Bell’s Seasoning II - The Spawning

Introduction

Having been a drone for the better part of two days (as you shall soon learn), I am bound and determined to do something with my brain now. So why not blog? (Don’t answer—rhetorical question.) To get you in the mood for serious literature, I shall start with an epigram:

”They have a saying in Chicago, Mr. Bond. Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time, it’s enemy action.” –Auric Goldfinger (in Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger). 

Do I have an enemy meddling in my affairs? Read on and decide for yourself.

The quest for Bell’s

What is Bell’s seasoning? Well, I’m glad you asked. It is nothing less than the key to Thanksgiving, as documented at length here.  Bell’s goes in the stuffing and is, I believe, instrumental in its apotheosis from dried bread cubes and celery (useless on their own) to stuffing, that supreme Thanksgiving dish. (At this meal, I could probably do without the turkey, and could almost do without gravy —but without stuffing, you might as well forget the whole thing and get takeout Chinese.)

As documented in that first Bell’s post, one of the few ways I contribute to the Thanksgiving feast is to procure this all-important seasoning. That’s a harder task than you might expect. Some stores carry Bell’s, many don’t, and for some reason I can never remember where I got it the previous year. It’s just a blur … like when you have this vivid dream that somehow gets erased within minutes of your waking up. If I were smart I’d have checked out that previous post, though this didn’t occur to me until after my quest.

My strategy

Phoning a store for a stock check is nearly impossible these days. Even if you manage to get past the Interactive Voice Response system and are transferred to a human, they usually shunt you off to some other department and you bounce around until you give up. Or they put you on hold, try to find the item, get distracted, and eventually someone else picks up and you have to start from scratch—or, more often, the line just goes dead. I did phone Andronico’s on Solano Ave because they have legit customer service. It turns out (I only now discovered when rereading my last Bell’s post) that’s where I got the Bell’s last time. Alas, the clerk yesterday advised that they’re out of stock. This answer came swiftly, meaning she’d rather make up an answer on the spot than bother to check, or they’d had a run on Bell’s and I wasn’t the first person to ask.

So forget phoning. I decided to just stop in at this or that store in a gradually increasing radius until I found the Bell’s. Surely somebody would have this and my circle wouldn’t grow to encompass all of northern California … right? I had some time, because I started on Tuesday. (Only an idiot would brave the markets on the day before Thanksgiving, right?)

Store #1 – Berkeley Natural Grocery

This was a no-brainer. I was walking back from the mailbox, several blocks from my home, and Berkeley Natural was right on the way. I dig this store because a) it’s my “corner grocery,” b) they used to give my kids balloons (click here for details), and c) my younger daughter worked there one summer. Alas, though they have lots of bins and an admirable spice section, I did not find Bell’s there. I knew this was a wild card, my “fail-fast” foray, anyway and the effort cost me almost no time.

Store #2 – Magnani Poultry

This is where I went to pick up our turkey. It was supposed to be mobbed—they told us Monday would be a lot better than Tuesday for the pickup—but who wants to store a fresh turkey that long? Early signs were not good—there was no parking anywhere nearby and I had to park in a nearby neighborhood and walk a few blocks—but it wasn’t that crowded in there. I took a number, was served pretty quickly, and was told that the turkey pickup was a separate line, but since I had the guy, I bought a pound of organic local grass-fed beef from cows that are “encouraged to socialize.”

I got my turkey and yikes, it was $115. For that much, I hope it also had been encouraged to socialize. I should have just hit one of our neighborhood’s many stray turkeys with my car … it wouldn’t be hard to do. But then, I’d have had no idea how to pluck it. Plus, what if the impact didn’t kill it? (This is how I rationalize the $115.) I also picked up a quart of frozen turkey stock and—could it be, their extensive spice rack included Bell’s? It did not, alas. All kinds of rubs, sauces, and seasonings, but no Bell’s. There’s the rub.

Store #3 – Monterey Market

I walked over to this place because it’s just across the street from Magnani and has all kinds of cool stuff (beyond their produce which is excellent and cheap; for example, around $0.40 for a bunch of cilantro). They have like ninety kinds of mushroom, fifty kinds of pepper, all manner of salsas and spices and extracts, and … no Bell’s. But hey, it was only like a five-minute detour and I got in some really great people-watching, everyone from restaurant owners to frugal housewives to college professors to tech bros, and a variety of ethnicities including those who actually know the differences among the ninety kinds of mushrooms and fifty kinds of peppers.

