It’s Over, The Better Hovels and Gardens Series Comes To An End
A Geezer’s Notebook, By Jim Foster
Now (finally) we get into the recipes that will impress your guests and almost certainly guarantee they will not be pestering you for another invitation.
By rooting head-first in the dumpster and battling the local fruit fly population for your share of the spoils, an adventurous chef can find a wealth of exotic fruits and vegetables ready to carry home to his/her kitchen.
There is a knack to choosing the right fruit to impress your guest (or guests if you can find more than one sucker to join you which isn’t too likely.) Hold your selection to your ear, shake, and listen carefully. If you hear nothing, you have found tonight’s dinner. If you hear a gnawing sound or angry buzzing, you would be well-advised to fire your prize in one direction while you head the other way as fast as your spindly legs can carry you. The Oriental torture death by a thousand cuts is a walk in the park compared to the Occidental death by a thousand hornets outdoor dining experience.
Honey-Broiled Grapefruit (Burnt pamplemice de beehive)
Ingredients: 2 medium grapefruit halves.
1 fluid ounce (2 sips) bitters — or something, preferably Italian, such as Campari, but just about anything found on the de-listed shelf of a liquor store will do.
2 blobs of honey (the fresher, the better). If the bees are still squatting in there buzzing, it should be ideal.
It is unlikely that a person on your limited means will be able to actually finance the purchase of a whole grapefruit. However your neighbourhood supermarket will occasionally dispose of a number of these tasty fruits after they have been bruised beyond recognition or covered in a decorative fuzzy greenish-blue mould.
Method:
- Preheat broiler. Since you are not likely to have a fire pit let alone a broiler, preheat the blowtorch.
- Slice a thin slice from the bottom of your grapefruit half so it stands upright. Place in broiler pan or on a flat rock
- In small bowl or pocket, blend bitters and honey: drizzle over grapefruit halves.
- Ignite blowtorch and stand well back. From a height of 1 ½” pass the torch over the grapefruit slowly until the surface is a rich black colour and the juice sizzles and flies off in all direction. Once everything has been reduced to a smouldering cinder, place in the centre of an aluminum-foil plate, garnish with crabgrass or plantain leaf and serve.
- Alert the poison control centre.
Pan de Muertos (loosely translated as the Bread of Death)
This is one of those traditional dishes that the simple folks from New Orleans eat every November 2nd to commemorate the release of souls from purgatory on All Souls Day.
I’m afraid that the recipe I was planning on copying seems to be incomplete. The yeast, the flour, the eggs, corn oil and food colouring are there, but the next ingredient is unclear. It says two scoops of gunpowde . . . and then the bottom of the page disappears. I think that I will skip that one and move on to the Healthy Eating section.
ENTREES
The true test of a chef’s culinary expertise is what he or she can do in the kitchen with nothing but a well-stocked larder, imagination, and a few bottles of cheap cooking sherry. Even a dolt like you can conjure up an entrée that will be talked about long after the people who ate it are dead and buried and the coroner’s inquest forgotten. Don’t be afraid to try something new. Again we cannot stress often enough the Old Latin proverb,
‘Semper canes experimentatus primus’ – Always feed it to the dog first.
Most people in your circumstances live on wild animals that are either too old or too stupid to look both ways before crossing a busy highway. Therefore the following meat dishes call for woodland creatures. However there is no reason why you can’t substitute real domestic animal products if you should happen to wander by Zehrs and steal some old dolly’s shopping cart.
Porcupine Stew (Ragout de Porkie)
This would seem to be the ideal time to tell you the difference between a porcupine and the House of Commons but I won’t. I can tell you the answer but it will cost you a dollar.
Apparently the law protects porcupines because they are the easiest animals in the forest to snare. That means that even a bozo like you has a chance to catch one, but I wouldn’t count on it. Let us assume for argument’s sake that you actually have one of these little creatures. It would probably be advisable to have him plucked and eviscerated. How you do that is your problem we are gourmet chefs, not cold-blooded killers.
Method:
- Add porcupine remains to Hovel-Made Beef-like Soup
- Boil six weeks.
Sweetbreads or Lamb’s Fries (Les gemmes precieux d’agneau de printemps)
This recipe calls for some delicacy here. Sweetbreads is (or are) not something that is discussed by the members of polite society. I’d rather not get into a long and technical discussion concerning a sheep’s anatomy. Let us just say that if a male sheep (genus ovis) hereinafter called the ram, attempts to jump a barbed-wire fence and misjudges the height of said fence, the ram’s dangling bits left hanging on the fence, is (or are) the sweetbreads.
This particular recipe is courtesy of the late J. A. ‘Pete’ McGarvey. Mr. McGarvey was a well-known CKEY broadcaster and noted authority on sheep having once served as a procurer for the Grenadian Armed Forces.
Method: Once acquired by stealth, these delicacies are best soaked in salt water, sliced, diced or mashed (the very notion of which causes strong men to blanch) and sautéed at high heat with butter and herbs for six minutes in K-Y Jelly.
Eat if you wish – but the next time you are ambling through a meadow and see a particularly sad-looking ram staring at you with a tear in his eye, just remember that it was you who ate his testimonials.
Enough of Better Hovels and Gardens already! No more.
(Image Supplied)
