A Cook Writes 

Update

April 5, 2013 | Fresh Fish and Scrambled Love: One Woman's Unexpected Culinary Adventure | Permalink

My fingers pound on the keyboard daily. It’s a soft clicking sound I’ve come to crave, like a good piece of chocolate.

My last Gotham class finished a few weeks ago. I’m comfortable (not excited) with the first 14,000 words of my food memoir. During the last week of class I decided to jump into another ten-week Advanced Memoir class which starts Wednesday, April 10th. After that I’l have one more class to complete my Memoir Certification with Gotham.

So until mid-June, I won’t be posting here, but if you want to keep up with me, check out my other blogs.

And thanks for stopping by.

Ten-week break

January 3, 2013 | Unpublished memoir | Permalink

On Wednesday, January 9, 2013, I will begin a ten-week writing course, Advanced Memoir, with Gotham Writers’ Workshop. When the class is finished, I will need one more class for my Memoir Certification.

I’m excited, energized, and nervous.

Excited and energized because I haven’t worked on my food memoir since last spring. Nervous, well, I’m always nervous when I sign up for a class online. However, once the class begins, I meet the instructor and other scribblers, and then I relax, and get to work.

While I work on Handcuffs, Hurricanes, Pepper Spray and Scrambled Eggs, I won’t post here.

But you can always find me on Twitter, or Facebook.

Until then, see you back here mid-March.

Blue Crabs 1975

December 13, 2012 | Family, Growing pains | Permalink

I’d sat down on the hard-packed sand, after sitting in the car for more hours than I cared, and looked out to where the dark blue water met the pale blue sky. It was the summer of 1975. I was fourteen years old. We’d driven from Pittsburgh to Ocean City, MD. It was the first time I’d see the Atlantic Ocean.

The earth warmed my sore butt. I’d dug my toes into the sand. The soft grit was cool underneath the surface. I’d wondered, if I kept pushing my feet down, would the sand swallow me whole? I’d quickly pulled my feet out and marveled as the sand rushed back down into the cavity where my feet had been. I’d sucked the warm, salty air into my lungs. My curly brown hair whipped into my eyes, stinging like tendrils from a jellyfish, although it would be years after that day, before I’d feel the sharp, prickly sensation of a man-o-war sting.

I’d licked my lips and tasted salt.

I’d fallen in love.

Immediately.

Every chance I got after that trip, I’d find a way to go where the flat line of water meets the sky. I’d find my purpose with the ocean decades later.

But feelings of unrest pulled at me for years, like an undertow. They sucked, and swirled. Suffocating me with feelings of not belonging.

I’d grown up in Pittsburgh, PA, surrounded by concrete, steel, and a few city parks with the required baseball field that every city park has. Even the yard at the public school I’d attended was covered in asphalt and surrounded by a chain link fence.

On that trip to Ocean City, MD, in 1975, my mother, Mary-Margaret, her sister’s, Clare and Annie, her brother’s, Jack and Bob, their spouses, my sisters, a few of my brothers, and several of my cousins were on that summer vacation.

One evening I’d watched from the outside patio through the salt-stained, glass-paneled sliding door, as the adults sipped clear liquid from upside-down funnel-shaped glasses. They ate tiny pearl-shaped onions and pimento-stuffed olives.

They had their spouses. Except my mom. She was alone.

I was hot, and thirsty, but wasn’t allowed in the kitchen. I’d played for hours in the sun with my cousins and sisters. I must have missed the kid’s meal, and I remember feeling lonely. But then I remember seeing my mom laugh like a kid. It was a funny cackle. Loud, long, and pretty.

She was happy.

I, on the other hand, was lonely. Miserable. I was insecure, unsure. Angry at my father, whom I didn’t know. He had died when I was seven, while we watched the black and white television. He sat in his nubby black and white recliner. Me, on the couch next to him. There was a party of some sort going on that day, or perhaps just another weekend day in a family of fourteen.

On another evening in the middle of our vacation week, after another blistering hot, sunny day, I’d watched again. The ritual of the adults. The salt on the door was splotchy, probably from an early morning rainstorm, or mist from the ocean.