Store #4 – Lucky

It was time to stop messing around and actually do some research. The website for Lucky, in the neighboring town of El Cerrito, indicated that this very location did in fact have Bell’s in stock. This is a bit of a schlep so I never go there. In the parking lot an old, run-down guy seemed to need help getting out of his car, and called out for assistance. I was happy to oblige, but when I reached him he said he just needed money to buy a sandwich. This was a bit perplexing. I mean, he had a car, right? How broke could he be? But then, he was sitting sideways on the car’s back seat, legs sticking out, with no driver in sight, so who knows, maybe it wasn’t his car. Maybe he just needed to sit somewhere and found this car unlocked. The smallest bill I had on me was a five. Oh well … happy holidays, dude.

 I made my way through the front door and immediately encountered a large security turnstile, manned by a security guard. I got through that and the next thing I came upon was the “Convenience Section,” an area containing pricier items like cigarettes and booze, all fenced in with a locked door requiring customer service assistance. “Convenience” indeed. The fluorescent lighting at Lucky was that overly intense type that makes you feel like you’re being interrogated. The whole scene was pretty downscale. I made my way over to the spice section and—denied! Here is the gap where the Bell’s should have been:

I headed to the customer service counter, which was oddly situated beyond the checkout lines so I had to squeeze past people. The place was teeming with shoppers. At the service desk I waited behind a woman with a giant clear jar of what looked like granulated ginger, but it was the size of a coffee can, and had been penetrated by moisture so the contents were like cement. She was having a protracted negotiation about a refund or exchange and there was a language barrier, so it took some time. Finally it was my turn. “You mean the spice mix in the yellow box, with the turkey on the front?” the clerk asked. Yes, yes, yes! She said, “Oh yeah, we have that. If it’s all out in Aisle 2, go to our seasonal display.” She pointed toward that area and assured me there’d be more Bell’s there. I headed over and scoured the area. Nothing.

But surely there’d be more in the back, right? I decided to head back toward customer service, but didn’t feel like squeezing through a checkout line again. Seeing some people on their way through the inbound security turnstile (it had two big gates, you could drive a truck through it) I decided to slip through there instead, like piggybacking in reverse. Well, this set off the security alarm, which was exceedingly loud and shrill. The security guard gave me a withering look that said, “Man, you’re a damn fool.”

The next clerk at customer service rang up her boss on the red line. He took forever to answer. “My boss isn’t answering!” she said, bewildered. Finally the boss answered and said I should head way to the back almost by the double-door exit, near the dairy, where there’s yet another holiday display that would have more Bell’s. I found my way there but it was another fool’s errand.

Store #5 – Ranch 99

Ranch 99 is a giant Asian grocery in the Pacific East mall in Richmond. It wasn’t all that far away, since I was already pretty far north. It was a long shot I figured, but then this place is vast and has, like, millions of products. Once in the mall I had a lot of other businesses to navigate, but eventually found Ranch 99. Walking around in there was like a Willy Wonka experience, one tantalizing aroma after another, none of them exactly recognizable but like being at a Chinese restaurant and/or an open-air bazaar. They have half an aisle just for seaweed, and more kinds of cup-o-noodles and ramen than you’ll ever see anywhere. I scanned several hundred wacky spices, but no Bell’s. So I headed over to the seafood department to look at the lobsters. Check this one out:

From this (hastily snapped) photo it’s hard to grasp the scale of this lobster. It was the size of a small dog. Now, unless this critter had been living in this tank for years, which I very much doubt, he (or she) was waaaaay over the size limit on lobsters and should have been thrown back in the ocean (details here). This was basically an illegal lobster.

Not wanting my trip to have been in vain, I searched for something to buy, that I couldn’t get elsewhere. I hit pay dirt with this cookie tin, perfect for a Christmas gift for one of my daughters:

But alas, it too was not meant to be:

Store #6 - Oaktown Spice Shop

Google Maps found me a sneaky way home, which took me on this frontage road and then right up Solano Ave where we have a Safeway. The Safeway app said they were out of stock, but I figured, what the heck, maybe it’s wrong? So I started to head up there and passed right by this giant spice emporium I’ve somehow never noticed before:

This place was huge—I mean, floor-to-ceiling spices—but it’s all this homegrown Oaktown stuff, no third party products like Bell’s. The clerk was very helpful, letting me sniff various products designed to enhance poultry and even stuffing. I’m getting over a cold (don’t worry, I was rocking a COVID mask) so I couldn’t smell all that well, but suffice to say nothing smelled even remotely like Bell’s. So it would be as inappropriate as, say, putting jelly on a hot dog instead of mustard. No way.

