TheSnackHound

I used to love getting the tableside “Caesar Salad” making service.   At some upscale restaurants, usually Bananas Foster is another dish that is made tableside.    You might not expect someone to come to your table and make drinks, however.

When we were kids, there were occasions that much of the whole family would go out to a restaurant.  It may be after a funeral, on the way home from the fair, or whatever the case may be.   Somehow, the parents allowed myself and a few of my cousins to sit at a table together against their better judgement.   We were not bad children (so we say).  We didn’t run around.  We were the kids who were more likely to be “a little too quiet.”   Inevitably, though, there would be culinary creations emanating from our table.  Yes, even at a Big Boy’s restaurant there was enough to work with.  All of those tantalizing caddies of additives and jellies awaited us.

My brother always ordered a glass of water with lemon, and then would confiscate the lemons from everyone else, not proud to ask at the “grown up” tables as well.  He would take the sugar packets lined in their little caddy, too.   With sugar granuals liberally littering the table, he squeezed and mixed his own lemonade.   Usually, it took half a glass of tasting to get the ratio of sugar, water, and squeezed lemon wedges just right.  He would then declare his creation a masterpiece and pedal his wares to the several tables our extended family took up.

Oddly enough, he got few special orders.

Here is how hand squeezed lemonade is supposed to go:

1 cup sugar (white.  No fancy schmancy stuff or your lemonade is going to be awfully crunchy)
6 lemons
6 cups of water
6 cups cold water

Squeeze the lemons, pour the juice in a pitcher, add the sugar, and stir in 6 cups of cold water.   If you really rather prefer your water temperature not be dictated to you, and you like warmed over lemonage, go for an alternative temperature.   If you think that is not enough sugar, just go to town, but it will surely be to your taste and not mine.

Actually, since the ratio is 6 to 1 seems to be the golden mean of lemonade,  maybe my brother was actually not so far off. If he combined all the lemon slices and it added up to one whole lemon, I could imagine he could dump enough of those sugar packets to make approximately 1/6 of a cup of sugar.

On the way home, we crashed in the car due to not only the ratio but the sheer volume of sugar that was consumed through a straw througout the evening, even though our breath and hands and sleeves smelled as refreshing as lemon scented Pledge. Our parents didn’t need car air fresheners. When you are doing this level of experimenting, you drink your mistakes.

My dad and a friend of his always used to joke that they were going to retire and open up a Dairy Queen.  They thought it was the best business because you would be open just after Easter to before Halloween and you would have the other months off to kick back.   I don’t think it was really about business model, but more so that they both really liked ice cream.  My father is not a heavy nor particularly indulgent man, but an outing usually doesn’t end without an ice cream.   I was always Miss Boring Vanilla until I later discovered Peppermint Stick and Cookies N Cream.   Until then, I was a Vanilla girl probably for fifteen years running.

When I was in grade school, Charlie’s Shake Shop in Mukwonago, Wisconsin, was pretty legendary.   Charlie was actually named for a Charlene.  They had booths as well as the expected little tables and “ice cream shoppe chairs.”  They served every flavor of ice cream someone in second grade could have ever dreamed up, scratch n sniff stickers, and candy sticks.  In the back hall, there were a few arcade games.  I remember Pac man and Joust, and a pin ball machine.  I remember the jukebox, and the times we used to try to trick our siblings into smelling the old shoe or skunk scratch n sniff stickers.

Every year, the student who won the Listening Competition got to go their with the music teacher, where they were treated to the ultimate situation.  What was the Listening Competition?   We prepared for it all year.   We were heavily versed in music appreciation from the standard classical pieces, show tunes, to orchestra pops.   We were played a very short, short snippet of the record and had to identify it the quickest.  But the needle could go anywhere in the record.  Kind of like “Name that Tune” without Kathie Lee.  In otherwords, if you are the type of person to only remember snippets of bad 70s ballads because you have seen too many Time Life music commercials, we had the classical version in our heads.

There was a dish that was seldom ordered, but was heavily entrenched in the Clarendon Avenue Elementary School lore.  It was literally a bucket that contained a scoop of every single flavor Charlie’s Shake Shop served (and it could be plain or have any toppings you wanted).    The winner would get to go to Charlie’s and actually order anything they wanted on the menu, but that is what traditionally was ordered just because you could. No one ever finished it, unless they were lying.   You see, the selection put Baskin Robbins to shame.  If you were thinking about just 31 flavors, that would be the appetizer.  You were just starting to warm up at that point. They happily wrapped it up “to go” if you could make it back to your freezer in time.   In a small town, nobody lived to far, so one could actually make it.