This time my Uncle Jack plunged live, wriggling, blue crabs into a pot of steaming hot water. Newspaper covered the counter top. The adults drank beer out of shiny gold cans. Mom sipped a dark liquid from a short glass filled with ice and one, bright-red maraschino cherry. It was a party like I’d never seen.

When Uncle Bill plucked the lifeless crabs from the steaming pot, the adults shouted. Then the pounding commenced. It frightened me and I didn’t know why those dead crabs needed to be beaten. Then the adults were quiet. They picked at the crabs like the gulls on the beach picked at chips and pieces of bread that I’d tossed at them. The adults groaned. It was a mysterious sound that came from deep in their belly’s, or like something that would come from the deep blue sea where the sky met the water. My mouth watered and I’d swallowed hard.

I didn’t get to eat blue crab that week. I‘d spent the remainder of my vacation wondering when my uncles would go back out on the boat to bring back crab. I would have done anything to get on that boat. Each time I saw a small boat on the water, I wondered if the fishermen had crabs on their boat. I’d wondered how the crabs were caught, and how many crabs were in the ocean. I wondered if I was going to see the crabs when I was swimming in the water, and then became afraid to put my feet on the sandy-bottom ocean floor. I’d feared the crabs would pinch my toes and not let go.

But there wouldn’t be another boat trip to “go crabbing,” that week. Or any other week. I didn’t learn the answers to those questions during that vacation. I was afraid to ask for fear of sounding stupid.

We’d driven back to Pittsburgh at the end of the week.

In July 1975, my mother had turned fifty years old.

I’m glad she had her brothers and sisters, some of her children, nieces and nephews. Six years passed since she’d lost her husband.

She’d deserved to laugh, drink martini’s, and not share the succulent, hot crab with her kids.

She’d needed to dig her toes in the sand more often, too.

Elevator pitch

November 29, 2012 | Fresh Fish and Scrambled Love: One Woman's Unexpected Culinary Adventure, Unpublished memoir | Permalink

In 1989, I was a broken, reckless, twenty-seven year old woman chasing shoplifters for a living in downtown Pittsburgh. A move to the tropical island of Marathon, Florida, sparked my lifelong affair with food, in a rundown diner.

My two working titles are, Fresh Fish and Scrambled Love: One Woman’s Unexpected Culinary Adventure, and Hurricanes, Handcuffs, Pepper Spray, and Scrambled Eggs. 

Which title do you like?

Bubble-gum pink walls @1991

October 4, 2012 | Fresh Fish and Scrambled Love: One Woman's Unexpected Culinary Adventure, Unpublished memoir | Permalink

It was early 1991. I’d worked to be a better cook. I’d learned to fish. But not necessarily in that order.

The fishing, was the easy part.

There was a monster-size learning curve on how to cook eggs on an electric flat-top, greasy griddle. Especially in front of a steady stream of customers whose personalities hailed from an episode of Gilligan’s Island, to a CEO of a multinational bank. All demanding their eggs cooked over-medium, three minute poached or scrambled soft. There wasn’t room for  a lot of error.

An average week at the Wooden Spoon meant I’d crack thirty dozen eggs a week. It gave carpal tunnel a completely new meaning.

My income relied on my cooking skills. How many eggs I could cook to order without breaking the yolks, how fast I could get the orders served, and how much of a flirt could I be. The latter was something I mastered eventually, but first I had to learn very quickly how to flip an egg, and I hadn’t mastered it yet.

At the rate I was going, I would be as broke as the yolks on the flat griddle.

I’d try various ways to crack eggs, tentatively tapping it’s smooth, round surface against the hot griddle, against the side of the bowl, or with a fork. I hadn’t mastered the one-hand technique yet.

But there was more going on at The Wooden Spoon than my income or perfectly cooked eggs over medium.

The restaurant had been neglected for years. And even though it was an odd, comfortable fit, me and my run-down, greasy diner, I had to do something about it.

The previous managers did only what they had to do. Years of cigarette smoke, cheap oil for deep-frying French fries, and vats of bacon and sasusage grease, would eventually permeate every open pore and surface in the restaurant. It wouldn’t come clean overnight.

And so after several months flipping fried eggs, blueberry pancakes and burgers, I’d started to see things other than the flat, charred top of those griddles and the endless stream of tickets on the spindle.

