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... And they're right! Though I must admit, I stopped looking at any other recipes when I found this one. * * * * * * * While drafting this article I toyed with the title, "What Do I Do With All These Damn Tomatoes?" But, I decided that was wrong. Why? Because I know damn well what to do with these tomatoes. I'm making ketchup. But not just any ketchup, the BEST ketchup I've ever tasted. The only ketchup anyone in my household will eat. The ketchup that has gotten people who told me they didn't like ketchup to BEG me for more ketchup. Now, I know some of you are thinking-- "Who makes ketchup?" And to you I say, "I know, right?!" It's weird. You can get the "good" ketchup at the grocery store for like, $10 a gallon. So, why make it from scratch? What's the point? The point is that it's DELICIOUS! Also, because we're fancy. Survival in Style, right? Why not? Artisan everything is in right now. On top of that, regular, store-bought ketchup, even the "good" kind, is made with high fructose corn syrup and whatever "natural flavorings" is. This recipe uses fresh ingredients and whole spices. It's a highly regarded addition to wherever hotdogs, hamburgers, or french fries are being served, and your family and friends will think you're a magical unicorn wizard because who makes ketchup? When I originally discovered this recipe last summer it was because I most certainly did not know what to do with all the tomatoes from my garden. I had already made or canned whole tomatoes, tomato puree, various tomato sauces and salsas, chili... I was running out of ideas. Ketchup was a search born of the sheer desperation that resulted from every flat surface in my kitchen being blanketed in tomatoes for too many months. I quickly realized that "ketchup recipe" was insufficient for my search terms. The first few recipes that I looked at called for canned tomatoes. I needed a recipe that called for fresh tomatoes, so I refined my search. I went back to Google and entered "ketchup recipe fresh tomatoes" and it was the first result. The Best Homemade Ketchup, subtitle - Made with Fresh Tomatoes! That's what I wanted! And I got what I had come for. I can't count the number of times I've made this recipe at this point. For a while, at the height of this year's gardening season, I was making a batch of ketchup every 2 days. While my version of this recipe doesn't stray exceedingly far from the original, I have managed to make the best even better. I have found a lot of suitable substitutions that do not detract whatsoever from the final product. I also can this ketchup into jars that are shelf stable so that it lasts longer than in the fridge, and I doubled the recipe because it wasn't enough. Trust me, you're gonna want more. The Hardware You will need: - a pairing knife, or at least that’s what I use to core and halve the tomatoes, but you can do it however you want. - a chef's knife and a cutting board, for the garlic and onions - a big enough, non-reactive pot, i.e., stainless steel. Weird things happen you use reactive cookware for acidic foods. But… having said that, I do use my copper-coated pot for this recipe all the time… so… yeah. Moving along. - a blender or food processor - a strainer, ideally a fine mesh strainer with the hooky things that grab onto the side of the bowl for you so that it doesn't fall in. - a rubber spatula, for stirring the puree through the strainer. - cheesecloth and butcher twine, or some other food-safe something or other to tie your cheesecloth closed to make a spice pouch. If you're extra fancy, they make "spice pouch bags" that just sinch closed for you and you throw it in. But I prefer my cheesecloth. It's comparatively much cheaper, and I reuse the same square of it over and over again. I just wash it and once in a while soak it in bleach water. It's really the laundry of dishes. The Main Ingredients - 4 pounds of fresh (Roma) tomatoes, core removed and cut. Halved, chopped, diced… dealer's choice 'cause you're gonna blend it all in the end anyway. I cut mine in half after taking out the core. Romas work particularly well in this recipe and that’s what I've had the most of this gardening season, but I do add in whatever other ripe tomatoes I have at the time. The author of the original recipe says that using different tomatoes will result in varying flavors in your final product, but the only time I ever found that to be true was the time I tried to use only yellow tomatoes. It was less acidic and a little sweeter, but still delicious. It confused people though because it was yellow. - 1 cup apple cider vinegar Choosing the expensive, organic ACV with the mother in it versus the cheapest ACV on the market hasn’t made a lick of difference in this recipe that I can tell. All that really matters is that it be 5% acidity for the purposes of canning. You could substitute other types of vinegar here to add different nuances of flavor, such as white balsamic vinegar, which is one of my absolute favorites. Regular balsamic would change the color and flavor quite a bit, but I don’t imagine it could possibly be bad. However, these other kinds of vinegar would not provide the level of acidity necessary to can the resulting ketchup safely in the water bath process I use. So, if you substitute a less acidic type of vinegar you’d want to just keep it in the fridge and use it up within about 3 weeks. You could substitute regular white vinegar and it would be safe to can, but don’t. It'll be a lot harsher. The ACV tastes much better. - 10 tablespoons of packed brown sugar Or ½ + ⅛ cups if 10 tablespoons are too many to pack. The original recipe called specifically for light brown sugar for no good reason. I use dark brown sugar when I have it, but I’ve also made it with light brown and a mix of both to the same degree of success. Substituting white sugar also works just fine, but you lose the depth of flavor provided by the molasses in brown sugar. Solve that by adding 1 TBSP of molasses with your white sugar if you've got it. - 2 medium-large sweet onions, peeled and rough chopped The essay Cry, Baby, Cry - The World of Onions can explain to you why the original recipe called for yellow onions, but I substitute sweet onions in just about everything I make, raw or cooked. Please don’t tell Danny. - 6-10 large garlic cloves, rough chopped Never trust a recipe that calls for less than 3 cloves of garlic... and even then, you ignore that and you measure garlic with your heart. - 2 teaspoons kosher salt Salt is an ingredient that I only truly measure when I'm baking. However, one thing to note is that when a recipe, any recipe, calls for kosher salt, you can NOT substitute the same amount of table salt “in a pinch.” (See what I did there.) If you must substitute table (iodized) salt for any recipe that calls for kosher salt, use half as much as is called for, but beware that it may add an undesirable metallic flavor quality. The Spice Pouch These ingredients may be small, but they are mighty. They’re what makes ketchup taste like ketchup. Without it, we’d just have vinegary tomato sauce. Unlike the main ingredients above where you can play fast and loose with the types and amounts, I do measure these and have never tried this recipe whilst substituting ground spices for the whole spices that are called for. You’ve been warned. - 8 whole cloves - 4 bay leaves - 2 cinnamon sticks - 1/2 teaspoon celery seeds - 1/2 teaspoon whole allspice (6-10 berries, depending on size) The Process - As I prepare the ingredients, I throw them in the pot. There is no ceremonious procession required. All the ingredients in the pot. Stir a bit to combine. - Prep the spice pouch. Put the spices in the square and cinch the cheesecloth closed with the butcher's twine, or whatever "keep it closed" apparatus you are using. Then, in the pot. I usually nestle it lovingly into the exact middle of the ingredients making sure it's completely enveloped by the tomatoes and onions, but the necessity of this is questionable at best. - Put the pot on the stove over medium heat and let all the ingredients cook together for at least 30 minutes, stirring enough so that nothing burns or sticks to the bottom of your pot. Any burnt flavor at this point would only be accentuated by the rest of the process. The cook time and temp are really customizable to how much attention you want to have to pay to the pot at this point. I've done it on a lower heat so that I wouldn't have to stir it so much and taken my time with it, and I've done it on a bit higher heat paying closer attention, stirring often cause I needed to get'r done. So, this part of the process is flexible. During this part of the cooking process, the tomatoes will give up their water, the essence of all those amazing spices will permeate everything, and the onions and garlic will become super tender in the resulting soupy mixture, making it ready for blending. - Make sure you remove the spice pouch before moving on. Discard the spices and wash the cheesecloth with dish soap like you're handwashing a garment, rubbing it together against itself. If it's stained from your tomatoes you can put it in some bleach water for a little while to brighten it up again. Hang it to dry and save it for your next batch of ketchup. - Once you've got a soupy mixture and your onions are nice and tender, it's time to blend and strain. I used to do the blending in 5-6 batches in my fancy food processor that you can only fill up so much with liquid ingredients until I reacquainted myself with my $20 blender. Now I do the blending in 2-3 batches and my blender has far fewer, and much simpler parts to clean. For the straining, I position my wire mesh strainer with the hooky things on top of a bowl and after each batch is blended, I dump it through the strainer into the bowl. This step is to remove the seeds. Seedy ketchup would not be delicious. Tomato seeds in general make your sauces and whatnot much more sour than is desirable at my house. When the straining action of your puree inevitably slows once the more watery particles have passed through, use the rubber spatula to stir inside the strainer. It may take 2-3 minutes of stirring but, eventually, all that will be left is seeds and bits of tomato skin. Discard this, or put it in your compost pile, or feed it to your worms. Whatever. - Wipe out any cling-on seeds or bits of skin from your pot and transfer your strained puree mixture back into it. Stick the pot back on the stove over low to medium-low heat. The original recipe says to cook again at this stage for 20-30 minutes, but I disagree. The cook time at this point depends heavily on how high your heat is and how thick you want your ketchup. Personally, I slow this part of the process WAY down. I start it on medium-low heat and gradually turn it all the way down to low as it reduces. This way I don’t have to stand over and stir so much, and it doesn’t spit and splatter all over the stove. Depending on the water content of the tomatoes that I've used and how froggy I'm feeling about stirring, I've had this step last up to 2-3 hours, but we like our ketchup nice and thick. The thicker you want it, the more time it takes and the less total product you end up with. Once it's at your desired consistency, you're done. If you're not going to can it, that is. Contrary to some other sauces, it doesn't really thicken much more after it cools. Store in the fridge. Storing in glass will help it last the longest and have the least chance of absorbing other flavors from within the fridge. The original recipe says it's good for 3 weeks like that and ours never lasts long enough for me to contradict that suggestion. If you want to try canning... People who haven't done any canning before may think that you need a bunch of fancy or expensive equipment in order to do it, but that's not the case. I just use my old pasta pot. For small jars with short processing times, I use the strainer insert. For taller jars or longer processing times, I use this $5 silicone thingy made for keeping the jars from touching the bottom of the pot. I had to look up what it’s called-- a Silicone canning rack. I have 2 of them hooked together so that it covers more of the bottom of my pot. Besides the mason jars themselves, with the rings and lids, there are only 2 pieces of equipment that you absolutely have to have. Those are the jar grabber and the canning funnel. Though no substitute exists, these can be acquired in a set for under $15. The water bath process is fairly simple and is used almost exclusively for high acid products like this ketchup. The first thing you have to do is bring a pot of water to a boil. The pot should be deep enough that when the jars are added, the water level of the pot will be 1-2 inches above the top of the jars for the duration of the process. Put this pot on to boil while you're cooking down the strained puree mix. Also, while you're strained puree is cooking down, prep your jars, lids, and rings. They should be freshly washed and the jars sterilized. I do this by setting my freshly washed, wet jars on a sheet pan and putting them in the oven on 250 for at least 25 minutes. When your ketchup is your desired thickness, your pot of water is vigorously boiling, and your jars have been in the oven for 25 minutes, quickly and carefully fill the jars. Using the canning funnel, ladle your ketchup into the jars leaving a 1/2 inch of headspace at the top, essentially filling them to the bottom of the funnel. Once they're full, take a damp paper towel or cloth and wipe down the rims of the jars to make sure there's no ketchup on them. If they're dirty they may not seal properly. Once the rims are clean, put the lids on and screw on the rings just finger tight. Using the jar grabber to lower the jars into the boiling water in a single layer, put the top on the pot, and set your timer for 45 minutes. This processing time is a bit longer than I feel like it really needs to be, but for the sake of sharing it with others, just to be safe, do 45. At the end of the 45 minutes, turn the heat off and remove the pot lid, but do not remove the jars yet. Set the timer for another 5-10 minutes and just let them sit in the pot to allow them to cool slowly. Once the timer goes off again, you're good to take the jars out. Use the jar grabber! Set the jars on a wire rack or a kitchen towel somewhere they can be left undisturbed for 12 - 24 hours. Soon you should start hearing the sweet ping of the jars successfully sealing, although, no ping does not necessarily mean no seal. But no matter what, just leave them alone for the duration of the resting time. Once the resting time is over, check your seals. First test by pressing your finger down into the middle of the lid. It should be stiff and tight with no give. If you can push it down like a button, your jar did not seal properly and you should stick that one in the fridge and use it up. If there's no give when you press down on the lid, lift the jar up by the edges of the lid. Ensure that the seal of the lid is strong enough to hold up the entire weight of the jar by itself... but don't lift it too high and do it over something safe just in case it's not. If it passes both tests, your jar is sealed properly for shelf-stable storage. Wipe down the jars and store them in a cool dry place with your other canned goods. Modern lids advertise that they last for "up to 18 months" but in my experience, they last much longer than that. A good tip to ensuring that your jars stay safely sealed is to store them without the rings on them and with nothing set on top of them. This ensures that a "false seal" can't trick you into thinking that the product is still safe when the seal has actually failed. Always perform these checks on your home canned goods to ensure proper seals upon opening for use as well. And that's it! I hope I have inspired you to try making some of your own "The Best Homemade Ketchup" and sparked an interest in home canning. It's becoming a lost art, which is a shame because it is an incredible skill to have in your toolkit.

