Tag: food

crab soup

crab

Well damn. Could that crab soup be any better?

It was creamy. But not floury. The worst is when you can easily identify the thickening agent. When you taste the flour, somebody failed. Worse would be a thickening and flavorless and thick cornstarch. But this soup did not make that mistake.

Flour needs to be a part of the fat, incorporated, with only thick and no interruption except to add feel. The fat could be butter. It could be olive oil. Or another oil. The flour needs to be heated, maybe taking on a color, and cooked. Flour tastes lousy. A mouthful of fatty thickness? Yes. That’s it. And cream. Yes, add cream.

The soup was sweet from the flesh of the crab, but you could taste the honey from the sherry. The sherry wasn’t just sweet, but nutty. And the butter wrapped around all of it–to fill your mouth.

That’s what I shoveled into my mouth. It was crazy. I didn’t need to eat it so fast. But it was just that good.

Posted on by docthink 0

Big Juicy

Tomatoes on the vine. Damn, they look good.

I had my eye on that tomato. I wanted it, but I wanted both of us to be ready.

I don’t know that I saw its flower. There were a bunch of flowers that late spring. They were little yellow stars against the deep green of the vines. I didn’t hone in on one or the other as they twinkled in the morning sun. I was just happy to see them get off to a great start.

The flowers soon disappeared and were replaced by little grape sized globs (or maybe globes?). Tomatoes-in-waiting. Where I am doing the waiting. Waiting for tomatoes. I’m encouraging them, too.

It’s funny how the flowers all appear at, or at least near, the same time, but the indivitual spheres take off on their own pace. Like a race.

So from the undifferentiated yellow flowers springs a free-for-all of vegetables. Some grow fast, some grow in clumps and some hang out by themselves. Sunning themselves, supping on the morning dew, and growing.

The tomato I am watching is not only the biggest, but it’s the one that starts blushing. As it changes from the waxy green, it first looks like a bruised face. Like it was in a fight and the fleshy part of it’s chin took a punch. The discoloration evens out, and it is orange. There is a ring of yellow at the top, near the vine, but the rest of the tomato is more carrot than zucchini.

This is NOT the time to disturb it. The contrast, especially next to its still-green sibings, makes it look red. But it’s not. It’s orange. A rainstorm moves the progress along. Now, when you cup it in your hand, the tomato starts to feel less hollow and more heavy. It passes from orange-red to red-orange. But it’s not done yet.

I very gently and very slowly wiggle the tomato against the vine. It’s umbilical cord is holding fast. Not yet.

The next day was brilliantly sunny. The tomato is definitely red. Any hint of orange is gone as is the yellow-orange ring at the top. I brush away the nub left from the dried up flower at the bottom of the orb. The green vine looks even darker and lusher next to the deep pomodoro red. I test the vine. The vine releases the fruit into my hand.

I draw the tomato to my face and breathe in the core side. It smells a little pine-y with a hint of what might be a whiff of hops, like cascades hops. The top definitely smells green, grassy green. It’s warm from the sun.

The tomato is much heavier than it looks. As I compress my fingers around it, it gives in. You can feel the moisture just inside its waterballoon self. The red walls, though, breathe back. There are no indentations left from fingers.

I bring it into the house and give it a perfunctory run under the water from the faucet. I put two pieces of bread in the toaster. I take the serrated knife and cut off a thin bottom and then gently saw back and forth to make a bunch of slices that I place on the mayonnaised bread. A twist of the pepper mill, a sprinkle of coarse salt and the frills of the outside green flounce of romaine finish it.

I bite in and the wet of the tomato spills down from the corner of my mouth and soaks my chin and my hand.

Did I tell you it was still warm? From the sun?

Posted on by docthink 0

No Comment

shrimp on bed of fresh greens with chickpeas and farro
zucchini ricotta lemon with prosciutto
salmon niçoise
arugula pine nuts golden raisins with shaved Parmesan
basque inspired clams and rice
peaches

I love to cook. I love to cook different things. I love to learn how to cook different things. The Internet helps me. See my handiwork above.

I am so happy to look at my mostly barren between-shopping-trips kitchen, type the words [squash], [capers] and [mint] and find something to make for dinner. And many, many times, the results taste good. Even better, I might have added to my cook’s knowledge for next time.

