (which I dig, by the way) just make sure you’re not swapping his arteries for a pink colon and slim hips. Read the labels because many vegetarian substitutes for actual food have high sodium content.

    Of course, you may disagree with both me and the anti-fat crusades of the CSPI because the ideal meal for kids of any age is…Breast Milk! How could I ever forget that?  It’s what that bristle-lipped troll from the La Leche League came to preach to us the day Jack was born at Beth Israel. I can only imagine the sour, testosterone-laced meals her kids enjoyed from the lumpy jugs of such a creature…

   Anyway, this is getting brought up because I do fancy this “thought-porn” site to be something of a parenting forum. On occasion. And since I’ve been snipped and cauterized my chances to babble about breast-milk are growing fewer. Luckily a friend just told me about another friend who was still nursing her three year-old and had decided that she was going to let the kid wean himself. Now that’s a big, freaking psychological issue and this isn’t the place where it might be solved, no matter how many giddy comments I can come up with on calloused tits and kids with backward pointing teeth who are old enough to ride a bike or maybe do algebra. But I can address the belief that set that weird situation of the present into motion: that breast milk is the best possible food for an infant. Anybody care to guess what I think? 

   It is the best food for an infant!  Weren’t expecting me to say that, were you? That’s okay, because I was only fuckin’ with ya. Without a doubt it is a highly beneficial and efficient form of nutrition for a newborn, but there are certainly factors which limit its value and make the alternative, infant formula, a better option for some.  What’s best for a particular baby turns out to be highly situational and that is something most proponents of mother’s milk fail to understand.

   Some of the pros of breast feeding are obvious: it’s readily available, natural, free and it further develops the physical and emotional bond between mother and pup, er, child. Experts have also stated that “breakfast at Mom’s” also delivers important antibodies which help protect newborns as they start sucking in the wild, crazy atmosphere outside the uterus. The whole idea of nursing had entered a new realm of chic, alongside Apple Martinis and experimental lesbianism, so people had really got into it. By the turn of the century it suddenly seemed that wherever you went – restaurants, dinner parties, hockey games – women were openly flipping out udders and sticking them in the faces of caterwauling, beet-faced babies. When something achieves such fashion people begin attaching additional importance to it. During both of Elisa’s pregnancies the inquiry which rivaled “Is it a girl or a boy?” was “Are you going to breast feed?“

  So nursing was all good! Except when it wasn’t. Long before we made decisions on how to feed our forthcoming offspring the idea had become an irritant. Is your wife going to nurse? She really should breast-feed. Breast-feeding is the best, you know. She has to nurse! Why that was such an imperative from men drinking 007’s and Vodka/Red Bulls at my bar was baffling. As Elisa suffered similar interrogations I’m sure it added a touch of anxiety to the elevated stress of late pregnancy. Then Jacko arrived, after a long labor, and a martial maternity nurse came along to demonstrate how attach him to his mom with the mechanical roughness of a wrench to a lug nut (upon request she was promptly replaced with far nicer nurse.) She was followed by La Leche League’s Mz. Furrlip with her rolling kiosk of books, tapes, lubes, lotions, Tupperware, rubber hats…and machines with gears, nozzles, tubes, whirligigs and what appeared to be little brain transference caps straight out of a Bugs Bunny cartoon. With her whiskery, smile-free face and brusque demeanor I’d wondered why she was allowed to sell her wares in the hospital. Wasn’t breast feeding just as much about love and bonding as it was nutrition? This sour gant was far better suited for abortion protests or working an organic turnip stand. It had gotten very weird.

   But Elisa had made the decision to nurse so while my little boy was getting one of his first meals we agreed to lease one of the hag’s extractors so we could fill the home fridge with Elisa’s surplus dairy. As it turned out, however, Jack was voraciously hungry and his mom was unable to keep up. Not everybody can be a prize Guernsey – and her doctor surprisingly told us, “Just give him some formula…nothing wrong with that.” Jack seemed far happier on a bottle of Similac and soon that was all he was getting. We returned the breast pump to the boot where Lactate Hazel lived (Elisa got some static for that) and nursing was behind us.  Elsie got a little nursing when she came along, for the antibodies, but she left the hospital as a formula-only baby.

