EPITOMIC

You could live a long lifetime without ever again encountering a line like this in a news story:

The health department does not consider a person’s shoe or boot a proper instrument to use in food preparation, senior public health sanitarian John Stoughton said Tuesday.

You of course can read the whole thing, but this is the comedy gold right here.

LIFE’S PECULIAR LITTLE MILESTONES

So help me, I think I like tea more than coffee. This is a change.

THIS PLACE WRITES ITS OWN HUMOR

Wisconsin. Land of cheese. You’d think that, if we sprinkled anything other than salt on our popcorn, it’d be powdered cheese. And there is plenty of that at our state’s movie theaters. But then again, there’s another popular popcorn topping around here. It may be a little more obscure, but really, it makes perfect sense.

THESE ARE MY SALAD DAYS

It’s been quite a while since I’ve heard of a good salad dressing scandal, but here’s one:

Two suburban businessmen who partnered to buy about 1.6 million bottles of salad dressing that were about to expire in 2003 were indicted on federal charges for allegedly relabeling the expiration dates and selling the dressing to unsuspecting wholesale distributors and discount retail stores, which then sold the products to consumers, according to the U.S. Attorney’s office.

Despicable. But here’s what makes me scratch my head:

All of the bottles were originally labeled with “sell by” dates ranging between January and June 2003, but those labels were covered with bogus extended expiration dates of either May 25, 2004, or July 25, 2004, the release said. Anyone with these bottles of salad dressing is urged to contact the FDA at 800-521-5782.

Or just clean your flippin’ refrigerator once in a while. Sheesh. Even in my bachelor days I didn’t have food that antiquated in my fridge. What difference does it make if your salad dressing expired two years ago or three years ago?

THE NEVER-ENDING MENU

I spent a while trying to read The Cheesecake Factory’s menu today. I’d always heard of its wonder, how whatever it is you want, they probably have it or something close to it. And clearly, they’re doing something right; the restaurant in Milwaukee is always busy and there’s usually a line going out the door.

You’ve got to figure the food is decent if people are willing to stand outside in Milwaukee in the dead of winter for it.

I don’t think, however, that we’ll be visiting there any time soon. First of all, I doubt I can afford four meals there right now. Second of all, while the menu is wonderful, I cannot even fathom how long it would take us all to figure out what we wanted. If we got there early for lunch, we might have it all figured out in time for a late dinner.

You can’t really blame The Cheesecake Factory for its Everlasting Gobstopper of a menu. There’s a certain value in throwing out a broad net. If nothing else, it makes you a good last resort for indecisive groups:”Let’s just go to The Cheesecake Factory; if you can’t find something you want there, you’re probably not hungry anyway.”

The real problem, though, is lurking in the shadows. How do you even start to choose when you can choose from anything? If there’s been a theme to my academic and spiritual life, that’s it. Life is a menu, and the waiter wants your order, so decide.

When I was in high school, I couldn’t figure out which way to go with my life. I knew I was bound for college and not the military or the job market, but that’s where the clarity ended. So I used to ask people what they thought I should do with my life. And I always got the same answer, more or less: “You should do whatever you want to do. If you put your mind to it, you can do anything!”

I go looking for advice, I get the Cliffs Notes version of “Up With People.” Thanks. I knew I could do whatever I wanted; the problem was, I didn’t know what I wanted. I wasn’t looking for someone to make the decision for me; I just wanted some opinions. Maybe somebody saw something in me that I hadn’t yet seen in myself. That’s what I wanted to know.

Nobody can make that sort of decision for you, any more than somebody can tell you what you want for dinner. And I was fortunate in that my parents would’ve been just as happy with me if I’d become a plumber as they were that I became a pastor. So long as I really wanted to be a plumber, that is.

But again: How do you choose when you can choose from anything?

Choice is good, but too much choice can be paralyzing. Too much choice leads to that downward spiral of analysis, overanalysis, information fatigue, and resignation. First you lose your desire to choose; then you lose your ability to choose; finally, you lose the possibility of choice and things are just chosen for you. Instead of engaging your life, your career, your family, or whatever, you wind up just letting things happen to you. At least that way, you don’t have to make a choice. But you never realize that you don’t get to make a choice, either.

In our post-modernist times (assuming we still live in them), ruling out possible choices has become a lost art. Nobody wants to close the door on anything. We don’t understand the reality of the opportunity cost involved in making decisions: If you pick the Southwest Pizza Fingers for your entree, you give up the chance to have the Cajun Stir-Fried Meatballs; if you spend four years of college studying video-game design, you won’t learn much about Keats or Wittgenstein or how to grow dahlias in a greenhouse. And vice versa, of course. You may hate this reality, but you can’t get around it.