Another terrific thing about cooking is that you can use your learnings to make changes or substitutions to reflect what you have on hand or your taste preferences or both.  Sometimes I’ll scroll through a bunch and take parts of two–or maybe on occasion six–and concoct something. Sometimes I look for a recipe just to get a technique or a cooking approximation. The internet is a treasure trove for cooks and cook wannabes.

Yet another terrific thing about using recipes online is looking at the reviews of the other cooks. You can get an idea if people thought that there was too much salt or too much oil or if the prep-time is onerous or if it feeds an army rather than two or if you should double the sauce. If many commenters said that the results stunk, you take that caution and move on.

A non-terrific thing about cooking and the internet are people who comment and rate a totally different recipe.

Like this one for a corn and tomato salad,

I didn’t use tomato.

What the what? It’s a corn and TOMATO salad. Rule 1: You can’t review a recipe that you didn’t use.

Or this one for old fashioned spaghetti and meatballs,

I thought this was a great, old school recipe. Like somebody’s grandma. I pretty much followed the recipe exactly, except for making the following changes: I substituted salmon for the ground beef and veal because I had some leftover. I don’t really care for Italian seasonings so I used ginger and scallions. I bound the salmon together with some breadcrumbs and egg and the sauce was more soy and mirin. We served over rice with sesame bok choy. I would give the recipe 3.5 stars if I could, but will leave it at 3 since I made a few changes.

What recipe did you make? How could you review this recipe. And, most importantly, why do we care about your version of what is definitely not Mama’s Pasta? Rule 2: You can’t review a recipe that you didn’t follow, like at all. Shut up, please.

And the final one is the person who takes offense and feels compelled to share said offense because that is NOT how his family makes it. And his grammy knows! This is most entertaining when they include their own version of the recipe so that you don’t make the mistake and prepare the food wrong.

From a vegetarian recipe for healthy “fried” green tomatoes with red pepper vinaigrette,

I am from the South and no self-respecting Southerner would make their fried green tomatoes with goat cheese. My grandma would take the can of lard or bacon fat out from behind the pantry and she’d fry them up. Also, we don’t put any fancy salad dressing on them. Just eat them sitting on the back porch waiting for the catfish to cook. This recipe is an insult to my heritage. No stars!

Seriously? Your childhood is sullied because someone is making a different version of a vegetable? Rule 3: Recipe comments are not a space for your personal therapy. Find a professional.

I know that this recipe commenting thing is a part of the broader issue of internet commenting and trolling. You know, where people comment on things that they didn’t read, comment on something that they reinterpret for their own purposes or comment so they can get something, maybe peripherally related, off their chest. [As an aside, if you want to be entertained by some of the best recipe trolling ever, go here.] 

Come to think of it, I think that I just might prefer reading recipe comments over any other internet comments.*  At least there’s a chance I’ll learn something.

 

* except when I see your Facebook comments that say I look good. Never enough of those.

Posted on by docthink 0

Is That It?

Generic ketchup and roll of papertowels at the most nondescript restaurant.

It’d be hard to imagine a more generic joint. More generic than a hospital waiting room. More generic than a 70’s bus station. More generic than an underfunded rural elementary school. More generic than hundreds of cookie cutter houses along tracks of a former dairy farm.

The color palette is unremarkable. The tables are a blond shellacked wood. The red brown chairs look like they were purchased at a hotel overstock sale. The walls are a yellowy cream. The lighting does nothing to enhance the color. It is neither bright nor dull. There is a maroon border around the wall. It’s almost the same color as the chairs. Almost. Must be a standard issue. No color matching.

Even more generic are the walls. There is nothing on them. No posters. No velvet paintings. No year at a glance calendars. No neon. No Christmas lights. No tchotchkes. Not even an official occupancy sign. There was, however, a fire alarm. A generic one.

There’s a shellacked table that’s pulled up next to the counter. It has a row of tabasco bottles, a row of yellow mustard bottles and a row of ketchup bottles. There is also a pile of napkins. No napkin holder, just a pile of napkins. There is a plain sign with the menu. It’s not even hung. It sits on top of the shelacked table next to the counter and leans on the yellowy cream wall. On the other side of the counter is a soda fridge. Like at 7-11. Or at a 7-11 knock off.

Oh, and that counter? It is more like a small bar in someone’s basement. It’s maybe four feet long with a cash register. It’s all yellowy cream colored. It disappears into the walls. If there wasn’t a very big man in a black shirt behind it, you likely would not see it. You’d just think a cash register was levitating.

