Tangy Oil & Garlic Sauce for Pasta

This sauce or topping is a variant on the classic Italian alla olio sauce. It goes well with any style of pasta, and would be great as a dressing for home-fried potatoes.

Ingredients

1/4 c. Extra-virgin olive oil
~6 small portabella mushrooms, sliced
1T. Dried onion flakes
8 - 10 fresh garlic cloves, crushed and minced
1T. Worcestershire sauce
1/2 t. Sea salt
1/2 t. Ground fresh black pepper
1t. Dried oregano
~1/2 c. Chicken broth (canned is OK )
~1/2 to 3/4 lb. pasta of choice, cooked al dente

1. Heat olive oil in medium skillet. Add mushrooms and cook for five minutes.
2. Add onion flakes, Worcestershire sauce, salt, pepper, and oregano. Cook briefly to bring out flavor and aroma.
3. Add chicken broth and cook on medium heat until liquid is reduced by half.
4. Add garlic and cook for two minutes or until garlic is softened.
5. Combine sauce and pasta. Drizzle with a bit more olive oil.

Serve with a robust white or red wine.

NOTES

Add crushed red pepper flakes in moderation if you like heat in your pasta dish.
Virtually any style pasta will work with an alla olio sauce.
Any type mushroom will work.
Add par-boiled broccoli or cauliflower to bulk up the dish.
Adjust spices to taste before serving.

Oatmeal Spice Drop Cookies with Walnuts & Raisins

These are somewhat crisp cookies with a nice blend of spices.  The raisins give a softness to the texture, while the walnuts offset the softness with a gentle crunch.

Makes between five and seven dozen, depending on the size of your teaspoon.

Qty	Ingredient	Prep	Comment
¼ lb.	Buter (1 stick)	At room temperature
1 c.	Light brown sugar	Packed
1 c.	Granulated sugar
1.4 t.	Salt
1 t.	Cinnamon	Ground
½ t.	Numeg	Ground
½ t.	Allspice	Ground
½ t.	Ginger	Ground
½ t.	Cloves	Ground
2	Eggs	At room temperature
1 t.	Baking soda
1 t.	Baking powder
1 t.	Red wine vinegar
2 c.	Flour	Unbleached
1 c.	Raisins
1 c.	Walnut pieces
1 c.	Rolled oats

Instructions:

1.	Preheat oven to 375 degrees F (convection setting works well for baking)
2.	Cream together butter and sugars until fluffy
3.	Add salt, spices and mix briefly
4.	Add eggs, one at a time, mixing briefly after each
5.	Add baking powder and baking soda, mix briefly
6.	Add flour, about 1/3 at a time, mixing gently after each addition
7.	Add raisins, walnuts, oats, and vinegar, mixing gently until combined
8.	Drop batter by teaspoons onto ungreased cookie sheet.  Bake for 13 – 14 minutes until lightly browned.

That Hot Dog Never Went to Texas

I never met any of my great-grandparents.  In fact, my father’s father had already died years before I was born.  But my mother tells me that her maternal grandfather was a top-notch German butcher.

The way things worked back then, people who worked in a trade probably started out as an apprentice.  Back in The Old Country, that may have meant membership in a trade guild or some other formal group invented to control access to lucrative employment as well as fulfill important societal roles.

So my great-grandfather was a German butcher, his father was likely the same, and so on and so on back through history to someone who lived in a forest and butchered wild game for friends and neighbors.  One can imagine a misty medieval scene in which a local hunter-gatherer dragged the still steaming carcass of a wild boar to one of my ancestors for “processing,” my forebear extracting his fee in a combination of choice and not-so-choice hog parts.  Hey, it’s a living.

As a result, I can accept that my carnivorous tendencies come naturally.  Families of butchers almost always ate; sometimes they ate sausage.