   Did we do a disservice to our kids by cutting off the breast so early? Nobody poses the question now, as they’re 5 and 3 with no visible premature weaning scars like permanently suck-puckered faces and deprived expressions. But we did get a little flak for it when they were babies. Again, strangers at parks asked the question and scowled at the answer. Even friendly acquaintances could grumble over the thought of our infants drinking formula. I’d point out that fact that I was formula fed from the get-go; as an adopted baby there wasn’t any option, but a big chunk of babies, Elisa among them, from my generation were as well.  Those were the Better Living Through Science days of life and breast-feeding was a choice made by individual mothers and not popular opinion. It’d be hard to say that formula had any adverse effect on us. Elisa is intelligent, pretty, kind and was a bruiser playing NCAA Soccer in college. I’m 6′ tall, last benched 375 lbs when I was 34 and brain-wise…let’s just say I test well. I’ve also ran fast enough to not get killed by a hippo and almost elude some cops (just didn’t have the momentum to snap the wire cow fence that tripped and flipped me onto my face in the dark)Neither of us is allergic to anything (I do sneeze some every other spring when the Mansfield skies go green with fucking pollen) and we get sick or don’t as much as anybody.  And we were fed formula from the late 60’s/early 70’s! In lieu of the super-nutrient formulas of today what more could breast-feeding have done for us? Given me x-ray vision and Elisa an everlasting libido? Wait…oh, damn you formula! 

   As far as our kids go – neither suffer allergies, both are generally well-behaved, happy and healthy. Bright children as well, Jack was conversational at 18 months and has crazy knowledge of critter anatomy for a 5 yr old. Elsie can write her name at 3 and has a iron-clad memory which fits her ability to hold a grudge.

   Now none of this is an argument against nursing. When everything is working properly it is a great thing. In our case, Jack was a milk shark more ravenous than Elisa could naturally provide for. And if an infant isn’t getting what he/she needs then breast-feeding becomes a stressful event for both mother and infant and that kind of takes kicks at the bonding aspect of nursing. But getting his belly happily filled while nuzzling into his mom’s arms, or mine, was no less nurturing than drinking directly from the tap.  Again, individual circumstances need to be weighed out on this issue. Ensuring feedings are stressless is an imperative as is a mother’s diet. Milk quality is directly affected by it, so if Ma ain’t eating right neither is her youngin’. In these respects, formula becomes the more reliable meal.  

   One of my favorite detractions on formula came from an acquaintance who was a biologist, studying the spindle apparatus of chromosomal fission or sumptin’ at a research hospital. Again, a puzzlingly staunch opinion from an odd source: someone who wasn’t a parent. Her particular take was that evolution had made breast milk the perfect food. Which was just a silly idea. Although a strikingly large number of biologists, laypeople aside, are attached to the notion, evolution is not in the business of creating perfection. If that were the case dinosaurs might still be in charge and octopuses would have a space program. All evolution, or natural selection, really does is to provide an organism with adequate tools to survive in a particular environment. Sometimes those tools become better than necessary – take shark anatomy in post-Cretaceous oceans free of competitive predators. Other times the environment changes and some things become inadequate – lactation falters when a parent mammal’s food supply collapses or becomes deficient in certain nutrients. Luckily for us, evolution has made us better than adequate in intelligence and we’ve found ways to synthesize, and even improve upon, the composition of breast milk. 

   So what it comes down is this: making informed choices. If you’re soon to be at the Breast vs. Formula crossroads, or already there, free yourself from the pressure of excess external input and go with what works best for you. If you’ve already taken your chosen route or have never been faced with the option then do everyone else a favor and choke back the compulsion to shove your opinion down anyone’s throat.

  In closing: Let your kid eat a hot dog or even a bacon-cheeseburger now and then. And if your children are lean little running machines, don’t be a prick and hide the ice cream.

June 4th, 2009 | Tags: bacon, Bacon of the Month, breast feeding, La Leche League, mustache, nursing | Category: Bacon of the Month, Dad, Daily Movements | Leave a comment

It’s been a fairly crappy couple of weeks around here, death and grief and sneaking cigarettes and all-day-alcohol-enhanced goodbyes, etc.  All while still trying to be half-decent parents to Jack and Elsie – and a large part of that effort went into not going postal when their little friends would turn into retarded orcs, hell-bent on busting everything they touched over here. It took an entire day to write that last Bacon post – typing three or four words per sit before getting back up to do things like pull a toy golf club out of one bastard’s hands in the middle of his assault on the deck furniture. Or to yell at one beast-princess to not sit on my dog’s head. One of life’s funny ironies is that a neighbor’s inability to instill boundaries in their defective offspring probably means I’m gonna get sued when Chooch chews little Sally’s face off in self-defense. 

Anyhow – I thought I’d take it easy and go with brief, scattered thoughts today.  Let’s get the bacon out of the way to start.

