New Thing #4: And nobody called 911

To fully appreciate Monday’s New Thing, you must understand my history with 911 emergency dispatch.

I’ve called 911 three times. Always for the fire department. Most recently was when the house next door was burning down in 2007.

Before that was in 2006, when the vice mayor of Saginaw ordered her handyman to blow up her Mercedes in the backyard so she could collect the insurance. My window overlooked the scene. The ground shook when the gas tank caught fire. There was a great ball of fire, like in the movies.

My first 911 call was in high school, when I tried to make grilled cheese sandwiches. I didn’t butter the bread on my first try, so it charred to the pan. I tried again with butter, but the bread still stuck to the black patches. I wondered, was this a job for canola oil? I filled the pan about an inch deep and tossed in the sandwich.

It turned black in seconds and somehow activated the grease to a rolling boil that splashed onto the stove.

OK. I’d tried everything. Time to give up and rinse the pan.

With cold water.

POW!

Hot oil splattered onto my arms and continued blasting the sink area as I fled the kitchen and grabbed the phone.

“911 Emergency Dispatch. What is your emergency?”

It is here I must admit that the blackened cheese sandwich was not the first thing I’d ever deep-fried. There was doughnut day in 7th grade home-ec, but I ended up in the nurse’s office almost immediately for burn treatment and missed the no-cold-water discussion. Which probably never happened anyway, as this was the home-ec class where kids set fire to the centerpieces during the end-of-term Tea Party.

Anyway.

It was with apprehension that I approached the samosas I had so femininely pieced together this weekend. But I rolled up my sleeves, poured that half-gallon of oil into the wok, and voila!

For the first time, I deep-fried my own food without a single call to the fire department.

My home will forever smell like a Little League concession stand, and the wok is now encrusted with a rim of booger-looking cement. But the samosas tasted like … samosas!

This will be my last post on food for awhile. I still need to be able to wear clothes.

New thing #3: Taste the stick first

On a Sunday afternoon, just a few yards apart, two tragic heroes collapsed in simultaneous acts of hubris.

Here are their stories.

Story 1: Your friend is puking on my car

Shaggy was already an Elevener.

It wasn’t clear, through the sputtering, when he first accepted the challenge to eat 11 of the Wing Coop’s super-spicy “Sauce Eleven” chicken wings in 11 minutes without taking a drink. Those who succeed get their pictures on the wall.

But there is limited space on the bulletin board, and Shaggy’s place of honor had since been usurped by other Eleveners, like this one:

So Shaggy was back to reclaim his glory.

He was on wing No. 4 when we crossed paths. His friend was sitting across from him to provide moral support.

“It’s just brutal,” the friend told me. “I tried it once, but I only got through nine. Then I was sick for like a day.”

We fell silent and allowed Shaggy to focus.

On wing No. 7, Shaggy called it quits.

“I’m done, man. I’m done,” he said. Moments later, when the audience’s attention had shifted to the U.S.-Canada hockey game on TV, some red goo burst out of his mouth. His friend started to clean him and turned to ask for some water, but Shaggy shushed him. No true hero wants a fuss during his hour of defeat.

But it was hard for people not to notice when Shaggy covered his face and ran to the parking lot. Patrons peered out the front window.

“What’s he doing?”

“Is he puking?”

“Probably,” the friend said, returning to his own basket of lesser wings. “It’s brutal. But he’ll be OK. He’s done it before.”

One girl kept watching.

“Dude, your friend is puking on my car.”

The friend shook his head.

“It’s just brutal, man.”

Story 2: I mean, it’s just retarded.

Moments earlier …

Said Guy and I went skiing Sunday for the first time since I hurt my back. It kind of sucked, so we bailed early and hit the Wing Coop for lunch. We usually disagree on sauces, Said Guy having a high capsicum tolerance. But I needed a New Thing for the day.

“You want to try the Eleven sauce?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said breezily.

When I placed the order, the cashier looked me up and down.

“Do you want to test the Eleven before you buy it?”

I hemmed and hawed, not wanting to be talked out of my New Thing. The cashier shook his head.

“I’d definitely try it first,” he said. “I mean –” he leaned forward and lowered his voice “it’s just retarded, it’s so hot.”

He brought out a toothpick dipped in sauce. I put it on the back of my tongue.

No one will ever know what percent of my esophageal lining evaporated on contact and what percent melted and dripped into my stomach.

I turned to Said Guy with weepy eyes and choked:

“Can just tasting the stick be my New Thing?”

At least I stopped crying for the commemorative picture.

New Thing #2: But Donna Reed was so hot.

Despite voluminous evidence that I have no place in a kitchen, I periodically go Donna Reed crazy and try to cook food.

This usually means Indian cuisine. Admittedly, not very Donna Reed. But somehow a 26-item ingredient list manages to scream “Delicious!” while muffling “You’ll be washing dishes for the next 30 hours.” Kind of like a 1950s sitcom.