One morning, I’d swapped places with Lucielle, my kitchen cook. She’d cook on the griddles, I’d go to the kitchen. That day, I was attempting to bake fluffy, buttermilk biscuits.

I’d placed the trays of semi-flat baked biscuits on a rack to cool, and then I’d returned to the front of the restaurant. A ray of sunshine pierced the bay windows and I’d considered curtains or shutters of some sort. The white glare slanted across the restaurant. I’d noticed my customers moving their seats to avoid the harsh light where it angled across the restaurant and bounced off the wall near the side door that lead to the outside bathroom. Dust bunnies floated through the sunlight, and then I noticed the color of the walls. A dull shade of institutional green took my mind back to the walls of the kitchen where I’d grown up in Pittsburgh. They were the same shade of green, the depressing, dingy green walls of my youth, before my mom let me buy paint and change our dreary kitchen to a bright, airy butter-cream yellow happiness.

At the close of the business day, I took a warm, soapy cloth to a small space on the wall. After wiping a two by three section clean, I’d revealed a greenish-blue shade that I neither liked nor wanted.

Stepping further back from the wall, to my horror, I realized just how dirty and greasy the entire restaurant was. I was embarrassed as much for my own situation as for the previous managers decision not to keep the restaurant clean, as well as Steve’s lack of attention to his property.

When I’d decided on a shade of bubble-gum pink for the walls, I knew I’d hear groans and moans from my mostly masculine clientele. It wasn’t just the testosterone-laden anglers and crabbers that harassed me about my choice of color, it was all of my customers.

As I’d peddled home that afternoon, I’d realized it wasn’t the color that was the problem; it was change itself, that made everyone uncomfortable.

$1.50 Special~1989

September 27, 2012 | Fresh Fish and Scrambled Love: One Woman's Unexpected Culinary Adventure, Unpublished memoir | Permalink

It was December, 1989. I’d been managing The Wooden Spoon for several months when I noticed a nagging sensation gnawing in my belly.

I’d ignored it since I’d taken over the restaurant in September, but when the tickets kept lining up on the line for the $1.50 special, I knew I’d have to get creative, or remove the twenty-foot sign from the side of the highway. The latter was just a fantasy. I didn’t have the right to remove the sign. I was just leasing the space.

If there was one thing I knew how to do at The Wooden Spoon, it was make people happy with good comfort food.

I didn’t learn that early in life, nor did I have cooking experience when I took the keys from Steve and said, “I do.” It wasn’t a marriage I was agreeing to, but rather, an arrangement to manage a run-down diner in the middle of a small sleepy fishing and boating community in the Florida Keys.

As a kid growing up, I didn’t have the luxury of a cooking staff, or nanny. My parents didn’t teach me to cook for a restaurant. Dad died while I was seven, mom went back to work as a nurse when I was ten. When I was a teenager and it was “my turn,” to cook dinner, my older siblings, Kathleen, and Kevin, did teach me a few things I’ll never forget.

Kathleen taught me how to make one-pot wonders, spicy chili, Italian sausage with sautéed onions and green peppers, Swedish meatballs in a thick, sweet and sour brown gravy, and a tangy tomato and ground beef meat sauce. Kevin taught me how to hold a Chef’s knife and how to make a roux.

I was a child of the 70s, which in the food world, meant, boxed and processed food. Kraft Mac ‘n Cheese, Hamburger Helper. I’d learned what can come from little or nothing.

But at The Wooden Spoon, I wasn’t making meals for my broken, hungry, poor family. I was cooking for tourists, local anglers and islanders in a sixty-four seat restaurant. Cooking for a living would bring responsibility, frustration, money and friendships to the table. Cooking on two flat-top griddles would be an entire new learning curve.

I learned from several people, but none would be more instrumental than Dan Schick, my Sysco food rep, and eventual first great friend on the island of Marathon, Florida.

Some of my favorite daily special ideas came from Dan. His strong, square jaw and big blue eyes were all I needed to pay attention. His thick blond, wavy hair and tall, lean body created a package that most women couldn’t resist. Most men either, for that matter. Dan could sell me anything.

He, of course was looking out for himself and his pocketbook.

