Meatball Sandwich a la Gary's Submarine

Gary's Submarine was a dive I discovered back in high school. My favorite sandwich of theirs was a pepperoni sub on a hard roll, which they'd steam before adding the fresh veggies. They did a mean meatball sub, too.



The window of Gary's had a cartoon picture of a yellow submarine being attacked by a giant squid with the owner's caricature in the glass bubble. They served beer, too, and were shockingly lax about ID.

A Subway went in two blocks away somewhere in the late 80's and Gary's went the way of the Red October.



So here's my little tribute to the awesome little sub shop. I hacked six or eight inches off a baguette and split it most of the way. Then some fresh red onions (I remember Gary's used a deli slicer to get the red onion paper thin, I just did my best with a kitchen knife). Then three meatballs worked into it, a drizzle of Marinara, some provolone and into the microwave for thirty seconds (I'd already heated the meatballs in the 'wave, I didn't want the bread to get soggy). Then with the fresh veggies, in this case some spring mix, salt & pepper, parmesan.



This sandwich was so good, I think I could have done the whole baguette as one giant 20" sandwich.

Stockathon

I'm making stock this weekend while I work on a freelance project.

The steam from the pot helps add some humidity to the winter air. It warms the kitchen and makes the house smell good. And once everything's in the pot, it doesn't need much looking after. It just needs to reduce, concentrate flavors, extract the yum and gelatin and whatnot out of the raw materials. The effect is so pleasant, I've moved my computer upstairs for the weekend.



This stock is a pork stock, I'm planning a batch of Papa Legba's Black Bean Soup for it. On its tail is going to be a beef oxtail stock which will likely end up in some sort of homemade noodle soup.



For the pork stock, I had three smoked ham hocks and a thing of smoked neck bones, which I covered with water in my jumbo stock pot (I think it's a 4 gallon pot). I added some whole peppercorns, not sure how much, just kind of guess at it. A little salt, but not much because this is getting concentrated down and the smoked pork is already pretty salty.



To this I added a bunch of cilantro, some carrots, two sautéed onions, about thirty cloves of garlic (the whole bulb, really, minus the papery stuff), some flaked parsley, a quartered onion, five whole cloves, some thyme and rubbed sage.



I turned off the simmer when I went to bed, about six hours worth of reduction. Then I added about six quarts of water this morning and tossed in three ribs of celery and a bunch of fresh parsley. These latter ingredients I'd just picked up at the store or they'd have been in there last night.

What a Commute

Over two hours to get to work, over an hour to get back home. I could have just about walked it that fast.

The morning drive was at least comprehensible. It started snowing around 6:00 am, so there wasn't a chance for plows to get ahead of it. I saw several accidents along the way, and I'm pretty sure some of the sitting still I did on the Interstate was due to accidents that were cleared before I got to them.



And even once the traffic thinned out on 435 past Roe, visibility was maybe a quarter mile, so I couldn't go more than maybe 25-30 mph without totally outdriving my possible stopping distance.



Wornall was better suited to skiing than driving, too.



So when I walk in at 9:30, I'm teased with 'Decided to come to work today?' If I'd known what the drive was going to be like, I don't think I would have.

Chapter 7 Health Insurance

As my latest favorite crime novel detective* puts it, They all count or none of them do.

I'm not one for the 'single payer,' aka 'socialized medicine' solution to our little insurance quandary.

As bad as HMOs can be, and I've dealt with some turkeys in that area, none of them are an Amtrak or a Post Office.

We're about to swear in a President some adults I know have a sort of Santa Claus-style faith in with regard to health care. Including at least one person with a PhD, which is to say these friends are not idiots even if they're deluded about both the effectiveness of the Federal Government and the actual difference between a Republocrat and a Depublican in the White House.

The same fairy dust George Bush didn't have to stop terrorists and a global financial crisis, Obama doesn't have either. Sorry, that's the breaks.

But this wasn't prompted by the NPR love-bombing of the incoming administration, which I take as par for the course. Along with their fundraising begathons, this is just something that comes with the territory.

It was prompted by a conversation with yet another friend who's only real recourse for medical bills is bankruptcy court.

One friend owes around $100,000 to a county hospital that kept him alive, if barely, with congestive heart failure. He's fully disabled, including a disability to pay a six-figure hospital bill on the pittance he gets for being disabled. Since his condition is not reversible, he'll either die with bill collectors hounding him, or he'll go Chapter 7, the only legal and effective way to make them fuck off.

Another owes a mere twenty grand. But being relatively young and not established in a career, that's something like a year's wages. And these bills come from a congenital condition that is only going to add to the bill pile. The first friend I mentioned could probably declare bankruptcy and live as long as he's likely to with 10-15% heart function without going back into the hole again. The latter friend could 'go out' as the saying goes and likely be at least as deeply in debt before seven years is up.