Store #7 – Safeway

This is where I normally shop and I found the spice section very quickly, and almost just as quickly ascertained that they were either out of Bell’s, as their app had warned me, or didn’t actually stock it and only made it available online through some partner, like they’re trying to be mini-Amazon or something. But hadn’t I bought Bell’s here before? I decided to check out the discount shelves where they put overstocked and discontinued items. I mean, you never know, right? No Bell’s, but I found this:

Huh? Girl Scout Seasoning? Is this for, like, cannibals? Next I headed over to the “Manager’s Special” shelf, at the other end of the store. I’ve found weird products there before that I liked, and normal products oddly reduced, so I figured what the hell. Alas, no Bell’s, but I did find this:

How about Crushed BS? Is that good in stuffing? Dang. At least when I wandered the shelves for something else to buy, so as not to go home empty-handed, I found a crazy QR-code-driven digital deal that saved me—I kid you not—$18.40 on eight cans of cream-style corn. Since when is this humble product so expensive? At this point I realized my blood sugar was getting precariously low so I headed home, made Southwestern Corn Goo for my visiting daughter, and called it a night.

Store #8 – Berkeley Bowl West

Berkley Bowl is a great supermarket. When I was in college, friends would say to me, “What?! You don’t know about Berkeley Bowl? You of all people would love Berkeley Bowl.” I ignored all their advice because I thought it was a bowling alley. Why, I’d wondered, do all these people thing I’m a bowler? Finally someone clarified that it’s a grocery. So yesterday I checked online and confirmed that their Berkeley Bowl West location (the one nearer me) had Bell’s in stock. At this point my wife had a list of stuff she forget to get for our feast, so it wasn’t a special trip (though it’s a lot farther than I usually go to shop).

Their parking lot was large and cramped and full. I made a hot lap in vain. They even have a parking garage, but I just didn’t feel like it. I took another lap and got lucky. It took ages to walk across that giant parking lot and get a cart. I made my way to the spice section and—denied!

I found a customer service clerk and asked if they had any more in the back. “No,” she sighed. I asked if their other location would have it. “They do carry it, but there is no way I could find out if it’s in stock.” Well heck, if they won’t disclose that proprietary information to their own employee over the phone, I didn’t see any point in calling them myself. I decided I better just head over there.

Now, if you’re starting to think I’m bat-shit crazy to stick with this obviously doomed search (as my wife certainly does), you should know that this will be my first Thanksgiving in at least twenty years without my mother present, either at her place or ours. No, it’s not that I’m some momma’s boy or anything; it’s just that to let my wife to fly solo on the feast without having Bell’s seasoning would be like setting her up to fail. I don’t want to put that kind of pressure on her. If my family isn’t making spontaneous and heartfelt yummy noises over the stuffing, it will be pretty obvious.

Store #9 – Berkeley Bowl

I headed up to the original Berkeley Bowl. Traffic was murder. Every single motorist in the Bay Area was on the road, and many of them were angry, probably hangry, and honking. I so badly wanted to judge them, for being so utterly stupid as to wait until Wednesday before finishing their Thanksgiving shopping, but here I was, one of them. Having to withhold judgment was just insult to injury. I arrived to find another huge parking lot, also cramped, seemingly designed for nothing but Minis and those little Fiats. I totally lucked out and found a spot next to a guy at the end of the row who was so worried about his (albeit humble) car getting dinged, he was at the very far edge of his spot, meaning I had room to squeeze in despite the SUV encroaching on my other side. I headed in past throngs of people going in both directions. It was like a music festival or Burning Man. Oddly, when these masses of people aren’t in cars, I don’t mind them at all.