The first several months managing The Wooden Spoon, Dan and I’d have a standing appointment at three thirty, after the restaurant was closed. Usually I was finished with inventory and ready to give him my order, but the day we’d addressed the $1.50 special, I was bent over the griddles, cleaning.

He sat at the counter in front of me, my backside to him.

“What am I going to do about this $1.50 Special?” I asked. I was scrubbing the top of the electric griddle with a brick of black lava.

“What are you offering now?” he’d said.

“Two eggs and toast.”

I’d glanced over my shoulder to get a glimpse of him while he scrolled through his five-inch book for inexpensive food products. My brain spun like an empty Ferris wheel. I turned back to the task. My anger seeped out as I scratched the burnt food and built-up baked oil from the surface of the griddle. Helen and Ron, the previous managers, offered the two-egg special for $1.50. I offered two eggs and toast, with potatoes and grits for $2.50 on the menu.

So insecure and unsure of what I could do, I’d let the $1.50 special consume me. I wrestled with myself, I didn’t want to lose my regular customers, the “steady-eddies,” I’d called them. After all, if I didn’t have my local customers, who was going to fill the sixty-four seats when the tourists were gone in April? Even Steve, my silent partner, supported the $1.50 Special. It was he and his deceased wife, Susan, who’d put the sign up in the first place.

“I have a sampler case of pastries, each is twenty-four cents. Bagels are fifteen cents. I have a variety pack for eighteen cents. You get blueberry, sesame, cinnamon raisin and plain. How much is a cup of coffee?” he’d ask breaking my reverie.

“Six cents.”

The scratching of the lava stone against the steel was a shade shy of sound of fingernails running down a chalkboard.

“I have a chemical for that job,” he’d said to my backside more than once referring to the cleaning of the griddles.

“I don’t want to use any chemicals, Dan.” I’d turned around to face him. My face was flush from my exertion from cleaning the griddle and my inability to come up with a $1.50 special.

Or maybe it was the flush from the feelings I’d begun to develop for Dan. The feelings that started to surface like the shiny, clean steel grills that would emerge each day after I scrubbed and scratched the burnt surface clean.

Cracked eggshells

August 30, 2012 | Fresh Fish and Scrambled Love: One Woman's Unexpected Culinary Adventure | Permalink

One of my first memories is the sound of the empty eggshells hitting the aluminum plate on the wall above the fifty-five gallon garbage can. I was twenty-seven years old. It was nine o’clock in the morning.

For several weeks, Steve and I talked about my managing his restaurant, The Wooden Spoon, a run-down breakfast diner. I’d moved to Marathon, Florida, July, 1989, from my hometown of Pittsburgh, PA. I’d left my dead-beat job working as an undercover store detective in a large retail chain, a series of roommates who’d managed to find love and get married, and a few pieces of used furniture, for the promise of a fresh start with a man who said, over a long weekend in California at a magic convention, that he loved me.

We’d sit in his kitchen each morning, sipping espresso, and  talk about what I’d considered a doomed arrangement. Me, managing the restaurant, he, traveling to Europe for six weeks.

One morning in early August, after breakfast, with a flourish of excitement, he’d said, “Let’s go look at my restaurant.”

The orange vinyl barstools ran the length of the bar, split in the center by a space wide enough for one person at a time to walk through. Two middle-aged women glided past each other, shuffling their shoulders and hips side-to-side, plates of food lined on their arms. I’d swiveled back and forth on the orange vinyl-covered barstool as I surveyed the small, smoke-filled restaurant. Wooden tables and chairs overflowed with families on vacation, local anglers and boaters. Ceramic plates clattered as the dishwashers stacked them back onto the shelves above the griddles. Silverware tinkled as the servers plunged their hands into trays of flatware. The walls were paneled. A dingy, grease-stained institutional green. Cracked, old fish mounts hung above the griddles near the clock.

The repetitive sound of the eggshells splattering against the wall brought my attention back to the two, black, flattop griddles behind the bar. Helen, the cook, a skinny, beady-eyed woman, stood in front of us, her backside to us, facing the griddles. She’d crack the raw eggs with one hand onto the surface of the griddle or into a small metal bowl, then with rapid-fire action and swiftness, pitch the empty shells against the wall and into the garbage can. I could barely keep up with what she was doing. I marveled at her ability to cook, shout orders, smoke a cigarette and maintain a conversation with Steve without turning around to speak.

