Refrigerator management

Crack! Silence. Crack! Silence. Mmmmm. Crack! Silence. This is the approximate sequence by which Mark and I eat crab legs. There is no talking while eating crab legs. The business of cracking the shell, extracting the meat and dipping it generously into melted butter requires the utmost concentration. The sad fact is we are watching CNN’s coverage of the Gulf oil disaster while we are eating crab. The irony of that is not lost on us. But we eat on.

I would like to speak to you tonight about refrigerator management. Eating crab legs is directly associated with refrigerator management. Crab legs wait for no man. Or woman. You cannot let them sit in the refrigerator for a week and then decide you have a hankering for crab legs.

This is how my refrigerator looks right now, exactly as I am writing this. I have not altered a single thing to make it look pretty. And I know it doesn’t. But let’s go shelf by shelf. Note that there is one – one – leftover container on the top shelf. This is because as I was warming up the crab legs I was methodically throwing out any leftover that had been there more than one week. Mark and Noah are not sensitive to the one-week rule. They can go almost a month before declaring a leftover hazardous to their health. It’s a wonder they’re still alive.  Second shelf – two cartons of eggs from my friend,  Bobbie Cox. Eggs last a really long time in the refrigerator. Many people do not know this. Under that is the cheese drawer. It usually contains deli meat, too, but Noah ate all that.

Last shelf. More eggs. I know. But we’ll eat them. And wine. Wine lasts forever if you buy it by the box. It actually lasts about a day and a half in my refrigerator so freshness is never an issue. And iced tea. Lasts forever. Milk? The carton was there, but after milk is three days overdue, it goes down the drain. Please note the refrigerator door is jammed with condiments. They last a long time.

You might think from this that I throw out food willy nilly. I do not. I hate waste, especially of anything that gave its life to wind up as a leftover in my refrigerator. But I also hate to see a refrigerator so crammed with containers that inevitably something will end up towards the back until it begins emitting an odor. Just as everything else in life, refrigerators must be managed.

Now here’s the best tip of the day, I promise. When something does manage to go south and I can’t flush it down the disposal, I freeze it. This works well with moldy cheese in particular. Then when trash day comes – mine is Thursday – just throw out the frozen stuff. It will not thaw before the garbageman gets here.

Five food memories with Mark

Ya’ll, Mark and I are celebrating our 20th anniversary today and I can tell you without equivocation that the basis of our extremely happy marriage has to do with food. We are like the French. As we are finishing one meal we are thinking about the next. So I thought tonight that I would tell you about five food memories with Mark. I was going to give you the Top Five, but quite frankly we have eaten our way from one  end of the country to the other and I couldn’t pick out the absolute best. They’ve all been good. But many of our food memories began in Reno as did our marriage. So here we go.

1. Caviar. We are living in Reno and there is a seafood purveyor called Blue Bounty. I am the features editor at the Reno Gazette-Journal and I am called on to taste caviar as part of my job at Blue Bounty. Yes! I bring some home, and prepare it in the traditional manner with diced egg, diced red onion and toast points. Mark and I sit on the floor in our den with our caviar feast on the coffee table. We drink champagne. I need go no further.

2. Chicken Diane. Paul Prudhomme was a pretty big dog back in the late 1980s in every sense of the word. The man had to cook sitting on a stool because he was so large. We almost followed in his footsteps when we found Chicken Diane. It has a stick and a half of butter in it for two people. Mark would come home from work about 7 p.m. and I would start making Chicken Diane. He would sit on the daybed in the kitchen alcove and we would discuss the day’s events while I made this outrageously fattening dish. We were newly married and I had just gotten over the fact that I would never have to date again.  We ate Chicken Diane and practically expanded as we sat there. Here’s the recipe. It’s worth it.

3. Louie’s Basque Corner. The Basques in Reno are a huge influence on the food. Louie’s was the best practitioner. We went to Louie’s shortly after I moved to Reno and we were both captivated by both the food and the crowd. We sat in the bar with miners and cowboys, sipping Picon Punch. It is very refreshing and extremely potent. We needed that huge steak loaded with garlic to get us to the point where we could drive home.

4. Mustard Chicken. When I moved to Reno to marry Mark it was the first time I had been without a job in decades. I spent inordinate amounts of time cooking because I had nothing else to do. But a happy result of that is Mustard Chicken, a recipe I got out of a bed and breakfast cookbook I took out at the library. It is by far Mark’s favorite meal and the one he asks for every year on his birthday. It is ridiculously simple and like all great Southern recipes only has three ingredients not counting the chicken.