The entire Germanic race seems to have an ongoing and intimate relationship with sausages.  Big ones, small ones, white ones, black ones, slim ones, pudgy ones, sausages made from pork, beef, veal, and blood (yes, blood).  Have you ever checked out a recipe for headcheese?  Oops.  Headcheese is, technically, not a sausage.I

I’m afraid that in much of my family, sausages enjoy an iconic status.  My relatives used to mark their calendars so that they would be properly attuned to the scheduling subtleties of the upcoming bockwurst season.  Never mind that “bockwurst season” always came a couple weeks before the start of Lent. No exceptions.  These people wanted to KNOW precisely when the delicate white, garlic-and-chive-laden veal links, with no preservatives, would make their annual debut, coiled and curled in stacks on big white enamel trays or hanging from huge cast-iron wall hooks in the refrigerated cases at local meat meccas like Schumacher’s or Gutheinz’s.

These places also enjoyed iconic status.  They were different, but in a way, the same.  If that sounds confusing, be assured that it really wasn’t.

Both places were retail stores.  They served as places of employment for many people.  They served lots and lots of customers who relied on them for lots and lots of wholesome, high-quality meat.  No cheeses, no spices, Tasty Cakes or Little Debbies, no frou-frou, no point-of-sale Tic-Tacs or key chains.  Meat.  If you wanted meat, you knew where to go.  If you wanted anything else, you went elsewhere.

However, at “retail establishment,” the similarity ended.  Gutheinz’s was big, situated on one of the main commercial avenues on the south (we called it “home”) side of town.  Although they sold all types of meat (and I mean that in every sense of the word – the bristles of a hog were made into brushes, the hides into footballs – virtually everything else got eaten), they supplied most of the hot dogs to most of the restaurants, vendors, and homes within a twenty mile radius of Scranton.  The store was always cool and slightly darkened, with long white cases and cutting tables dotting the floors covered with small white hexagonal ceramic tiles.  Lots of (mostly) friendly white men in white cloth hats and coats filled the orders of the white people who shopped there for red and white meat.  Things were simple.  Clean.  Life was orderly, in a Germanic sort of way that was tempered by the bustle of post-War growth and the welcome clamor of young, growing families.

Schumacher’s was in many ways the anti-Gutheinz’s.  Their shops (they had two, Gutheinz only one) were small and dark.  The floors were wire-brushed hardwood, squeaky-clean yet covered with scattered wood shavings put there to absorb anything unseemly that might drip on them.  I loved going there, especially in the summer when the humidity outside would render everything on your back damp and clingy.  Inside, Schumacher’s was cool, cold almost, partly because it needed to be that way to preserve the tons of meat standing around and stacked in the huge cases and walk-in refrigerators, but also because the store was two steps below street level and shaded by surrounding trees, houses, and shops.  Zoning rigor was not a feature of life in Scranton.

Children always seemed to be welcome at Schumacher’s.  They would gravitate to the eye-level cases full of chops, roasts, and sausages (ground meat was prepared on demand).  We watched with fascination through the glass of the cases as men’s hands, protruding from the sleeves of white cotton full-length coats, reached in to retrieve items for your grandmother’s or mother’s weekly order.  And, for your troubles and patience (and because the Schumacher family appeared to firmly understand that today’s young apprentice carnivore becomes tomorrow’s customer/carnivore), they would reward their mini-clientele with a freshly cut slab of rich, moist, garlicky bologna, made on-site and the best you’ve ever tasted.  The slice filled your little hand.  I guarantee a vegetarian would go over to the dark side after one taste of this stuff, if for no other reason but to grant them insight as to why some people like and even fixate on meat.

I’m pretty certain that my entire extended family bought the bulk of its meat from either one purveyor or the other, with the possible exception of the stray pound of ground beef bought on an emergency basis from a corner grocer.   This was partly because supermarkets were not yet ubiquitous.  Part was also because rapid worldwide transportation of goods had not yet made possible the eating of fresh lettuce or beets grown in Tierra del Fuego.

And part of it was just healthy, good old local chauvinism.  I know for certain that I never even saw a Hebrew National frankfurter until I went to a baseball game in Yankee Stadium with my Cub Scout pack when I was about nine.  I wouldn’t have known a “frankfurter” if I had stepped on one if we hadn’t gotten a television.  We were Americans, and, darn it, Americans ate hot dogs.

My earliest awareness of Oscar Mayer – the brand, not the person -- was an encounter with that incredible application of technology in which food-followed-function.

