Burnt Ends of Newton

September 14, 2006

The best thing about moving into a house just down the street from Blue Ribbon BBQ in Newton is, well, just that. I will now relate an experience that completely redeemed this cold, rainy afternoon.

After two days of moving everything I own from a house on the North Shore of Massachusetts to one just north of the Mass Pike, I discover I have forgotten just one thing: my wallet. Barring a trip back up just to retrieve it, I must now survive (no food yet in the house) on $9 for the next 24 hours, at which time a friend heading my way would drop it off. Fine. I can make that happen. By next afternoon, I'm starving and down to four dollars and change. Feeling rather doubtful, I head to Blue Ribbon. I show up and take a look at the menu, which tells me a basic sandwich costs $6.29. Time to scrounge the car for coins. Ten minutes later I emerge with every cent in there, and after a minute of feverish tallying, I have $6.30 to my name. Brilliant, says I, and head back to the restaurant. Then I remember tax, and my face falls. Really, I could drive the few blocks back home and find a quarter somewhere, but that's just against everything I stand for. You fellow Death-Before-Two-Trips people will understand.

I stroll to the counter. "Hi there. Is there tax on the food?"

He grins. "Yup." A small pause, during which I get hungrier. "But we can help you out." His buddy, standing nearby, contributes the line: "We don't want to see a grown man cry!"

I pound that sandwich, along with the included two sides, like someone was about to walk in and take it away from me. Sometimes, meat is the answer. And if I need to volunteer on a farm and get my hands bloody to justify eating it, I’ll do it.

As a Bostonian, I know what I am and am not entitled to claim. For example, I am entirely within my rights to claim the best and most aggressive drivers, the most frustrating baseball team, the most old Democrats, and the best schools. Best barbecue, however, is something I am not allowed to claim, so I won't. But let me say this: I challenge all you Southerners out there to come and eat Blue Ribbon, and see if it don't make you feel like home.

But there are other good things about living here. My new housemate, Eric Merrill, owns 19.5 instruments. New housemate Zack Hickman owns 63, unless he picked up another one on tour this weekend. (More than likely.) I own 14 instruments, which gives us a house total of 96.5, not counting our voices. (Zack: "That's almost body temperature!") Here's how it breaks down:

We have

17 harmonicas

11 amplifiers

9 violins (not including pieces)

9 acoustic guitars

6 electric basses

5 electric guitars (one set up as a banjo)

4 tambourines

4 mandolins

3 accordians

3 upright basses

2 banjos

2 ukeleles

2 fretless banjos

1.5 violas (Eric's building one)

1 nose flute

1 autoharp

1 pennywhistle

1 bouzouki

1 Egyptian lyre

1 set of bagpipes

1 banjo ukelele

1 "rapmaster"

1 mandocaster

1 victrola

1 pump organ

1 dobro

1 drum set

1 lap steel

1 pedal steel

1 upright piano

1 tuba

All instruments will be used at this month's upcoming performances.

Hooray for fall, the best time to be in New England! Hooray for Newton, the best place to eat barbeque, in greater Boston at least! And hooray for me, because I just played a tuba.

A glorious autumn to you all, and renewed thanks for your support.

bursting with fruit flavor

June 21, 2011

It's been said that beer is God's way of telling us he loves us and wants us to be happy.  I agree with this, depending on the beer, of course.  I would like to suggest an addendum: that God's other way of telling us this is strawberries.  

Happy June, better known as Happy Strawberry Season.  Last gorgeous Saturday found me picking them at a farm in Western Massachusetts, and it occurred to me, while brushing leaves aside in search for these clusters of joy, that, really, there is no more perfect fruit.  I’ll prove it to you.

First, who doesn't like strawberries?  (Silence.)  I thought so.  Almost a cliché in the fruit universe, you can't argue with what works.  But let's keep going.  

It's a beautiful fruit, undeniably sensual, shaped differently depending on the varietal.  The color ranges from bloodred to a shade I can only call strawberry blonde.  Rather than a big, tooth-chipping stone in the center, seeds pepper the outside of the fruit, a fashionable clothing pattern.  And more than any other fruit except the banana, the strawberry seems almost designed to be eaten:  bite-sized, it comes with a finger handle of leaves at the top for convenient eating.  (Contrast this with the pineapple.)