And another thing, this is a hamburger shoppe. They sell hamburgers and fries and shakes (and half liter sodas from the self-serve cooler). But it doesn’t smell like meat or grease or grill or onions. It really doesn’t emit any smells of food or of cooking. It smells of nothing. Do they even cook here?

Maybe I should have left, but I decided to get a burger. To see if this place was real or if it was like the fake town set up for the bad guys to raid in Blazing Saddles. I picked a soda out of the cooler, paid my money, took my number and sat down in front of the window at the generic table with a generic roll of plain white paper towels and a bottle of ketchup.

The big man in the black shirt brought out my hamburger in his hand. It was in a nondescript gray–or is that an ugly khaki?–clamshell box that was good for composting. I thought that maybe this same guy also cooked the food.

Anyway, the moment of truth came as I opened the box to see a good looking sandwich. The bottom bun was soaked and soggy from the beef juices. And the burger itself tasted fine. Not amazing, but a few steps above generic. But evaluating the entire experience, and adding the $7.99 before tax for the burger to the calculations (I am not including the soda price), I’m left without anything to draw me back.

In fact, the memory is becoming less clear, duller and fading. I hope that I remember to remember that this place isn’t memorable. But I bet that I’ll forget and stumble back into this unremarkable scene.

Posted on by docthink 0

Beautiful Swimmer

Maryland blue crabs. So much work for so little meat for so much reward.

I didn’t grow up eating Maryland crabs. This was very obvious to people who did.

Early in my career, I worked for an association. One of our members, Mary, invited me to speak at a chapter event. Since it was at the beach I said, “Yes!”

Ocean City, Md., has a boardwalk with a big ferris wheel that reveals then hides the shore as it circles. It has cotton candy and beach fries and whack-a-mole and t-shirts that say, “Don’t Bother Me, I’m Crabby.” But you don’t get crabs on the boardwalk.

Mary and her husband Chester were from Baltimore. They had a daughter my age, a son a few years older and two grandchildren, so far. They loved the beach and the Eastern Shore where the watermen delivered rockfish and oysters and crabs. There’s also amazing Eastern Shore chicken you can get at a fire house on the way to the ocean. But this isn’t about chicken.

My hosts spent many summers picking crabs (picking is how you eat crabs). They made no assumptions about me, though, and politely asked if I ate crabs. I thought I did, and it seemed like fun. They took me to a favorite spot. It was back over the bridge, heading away from the ocean across some marshy land. It was a crab house.

I knew how to order a beer, and Charlie asked how many crabs I could eat. I didn’t know. And, I really didn’t know. When the waitress brought the platter piled high with steaming crabs unevenly seasoned with red powder, I realized just how over my head I was. This wasn’t lobster. No. It was not lobster at all.

Charlie grabbed two of the crustaceans and dropped them next to his beer. He started pulling one apart and banging a piece with a hammer. I swigged my beer and, following Mary’s lead, I took a crab off the plate and placed it in front of me, on my newspaper tablecloth. I snuck a look at Mary and mimicked her by pulling off an appendage. I used a nutcracker to open it. The use of the tool on the oddly shaped claw did not come natural to me. I did, however, get some meat. And a little shell. The meat was quite good. The shell, not so much, but it did have the flavor of salt, celery, mustard, cayenne, and whatever seventy-three other spices are in the yellow can of Old Bay. Fortified, I repeated on the other side of my crab. Then, I was stuck.

I turned the body of the crab around. It was looking at me. I spun it away, but I couldn’t find a way in. Chester was on his fourth. Mary kindly asked if I had picked crabs before. She didn’t want to embarrass me, but I was obviously incompetent. Or, in her mind, untrained. I looked up, wide-eyed, and she schooched closer to me. Chester knocked back another crab. I could tell because the empty carcasses were piling up on his side of the table. He paused to eat his ear of corn. I think he powdered it with Old Bay before he ate it.

Mary showed me where I had missed some meat on the hinge part of the claw. She pointed at the legs and demonstrated where to pull them off and how to suck out the strings of meat. These were very big crabs, so it was worth the effort. She expertly flipped the crab on his back and lifted the tab on its belly as if she were unlocking a round red box. This exposed an opening at the top for her thumb to wrest it’s body apart.