Yep, it was the Wiener-Mobile.  My sixth-grade friend Davey and I were walking home from a hard day of annoying our teacher, dawdling as fast as we could to postpone our daily confrontation with homework.  Suddenly, Davey spotted it out of the corner of his eye.  I caught his double-take and matched it with a few takes of my own.  It was … look at that!  A HUGE HOT DOG ON WHEELS!  DRIVING RIGHT DOWN THE STREET!

What an incredible hoot.  We chased the thing on foot for blocks until it rounded a corner out of view.  Afer that, it immediately became Hot Topic Number One at our respective dinner tables that night.  Neither set of parents believed us.  There was no such thing as a 15-foot long hot dog on wheels.  Please.  Of course, I’ve now come to learn that not only was the Wiener Mobile a fact of the moment, it was historically significant, a piece of Americana before we had an inkling of what Americana was.  Having been unleashed upon America’s highways by Oscar Meyer Company as a rolling promotion in 1936, we were probably, in 1955 looking on the original, a one-off prototype, art on wheels.  After all, there was certainly no every-year-a-model-year phenomenon in the Wiener Mobile business.

Davey and I were now gun-shy and hyper vigilant.  Our tale of a big roller-weenie on a bun had been deemed too far-fetched even for our fertile and over-achieving imaginations.  But we were redeemed a few days later through several other independent confirmed sightings and a newspaper article.  However, by then our buildup had rendered redemption anticlimactic.  To us, it was old hat, yesterday’s meat sighting.  Later on, though, the memory would make me empathetic, at least in a small way, with the army of poor blokes who have been unfortunate enough to be compelled to tell their tales of abduction by space aliens.  Space aliens, yeah, right.  Hot dog on wheels.  Sure.

I almost forgot.  This is about Texas wieners.

Odds are, unless you’re from Scranton or its environs, you’ve never even heard of the Texas wiener.  Join the deprived masses with no knowledge of this culinary phenomenon, low cuisine’s best-kept secret.  With more thorough press, the Texas wiener could, no, make that should, enjoy legendary status equal to that of See’s candy among West Coast devotees, the deep-fried Ding-Dong, or the truffle consumed by the truffle dog.  Locally, of course, Texas wieners were simply taken for granted.  (A sidelight:  personally, and having sampled both, I always thought that West Side Scranton’s own Williams’s Candies far surpassed See’s Candies for flavor and quality, and did so by orders of magnitude.  But that’s another subject, saved for another chapter.)

Since leaving Scranton, I’ve encountered and devoured numerous chili dogs.  But the chili dog, my friends, runs a distant and inferior third to a genuine Texas wiener, and second place is equally unmemorable.  A chili dog is to a Texas wiener as a button mushroom is to an oyster mushroom, or maybe even an amanita muscaria (look it up).  Don’t overburden that analogy, though, if you know anything about mushrooms.  Texas wieners may be many things, but they are not hallucinogenic.

I recently heard a rumor that someplace else in Pennsylvania, maybe Altoona, has a flock of Texas wiener devotees, probably because some transplanted and homesick Scrantonian met a market niche by opening a Texas wiener stand.  Or maybe some poor Altoonan lost a weekend in the fleshpots of Scranton and had a Texas wiener or twelve while he was there, gargling them down with orange Nehi soda (it was Radar O’Reilly’s drink of choice, which is why Radar’s tastes were never suspect in my book).  As a result, this poor Altoonan probably couldn’t get the damn things off his mind or their distinctive aromatic presence off his breath or out of his double knit polyester pants.  Petroleum-based pants seem to come with the geographic territory of western Pennsylvania.

Among its embarrassment of cultural riches, Scranton had two Texas wiener emporiums, and I use that term because these places sold nothing else, except possibly Alka Seltzer.  One of them, called Coney Island Texas Wieners, was on the dividing line between Scranton’s decaying downtown and its similarly decaying south side.  It was near the train station, which may have accounted for the Texas wiener phenomenon stretching as far afield as Altoona.  The place occupied a basement-level space accessed by a sidewalk that ran down the hill under a railroad trestle carrying the old DL&W tracks over the first few feet of Cedar Avenue.  Coney Island occupied the Texas wiener pinnacle as far as I was concerned.

Not far behind was Yankee Lunch, located on a busy South Side (pronounced “sow-side,” one word, by residents) corner of Pittston Avenue and Birch Street.  It fit the Texas wiener formula exactly (see the recipe below), but enjoyed a somewhat less sophisticated – ha ha --clientele than did Coney Island.