Now, this is the Berkeley Bowl where my brother M— worked, and I’m going to tell you a fun story about that. M— worked in their excellent seafood department, and was impressed at how well it was run. But he had trouble making friends with the staff, who—being career blue-collar guys—might have assumed he was a fly-by-night college kid or something. One guy in particular, Jose, seemed a bit cold. Well, for various reasons, M— decided to move back to Boulder, and on his very last day working there he waited on a rather snooty old lady who told him something like, “Make it snappy.” She seemed so privileged and self-important, M— just couldn’t bring himself to move very quickly. Gone was his normal verve; he somehow felt like he was underwater and everything was happening in super-slo-mo. Eventually the lady became exasperated and demanded of Jose, “Why is he so slow?” Jose, taken aback, didn’t really know what to say and after an awkward pause, replied, “I don’t know. Why don’t you ask him?” Flummoxed, she could find no other response to this suggestion than to turn to M— and ask, “Why are you so slow?” M— stared at her and said, “Because I’m stupid. Okay?” He handed her her purchase and she stormed off. Jose looked over at him and said, “M—, you’re okay.”

And so, on to the spice section. Guess what:

No, that’s not a repeat of the first Berkeley Bowl picture. It’s just the same old story. Gobs of the competing products on either side (I got really sick of looking at this fancy Colman’s mustard powder and Old Bay seasoning, whatever those are) but the Bell’s was totally gone. The customer service clerk said, “Gosh, that’s odd, this was just stocked this morning!” There wouldn’t be more in the back, she advised, but they might have more in the boxes atop the shelves. She climbed a stepladder and rooted through at least a couple dozen boxes up there, wheeling the ladder down the entire aisle before finally giving up. But hey, at least she tried.

(By the way, did you notice that the Bell’s at this rather upscale store sells for only $3.79, whereas at the down-market Lucky it was $5.19? I’ve seen this disparity before and I just don’t get it…)

Store #10 – second Andronico’s

I decided to head home via Shattuck Ave, which would take me by another Safeway, this one much more chichi than the one near my place. Along the way I passed an Andronico’s I’d totally forgotten about. Since the first Andronico’s acknowledged that they normally did stock Bell’s, this seemed well worth a shot. The parking lot was completely full, and parking in the surrounding streets was no better. On my second hot lap I got lucky and a SUV was pulling out. This was a weird spot right up against a brick wall, but I had plenty of room. Maybe I was just too tired and frazzled, but my first approach was way too shallow and then I felt like I was committed. It took me a good bit of sawing back-and forth to nestle in there, during which time an old geezer in a motorized wheelchair oozed so gradually across my path it took all my patience to wave nicely at him and put on my best fake smile, and also during which time some other dude, as if to rub it in how far I was from the wall, passed by my car on that side. I finally got ‘er done and headed in to the store.

This had to be the flagship Andronico’s. Fricking giant place. I found the spice section, which was quite large and I counted over twenty different kinds of salt. They had stuff I hadn’t seen anywhere, but—you guessed it—no Bell’s.

Store #11 – second Safeway

The Safeway on Shattuck has the largest parking lot of all, and it was 100% full. They had a garage too, with a digital sign to indicate available spaces, but it was broken. I finally found a very narrow spot in the 15-minute section, between a big concrete median and a battered pickup truck full of all of somebody’s possessions, parked diagonally so it infringed significantly on my target spot. I just couldn’t get in there because my tires kept hitting the median. No wonder nobody had taken the spot. I finally managed to find parking along the street. I headed in, braved another crazy crowd, found the spice section, and I know you’re not gonna believe this, but … they didn’t have Bell’s. I was beginning to feel like the narrator of Poe’s “The Raven” who seems to take a masochistic pleasure in asking the bird question after question because he knows it will only reply, “Nevermore.” He’s basically torturing himself, as was I.

As a last resort, I double-checked the websites for Sprout’s and Whole Foods. Here’s what Whole Foods said:

What a blatant lie. “We can’t seem to find this product” actually means, “We have chosen not to stock this, even though we have an entire aisle for homeopathic remedies, aka snake oil.” I’m not necessarily averse to placebos, but they shouldn’t cost an arm and a leg; Whole Foods is basically stealing from clueless people. They’re dead to me. Sprouts showed me bell peppers, some kind of beer with Bell in the name, and hundreds of unrelated spices, but no love.

Well, that was that. I was done. Nobody could say I didn’t try. In fact, I realized it would be better not to even mention stores 10 and 11 to my wife. She already thought (knew?) I was crazy to be so persistent … why salt the wound?