 Johnston Country Hams Dry Sugar Cured Bacon – We got fucked again.  I’m not sure what the hell is up with the Bacon Of The Month Club, but I am really starting to feel awful for Elisa’s brother as he dropped over three bills on this travesty. I am glad I was introduced to the fairly unique Kolosvari bacon.  And the very first bacon we received in January, the Vande Rose Farms stuff, was such miraculously delicious meat it just had to have been sliced from tender belly of Jesus Christ himself. 

But then came that shrink-wrapped slab of plague back in February and now this Johnston Country etc, etc pre-sliced crap. What the hell is going on?  At over $300 for 12 packages of bacon one would assume that every last one of them ought to be crazy awesome. But four months into this and I’ve had what must be the absolute worst the cured meat world has to offer (Dan Philips Private Cure) and this latest batch which was just insulting.  I whipped the Johnston crap up for my kids’ breakfast just before heading out to a funeral. They ate it first, and then my in-laws had some and everybody in the room looked like it was me they wanted dead. So I had a bite. Eeeeesh. 

For reference, here’s what Dan Philips’ (Now describing himself as “Capt. Bacon” in the mailings) “tasting notes” stated: …intense flavors, balanced and slightly salty. This prick never gets it right. There’s mention of slow hickory smoking, but my package must have been the one which missed that part of the process.  If there was any flavor at all it wasn’t smoke – it was anchovies. And that was just ducky because the slices were so goddamned salty that they were almost inedible anyway. I mean there were fucking salt crystals forming on the meat during cooking. This was getting out of hand.  I’d love to know what Dan Philips notion of “too salty” might be. I wonder if he actually has a tongue. And I worry that my kids will never trust me to make them breakfast again. 

Now, onto happy family stuff.  Happy Soccer family stuff.  No happy Soccer Mom action, however, as Mansfield is sort of a Plain Jane town. Most of the eye candy here is a wee bit bland.  I do think my wife, who coaches, is pretty sweet in shorts and a FIFA approved shirt, but there’s not much to be gained by perving on the missus from the sidelines. Nevermind. The point is that today was Jack’s second town league, and the first I got to see. It was neat. 5 years back we had a chubby little goon struggling to hold his big baby head up and today he scored 7 goals. Granted, his pre-K opponents were pretty weak on defense, but still he was excited and that’s what it’s all about, right? Getting so giddy just watching him run and control the ball I actually failed to capture his first goal on video.  I was jumping and shouting “Yay Jack!!!” while the camcorder filmed whatever else my crazy, flailing arms pointed it at. 

Since Elisa is a coach I thought I’d toss my hat into the ring and volunteered to set up the soccer fields.  So at 6:30 on Saturday mornings I drag my ass over to paint lines and set up goals. I also get to spray paint notes to my son on the sidelines! Interesting how things change over a lifetime.  Scoot past Jack’s arrival a half decade ago and travel to Boston of fifteen years past. What was young Frankie doing at 25? Well if it was 6:30AM in April I was already getting sick of the early sunlight and thinking about finally going to bed. I might be dialing a cab for a ride back from wherever the hell I was or wondering how many people to boot out of my apartment to make it quiet enough to sleep. I don’t look back on the past with any regret, but I guess I’m cool with the fact that what’s stuck on me now early on a Saturday morning is white grass paint and not Chlamydia.  

And lastly, a thought spurred on by a Dresden Dolls song, heard on the radio coming back from field painting:   

Musicians Boston Owes the World an Apology For 

Apart from my seedier doings, a couple of decades in Boston gave me a bunch of years hanging around clubs and catching some great acts. There were always some cool locals playing in Cambridge, Jamaica Plain and Somerville, and a lot of great national acts pulling through.  But taken as a whole, the Boston area music scene could also feel repetitive.  There were far more people playing the same shit than there were trying to push the edge. And that was mainly the fault of the venues, club managers always looking for familiar sounds rather than innovation. If you were a band  or musician that fell into one of three veins – Green Day knockoffs, Pixies mimics, or Aimee Mann clones -  you were likely to get gigs.  So it’s surprising that anyone ever got to make a name for themselves nationally.  But some did and some of those truly blew.  And I have a minute, so I’ll scribble out my sour little opinion… 

Julianna Hatfield – Snitty Indie Disaffected Cunt Rock. Liz Phair w/o the fun or the hooks. Dullest take on feminine empowerment ever. Belongs with Tracy Bonham in the same back of cats that needs drowning. 