Entry #1 from REDNECK RIDGE BBQ– How to make the smallest possible batch of delicious chili with the fewest possible ingredients. * * * * * * * The word “chili” means different things to different people. Thanks to elementary school cafeteria lunches, I grew up understanding it to be a tasty stew of ground beef, kidney beans, tomatoes, and onions. But hey– what do I know? To the orthodox Texan, true chili contains neither beans nor tomatoes… just beef, chili peppers, and very little else. At the other end of the spectrum, I included a recipe for vegan black bean chili in an earlier essay (The Big Bird Bowl) that, of course, contains zero meat. Scour dozens of chili recipes and you’ll find a wide range of ingredients, some exotic and unusual, including pork sausage, bacon, turkey, tomatillos, coffee, and even chocolate. One of my favorite all-time chili recipes is CHILI FOR A CROWD from the seminal 1982 SILVER PALATE COOKBOOK, the unintentional masterpiece and yuppie bible that became the philosophical and stylistic successor to everything Julia Child taught us in the 60’s and 70’s. (After 40 years it is still relevant; you can buy it HERE.) This is a fabulous chili recipe… However, it calls for large quantities of NINETEEN ingredients, and I know from personal experience that it will leave the average civilian kitchen looking like Chernobyl. I recently reviewed and cross-referenced a great number of chili recipes in search of the most common and essential ingredients. I settled upon fourteen, including the cooking oil, salt, and water. Of at least equal importance, I also “negotiated” the quantities and ratios of the various components to find the lowest common denominator, thereby making your both your shopping and your cooking much simpler. So… here we go– ONE 1 LB. Package of Ground Beef, preferably organic and/or grass-fed. Feel free to substitute bison (which is delicious, nutritious, and becoming widely available) or venison (if you are a deer hunter or know one.) I personally find it galling to see packaged ground venison offered at $15/lb. when the sons of bitches are probably right out back eating your garden as you read this. Click HERE for more on that. ONE 15.5 oz. Can of Kidney Beans (a standard store size; available either light or dark depending on personal preference. Organic available.) It might tempt the purist to cook dried beans from scratch; if you are good at it, go for it. However, I have found dried beans quite stubborn and reluctant to cook completely, so be careful– contrary to reasonable expectations, undercooked beans won’t soften in the finished chili… any more than a woman can “fix” a man by marrying him. ONE 14.5 oz. Can of Petite Diced Tomatoes (another standard size can, also available organic.) Please insist on petite. ONE Small yellow onion (no other kind, please. You might want to read this.) ONE Small Green Bell Pepper (the darker the better, in my experience.) ONE Clove of Garlic (Is it me, or is organic garlic ten times better? Oh– make sure your garlic is American, not from The Country That Makes All That Cheap Crap, a.k.a., TCTMATCC.) Feel free to substitute high-quality granulated garlic, but not garlic powder. ¼ Cup Chili Powder and ⅛ Cup Cumin– the one-two punch of spices that give chili its distinctive flavor profile. (If you took my advice and now Shop Like A Pro, you’ll have large quantities of these on hand. Buying these spices in tiny retail containers is outrageously expensive.) 2 TBSP Tomato Paste (now available, at long last, in small jars as shown above, thereby eliminating considerable waste.) 1 TBSP Sriracha (or other source of heat) Use HALF this amount (or less) if you don’t like it hot. 1 TBSP Brown Sugar (Both the acids and the spicy heat in chili cry out for a mitigating smidgeon of sweetness. A little goes a long way.) Grape Seed Oil 1 tsp. Salt 1 Cup of Water Equipment– 1 large pot, 1 small or medium saucepan, 1 frying pan, a strainer, a whisk, and a potato masher. Also, some sort of double-boiler set-up and three containers for the veggie prep. The Veggie Prep– Dice the onion, dice the pepper, finely mince the garlic. The Cooking– Brown the ground meat in just enough grape seed oil. Cook well enough so that some tasty bits remain stuck to the pan. Add cooked meat to the pot. Thoroughly deglaze the frying pan with the one cup of water, and then add this liquid to the saucepan. Add ⅓ to ½ of the can of beans to the water and raise to a boil. Sauté the diced onion in the frying pan with just enough grape seed oil. When soft and translucent, add the diced peppers and stir until the peppers become fragrant. Add the garlic and stir for a minute, then add it all to the pot. Add the remaining canned beans to the pot. Strain the liquid from the petite diced tomatoes into the saucepan and then add the diced tomatoes to the pot. Now, here’s my own personal CHILI HACK– Simmer the liquid in the saucepan until it is significantly reduced and the beans are WAY overcooked, mushy enough to mash with the potato masher. THEN add to the saucepan the tomato paste, brown sugar, salt, and spices and mix thoroughly. This hack accomplishes two useful things– it forms a thick medium that, when added to the pot, holds the chili together nicely; and it also evenly distributes the powerfully flavored spices. To Finish– Add the contents of the saucepan to the large pot. Stir well, then remove from heat and transfer to a double boiler. (Pro Tip– NEVER put a pot of chili or any other stew on a hot burner unless you also stand there and stir constantly, because otherwise you will surely burn it. Instead, rig up a double boiler– you can spend big bucks on a fancy double boiler, or you can improvise with a small pot suspended by its handles inside a larger pot with a little water in it. Give it an hour for the flavors and textures to integrate. Taste it– Add more salt if you deem it necessary. Add a little at a time, stir well, and allow to sit for a while; re-taste, then repeat as needed. Adding more heat or spices is even trickier– I recommend that you separate some liquid from the chili, add what you think you need, add some of the chili, mix well, and then add all this back to the big pot. These optional re-seasoning operations might seem complicated, but they are both doable and foolproof. This batch of chili went from the photo of the ingredients on my kitchen table to my stove-top double boiler in less than half an hour… AND, for what it’s worth, I did all the chopping with my Seven-Dollar Chef’s Knife. (Andrea shrewdly acquired this double boiler for five bucks at a local garage sale.) As the SILVER PALATE COOKBOOK authoresses graciously suggest with their “Chili for a Crowd” recipe (and I paraphrase)– Make this recipe your own… follow it ONCE, then use a little more of this ingredient, less of that one, and feel free to swap your ingredients for ours as you see fit. Of course, such trial and error experimentation is a much simpler, faster, and less expensive process with my minimalist recipe than with theirs. So how would I personally improve upon my own minimalist recipe? Well, in the spirit of legendary Lotus Car mastermind Colin Chapman– one of my artist heroes and an engineering genius for whom “simplify, then add lightness” was a zen-like design credo– I like to add very finely diced celery, which indeed adds lightness and also what I like to call “micro-crunch” to the texture of chili and other stews. (If you opt for this, please cook the diced celery for a minute with the onions.) I also like to replace the Sriracha with finely-minced pickled jalapeño peppers as an intriguing alternative source of the spicy heat… and, given the current state of the worldwide Sriracha supply, it might behoove all of us to similarly find backup sources of Scoville Units. But of course, you are free to take this dish in any direction you like, for “chili” is more of a personal lifestyle philosophy and an expression of local traditions than it is a specific recipe. May this minimalist version we’ve posted here inspire you to great heights of culinary creativity.

In early September of 1971, Chef Astor continued working on his new Autumn Menu… adding new dishes and removing or updating old ones. * * * * * * * How many different salads were necessary for this Autumn 1971 menu? Several years before, Chef Astor had successfully convinced a handful of local farmers to grow a variety of lettuces and then pick them when they were still small and tender. These, combined with chopped iceberg, had become the Cayuga Lounge’s “house salad,” which automatically came with every entree. Though the salad bar was long gone, Astor couldn’t completely wean his clientele from the thick and creamy goop like Bleu Cheese or Russian dressing, but he insisted on also offering real vinaigrette that he crafted from Italian olive oil ordered from a Manhattan salumeria and his own barrel-aged red wine vinegar made from local grapes. The individual caesar sold well… gotta keep that, but without anchovies in the dressing… better to offer them as an optional garnish. What else? Ah, yes– an “autumn salad” with apples and oven-dried grapes, served over watercress and topped with toasted pumpkin seeds. Perfect. Next, the entree section. How many fish dishes? One or two chicken selections? Or was there another bird he should add? Duck would probably sell, but he didn’t want to get stuck with unsold ingredients that he couldn’t re-purpose if it didn’t. Perhaps breast of capon, if he could source it? Or pheasant, if he could find a farm with a steady supply? So many decisions to make for this menu... and yet when Astor paused for occasional reflection, he felt immense satisfaction and joy to be in position to make them. Eleven years after stumbling upon this ramshackle roadhouse, he had successfully built a unique and wildly popular destination for fine dining and nightlife... an outcome utterly unimaginable in May of 1960, when he ventured north from Manhattan in search of his destiny with only his talents and a postcard map. * * * * * * * As he readied himself to leave Manhattan in the spring of 1960, Graeme Astor was happy to be reunited with his 1953 Rover, veteran of multiple Morocco rallies and Serengeti safaris under its previous owner, and with the undercarriage dents and battle scars to prove it. He also felt a mix of trepidation and adventure while driving it through New York’s Catskills laden with all of his belongings, what with the Rover's puny four-cylinder mill barely sputtering up the steep inclines. But Astor didn’t mind these slow stretches, for the lush mountain scenery was such a refreshing and welcome respite from the colorless concrete of the big city. Might one of these Catskill summer resorts be a good spot for him to work? Probably not… too seasonal; too many children to be serious about food. Besides, he already had a good skull-ful of culinary knowledge, and he didn’t care to reorient it toward the additional requirements of kosher law. On to New York State's midsection he drove. On Astor’s little postcard map, the Finger Lakes resembled stockings of varying lengths dangling from a clothesline stretched from Syracuse to Rochester. Such a region, surmised Astor, would likely attract the sort of sophisticated travelers who might actually support a fine dining establishment. Proximity to one or more of the region’s colleges would certainly be a plus, providing a steady flow of well-to-do parents and worldly scholars from afar who were accustomed to dining well. A casual day’s drive later, Astor was holed up in Ithaca, a perfect central base from which to tour the region. But where to start? Maybe just poke around town here and then go clockwise, he figured. Might there be a critical mass of quality Ithaca eateries within a few blocks of each other that competed for both customers and employees? If the balance were right, Astor knew, they would make each other better while collectively making their district as a whole a popular dining destination, thereby benefiting all of them. However, for all of Ithaca's university-related activity and its relative proximity to New York City, in the spring of 1960 it seemed not only untouched by the French food revolution that had consumed Manhattan for the previous decade, but also devoid of any restaurant scene altogether. He was similarly underwhelmed by Watkins Glen– he had long heard its name mentioned in association with international sports car racing, but the sleepy downtown itself was dominated by a marina and, for God's sake, a salt mine. Discouraged, Astor continued west to Hammondsport… a cute little village, but there really wasn’t much there other than a massive, industrial-looking winery just south of the town square. He did find a bakery-café for a quick bite in lieu of a real lunch, and there he overheard a quartet of young twenty-somethings chattering excitedly about grapes and soil. Curious, Astor introduced himself and asked if they worked at the winery he had passed. “HELL no! We’re the wine rebels!” gushed one of the two women. They were interns from Cornell’s agriculture program, they explained, working for an immigrant viticulturist who claimed to know the secret to growing real European wine grapes in a region where such efforts had utterly failed for the previous three centuries. “The native grapes and their hybrids are winter hardy,” explained another intern, “but they’re actually no