Store #12 – Rose & Grove Market

As I headed home I realized there was one more store I could try, which had been next door to the bike shop I worked at in college (which is where I met my wife). Oddly, I’d never set foot in this little store, but always grasped it was a Berkeley institution. (Its very name attests to its longevity, since the street it’s on, Martin Luther King Jr. Way, was called Rose Street until 1984.) Rose & Grove is not a big place but hey, you never know. I decided if there happened to be street parking right out front, I would take that as a sign from God that it was worth checking out.

Well, guess what? There was a parking spot right out front—unbelievable! So I headed in. Now, if this story were an “ABC After School Special,” Rose & Grove would have had Bell’s Seasoning and the holiday would be saved. But what I encountered was almost the opposite: they had almost zero inventory. All the shelves were bare except for some booze behind the counter. The clerk informed me that they’d gone under and would have a new owner in a month or so. The end of an era, and the end of my quest.

“Wizard of Oz” ending

Oddly enough, my story has a happy ending, along the lines of “there’s no place like home” in “The Wizard of Oz.” No, I didn’t wake up and realize all this had been a dream. Rather, I arrived home defeated, but had a backup plan: on Monday night, foreseeing possible Bell’s supply issues, I took from the freezer a fresh box of it I’d put away last year. My mom has said it freezes just fine. But when I opened the box on Tuesday, I discovered to my great disappointment that it had almost no smell. Since I’m getting over a cold, I had my daughter smell it to double-check. Instead of saying, “Mmmmmm, that smells like Thanksgiving!” she frowned and said, “It doesn’t smell like anything.” Unlike Han Solo, the Bell’s had not survived the cryogenic freezing operation.

But now, in desperation, I gave it another sniff. Eureka! As it thawed out, it must have regained its potency. Like magic, it now smelled like Mom’s stuffing! I had my daughter sniff it again, and she agreed. It’s not ideal, but we should be fine. What a relief.

Enemy action?

What remains to solve is how so many places could possibly be out of Bell’s at the same time. It couldn’t possibly be coincidence. So I started to wonder if I’ve made any enemies who might want to thwart me in this quest. I’ve certainly seen evidence, when shopping, of a doppelganger at work, who buys up, say, all the Bonne Maman apricot jam (but no other flavor!) when it’s on sale because he has the same taste as I do and is just as much of a cheap bastard. But that has a logical explanation: he’s stocking up, same as I would. But who needs more than one box of Bell’s (or two, if freezing one for later)? What would be the motive?

Maybe it’s that first blog post. Maybe somebody read that, decided he hated me based on my writing style, and is an eccentric millionaire, and so went around buying up all the Bell’s, or (if he’s not local) hired some taskrabbit to do it. That could be. But then, why would somebody hate my blog that much (other than the Velominati, Andrew Tillin, or Margolis and Liebowitz)? This enemy action theory just doesn’t seem very realistic.

But then a much simpler explanation occurred to me. Perhaps my last Bell’s post simply hit the mark, and convinced all my readers that this particular seasoning really is the key to Thanksgiving. Maybe across the country, even across the world, including my own locale, people are buying up the Bell’s in droves. To test my theory, I looked up the stock price for Brady Corporation, which makes Bell’s seasoning. Sure enough, its price began a dizzying climb in late 2015, right around the time of that first post. I appear to be a victim of the very success my blog has brought about!

Yeah. That must be it.

Well, if you’ve made it to the end of this post, especially if this was after your big feast, congratulations. And have a very happy Thanksgiving!

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Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Pretty Good Guacamole

Introduction

It’s still summer, which means it’s time for guacamole. If you’re interested in learning how to make it, you’ve come to the right place. Don’t bother with any of the recipes you’ll find online. My instructions are better, more complete, and best of all aren’t infested with annoying ads. Recipe websites are the worst, with nefarious pop-ups, videos suddenly springing to life, requests to access your location, invitations to mailing lists … just keep all that crap out of your life.

Following the structural tradition of my posts on homemade pasta, fettuccine Alfredo, Bolognese Ragu, and homemade macaroni and cheese, I’ll give you this guide in the (perhaps mythic) who-what-where-when-why-how format of the newspaper reporter.