And do we really want our bankruptcy courts to be health insurance of last resort?

Here's my idea, and it beats a 'single payer' system up one side and down the other. Treat catastrophic health insurance the way we treat liability auto insurance. If you want to participate in the system, you have to buy insurance. No groups, sorry all you UAW members, but your boss cannot be the source of seemingly 'free' insurance anymore. I'm getting screwed pretty hard in this proposal, but bear with me.

This insurance will pay nothing for ordinary checkups or routine followups with specialists. It won't pay for maintenance meds or for cutting edge treatments. It will pay your $54,000 hospital bill when you shockingly drop dead mowing your Mom's lawn at 32. It will cover your annual treadmill if you have an enlarged aorta due to a fluke of genetics. It will cover your congestive heart failure even if that was caused by a few too many rounds of Old Overholt back when you worked construction.

When I say 'participate in the system,' I mean if you want to work or buy stuff. A good way, overall, would be to tie this insurance to a driver's license, though there are some places you can rely on mass transit. If you don't want a handful of New Yorkers to be able to opt out of paying and still receive benefits, I guess you could extend it to state ID's as well. Basically, if you want to be able to get a job, even a menial job, you'd have to prove you had minimal health insurance.

People with means can still buy Cadillac coverage if they like. Such coverage often isn't so much 'insurance' as a payment plan, but whatever. The main thing is to pool the risk of the least common denominator from the biggest threats so someone doesn't start out life permanently behind or end life with impossible burdens.

*Harry (short for Hieronymous) Bosch, central character to a whole slew of Michael Connelly police procedurals/mysteries. I've been listening to a few on my commute, and Connelly isn't just a genre fiction hack: he can write. Up there with Ridley Pearson, Dennis Lehane and Peter Robinson. Check him out.

That's Some Watchmaker

The blind watchmaker argument is one of the strongest the Intelligent Design movement makes. Don't bother telling me that's 'Creationism masquerading as science.'*

But dig it: I get the Oxford 'Fact of the Day' in my email every day and today it was something really interesting. Ever hear of the Honey Guide? Me either, and I've dabbled in beekeeping. It's a bird that likes to eat bee larvae and beeswax. When it finds a hive, it notifies the first Honey Badger it can find, another creature that's news to me. If it can't find a badger, it finds people.

For real. The Oxford article concerned symbiosis, but symbiosis is one of those things like blood clotting that is so complex it seems to require something in the way of an architect. Or maybe I underestimate the power of the random.

My links are Wiki, not Oxford. I don't subscribe to Oxford's stuff, which is best described as pricey but good. I subscribed to the OED Onlne a few years back when I was reading Thomas Pynchon's magnum opus, Mason & Dixon. Unless you have the kind of vocabulary that can make short work of the New York Times Friday crossword puzzle in ink plus a PhD in American History, I doubt if that book is much fun without an OED.

*Lighten up, for crying out loud. Saying life seems more like something designed than something that just happened is not necessarily saying it went down verbatim according to Genesis. The Hindus, the Budhists, Sikhs, etc., all have their own versions of the mystical origin, and any of them could use this argument as easily as a Christian, Jew or Muslim.

Italian Meatballs & Butternut Squash

I forgot how good butternut squash is.



Basically, I split it, scooped out the strings & seeds (saving the seeds to roast like I do pumpkin seeds later, though there's not many of them), and put them skin down in the roasting pan.





I brushed olive oil on, then seasoned with rubbed sage, ground thyme, salt and freshly ground black pepper.



I put three baking potatoes in the pan, too, on a bed of rock salt and stuck the whole mess in a 400ºF oven for an hour.



For the meatballs, I'll go more 'recipe' mode here:

1.18 lbs Hot Italian Sausage
3.44 ground beef (very lean, 97/3)
3 eggs
1 onion, finely diced
1/2 cup Parmesan
1 tbsp. minced garlic
1/4 cup flaked parsley
1/4 cup Scimeca's Marinara
salt & freshly ground black pepper

Once I got everything all mushed up, I used a 1/4 cup measure to scoop up consistently sized balls, dredged them in flour and browned them in olive oil. I crowded the pan, which you shouldn't do, but I had a lot of meatballs to brown. Ended up using two skillets and both my casserole dishes to do it. If my roasting pan wasn't already occupied with squash and potatoes, maybe I could have fit them all in that.



The taters weren't quite done at an hour, so I put the roasting pan on the bottom rack, reduced the oven to 375ºF and put the browned meatballs in to bake for 30 minutes.




I served it as meatballs by themselves, baked potatoes and butternut squash. The meatballs are good, but would be better with a sauce. Either a red sauce or Alfredo or even a pesto. And pasta. Em wanted baked potatoes, and I figured one pure starch was enough for a spread, but the leftover meatballs, and they are legion, will probably get married to rigatoni and some sort of pasta sauce.