good for decent wine,” Another added, “They’re easy to grow here, and the big, industrial wineries are able to process them into cheap champagne or jug wine for mass marketing. But make no mistake... WE are the future of fine wine in this region!” Spoken like true believers, thought Astor. Poor fools. An hour later– charmed, no doubt, by their youthful if näive enthusiasm– Astor was toiling in a small vineyard overlooking one of the smaller lakes, helping them plant young Chardonnay and Riesling vines. His Series 1 Rover was designed as a dual-purpose vehicle and functioned perfectly well as a farm tractor, thereby saving the interns countless hours of physical toil. As he hauled wagon-loads of planting stock from the nursery to the vineyard, he also casually picked their brains for valuable local intelligence. He left with a mixed case of their experimental wines as payment for his help, along with a much better working knowledge on the region as a whole. He also got their recommendation to eat and stay overnight at the nearby Naples Inn, and– perhaps most importantly of all– their consensus that there was one and only one venue in the region where a chef of his experience and background would likely find meaningful, full-time employment. * * * * * * * Other than aerial photography, no single picture ever existed of Château Stromberg in its entirety, for its gigantic banquet rooms and humongous, faux-castle main building– all majestically perched on a bluff overlooking the northern half of Cayuga Lake– sprawled over too many acres to capture in a single ground-level frame. Astor eventually found his way to the hiring department (a whole department? That in itself was impressive!) Upon giving his résumé a quick perusal, the receptionist hastily dialed an extension. “I’ve got a code C,” she forcefully whispered. “Yes, he’s still here. Wait– I’ll ask him.” She turned to Astor– “Would you mind waiting a few minutes? The executive assistant sous chef would like to meet you.” After his unexpected interview, Astor strolled the grounds, absorbing the sheer enormity of the operation and pondering his initial impressions. The “executive assistant sous chef” had appeared in chef’s whites, and yet they were spotless and crisply pressed. His dainty hands clearly hadn’t chopped an onion or even held a knife in months, and his important-sounding title suggested a chandelier-like hierarchy of authority in the kitchen. Astor had gratefully accepted his invitation to stay for dinner, with the request in turn that the chef de cuisine personally surprise him with each course. He spent the hours before dinner exploring the meticulously manicured grounds, which reminded him of his early childhood in the Surrey castle, just as the massive, forty-foot Corinthian columns in the Colonnade Dining Room echoed the stately main room at Boodle’s… except for one thing– everything at this Château Stromberg was completely fake, from the flimsy and hollow Greek columns to the island in the trout pond to the pretentious menu descriptions. Astor gave his Colonnade Room dinner entree– Stuffed Sole Mousseline– an “A” for presentation but a “D” for flavor. There was nothing wrong with it, per se, but… if you’re going to pay top dollar for quality fresh ingredients like fresh sole and crabmeat, shouldn’t it TASTE like what it is? Likewise the alleged “pâté de la maison,” which was most certainly mass-produced in a commercial food factory far away from this “maison.” Yes, they had gone to the effort of sourcing cornichons and Dijon mustard, but the item itself was just plain unworthy of such embellishments. His dessert– an individual Baked Alaska, dramatically flambéed tableside– was presented like all the previous courses as “a professional courtesy with the Chef’s compliments,” leaving Astor no choice but to smile and feign rapture as he overstuffed himself with all this culinary mediocrity. An after-dinner sunset stroll was definitely in order to settle his internals. To reach the garden pathway, Astor had to pass through the Oak Room Bar, which had become packed with patrons as he dined– loud people in loud clothing, drowning out the expensive grand piano with their roars of laughter and braggadocio. It felt like a rugby scrum as he elbowed and wedged his way to the massive French doors, and he relished his first deep breath of outdoor air. After a few hundred yards, the pea stone trail had given way to wood chips, replacing audible footfalls with cedar perfume. Astor paused to behold the last remnants of the springtime sunset over the lake and further contemplate his impressions. How to even describe such a gargantuan enterprise? Wealth without class? Power without grace? Astor pulled out his packet of Dunhills, and a female hand holding a lighter magically appeared in the settling darkness, accompanied by a sultry alto voice– “How about… hubris without irony? Or maybe… self-appointed aristocracy without noblesse oblige?” Both the blueblood accent and the bare arm before him were decidedly feminine, but the lighter was a man’s Ronson, and a clunky Rolex Submariner dangled where one might rightly expect, say, Cartier. “A mind reader as well as a cat burglar,” chuckled Astor. “Dangerous combination.” “Sibley Stromberg,” she replied, stepping into the light and giving a firm handshake. She was tall and medium-boned… perfectly fit, maybe just a decade past her field hockey prime. Her chosen shade of blonde accentuated her early season tan. “The unmarriageable tomboy daughter of the megalomaniac responsible for this architectural atrocity. And you must be the bigshot chef from London.” She accepted Astor’s proffered cigarette. “By way of Manhattan, but yes. Graeme Astor.” This place isn’t for you,” she authoritatively declared, her judgment carried forth with a huge cloud of exhaled smoke. “Not if you have a soul. Let’s go for a quick ride, and I’ll show you where you really belong.” Astor, of course, knew she was right… at least about this place. He followed Sibley’s GMC pickup south along the lakeside highway, barely able to keep up. Twenty miles later they approached a sign that read, "CAYUGA LOUNGE." From the bottom of the sign hung a hand-lettered plea-- “Help Wanted.” This can’t be it, thought Astor… this can’t possibly be the place she had in mind. There were only six cars and a pair of motorcycles in the lot… then again, it was a weeknight. Four scruffy boys played pool in the bar. Two parties were finishing their dinner, while a towheaded young lad wearing Brooks Brothers beneath his apron tended bar for a trio of adoring college girls. He looked up as Astor and Sibley walked in. “Hayden!” she affectionately called out. “Hey Sis!” he answered with a genuine smile. That caught Astor off-guard. “Your brother?” “Kind of… my father was married to his mother one summer, and he bought him this place to keep him busy while they were in Greece… and give him a chance to maybe learn some job skills.” Astor paused for a moment to look around and assess the place, and it didn’t take long. “That sign out front should say ‘S.O.S.’ You’ve more or less tricked me into coming to this… this... Why? Do you honestly think I would work here? Or that this place could even afford me? You don’t need a chef– what this place needs is a fire!” Eleven hours later, Astor groggily awoke to streams of harsh morning sunlight brightening a completely unfamiliar room as Sibley’s blond hair brushed his bare shoulder. Once his thick mental fog started to clear, he retraced his steps of the night before. Sidney had made an impassioned presentation– that what he, an experienced and capable chef, needed most of all was the right venue in which he could give complete and free reign to his talents. This place was a blank canvas, she insisted, just waiting to be painted by a master. He and he alone could dictate its direction and determine the result. He would answer to no one, and Hayden and Sibley would provide whatever financial backstop was necessary. Two rich but desperate trust fund babies... where else could he possibly find such an opportunity? That was enough to keep Astor from immediately leaving. As the night progressed, the girls at the bar chimed in with their enthusiasm and charming but mostly unrealistic suggestions. A carload of college faculty stopped by… and, upon learning that Hayden’s bar was out of everything except triple sec and sweet vermouth until Friday, they were about to leave. But then Astor recalled the case of wine in his Rover, and soon it was iced and flowing freely. The Riesling was nothing short of nectar, declared the professors… indistinguishable from a great German Mosel. Was it really local? Hayden’s gaggle of groupies liked it because it was a little sweet. And Astor found the Chardonnay on par with a decent white burgundy from France... not quite premier cru Meursault, but definitely Pouilly-Fuisse. By the time the whole case was empty, Astor had come to see his future in perfect alignment with perfect clarity– how he would grow and nurture this place from a mere seed to a tender shoot and then to a thriving, fruiting tree. It would be difficult, it would take years, and there would definitely be growing pains… but it was doable, and would surely bring him great joy. And then, apparently, he and Sibley strolled out the back door to what looked like a gardener’s shed but was actually her little cottage. Now she was starting to awaken, and Astor waited a few minutes before posing the questions he was dying to ask. “Okay,” she finally said. “I’m awake.” “Alright then. First of all, what was that rubbish about you being an ‘unmarriageable tomboy?’ I dare say we had ourselves a right proper romp.” Sibley laughed aloud. “I’ve never heard it put quite like that! What I meant was that I could never be what my father thought I should be, or have the kind of wedding and marriage that he wanted for me. My mother was actually a distant royal– Her Ladyship the Arch-Duchess of East Beavercrap or some such nonsense. She couldn’t have cared any less, but my dad was all over it… even tried to get a title for himself. I don’t want any part of that world.” “So… are you bringing me in to stick it to your dad?” “A fair question, but no– he’s doing that all by himself. The thing is, I have no room in my world for all the phoniness and fakery. None! And I could tell right away that you and I thought alike.” “Alright,” said Astor… “take the ‘help wanted’ sign down. I’ll make us breakfast, and then I’ve got a long day ahead of me.” Astor’s first decision was to hire those pimple-faced teenaged boys who were playing pool in the bar– a local quartet of high school dropouts who called themselves the Glen-Guardians. By day they fancied themselves a biker gang, even though they only had two working motorcycles. By night they pretended to be a rock-and-roll band, playing high school parties and village green dances. Astor hired them as a crew because they already knew how to work together, and teaching them cooking skills would therefore be the easy part. Astor decided to keep the old roadside sign and just give it a fresh paint job. No need to raise expectations right away with any suggestions of “new management.” They wouldn’t spend one shiny penny on advertising; rather, he would slowly, incrementally raise the quality of the food and the setting until it was common knowledge throughout the region– from the faculty lounges to the fishing docks– that the CAYUGA LOUNGE was a quality restaurant and a worthy destination for local and visitor alike. Rather than rely solely upon the industrial restaurant suppliers, Astor reached out to all the small farms in the area for their finest dairy, meat, and produce. In exchange for regular meals and a place to call home, the Glen-Guardians eventually gelled into a perfectly good kitchen crew. Astor and his team started with just bar food to accompany the best wines they could find around the region; full dinners would come only when they were good and ready. And as for Château Stromberg, Astor would simply ignore its existence, confident that the CAYUGA LOUNGE would never become significant enough to even appear on their radar. * * * * * * * That day that had so drastically changed the course of Chef Astor’s life was in May of 1960… eleven years ago. Funny-- sometimes it's like it was yesterday, while at other times it felt like half a lifetime ago. Merely a year after Astor took over, there was a long waiting line for dinner most nights. As he had optimistically hoped, the CAYUGA LOUNGE became the worst-kept secret in the Finger Lakes– the smart place for all the professors to dine and, on weekends, a happening bar scene with live music and Hayden’s increasing flock of groupies in turn attracting throngs of young men. It was all progressing in perfect accord with Astor’s most optimistic plans… too perfectly, perhaps, for by 1968, New York City's most influential restaurant critics had begun to sniff around the area, and a few of those merciless sharks had taken to cruelly comparing and contrasting the CAYUGA LOUNGE with the far larger and much more ambitious culinary destination twenty miles to the north. The harshest piece, "A Tale of Two Eateries," appeared in the "Upstate" column of a Sunday magazine and included a cartoon of David and Goliath-- with David in chef's whites and Goliath in a clown outfit. And "Baron Stromberg," as he had re-christened himself, was not amused.

