A LOAF OF BREAD, A JUG OF WINE, AND Y'ALL

My families are a mixture of Italians and Southerners, so family recipes were always pretty interesting. Here's one my grandmother used to make. She lived alone, but she always cooked meals for herself and would sit down with a nice plate to enjoy her food. I loved that about her.


Nona's Telephone Road Relish

1/2 cup finely chopped celery
1/2 cup finely chopped olives
1 pickled green jalapeno pepper, seeded and finely chopped
1 unpeeled piece of garlic
Olive oil
pepper and salt

Combine the first three ingredients in a mixing bowl. Take the piece of garlic, put it on a cutting board and then take a big chef's knife and cover the garlic with the wide, flat side. Give the knife a couple of hard smashes using the heel of your hand (you can cover the knife with a towel if this scares you). Take the peel off the garlic, then toss the garlic into the bowl. Stir well, sprinkle with pepper and salt, and stir again. Transfer the mixture to a jar, like an old pickle jar or mayonnaise jar that has a screw-on lid. If you don't have a jar, a glass bowl will do. Pour olive oil over the mixture until it comes up to the top of the vegetables. Screw the lid on tightly (or cover the bowl with some plastic wrap) and let sit in the refrigerator overnight.

You can serve this relish with hamburgers and sandwiches. I like to add about 1/4 cup of it to a 14-ounce can of tomatoes and simmer it in some of the oil from the relish. This makes a nice sauce for pasta with shrimp or tuna.



My other grandmother was from a once well-to-do Southern family. She was an only child, and I don't know who taught her to cook but it must have been my great grandmother. They both had some wonderful specialties -- my mom still moans over the fact that she never got Mama Hallie's lemon meringue pie recipe. Here's one my grandmother taught me how to make.

VEGETABLE BEEF SOUP

1/3 - 1/2 lb. Beef scraps (steak bones, leftover steak, or two oxtail bones from the grocery store)
1 onion, diced up
2 pieces celery, diced
1 28-ounce can whole tomatoes
1 14-ounce can tomato sauce
1 cup of each:
diced carrots
green beans cut to 1"
whole-kernel corn
green peas
1/4 cup barley
1 14-ounce can cream-style corn
pepper and salt

Put a big soup pot on the stove over medium heat. Add some vegetable oil to the pan, enough to barely coat the bottom. Cut up the steak into little bite-size pieces. Add it to the pot along with any soup bones you're using and let everything brown evenly, stirring frequently. Next, add the chopped onion and celery and cook until it's softened. Then, add the tomatoes and the can of tomato sauce. Fill each of the empty cans up with water and add the water to the pot. Break up the tomatoes with the back of a spoon as you're stirring. Season with pepper and salt, about 1/2 tsp each. Cover the pot and let this simmer for about 30 minutes over low heat.

After 30 minutes, uncover the pot and add the remaining vegetables and the barley. Cook for another 30-45 minutes or until the barley is tender. Last, add the can of cream-style corn and cook until the soup returns to a simmer and is bubbling hot. It should be thick, but not as thick as a stew, so add some extra water to loosen it up if you think it needs it. Remove the soup bones and serve.

THE BRATS FROM SHEBOYGAN

There are two guys in my band from Sheboygan, Wisconsin -- let's call them the Two Guys From Sheboygan. After many missed invitations, I finally got myself over to Cory's for a real Sheboygan bratwurst cookout, complete with his parents visiting from Sheboygan.

Now, I live for stuff like this. Little ol' foods from places that specialize in those little ol' foods. Cory's parents brought the sausages, hard rolls, and even some 4-year aged white cheddar, fresh from 'Sconnieland, and you can bet I was taking copious notes. This is the kind of food you can't get just anywhere, so when you do get it, it's glorious.

You think you know what bratwurst tastes like? Not if you buy it at the grocery store. And if you can't get all the way to Munich or the German Alps for the real thing, you'd do well to fly some in from Wisconsin and give your friends a fantastic treat. This bratwurst, cooked outside on a grill, doesn't taste smoky or garlicky or any of those other flavors that tend to make sausage all taste the same. And there's no liver in it, so give that idea up, too. It's just quietly savory, and all the flavors balance together into something you can't really figure out.

