January 24, 2008

FRIED CHICKEN MACHISMO

Ask anyone about fried chicken, and he or she will invariably answer, “The Colonel.” Long before The Colonel, deep-fried chicken was an American favorite. In fact, I have it on good authority that many plebeians of the South have never tasted any chicken other than fried – or at least none of the roasted like bubbe used to make.

But, The Colonel – a chubby old man in a white suit and schpitz-bord – turned his Kentucky Fried Chicken into an international enterprise. I guarantee that there were five KFC’s in Beijing well before the Chinese discovered Ping-Pong.

Of course, The Colonel’s fried chicken is globally treife, except for a couple of spots in Israel. Nonetheless, I have sometimes “experimented” and found it a decadent balm for the yetzer hora. The “original” recipe, in contrast to the “crunchy,” is always my choice. The breading is thick, gooey, salty. The skin oozes grease. The flesh is juicily underdone.

Now, The Colonel has fomented a revolution. Steering away from his unpretentious fried chicken, he has gotten into the business of “The Famous Bowl.” Nauseating. Noxious. Like a biblical excavation gone awry, The Famous is layer upon layer of chicken, gravy, mashed potatoes, cheese, more chicken, rice, more gravy, cole slaw, and more cheese.

Eating the toxic Famous while sitting down is sufficient to put you in life-threatening jeopardy. Machismo multiplies the danger exponentially. A “real man” will not merely order The Famous. He will dig in and eat it while speeding along at 75 miles an hour.

Unimaginable, you say. Ha. Just last week, Linda showed me an article about someone who ate The Famous as he collided with an oncoming car. The impact made him suck up his Famous so violently that surgeons were picking out shards of breading from his lungs for 18 hours.

“Let that be a lesson to you!” Linda admonishes me with the authority of a third-grade teacher. I promise her devoutly that I will never, ever again eat The Famous, especially when I am driving.

“OK, no more Famous,” I chastise myself, as I pull away from the Sun Yat Sen drive-thru, balancing a carton of lo mein on my lap and maneuvering the steering wheel with my chopsticks. I’m what you call a “real man.”

January 02, 2008

GARDEN-FRESH VEGETABLE MEDLEY

Growing up, the word “medley” had two meanings. It either meant fragments of songs strung together by a common theme, like “an Engelbert Humperdinck medley.” Or, it meant a series of similar sporting events, “a backstroke, butterfly, breaststroke medley.”

When I entered into the culinary world, “medley” took on a more dubious meaning: a vegetable medley. This is the haystack of sautéed vegetable matchsticks that resides on the dinner plate next to the blob of mashed potatoes or pasta served at weddings, Bnai Mitzvah, and “finer” restaurants.

Inevitably, there it is on the menu, next to the main course: “served with a medley of garden-fresh vegetables.” The vegetables, alas, are not garden fresh, or even distinguishable, and oh yes, they are greasy as my 1957 Volvo.

Truth: The medley is comprised of the cheapest vegetables available that week, green and red peppers, broccoli, cauliflower, zucchini, yellow squash, onions, and canned mushrooms – fried together until they resemble a pile of hemp.

Is there no end to the madness? Do what I did: Google “vegetable medley” and discover that most of them are sold to hotels and restaurants frozen in plastic bags and cardboard boxes, produced “garden fresh” in Chile by Donald Trump.

If you step up a rung on the society ladder, let’s say a Rothschild Bar Mitzvah, you will still find vegetable medley. In an attempt to impress, it will be even sicklier – spooned out by white-gloved waiters, but still a pathetic mélange of higher-classed “baby” vegetables: baby carrots, squash, asparagus, tomatoes, all seemingly plucked out of the ground prematurely by over-eager farmers, just as I impatiently did from my garden when I was a kid.

The only restaurants in my vicinity where I can procure a fresh vegetable medley are called “meat-and-three’s.” They are habituated by the working class and low-life’s. You walk down the line, and you see real carrots, squash, beans, and potatoes in different pans. You simply point, and each is presented in its own little bowl.

The ultimate wisdom proffered on vegetables was by my Yekke father-in-law. “In Deutschland,” he said, “we didn’t eat vegetables. We considered them meichel behemah (animal fodder).”

No wonder Ronald Reagan considered ketchup a vegetable.