Mission of Burma – Desperately hoping to be an American version of the Clash, their songs about political justice, class angst and the like never achieved more than a suburban Connecticut edge to them. MOB Retrospective on WFNX? That’s when I reach for my revolver…Sonic Youth found them influential, and boy howdy ain’t Sonic Youth the most awesome band ever? 

Pixies – See Juliana Hatfield. Mission of Burma gone worse. Built on the cutesy/fake/lazy “rage” of Black Francis I used to think these dingbats had stretched the apogee of pithy, Freshman-English-major lyrics. But that’s before I met the Dresden Dolls…Anyhow, it is tough to hate everything about anything everyday, and I can’t solely dismiss a band for lousy wordsmithy – if that were the case I wouldn’t  have worn the grooves  off my Metallica LP’s, play the replacement cassetes to death or have permanent fingerprints on the Master of Puppets CD….but talk about retarded lyrics!  The Pixies’ Joey Santiago laid  some seriously neat guitar work – at times sounding like a buzzsaw trudging up a landslide of gravel and bluebirds.  

The Dresden Dolls – Is Amanda Palmer hot under that make-up? Who gives a damn? Can’t sing and the Cabaret dress-up barely masks a weak, yet wholly self-impressed, musical duo. While I must admit liking “Coin Operated Boy” it only demonstrates that I enjoy novelty songs. And the Dolls are a novelty band. They tagged themselves as a “Brechtian Punk Cabaret”, all terms which barely fit.  Punk they ain’t, except that they sneer; Brechtian is smart-talk for a band looking to add bumper-sticker literacy to their gig by associating themselves with an avant-garde German playwright (see we’re on the same level as Lou Reed! Our promo sheets say so!). And Cabaret? Amanda likes to groan atonal, and look sultry and paw at her breasts. OK, sure. Cabaret. 

Aerosmith (V. 2, 3) – Once upon a time these guys were the Great American Hard Rock Band. Then they became drunk as shit, fought on stage, made lousy albums then disbanded. Then they reunited and went quintuple platinum singing over-produced ballads penned by the likes of Desmond Childs: a guy who wrote insane hits for KISS, Bon Jovi and and Ricky Martin and Michael Bolton and Kelly Clarkson.  Then they won an Oscar for a pithy tune for a lousy movie written by a little woman on her white piano in LA. The Bad Boys of Rock became richer than all get out as a cover band. Lame. 

The Dropkick Murphys – I’m not a big baseball fan to begin with, but I really want MLB’s biggest prima donnas – The BoSox – to have a huge losing season so I won’t have to hear these jackasses ever again. Now the official soundtrack to Sox Nation, these working class heroes have been at their schtick for a long time now.  Their catalog of ditties, all which open with a near identical accordion riff, includes songs about being from Massachusetts. And being from Boston, Massachusetts. And for being Irish in Boston, Massachusetts or American Irish in Boston or just being a crazy ass Boston-Irish fan of the Sox which is the greatest thing for any Mick in Massachusetts to be. 

Okey Dokey – enough slander for now.  Sayonara folks, talk to you when the next Bacon Atrocity comes in the mail…

April 27th, 2009 | Tags: bacon, Chlamydia, Dan Philips, Dresden Dolls, Jack, Mission of Burma, Pixies, Soccer | Category: Bacon of the Month, Dad | Leave a comment

   First off, I’d like to note how cool Wynonna Judd is for staying fat for her fat pill commercials. It saves us all from having to wonder if alli® actually works. Therefore this installment of Bacon of the Month goes out to that wonderful, Country singin’, crybaby cow.

   We’re all on board with the idea that the BOTM will always be at least a month behind, yes? March’s post was merely a gripe about not having received any slabs from the club. But the whine went straight to heaven as our Lord ‘n Savior Jesus of Nazareth made the mailman cough up the goods the very next morning. And this is what we got: Hungarian Kolozsvari Bacon from Bende & Son.

   It throws you off at first. With a burnt orange rind over streaks of hepatitis yellow and machete red it’s like a compact, rectangular sculpture of a zombie sunrise. A string looped through one corner ignites images of rattling caravans and darkly exotic women with huge gold earrings, boot-length red skirts and white blouses billowing at the sleeves but snug and plunging where it counts. Animal parts sizzle over campfires as whiskered old ladies cackle about silver bullets and wolfsbane. Cabbies in satin suits try to sell you leather goods as you weaken under the hypnotic dangle of a meat slab slung on the taxi’s rearview mirror. “Ready To Eat” stated the label. So gimme some already, I thought.