But I’d fiddled with my napkin and sipped the bitter-tasting coffee. I knew nothing about the restaurant business or cooking, and even begun to wonder why I’d moved to Marathon.

Then that morning, Helen spun around, glared at me, and then said to Steve, “Must be your new girlfriend?” never taking her eyes from mine.

I felt the heat in my ears and then felt the flush creep into my face. I didn’t wait for his response. I said, “Yes, I’m Maureen.”

If I’d had any reservations about managing The Wooden Spoon restaurant, it was gone in that one moment.

 

How I learned to cook

August 23, 2012 | Fresh Fish and Scrambled Love: One Woman's Unexpected Culinary Adventure, Growing up in Pittsburgh | Permalink

I was 10 years old in 1971. It was the first time I remember eating fish.

I should clarify, it wasn’t the first time I’d actually eaten fish, because as a religious ritual, we’d eat fish every Friday.

But it was the first time I’d remembered paying attention to what my sister Kathleen was doing with the box of frozen fish sticks.

Kathleen removed the Mrs. Paul’s breaded fish sticks from the freezer, lined them like soldiers on the blackened sheet pan, and placed them in the center of our new avocado-green electric oven. (Maybe it was the new oven that got me jazzed about what was happening in the kitchen) She’d set the timer on the stovetop and the went on to another kitchen task.

I’d sat at the kitchen table and waited. I’d turn on the oven light a few minutes before the timer rang, just about the time I’d smelled the toasty, fishy aroma, and peeked through the window of the oven door to watch the fish sticks sizzle and turn golden brown.

How did I get from those days to where I am now, writing and blogging about fresh seafood?

Well, thanks to my older sister Kathleen and older brother Kevin, I’d learn the basics of cooking. Along with the four-burner electric oven, a cast iron skillet, a well-worn Dutch oven, a handful of baking sheets, a few wooden spoons and several plastic spatulas.

Kathleen taught me how to brown links of Italian sausage with green peppers and onions, then add tomato sauce, a few dried herbs and then toast a hoagie bun in the oven. She’d taught me how to bake a meatloaf, “Don’t mix it too much,” a creamy tuna noodle casserole, and to how simmer Swedish-style meatballs, slowly, in a rich brown gravy.

Kevin, fresh out of culinary school, taught me how to hold a knife in my right hand, celery, carrots and onions in my left, and chop, mince and dice, so I wouldn’t cut myself. “Curl the tips of your fingers under when you hold the vegetable,” he’d say, as he held his hand over mine.

It wasn’t until I was twenty-seven years old when I’d moved to Marathon, Florida, I’d learn to cook professionally and find my real passion for food, in a run-down greasy diner.

From 1989 to 1999, I’d cracked over a quarter of a million eggs, fried five tons of lay-out bacon and sausage patties and flipped more blueberry and banana pancakes at The Wooden Spoon Restaurant than I’d ever thought possible.

All cooked on two, three-foot, flat-top griddles.

The Wooden Spoon Restaurant, also called, “The Spoon,” was a 50s-style breakfast and lunch diner. It was the kind of place you love to stumble upon by chance, or better, the kind of place you go every day, because the food and service are so damn good. It was the kind of place you were known by your name, or better, by your food order. Or by the dollar amount that you spent, like Bob the boat mechanic’s nickname, “Three eleven.” Bob spent three dollars and eleven cents for two eggs over-easy, wheat toast and a cup of black coffee. Every day. Nobody minded, and everybody loved it.

At The Spoon, I longed to get away from the traditional, budget-friendly, family meals that I cooked as a young teenager in the little, sparsely furnished kitchen in Pittsburgh. But I only cooked breakfast and lunch at The Wooden Spoon.

I’d learned no matter where you go, or how big your kitchen is, people love familiar, home-style comfort foods: bacon and eggs, French toast, pancakes and creamy sausage gravy poured over fluffy, buttermilk biscuits, meatloaf and mashed potatoes. I poured copious amounts of rich, chicory-flavored coffee and gallons of sweet tea. No barista’s at The Spoon.

