Back to the grind

Bilbo Baggins’ Road goes ever on and on, but mine came to a halt on Sunday. Monday I spent in the usual post-expedition fog, and today it was time to get back to business.

Herself lacks my interest in the culinary arts, so it’s a given that when I come home from a road trip there will be exactly jack-shit in the house to eat. After we burned through the steak, spuds and salad it quickly became apparent that someone would have to replenish the pantry, and as usual that someone was me.

The Turk' catches some rays in the backyard.

So today, I hit the grocery — and man, did it ever hit back. Two hundred smacks down Whole Paycheck’s organic rathole for tasty bits of this and that. I should just sign over my Velo checks to these dudes and be done with it.

The good news is that the week’s menu will include fusilli draped with a spicy all’arrabbiata sauce full of red pepper flakes, capers and black olives; kung pao chicken with white rice; sausage and cheese enchiladas in red sauce with Mexican rice; chicken quesadillas; and chicken enchiladas in green sauce with a side of roasted potatoes in red chile. Can you tell I’ve been to Santa Fe recently? Yeah, me too.

Meanwhile, the Turk’ has been enjoying plenty of outside time since my return. Getting him in a harness is like sticking a hand in a running blender, and since he’s mostly my cat he’s mostly my problem.

No worries. I’ve been getting my furry brother hooked up so he can live the feline dream in the backyard, hunting grasshoppers and enjoying the last few days of summertime in Bibleburg.

Getaways, groceries and grifters

There’s nothing like that first day after the Tour folds its big yellow tent and life gets back to normal.

I got out early for a two-hour ride northeast on Highway 24 and enjoyed a tailwind to Falcon. The headwind on the homebound leg wasn’t outlandish, and I considered stretching the outing to three hours before remembering that there was nothing to eat in Chez Dog, someone having been a little lackadaisical about grocery-shopping lately.

So I rolled home, made a list and headed north to Whole Paycheck, pissing away a car payment on bits of this and that to keep flesh on the bones. Last night’s “dinner” involved a tin of smoked oysters, cheddar, crackers and a salad, and that’s just not enough to keep a renowned cycling journalist at the top of his game.

Now it’s raining for a second consecutive day, which is excellent. It’s been hotter than the high-flange hubs of Hell around here lately, and this takes the edge off, as does a little effervescent Austrian rosé.

Alas, we may all be reduced to drinking feeble American lager out of red-white-and-blue cans if the “mine is bigger than yours” contest ends badly in DeeCee, as seems increasingly likely.

These overfed, undereducated pustules afflicting the body politic should be compelled at gunpoint to hold their slapfests in small-town bars and beaneries, in the company of the simple folks these rich fucks profess to care about. Maybe after a few vicious beatings administered by work-hardened knuckles they’d realize their cushy gigs are about people, not politics.

• Late update: Kevin Drum sure wasn’t impressed by either Obama or Punkinhead tonight. I listened to the first few minutes of Obama’s bit while cooking dinner and I wasn’t exactly hearing a clarion call to arms. As for Punkinhead, I unplugged his ass before he even had a chance to start lying. My patience has its limits.

An evening on the deck

It’s 11 p.m. and I’m relaxing with a glass of rosé after two days of medium-heavy cookery and other minor labors in honor of a couple of friends and neighbors who are shuffling off to another area code.

Cuidado señores ... hot plate! The leftovers are good, too.

I started yesterday, roasting some Whole Foods poblanos and Anaheims on the gas grill, then whipped up a basic posole (a recipe so old I can’t remember where I found it) alongside a pot of pintos with chipotle (from The Santa Fe School of Cooking Cookbook). Herself, meanwhile, got busy on a killer lemon-vanilla pudding, saving the final touches for just before mealtime.

Today I hosed down the back deck and zip-tied down the fabric pergola cover — a good thing, too, as Bibleburg tied a record high of 91 degrees — and broke out the patio table’s umbrella for backup. Then I made a little pico de gallo salsa, roasted potatoes with Chimayo red chile, and a green chile sauce (all three from the Santa Fe folks). Poached a pound of chicken, shredded it, made enchiladas with blue corn tortillas, some Monterey Jack and that pot of green chile, and hey presto! Dinnertime.

There was wine, of course, and also beer. The 2010 Thierry Delaunay Touraine from the Loire Valley seemed a bit thin, so I switched to a 2010 Le Cengle Côtes de Provence, which has a beautiful copper color and a tart flavor that, oddly, reminds me of Jolly Rancher watermelon candies, an item I was addicted to as a much younger dog.

The beers were two seasonal items from Deschutes Brewery — Red Chair NWPA, which is hard to find right now, and Twilight Summer Ale, which should be around until September. I should have Vespa’d on down to Bristol Brewing for a jug of their Red Rocket Pale Ale, but tomorrow is another day, eh? As it is I barely had time to grab a shower before the guests of honor arrived.

We ate and drank and shot the shit until long after sundown, and now I and my wine are surfing Al Gore’s Innertubes in search of evil tidings, which are regrettably easy to find, and enjoying a cooling breeze from somewhere.