I started high school fifty years ago… September 6, 1972. My world– and the whole world itself– changed quite drastically that day. * * * * * * * September, 1972… the 26th Amendment, adopted the year before, meant that 18-year-olds would be voting in the upcoming presidential election, most of them for anti-war Democratic challenger Senator George McGovern (D-SD). But the incumbent, President Richard Nixon, was looking strong– the Vietnam War was winding down, we had established diplomatic relations with China, and we had also signed the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT 1) earlier that year with the Soviet Union… even if their trustworthiness in complying with its terms was an open question. Oh, and the term “Watergate” had barely entered the public lexicon. 1972 was a noteworthy year for music, having given us great albums from Elton John (Honky Chateau), David Bowie (Ziggy Stardust), Emerson, Lake, & Palmer (Trilogy), The Rolling Stones (Exile on Main St.), and many others that became familiar to us via “album rock” FM stations that were encroaching into AM Top 40’s long dominance of the airwaves. In cinema, “The Godfather” was packing theaters and seemed a lock for Best Picture. This movie broke new ground in that, contrary to the Hays Code that had been operative until the 1960’s, we found ourselves rooting for evil arch-criminals to prevail against even worse bad guys. Closer to home, Xerox and Kodak– the twin pillars of the Rochester economy and where many of our parents enjoyed lucrative and seemingly secure employment– were each going strong with no end in sight to their dominance in the American manufacturing sector. Xerox was on the verge of inventing the personal computer as we know it, and Kodak would soon thereafter invent digital photography. However, consistent with Rochester’s notoriously stodgy conservatism and yet utterly bewildering in retrospect, both companies shelved their innovations in favor of their existing, tried-and-true technology… leading, at least in part, to Rochester’s transformation over the next few decades into a socio-economic hellhole as Silicon Valley and foreign countries capitalized on what Rochester had so blithely discarded. Meanwhile, nineteen miles to the east in the town of Ontario, a skinny wise-ass was about to enter the ninth grade and thus begin his first year of high school. My birthday is in November, so I was actually only 13 when I started high school. (Not only was I still below the upper weight limit, I was also still young enough to play Pop Warner League football with the junior high kids. I loved being a kicker, but it felt a little weird, like straddling two worlds.) I didn’t have any clear expectations of what to expect that Wednesday, other than being in a different building that I already knew quite well from attending basketball games and such. I’d be with classmates I’d known since 2nd grade, so how different, really, would high school be? As my older sisters and I waited for the bus on that warm and sunny morning, we watched an unusual spectacle on TV– a live broadcast of the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra playing Beethoven’s majestic (and dare I say defiant) “Egmont Overture” in a sports stadium. We knew why and what it was for, but we didn’t realize at the time how abruptly the world was shifting right under our feet. * * * * * * * For me and many others, the Summer of 1972 had been dominated by, of all things, the World Chess Championship Match in Reykjavik, Iceland. That’s because an American was competing for the title… and not just any American– Bobby Fischer’s meteoric rise to fame and success closely paralleled that of boxer Muhammad Ali, and they were similarly inclined to proclaiming their greatness and drawing attention to their accomplishments (like here and here.) And yet each had a vexing nemesis– Ali had lost a unanimous decision to Joe Frazier in 1971’s “Fight of the Century,” and Fischer’s opponent for the title in 1972– the Russian reigning world champion Boris Vasilievich Spassky– had beaten him in 3 of their 5 previous encounters, with the other 2 games drawn. During the match that consumed most of July and all of August, we Americans were witness not only to Fischer’s scintillating victories and fits of juvenile impetuosity, but also to something new and completely unexpected– a sympathetic human face on the Big, Bad Soviet Union. My classmates and I had grown up in the Cold War, engaging in “duck and cover” drills and regularly seeing Russians portrayed– in films ranging from James Bond installments to this underappreciated Hitchcock opus– as the pure embodiment of Godless evil. But then along came this Spassky character… every bit as dashing and well-dressed as Fischer, but a far more polished gentleman. His was an old soul's countenance, almost as if the collective glory and sorrow of all Russian history were chiseled into his handsome equine features. Upon resigning Game Six in the jaws of Fischer’s sudden and irresistible mating attack, Spassky stunned the world with a poignant display of sportsmanship, rising to applaud his opponent’s brilliant victory along with the audience. And so, with the Cold War and the massive militaries on either side seemingly boiled down to a pair of flesh-and-blood men over a chessboard, might it be that the Soviets were actually decent human beings? And if so, might peace with them actually be possible? The SALT-1 treaty back in May had been a significant step, albeit a pure abstraction encoded in military-diplomatic legalese. But Spassky’s dignified and classy gesture suggested that not only disarmament treaties but actual amity and mutual respect were possible between our peoples. Fischer went on to crush Spassky for the title, and their match concluded on September 1st. By then the XX Olympiad had been underway in Munich, (West) Germany for a week. It was a big deal that the Olympics were being held in Germany– East OR West– for it was not only just 27 years since the end of World War II, but also just 36 years since Hitler turned the 1936 quadrennial into an odious showcase for Nazism. The televised presentation of the Olympics was much more widely watched in pre-cable 1972 than it is now. Munich is 6 hours ahead of us on the east coast, and therefore most of what we saw on TV wasn’t live. But it didn’t really matter; most of us just wanted to see two specific athletes, live or taped– an American swimmer, and especially a 4’11”, 82 lb. Soviet gymnast. Long before Michael Phelps there was this studly hunk– swimmer Mark Spitz, winner of seven golds at Munich. Swimmer Mark Spitz was unquestionably spectacular… and yet, great as he was, his legacy and potential future success were somewhat diminished by unfortunate timing way beyond his control. Having swum his way to an unprecedented 7 golds, Spitz’s victories for the United States nonetheless came in the immediate wake of Fischer’s equally dominant yet far more geopolitically significant run to his victory. (Fischer even outshone Spitz as a TV guest comedian when they both appeared on a Bob Hope special later that autumn.) It was instead little 17-year-old Olga Valentinovna Korbut who ultimately stole the show and our hearts at the Munich Olympics, for she displayed not only artistic and athletic excellence, but also unbridled teen-aged joy in doing so. We Americans, so long accustomed to stern-faced Soviet athletes who looked as though they’d been potty-trained with electricity, suddenly beheld this adorable and talented little pixie as she took obvious delight in the fruits of her preparatory training. If Boris Spassky had managed to put a sympathetic human face on the Soviet Union, then it was Olga Korbut who graced it with a heart-melting smile. And so, in the summer and autumn of 1972, it suddenly seemed a lot less likely that we would ever engage in World War III against the Soviets and meet our ends via Mutual Assured Destruction. But just as Cold War tensions were finally beginning to ease, a new enemy to world order and tranquility suddenly emerged… which is why that concert was on TV on the morning of Wednesday, September 6th– my first day of high school– instead of the athletic competitions that were originally scheduled for that day’s telecast. On the night of Tuesday, September 5, a Palestinian terrorist group calling itself “Black September” had kidnapped and then slaughtered 11 Israeli athletes and coaches, ensuring that the XX Oympiad would be forever remembered for the “Munich Massacre.” In trying to counter this well-planned act, the (West) Germans were handicapped by several factors– One, their military had been hamstrung and de-fanged (for self-evident reasons) after World War II, and they were legally enjoined from operations on their native soil, leaving this matter to the untrained regular police; Two, in response to the excessively militarized 1968 Games in Mexico City and the Nazi-themed 1936 Berlin spectacle, West German officials promoted this Olympiad as “Heitere Spiele,” i.e., “The Cheerful Games,” in order to show the world a kinder and gentler German face, and they accordingly made their security forces (such as they were) less visible; and Three, the western democracies were new at this sort of thing, and the military science of counter-terrorism was in its infancy (except in Israel, who sent their dreaded and brutally efficient Mossad agents on Operation “Wrath of God” to avenge the massacre with extreme prejudice.) * * * * * * * As my sisters and I watched the memorial service in Munich Stadium that Wednesday morning, we understood that something really horrible had happened, but little else. Neither we nor many other people, adult or adolescent, fully comprehended that day that we were entering a new era of international conflict, one marked not by massive troop movements or nuclear-armed submarines and supersonic bombers, but rather by small bands of fanatics armed with suicide bombs or even just box-cutters who were willing to martyr themselves or their own children for their cause. Sadly, we would all come to learn more and more about that stuff in the coming months, years, and decades. All this along with the lesson we absorbed from “The Godfather”-- that there are bad guys, and then there really bad guys. After the summer of Boris and Olga and the Munich Massacre, the Russians would never again seem quite as scary as before… especially 29 years and 5 days later, on September 11, 2001. Meanwhile, it was time for me to start my first day of high school. The bus pulled up in front of our house, and I boarded it and took a seat.

Did you know that today, September 5, 2022, is, (among other things,) the 9th observance of the International Day of Charity? The General Assembly of the United Nations chose this date in commemoration of the passing of Mother Teresa of Calcutta on this date in 1997. I’d be willing to wager that anyone Gen X or older knows who Mother Teresa is, but just in case, she was the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 for her lifetime of philanthropic work. “Charity can alleviate the worst effects of humanitarian crises, supplement public services in health care, education, housing and child protection. It assists the advancement of culture, science, sports, and the protection of cultural and natural heritage. It also promotes the rights of the marginalized and underprivileged and spreads the message of humanity in conflict situations.” https://www.un.org/en/observances/charity-day In the spirit of the day, I’d like to use my debut as a guest contributor to introduce everyone here at The Table to a charitable organization that is very dear to my heart and has an incredibly fun event coming up. Hope Dealers BTC Inc. is a charity organization that I helped found and where I am proud to sit as the Executive Director. We are a grassroots organization, run by volunteers who are committed to providing support to anyone affected by substance use disorder, mental health issues, and poverty, including friends and families, through outreach, community service, and education. We deal HOPE because we DO recover, and we do it TOGETHER. On October 1st at Cobbs Hill in Rochester, NY we will be hosting our second annual Color Run. This is a family-friendly, fundraising event where we invite both participants and sponsors to join us for an unmeasured, untimed, run (or walk) around Lake Riley while getting (gently) blasted with non-toxic, biodegradable colored powder. https://www.hopedealersbtc.com/colorrun2022. Last year was a lot of fun and we would love to see some new faces this year. This fundraiser supports a large percentage of our annual budget that we use to offer a wide variety of services to the community, completely free of charge. We welcome anyone into our family with no criteria for participation, or receipt of services. We assist anyone in need, no questions asked. Member Support We are first and foremost a support group for our members and volunteers. All of us have been affected by substance-use disorder either directly or through family or friend's use, or the incomparable heartbreak of loss. Our organization was born from a need for a different kind of support that was offered freely with absolutely no judgment and we uphold that in everything we do. This job, providing hope, is a difficult one. While extremely rewarding, we recognize that it is also very emotionally taxing and we are always there to support and recharge each other when we're feeling depleted. As they say, you can’t pour from an empty cup. Multiple Pathways to Recovery Support Group MPtR is our structured support group targeted toward, but not limited to, volunteers and community members who are in recovery from substance use disorder and other addictions. Complete, judgment-free acceptance of the multiple pathways philosophy is one of our official core values written into the by-laws of our organization. We firmly believe that the only "correct" pathway to recovery for an individual is the one that works for them. We accept any and all ways that a person chooses to refrain from something that has made their lives unmanageable. During the Multiple Pathways to Recovery meetings we teach and inform people of all the different structured avenues of recovery that are available within the community, as well as share personal experiences of what has worked for others. We embrace the fact that recovery is a dynamic process that changes and evolves over time. What worked, in the beginning, may not be effective forever, and that's ok. There are other avenues to explore and we're here to help people learn about and embrace those alternatives. The Multiple Pathways to Recovery Support Group currently meets online on the 1st and 3rd Thursdays of each month from 8pm - 10pm. The meeting is led by our Board President and Certified Peer Advocate, Karena Gordon-Smith, supported by Board Member and Licensed Clinical Social Worker, Maria Panitsidis. Resource Navigation Another of the core principles written into our organization's by-laws is to act as, essentially, a middle-man between community members in need and resources that already exist to assist them. We “bridge the gap” between people and services. Where once we focused solely on assisting people through substance-use recovery and detox programs, we have since expanded to assist with additional types of community service resources such as food, clothing, housing, medical treatment and obtaining insurance, and mental health treatment programs. Community members can reach out to us in a variety of ways, like our website, social media, and 24-hour message service that I’ll tell you more about in a minute. We also host two resource-sharing events each year where we provide space for other organizations and resource providers to come together all in one place. We call it the Bridge to Change Resource Fair. It’s held at the International Plaza on North Clinton Avenue. Our next Bridge to Change Resource Fair will be held with our annual Hopesgiving Dinner event in November. Street-Level Outreach Yet another of the core principles written into the by-laws of our organization is to provide some form of street-level outreach. We provide resources and information directly to the people who need it, through physical presence where the people in need exist. Our current outreach team operates out of a space graciously shared with us by the Latino Youth Development organization at 980 N. Clinton Avenue. On the 1st and 3rd Sundays of every month from 9:30 am - 11:30 am we provide bagged lunches, hygiene kits, clothing, shoes, and any other survival and household items we have in our inventory, as well as harm reduction items and information, and resource navigation. This is also how we let people know that there IS hope. We do recover, and we’re here to help. We have trained members who are able to offer immediate assistance to people interested in beginning a journey in recovery. We’ve even taken people directly off the street and brought them to treatment facilities during Sunday outreach. We are currently recruiting new volunteers in an effort to increase our street outreach services to weekdays as well. If you are interested in joining us, please visit our website. Harm Reduction “Harm reduction is a set of practical strategies aimed at reducing negative consequences associated with drug use.” https://harmreduction.org/about-us/principles-of-harm-reduction/ We are an official Opioid Overdose Prevention Program certified by New York State. This program allows us to distribute and officially certify individuals in the proper use of Narcan©/Naloxone, the life-saving opioid overdose reversal drug. We also furnish condoms/safe sex kits and information at outreach, upon request. We also, in partnership with the Monroe County Health Department, provide fentanyl testing strips to the community. Sharps Removal True to our roots, one of the very first community services our organization ever offered-from before we were incorporated to this today- is our sharps removal service. That is picking up wantonly discarded needles and drug paraphernalia from public and abandoned spaces within our target service area. Even after removing over 140,000+ needles since the inception of our organization, the Ibero neighborhood and the surrounding areas continue to be plagued with this dangerous debris. Though the problem still exists, the impact made by our organization and others like ours is clearly evident from our data and observations. Where once we could retrieve upwards of 1000 - 2000 needles week after week, we now find 200 - 600 every two weeks. Our current sharps removal operations take place on the 2nd and 4th Sundays of each month, beginning by meeting at 980 N. Clinton at 10 am. We then carpool through a pre-determined route, while also providing mobile street-level outreach to anyone we encounter in need of assistance. This service is also available to anyone in need of it. We are able to arrange emergency operations on other days or times as necessary for individuals and businesses outside of our service area, such as landlords and stores. Community Education There is not enough education surrounding what Substance Use Disorder actually is, what it can look like, and how interconnected it is with other mental health and trauma-related disorders. To address this, we offer free educational presentations to anyone for any reason. We have presented in many different environments over the years, including schools, church groups, rehabilitation facilities, businesses, youth groups, scouts meetings, and industry conferences. The Hopeline Last, but certainly not least, is the Hopeline. (585) 633-8690 Our automated answering service is there to provide information to people 24 hours a day. They can also leave messages to request any of the services that we provide. Trained Hopeline Representatives return calls, texts, emails, and other messages to provide information and services to anyone that makes a request. That was the extra long way of getting to the point, which is that we deal hope to as many people as we can as often as possible and do whatever we can to #BeTheChange that we want to see in this world. We have been officially incorporated in the state of New York as an NFP since April of 2019, and in June of that year were granted our public charity and 501(c)3 designation. As such, all donations to us are completely tax deductible. We are an all-volunteer organization, meaning that we have absolutely no paid staff, not even me. We operate on an incredibly small budget. A large majority of our funding comes from individual contributions directly from local community members and small businesses. While we all know that money makes the world go round, what is even more essential to our organization's success is volunteer participation. As I mentioned before, there are little to no criteria for participation within our organization. We’ve got jobs for all ages and skill sets. One of the most important recurring duties that anyone in the family can help with is making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for the lunches we hand out during outreach. Having these made by volunteers allows us to drastically reduce the cost of these lunches so that we’re able to serve more people on a weekly basis. Other in-person opportunities include participation in outreach or sharps removal operations or assisting at events. We have remote/work-from-home opportunities on our Hopeline and Social Media teams. We also have other jobs that require more professional experience or education, like fundraising, grant writing, IT support, or web development. We would love to welcome you into our volunteer family. If you are interested in joining us, please visit either of the links above or visit our website and let us know how you’d like to help. https://www.hopedealersbtc.com/join-us If you would like any additional information or have any questions about volunteering, you may call the Hopeline at 585-633-8690 and choose Option 6 from the main menu, or dial x600, send us an email at volunteer@hopedealersbtc.com, or use the contact form on our website. If you are interested in making a contribution, we accept both monetary and in-kind donations. Monetary donations can be made online through our website or Facebook Page. Letters and packages can be sent to our mailing address: Hope Dealers BTC Inc. 1485 Howard Rd, Unit 64264 Rochester, NY 14624 Donations can also be dropped off during our outreach operations at 980 N. Clinton Ave on the 1st or 3rd Sunday of the month from 9:30 am - 11:30 am, or at any of our public, in-person events. If you would like any additional information or have any questions about making a contribution, you may call the Hopeline at 585-633-8690 and choose Option 4 from the main menu, or dial x400, send us an email at indonations@hopedealersbtc.com, or use the contact form on our website. All of us at Hope Dealers BTC Inc are looking forward to our friends at Danny’s Table helping us continue to improve our community while giving the priceless gift of HOPE to those who most need it. We would love it if you would join us at our Color Run, make a donation, or sign up to volunteer with us. Thank you.