Today, no one would dare serve something like that.  It would just be a major health issue waiting to happen, but you sure wouldn’t die of a calcium deficiency!    It could make any person lactose intolerant for life in twenty minutes.

A few years later, we moved away, and Charlie’s closed and became a bike shop.  Or did it used to be a bike shop before Charlie’s?  I can’t remember.   But the fact remains, is that Charlie’s became history, for a reason we don’t know as it always seemed busy.     Back then, which was not that long ago (the 80s), it was the only ice cream place at the time in town in a “one grocery store/one restaurant/one pharmacy” town.    Today, there are over 25 restaurants there.  I guess we would have been considered like “pioneers” compared to what it is today, except we wore jelly shoes and carried trapper keepers instead of carrying muskets.

Now, I am sure I will hear from someone else who remembers Charlie’s, as I found zero reference to it on the internet.  Well, now something about it is on the internet.

Yesterday, my husband and I were kidnapped and taken to a Sunday Brunch at the Hilton.  I am unable to disclose which Hilton property in the United States we were taken to, in order to protect the identities of those innocent bystanders who work there.  In a future post, I promise to thoroughly review the actual hotel restaurant, which deserves to be seperated from the event as much as possible.

If you can guess which particular location it was, then wow me and I might just give you a special gold star of that you can brag about on your report card.   Maybe you will shock me so much, that I will give you other special prizes.  Who knows. Since this is a kidnapping story, detectives, private investigators and crime psychics are not excluded from participation.

Just as we were about to walk out the door, where our friends were waiting in the driveway to pick us up for church, Aunt-in-Law called, asking us about Sunday Brunch.    Even though technically the brunch could occur at a moment that was after the service was finished, Aunt-in-Law has no concept of Space and Time.    If church usually got out about 11:30, 11:45, and we weren’t going to rush out the door (we would inevitable stay and chitchat with different people and wouldn’t dream of rushing the friends that drove us), a time machine would have still been needed to make a noon brunch.    It took fifteen minutes to get home from church, plus it was another 45 minutes from home to the brunch location.

I almost left out the fact that at 9:30, Aunt-in-Law had not made any motions to walk out the door or probably still had rollers in her hair.  She was also more than 100 miles away from us.

Instead of saying “NO,” my husband said:

“We are going to church. Sorry, we aren’t going to be out until at least 11:30.  You can call us later if you want, but we won’t be able to make something that if it is at twelve.”

Most common sensical people would have taken that as us giving our regrets, but just being polite as heck about a scheduling conflict that we much rather attend.

No, no dear readers, Aunt-in-Law interprets such things as a glimmer of hope.  She is a “figure of speech fundamentalist.”  ”Call me later” does not mean: “You are welcome to phone us later and tell us how it went.”  Rather, it is an appointment or an insistence to be called later.  The secondary meaning is:  Call when you are on your way to pick us up because we technically would be finished with what we are doing by then.

My husband did not think anything of it, and we made our way home from church at our very leisure.  We stopped one place and our friends dropped us off.

We got in the door of the house, and I no sooner took one of my shoes off and was about to kick off the other when the phone rang.  I could sense the disturbance in the force, so I went to where my husband was on the phone.

It was Sister-in-Law screaming:”They are at the corner and will be there any minute so go outside now and you better be ready and we’re driving ahead of them so we can get a table and they won’t wait for you because we are on a time schedule and if we don’t make it there by one o’clock they will give our table away and brunch is only until two and we’re all going.”

“Who is ‘all of us’,” my husband innocently asked.  (I would have said, “Who are THEY?”)

“You, me, mummy, Aunt-in-Law….WHO DO YOU THINK?” SIL barked off the laundry list.  She never thinks the request for a body count indicates that my husband is calculating how many/which vehicles need procurment, but rather takes it as a sign that he doesn’t want to go if someone specific is going.  There would be six of us in all.

“Okay, okay, stop yelling at me!”

I will confess that I was tempted to bail and let my husband go by himself, but since he was still recovering form being in the hospital I didn’t want him to be vulnerable.  Nice that Sister-in-Law wasn’t even involved in the “plans” at first.  They added her on, and, as usual “took over.”