Or we were. A small yet authoritative voice in another room has chimed the hour in a style that Big Ben would envy. See you tomorrow.

Kung pao, chingado

OK, time for another cooking show here on the Dog Channel. Remember the NPR kung pao chicken recipe I linked to a while back? Well, I’ve reprised it a few times since, ramping up the chile content each time and changing the protein from chicken to beef to pork.

Today Herself and I are both suffering from various ailments — allergies, injuries, you name it — and so I went for the healing pork and 14 chiles plus an overflowing teaspoon of Sichuan peppercorns. Hijo, madre, puto, cabron … my head is still sweating. And I think I just grew a third testicle. It was that powerful.

But there’s not a picture, because we were both so beat down and hungry that we just dove right in, and I ate all the leftovers for seconds. Sorry ’bout that. Stir fry up a batch yourself and you’ll forgive me for my piggishness.

Thou art mortal

Chicken quesadillas and calabacitas.

Damn, this has been a fun week. First I make drunkard tartare out of my right leg in a trail tumble, and now I’ve managed to throw my back out again.

Hitting the deck on Tuesday started the ball rolling. Favoring the bum leg gave it a nudge. And the kicker was probably spending too much time crouched over the cutting board, assembling last night’s New Mexican feast, chicken quesadillas and calabacitas.

These are easy dishes, to be sure — the quesadillas are merely poached and shredded chicken, seeded and sliced jalapeños and grated Monterey jack layered between two flour tortillas and baked for 12 minutes at 350 — but some assembly is required.

Long story short, this morning I bend down to see if Turkish is lurking under Herself’s car and pop! Out goes the back, which I first injured in college while delivering heavy appliances for beer money. Every couple of years it likes to slash the tires on my chariot and hiss, “Thou art mortal!”

Still, things could be worse. A couple of friends are on Cape Cod, playing hide-and-seek with Hurricane Earl. Or I could be one of the poor chumps blown off the latest offshore oil platform to explode.

So, yeah. I’ve got that going for me. That, and the drugs, and the ice pack. …

Awright awready

It's not music that soothes the savage breast, it's pasta and vino.

Maybe it wasn’t such a horrible speech after all. I was cranky (having just shredded my right leg in a boneheaded trail mishap) and hungry (Herself was working late so I didn’t have dinner on the table pre-speech). After getting a meal and a few drams of Spanish vino into my system, I felt more kindly toward the prez and his little chitty-chat with the nation.

The recipe, pasta with salsa crudo and green beans, is from Martha Rose Shulman. Run it past the cranky-pants in your family and see if it doesn’t work wonders. I made mine with homegrown Portuguese beans and tomatoes from the gardens of two generous friends.

This is not to say, mind you, that I comprehend Obama’s fetish of continually extending olive branches to the Repugs only to watch them snatch them from his hand, toss them to the floor and piss on them.

Nor am I satisfied by his fondness for glittering generalities (“Our troops are the steel in our ship of state. And though our nation may be traveling through rough waters, they give us confidence that our course is true, and that beyond the predawn darkness, better days lie ahead.”).

And while I’m delighted to hear he wants to at least cut back on croaking our fellow Americans abroad and get cranking on the domestic economy instead, I’m still waiting to hear any details of how he proposes “to shore up the foundation of our own prosperity.” How many of us wonder whether the next paycheck we get will be the last? Just ’cause you’re paranoid, etc., et al., and so on and so forth.

And then there are the midterms. The more I watch the Obama “machine” in operation, the more I’m convinced these guys think they can take a page from the Repug playbook and blow off a sizable chunk of their supporters without consequences at the ballot box. The Repugs punk the Bible-thumpers every election year, and the Donks think they can do likewise to the lefty-loonies.

It’s a dangerous game. Sure, moving center-right to woo the independents and the handful of Repugs who aren’t yet completely unhinged may pick up a couple of loose votes. And it’s true that like the Bible-thumpers, lefty-loonies are not likely to hold their noses and switch their allegiance to the other side.

But a bunch of us, disillusioned once again, might just stay home on Election Day. And that’s really bad news, because the GOP’s whackjob base always turns out with a will, like a bunch of frat boys gleefully piling out of a van to beat up a longhair, nigra or queer.

Shit, now I’m cranky again, and I don’t feel like cooking. Happily, I still have some wine.

• Literary addendum: I almost forgot — one of the reasons I started writing this post was a recollection of Sinclair Lewis’ “It Can’t Happen Here.” Red Sinclair certainly thought it could, and anyone who read the book will recognize many of its characters hamming it up on today’s stage.

Keep it simple, stupid

Spice is nice.

It’s gonna be a long, fat winter if I’m already searching out new recipes in the first week of August. Step away from the skillet, lard-ass, drop the spatula, and keep your hands where I can see ’em.

Yesterday I test-drove a Kung Pao chicken recipe from NPR and it turned out pretty damn’ good for a first attempt, though stir-frying on a glass-top electric stove is far from ideal. Plus it gave me a chance to go shopping for stuff I don’t ordinarily have on hand, like Sichuan chiles, Sichuan peppercorns, rice wine, Chinkiang vinegar and what have you.

