Big Daddy Paul

Some people like to sew. Others enjoy backpacking or tinkering around with dead bodies to find out a cause of death. There are tribes in Africa that chase around rodents in a bizarre hybrid of lunch and soccer. Me? I enjoy celebrating my birthday. Each year, when my birthday comes around, I plan weeklong festivities so that everyone gets a chance to appreciate my fabulousness and drink lots of booze. This year was no different. I went to Las Vegas for my birthday. Amy had a conference there, and instead of dealing with me guilting her about how she abandoned me on my birthday, she invited me to join her. I gladly accepted and here is what I did to treat myself on my day of days:

Amy had an 8 a.m. session at her conference, and instead of bemoaning the early wake up call and the sudden onset of “all-alone-ness,” I went large. I decided that I would treat myself to a breakfast of chicken wings, french fries and beer. I love chicken wings like librarians love comfortable shoes, so watching the world cup soccer match and scarfing down wings and beer was the perfect way to begin my day.

This is Las Vegas?

Fortified with liquid courage from the beer, I headed out to the golf course for a round of golf at a posh Las Vegas resort course. One of the more interesting things about golf is that you get to meet a variety of different of people when you play, and this is especially true in Las Vegas. While there, I played with some New York investment bankers, a 20 year golf phenom who plays for the UNLV golf team, and a couple of toothless Texans whose favorite word seemed to be, “Dangit!”

I finished up at the golf course and rushed home for a quick nap in the room, followed by a massage that Amy set up for me. I have had a recent glut of male masseuses recently, so I was very glad to walk in the massage room to find a woman, even if she appeared to be a long lost relative of the Texas Dangit brothers I met on the course. The massage was pure bliss, save my stress over almost getting an erection when the masseuse spent five minutes rubbing the inside of my thighs. Luckily, I was pretty gassy after eating chicken wings and drinking beer all day, so instead of playing out fantasies of shtooping the masseuse, I focused single-mindedly on not farting. Worked like a charm!

From there, Amy and I had dinner at a outrageously fancy restaurant, Joel Robuchon. Mr. Robuchon was voted chef of the century and has three Michelin, stars, which simply means dude can cook. Our dinner was a ten course food orgy. The highlights for me were a langoustine ravioli with black truffles and foie gras butter, roast lobster and caramelized sea urchin, and duck breast and seared foie gras with cherries and almonds. It’s the kind of food where you can taste how much work went into each dish and I cherished each and every bite.

We even decided to have the restaurant’s sommelier pair glasses of wine with each course of our meal. It was a good deal more expensive to go this route, but the results were fantastic. The wines were chosen to bring out the buttery-ness of a sauce, the soy in the rice, or the richness of a meat. The sommelier used words like “minerality” or “acidity” to describe the pairings, but I was so stuffed and drunk that I could only reflect that the food and wine went together like pigs and blankets, a comment which, like my gas in the massage room, I kept to myself.

One of the best things about the meal was the number of ridiculous choices the restaurant offered. The bread cart had 30 different kinds of bread, all fresh and warm. We each had an appetizer, soup, two entrees, dessert, a choice of 30 cheeses and a meringue cake (with two kinds of ice cream inside for my birthday!) Just when we thought we were done, they brought a confectionary cart around filled with over 30 chocolates, pastries, and pretty much every other high sugar treat in the world. I didn’t need to eat three truffles, a praline candy and an eclair, but, then again, I didn’t need a dozen wings for breakfast either. That’s the joy of my birthday, I got to do it all, and it was one perfect day.

Thanks to my special lady for inviting me to Las Vegas. Amy, I love you dearly!

Those of you tuning in to see if I somehow injured my private parts while making peanut butter will be disappointed, but given the subject matter, I was still able to throw in a good nut joke or two.

I love peanut butter. It is a gooey, crunchy slice of heaven that has a very powerful hold over me. If peanut butter told me the chop up the mailman and stick him in a hefty bag under the house, I would probably do it. I love making Malcolm peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for school because it means I get to lick the knife afterwards. If I got one food that I got to eat for the rest of my life, I would definitely select crunchy, old style peanut butter. (Suck on that, cheese!)

Not surprisingly, I chose peanut butter as one of the foods I would try to make this week. It seemed simple enough, buy peanuts, roast ‘em, shell ‘em, and grind em up. No big deal, right? When I finished, I realized that I was never going to get that the process was long, physically demanding, and that I didn’t save any money either. Add in the fact that the finished product closely resembled dark brown spackle, and you’ll find that I will never, ever make peanut butter again.

Daddy, why are you swearing at the peanuts?

After roasting the peanuts in their shell, I knew I was in trouble. I now had two pounds of peanuts to extricate from their homes, which, on a per unit basis, added up to around 400 peanuts. As fun as taking a delicious roast peanut out of its shell is to eat, doing 400 times feels more like torture. It felt rather like trying to conceive a baby: doing it once is fantastic! Doing it five times in a three day spell for twelve months in a row takes on a more of a chore-like quality. I began to resent the peanut for having a shell at all, talking to the individual nuts scornfully and telling them how sore my arms were getting. After a full hour of shelling while huddling over two different bowls at the kitchen table, I was finally done.

With the first step! I completely forgot that peanuts have skins, and those skins need to come off before they can be ground up. After wasting away for a while individually taking off each peanut skin, I eventually looked on the internet for a better way. Luckily, the internet covers such subjects, and I was quickly spinning the peanuts in a colander with the bottom of the cup in much the same manner as a salad spinner. With little pieces of skins flying everywhere, the kitchen floor soon began to resemble the floor of a dive bar.