That butternut squash, though. I'm fixing to go on a binge with that winter squash.

Doublewide

Saw this on the way back from taking Mo to the doctor.

I noticed a lot of wave to the roof line, where gutters might one day be, and I thought, how insubstantial can a structure get?



I know it's cheap, and I'd be in one for that very reason if I lived someplace where tornadoes are as rare as earthquakes are in Kansas. But this thing is so flimsy, it's hard to picture how it gets to its destination.

What's Up, Doc?

Mo had her annual follow up with her developmental pediatrician today. I burned a vacation day to take her, which also let me pick the girls up after school, something I haven't been able to do since getting traduced out of my job a couple years ago. Back then, I lived and worked about five minutes from the girls' schools and I had a flexible schedule to boot, so as long as I made up the time and made sure my boss new what I was up to, I could take off early on nights I had my kids.

But I work for a much smaller outfit now, and that necessarily means less flexibility on hours. Plus, I work a long way from home & school, so the logistics are totally different. The main effect is I don't have quite as much flexibility in what I make for dinner: getting the girls two hours later means supper needs to be quick. No big, I've found workarounds, but pizza from scratch is strictly a weekend thing these days.



So with a day off, and with me having two nights this week because it's not my weekend coming up, having the day off was really nice.

Anyway, Mo had fun playing with Dr. K's Legos and we discussed various big picture concerns, then I took Mo to school and went home and absolutely wasted time until it was time to pick them up from school. One of the things I wasted time on was figuring out what to have for dinner since I had more time to cook. Several ideas were floated, such as a lamb roast with rosemary, but Price Chopper turned out not to have any lamb except for some chops. I'd picked Mo up from school and hit the store before picking Em up from Hand Chimes.



I ended up settling on Italian Meatballs. But that's more of a Grub post, so I'll put a pin in that for the moment.

Basketball & Dancing

Em's dance thing was tonight, between basketball games. The first game was the girls' game, and the dancing came between that and the Varsity boys' game.





I'd forgotten I actually like watching basketball, at least 'real' basketball. Which is almost exclusively the feminine version. The game Naismith invented, not too far from where I live, was a game for men, but these men were about the size of modern high school chicks.



I could probably take the NBA seriously if they raised the hoop to 15 feet and doubled the size of the court. Because without that, the 'basketball' of the NBA is to basketball what the WWF is to Greco-Roman wresting. It looks the same (sort of) at first glance, but one is a sport and the other is just a show.





Anyway, the home team won handily, by like ten points (I enjoyed the game but I'm hazy on the final score, 52 to 40 or something like that). It was fun to see actual teamwork. There was a star, a chick who's name seemed to come up every time the home team scored. But they passed that ball like it was a hot potato.





The other team also had a star, but that girl was trying to be all five players at once. She was their best player, but she was also their most aggressive, and she was an easy foul to draw. While she was still in the game, they could keep within five points or so, but when she fouled out they just collapsed.





Despite the chaos, Mo did a great job of sitting for the game and the cheerleading. The band and all that noise. It was sensory overload for me, even, and she did great.


Dance from Chixulub on Vimeo.

The majority of the girls dancing here are the high school drill team members. Em and a handful of others went to a two-hour clinic with them last weekend and then they performed tonight. Em was frustrated that she had trouble keeping in sync, but it's a lot to pack into two hours, and the rest of the squad have been doing this routine for awhile.





I got into the photography thing, trying to get those shots my camera was never intended to get. This was a better lit field-house than some, but it was still a battle. I tried to get a shot of this cheerleader tumbling like a bullet the length of the gym, but even at 1600 ISO and F2.6, she blurred. Shot's as noisy as a high school basketball game, too.



I'm pretty sure I never moved that fast, not on my best day. I couldn't move that fast for free beer. I probably couldn't get ejected from a car that fast.

Carnitas Según lo Previsto

This is more like it. The Carnitas recipe at Simply Recipes is more or less what I did. Except, as I said in my last post, I burned the first batch to a crisp and reused the liquid from the crock pot for the replacement pork roast.



The recipe (not entirely as presented at Simply Recipes, this is what I actually did):

1 pork roast (sirloin tip)
1 14.5oz can Ro-Tel tomatoes, undrained
1 16 oz. can diced tomatoes
1/3 cup Mrs. Renfro's Habanero Salsa
Juice of 1 lemon
Juice of 1 lime
1 pint chicken broth (to finish covering meat)

The recipe called for 2 cups of salsa, but the only salsa I had in the house was the Mrs. Renfro's and I wanted this to be something I might con Em into trying. Mrs. Renfro's Habanero has a great flavor, best salsa on earth in my entirely un-humble opinion, but it does pack some heat. Not as much as the name implies, but it's pretty intense.