So two seconds later, a horn honks and the OTHER Sister-in-Law is there, and I barely have time to even go to the bathroom, and certainly had no time to change.  The dogs are all discombobulated that we acted like we were “home” and then walked right back out.    By this time it was 12:52 and they had changed their reservations to 1:00 P.M.   We knew by the time we got there the last of the cream cheese would’ve been scraped off the cut glass serving plate and it would’ve been called a day.

Aunt-in-Law decided that it would be “fun” to at least “go and see the restaurant” even if we were there and only had five minutes to eat.   We could just “look” and go somewhere else if they wouldn’t let us eat.   She said this as if we had been invited to see the President’s Private Residence, or were allowed to look through any scrolls never seen by the public that was saved from the library of Alexandria before the Romans and others destroyed it before the Dark Ages.   One would still have gone and seen one of those even if one only had 5-15 minutes.   In fact, you would have something to talk about for the rest of your life.

We had a pleasant enough ride.   Part of it, of course, was an argument about the stupidity of driving 45 minutes to go to something we wouldn’t be able to make, nor did we have to, and then the rest of the conversation was quite pleasant.

My husband had an ephiphany:

“Why don’t we eat somewhere else?”

Yeah!  Let’s do that.  Even Cracker Barrel with the high ceiling that magnifies the voices of screaming children, and the prospect of good desserts but “eh” food sounds like a utopia by this time.

Aunt-in-Law quickly vetoed that, “Sister-In-Law and Mummy will be waiting for us.”

(By the way, she really referred to Sister-In-Law by her given name, but she referred to her sister as “Mummy,” much like my Grandfather would call  my Gramdmother “Grandma,” in front of me and my cousins when many of us were in the 2-5 year old range.    Aunt-in-Law’s two nieces and one nephew in their mid 40s or early 50s – plus me, her niece-in-law in her early 30s were all definitely past the 1-3 year old identity issue age where they don’t understand mom has a first name).

No sooner was it mentioned that we should just go to Olive Garden, no matter if there was little on the menu someone with salt restrictions could have, the phone rang.   Of course it was Sister-in-Law who always seems to know when someone is trying to thwart her.   Sister-in-Law #2 handed Aunt-in-Law the phone seeing who it was because she didn’t want to talk to her.

“We’re IN.  We’re SITTING DOWN.  WHERE ARE YOU?”

“We’re Five minutes away.”

We were more like ten I thought, but I didn’t say anything.

In the meantime, my husband’s customer called and invited us all to a pool party, and because he is not a rude man, invited all who we were with to come too.  Under my breath I said to my husband,”We’ll see,” because I could just imagine what would unfold and wanted to assess whether everyone could handle that (if he could handle them and vice versa). Aunt-in-Law sounded delighted.

We made our way into the restaurant, and the hostess told us that we only had twenty minutes.

If this was Panera, or another similar place, I would have said that twenty minutes was plenty of time to get our food and eat.   Not at a leisurely Sunday brunch.

Since we didn’t see Aunt-in-Law very often, my husband replied, “We can do a lot of damage in twenty minutes, that’s fine,” to avoid any arguments.

So, down we sat.   I got my salad, a plate of entrees and sides, dessert, and another plate.  We looked like gluttons because we tried to get everything we thought we would eat and just pick it up all at once.

Among the dishes I sampled:

Pasta with Clams.   Penne with a creamy clam sauce.  The bits of clam were not just all cartilage!
Chocolate Cake (of course)
Cream Cheese and Lox on Rye (I was thrilled – you just can’t find that around here.). Capers were sprinkled across the Lox. I skipped them.  I just decided I hated capers.
Steamed Veggies – Summer Squash and Green Beans.  Summer squash is a very underrated vegetable.

Mimosa was included, but I was surprised I wasn’t carded.   Oh well, end of an era.  Unless they just were sick of is. Normally, I pass on alcohol, but I like mimosas, the champagne ratio is low and with the present company, I sure needed it.

I was pretty quiet during the meal, especially since we were sort of on a mission to eat enough before they put the food away.   Meanwhile, Mother-in-Law (for more lowdown on her, here’s another article,) who is an insulin dependent diabetic and shouldn’t be drinking excess amounts of orange juice and liquor got skunk drink.  There is not a lot of alcohol in a mimosa, but too many is too many.   The immediate, unpleasant side effect was that she blurted out at the waiter, “Come here and clean the table now!”  My husband did an almost Tex Avery double take.