And the brats are only half the experience. The other half is the rolls, which although they're called "hard rolls" are anything but. They're as light and soft as a fresh piece of French bread, but more satisfying and chewy. They're not sausage-shaped, either, which is cool.

Sheboygan brats are served on a buttered hard roll with good mustard, ketchup, slivered red onions, and a side of coleslaw. If you're up to it, put two sausages on there, but Cory's mom said you can also just slice one sausage longways in half to cover the roll. And they're great left over: Warm them up in a skillet. Butter the roll and heat the halves face-down in the skillet til the butter melts.

Don't wait for football season to try them. Baseball and brats are the ticket. Get yourself to Sheboygan online. Some of the best local factories don't ship their sausages, but the following vendors do, and they're Cory-approved. Johnsonville sausages are widely available, but according to him they're not quite as good.

Miesfeld's
Sheboygan Bratwurst Co
Fresh Sheboygan Hard Rolls
Johnston's Bakery
Bake Your Own Hard Rolls

And how 'bout some local brew?
Leinenkugel
Huber

EATING LIKE CRAZY

Look, I'm sort of tired of the Food Conundrum. Bored with it, really. For most of my lifetime Americans have been whipped around on issues of Bad Foods, calorie counting and nutrient management. Meanwhile, the rest of the well-fed world kicks off their shoes and hunkers down with the same delectable cuisine their people have been enjoying for millennia without rotting their guts out or going diabetic by age 10.

Food is a problem, but I don't think it's THE problem. I think Americans are just vulnerable. We have a culture that offers and encourages innovation to great effect, but the downside is that we're constantly re-inventing and questioning basic life processes like what to eat for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and that oh-so-American anomaly, the Snack. (I don't think any other country could feed the third world on the Pepperidge Farm Goldfish stuck to its carpets and car seats.) Our economy is driven by our willingness to doubt ourselves, try new things and gratify instantly, but it's had an unfortunate effect on our appetites -- and its gotten our goat in ways we didn't see coming.

I took my mom out to lunch yesterday and ordered a BLT. They brought me a gorgeous, cinematic plate, toasted artisan sourdough with that ruffly green leaf lettuce peeking out from piles of perfectly charred bacon. The sandwich wasn't huge by New York deli standards, but it was easily two full-size sandwiches disguised as one. I could have eaten one of the halves and been more than satisfied. But what did I do? I ate the other one, too, most of it anyway, unable to leave the gorgeous, cinematic food on the plate to go to waste or cart it off in styrofoam to ossify before I could eat it later.

See what I mean? And I don't blame the restaurants. That'd be like blaming Judas Priest for those teen suicides. Restaurant food is entertainment, and good restaurant food is art -- so in some way it has to be larger than life. I picked up a restaurant trade magazine once and flipped through it to find concepts like "optimal plate coverage". A bit of research into this is good for chowhounds -- it helps to know where both your food and its preparers are coming from.

In educating ourselves about how to eat well, it'd be great if we could just stop questioning the basics and get on with the enjoyment of eating, with our appetites and impulses strapped down safely in the back seat. To do this requires questioning not what we eat, but our own habits and impulses, and the rationality of our behaviors. Eating everything on my plate when my plate is too full is, well, crazy. I admit it. And it makes my body crazy, too. Eating only raw foods or fat-free foods or macrobiotic foods or vegan foods....Draw your own conclusions about these forms of exclusion, but to me when the rest of the race is still thriving, after thousands of years, on the same endless interpretations of nature -- healthy balance, artful variety and moderation -- I'd rather be hedonistically omnivorous right along with them. They seem to know what they're doing.

I read somewhere that the rational brain is always contending with the emotional brain for dominance -- and because the emotional brain is bigger and stronger, it can usually bully its way to the top. You have to be smarter and more patient to outfox your irrational brain, especially when it comes to hunger -- which, along with the other appetitives like, um...sex...can absolutely give you a run for your money. This is one reality the food industry is way ahead of the rest of us on. Protect yourself. Get smart. Stick it out. It'll be worth it.

And I've got some ideas...