Who, where, and when

The first time I had guacamole I was a little kid. It was a bad batch made with really awful avocados that were not only basically rotten, but also really stringy. (I’ve never understood why, but that occasionally happens.) I was revolted, and decided I didn’t like guacamole or even avocados. My evil brothers encouraged my utter failure of judgment because hey, more guac for them. (I should have been more skeptical when they didn’t ridicule my taste. They pretended that their love of guac was a bizarre idiosyncrasy and it was only natural I didn’t share it.) When I finally gave guac another try, many years later, and realized the error of my ways, I was livid—at myself, of course, but also at my brothers. On some level I still haven’t forgiven them.

I didn’t learn how to make proper guac until about 1990, when I was a student at UC Santa Barbara. A Chicana friend of mine named Tina showed me the ropes, and I have zero reason to doubt her ethnic and culinary cred. (For some reason I’m more nervous about presenting myself as an authority on this Mexican dish than I am with regard to Italian food. Perhaps it’s because I once recommended a Mexican restaurant to a friend of mine who rinsed the piss out of me for its not having been authentic enough for his more sophisticated palate.)

What

Guacamole is something made right before you eat it, whether you serve it with chips or as a topping or both. Guac is not that homogenous over-smooth green stuff you buy in a tub, and I don’t care where you buy that. (Just because Whole Foods charges like six bucks for a paltry inch-tall tub doesn’t make it good, and scarcely makes it guac). You cannot cut corners with this food, even if the store-bought stuff is arguably better than nothing. They should have a different name for that stuff, like Avocado-Whiz.

Why

Obviously you should make guacamole because it’s delicious. It’s also good for you, because avocados themselves are nutritious as is everything else that goes into it. And if you have a bunch of avocados that are perfectly ripe and will be rotten tomorrow, you practically have to make it. (Back when I commuted to San Francisco for work, I once called my boss and told him I had to work from home because my avocados would be perfect at lunchtime and rotten by dinnertime. As a fellow foodie, he was fully supportive.)

How

The best thing about guacamole is that it’s pretty easy to make. So long as your ingredients are good, all you have to do is basically get out of Mother Nature’s way. By this I mean you need to refrain from doing all the things people do to ruin their innocent produce and turn out an inferior product. Here is a list of what not to do:

• Don’t put sour cream in your guac. I cannot fathom why people do this. It simply doesn’t belong. I mean, would you put sour cream in your beer?
• Don’t mix your guac in a blender. It’s not supposed to have the texture of mayonnaise. I was once at a dinner party and the hostess set out a bowl of this strange white-green substance. Since there were chips nearby, I grasped that it was a dip of some kind. It tasted like nothing. I asked what it was and was shocked when the hostess said, “It’s guacamole!” I was struck dumb. I’d had no idea that’s what it was trying to be.
• Don’t put garlic in your guac. Yes, some recipes call for this, but garlic is not authentic, it doesn’t greatly enhance your guac, and it gives you bad breath.
• Don’t roughly hack up the onions. If you get big hunks of onion in your guac, that drowns out the other flavors, plus you (again) end up with dragon breath.
• Don’t just mix avocados with commercial salsa and pretend that’s guac. It won’t work. The only exception is if the salsa is from Mario’s La Fiesta, but this is sadly impossible as they folded a decade ago.
• Don’t make it right at the table in front of your guests like some silly overpriced Mexican restaurants do. That’s just a gimmick. This takes a little more work than your guests would have the patience for.
• Don’t start with inferior ingredients. If the avocados and tomatoes aren’t in season, it’s just not going to work out that well. This is a summer food, unless you live in California and your local produce market has connections in South America (though really, shouldn’t you source your produce locally, blah blah blah?).
• Don’t add peyote. That’s totally not the point. I don’t care if the characters in Oscar Zeta Acosta’s Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo spiked their guacamole … you shouldn’t. (Note that Acosta himself just said no to that spiked guac.)

So here are all the ingredients you’ll need:

• Avocados (preferably Hass)
• Onion (red is best, or white)
• Cilantro
• Lime
• Tomatoes (preferably dry-farmed Early Girl, though cherry tomatoes work too)
• Salt
• Crystal sauce (or Tabasco)
• Rice vinegar (optional)

I won’t bother with the quantities of each ingredient because how much you use has simply to do with the number of avocados you have, and (to a lesser extent) the number of people who’ll share it. Everything else is up to your judgment: what looks right, like what you’d see in a good restaurant? What tastes right? You can always taste as you go (chips being easier than a dozen little tasting spoons) and add more of whatever it seems to need. Experimentation is necessary and fun. If you avoid the don’ts listed above, it’ll turn out fine.