You might think a guy would have a tough time finding anything other than wafers and wine in Bibleburg. But we have a bunch of military types here, many of them wed to Asians, and thus there is no shortage of Asian grocery stores — among them the excellent Asian Pacific Market, housed in what once was the old Ampex headquarters off Highway 24. The chiles and peppercorns I got downtown at Savory Spice Shop, which is a place I’d like to run through someday with a wheelbarrow and someone else’s credit card.

Like many stir-fries, Kung Pao chicken is a simple dish, and I appreciate simplicity. It’s not always fun to spend hours in the kitchen for 15 minutes of eating. So here’s another easy one, from Martha Rose Shulman at The New York Times — a spinach omelet with Parmesan that she calls “the perfect one-dish meal.”

Satiated sirens

Herself, Mary and Kelli are smiling because they're full of posole and rosé.

We had an old pal from Weirdcliffe pop in for a two-day visit beginning Thursday, and she brought her mom along, so I was required to cook. They’re all smiling in the picture at right, so I must not have poisoned anyone this time around.

The dinner menu was, of course, New Mexican — chicken quesadillas with salsa fresca and jalapeño-stuffed olives on Thursday, and posole with salsa verde on Friday. I was going to whip up some guacamole, too, but spaced it out, which means we can have that tonight with the leftovers.

Wines came from Spain, Portugal and France, including a delicious 2008 Château Miraval Côtes de Provence rosé called “Pink Floyd” that Kelli’s mom, Mary, bought for us. The 2009 iteration placed fourth in a top-10 ranking in a recent Wines of the Times piece by Eric Asimov.

Kelli had requested the posole, which I used to make all the time when we all still lived in Weirdcliffe, so I reprised my old recipe instead of the one I’ve been using from The Santa Fe School of Cooking Cookbook. Posole v1.0 uses plain water instead of chicken stock, canned white hominy and a tad less garlic, plus I don’t sauté the onions and garlic — I just chuck ’em into the pot with all the other ingredients.

It’s a lazy man’s posole, but Mary liked it enough to ask for the recipe. If you’d like it, too, here it is:

Lazy Man’s Posole

1 29-ounce can of white hominy

1.5 pounds lean pork, diced

2-4 dried New Mexican red chile pods

2 cups chopped onion

3 cloves garlic

2 tsp. Mexican oregano

1 tsp. freshly ground cumin seed

6 cups water

Salt to taste

Remove the stems and seeds from the chile pods and chop with the onions in a food processor. Mince the garlic. Throw the whole shootin’ match into a pot, bring to a boil and then simmer for 2-3 hours until the pork is tender. Add water as necessary. Serve with warm flour tortillas and small bowls of various garnishes — I usually chop up a few jalapeños, radishes and scallions for folks to add to the posole as they please. Coarsely chopped cilantro is nice, too.

This serves about six light eaters or three to four bicycle types, so I usually double up on it to be assured of leftovers.

Soup of the evening, beautiful soup

It's not as cold as it looks. It's colder.

Feh. Again with the cold and snow. What is this, February in Colorado?

This is soup weather, for sure, and we’ve been through quite a few of my favorite recipes lately, among them a posole from The Santa Fe School of Cooking Cookbook and a Spanish vegetable soup from Martha Rose Shulman, who runs the “Recipes for Health” shop over at The New York Times. We’ve had her vegetable soup for dinner the past two nights and it’s definitely a keeper. A guy could beef it up some with the addition of dead-animal parts, maybe some moderately spicy sausage links sliced into half-inch rounds and sauteéd in olive oil, but it’s fine as is.

Here’s another posole from the Santa Fe folks. I haven’t tried this one before, but it’s early yet and all I need is the chicken thighs. Looks like a visit to the Whole Paycheck is in order. Oboy, my favorite, an icy slide to the corner of Collision and Contusion so I can transfer a century note from my pocket to John Mackey’s.

Meanwhile, I’m trying to decide whether I should go for a mountain bike ride — I still have a few fingers yet to dislocate — or choose the better part of valor and ride the trainer. Maybe I’ll split the difference and go for a run.

Tasty snacks from a can … and a tube?

Uh-oh, SpaghettiOs ... your daddy-o is gone-o.

The Mud Stud is in mourning this morning. It seems that Donald E. Goerke, “the Daddy-O of SpaghettiOs,” has gone to that Great Executive Washroom in the Sky. He was 83.

Goerke was the Campbell Soup exec behind the creation of the Stud’s favorite food in the mid-1960s. It apparently took some doing, coming up with the right recipe for spaghetti, tomato and cheese in a can,  but Goerke’s brainchild was a hit with some other babies, those of the boomer variety.

And SpaghettiOs wasn’t his only offspring. Altogether, Goerke was credited with helping to introduce more than 100 products that earned more than $500 million in sales for the company. Uh-oh, SpaghettiOs, indeed.

Speaking of delicious treats, the hard-hitting, hotshot journos at Livestrong have concocted a recipe for an all-natural snack that you can whip up right at home. Low in fat, high in protein — go ahead, Livestrongers, give yourselves a hand. And perhaps a Kleenex.