   I was leery of treating bacon like a cold cut. Then again, it’s merely a form of fatty ham. If cured enough almost anything can be eaten before cooking. I wasn’t about to question Central European wisdom either lest my children suddenly grow donkey ears or get turned into dancing rats. I took a thin slice off the slab and popped it in my mouth…

   …and it was pretty nasty. Lots of overpowering, acrid smoke, a bitter vegetal bite and the salty slap of a jilted Gypsy chick on the tongue. I almost cried, briefly thinking that the B of M Club was a cruel joke or a clever dummy organ of PETA’s, designed to turn people off of meat for good. But I realized I’d made a mistake and it should’ve been obvious by the string and overall hues of this brick of bacon. It had gone straight from the curing process into a cryovac pack. I’d eaten a micro-slice of the rind so I was really only tasting the cure but not the bacon.

   Cutting further into it revealed its true bacon heart, pinkish-white fat and vermillion meat.  Nice, veeerrrry nice. And the aroma kicked ass – internally it had a waft of beechy/oaky smoke and a touch of paprika perfume behind the ears. The paprika seriously jumps out in your mouth – bright AND earthy, lightly pungent – the Hungarian Baconators were apparently using the good stuff. The “tasting notes” said something about garlic in the method but even though I know it goes into many cured meats, like salami, my tongue has never been very good with noticing it. 

   Anyhow, this tricky fucker was a true surprise, going from a hideous entrance to a deeply charming finish. Just needed to figure out what to do with it. I fried some up with eggs and made a swell breakfast. Can’t be cooked too crisp, however, otherwise the concentrated salt will overwhelm the other flavors. There’s always a suggested recipe with the bacon they send you penned by their house chef or somebody. I usually toss them out because the card includes a picture of the guy and I generally refuse to take direction from any putz in a denim chef coat and an ascot. I do, however, recall a soupy, white bean recipe for the Koloszvari and things like that are probably the best way to go – this stuff seems ideal in supporting roles rather than as the main attraction.

  A Google search on Hungarian bacon will yield an almost unanimous suggestion that the best way to go is to put some on a stick, sear it over a campfire and eat it with black pumpernickel and hefty shakes of hot paprika. I’m sure I’ll get around to one of these Magyar weenie roasts soon enough, in the meantime I used it to make a Cuban style batch of black beans. Except that I used pinto beans. I kept a little chunk of it for later use in one of the Caribbean seafood stews which make my spring times happy times.  Also, Remembering one of my Facebook pals from high school was actually Hungarian I asked if she had any thoughts. She was nice enough to send me the Layered Cabbage and Gulyas recipes below. They’re solid cold weather recipes, but it ain’t like April has been sweltering this year…

Cuban Frijoles (not exactly) Negros

• 2 Cans (19oz) Pinto Beans, or whatever you like, rinsed & drained
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 medium onion, diced
• 1 carrot, diced
• Pinch of ground cloves
• 6-8 cloves garlic, chopped
• 2 bay leaves
• 2 teaspoons dried oregano
• 12oz (3/4 lb) Koloszvari Bacon, diced
• kosher salt to taste
• Water (enough to keep beans somewhat loose while cooking)
• Splash of white wine
• Freshly ground pepper
• 1 teaspoon vinegar
• Garnishes thought – Sour cream, sliced scallions, crumbled queso fresco or cheddar, chiles, gummi worms.

In a large soup pot heat the oil over medium to heat. Add onions, carrots, cloves and garlic and cook until soft. Add bay leaves, oregano, the beans and hocks. Add the bacon, beans and enough water to cover then bring to a full rolling boil. Adjust the heat to maintain a simmer, cook until beans and meat are way tender, about 1 hours.

Test seasoning, adding salt (if necessary) & pepper to taste. Add wine & vinegar.  Take a half cup of beans out, mash and return to pot. Simmer to thicken. 

Layered Cabbage

preheat oven to 375, squeeze sauerkraut well and wash it in cold water. add 1 cup water and cook for 15 minutes. Cook the rice in the broth. Fry the onions in lard for 5 minutes. add ground pork and cook for another 15 minutes. Remove from heat and mix with paprika and garlic. Cook diced bacon for a few minutes, then add the sausage. Remove with a slotted spoon.

In the bottom of a baking/serving casserole dish put fat from bacon and spread along the bottom. put one third of the sauerkraut in the bottom. Layer pork then rice then sausage and bacon and half the sour cream and milk. pour the remaining sour cream and milk on the top layer. Bake for 1 hour.