Take the time to master these culinary “Five Easy Pieces,” and you’ll be well on your way to becoming an accomplished kitchen maestro. * * * * * * * My good friend AndyT. (fraternity brother, college football teammate, fellow Big C survivor, and regular follower of Danny’s Table) recently asked me for THREE recipes that are relatively straightforward to prepare, relatively easy to master, and would give him or anyone else a useful arsenal of dishes for impromptu home entertaining. I tried, but I couldn’t narrow it down to just three. And so, because I love the title of this obscure cinematic masterpiece and its iconic diner scene, I’ve decided to codify Five Easy Pieces worth learning: Pork Tenderloin with Wild Mushrooms, Roasted Salmon Filet, Balsamic Chicken, Pan-Seared Sea Scallops, and Mini Pot Roast. (I said “codify” instead of “create” because neither I nor the vast majority of cooks– amateur or professional– ever come up with truly original recipes; rather, like Keith Richards “borrowing” guitar licks from Chuck Berry or lesser-known bluesmen, we merely appropriate, modify, re-purpose, update, or just plain steal the works of our predecessors.) Before we get to the actual recipes, we need to cover a few minor details– ONE, all of these can be served with either potatoes (mashed or otherwise) or some sort of rice, or neither if you want to go full paleo. (You can also serve at least the chicken and salmon directly over salad greens.) TWO, I always keep blanched broccoli on hand, and you can simply sizzle a few fleurettes in butter for a quick side veggie. (Alternatively, a quick sauté of spinach is also tasty and convenient.) And THREE, a simple and elegant salad before dinner works beautifully. So first, the salad– Roasted Pepper Salad Here’s a great hack for salads that you can make a day or more ahead. It borders on actual work, but is well worth the effort for its make-ahead convenience as well as its deliciousness. Purchase two sweet peppers– one red, one yellow. (Feel free to double the quantity if you love peppers.) Preheat your oven to 400º. Lightly rub each pepper with grape seed oil and then roast them whole in a pyrex dish. It’s okay if they start to scorch a little; just give them a turn and keep roasting until they just begin to collapse. (Interestingly-- in my test run, the red pepper took 30 minutes while the yellow needed 45.) Allow to thoroughly cool. Peel them, reserving the juices. When properly roasted, the skins will remove easily but the flesh will still be firm enough to remain intact. Remove and discard seeds. Slice the pepper flesh into finger-wide strips. Combine with reserved juices and your favorite vinaigrette (homemade or store-bought) and refrigerate. To serve, simply plop a tong-pinch of peppers over a handful of your favorite mixed greens. This salad will dress itself as the pepper-flavored oil drizzles over the greens. (If the oil has solidified in the fridge, just leave out at room temperature for a few minutes before using.) If you are making dinner for two, you will have plenty of peppers left, which will keep for several days. And if you are not into peppers, this pre-soak in vinaigrette also works with other veggies. (See my earlier take on beets.) And so, in no particular order, here are the Five entrees– Pork Tenderloin with Mushroom-Madeira Sauce In this dish, pork tenderloin is merely a vehicle for the fabulously rich and delicious sauce. I saw two prices for pork tenderloin at my local store– $4.99/lb. for standard issue, and $16.29/lb. for organic. In a moment of economic irrationality that, writ large, would explain a lot of consumer behavior, I bought the organic tenderloin because it was smaller. Whether organic or not, pork tenderloin is very popular. It is also tricky to cook at home because of its small diameter– while beef tenderloin is sufficiently large that one can roast it whole to exterior crispness while keeping the interior rare, it is way too easy to overcook a skinny pork tenderloin if you roast it like that. We avoid this problem by diagonally slicing the raw tenderloin into medallions and then scorching them on both sides in a hot iron pan. But before that, we need to make the sauce… and before that, we need to discuss Madeira. Let’s say our Founding Fathers went out drinking after penning the Bill of Rights. It is highly likely that Madeira would have been their drink of choice, as it was quite popular back then. Madeira is a fortified wine like Port, Sherry, and Marsala, and therefore has an alcoholic content of 18-20%. Such a high alcohol level– provided by the addition of brandy– neutralizes the bacteria that would otherwise convert wine to vinegar. Madeira, produced on the Portuguese-owned island of the same name, comes in several different styles ranging from light and dry to rich and sweet. “Malmsey” is a nickname for the Malvasia grape variety and also indicates a rich and sweet style that I find perfect for this and other recipes. You should of course taste some before you cook with it… you might be surprised how delicious a wintertime sipper it is. (It is close in flavor to Marsala, but no one actually drinks Marsala.) So, for the sauce– 1/2 Pint Heavy Cream 4oz. or so of Malmsey Madeira 1 Large Shallot A Small Handful of Portobello Mushrooms, Sliced (Shiitakes also work.) 1 TSP Glace de Veau Gold Demi-Glace (available at quality grocers or here.) Salt & Pepper As Needed Heat up the cream in a saucepan with low heat. Add the demi-glace and stir periodically until it is completely dissolved. While that is happening, slice the shallots and saute them in just enough grape seed oil. When the shallots are browned and wilted, add the mushrooms and saute until slightly scorched. Add the Madeira and cook until almost all liquid is gone. Add the cream and stir, reducing until it is nicely thickened. (Avoid bubbling over– you can transfer this back to the saucepan for the reduction.) Add salt and pepper as needed, and it’s done… just scorch your pork medallions, sauce them, and enjoy. Roasted Salmon Filet Unless you feel like spending $28-30/lb. on fresh King Salmon, I recommend buying quality farm-raised (and certified organic) Atlantic Salmon for about half that price. Plan on 6-8 oz. per person; HOWEVER– check the prices! if you purchase it conveniently pre-portioned, you might get hosed for as much as three bucks a pound. (Nice work if you can get it.) But because leftover cooked salmon is so delicious in omelets and salads, you might want to buy a large piece and portion it yourself. (Pro Tip– Your dinner plates will be much prettier if you cut your portions before cooking instead of cooking it whole first.) The cooking part is stupid-easy– preheat the oven to 400º. Place salmon portions skin side down on foil in a pyrex dish and then rub the exposed flesh with grape seed oil. Roast for 13-15 minutes, and then check for “wiggle.” Cook more as needed, mindful that high-quality salmon is much better slightly undercooked than overcooked. After a single practice session with one filet, you should be able to correlate your preferred degree of doneness to an accurate cooking time. (Note– I timed a test piece of fairly thick farmed Atlantic salmon and it was perfect after exactly 15 minutes.) If you’re keeping score with an instant-read thermometer, shoot for 120º-125º, definitely not higher. Because you didn’t oil the skin, it will conveniently adhere to the foil as you lift the cooked salmon with a spatula. Prepared like this, good salmon is delicious all by itself and doesn’t necessarily need a sauce. And besides, we’re striving to keep our “Five Easy Pieces” simple, right? But if you must– the simplest sauce for this would be a squeeze of lemon; next up is a quarter cup or so of extra virgin olive oil enhanced with a dab of Dijon mustard and a pinch of chopped fresh dill. After that– as seen in the photo– would be a simple salsa of diced cucumber, red onion, and chopped fresh dill with lemon juice and olive oil. Replacing some (or all) of the diced cuke with genuine half-sour deli pickles is a snazzy touch. As the temperatures drop and our appetites sharpen– and you gain confidence in the kitchen– perhaps you’ll eventually want to hone your saucier chops and master Sauce Beurre Blanc and Hollandaise, each of which can be enlivened with the aforementioned and salmon-friendly mustard and dill. Here are the ingredients for the salsa in the photo above– ½ Cup Extra Virgin Olive Oil 2 TSP Dijon Mustard 1 TSP Lemon Juice 1 TSP White Wine Vinegar 5-6 Quarter Spears of FRESH Dill Pickles, Finely Diced 1 Cup Finely Diced Fresh Cucumber 1 Large Pinch of Chopped Fresh Dill A Twist or Two of Fresh Ground Pepper If, as I did, you choose to use pickles, please opt for REAL pickles from the deli case, not the alien-green ones sold in room-temperature jars. And if you are having wine, I’ve stated many times in other essays how salmon and Sauvignon Blanc seem made for each other. If you’d prefer a red, I would consider a lighter (e.g. Oregon) version of Pinot Noir, or perhaps a Beaujolais. But read the labels and check the alcoholic content– thanks to increasing global temperatures, traditional “lighter” reds are getting bigger and stronger every vintage. Balsamic Chicken This dish has a four-part genealogy. In 1950, Dr. Robert Baker, a Professor Emeritus of the Department of Animal Sciences at the New York State College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University, published his recipe for “Cornell Chicken.” Fast-forward three decades. When balsamic vinegar (genuine or otherwise) became a trendy new “thing” in American cookery in the early 1980’s, it wasn’t long before recipes for “balsamic chicken” sprouted like weeds. Back when I was an over-the-road trucker, I used to enjoy visiting the Amish food stands in Pennsylvania… and one of the normally reticent Amish lads showed me how they marinate chicken before grilling it to delicious perfection. And finally, the practice of brining poultry has gained considerable popularity in the past two decades. By incorporating principles from these four different root sources, we arrive at an excellent method for making delicious and juicy chicken. I chose to make this dish with boneless but not skinless breasts; to obtain these, I had to bone them myself… and you can, too, even though it’s a pain in the ass. If you’re good with a knife, you’ll leave the tenderloin well attached to the breast… and if you’re really good, you’ll do so even when you remove the tenderloin’s tough white tendon. (A butcher should be willing to bone the breasts for you at no charge.) Whether you use breasts, legs or both… whether you grill or roast them… and whether you use boneless and/or skinless pieces, the key to this recipe lies in the marinade– ⅔ Cup Good-Quality Balsamic Vinegar ½ Cup Pure (NOT Extra Virgin) Olive Oil 1 Large Garlic Clove 1 TBSP Kosher Salt 1 TBSP Brown Sugar 1 TSP Bell’s Seasoning 1 TSP Lemon Juice 1 Pinch of Lemon Zest ½ Raw Egg (whisk with a fork in a small bowl first) Combine all ingredients in a small blender or food processor. Marinate chicken (in a plastic bag or a dish) for a minimum of two hours. Alternatively, you can just use bottled balsamic vinaigrette for the marinade and doctor it as you see fit. Whichever you use, this dish seems like an obvious candidate for the grill, as Professor Baker originally proposed. In lieu of outdoor grilling, a commercial convection oven would likely be the best indoor method. I don’t have such fancy restaurant equipment at home, and I wanted to eliminate the variables associated with grilling (Direct or indirect heat? Smoky or not?) so here’s how I improvised a roasting apparatus for all-around air circulation in a 500º home oven– By brushing the skin with a little oil, I achieved a nice browning. By using my instant-read thermometer, I was able to pull it out right at 150º and then let it “coast” up to 160º, the proper cooking temperature for poultry. And by adding water