OK. To start, sink a sharp chef’s knife or paring knife into the avocado, across the middle horizontally, until you hit the pit. Rotate the avocado so that you cut all the way around, then twist the two halves apart. Thwack the knife into the pit so you can pull it out. Now slice the flesh of the avocado into rows, then go across those like a grid so it’s kind of cubed. Scoop that out into a big bowl. You’re not really going to mash this per se. By the time everything is mixed, it’ll be mashed enough. Again, you want it chunky.

It would be a shame to use mealy, pink tomatoes like what the giant supermarkets have. I suppose really good commercial pico de gallo would work in a pinch, but really you want those Early Girl tomatoes, in season. They should be bright red and so flavorful that you actually curse under your breath that you spent so much of your life eating terrible tomatoes before discovering these. Dice them into pieces roughly a centimeter on a side (though of course they shouldn’t be perfect cubes—what kind of nutjob are you?). Throw them in the bowl without the juices. (If they’re really watery you might question their quality. The non-flesh part with the seeds should be fairly gelatinous.) Can’t get good tomatoes when you need them? Not to worry. The photo at the top of this post was of a batch that didn’t even have tomatoes … it was still pretty good.

Now dice up those onions. If they’re strong, use less. And like I said before, don’t just hack them up willy-nilly. Use a razor-sharp knife and make very thin slices, like you could read through, almost all the way through the onion but not quite. Then shift it 90 degrees and slice the other way. Now turn this on its side and slice down again to create tiny cubes. Once you have a nice pile, hack it all up further, pivoting the knife around. There’s no such thing as too fine … your patience will ultimately limit you. Throw those in the bowl.

Next comes the cilantro (which is the only ingredient Tina didn’t teach me to use, probably because we couldn’t get it). Tear the leaves off the stems, wash them, and hack them up nice and fine and throw them on the pile. How much you use is a matter of taste. If you don’t put any in, your guac will still be just fine, but cilantro really does make it better.

Squeeze in some lime, and shake in some salt, and then glug in some Crystal sauce. How much of each you add is, again, all up to taste. (As explained here you should not skimp on salt in the name of good health.) If you have very young children you might go light on the Crystal sauce. (Why wouldn’t you just use cayenne pepper? Well, you could, but the Crystal sauce includes vinegar which makes your guac tastier. If you don’t have Crystal or Tabasco sauce, or are going light on that so the guac isn’t too spicy, add a tiny bit of rice vinegar for a bit of zip.)

Now, if you’ve started with beautiful ingredients, take a moment to gaze at your bowl of goodness before you mix it up. It should look about like this:

Note the fresh red and green peppers in the background of the above photo. Did those go into my guac? Nope. They’re just for show. I’m not sure what that salsa is doing there either … I was probably just eating it with chips while I made the guac, out of sheer gluttonous hedonism. By the way, I’ve noticed how modern smartphone cameras take liberties with the color, trying to make everything look better than it is. I really don’t like this about the camera software. But rest assured, my tomatoes really were that red. Just gorgeous. Note the size and shape of the Early Girl on the cutting board there. It’s not a beefsteak tomato, and it’s not a Roma, okay? If you can’t get Early Girl, get cherry tomatoes, like I said earlier. (Weren’t you paying attention?)

Now you stir everything together … not with a whisk, not with a hand blender, and not with any force. Just mix it gently with a big spoon until the ingredients are combined. Then stir it more only as needed to re-mix as you adjust the flavor. The great thing about making guac is that you can just go crazy fine-tuning it by adding more of this or that ingredient, tasting all the while by dipping in chips. If half of it’s gone by the time you declare it officially done, that’s not such a bad problem to have, innit? I mean, you’ve just had this blissful kitchen time…

Here’s what the finished product ought to look like:

If you’re serving this at the table, you’ll want to move it into a nice clean bowl that’s just large enough to hold it all. (This provides the added benefit of giving you, the deserving chef, the opportunity to clean out the mixing bowl with a rubber spatula like a cat licking her paws.) I took a final photo of my latest batch in a nice white bowl, but I won’t post it here. The phone software went nuts and enhanced the color to the point it almost looked like the guac had M&Ms in it. This was a ridiculously brazen act of auto-retouching and I cannot deceive you like that. Maybe next time I make guac I’ll get out my real camera and snap some more photos to post here. Sheesh.