5. Crab legs with butter. Back to Blue Bounty. You would think a land-locked state like Nevada would come up short in the seafood department but you have to remember that it’s only four hours from San Francisco. Fresh seafood was trucked in daily and crab legs were a steal. When you look at them you think they are enormous and ungainly and how in the world would you cook them. Just remember, they’re already cooked! You just heat them up in the oven or on a grill. Melt some butter. Dig in. I am here to tell you that there’s nothing as sexy as extracting that crab meat, dipping it in melted butter and easing it into your mouth. It leads to things. If you know what I mean. And I think you do.

No manners

“Damn, that was good. You’ve still got butter on your lips.” This from Mark who just walked into the office after polishing off a cluster of King Crab legs.

Mark and I were at the Publix today and they had King Crab legs on sale. So I brought them home. Ya’ll, this is the easiest thing to do. When you see crab in the seafood case at the grocery store, it’s already cooked. All you have to do is heat it up and eat it.  We just stuck the crab legs on a cookie sheet, put them in the oven (350 for about 15 minutes), melted some butter and got out the kitchen shears.

Now here’s something worth remembering. Those crab claw cracker things? Forget about them. You just need a good pair of kitchen shears. Cut through the shell, pull out the meat and dip it in the butter (obviously, no substitutions). One of the great things about being married to your best friend is that manners can go out the window at any second. We ate them off the cookie sheet like mongrel dogs. We didn’t even use napkins. We just kept rinsing our hands off in the kitchen sink.

I spent $20 for more than two pounds of crab legs. We’d have paid twice that much in a restaurant. And we didn’t have to contend with an annoying waiter named Dwayne who kept asking us if we wanted dessert. No, we did not. Not in the least.

I Feel Like An Exoskeleton For Supper

The other night Mark out of the blue said: “I feel like an exoskeleton for supper.” It’s not every day you hear something like that. And it brought to mind the absolute best “thing you’d never want to have happen to you involving your future mother-in-law” story ever. My mother and father were courting back in the late 1940s when my grandfather on my dad’s side suggested a road trip from Jacksonville, Illinois, to Maine. Think about that. Hours and hours in the car with your future in-laws. On your best behavior 24/7 for at least two weeks. So, off go my mom and dad and his mom and dad to Maine. Bad enough. But it gets worse. They finally get to Maine and stop at a lobster dock. My dad and granddaddy decide to walk down to the boats to chat up the lobstermen for a minute, leaving my mother and Mrs. Chapin in the car. FOR FOUR HOURS. No cellphone to call, no texting, “Where the hell are you?”

I asked my mom once why she didn’t get out of the car, stomp down to the docks and bring those boys back to the car. She was a very assertive woman in the best possible way but she just didn’t want to cross Mrs. Chapin, not an assertive woman, so early in the game. My mother had quite an aversion to lobsters for most of her life. She said eating one was like “fighting for your food.”

Which brings me to exoskeleton dinner night. We went over to the Publix (the world’s best grocery store) in Cool Springs to scope out the exoskeletons. They had some live lobsters, but I’d just seen Julie and Julia and I just couldn’t go there. I remember cooking a lobster once and I really did hear it scratching at the top of the pot. From the inside. So, instead, we opted for some king crab legs that were already cooked and detached from anything that might stare at you mournfully. If any of you are intimidated by crab legs, just stop it right now. They couldn’t be easier. As I said, they are already cooked (they always are) and all you need to do is put them in the oven at 350 degrees for about 10 minutes to warm them up. I sometimes stick them on the grill. Then the fun begins. Get some kitchen scissors (I hate Williams Sonoma because everything is ridiculously expensive but the best kitchen scissors I ever got came from there).

Use the scissors to cut through the exoskeleton. You might be tempted to use the kind of cracker you use for lobster claws, but they don’t work. The shell is too soft.

And then the good part! You melt a stick of butter in a small saucepan. Now, don’t attempt to serve this all fancy, with china and a tablecloth. No, no, no. You put the crab legs on the counter in the pan you heated them up in. You put the pot of melted butter on the counter. You count out about 10 paper towels each and go to town.  Do “the hunch” so you don’t drip butter all over your shirt.

We don’t do this very often. It’s a cholesterol fiesta. But it’s sooooo good. A few hours later, I was sitting in bed watching Giada or Paula or somebody and I could still faintly feel the film of butter around my mouth. I savored it. What more could you want from a meal?