“It’s okay, nobody heard me.” she said.  When you are drunk, you have no concept of sound amplification.

Later, she started talking a bit incoherently in the lobby.   My husband facetiously said to her, “Drink more!”   Despite the health concerns, it was an improvement, because normally she dished out the guilt trips and the crocodille tears at the drop of a hat.

I excused myself to go the bathroom, and when I returned, half the table was standing up and in a defensive position.  The moment I had left, all heck broke loose.  Sister-in-Law was yelling at my husband about me and how I talked or didn’t talk enough during the meal and what was my problem.  Like I wasn’t methodically eating like everyone else was.  Should I talk with my mouth full now? She also brought up that two weeks ago my husband didn’t answer the phone when she called.   Everyone in the restaurant probably would have said that he had good reason to not want to.

Abuse? Salt Bloat? My husband would have take salty Olive Garden food anyday.

When the invite to the pool party was mentioned, Sister-in-Law barked at my Mother-in-Law that nobody was allowed to go there, as she had to go to Lowes and everyone had to help her or tell her what she should do when she bought a shower curtain.  Maybe its just me, but I thought she had much bigger problems, as she decided to tear apart and renovate both bathrooms at once.   Maybe that is why she was such a tool today.  She had nowhere to “go.”   So i guess she decided that we shouldn’t have anywhere to go either.

So, Sister-in-Law carted Mother-in-Law out and my husband and I had a wonderful hour or two, totally abandoned at the hotel with nowhere to go.

Oh,  I forgot to tell you that I can’t drive.   Also, my husband can’t drive for another 5 months to medical reasons.  That would have been a crucial element earlier on in the story, to create more of an element of tension.

We took a walk to a nearby horse farm and fed the horses apples and oat biscuits.   The only other things we had on us was a church bulletin, eyeshadow, a Halloween pen with an eyeball that moved around on it, gum and $21.72.     MacGyver would have had us flown to Hawaii and back on that bounty of supplies.   But MacGyver was off that day.

That’s the story that we will embellish over the years about how we had been kidnapped and were held at the Hilton.  Not at any sort of gunpoint, but there had definitely been a standoff.

(for more stories of the characters herein if you are a total glutton for punishment:)
Mother-In-Law:
Burnt Offerings
Eww.  Who Drinks Pepper Water?

I am not sure if this is a legitimate question or a cry for help. It is well known that frugal folks sometimes use the water from the pickle jar in recipes. Okay, not a LOT of people, but I have read about it. Is there any health benefit or strange “alternative use” for the vinegar water in pepper jars?

Yesterday, we got out the peppers, and my mother-in-law drank the “water” right out of the jar. I thought it was very rude, as there were still peppers in the jar and she was not at her own house where she would be the only one eating them. Secondly, I wondered how the heck it could possibly taste good or be that great for you. Vinegar is not bad for you at all, but in this case, it is not a salad dressing but a preservative.

Apparently, she has been doing this for years, just not in front of me.

This is just not normal, at least in my opinion.

Does anyone know if this is part of an “old wives’ tale” and there are great uses for this leftover water, or should I get ready to take her to the nut house?  Either way, she won’t be doing it at our house.

I legitimately want to know, do you have any recipe or health claim that would back up my mother-in-law’s beverage choices?  It is obvious that her etiquette choice, on the other hand, was less than “how you should act at someone else’s house.”

*****
Do you like the atmosphere around here?
Okay, this was more pathetic than funny, but still it would be nice if you would rate me on Humor Blogs!
(You will have my undying appreciation!)

Hey, here is something that you probably don’t know** (**see footnote).    It is certainly news to me.

I stumbled across FruitandVeggieville where the latest subject is those labels on fruit.  Kathleen informs us:

Fruit that was conventionally grown, meaning with chemicals, has a four digit number. Fruit that was organically grown consists of five numbers always beginning with the number 9. Other fruit that was engineered genetically have a five digit number that always begins with the number 8.

For some reason I thought the numbers merely were a convenience for the cashier, so they didn’t have to look up the stock code off of that laminated picture menu they have at the register.   Now I know!   It is so much more intricate.  It certainly will be a way for us to navigate around the produce department just merely wondering.

