Somebody Might See You Standing There

Here is an essay I wrote for The Monarch Review about making coffee in a hospital in Kalamazoo:

http://www.themonarchreview.org/somebody-might-see-you-standing-there-stephen-morehead/

Is There Anything Weird in That Apple Pie?

 "Um, I don't know," said the woman. She stood in front of the glass pressing her fingers onto it, leaving greasy finger prints all over the deli case. "I just can't decide."

“Mmm-hmm,” I said.

“They all look so good,” she said.

She was obese, and a lot of the customers are. Over fifty-percent of the people who come in are gigantic, and what they buy in the cafe are things like brownies with chocolate chips, a layer of peanut butter and and inch thick layer of compressed frosting. These things don't sell better than the other things in the dessert case, they sell better than food.
While someone is being indecisive it's futile to suggest something or to ask what exactly what they're in the mood for, for the simple sake that most people are indecisive for the sole purpose of being the center of attention. They spend most of their day unnoticed, not being babied, and often ordering something at a cafe to be nurtured: first by the person at the case and then again as serotonin splashes out in response to the cinnamon roll frosted with a batter so saturated with sugar that I can see individual granules. When I'm in a good mood, I play along, and say something like, 'Well, you look like you might need a piece of cheesecake, what do you think.” Invariably, the person tells me that cheesecake isn't the right thing, and so I'll suggest something else, and we'll go around in circles until she chooses something from an area where she wasn't even looking, making a body gesture and pushing away the air with her hand that is the manner of people when they have given up because their task is just too daunting. In this way, picking out an eleven AM dessert is similar to building an airplane that travels the speed of light in a vacuum in order to board it and, just at the moment that the plane reaches the most impossible of speed thresholds, unlatch your safety belt to run to the bathroom at the front of the fuselage so that you can break the light-speed barrier.

Other times, as with this woman whose body language reads to me as annoyingly self-important, (I'm not a very good person, but customer service has nothing to do with being a good person. For example, a woman whom I know to be diabetic comes in every day. The other day, she bought an enormous, frosting globbed cinnamon roll. I sold it to her. Had I been a good person, I would have reminded her that this wasn't a good idea, reminded her of necrotic digits and told her a story about my great uncle who has dementia, sometimes forgets where he's at while driving down the street in the town he grew up in [yes, my family still lets him drive] and panics because he didn't keep close attention of his diabetes and now has microscopic strokes that render more and more of his brain useless, basically the same thing that happens to a diabetic's digits, but I didn't tell this woman ordering a cinnamon roll any of that. I let her order the roll and I smiled at her while she did it, because customer service has nothing to do with being a good person and in fact you have to sometimes be a shitty person, and being a shitty person, sometimes you grow tired of the behavior on the other side of the case, which is often shittier behavior than your own) I have a hard time playing along and am silent while she hems and haws. But I can only stand on the business side of a dessert case for so long before my silence gets awkward, even for myself. I said to her, “This apple pie was made in-house just this morning.”

To which she said, “Is there anything weird about it?”

Anything weird about it?

How she knew, I have no idea, but here's the thing: There was something weird about it.

When I was working in a bakery in Seattle, a new girl was hired and it was my job to train her. At five in the morning, she came in, small like a pixy, bouncing on the balls of her feet. She had tattooed sleeves on both of her arms and in spite of that she seemed, in manner and build, like she could have been running around on a sixth grade playground at recess as much as working in a bakery. The first day that I worked with her I showed her how to do the bake-off, cook omelets, handle the rushes, etcetera, and by the second day I could tell that she was bored so I let her play while we were slow. She found the flour, the butter, some apples and some cheddar cheese and she made some individually sized apple pies, placing a layer of cheddar under the top crust. For a moment, I couldn't imagine why she would do this (she pinched edges while talking about her mother teaching her how to bake, how she loved baking, dreamed of being a baker... eventually talking about how it was the new trend to put colby cheese or sharp cheddar in with apple pie).

And then I remembered my grandfather. Nobody loved pie as much as my grandfather, and because of that fact my grandmother more often than not had a pie on the kitchen table for him. My grandfather used to take a slice of apple pie, cut a big chunk of cheddar to stick on top, then warm them together in the oven until the cheddar melted down the sides. My grandfather, God rest his soul, is the oldest person I have ever met, and the oldest person I will ever have met. And so if he was combining the flavor of apple pie with that of cheddar, it's been going on far too long for it to be weird.

But I had put cheddar slices under the top crust of that apple pie precisely because it was to be weird. I work in a place where, when I schmeared hummus and placed slices of cucumber on take-home bagel sandwiches, a regular customer came in the next day, having seen the sandwiches, to tell one of my coworkers how ridiculous it is to put hummus and cucumber on a bagel sandwich. Meat, egg and cheese should be the only things that we put on our bagel sandwiches. But the truth of the matter is, hummus was the first schmear schmeared on the first bagel when the bagel was invented, and when the bagel seemed a bit dry on a hot day, the inventor of the bagel placed slices of cucumber on it to make it refreshing. It's not ridiculous for someone to put hummus and cucumber on a sandwich, it's ridiculous to think that it's in any way out of the ordinary to do so.