Not that we don’t try to get around it, of course. Some people are like me: they look at the menu and try to figure out what gives them the most. The most what? Doesn’t matter! I just want muchness. Others will try to string four or five side dishes together into a meal of some sort, even though they wind up without a theme or a central defining work. Still more will simply refuse to decide in the hopes that later on they can go somewhere else where the possiblities are more enticing. (These last are the ones who wind up on the couch late at night, eating Raisin Bran straight from the box, deeply peeved that they never got their dinner.)

Blessed, however, is the one who can find one good thing–and then chooses it. They’re like the one person at every table who gets what everybody else wishes they had ordered. Bill Simmons has noted this phenomenon with regards to the reuben sandwich: you never think of ordering it yourself, but when it comes to the table, you always wish you had.

Sometimes we don’t make choices because they’re too obvious. Sometimes we don’t choose certain things because we feel they limit us too much. Sometimes we turn our back on some life choices because we feel like what we really want isn’t good enough for us; we should want more, even if we really don’t want more.

I read in a book once (I think it was this one) about a TV talk show where a diet expert put a lavish buffet out in front of the host and asked him to close his eyes, pick the one food that would satisfy him the most, and then eat it. The host was allowed as much time as he needed to make his choice. He closed his eyes for a couple minutes, then walked over to the buffet and made himself a roast-beef sandwich with mustard and mayo. The diet expert asked him if he really wanted more food, or if he was satisfied with what he had chosen. The host admitted that he was.

This doesn’t just work with food, although it does work beautifully with the buffet/overindulgence problem. It actually works with any choice you have to make, or at least it always has for me. When I couldn’t decide whether I was going to seminary or going after a PhD, I closed my eyes and wondered if I’d regret not making one choice more than I’d regret not making the other. I found that I would. That’s how I wound up at seminary–not because some flaming plant started talking to me, not because some giant fish puked me up at the corner of Como and Hendon in St. Paul, but because I knew if I didn’t try seminary first, I’d always wonder what life would have been like if I had. I could not see myself wondering the same thing about getting a PhD. (True to form, I’ve pretty much concluded now that I don’t really want one.)

Clarity does not come from looking at all possible choices equally. Satisfaction doesn’t come from keeping your options open as long as possible. Clarity and satisfaction come from realizing that the most important thing about any choice you make is that it has to be yours. Nobody else is going to eat your dinner. Nobody else is going to make your car payment for the next five years. Nobody else is going to be married to your spouse (at least not at the same time you are).

Nobody else is going to live your life for you. There are people who will be glad to make decisions for you–but they never have your best interest at heart.

And now, after all this time, I realize why nobody could or would answer my question for me back in high school. They did see something in me that I never saw in myself: They saw that I’d already made my decision; I just didn’t realize it yet. There’s more to that story, of course.

(Oh, and if you must know: Jamaican Black Pepper Shrimp.)

YOU’RE WELCOME

SALSA VERDE DE HASTYMAN

1.25 lbs tomatillos, peeled, rinsed and quartered
3 Anaheim peppers, stemmed, seeded, and coarsely chopped
10-12 sprigs cilantro, coarsely chopped
0.5 cup water
0.25 cup red onion, minced and rinsed under running water
Juice of one lime
0.5 teaspoon kosher salt

Put the tomatillos, peppers, and cilantro in the carafe of a blender. Add the water. Buzz it, occasionally pausing to stir it down, until it looks slushy. Pour into a dish; stir in the onion, lime juice, and salt. Grab the chips.

FLAVORFUL WRITING

It’s been a while since I posted a plain old link, but here’s one to a story about Bill Penzey, founder of Penzeys Spices. I always like to see the Penzeys catalog in the mailbox, even though there’s usually only one or two new products in it. It’s beautifully photographed.

I like the spices from Penzeys. Especially the Adobo Seasoning and the Old English Prime Rib Rub, the former of which finds its way into almost everything I cook and the latter of which has amplified my enjoyment of roast beef about 300%.

BREAD AND CIRCUS

I made bread today.

Stunning news, right? “Local fat man enters kitchen, but first, some breaking news: Sun disappears behind western horizon; experts expect it to reappear in the east in approximately fourteen hours.”

Can I help it that I just can’t stomach that putrid supermarket bread/big bag of slightly crumbly air anymore? Especially at $3 a loaf?

This was my third attempt at baking bread in the past year or so. The first, right after Serena was born, yielded two big, succulent loaves of whole-wheat bread which was delicious, but completely unsliceable. The second was a cornmeal-bread recipe which might have been good, except it had cornmeal in it. If I wanted a mouthful of sand, I’d dig around under the big tree in the back yard. It took us three weeks to eat two loaves of the stuff.