What this doesn’t explain, is how I ended up with an orange awhile back that had an advertisement on its label letting me know I could buy Peter Pan on DVD.   You know how important that is.  Disney will put it “back into the vault” and not let us buy it ever again.  Well, actually, they sell more in another couple years, but just want us to think that they are smashing the master reel so people cash in their life savings to buy them.    They always bluff.

Upon furter investigation, I found the International Federation for Produce Standards Site.  These people are the masterminds behind the codes.  I looked up several PLU codes.  More specifically, I went backwards and looked up the item.     There are all sorts of varieties of both natural and hybrid fruit, vegetables, and herbs.

The big mystery for me to unlock was posed to me as I wandered through the “ethnic food” aisle of the grocery store.   Occasionally I like to get Goya Pineapple or Mango Juice.   One time, sort of on a dare, I tried Guanabana juice.   A spiney green orb was on the can, one that appeared like it should never be eaten by anyone.  It really tasted bad to me.   My natural instincts did not head the warning, apparently.   Anyway, according to the site, Guanabana fruit does not exist.   There is no code for it!   At first I thought it was just the Spanish name for something else, but it is never translater, unlike pineapple.    The translation is probably “I am scarey looking, don’t eat me.  I warned you!”  Even little lizards and mice in the desert understand that language, unlike humans who would consider it a dare.

Try not to tax your brain too much.   Four digits means “conventional/regular”, 5 digits starting with a 9 is organic, 5 digits starting with an 8 is frankenfood (sort of).

**=  (A few years ago, spending a big chunk of my childhood in Wisconsin, I probably would have started this off with: Here is something that you pro’lly don’t know, hey?)

*****
Do you like the atmosphere around here?
Okay, this was more pathetic and not funny but still it would be nice if you would rate me on Humor Blogs!
(You will have my undying appreciation!)

For every birthday, I made a special request to have a Mud Cake. What is a Mud Cake? The more proper name is “Chocolate Pudding Cake” but my grandmother made it when my cousins and I were little, and the name stuck.

It is a very simple recipe, involving a standard cake mix and a box of cooking pudding. I decided that I was going to make it to impress my boyfriend. He is my husband now, so apparently I did not poison him. I certainly came close that night.

I called Grandma up to proudly tell her what I was doing. I bought the cake mix and the pudding, and followed the package to a “T”. I had my egg and flour out, made the cake mix and then stirred in a box of the pudding.

As it was cooking, I noticed something didn’t look quite right, but I chalked that up to performance anxiety. When I brought it out to cook, I noticed that one side of the cake was only about a centimeter high, where the other edge almost was as tall as the lip of the pan.

My boyfriend came over, and tasted the cake.

“What is this supposed to be? A brownie?,” he said.

“No. It is supposed to be Chocolate Pudding Cake. The one that my Grandma makes.”

Inspired by his looks of incredulity and a cake texture that the NHL would be begging me to reveal to them to use to make practice pucks, I called Grandma up.

Then she laid it on me:

I was supposed to MAKE THE PUDDING. When it was thoroughly stirred, I was to stir in one chocolate cake mix. Then, instead of putting it in the fridge to set up, I was supposed to pour it into a cake pan and back it.

Can dyslexia translate beyond the written page and cause one to confuse left and right and get spoken directions backwards too?

Mud Cake aka Chocolate Pudding Cake
The REAL Recipe

1 Commercial chocolate cake mix
1 4 oz Packet of chocolate pudding. Must be the baking kind, plus the milk or water it calls for.

Follow directions on pudding package. When ingredients are mixed thoroughly, open and add the full cake mix.Follow temperature suggestions recommended for the cake mix, making sure to check the cake often to adjust for your oven and elevation. Test with toothpicks. When they come out clean, the cake is done.

This is a SUPER MOIST cake. If you plan to serve the cake on a different date from when you serve it, you must lightly dust the top with baking powder. Okay, if you make it the night before and take it to a party the next morning, we will count that as the same day. We are not talking actual calendar days, but common sense. This is especially crucial if you plan to store the leftover cake in plastic. The cake may get moldy very quickly because of the moisture content if you do not.

And I am still strongly discouraged from baking til this very day.   I think I should keep an open mind as I could have done better if I promoted them as the world’s most compact and harshest tasting brownies.   One could say that I achieved that.