to the pan before placing it in the oven, I was able to capture the delicious “au jus” drippings and use them for a sauce– The result was as juicy and delicious as it looks. I’m looking forward to trying the grilled version. Seared Sea Scallops Andrea and I absolutely love sea scallops. (Please see my earlier piece about Coquilles St. Jacques.) We don’t even mind paying $26 per pound, since we have smallish appetites and also save so much by eating great food and drinking great wine at home instead of in restaurants. Scallops are a wonderful choice for enjoying at home for two major reasons– they are easy to cook, and you know what you are eating. By purchasing your own scallops from a reputable seafood supplier, you can make sure that they are FRESH (never frozen); and DRY-PACKED (rather than shot through with sodium tripolyphosphate.) I am old enough to remember when authenticity itself was an issue, as some shady fish dealers used to sell cylindrically-cut pieces of shark meat or skate wing as sea scallops. Cooking sea scallops is quite simple. Preheat your oven to 400º. Remove the foot (the tough little tab) from each scallop. Sear in a hot iron pan with plenty of grape seed oil. Scorch one side, then flip. Immediately remove pan from the burner and place in the oven. By the time the other side is scorched, they will be done. It is okay to eat sea scallops undercooked. Now, since cooking them is so easy, I thought I’d synthesize a few sauce recipes into something fairly complicated. Western and eastern denizens of North Carolina fight as fiercely over what constitutes proper barbecue sauce as they once did with Yankee troops over secession. The hill folk in the west like tomato-based versions, while those in the east intriguingly eschew all traces of tomato in favor of a concoction made from vinegar, mustard, and a little sugar. Because we love the flavors of lemon and sherry with our scallops (see Coquilles St. Jacques), it was only a minor leap to adapt an eastern Carolinian BBQ sauce for our purposes by using sherry vinegar. Browned (don’t say caramelized) onions provide thickness, while extra virgin olive oil nicely balances the acids. ½ Cup Sherry Vinegar ½ Cup Extra Virgin Olive Oil 1 TBSP Dijon Mustard ½ Cup Browned Onions 1 TSP Lemon Juice ½ TSP Lemon Zest Dashes of Salt & Pepper Dash of Granulated Garlic Puree all ingredients together and serve sparingly with Pan-Seared Sea Scallops. This sauce also works with other seafoods as well as chicken. Of course you can opt for something much simpler for your scallops… a squeeze of lemon works just fine. And about the B-word– bacon– please don’t do it. Scallops wrapped in bacon sounds like a great idea, but in my experience it isn’t. I have found it infuriatingly impossible to get both the bacon and the scallops to cook properly with the former wrapped around the latter. If you love bacon and love scallops and insist on enjoying them together, I recommend this– Red Wine Pot Roast There’s something about pot roast that smacks of a successful long-term marriage– it is soothing and comforting rather than edgy and exciting; its cooking technique is utterly reliable rather than riskily experimental. And therefore, of these Five Easy Pieces, this miniature pot roast is the dish most worthy of being dedicated to AndyT. (whom I cited back in Paragraph One as this essay’s inspiration) and Paula, his bride and companion of many decades– two humble Buffalo natives who’ve known each other from childhood and are now enjoying their hard-earned seasons of leisure with good health, youthful energy, and a quintet of young grandchildren. Aside from its vague similarities to matrimonial bliss, pot roast is nothing special to look at, so behold ye instead the special pan I rush-ordered from Amazon just to make this dish for all of you– My new 1.5 QT LODGE DUTCH OVEN, available HERE. For dimensional reference, my hand with fingers spread is wider than this pot, making it perfect for small batches of pot roast. I highly recommend buying something like this. Pot Roast is a braise, which is the culinary equivalent of a rodeo cowboy riding a nasty old bull until it falls asleep. In other words, we take a cut of meat that is too tough to grill like a steak and instead give it a 3-4 hour simmer in a low temperature oven (325º) within a covered vessel like the Dutch oven above… a process that renders such meat spoon-tender. Cuts of beef that lend themselves to braising include chuck, neck, brisket, and short ribs. To me, the ideal cut for this dish is grass-fed chuck. Grass-fed beef is both healthier and tastier, and its bias toward toughness is not only completely negated by braising, but also translates into deeper and richer flavor. Special ahead-of-time prep– thoroughly brown (don’t say caramelize) 4-6 onions. (You might want to read this and this before you start.) This is way more than you’ll need, but the remainder will keep in the fridge for quite a while and surely come in very handy at some point. Here’s the recipe itself– 1- 1.5 lbs. Braising Beef (I suggest purchasing a large piece of grass-fed chuck and then cutting off what you need and freezing the rest for next time.) 2 Sticks of Celery, ¼” Dice 2 Sticks of Carrot, ¼” Dice ½ Cup of Browned Onions (The pre-browning gave them a lot of great flavor.) 1 TSP Demi-Glace (See Pork Tenderloin Recipe) A Good Stiff Glass of Pinot Noir 2-3 Bay Leaves 1 TSP Tomato Paste Preheat oven to 325º. (This is the magic temperature for breaking down the collagen-rich connective tissue that makes braising cuts otherwise inedible. Any hotter and you toughen the actual meat.) Brown the piece (or pieces) of beef in an iron skillet with grape seed oil. This will produce a considerable amount of smoke. (You can do this outdoors on a grill, but it will add another flavor component. I like to do this for a BBQ version of this dish, but not this one. Perhaps using your iron pan on your ourdoor grill is the ideal solution.) Remove the meat and deglaze the pan with one pint of water. Transfer this liquid to a saucepan for the time being. In the same pan in which you browned the beef, simmer the carrots in just enough grape seed oil until they soften, and then add celery and cook for another two minutes or so. Set aside off the heat. Add the glass of Pinot Noir to the deglazing liquid and simmer on medium heat. Add tomato paste and demi-glace and continue to simmer until the demi-glace is thoroughly dissolved. You want to cook off as much alcohol as possible, so a long simmer is good. But then you’ll need to let this liquid cool for a while before adding to the braising pot. For the "assembly," place the browned onions in the bottom of the braising pot. Add meat and then the carrots and celery. Add the cooled wine/deglazing liquid. If it doesn’t all fit, save the rest of the liquid and cook it down; you can add it to the pot later OR use it in the finished sauce. Add bay leaves and cover. Place in the oven atop a sheet pan in case it drips. Check after two hours and add more liquid if needed. Check after three hours for doneness– the meat should have retained its shape and yet yield to the gentle prod of a fork with little resistance. Set the finished meat aside and taste the braising liquid that should have transformed into a luxuriously flavorful sauce. Add salt if necessary. If you want the sauce richer, add a dab more of the demi-glace. Better Than Bouillon® Beef Base is quite useful for such sauce adjustments, but beware its saltiness. Throw the bay leaves away. Your finished sauce will be dark brown with visible carrots and celery cubes. Since you browned the onions prior to braising, they will have completely melted into the sauce. Serve over the mashed potatoes you made during the long braise. (Alternatively, I can more easily imagine this with egg noodles than rice.) * * * * * * * Five dishes worth mastering… are they really easy? Having made them all in one day for this essay, I’ll just say that some were a lot easier than others, but they were all what I would call reproducibly doable. After you make one of these once, the next time will be more than twice as easy. And if you love to cook half as much as I do, you’ll enjoy yourself on the learning curve. Bon Appétit!

Here we have a quintessential “Danny’s Table” dish– a tricky yet worthwhile update of something simple; hard to make, yet well worth it. * * * * * * * “Ratatouille” is an old southern French classic– a humble stew of eggplant, squash, and tomato with herbs and garlic. There is perhaps no finer vehicle in the European culinary canon for displaying the exuberant, sun-splattered ripeness of Old-World eggplant combined with that of New-World squash and tomatoes. When I was a young whippersnapper just cutting my culinary teeth, I used to dutifully add one vegetable after the other to the pot, stirring constantly, until I got what roughly resembled a stew. The result was quite tasty and satisfying, and yet it was also, I admit, an indistinct mash of its components. It was Chef Cathy who taught me to treat the individual ingredients as stand-alone parts of a greater whole. Since we had a fully-equipped professional kitchen, we could separately fry the eggplant, zucchini, and yellow squash to exterior crispness and then combine them for a final simmer, during which they largely maintained their discrete identities. However, one cannot easily do that in a civilian kitchen. But the good news is that there is a whole different way to treat this dish– not as a stew, but rather as a casserole. As such, it makes a great stand-alone vegan entree or, alternatively, shines as a perfect foil for entrees such as grilled lamb chops. You can even enjoy it for a cold lunch in the increasingly hot late August afternoons. A further note– if you are a REALLY busy person and struggle to simply feed yourself at hard-won intervals in your way-too-stressful day, then this dish isn’t necessarily for you. However, if you are semi- or fully retired and regard your afternoon as “wine-time,” making this dish can be a positively meditative experience that makes for a delightful two hours or so in your kitchen, sipping your favorite wine and listening to your favorite music as you stresslessly and painstakingly assemble this dish. The added advantage is that, if you do everything exactly as described, this dish is utterly foolproof. Furthermore, if you are planning a dinner party on Friday, you can make this on Thursday or even Wednesday without any negative consequences. INGREDIENTS: 1 Pint Pure Olive Oil (NOT “Extra Virgin”... “Pure” is better for cooking) 1 Eggplant 1 Zucchini 2 Tomatoes 1 Yellow Squash 2 Yellow Onions, Browned 1 TBSP Herbs de Provence mix 1 TBSP Dried thyme 1 Clove Garlic ½ Pint Pitted Kalamata Olives First, the “Paint”-- In a small food processor, blend the garlic with half of the oil. Combine with the rest of the oil and the herbs. And next, the Olive-Onion Spread-- Briefly process the olives with the onions. Keep it chunky, i.e., don’t liquify it. Next, the Veggies– Set oven to low broil. Slice the zucchini diagonally into approximately ½” pieces. Distribute on a half-sheetpan covered with parchment paper. Using a pastry brush, paint each with the seasoned oil and then broil until lightly browned. Flip the slices and repeat. Set zucchini slices aside and repeat with yellow squash and eggplant. (The eggplant will soak up the oil like a sponge, so be generous.) Slice the tomatoes and start layering your casserole in a Dutch oven or rectangular casserole dish. I recommend the order as zucchini-tomato-yellow squash-eggplant, which alternates the firm veggies with the mushy ones. Add a small dab of the Olive-Onion Spread to each tomato so that the juice will distribute the flavors as the tomatoes cook. Bake at 350º until the tomatoes have pretty much dissolved, which should take about an hour depending on your pan. Cook longer as needed. When done, the olive-onion spread will have provided all the salt you need.