Another time, I made hollandaise sauce, roasted tomatoes and asparagus, combined the ingredients with eggs and put it on rye bread for an eggs benedict sandwich. Customer quote: “Looks like someone took the 'salad' part of egg salad too literally.”

When the woman asked if there was anything weird about the apple pie, I said yes.

She said, “I'm glad you told me that. That prevents me from buying it. Umm... I'll just take a piece of that cake.” (The cake that she bought was a Jello cake. We buy them daily from the same place we buy the cinnamon rolls and the frosting and peanut butter layered brownies, along with a lot of other things. Interestingly, they call it a Jello cake because it really is made with Jello, and you can see the neon strips of it throughout the cake. The Jello is supposed to make the cake moister, to which I say, if you make a cake properly, shouldn't it already be moist enough? The cake sags under its own weight.)

I work in a place where the desserts are so sweet that when I taste them, I only taste the flavor of the dessert for a split moment before they become overwhelmingly sweet and my tongue goes into shock. Yes, I feel the granules of sugar between my teeth. I have an urge to take something and scrape them off. Every time I add whipped cream to someone's 'Teddy Bear Mocha', I think about the fact that I'm adding, at a conservative minimum, 300 calories to their drink at the space of only the top ½ inch of their cup. This is the nutritional information of some frozen omelettes that we sell:

These are real. I've never seen a piece of food that listed such a high percentage of your daily value of anything besides vitamin C or B12. On Wednesday, a cardiologist bought four of them.

Those bagel sandwiches that I mentioned above, they usually have 1-2 omelettes along with a meat (roast beef, ham, bacon, turkey or corned beef) and a slice of cheese (cheddar, Swiss, provolone, mozzarella or American) on them.

I came from a land where pixy girls with tattooed arms giggled at how naughty they were being for putting finely diced bacon into doughnuts, and arrived in a land where lumbering giants eat 60 pounds of bacon before Matt Lauer has greeted America.

(Bacon grease at 8:30 in the morning.)

When that woman asked me if there was anything weird about the apple pie, what I wanted to tell her was that there isn't anything weird about food there's only food that you are closed off to because of some reason or another, cultural differences or your parents didn't force you to try foods growing up and so your brain didn't ever develop beyond Wonder Bread, cheese and Oscar Meyer lunch meat. That's why you're huge and your skin looks like cigarette ash. I wanted to tell her that her worldview of food is a small one, based on the food that you can get in this town, which is pizza and sandwiches. But this would be wrong. Food is weird.

It's weird that people would rather eat one of those omelettes instead of fresh vegetables. (I have grown to be just as repulsed at adults who make yukky faces at vegetables [or adults who make yukky faces, generally] as those adults are of those fresh vegetables.) It's weird that someone will look at a trough among many on a steam bar, see the bacon grease pooled at the bottom, and then use a pair of tongs to fish out five or six sticks. It's weird that science can study food, how we should eat food, and then come out with a simple to follow chart on how to eat, such as a food pyramid, and it will be so unsuccessful that they have to abandon the pyramid altogether and just adopt different portions. It's weird that we can have one food, beef, that is the largest cause of water pollution, the largest cause of topsoil deforestation, a larger cause of green house gas emissions than cars, and do nothing about it. Less than nothing. If we just switched a cow's diet off of corn and back to grass, the greenhouse gas emissions would be negligible and the average consumer of the meat would lose almost six pounds a year. Making our diet smaller rather than more diverse is weird. Not eating something called a cup-cake for breakfast, but eating a cup-cake without frosting and calling it a muffin is weird. Getting skim milk in your cafe latte, then having 350 calories added to it with a fortress of whipped cream... and on and on.

What I'm saying is more of a question than a statement. For centuries, food sustained us, made our cities and population grow, came from earth and returned to it. When was it that it got so weird?

A little help with your vegan Pesach Seder

For some reason, I spent the last several years thinking that I'd already posted this recipe for vegan eggs. But when I went looking for it to show someone for the purpose of their Passover table, I couldn't find it. I've used this recipe to make vegan eggs benedict, vegan deviled eggs and Pesach eggs. The finished product looks authentic and tastes great.