Gulyas (Goulash)

peel tomato, cut in to 1 inch dices. Core green pepper and slice into rings. Peel potatoes and cut into 3/4 inch dices. After meat has braised for an hour, add the tomato and green peppers and a cup more water. Add a little salt and simmer for 30 minutes.

Add potatoes and cook until they are soft. Adjust salt. Make dumplings (water salt and flour dropped in small bits into boiling water).

April 22nd, 2009 | Tags: bacon, frijoles, Gulyas, gypsy, Hungarian, Koloszvari, PETA | Category: Bacon of the Month, Recipes | Leave a comment

“Black Spring”

“…Henceforward everything moves on shifting levels – our thoughts, our dreams, our actions, our whole life. A parallelogram in which we drop from one platform of our scaffold to another. Henceforward we walk split into myriad fragments, like an insect with a hundred feet, a centipede with soft-stirring feet that drinks in the atmosphere; we walk with sensitive filaments that drink avidly of past and future, and all things melt into music and sorrow; we walk against a united world, asserting our dividedness.”

   I just reread this book. Having been in a writing slump I needed some sort of recharge and Miller has a way of ionizing an interest in turning bland thoughts into interesting sentences. This book in particular had once altered my idea of writing: turning a simple, entertaining exercise used for writing letters and soused pap smears on bar napkins into a tenuously held belief that I might be able to do      it for a living. 

   Matter of fact this book also contained the passage above, one which helped eradicate any doubts I’d been having over my style. Taken alone it almost reads like the overwrought, thick-tongued, lung butter drivel of your average poet.  But it sits amid a tract about the ships’ bilge, scabbing pollution, anoxic atmosphere and overall tarnished lust of Brooklyn.  And while I feel I’d always been a slow reader because I tend to really envision a book as it gets processed from eye to occipital lobe to wherever the hell else it pings around to in my brain, this chunk of Henry Miller felt like a new multimedia center had opened up inside.  I saw actions and lives dropping and shifting over razor planes of his parallelogram, felt myself split like the shrapnel in a kaleidoscope and the sonic whir of the centipede coiled inside my ears.

   This was how writing is done.  Miller took the rainbows from the dazzling horizon, the ones which shimmer in the oily slicks of shit-choked sewers and all the rest in between and married them in an onslaught of beautiful, uncensored language.  It resurrected my scribbling ambition – no easy feat considering it had taken a gun in its mouth years before and lost half its head and a ragged scoop of neck in the blast. Writing teachers from Woonsocket High through URI and BU had informed me that you could NOT employ both well-written prose and profane thoughts in the same piece.  You were supposed to cloak the unsavory in carefully crafted metaphor, keep it all on the down low or dance all around your idea in some fucking Catholic styled cop out. They’d point to Hemingway and his tedious allusions or even Faulkner – brilliant in his language and far coarser than fat Ernest, but he still failed to address the ugly parts of his tales directly.  Was it enough to know that there was a corncob in the barn while Temple Drake was getting raped? Hell no it wasn’t – did it get kicked up her snatch or did it only get whittled into a pipe as she was groped against her wishes? And Faulkner suddenly seemed too squeamish to commit to the idea that she’d been raped at all.  These were to be my models for writing?  The Canterbury Tales had been assigned to me three times in my various schoolin’ venues and it was comical that none of my teachers ever seemed to notice what a lewd, lowbrow piece of crap that ancient text was.

   But it wasn’t all that pretty a book anyway. Maybe they were all right in the end. You couldn’t weave the nasty into the wonderful – and that meant that life, as it is, could not be expressed in words. I partially murdered the writing bug and decided to just make my little R-rated circuses into letters to send to friends.  One of which prompted my pal, Yella, to draw a comparison to Henry Miller.  So I went and bought Black Spring, being the title I’d never heard of, and shaaa-zam! Writing was suddenly a neat idea again.

   It also began to ruin my tastes in reading, at least as far as fiction goes.  Not that Miller is exactly fiction, but he set the bar so high in regards to both compelling stories and stories compellingly told that many of the make-believe tales I’d later read began to taste like unsalted rice paste. I stumbled upon Reinaldo Arenas’ The Palace of the White Skunks  shortly after Black Spring and that book nearly annihilated my ability to sit through any fiction at all – I’m kind of limited to Dr. Seuss and Chester Himes’ shoot ‘em up Harlem crime books now. 

   So, thanks to the reassurances granted by the wild, marvelous and sordid magic of Henry Miller, I’ve been putting my family through the profane experience of a guy taking a serious stab at writing for income. I don’t consider my efforts to be anywhere near what Miller could produce on a bad day.  But at least I feel good that I can scribble my stuff in my own way.  