I clumsily followed her demonstration and attempted on my own crab. I couldn’t get a good feel to separate the “lid” from the body. She helped me. I was now faced with the insides of an arachnid. That I was supposed to eat. But first I had to brush away the grayish gills. Not to be eaten. At this point I was starting to wonder what I could eat. It’s been all prep except for those claws I ate twenty minutes ago. Meanwhile, Chester ordered a second beer and was on his eighth crab. He was licking the salty seasoning off his very messy fingers. I think he smirked at me. Maybe it was a look of pity.

Now, I was supposed to take the body and crack it in half. The body was like a big honeycomb, only thin and fragile. Mary was eating from hers. Mine collapsed in my hands and I learned why it was called picking as I picked hunks and scraps of crab meat out of the debris of cartilage. There was one piece, though, that slid out intact from it’s chamber. It was moist and sweet and significant enough that it was more than one bite and more than two chews for each bite. And I knew, in that moment, that was why we were doing this.

Chester ordered another plate of crabs.

I struggled through another crab, but by the time I got to my third, all the lessons escaped from my head. I couldn’t find the tab. I ate my corn. I successfully extricated meat from the claws. I was dirtied by splashes of crab juice from my forehead through my elbows and, of course my hands. The backs as well as the front. There was blood coming from my thumb where I cut it on the shell as I was trying to find something to eat. I ate my coleslaw. It was good. It was cool. My beer was warm.

I pushed my crab around on my newspaper a bit. Mary started feeding me meat that she had picked, but after a few bites I decided that she should feed herself. I said that I was full. Chester lifted his eyebrows at Mary as he sucked the meat out of his twelfth crab.

Once I had declared my “fullness,” I could better enjoy my dinner companions. They teased each other with the bite of a long marriage but without bitterness. They finished each other’s sentences and interrupted when the one told the story wrong. I had an iced tea to round out my dinner. Chester ate the last of the crabs. He drove us back over the bay and back to our conference hotel. I did have a fun time and thanked them for the adventure.

The hotel was a step or two above a touristy, “family” oceanside motel from the 70s. The towels were very thin, but were more than sufficient to wash off the crab juice. When I had cleaned up and changed my shirt, I thought the coast was clear. I surreptitiously crossed the small lobby–it was more like a vestibule–and walked to my car. Up the strip was a drive through. I got the Number 1 hamburger meal. With a shake. I knew how to eat that.

After that lesson, when we’d eat crabs I’d sit next to somebody who liked picking crabs and let them feed me. Sometimes it was The Spouse. Many times it was someone else’s spouse. I wasn’t proud. Occasionally someone would give me a refresher lesson. I liked crab, just not enough to pick them. In other good news, crabs were usually part of a summer party with an accompanying barbecue. I could always have a hotdog after mooching crab.

One year, the Spouse was away for the neighborhood crab feast. He had the role of walking the boys through their crab consumption. This time, it was on me. But, I knew exactly what to do. I taught them where the meat was in the claws, to open and eat from the hinge side, to suck the juices from the legs, to pull the tab and separate the top, to remove the gills and crack the body. They were much better students than me, but over years of observation I had became a crab picker. So much that people started to think I grew up eating Maryland crabs.

Callinectes sapidus, the Maryland blue crab. It’s part of my language. Hey hon, Chester wouldn’t get all the crabs now.

Posted on by docthink 0

Countrywoman

Two roosters. Polish folk art.

“Do you know kielbasa?” She bewitched me and then owned me with her intense blue eyes. Eyes that were light and deep blue at the same time. Like the beginning of a night sky, with the lightest brightest blue at the horizon almost immediately becoming a deeper darker murkier and much more complex blue until it became black-blue.

I couldn’t look away. She reeled me in by calling out more food of our people.

“The haloopschi?” I didn’t get that one, but I told her I made golabki.

She held up her little Polacki hands and cupped them together. “The stuffed cabbage?” And then to the common translation, “the pigs in the blanket!?!”

I nodded. She never made them herself but her galaxy eyes lifted to the heavens to savor her memory of those cabbage rolls braised in tomato. She bored through the simple green in my own eyes and planted herself into the ethnic part of of the tribal part of my brain.

In unision we said, “pierogi.”