For Vegan egg-looking eggs:

For the whites
2 C milk substitute (almond or rice milk works great, soy milk when it's not Pesach, or you can make a quinoa milk if you choose that will come out a bit browner in color)
2 tsp agar flakes or powder (this is a sea vegetable that you can find in Asian groceries or at a lot of natural foods stores)
1/4 tsp salt

For the yolk:
1 large potato, baked until soft and cooled
4 Tbs olive oil
2 Tbs apple cider vinegar
2 tsp mustard powder
2 tsp salt
about 2 tsp turmeric (to color)
place in a food processor and process until smooth

For a mold, those plastic eggs that you find everywhere this time of year for Easter work great. Dust each half of the inside with olive oil.

In a pot, bring the whites mixture to a slow boil, or just under a boil, while whisking. You'll notice that the agar has already started to firm a bit. Let cool slightly, but do not let the mix firm completely! Then, use the whites mixture to fill one half of the egg mold. Use a melon-baller to scoop an orb of the yolk-potato mixture and place into the whites mixture. Fill the other half of the plastic egg mold with the whites mixture and  carefully close the two halves of the mold together. When all is done, place them in the fridge to set -- 1 hour is a safe amount of time, but until completely cooled is good for flavor.

Chag Sameach!

Here is the recipe in action as vegan-eggs benedict. For the mold here, I used a muffin pan instead of the egg-form molds so that the eggs could lay flat on their muffin. They are here topped with roasted red peppers, chopped Kalamata olives and a vegan hollandais sauce, made mostly from tahini and dill.

Superbowls Are Played on Reasonably Temperatured September Sundays

My father never allowed me to have a gaming system while I was growing up, meaning that I grew up with a Commodore 64 in the house, an inferior product when it comes to video games with joysticks that broke down often, and the reason I was allowed to use the Commodore 64 was simply this, with a NES or Sega, you put a cartridge into the console and press it on, but with the 64, in order to load your game, you had to type: load"*",8,1 <return> into the prompt before the drive would kick into motion and whirl its magnets and smoke over the face of a floppy disk. I did spent some major hours on the 64, and once kept a notebook of statistics while I played an entire season of a computer game called 'Hardball', a baseball game with a total of two teams, and that year those two teams played each other a total of 162 times. I hate to say it, but all of the math involved with figuring ERAs and batting averages was a victory for my father.

So when last fall, when roommate Jimmy brought home an original NES, I felt like I was somehow striking a victory for my inner, bitter child. I played NES with Rory Hunt when I was growing up, but only when he felt like playing and, because he owned the NES, he was generally pretty bored with it. Now, I was in charge of when I got to play the damn thing, and when one of the roommate's friends brought of a cartridge of Super Techmo Bowl, I knew that there were going to be weekends that I couldn't get back again.

After playing a few warm up games, I started a season determined to give the Minnesota Vikings their first Superbowl victory. I made it to the big game where I was to play against the Cincinnati Bengals. One afternoon, roommate Jimmy came out of his room. I was in the kitchen. "How is your season going?" Jimmy asked.

"I'm in the Superbowl," I said.
"Really? When are you going to play it? Can you wait until I can watch?"
Bashfully, I kicked at the floor and said, "Um, I was going to, um, wait until Sunday to play it..."
"Really? Can I watch? We should make a party out of it!"

And with this brilliant suggestion, I set to making a whole-stinking-bunch of vegan spinach and artichoke dip along with a bread bowl to put it in to be ready on Superbowl Sunday in early September!

The Bowl

Filled to the brim. Stick a chip in it son, that shit is done!

You know when you order a milkshake, and they bring out the metal cup of extra milkshake along with your milkshake? This is the metal cup.

If there's a rule of Superbowl food, this is it, nothing is fresh. Here's what I put into it: 

4 bricks of spinach (thawed)

2 jars of marinated artichoke hearts

about 1/4 cup of vegannaise

several cloves of garlic

lemon juice

1 container of Tofutti cream cheese

Salt 

Pepper

Cooked at 400 until bubbling and brown at the edges. Then I topped it with Daiya Mozzerella style cheese, broiled it until browned.

Was it delicious? I think the greatest compliment the chef could have asked for in this case was waking up in the middle of the night, looking for it in the fridge and not finding it; finding out the next day that Roommate Jimmy had taken it into his room with him for drunken shame food. This is basically the equivalent of a 28/30 on the Zagat rating system.

For anyone concerned about the game, I played a half and was up 7-0. I received the kickoff in the second half and started a methodical, precise and deadly drive, when all of the sudden  the NES froze and the game had to be started over. This new game, the Cincinnati Bengals walloped me and my promise to bring the city of Minnesota its first Superbowl victory. Such was the conclusion of the three-half Superbowl.

But with this a football dynasty had begun! Angrier and more determined, the Vikings went back to the Superbowl the very next year and won.

Defense wins digital ball games.

And the repeat came at the end of a perfect season. I'll point out that my perfect season was a much bigger accomplishment than that of the 72 dolphins, as their season was much shorter.