April 10th, 2009 | Category: MULTIMEDIUMS | Leave a comment

As of today I haven’t had a cigarette in 6 or 7 weeks.  Losing certainty over the time which has passed is a good thing. Far better than, say, a month ago when the slow stomp of time away from my last smoke had been excruciatingly clear and I was having conversations like this: 

Martha – Hey Frank! You quit smoking? That’s wonderful! How long has it been?

Frank – Thanks, Martha.  It’s been about, let’s see, 4 weeks. Oh – and 2 days. And 14 hours, give or take about 15 fucking minutes, but really, it feels much longer.  Even waaay longer than you’ve had that “cute” freaking mustache on your upper lip. Thank you for asking. Now I can endure the rest of this goddamned eternity thinking, “Gee, it’s swell that Martha really cares about my fucking health!” Sure hope you don’t choke on a bag of nails or anything you cheerful, fucking supportive, bristle-lipped snat…” 

So, things are way better. I’m growing vague on the passage of nicotine-free time and people say Martha is looking much better since she started waxing…

March 20th, 2009 | Category: Daily Movements | Comments (1)

Happy Belated Evacuation Day, btw, for all you souses who took a day of rest after annihilating yourselves in homage to our patron Naomh Padraig. 

Anyhow, it’s the 19^th and we’ve yet to eat any March bacon. I’d like to think my last review, a weeee bit unkind towards the owner of the BOTM Club, pissed somebody off who then shut off our supply. But last I checked this blog has about 40 registered users, at least 5 of which are spambots. I’ve barely got more influence on the world than a remedial theology teacher. I probably have no new bacon because we put our mail on hold while we took a family trip to Florida. Which still upsets the living crap outta me since the first two installments had arrived close to midmonth and we got back on the 10^th of this one. 

So, this is what we’ve learned so far about the Grateful Palate’s Bacon of the Month Club: They sell at least one heavenly brand of bacon and one of the nastiest slabs known to man; and their shipping schedule is all over the fucking map. 

Among the bonuses of initiation in this Bacon Club are these: a club t-shirt (scratchy cotton and not very funny), a rubber pig (which I can’t find because it’s the size of a freaking pencil eraser) and a cheap, plastic pig nose with such a flimsy cord that Frito-Lay would feel embarrassed to stick one in a box of Cracker Jacks.  What I’ve been having trouble locating among wonderful trinkets, however, is the contact info for folks who might run into “issues” with the club.  I’ve got an email address which I’ve used but nobody there wants to write back to me yet.  I’m almost starting to think my brother in law misspent over $300 on this think.

How can these things be happening? It’s a bacon club, for cryin’ out loud! It’s based entirely on a very magical meat product – everything oughta run smoothly simply via the enchanted goodwill emanating from each slab of smoky, universal love. It has to be that abomination the Club founder created; the Bacon Homunculus which has obviously upset the Gods of Brine and Wood Chips and thrown the whole club into damnation. 

March 19th, 2009 | Category: Bacon of the Month | Comments (2)

   Spending the next week at the South Seas Island Resort on Captiva.  It’s a swell place – the sun rises directly across from the balcony, dolphins frolic in the channel below,  the best hotel food I’ve had since Bali, the kids are stoked and if the hotel ever gets around to sending a plunger this could turn out to be one hell of a nice vacation. 

   Not sure why, and this might be more than anyone wants to hear, but nobody seems to go on flying days.  Jumbo jet constipation perhaps, and it becomes particularly dicey when your green-conscious hotel has low-pressure toilets that flush as lazily as syrup soaking through a thatch roof.  And I choked the plumbing this morning.

   How hard is it to obtain a plunging? I’d have thunk it pretty easy – it took five minutes for a guy to show up with extra coffee when I called for that.  They couldn’t have just given him a plunger to drop off? Nope.  Some time, over an hour ago, housekeeping said they have “engineering” come right over.  20 minutes later a call to the front desk got me a mini-lecture,  ”You see Mr. Roberts, how that works is that a call has to be made to engineering…”  Nice, I don’t need to understand the process of getting a freaking plunger from some closet in the resort over to my asphyxiated john – I need to just have it.  We got a line out the door!

   I’m about to send Elsie over to housekeeping, or wherever the hell engineering is, and surprise them with how intestinally “productive” a 3 yr old can be. And then she can dazzle the bastards with her toilet paper-helicopter tricks.  I’ll keep you posted.