In August of 1971, Chef Astor worked diligently on his new Autumn Menu– the culmination of all his experience, his Culinary Magnum Opus. * * * * * * * By mid-August, autumn was taking the first steps of its annual, inexorable march into the Finger Lakes Region of central New York State. The sun was setting earlier, the mornings were cooler, and the Amish farmsteads were bursting their baskets with corn and tomatoes. Grapes hung ever more heavily on their vines and were starting to develop color. Even the sky was astir, seemingly organizing itself into a parade of massive cumulus clouds— slate-bellied, cauliflower-crowned behemoths that lumbered from west to east and sent blue-green shadows racing across the checkerboard of farmer’s fields and hedgerows. September was most definitely on the way, bearing the same gifts as in years previous— the deliciously cool sweater weather, the gaudy foliage, the massive influx of college students, tourists… and, perhaps most importantly, dining customers. As viewed from the CAYUGA LOUNGE’s back veranda, with its fabulous vista of the lake and the western sky, the sun set a little farther to the left each night as the summer days gradually shortened. Chef Graeme Astor, 41, worked out here for a few hours most August evenings in 1971 on the details of his new autumn menu, and the southward drift of the sunset served as his countdown clock to the menu’s September implementation. It was a telling measure of how far he had come, how far the CAYUGA LOUNGE had evolved under his watch, that he could focus on this menu while his well-trained crew dutifully and competently executed the dinner service. This new menu was to be Chef Astor’s career-defining masterpiece, the culmination of all he had learned in British cooking schools, Manhattan restaurants, and here at the CAYUGA LOUNGE, where he had taken over a dying hellhole of an eatery several years before and diligently built it into a premier dining destination for locals, college faculty, and visiting out-of-towners. Astor lit another Dunhill and scribbled some more on one of his yellow legal pads. There would be no French terminology on this menu, he had decided, except where English would seem downright awkward. For instance, nobody orders snails… they order escargots… but why present, say, simple beef stew as Boeuf Bourguignon? Same with Italian and other menu languages. One thing he had learned in his brief tenure at THE FOUR SEASONS was that American food had finally arrived and needed no fancy foreign words to describe it when plain English would suffice. And of all the skills and assets Chef Astor brought to his position— from his bridge master’s sharp intellect to his rugger’s physical strength and endurance— his greatest, perhaps, was a precise instinct for the line that separates true finery from pretentious fakery… a distinction that, in retrospect, he was trained from birth to understand better than most. * * * * * * * Graeme Astor’s father had been a footman in the rural Surrey household of King Edward VIII, hoping for eventual promotion to butler when, in 1936, the king abruptly abdicated. One didn’t easily jump from one royal’s staff to another’s, particularly with the whiff of scandal about. But he was immediately offered employment at a London gentlemen’s club— Boodle’s— where his well-ingrained dignity and discretion fit like old leather furniture with the dining and gaming rooms full of the cream of London society. Once securely established there, the senior Astor made what he would later describe as the single biggest mistake of his life– forgetting that a grown man can no longer understand what the world looks like through the eyes of a young child. What better way to inspire his seven year-old son Graeme to great accomplishment, the father had surmised, than to bring him to Boodle’s and let him observe firsthand the super-successful in their natural environs? What the father ostensibly showed his son was the majesty of self-made industrial barons, distant royals, powerful bankers and barristers, and especially the Oxford and Cambridge professors, all bedecked in Saville Row and engaged in lively card games and even livelier debate, glassfuls of pricey cognac or vintage port at their elbows and clouds of fragrant cigar and pipe smoke emanating upward. These were all great and noble professional men, declared the elder Astor… but in particular he emphasized the professors. There is no reliable path to becoming an industrial tycoon, and of course one is either born royal or not. But one could realistically set a course to becoming a professor… all that was required, really, was a good brain like Graeme obviously had, for he was already playing bridge and backgammon with adults; a good sound schooling, of course, and persistence. Becoming a professor, declared the father, enabled one to leapfrog his way upward through Britain’s rigid class hierarchy. He would always be welcome in the toniest salons among the much wealthier for his unquestionable expertise in economics or the sciences or native peoples or whatever. “All these rich people, for all their wealth, can’t buy what the professors have,” Explained the senior Astor. “And so, failing that, they seek their company and tacit approval.” No proper dinner party, he declared, would be complete without a professor authoritatively holding court on this topic or that. However, that is not at all what young Graeme absorbed from this evening. What was permanently etched into the seven year-old Graeme's memory, on a trip to the servant’s lavatory, was a professional kitchen in full military roar at the peak of dinner service— the smoke, the smells, the sizzle, the baseline din of pots and plates, the shorthand kitchen code that transcended national language barriers, all punctuated by the rhythmic progression of clipped verbal orders from the man at the center of it all, the culinary equivalent of a full field marshal— Boodle’s Alsatian Chef Hans Osterfeld, who cooly and sure-handedly oversaw plate after perfectly beautiful plate as it left the hot line. Chef Osterfeld radiated power and gravity as he gave each plate his brief but full attention, tweaking it, perhaps, with a tiny adjustment of its garnish. Upon his barely perceptible nod, an assistant immediately covered it with a shiny silver dome and off it went, whisked away with the others to the dining room on huge oval trays by elegant men with the grace and posture of ballroom dancers. It was at that moment, in that rank and steamy kitchen, that young Graeme Astor knew with absolute certainty… He wanted to become a Chef. “I serve others so that one day others will serve you,” thundered the exasperated father on innumerable occasions. But much to his father’s disappointment and occasional fits of fury, young Graeme stubbornly dodged every pathway to the upper tiers of London society. He chose rugby over sculling, and he read cooking treatises by Escoffier and Saulnier rather than the works of Shakespeare and Dickens. But despite the culinary experience and professional training he had managed for himself as he crossed the threshold to young manhood, Graeme Astor found himself mysteriously shut out of all restaurant employment within traveling distance of London. Of course it had to be the sinister work of his well-connected and resentful father. So he defiantly set sail for New York City, where the post-WWII fascination with French cuisine was fueling a burgeoning restaurant scene. With his European (if British) cooking school credentials, Astor easily secured employment in a series of Manhattan French eateries. Though the flames of his ambition roared ever more hotly as he accumulated experience and wisdom, he instinctively reined himself in, for he knew that if he vaulted prematurely into a full Chef position, he risked being eaten alive by his co-workers upon the slightest indication of weakness or incomplete mastery of his trade. This was a rough and tough business, he had quickly come to realize. While rising through the ranks in Manhattan kitchens, Astor learned not only the entire French repertoire of sauces and techniques, but also something far more important– what he came to think of as “The Pirate Paradox.” As Astor understood it, pirates were, by definition, incorrigible outlaws– men who held themselves above and beyond the jurisdiction of any civil authority… men with prices on their heads for regularly murdering and stealing with impunity, and therefore could never tread solid ground without fear of arrest and hanging. And yet, in order to effectively operate a ship at sea, a pirate captain must be able to exercise absolute control over a crew of just such men. To accomplish this, he must be perceived as all-knowing and all-powerful. The cost of even questioning his authority or decisions must be prohibitively high. The loyalty of his closest lieutenants– those most capable of actual mutiny– must be obvious and absolute. And so a pirate captain must be charismatic enough to hold personal sway over his crew; sufficiently sea-wise to command their respect as sailors; and cunning enough to sniff out even the slightest whiff of treachery. Astor knew that the same could be said about chefs in their kitchens, which were more often than not staffed by outcasts– drug addicts, ex-cons, and others who thrive in the alleys and shadows rather than the healthy sunshine of a nine-to-five, Monday-through-Friday work life and its associated spells of night and weekend leisure. He knew his time would eventually come… the right gig in the right place at the right time when he was fully prepared to marshal a half dozen of society’s least wanted into a smooth and capable kitchen crew. * * * * * * * The mid-August sun was now setting over Taughannock Falls across the lake. Chef Astor put down his pen and raised his hands to his face, folded as if praying, as he did when particularly deep in thought. What is the ideal array of autumn soups? “Autumn Bisque” was perfect, of course, for the name alone would sell it on crispy cool nights. But wouldn’t “Butternut Squash & Apple Soup” be a more honest name? More descriptive, and less pretentious? After all, classic bisque, if one is truly accurate, would contain shellfish and be thickened with rice or eggs rather than flour. French Onion Soup was a natural inclusion. How about “Nantucket Chowder?” Such a lovely name would appeal to the college town literary cognoscenti who could practically recite MOBY DICK’s Chapter 14 from memory. Astor’s version would remain true (or at least referential) to Melville’s great novel by including both clam and cod, which were offered separately at the Try Pots Inn. This way Astor could save a few bucks AND get a catchy menu name in the process. Perfect… three soups was plenty. One meat, one fish, one vegetable. Two creamy, one broth. Now the sun was dipping below the mountains and the temperature was about to drop. One more Dunhill and a splash of Courvoisier to keep the creativity flowing and the focus sharp. On to the appetizer section… might there be a heading name that better-sounding than “appetizers?” “Hors d’Oeuvres” not only sounded too precious, but also suggested passed trays of finger food at a stand-up reception. “First Courses” would be accurate but dull, and “Starters” sounds like pub grub… guess it’ll have to be “Appetizers.” Let’s see– gotta have pâté and escargots or else they’ll seem like they’re missing. But we need a few non-French choices. Gia’s delicious clam app has been popular for years now, and we had to have it for the “Council.” Shrimp cocktail would sell itself and it connoted no particular nationality. Yeah, that’ll work. * * * * * * * Graeme Astor’s big break in New York City– or so he thought– seemed imminent when he caught wind of Manhattan’s most ambitious restaurant undertaking to date– the opening of THE FOUR SEASONS restaurant, scheduled for 1959. An ocean of money was being lavished on the nation’s greatest culinary consultants as well as world-class architects and even top fashion designers for the front-of-the-house uniforms. THE FOUR SEASONS was to celebrate the full flowering of American cuisine, which of course could not be completely separated from the European roots in which Astor was so thoroughly steeped. They would surely need an entire army of talented kitchen personnel, he figured, so he submitted his résumé. He didn’t need to wait long, because they hired just about everyone who seemed remotely legitimate. But then, to his bitter dismay, he learned that he was never going to get anywhere near the actual kitchen, for it was run by a Swiss head chef who of course surrounded himself with a veritable Swiss Guard… and for all their purported neutrality, they regarded English cookery with cruel disdain and its practitioners as incapable of anything requiring more skill than peeling potatoes and chopping onions. Astor understood right then that he had hit the ceiling in Manhattan, that there were simply too many well-trained chefs for him to make his mark without a lot of luck and also working himself half to death with no guarantee even then of any reward. Furthermore, there was a swelling cadre of up-and-coming young French chefs, not yet thirty and still making names for themselves with a supposed reinvention of the Classical French Canon, pairing fruit sauces with meats and other such silliness. Astor knew that it was time for him to take his talents out to the hinterlands… and that in this part of the world, this meant that he would be pulling his battered Rover out of long-term storage and heading to central New York State without a job, a concrete plan, or anything else except everything he had learned since that evening in Boodle’s a quarter century before. TO BE CONTINUED…

“We be salmon, salmon, salmon, salmon… Hope you like salmon, too.” (NOT Bob Marley) * * * * * * * Seafood nomenclature is a bitch. That’s because a lot of the names by which we know various species of Neptune’s realm are regional, arbitrary, and inconsistent with their official Latin monikers. Atlantic salmon, for instance, was once nicknamed “the king of fish.” I’ve never eaten wild Atlantic salmon and neither have you, unless you are old enough to have dined before 1948, when the legal fishery for Atlantic salmon was closed due to its endangered status (or if you’ve more recently spent ten grand on a guided fly-fishing excursion to Newfoundland.) But there is available to us, dear reader, the actual “King of salmon”– Oncorhynchus tshawytscha, in official Latin… King Salmon, to its drooling devotees. As if to intentionally confuse us, King salmon, naturally, also answers to an alternative name– Chinook. That’s how it is known in my nearby Great Lake Ontario, where it has been stocked (for sportsmen, not commercial fishing) to great success in recent decades. It is also successfully farmed in New Zealand. But for our purposes here, we concern ourselves primarily with the wild Alaskan catch. A Lake Ontario Chinook… or King… or Oncorhynchus tshawytscha. Too bad you can’t eat them; the government says that Lake Ontario fish this size are too full of poisonous chemicals to consume regularly. They don’t need to tell ME twice. * * * * * * * The Pacific Ocean has a lot of freakin’ water… enough to dilute and disperse half the world’s industrial and domestic toxic effluence to either undetectable or at least “safe” levels. And so we can confidently consume the wild-caught species of Pacific salmon without fear of ill effects. Good thing, because it is one of the most delicious fishes in the entire world. Let’s take a trip to your local, high-quality fish market and concentrate on just the pink stuff– salmon. Atlantic salmon, the lightest in color, will invariably be farm-raised, in aquatic pens located in Chile, Florida, Maine. Canada, Iceland, Scotland, and/or Norway. (This list is by no means all-inclusive.) You might also see a selection of “previously frozen” Alaskan salmon, in the species of Sockeye, King, and Coho. Sockeye is the darkest red of them all as well as the most powerfully flavored, rank with overt “fishiness.” For the true believer, Sockeye is seafood heaven, densely packed with the flavors they crave. I personally keep eternally shelf-stable cans of Alaskan Sockeye in my truck for perfectly healthy and tasty emergency meals. But for many others, the strong flavor of Sockeye is halfway to sardines on the skankiness scale. These folks tend to prefer the farmed Atlantic, which has the mildest flavor. As a farmed fish, fresh Atlantic salmon is generally available year-round. So are the frozen wild Alaskan Sockeye, and sometimes Coho and King. But if you want the absolute best salmon– fresh or frozen– you wait for the spring and summer seasons when the Alaskan species return to their rivers of origin to spawn and find their way into the fishermen’s nets. Fresh Sockeye is fabulous– if you like Sockeye– and the Coho is… well, meh. But the fresh and wild King– that, my dear readers, is truly the King of salmon, and perhaps of the entire universe of all seafood. Fresh King salmon looks different from all other salmon– it has a uniquely jasper-orange hue and a putty-like opacity. And just as superior wine regions revel in their specificity, connoisseurs of Alaskan King pay close attention to their rivers of origin, and those caught in the legendary Copper River enjoy the same exalted status as, say, Cabernets from the Stag’s Leap District within Napa Valley. One thing that makes fresh wild Alaskan King salmon so delicious is its naturally high fat content, which also makes it really easy to cook. All you need to do is put the filets skin side down on foil, like this– Cook them for about 13-15 minutes in a hot (400º) oven, then manually check for “wiggle,” cooking more as needed. (Practicing this technique on less-expensive Atlantic salmon is a really good idea. You ideally want to reach an internal temperature of 120º.) By rubbing the flesh but not the skin with grape seed oil, you cause the skin to conveniently adhere to the foil, allowing you to easily separate the flesh from it with a spatula. SAUCE, YOU SAY? As mentioned in previous essays, dill & salmon enjoy a particularly special affinity. Mustard works nicely as well, so a mustard-dill beurre blanc is perfect. (If you don’t know how to make beurre blanc by now, you haven’t been reading my essays. A variety of easy-to-prepare versions can be found here.) AND WINE? Sauvignon Blanc goes perfectly with salmon for the same reason that dill does. Great versions of Sauvignon Blanc originate in a wide range of wine regions– France, South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Chile, and California. But you needn’t confine yourself to a single variety– lean and crisp (French) Chardonnays work well, as do Oregon versions of Pinot Gris (the grown-up version of Pinot Grigio.) Hell, on the HMS TITANIC’s last night afloat, one of its dining rooms offered poached Atlantic salmon (surely wild) with slightly sweet and super high-quality German Riesling. If you gotta go– as we all do, eventually– that would make one helluva last meal, I think.