Today was simple white bread. I needed exactly as much bread flour as I had left, which was the first and last optimistic sign. I finished kneading the dough and set it on the stove to rise at exactly the same moment Serena decided she needed to crawl on the kitchen floor. Which neither I nor her mother was willing to let her do, of course, since the floor had flour all over it.

So why not sweep and mop the floor right away, you ask? Because the bread still had to be shaped into loaves, a task which requires the application of yet more flour to the kitchen table and thus the application of yet more flour to the floor. Because no matter how careful you are, a flour particle weighs about as much as a hydrogen atom and has the same tendiencies towards ubiquity and chaos. Besides, Serena would have crawled on the floor for about ten seconds, then she would have been bored with the kitchen. So we opted to wait.

This is when the old, Adamic “forbidden fruit” tendency kicked in. Honestly, it amazes there are people out there who refuse to believe in original sin when the evidence in favor of its existence is so overwhelming.

So, for the next ninety minutes, we got to try to keep a cantankerous, curious fourteen-month-old with destructive tendencies out of a kitchen which represented, for her, the promised land, except Moses probably didn’t want to cross the Jordan as badly as Serena wanted to crawl amidst the flour puffs and dough bits on the kitchen floor.

Did I mention that my wife is due to give birth in the next seven days? Take it from me–don’t make bread in the same house as a pregnant woman who’s beyond the thirty-eighth week. In fact, don’t make noise in the same house as a pregnant woman who’s beyond the thirty-eighth week. Either way, it can only end badly.

The bread rose too much, because I couldn’t put it into the oven until the floor dried. It’s got a dense, doughy texture and a lightly sour flavor. In other words, it was worth it. Every last whine from the (currently) shortest person in the house, every rushed attempt to corral said short person, every moment of recrimination from a wife who certainly today wished that her husband had a more normal hobby.

That isn’t just my opinion. Serena couldn’t get the stuff into her mouth fast enough. I wonder if she, too, thought the bread worth the sacrifice.

Regardless, I think I’ll try making bread in the basement next time the urge strikes.

A TYPICAL POINTLESS TBP UPDATE

They still make TaB. And apparently ‘TaB’ is the correct way to spell the soft drink which preceded Diet Coke by about 20 years.

Of course, I’ve known about TaB’s existence for a while. I once had a parishioner who was a keeper of the TaB torch and, since her husband owned a convenience store, she was able to have a more-or-less unending supply of the stuff. I mostly recalled TaB as one of those products I used to remember seeing all the time. Eventually my curiosity got the better of me and I had to try it.

I think it tastes a lot more like Coke than Diet Coke does.

At one time I held out great hopes that TaB would fill a gap in my household; namely, that of being a soda which I could tolerate but my soda-crazed wife wouldn’t touch. And, indeed, the first time I brought home a 12-pack, she didn’t drink a one. But then all the other soda was gone, and my sinister plan was foiled.

So I guess it’s back to square one. Too bad that Jones Soda is all sold out of their Green Bean Casserole soda from Thanksgiving.

HIGH CONCEPT LISTING, AGAIN

Or, if you prefer, “I’m wide awake and hungry but the rest of my family is asleep, so here we go.”

Items on Hometown Favorites.com’s “Boy, They Were Good, But . . .” list of discontinued grocery products whose non-production somehow impoverishes my life:

• Banana Beichs
• Brach’s Watermelon Sparkles
• Chex Morning Mix (I used to keep this in my desk, for those mornings when skipping breakfast seemed like a good idea at home, but lost its luster by the time I got to work)
• Chocolite Candy Bar (I’m pretty bitter about this one, too)
• General Mills Buck Wheats Cereal
• Hi-C Peach (yes, I’m still bitter)
• Hostess Chocobliss (grrr . . .)
• Hostess Pudding Pies
• Kelloggs Apple Raisin Crisp (only my favorite breakfast cereal ever)
• Kraft Bacon & Tomato Dressing
• Lifesavers - Tangerine
• Lipton Noodles ‘n Sauce Romanoff (in college, when I felt too flush for ramen noodles, this is what I ate)
• Marathon Bar
• Nice Mice Candy
• Original New York Seltzer
• Pasta Roni Romanoff (I sense an anti-Romanoff conspiracy . . . the Communists have taken over our noodle-makers, it would appear)
• Pepsin Gum
• Regal Crown Sours (especially the cherry ones . . . man, I’m getting angry)
• Seven-Up Gold Soda (like most of the items on this list, I guess I was the only person that liked it)
• Slice Lemon/Lime Soda (note to Pepsi: I may never forgive you for this)
• Willy Wonka Skrunch Bar (IT’S AN OUTRAGE!!!!)