The flavors are more varied and complex than other fruit.  You know what I mean -- we've all bitten into a "bright" strawberry, a "deep" strawberry, a "smooth" one, a "mellow" one.  They are tart, earthy, ambrosial, flowery, savory.  They can take on the flavors of other plants -- one I ate in the field that tasted distinctly of peppermint, another of watermelon.  We should have strawberry sommeliers.

The strawberry is uncompromising -- something either is a strawberry, or it isn't.  It's the only fruit that can't be faked.  Every so often some overconfident junk food company releases a strawberry-flavored soda, or cereal with small, red strawberry pebbles, or something of the like.  It never works -- it always tastes awful.  Why?  Because one cannot simulate its true flavor.  They can fake citrus pretty well, and faux banana, apple, tomato and peach are coming right along.  But strawberries are just too elusive and complex to re-create in a lab.

Perhaps its most effective defense against copyright infringement is its fleeting nature.  It is coy, or maybe elusive is a better word.  It never tastes better than the moment you pick it.  Any plant will eventually rot, but real strawberries have a much shorter lifespan than, say, Granny Smith apples, which can fly in from Australia, lie forgotten in the bottom of the refrigerator for many weeks and still retain a decent crunch.  The fruit is delicate, easily bruised.  It stores poorly -- a few days at most, unless frozen, and when thawed, its cell structure collapses, leaving strawberry blob.  So the strawberry retains an air of mystery, a here-today-gone-tomorrow quality … which I've never found to be an obstacle.  I just eat more right away.

Picking strawberries is the perfect activity, innocent yet competitive.  It is the vegetarian equivalent of fishing. It has the bloodthirsty thrill of the hunt, but disguises it with bucolic surroundings; it lets everyone's greedy inner child come out in a responsible, adult way.  For several years, naively assuming my innocence, my parents sought to entertain their kids with a chocolate egg hunt on Easter morning.  Having twenty inches and forty pounds on my brothers, I must have tallied forty or fifty of those things before one of them even got their hands on one.  I haven't really come a long way since then, but strawberry-picking gives me a civilized way to appease the cutthroat inside.  Anyone who meanders too close to my chosen patch might notice my body language subtly shift into protective mode, digging my feet in as though preparing for trench warfare.  It's really immature. 

My better half and I picked eight quarts -- the amount our CSA share entitled us to -- then rose and tried to leave the field.  It was hard.  Luscious red berries kept peeking out at us from under their canopies of leaves, and how could we walk by?  We had to stop and harvest this fruit so patently dying to be picked and eaten.

We tried again to leave.  "Just don't look down," we encouraged each other.  "Then you won't see any more."  We looked down.  We saw.  We stopped, and picked, and ate.  

Finally, somehow, we left.  We drove off into the June afternoon, our car reeking of strawberries.

Notes from The fair

It is Fall, the very best time of year for ingesting food.  (Where I'm from, they call it "Hahvest.")  I recently rolled myself back home from my first experience at a State Fair – if you've never been, think "Fried Gloryland" – and, well, let's just say I'm ready for winter.  The State Fair food vendor has two goals:  1) deep-fry everything within reach, whether animal, vegetable or mineral, and 2) attempt to impale said creation on a stick.  Thus are born fried pickles, fried cheese curds, chocolate-covered bacon, mocha on a stick, fried alligator, fried Coke, fried butter (come on, seriously), Key Lime Pie on a stick, hot-dish on a stick (sort of an oxymoron, if you think about it), fried cheesecake on a stick, pizza on a stick, fried Norwegien banana split, Thanksgiving on a stick (mashed potatoes covered with roast beef, gravy, corn and a cherry tomato), and the Fry Dog, a French-fry-encrusted, deep-fried hot dog on a stick.

And that's just the stuff I ate. 

I swear they were frying orange juice and stuff at some of the other stalls.  As an astute AP writer remarked, "It's practically fattening just thinking about it."  All this, and then you're supposed to go ride on the roller coaster and watch sheep get born?  Your admission ticket should come with a bucket with a big PLEASE VOMIT HERE sticker on it.

More fun descriptions, along with free Spam, at these upcoming shows!