So on Friday, my free day, I attempted a banquet of samosas with cilantro chutney, paneer with peas and a Kashmiri pistachio chicken stew. I wrote out a schedule to have it all done by the time Said Guy walked through the door. My 2010 version of Donna Reed.

It took about two hours to figure out how to puree cilantro. Another two hours dry-roasting and grinding spices. Another three hours peeling, chopping, dicing and mincing stuff. Another hour shelling pistachios with my now-finely-minced thumb.

At that point, I decided to just get the chicken done in time for dinner. It was surprising to me that a recipe for four people called for 3.5 lbs of chicken. But there it was: “3.5 lb. chicken or chicken pieces.”

I dirtied every pan in our cupboard trying to find one big enough to cook that much chicken. It was still a pink pile of blobbies when Said Guy got home from work to find the kitchen completely trashed, his little lady drenched in tears and salmonella, and nothing for supper.

He told me the 3.5-pound measurement includes bones, so I had basically doubled the recipe. He added ingredients to bring everything to proportion while I washed dishes.

About two hours later, he had rescued the chicken. A little bland, he conceded, but edible.

That’s when I decided to add some cumin.

I didn’t know the sprinkle cap was removable when I opened the canister and gave it a shake.

About 15 tablespoons of cumin dumped onto the salvaged Kashmir chicken.

Said Guy didn’t have much to say for the rest of the night.

But I awoke Saturday with the will to redeem myself. I finished the samosa filling the day before and just had to make the pastry dough for the wrappers. It looked simple enough: flour, salt, oil, water. Roll flat, cut into circles.

And here’s how Friday’s folly turned into Saturday’s success: I used my rolling pin for the first time.

The samosas are fine and ready to be cooked. The kitchen remains in one piece. Said Guy got home in time to actually see me use a rolling pin.

So I’ll never be Donna Reed.  I can still learn to roll out some pastry dough at an angle strategic to viewer enjoyment.

That has to be worth something.

I owe my week to little old Croatian ladies and the jazz cats of Norway

Some years ago, before the Internet, my father embarked on a quest for Croatian dessert bread.

He had tasted it at a food fair and for some reason could not get the recipe from the vendor. So he started contacting Croatians all over the place, trying to find the name of the bread and the recipe. I think he even spoke to someone in the kitchen of the Croatian embassy. He finally was directed to some little old lady in Iowa, who gave him the recipe.

It was in the spirit of Povitica that I launched my own search for Monica Pilar and the Undecided Jazzband.

About a decade ago, I found their CD in a little music shop in China. It features a Chilean singer and a Norwegian combo on some old jazz standards plus a few Latin songs. The singer, Monica Pilar, was especially amazing. She goes chickee rra-rra crazy on “Mas Que Nada,” does the sexiest “Besame Mucho” you ever heard, and now I can only sing “Route 66″ with an adorable Spanish accent.

As would never happen to something I didn’t actually cherish, the CD got lost in my move to Utah.

For two and a half years I’ve been looking for another copy. It is not anywhere online. Neither the band nor the singer has a Web site, it’s not on iTunes or Amazon, and most of the references I could find were on the Myspace pages of scattered fans. I emailed a few, and they all said they got their CDs at shady bootleg stands outside the United States. Kinda like me.

I did see a Web site for a jazz club in southeast Norway, where the Undecided Jazzband was supposed to play. So I emailed the club manager and asked for contact info for the band.

A few days later, I got an email from the trumpet player! He said he was surprised I’d heard of the CD, because they made it as a demo in 2000 to get gigs and just sold whatever copies they had. He did have a couple of extras at his home, though, and he could send one to me as a present from the band.

I got it Sunday.

Totally made my week.

Here are a couple of clips:

Besame mucho

Mas Que Nada

Dandy Dude

My clementines have a little mascot. His name is Dandy Dude. There is a cartoon of him on the label. He rides a skateboard and wears a hat that says “Dandy Dude.”

The label also carries some discussion of a Mandy Dude. Join “Dandy and Mandy Dude,” it says. I thought there was no Mandy Dude pictured, but she’s on the back. She plays soccer and has hair.

It was a relief, because I had thought the clementine people only went halfway. But they didn’t. In fact, the label promises the clementines will “exceed your expectations for a satisfying and healthy snacking experience.” They went all out.

And I wondered if there is a point where your food product really needs its own mascot. Like, there’s no way the clementine people think Dandy Dude is as big as the Quick chocolate milk bunny. Not even as big as Frangelico. Whose idea was it to put a mascot on clementines? A mascot couple, no less. Is it a weakness when your mascot is the food it represents? Dandy Dude is an orange. An orange with a skateboard. How many people worked on this campaign? Did they outsource that to professional marketers? “Snacking experience” kind of makes me think so. I’d be a more loyal Dandy Clementines customer if I thought Dandy Dude was the invention of the farmer’s kid’s stoner friends. How many other food producers have little-known mascots? Were they all made by professional marketers or were some of them made by stoner kids?

These are the things that fill a person’s head after 6 weeks of writer’s block.