I remember that the proprietor of Yankee Lunch drove a late model Cadillac, bought by way of an endless stream of quarters spent by customers on hot dogs.  Either that, or he was a bookie.

In the day, twenty-five cents bought one of these gut-blasters, completely dressed with condiments (brown mustard, chopped raw onions, and secret red-fire chili-and-ground-beef sauce, nothing else allowed).  A dollar bought a wiener, a Nehi orange, and a copy of Mad Magazine packed with a zillion laughs, leaving room for a generous tip.  If you were really hungry, you had to bump your lunch/laughter budget up to $1.25.  If I need confirmation of the aging process, I need only note that today I can’t buy the little paper insulating collar on a Starbuck’s coffee for a buck-and-a-quarter.

Anyway, here’s the recipe (and believe me, the store’s setting is part of the recipe in so many ways).

·      One decaying urban building in a heavily traveled location (under a railroad bridge is good)

·      One worn Formica lunch counter featuring a boomerang pattern with 10 or so stools and 10 or so equally worn leatherette booths (please, NO genuine leather, and they are booths, NOT banquettes)

·      One middle-aged, overweight counterman (preferably foreign-born) in restaurant whites

·      A few assorted layabuts, ne’er-do-wells, and students, if that’s not redundant, strewn around the place for texture

·      One huge, sizzling flat-top griddle featuring a minimum of 10 dozen short, fat hot dogs with skins (no foreign terminology like “bratwurst” or “weisswurst” or “blutwurst” is allowed – these need to be hot dogs, unadorned and stacked like cordwood

·      About two gallons of recently chopped yellow onions, adding their fragrance to the surroundings from a stainless steel tank alongside the griddle

·      A small vat of ballyard mustard, the less sophisticated the better.  This mustard is not the bright taxicab yellow variety, but rather the brown, somewhat grainy mustard like French’s – no hoity-toity Dijon or whole-grain mustard here, please.  One must stick with the program.

·      About an equal amount of lightly bubbling sauce, made up of finely ground beef seasoned with garlic and various spices like chili powder, other red peppers, cumin, oregano, and no doubt several “secret ingredients” known to no man save possibly the cook.  Needless to say, this sauce was the most distinctive and compelling aspect of the dish.

·      A flotilla of rectangular soft white rolls.  These are kept in a steamer that gets the bread just warm, soft, and absorbent enough without ever being soggy.

OK, now it’s rubber-meets-the-road time.  It’s legal to order less than two, but don’t bother, because you’ll either want the second one immediately or want to take one with you.  Someone worthy might be waiting at home.  And two of them, wrapped, fit perfectly in the pocket of a Central High School letter jacket.

With a single slashing stroke of a kitchen sword, the counterman cuts the hot dogs lengthwise, not quite through but through enough so that they’ll lie flat on the hot griddle like two mirror-image little meat nuggets.  The counterman always seemed to have just the right number of dogs already on the hot surface so that you never waited very long for your order.  About two minutes was always right.  You were always next.

Assembly proceeds.  The roll is split horizontally, knife blade parallel to the counter. A generous but not too generous dollop of the mustard is placed on the roll, both sides.  The fileted dog is placed on the split roll.  A generous but not too generous portion of the raw onions is added, followed by a small ladle full of the Red Death chili sauce.  And – drum roll – voila, or some other more ethnically relevant utterance of the counterman.  Another dose of legal heroin, ready for gulping down counterside or wrapping for mobile consumption.  It was possible to wait to eat them at home, but it was a challenge.

As a teenager, the desired effect was always and instantly low earth orbit.  If you weren’t approaching a date or a school dance, a couple Texas wieners and a Nehi orange or a birch beer out of the chiller was a simple, satisfying event.  Meeting a girl after a Texas wiener probably required a hastily prepared apology, unless she had recently had one or two herself.  If you knew, for sure, that she was also a Texas wiener devotee, you also knew that she was probably a keeper.

It’s been said that someone could tell over the phone if you had recently eaten one.  Maybe so.  There were only three possible conditions:  you had either recently had one, you were currently eating one, or you wanted one.