March 4th, 2009 | Category: Daily Movements | Leave a comment

   A few Mondays back I wrapped up something that once felt like it was going to go on into perpetuity. I finished writing a book. Finished writing it for the third of eighth freaking time, that is.  Tough to say exactly how many drafts it’s been through – the beast was actually born back in the mid-90’s, transcribed on a PC a little later on then dicked around with it a little at the turn of the century before finally cleaning it up into something possibly publishable a couple of years ago.  Then an agent took interest, suggested it get cut back a hundred or so pages and while I was just about finished with that task my hard drive broke. Since I’d been of the negligent mindset that that sort of crap never happened it cost me two fucking thousand dollars to have a lab extract my book so I could finish it.  I musta done a good job, because I got a pat on the back and the dandy advice to chop it into two books.  And make the second half the first book and the first part a prequel and it was such an intriguing notion that I actually spent the last four months working on it. 

    It got done!  As I was shutting down the computer that night it occurred to me that it might wake up dead again in the morning. There wasn’t any obvious cause for worry, the drive was less than a year old after all. But even though the manuscripts had been printed, backed up on CD’s and an external drive, mailed and emailed, it seemed wise to hedge off catastrophe a little more by emailing yet another copy to my Gmail account.

   I must be a magic fairy of death because when I woke up my laptop didn’t.  How do you like that? I thought of it and it happened.  Well now, no big deal.  I could use a day off from the machine to undertake some household projects that had been delayed by all the writing. I could reconnect with my kids, see if Jack was dating anybody new at pre-school and have him remind me what his sister’s name was. My books were alive on somebody else’s desk and it was a bright and sunny morning.  It was early February but the thermometer was cruising towards 60. Then the doorbell rang and Mail Carrier Steve was standing on my stoop, “Dude! It looks like somebody sent you bacon in the mail! All things considered it was looking to be a heck of swell day. I’d have to wait a while before blogging about the bacon, but the stuff went straight from my front door into the oven. 

Finally, at the beginning of March, here’s February’s BOTM!!! No drum rolls, however. And grab your hankies people, because you’re not going to want to hear this: 

Gatton Farms, Dan Phillips Special Brown Sugar Hickory Smoked Country Bacon
Tasting Notes (in the package): “This is my own, secret, private cure. Only Charlie Gatton and I know the recipe. I set out to custom design the perfect bacon and I think this is it. It has an incredible balance between sweet, hammy pork flavors and salty, savory flavors. The flavors are intense and the meat is succulent. A bold new bacon that stands up and says ‘Eat me!’”

State of Origin: Kentucky 

Size: 16 oz. 

   I gotta catch a plane to Captiva this morning so I’ll make this quick -  this bacon sucked.  I didn’t know such a thing was possible, but it is.  I’ve had mediocre bacon and I’ve even been lightly disappointed over a lower quality bacon sticking to the pan.  But this stuff achieved the unthinkable – it was bad.  All the things this Dan Phillips idiot imagined about this meat were diametrically opposed to what actually occurs when you get the crap in your mouth.  There were some further allusions in the package literature about his curing technique There is no balance whatsoever – this nitrate abomination is over smoked, over salted and just nasty all over, right up to the iodine undertone which manages to creep across your tongue during the noxious taste assault. The morons in charge of the cure either used iodized table salt, tossed a rotting haddock in with the brine or used bad pigs.  This is what I might make at home if I was taking my first crack at curing, smoking and cooking anything in general.  When I suggested that notion to Elisa, who was trying to rasp the lingering skank off her tongue with a dry towel,  she concurred: “You’re right it does taste like yours…”  That was a little uncalled for, I’ve never made bacon, but my first attempt at smoked salmon had been similar – reeeeaaaalllly salty and it tasted like a chimney.  Dan Phillip’s tragic slab was even worse than that – and he’s selling it to people. Even my bacon junkie boy, Jack, grimaced and winced as though a pig had just punched him in the face, “Daddy, can we buy good bacon next time?”

   So who is this Dan Phillips who has blindly desecrated the Church of Bacon while trumpeting the glories of his insipid meat?  Turns out he’s the guy who created the Grateful Palate which operates The Bacon of the Month Club.  And a jackass, apparently.  And he’s got a little trouble with the truth to boot – the “16 oz.” pack of bacon was only 12.  Which leads me to doubt wheter or not it actually comes from a Kentucky farm or if it was made in an autobody shop in Rhode Island.

   Son of a bitch… Well, January started near the ceiling but at least I’m pretty sure where the fucking basement lies in the spectrum of bacon. There simply no way the next 10 months could taste as awful as February…

March 3rd, 2009 | Category: Bacon of the Month | Leave a comment