Watercress salads were a fine dining staple before the Great Mediterranean Revolution. After decades of absence, it’s poised for a comeback. * * * * * * * Four decades ago, a new and fancy boutique restaurant opened in Northampton and put forth a seemingly radical notion– they would serve salads after the entree course, not before. Everyone else was doing it wrong, or so they seemed to imply. The restaurant closed less than two years later. Here in America, you see, we don’t like businesses condescendingly offering to “educate” us. And we eat our salads up front, dammit. It might be a simple salad of mixed greens and vinaigrette… it might be a full-blown Caesar… or, for particularly elegant and important soirée in the early 1980’s, it might have been something like this– the tuxedo of salads: Watercress Salad w/ Endive, Apples, Walnuts, & Roasted Grapes w/ Champagne-Walnut Vinaigrette But the real reason that the upstart Continental restaurant tanked might have been its timing. As the 1980’s gave way to the ‘90’s, American fine dining sensibilities underwent a fundamental shift– Traditional French gastronomy suddenly went way out of style, and everything Mediterranean was suddenly in. The butter that had long accompanied our pre-dinner (and pre-Atkins) bread basket was replaced by olive oil; tarragon seemingly entered the herbal Witness Protection Program, replaced by basil, oregano, and the other Italian usual suspects. Barolo and Brunello di Montalcino elbowed their way onto the high end of our wine lists, a rarified section once monopolized by Bordeaux. And arugula, it seems, replaced watercress. It was as if it vanished from the face of the earth, or at least the marketplace. About six years ago I scored a large bag of it at the RESTAURANT DEPOT, but that was it. Until yesterday, that is. I was in my local Wegmans and casually asked a veteran produce guy about the last time he had seen watercress. “Funny you should ask,” he said with a smile. “We just started getting it back in.” And why should I or anyone else care? “Watercress” is a pretty-sounding name, with connotations of doily-necked British royals, pinkies extended and nibbling crustless watercress sandwiches at tea time. “Arugula,” meanwhile, is one of those naturally comedic names (like “Kalamazoo”) and suggests a Model T horn or a cartoon sneeze. But both of these greens have a refreshing, peppery zing, and both combine nicely with “Spring Salad Mix” or other such mixes of small-leaf lettuces. Watercress, I think, makes a better main ingredient in salads. If you see some in the store, I highly recommend that you give it a try… and please let us know where you found it! WATERCRESS SALAD Watercress Champagne Walnut Vinaigrette Granny Smith Apple Slices Roasted Red Seedless Grapes Endive Walnuts CHAMPAGNE WALNUT VINAIGRETTE Champagne vinegar Walnut Oil Tiny dash of Dijon Mustard Tiny dash of Homemade Mayonnaise Minced Shallots Salt & Pepper ROASTED SEEDLESS GRAPES Preheat oven to 250º. Carefully remove grapes from their stems, then wash and thoroughly dry them. Toss with a splash of grapeseed oil and spread over parchment paper on a baking sheet. Lightly salt, and then roast them until they just start to shrivel. Turn off heat and allow to rest in the oven as it cools. The finished product should ideally be halfway between a grape and a raisin-- wrinkled and slightly shrunken, but still juicy. (This works with all types of seedless grapes, but the red/purple/black grapes turn out prettier than the green varieties, which wax unattractively brownish in this process. Keep in mind that most raisins begin their lives as green grapes.)

As we turn the calendar to August, our gardens are suddenly a-burst with fabulous veggies that seemingly beg to become Late Summer Gazpacho. * * * * * * * I have strong feelings about screwing up perfectly good ingredients out of creativity for its own sake. Accordingly, I have no use for pineapple pizza, mango ketchup, fried ice cream, or any other such cleverly counter-intuitive culinary absurdities. I am likewise hesitant to “improve” upon classic recipes without good cause, e.g., I'll reluctantly update them with more modern ingredients and/or without flour and such, but I otherwise leave them as-is. In the spirit of such respect for hidebound culinary orthodoxy, I previously presented my Gazpacho recipe as a standard and boringly reliable early summer option for facing the season’s first sultry swelter in style. But as our August gardens fairly burst with scrumptious, sun-drenched delights such as corn, tomatoes, and zucchini, I humbly succumb to the temptations of sensory overload and hereby honor the sign of Leo with its own version of Gazpacho. But this is complicated, so bear with me. If you made my earlier version, you’ve got a great head start, for we are essentially using that as a platform for August’s farmstand bounty. The Recipe Special Equipment– Corn Peeler For the Base– 2-3 Cucumbers 1 Red Onion 1 64 oz. Bottle of V-8 2 Stalks of Celery ½ Cup Red Wine Vinegar ¼ Cup Sherry Vinegar Sriracha or Other Source of Spicy Heat Salt & Pepper As Needed 3 or so Cloves of Garlic, processed with ½ cup Extra Virgin Olive Oil Peel & de-seed cucumbers, peel onion, then chop both coarsely along w/ the celery. Pulse (but do NOT thoroughly puree) these veggies (and garlic/oil) w/ the V-8. Season to taste. To Finish– 1 Decent-Sized Zucchini 3-5 Burstingly Ripe Tomatoes 3-5 Ears of Young & Tender Sweet Corn 1 Orange Pepper Cook the corn for 1-1½ minutes in boiling water, then plunge into cold water. Remove kernels and add them to the base. Finely dice the zucchini– ¼” pieces are worth the trouble– and add to the base. Loosen the tomato skins by immersing in boiling water for 30 seconds followed by a brief plunge in cold water. Peel and then de-seed, carefully preserving as much juice as possible. Add tomatoes and captured juice to the base. Finely dice orange pepper and add to the base. At this point you might not like the texture, for raw zucchini is quite crunchy. However, an overnight soak in the fridge will soften it beautifully. When correctly made, the late-summer veggies will neither float nor sink in the base. Make your final seasoning adjustments– you will probably need a little more of everything, but add carefully by seasoning a bowlful of soup and then adding that back into the batch. If you are understandably tempted to include your gorgeous basil, please segregate a scoop for a small test batch first and see how you like it. Basil has strong character and can easily transform such a dish into something very different.

By AndyS. Corn Season is nigh, and so my dear friend AndyS. checks in with some valuable advice for buying, cooking, and enjoying corn. * * * * * * * Good sweet-corn (yellow and white) comes from a farm with a name -- not "Georgia" or "Florida." There's okay corn at the supermarket from those places, but unless you're using it for a recipe (e.g., corn chowder or cornbread) I wouldn't bother. Take a peek inside the husk-- the kernels of good, fresh corn are shiny, not dull. Try your corn options from different local farms and keep track of which ones you like best (say, your Top 3, in order.) It's very easy to forget the farm names and end up with mediocre corn next time. Corn is fattening. Once you figure out who sells good corn, only eat good corn. Corn ears that are way above or below average in size are not the way to go with corn. That being said, too small is better than too big. Ideally, corn is eaten the day it is picked. Good corn may still be pretty good the next day. I wouldn't buy yesterday's corn, but I would eat it if I bought it yesterday. You can grill corn, roast it in the oven, or even microwave it. (See cyberspace.) I boil corn for 70 seconds in a pot of water that is boiling before I put the corn in it. Avoid overloading, because corn needs space… the ears should fit easily, never crammed against the edges of the pot. If the kernels on my corn ears look particularly tender, I boil it for only 60 seconds. You can always give the corn a quick dunk in the hot water if the ears aren't hot enough or have cooled off waiting to be eaten. I've had farm fresh corn in Maryland, where its season starts in early July; in Massachusetts it starts in late July. Corn season is about a month long… although if you have a farm that sells Silver Queen (all whitish), that corn is generally in season for a couple of weeks past the regular sweet-corn season. My preference for corn is to add butter and salt, in that order, as it sits on your plate. I butter and salt them one at time in case they need a quick dunk to warm up for eating. Even at $1/ear, good corn is an eminently affordable pleasure. To my tastes, three times that price doesn't even get you a decent chocolate bar. * * * * * * * AndyS. And I politely differ on numerous topics. When it comes to cookery, he has a general bias towards simplicity, whereas I thrill to “playfulness” in the kitchen, particularly when it comes to the alchemy of sauce-making. Here’s how, in the horrified eyes of AndyS., I choose to ruin perfectly good corn– DannyM.’s Garlic-Roquefort-Basil Butter ½ Stick + 1 Pat Unsalted Butter ¼ Cup Finely Minced Shallots 2-3 Garlic Cloves, Finely Minced 2-3 oz. Roquefort Splash of Extra Virgin Olive Oil 3-4 Basil Leaves, Finely Chopped Ground Pepper To Taste Allow butter and Roquefort to soften. Meanwhile, cook shallots in the (melted) pat of butter until quite soft, then add garlic. Cook briefly and then remove from heat. Very briefly blend Roquefort, butter, shallots, olive oil, and garlic in a mini-food processor or by hand. Add basil and pepper. Chill, stirring occasionally until firm. Slather freely over fresh-cooked corn. * * * * * * * AndyS. Is a Boston-area corn enthusiast and data analyst. DannyM. & AndyS. bonded exactly four decades ago this month over vintage Rolling Stones, vintage Rioja, and uncannily similar senses of humor.