My second year managing The Spoon, the sixty-four seats were packed most days from 5 a.m. to 1 p.m. Tourists willing to wait, lined-up outside around the saltbox building, many times for over an hour.

I developed a knack for cooking on those two flat-top griddles.

I’d learned to create mouth-watering, gourmet-style omelets and baked apples with rum sauce on Zucchini bread French toast. I was fast and cooked grease-free most of the time. Of course when I was looking for my weed-wacker to get out of the weeds, everything was covered in the thick, stick-to-your-skin grease, including me.

But most important, I’d mastered the art of cooking eggs to order.

You see, people are fussy about how their eggs are cooked. I’d learned a lot about people based on how they ordered their eggs.

Then ten years of cooking in that tiny roadside diner flew by. Standing at those griddles took its toll on my body. My back, feet, and shoulders ached with pain. And that became what is known as the end of that phase of my life’s cooking journey.

The next ten years brought a larger, more diverse style of culinary training and cooking, that of big-box food sales, brokerage and wholesale distribution.

But I’ll leave that story for another day.

For now, as I write this story, a savory, spicy chili is simmering on my stovetop. And even though I don’t have access to fresh Florida seafood, and I’m thousands of miles away from either coast, I’m content.

Because I know that sooner or later, I’ll get my hands on some fresh fish, and then I’ll slice, batter, and bake my own version of Mrs. Paul’s breaded fish sticks.

A memoir excerpt, circa 1995

August 9, 2012 | Fresh Fish and Scrambled Love: One Woman's Unexpected Culinary Adventure | Permalink

This passage is an excerpt from my unpublished memoir,  Fresh Fish and Scrambled Love: One Woman’s Unexpected Culinary Adventure

The Wooden Spoon Restaurant Marathon, Florida @ 1995

I’d held onto the steel hood system as if my life depended on it. I’d used that damn hood system for support as I’d cooked over two flat-top griddles, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. I’d depended on it for far too long. I knew the day would come when it would be the last time I’d hold onto that hood system.

I just didn’t know when.

***

My lower back felt as if a cement block took up residence and wasn’t going anywhere soon. Sweat combined with fried grease and made me feel as though I’d bought a cheap hair conditioning treatment and forgot to rinse it out. Yet I was far, far away from a salon or spa of any sort.

Noise surrounded me and came at me like waves crashing on the beach. Loud, strong and nonstop. I’d felt as though I was stuck in a water bubble and was looking for a way up to the surface. For a life. Any life, other than the one I’d currently had as a short-order cook.

I was vaguely aware of the tables of hungry customers, and the line of sleepy tourists who’d stood in a line around the outside of the building, waiting to get in. All for bacon and eggs, pancakes and French toast, burgers and fries. Lisa and Vicki, my servers, ran like gazelles, as they’d carried platters of biscuits and gravy and oversized omelet’s, and then back to the make-shift cash drawer, normally smiling and happy.

But that day, they wore stressed-out smiles, and begged me to poach eggs, fry bacon, flip banana pancakes. Do something. Anything, other than what I’d been doing for the last what, five minutes? I’d lost my sense of time. I’d stood still, zoned-out. I’d stared at the steady stream of food tickets, piling up on the line.

This was one day I didn’t see dollar signs on those tickets, but rather, I saw white dots floating in front of my eyes. I’d felt pain as raw as the twenty-pound slab of bacon in my mise en place to my left. I had a strong desire to sit down and cry.

I’d just been electrocuted.

***

I’d been in the weeds for a good seven hours when I’d noticed out of the corner of my eye, just about the same time the acrid smoke hit my nostrils, and probably about the same time one of my customers at the bar behind me shouted, “The toast is burning!” I’d hit the lever on the four-slice toaster with my steel spatula, while I’d held firmly onto the steel hood system over my head. Just like I had for the umpteenth time.

I’d stopped the billowing black smoke from incinerating another batch of rye bread, but waves of electricity jolted me for what seemed like minutes. The connection of pure, free, clean electricity cursed through my hands, arms, chest, and neck until I’d released my hand from that damn hood system. Still clenching the long-handled spatula, I’d slammed it onto the service bell that sat in the pass-through window. The entire action took about five seconds.