We both blinked and took a step back. Not because we jinxed, but because we knew that we were both–each of us–slicing through a buttery stuffed dumpling using our thought forks. We synchronously met that most pure, delicate and delicious victual in our now collective concentration. We were conjoined on the holy grail of Polish-American cuisine. You know it’s just that good when six of the items on the Buzzfeed list of Polish foods are pierogi, nos. 18-23.

Our sentences overlapped and intertwined. “My My mother aunt made them made them. So good. Oh my god!” We licked our respective lips. Hers more wrinkled at the edges than mine. Mine well on the way there, though.

She asked where I was from in the same paragraph without sentences that simultaneously shared that she was from Western Pennsylvania. I braided her words with mine, “Detroit.” We nodded, again. In unison, again. She returned to kielbasa.

“That Hillshire Farms, like what is that? Not like what we got, what we ate.” I know that we  were both cutting into the taut skin of the red sausage, of watching the fatty juices running out and of filling our nostrils with garlic forward porkiness. If porkiness is a word. But it definitely, especially when combined with smokiness, says Polish sausage.

This is the prototypical exchange of all Polish Americans. It’s always about our food and our church and our families.

“You Catholic?” I nodded. No reason to parse it out right now.

“How come you were to Ireland and haven’t been to Poland? You gotta go.”

She was a very slight woman. She was actually tiny.  A septuagenarian with a little thinning of her bleached hair that was short but wavy, especially at the ends. She made no mistakes on her makeup, not an overly and oddly lined eye, not a big pink blotch on her uplifted cheeks. Her spring sweater was a cream with a ribbon of gold around the neckline.

A newlywed, she met her husband on Match.com and was unsure about what she had done. Her partner of forty-eight years had preceded her and before he left this world, told her to be happy. She didn’t want to be lonely. So she accepted an uneasy ease with her first spouse, after spending the prior half-century with a different man.

She didn’t know her husband’s ethnicity, but he had lived in Europe for a few years, but maybe he was French? She wasn’t sure, but in her eighth decade after seventy-four years with the same name, she was figuring out how to go by a new married name. Six months into matrimony, she still went by her own name. She said she was going to change it.

In the meantime, she told me how lovely the Poles were and how her Jewish partner make the pilgrimage to see the Black Madonna of Częstochowa on his hands and knees, but her tour walked through. This story of his devotion delighted her, and me.

She took my card and said that I’d hear from her. I hope so. I hugged my new friend, she joined her delightful new husband, and we parted as the bellman opened the door onto the street.

Posted on by docthink 0

Shell Game

Oysters, and a few clams i the back.

Oysters are of the sea. Of the rough and tumble sandy, rocky, salty sea. Of dark skies and storms that cold boil brackish water.

The chassis of an oyster tell you that they mean business. They are not the perfectly ridged, delicate, ombré fan of the scallop. They are not the smooth, radial, accreted ridges of a clam shell.

No. Oysters look like street fighters, with a rock hard face that has been pummeled into a misshapen mass of cartilage and bone, awkwardly swollen and of many colors. Not all of them, or maybe none of them, a color of health.

It dares you to open it. It is the door to the witch’s house that you step back from because nothing good can be in there.

What a liar.

When I tip the half shell into my mouth and the oyster sides onto my tongue, my brain hears phantom calls of gulls. I almost look up, to squint into the sun, or to push my face into cold sea spray on a clouded day to see big gray or white big birds challenging me for that briny bite.

I taste the entire ocean, thousands of years, hundreds of thousands of years, concentrated in a chewy drop of sweet saline. If they are shucked poorly, I will bite into bits of its shells. I roll the shale to the side of my mouth and pull out the nature.

When they are shucked well, and adorned with a squeeze of lemon and a spritz of sweet-sour-peppery mignonette they are still of the wild sea. Because that is what they are.

Of the sea.

Posted on by docthink 2

Orange Crush

Carrots. Baby carrots. Right size. Right color. WRONG!

It was so ridiculous. I ate a pretty big, and fairly late, breakfast this morning. I figured it would take me through the rest of the day. I was wrong.

It didn’t start until maybe 12:10 p.m. I was clicking through from Twitter when I was violently accosted by an awakening of sorts. Call it an urge, if you will. But by any name the results were the same. I suddenly and completely craved Cheetos®.

I immediately discarded this ridiculous thought. I checked my satiation scale. I wasn’t hungry. I returned to my computer screen. Only to be interrupted, again.