And Em thinks black pepper is hot and spicy.



So I used just a touch of Mrs. R to give it flavor, and diluted the heat of the Ro-Tel with just plain diced tomatoes. Plus, the roast is whole while it cooks in this stuff, so there's a limit to the infiltration of capsicum, I think. Hope. We'll see if Em goes into full meltdown when she tries it.*

Combine all this stuff in your slow cooker and let it simmer on low forever. I put this in last night after I ruined the first batch and let it go until I got home from work this evening. The roast was so tender by then it was impossible to transfer whole to the roasting pan. If you looked at it cross-eyed, it came apart.



To 'pull' the pork, I just kind of mashed at it with a ladle and it came apart in gloriously tender strings.

20 minutes on 400 to remove a bit of moisture and caramelize it and you're good to go. Goes excellently, by the way, with Chile Verde. Next time I make that dish, all the meat that goes in it will get this treatment.

*Postscript:



Mo ate the Carnitas like she'd just got out of a Turkish prison. Em liked it at first, but after awhile decided it was too dry. I suggested she try some ranch dressing, since I knew she wouldn't use salsa or the Chile Verde that was also on the table, which was what I was combining in my Carnitas wrap.

She decided the ranch dressing was too tangy, then, and really she didn't eat all that much. When we got back from her dancing, she claimed to be starving and fixed herself a sandwich. She's officially a teenager today, and I guess officially a high maintenance one. at that.

Carnitas Quemado

Well, I tried to make Carnitas according to Simply Recipes formula. I put the pork roast in the crock pot around the time I started my Chile Verde and it took a lot longer for the pork to get tender than I anticipated.

I was pretty shagged out from the weekend's festivities, too, and it was late when I finally pulled the pork and put it in the roasting pan. When the oven was up to 400ºF, I put the pan in and came down to my den to wrap up my blogging activities with an eye to going to bed.

When I woke up, the house smelled of burning meat. You're supposed to roast it at 400º for 15 to 20 minutes, not an hour and a half.

The roasts I used today had come in a three-pack, so I threw the third into the crock pot, which still had the tomato based liquid the meat slow cooks in. I figured it could take its time finishing, set the cooker on low and go to bed.



What was in the roasting pan, I wouldn't even give to Barley. He looked interested, but as far as I know he doesn't need an activated charcoal treatment.

Chile Verde

This started with a recipe search for something else, the chocolate fondue that didn't work.

But I came on this Chile Verde at 'Simply Recipes,' along with a Carnitas recipe at a time when I had a couple of pork roasts on hand.



All the 'verde' stuff I've ever worked with has come from a can. But if felt like time to branch out. This isn't exactly their recipe, I used more garlic, added the citrus (and the sugar it ended up requiring because of the citrus), but other than that it's the same idea.



So:

1-1/2 lbs tomatillos
12 cloves garlic, peeled
2 jalapeños (skin & seeds removed)
2 Anaheim peppers (skin & seeds removed)
2 Poblano peppers (skin & seeds also removed)
1 bunch cilantro, cleaned & chopped
Pork roast (in this case a sirloin tip roast, 98% fat free) cubed
Juice of a lemon
Juice of a Lime
1/4 cup sugar
Salt & freshly ground black pepper to taste
olive oil
2 yellow onions (actually one really big one)
3 cloves garlic, peeled & chopped
1 tbsp dried oregano powder
2-1/2 cups chicken stock (a quart of 'broth' boiled and reduced to about 2-1/2 cups)
1 clove (recipe called for a 'pinch' of ground cloves; I had whole cloves so I threw one in the chicken stock while it was reducing and fished it out before adding to the chile)

First I cubed the meat. Then I squeezed the lemon and lime juice on it and set it aside to marinate.





The tomatillos and peppers, and the dozen cloves of garlic, I roasted under the broiler for seven minutes. Cut the tomatillos in half and place them cut side down on sprayed foil and go for it. The garlic and peppers needed more time, so I gave it to them while I put the tomatillos in the blender.





The peppers & roasted garlic join the tomatillos in the blender, along with the cilantro.







Meanwhile, the pork gets browned in the olive oil. I included the marinade with the last of the meat and reduced to nothing. Then I sautéed the onions and the 3 cloves more garlic and added that to the mix.



Once it's all combined, simmer it for two to three hours, until the pork is 'fork tender.' The pork in mine never got quite as tender as I wanted, but I think that's a problem with browning stuff. The high heat to brown the meat also cooks it fast and tough. There was plenty of acid from the tomatillos and citrus, so much in fact that I added the sugar after to bring the dish back into balance, but the meat still has quite a bit of tooth to it. If the carnitas I'm making turns out, that's the way to treat the pork for this recipe.