Makeshift to Table
A Geezer’s Notebook, By Jim Foster
No home is truly a home if it doesn’t have a garden. There is something about the smell of flowers wafting through your lean-to/hovel/shack first thing in the morning that makes you glad you are alive, or choke you up so badly you wish you were dead. Regardless of which wake-up call you prefer, a nice garden will add an aura of pleasantness to your hovel/shack or lean-to and countless dollars to the resale value – Frank Lloyd Wright.
A friend of ours had the foresight to build his lean-to up against an outside wall of a local garden center and spent a delightful summer enjoying all the benefits of a scenic garden with none of the drawbacks such as weeding, hoeing and dead flower plucking.
He awoke each morning breathing in the delightful scents and smells from a thousand varieties of exotic plants, bushes and shrubs. Unfortunately, the enticing nectars of some of the more fragrant flowers also attracted a hive of killer bees. He hopes to be out of intensive care in time for Thanksgiving, assuming of course, he can find a hat big enough to fit over his lumps.
Gardening is a delightful pastime and we highly recommend it as a hobby. Many a pensioner or vagrant has spent his or her retirement years happily puttering away among the petunias until his name was called up yonder.
Gardening unfortunately means digging, digging means lifting and lifting means heart attacks and back strain. So we say ‘forget it, if you must see flowers, steal a seed catalogue and pin it up.’
Have we covered everything? Doors, roofs, walls, mud banks, gullies, dying… yep. That’s pretty well it. So much for that, let’s eat.
Cooking On A Limited Budget
Cooking is the second oldest profession in the world.
When Alley Oop first slipped Oola a clam shell for a few moments of horizontal conversation in some prehistoric bushes, his first thought after the swelling went down was not, “I wonder where I can scrape up another shell?” it was, “I wunner where I can get sumpin’ to eat?”
Through the ages, the two professions have evolved hand in hand, each in its own way, but always together. The first profession introduced the Missionary Position. The second followed shortly after with Missionary Pot au Feu (a delightful dish if the Reverend has been properly marinated). And so it continued, first one and then the other, until in an incredible bit of bad taste, the New Zealanders invented Shepherd’s Pie which I suppose has carried the love affair to its ultimate end.
We are not here to discuss the history of the culinary arts however, but rather how you, the derelicts of society, can throw together a passable meal without doing serious damage to your digestive system, or for that matter someone else’s, although the latter is not all that important.
Before we begin, there are a number of units of measure that one should learn before venturing into a kitchen, or in your case, cave.
Cooking Measurements
Some ingredients will be in single units, for example – a grape, a turnip, a watermelon, an ox. Should any of the above show up in a recipe, you may simply assume the whole unit is to be thrown in. There are others, such as an apple or a dog.
Accuracy is most important when following a recipe. One must be careful to measure the ingredients precisely if the stew or soufflé is to be a mouth-watering success. Some of the standard cooking terms used in the following recipes may be foreign to a stranger to the modern kitchen, like a wife. Therefore, please memorize the chart below to avoid a culinary disaster.
1 clump – a fair-sized handful
1 wad – a fair-sized handful of a substance previously chewed.
1 whole pee-pot full – several clumps, wads, or lumps
Liquid measurements are quite simple and are usually given in metric, for example:
750 cc – 1 wine bottle
1000 cc (1 Litre) – a bigger wine bottle
Cookware
Depending on where you are attempting to brew your concoction and the heat source being used, great care must be taken to employ the proper cooking vessel. For instance, one shouldn’t attempt to boil, bake or stew in a house brand dog food can. Although the resulting flavour may actually be better than the original recipe, the average diner is likely to equate dog food with poor quality. In actual fact, a good can of Purina One is far more delectable than most house brand TV dinners found in the modern supermarket freezer today.
No doubt you are anxious to get on with some tasty treats to delight your taste buds. Without further ado, we shall begin with:
The Appetizers
It is possible you may vaguely remember the last time you were actually invited over to a business colleague’s home for an evening of fine dining. In fact, if you take a moment and sift through the sand and grit in your ragged suit coat pocket, you may even find a few pieces of silverware that you borrowed to help commemorate the evening.
If you recall, just before you sat down to dine, and considerably before you killed that bottle of fine wine and threw up on the living room rug, the hostess passed around a silver serving tray festooned with a number of oddly shaped pieces of foodstuff. These titbits are aptly named hors d’oeuvres. ‘Hors d’oeuvres’ is a French expression for either the appetizers or the little snackies Parisian ladies of the evening nibble on while waiting for their next ‘Jean’. The ‘appetizer’ tray is where we find such treats as truffles, escargots, barnacles, clavicles and deep-fried things.
My particular favourite is smoked oysters wrapped in bacon and torched to several thousand degrees to burn off any poisonous sea urchins or whale poop that may have accumulated during the oyster’s life in the briny, and that is where we will start our cooking lessons next week.
(Image Supplied)