CHEETOS®! It was like I was the teenager that just had sex in the horror movie, and it was my turn to be lured out–to certain death–by the monster. It was just that dooming.

Nope. Nope. Nope. Not having it. In addition to not being hungry, if I had a bag at my desk, opened it and ate some, the orange Cheeto® dust would get on my keyboard. I wasn’t going to get started on that path. No Cheetos® everywhere. No Cheetos® anywhere.

I started back to work and my mind wandered to Baby Bear playing U-6 soccer. Some parents (okay, most) didn’t follow the guidelines requiring orange slices and water for games. They didn’t get that it was replenishment versus treats. So they’d bring salty snack bags and juice boxes. Bear would pick a bag of Doritos so I wouldn’t eat them. I hate Doritos. But he’d bring a bag of Cheetos® to me on the sideline so I would be happy. Stop! Out damn thought!

I pummeled the thought of salty-fatty-messy snack out of my thinking brain. But I couldn’t beat it out of my lizard brain. The part of me that imagined my chameleon-like tongue snapping a  Cheeto® out of the bag. Yeah. That. Couldn’t stop. Can I eat it now?

NO! I turned back to answering an email, still fighting through my consuming desire. I needed to check the possible dates for a meeting against my calendar. I switched between calendar and email and lost my place. Cheetos® were calling me, like a moth to the flame.

I looked at the clock. It was now 1:40 p.m., and I had been thinking about Cheetos® for 90 minutes. Literally thinking of nothing but Cheetos® for ninety minutes. Solid.

I grabbed my key fob and my wallet. I walked down the stairs to the lobby and turned into the little bodega. I knew that this wasn’t going to end until I ended it.

And, I did. Totally ridiculous.

Cheetos. Not carrots!
Cheetos. Not carrots. 
Posted on by docthink 0

Rule Breaking

non-branded junk food, like fries a cheeseburger and a soda. Not even I diet soda!

I’ve been feeling hungry most of the afternoon. I want to clarify that this is a completely unrighteous hunger. I ate cereal for breakfast, a muffin top for elevensies, then had a proper lunch with two sides.

Unrighteous is truth. I tried to keep this phantom hunger at bay, first by working, then by drinking tea with fake sweetener and then by watching cute puppies on the internet. No good. I started gnawing at the inside of my cheek. I looked up and the clock said quitting time. I was out the door, looking forward to a healthy and satiating dinner. Then, it hit me.

The Beast needs food.

I punched myself in the head for blowing the task off this weekend. Punching made me less hungry for a second. Anyway, I literally drove by the dogfood store on Sunday after the dog park, but found no convenient parking. I couldn’t imagine success in trying to balance the insane 78 pound dog on one arm and a 35 pound bag of kibble in the other. I drove home. Now I am very sorry. Very sorry. And not less hungry. Maybe more hungry. I swallow reflexively.

My desperate mind races to the bottom of the food storage container. Even if I could scrape a scant dinner from the depths of his echoing bin, there would be nothing for tomorrow morning. That’s it. I have to buy dog food. I am without another choice.

I am feeling even more hungry. My stomach is eating itself. Not really, but the unrighteous hunger is unrelenting as I try to push it aside. Instead of going home and digging up some dinner, I need to hop in the car and drive to the store.

Now I’m thinking about what I can eat in the way to the dog food store. I don’t want to wait. I want to have something salty or sweet, or sweet and salty. I’m thinking of burger toppings. I’m thinking of filling up at a drive-thru.

Arrggh! I remember that it’s not food if arrives in the window of your car.  And I’d be breaking a bunch of other food rules, like only eating junk food that I make and only eating at a table. My steering wheel is not a table. And I already said muffin-top in the third sentence here, that’s as close as I want to be.

I start thinking about responsibilities. I call up those days–usually a sunny and warm day–when I get in my car and feel like I just want to drive. And drive. Drive right out of town. Maybe to the beach.

I want to roll down the windows and turn up the radio and sing as loud as I can. So loud that other motorists turn to see where the caterwauling is from. And I just laugh and sing even louder and with even more “feeling.” I don’t know where I’d go, but I’d go.

I’m at the train station. I walk out of the car to the platform. It’s sunny, but end of the day sunny with long shadows suggesting not much sun left. I’m wearing a coat and pull it a bit closer. It’s not that warm, either. I ride down the escalator and amble to the turnstile. I flash my pass and the gates open in front of me.