Alan, my kitchen cook’s six-foot four-inch frame filled the tiny window. His eyes widened, and then he’d disappeared. Seconds later he was at my side, and with total authority, took control of the mayhem at the griddles.

I’d floated back to the kitchen in my post-electrocuted state, found the empty five-gallon plastic pickled barrel used for numerous kitchen tasks. I’d flipped it over and kicked it into the wall next to a table. I’d slide down onto my ass for a good laugh, but only tears fell onto my cheeks and rolled down the slick surface of my face and onto my grease-splatter apron.

An untitled recipe circa 1971

August 2, 2012 | Growing up in Pittsburgh, Recipe | Permalink

Summertime was one of my favorite seasons as a kid. Not just for the obvious, there was no school, but because we ate corn on the cob and sliced tomatoes for dinner. It was a refreshing change from the weekly standards of spaghetti and red sauce, chili and meatloaf with mashed potatoes.

What really sticks out about this summertime meal was the sauce that we’d drizzled on the sliced tomatoes. It was a thick, homemade dressing, something that my dad had concocted, years before I was born. I can remember when I was ten or so, I’d watched, as my older sister, Kathleen, prepared it.

This homemade dressing (I don’t think there was as name for it) was made in large quantities. In the large silver bowl that we’d used for everything from mixing meatloaf to boxed cakes, Kathleen would mix a 50-50 ratio of Kraft Catalina and French dressings, then she’d plop a couple of large spoonful’s of Miracle Whip, a few shakes of Worcestershire, shake in a lot of celery salt and then onion powder. Then she’d add a few shakes of Morton’s salt and McCormick’s fine ground black pepper and stir it well with a wooden spoon. She’d then stick her index finger in the dressing, coating her finger halfway down, then plop her orange-colored finger into her mouth, just before the dressing dripped back into the bowl. It took about a tenth of a second for this maneuver. This was to make sure it was okay, or maybe to tease me, because I’d have to wait to taste it at dinner. I’d do the exact taste-test years later when it was my turn to make the dressing. The result was a thick and creamy, tart yet sweet, salty, pale-orange sauce. It was perfect. My mouth watered every time I’d watch her make it and every time we ate it.

Now that I’m mid-life, I still relish summer, corn on the cob and sliced tomato dinners. I don’t make the dressing of my youth, but instead I try to keep things a little on the healthy side.

This year, I joined a CSA, and it’s summertime, which means sweet corn and tomatoes. I get more in that half basket than we can eat, every week.

When I get my fill of boiled corn slathered with butter, and sliced tomatoes drizzled with olive oil, salt and pepper, I freeze some of the corn. I suppose I could can the tomatoes, but I normally don’t have a problem eating the tomatoes.

But I cringed everytime I put that corn in the freezer. It’s never any better than when it’s plucked from the stalk, shucked and cooked.

I created Bi-Colored Corn & Tomato Salsa. It makes the most of both corn and tomatoes, and has become yet another, refreshing change.

Eaten alone, as a side, or paired with wild King Salmon, it’s a perfect recipe for summer corn and tomatoes. However, you could whip up that special, unnamed dressing I mentioned above, slice some tomatoes and grill the corn. Or you could remember your own childhood food memories and see where that takes you. Either way, I hope this story and my easy-to-prepare Bi-Colored Corn and Tomato Salsa recipe stirs something inside of you.

Bi-Color Corn & Tomato Salsa

Yield: about one cup

Ingredients

  • ¾ cup cooked corn, cut from two cobs
  • ½ half of a medium red tomato, or ¼ cup, diced
  • 1 tablespoon red onion slivers
  • 1 teaspoon minced jalapeño pepper
  • 1 teaspoon capers
  • ½ teaspoon lime juice
  • ½ teaspoon toasted coriander seeds, ground finely
  • ~sea salt, to taste
  • ~cracked black pepper, to taste
  • 2 teaspoons extra virgin olive oil

Directions

  • In a medium bowl, add all ingredients except the olive oil. Stir to blend the ingredients evenly. Drizzle olive oil over the vegetables and stir again.
  • Cover and refrigerate until ready to use. Store up to two days.