Undaunted, I moved to the last phase of the project: the grinding. (Actually, at this point I was very daunted. I wanted to quit, but kept chugging along on the off chance that things might get tasty at the end.) Inspecting the peanuts more closely, I realized that these nuts were not the robust nuts you think of when you dream about peanuts telling you to chop up the mailman. No, these nuts were tiny and shriveled, the Barry Bonds’ nuts of the peanut world. The size of the nuts also carried the unfortunate  circumstance of cooking much quicker than I had thought, so the tiny little nuts were dark brown and smelled a bit on the acrid side. (I’m leaving that one alone!) When I finally got them into the food processor, and added a bit of oil, the resulting mixture was chocolaty-brown and had a mealy texture, a far cry from the soft brown, velvetiness that it should be. That paled in comparison the aftertaste of burnt food that  permeated the batch. I am going to try and feed it to Malcolm to see if he notices, but if he does, the who effort will get thrown away. Sometimes, when you swing for the fences you hit a home run. Other times, you get busted for steroid abuse.

I am sure that I can tweak my approach and get things to turn out better next time. Given the amount of time it would take though and the fact that the organic store brand costs the same, I’ll stick to buying PB in a jar.

This is hard. After preparing for my fiasco Sunday by making some mayonnaise and some granola, I thought I would have a head of steam to get the week started. Boy was I wrong! Processed food has become such a fixture in our lives that trying to get out the matrix is nearly impossible. It’s like saying you want to go the beach, but only if you don’t get any sand in your crack or see big fat guys in speedos. I made some good decisions, but even my focused attack was penetrated by stuff made in some industrial “kitchen” somewhere. If I am going to do this successfully, I am going to have to step up my game.

Like my dreams of a secret rendezvous with Halle Berry, lunch was pretty good until I realized I was cheating. My stay at home dads group meets on Mondays, usually grilling up stuff at a local park. I had to decide what I could make that would be simple and good and came up with BBQ shrimp po-boys. I grilled up the shrimp and then added some lettuce and homemade cajun mayo to the bun and it came out pretty good. I didn’t realize until Amy laughed at me later that I totally screwed the pooch and ate a store-bought bun. Crikey! I also lapsed into a handful or two of potato chips, proving that regular habits die hard, even if you are trying to radically change things for yourself.

Dinner was leftover lamb gyros. On Sunday, (while still eating processed foods) they were super delicious. Having set aside the processed foods on Monday, however, I was unable to enjoy the pita bread, hummus or hot sauce that I so desperately wanted, so I was left with a sorry pile of soggy vegetables and day old meat. Not exactly enjoyable. Amongst the virtues that processed foods bring are excellent delivery systems (like pita bread) and flavor. Dinner was noticeably lacking in each.

This is how I felt after the one good thing that I ate that wasn't cheating

The meal was saved, though, by the coconut gelato I had made a few days before which still rocked the house. Considering how unsatisfying dinner was and my stomach was still grumbling, I ate a lot of it. At the very least, I am going to learn what it is like to constantly be hungry. Maybe I will lose enough weight to draw the attention of a certain Oscar winning actress…

I have been on a rant about fresh, unprocessed foods for a while now, so I decided to put my money where my mouth is. Actually, since it involves food, I am going to put my mouth where my mouth is. (Or is it my stomach?) Either way, I have decided that this week I am going to do my best to live without processed foods. That’s right, no jars, no boxes and certainly nothing that comes out of a tube. If I want to eat it, I have to make it. No exceptions.

Of course, there have to be some exceptions. I don’t have a cow, so I am going to use store bought milk products, and I don’t have the patience to make cheese, so we get a freebie on that as well. I can’t press my own oil, so I will use store bought oil, and I don’t have a mill, so I will allow myself to use flour. Cured meats are just so awesome that no one in their right mind should give them up. (That is actually code for Amy won’t let me hand strands of meat around the house for months at a time.) The toughest issue I have to confront is booze, since I don’t have my own winemaking and beer brewing facilities here. Sure, I could give these up, but that sounds a little to drastic to me. So, I have decided that microbrews and wine are essentially made without a whole of processing, so I’ll still get to get my thang on. Another factor I had to consider is that Amy said she would divorce me if I make her give up wine. I am sure that I will run into difficulties, but will still try and do my best to only make food for us that is fresh and not created for me by some food company.

I am saying the same thing that Jessica Simpson said to Tony Romo when they broke up: "You can kiss these doughnuts goodbye!"

Why am I doing this? There has been a lot of press recently that the reason our country is so unhealthy is because of all the processed foods we eat. To check and see if this is true, I am taking this to a logical extreme. I also have a sneaky suspicion that some of the stuff I am going to make is going to taste better than the stuff I can get at the store. I have no doubt that some of the things I am going to make are going to taste terrible and wind up inedible, but I do that a lot anyways. I might as well have a goal to focus my efforts on. So, beginning today, I am going to live on the farm, even though we are in the middle of Oakland. If nothing else, I will just starve myself because of the lack of anything tasty to eat around here.

Yesterday, I started preparing for the daunting task by making some granola. I figured breakfast was going to be the toughest meal to have to prepare for, with the exception of lunch and possibly dinner. Granola seemed like an easy fix, because it did not involve making 100,00 very small o’s to put in a bowl. The granola was quite easy to make, and the results were outstanding. I put 6 cups of oats, a cup each of almond and pecan pieces, a cup of real maple syrup, 1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon, and 1/2 teaspoon salt in a bowl and mixed it up. I put the mixture onto cookie pans and baked at 300 for 35 minutes or so until things were good and crispy. We had the granola this morning and everyone agreed that it was the best granola they had ever eaten, which sounded good, but had the qualitative impact of saying, “You’re the friendliest Neo-Nazi I have ever met.  I mean, it’s granola after all.

On the flip side, I made some mayonnaise that looked and tasted like machine lubricant. I will have to redo tomorrow. It is going to be a long week!