I’m not that hungry. I bet that The Beast is way hungrier than me. I near the house and see the car on the street. I can be back with the goods in a quick twenty minutes. A business walk and then just a few more minutes to get my plate on. I can hold out. And I can feel righteous in my choices.

My real dinner. Not junk. And Satisfying.
My real dinner. Not junk. And Satisfying.

 

Posted on by docthink 0

Clifden, County Galway

Clifden, County Galway.

“You’ve never been out drinking before with the Doc.” Spake the Big Guy to Baby Bear.

We had driven our longest stretch, from Belfast to County Galway. We bid our proprietor, Joe, goodbye. We had no idea what he said in return. Didn’t have a clue what anyone said in Belfast.

Except when Joe kept asking the other B&B guests if they “carikikeee reedeey.” We pieced together that he was asking about the Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge that was closed due to wind the day we were there. The young woman getting her tea did not understand and batted the old man away.

Joe the Proprietor asked us if we wanted him to take our picture. At least that’s what we think he said, since he motioned to the camera. He took a great one. I wish we got a photo with him.

He waved us away early that morning, after a full Irish, for some.  Not for me. Too much food. Seriously, who can eat that much?

We had a day’s goal to cross the country and make it to Kylemore Abbey for an afternoon view. Legs were folded and bodies curled in the back of the bitty car. The soundtrack was the white noise of light snores.

We drove across green rolling fields spotted with bright yellow bushes that over the miles was recast into the brown mountains of the West. The road was a taupe ribbon on the flats that looped around the feet of the brown peaks. Some turns unveiled blue and green flecked water pocked with a flurry of little white waves.

We had a map and a better than decent idea of where we we were headed. GPS was spotty, but based on our Belfast wifi’d  maps, we made it to the Abbey for an explore. The castle and formal garden were charming, but, oh, the wild grounds. The Victorian era lord planted a zillion trees and brought in pheasants and foxes and stag and a gamekeeper so he could host hunting parties. I’m thinking The Rules of the Game.

Long day. We followed the coast on mission for dinner and a bed. Leenane was behind us. We followed the coast through delightful Letterfrack and pressed on a few miles to Clifden.

Still hugging the coast, we pass some green covered ruins and roll into the nominal capital of Connemara. The main street is a ring, but we didn’t follow it to infinity. As we were making the first lean around the loop I saw the name of a B&B that The Spouse found in his Kindle Fodor’s.

“Go straight!”

The overtaxed, driving-on-the-wrong-side-of-the-road operator rolled down the hill to the sought respite. We were welcomed by the glance of a fluff of a mostly sleeping dog  next to a stoked fireplace. Fire. Pup. Good signs.

The host came out and gave us two rooms. We gratefully walked the steps and put our bags down. The Spouse asked me about the price. I hadn’t asked. I just made the deal. Two rooms with breakfast. Host gave us the keys. It wasn’t like a real transaction. Nobody asked for a credit card. It was friendly. We would pay.

We made friends with the host who spent a decade a decade ago in D.C. environs. Small world. He returned to Ireland, developed the guesthouse and was raising his family with the white fluff dog, Roxy. He pointed us to dinner options 93 steps away. We stepped.

The season was just beginning and all the pubs and restaurants were open. We walked up and down the main drag and settled on a dining room that was beautiful and beautifully delicious. I still don’t understand how such a small town could support quality fine dining. But fine it definitely was.

The non-drivers wanted to spend time listening to music with a pint. The driver had had enough good craic and walked the 93 steps back to the guesthouse to settle for the night.

And that’s how Baby Bear had his first time out drinking with the Doc.

We sat at the bar at the pub with the chalkboard promising live music. We ordered a pint. The joint was shyte. We finished and moved on.

Two storefronts down we found a young man singing and playing his guitar in a window bay, opposite a bulky bar and next to a fireplace hearth. We sat in front of the hearth and ordered more pints. We had the type of talk you have when you’ve eaten a great meal, consumed a few pints, are surrounded by good music and have no place to be.

As we walked the 93 steps back to that night’s headquarters, we crossed a street to see a beautiful moon hanging over the street lamps, watching us from a comforter of clouds.

It had been building all afternoon and evening, but at that moment, when I saw that moon, I fell utterly and completely in love with Clifden, County Galway.

Sláinte

 

Posted on by docthink 1