And the first ever Superbowl 3peat 

We Mayo May Not, This Is the Question

Roommate Jimmy and I once sat in the kitchen for what felt like an hour, him whisking an egg yolk into oil with a fork and myself trying to blend the same ingredients it with a blender. In the end, neither of us could coax out of these ingredients some mayonnaise, which I expected to expand from the canola oil like a magician's smoke. My good man Jimmy wasn't to be defeated though, and he used the oil and yolk mixture to make tuna salad anyway.

I've tried a few different homemade recipes for vegan mayonnaise before, and been disappointed with every one, so I stopped trying several years ago. But I went to buy some vegannaise, which is nearly delicious enough to eat out of the jar with a spoon, and here in the Midwest I found it to be nearly double the cost that it was in Seattle. So I went back on the hunt.

I didn't have to search long. I made the following recipe twice, once with the called for canola oil, another time with extra virgin olive oil. Both turned out creamy and tangy, though the extra virgin olive oil version tasted, um... well, very strong of extra virgin olive oil. So my recommendation for anyone who wants to try this recipe is, feel free to experiment with various oils and proteins (almond milk instead of soy milk seems like an obvious thing to try for people like my mother who can't have any soy) but if you are to make this out of an olive oil, make it out of an old whorey olive oil instead of an extra virgin.

Vegan Mayonnaise:
1/2 C soymilk
1 c + 2tbs canola oil
1/4 tsp agave
3/4 tsp kosher salt (I used French fleur de sel)
1/2 tbs lemon juice
the zest from 1/8 lemon
1/8 tsp dry mustard

Put all ingredients into a blender and blend until creamy and emulsified, which is roughly 10 seconds.

This is where I found it, which looks like an lovely little place: http://veganepicurean.blogspot.com/2009/05/homemade-veganaise.html

Dangit, what a happy guy.

Spiral Diner's Famous Vegan Brownies

Taste testers agree: these brownies are the shit.


Double Chocolate Fudge Brownies


1/3 c softened shortening
1 cup sugar
1 cup flour
1/4 t salt
1 T BP
1/3 cup good quality cocoa
1 t vanilla
1/3 c non dairy milk
3/4 c chocolate chips
3/4 c nuts, chopped


Cream shortening and sugar. In a separate bowl combine dry ingredients. Add to shortening along with wet ingredients. Add chips and nuts. Dough will be very thick. Bake at 300 in a 9x9 pan for 30 minutes. 

Christmas in July

I'm moving to France. They don't eat stuffing there. Or pumpkin pie (though they do eat a lot of savory pumpkin things. yum!). So in preparing myself mentally for this lack of holiday food, I realized the amazing opportunity I had. Stephen often likes direction/inspiration for Sunday dinners, and hell, I love themed parties. So glad we did it. I might make it a year and a half before I get my next helping of holiday food. I won't make it the same amount of time before re-watching Ernest's "Your World As I See It", which is how the night ended, dinner guests crowded around the tv. 


Le Menu


Stephen's Delicious Field-Roast Style Ham
Cornbread Stuffing
Pepper Gravy
Mac and Cheese Casserole
Pumpkin Pie

I dressed in my red sequin show choir dress, circa 2002, to honor...err be more festive. However, halfway through dinner I had to change. There was no room for food! 

Cornbread Stuffing

1 recipe vegan cornbread (Veganomicon)

4 cups veg broth

seasoning from a box of rice

prepared box of rice or packet of instant rice, heated

1/2 cup dried cranberries

1 acorn squash or sweet potato, roasted in the oven til tender

1/2 c chopped pecans

1 apple, cubed

2 stalks celery

1 onion, chopped

Mix together the cooked cornbread and the rest of the dry ingredients. Add salt and pepper. Mush with your hands or a wooden spoon to combine. Pour into 9x13 pan and pour veg broth over, making sure all is moist (more water or broth may be needed). Cover with foil and bake at 350 for several hours. 

Pepper Gravy

Margarine

Flour (could use Bob's Red Mill for GF)

Veggie Broth

salt and pepper

oregano

Over low heat, make a roux with the margarine and flour and add broth. Season at the end. People love gravy; make a lot!

Baked Mac and Cheese

(to fill a 9x13 pan, serves 8)

2 boxes GF pasta, prepared

2 packages Daiya Cheddar Cheese

1 red bell pepper, chopped

White Gravy*

Layer (twice) cooked pasta, then bell pepper, cheddar cheese and finally gravy. Cook, covered with foil until cheese is melted and gooey. Uncover and bake another 15 minutes. 350F

*White Gravy

Follow directions for pepper gravy but use white flour, non-dairy milk (look for very low sugar content), and margarine. Season with salt and pepper. 

Pumpkin Pie with Coconut Whip

recipe courtesy of Vegan Pie in the Sky, prepared according to instructions, though doubling (will have some filling left over. I made mini pies with it)

Sarah's thrifty find and 
a group decorating effort