Now, one of my favorite things about making guac is the way you get people to eat it. If your household is anything like mine, all you have to do at this point is say, in voice only slightly louder than normal conversation, “There’s guac.” You’ll witness a stampede as your family members descend on the bowl from every corner of the house.

Oh, one more thing: don’t serve your guacamole with lame national-brand chips like Tostitos—it deserves better. You don’t need to go full-yuppie with chichi brands like Late July either. Get that weird brand whose label is in both English and Spanish, if you’re lucky enough to live somewhere that offers such a thing. (I have no idea what people do in, like, Vermont.) My favorite brand is a local one, Casa Sanchez, that offers both thick and thin varieties. Find the chips that look like what you’d get at an authentic taqueria, not what you’d get at a Super Bowl party in Cincinnati or Green Bay.

A final note

If you follow these directions, don’t be surprised if your friends and family gush about how great your guacamole is, like you’re some kind of legit chef. It would be deceitful to accept the credit, though, given that all you did was cut up and combine some basic ingredients. Reply modestly, like, “Oh, I didn’t make this. God did. I just assembled some stuff without screwing up.”

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Easy Recipes for College Kids

 Introduction

 I just took my daughter back down to Santa Barbara to resume college a couple days ago, and suddenly realized my wife and I forgot to teach her how to cook. So I’ve decided to put together a quick batch of really easy recipes for her, and why not share that with 3.4 billion others?

Bonus: I reached out to my bike team for recommendations. So you’ll get some time-honored recipes from a group of elite athletes (most of whom would agree with the motto, “eat to ride, ride to eat”).

Mashed potatoes

1 box instant mashed potato mix, any brand (though Idahoan was my favorite back in the ‘80s)

Salt

Butter

Follow instructions on instant mashed potato box. Serve and enjoy.

Tip: add salt and butter to taste (duh!). Bonus tip: pour some of these potato flakes into soups or sauces if they’re too thin and you’re too busy, stressed out, ignorant, etc. to fuss with corn starch.

Instant spuds ended up being my daughter’s first meal after we dropped her off last week. She sent the attached photo with the caption, “Eerily realistic.”

Mashed potatoes extraordinaire

Depending on your major and/or your time management skills, you might have the opportunity to make mashed potatoes properly.

A bunch of potatoes, preferably Yukon Gold but anything will do

Heavy whipping cream

Milk and/or buttermilk

Sour cream

Butter

Salt

Peel the potatoes. Do use only this Famos peeler, being careful to avoid harmful substitutes:

(Note: I’ve paraphrased the instructions that came with Campagnolo bicycle components, circa 1982, the full text being “do use only Campagnolo grease LB-100, being careful to avoid harmful substitutes.” Ironically, grease was the only thing Campagnolo sucked at manufacturing; almost any other bearing grease was superior. But I digress.)

Gouge the eyes out of the potatoes. Don’t skip this step because you could die! Then slice them into, like, eighths lengthwise. If the potatoes are very large, cut the slices in half.

Boil the potatoes, or better yet steam them if you have that kind of hardware, until they’re easy to pierce with a fork but aren’t yet starting to dissolve. Strain. Melt a bunch of butter in the pot. Add the potatoes and a splash or two of milk or buttermilk, just until they start to get creamy, and cook for a couple minutes over very low heat. Mash, using a potato masher, obviously. Add a nice glug of cream, and a serving-spoon-sized dollop of sour cream. Salt to taste. If you accidently let them get too waterlogged, cook over low heat for a while longer (if you have time), stirring continuously, until they’re thicker. If they’re kind of bland, add more cream, butter, salt, and/or sour cream.

Tip: Don’t skimp on the salt! If you don’t have high blood pressure, eating salt won’t cause it. Salt doesn’t just make food tastier—it makes it yummier. It’s really easy to fail to optimize your mashed potatoes by under-salting them.

Bonus tip: when eating, hollow out the middle of pile and fill this with butter. “Cap” it with potatoes until the butter is liquefied. Now you can dip each bite in the butter, so it’s right on the surface. This will give you more pure butter satisfaction than mixing it all in. Extra bonus tip: throw in stuff like carrots, onions, maybe some diced ham and call it Hutspot, explaining to your roommates that it’s Dutch. Won’t you look sophisticated!

Smotheretti

I named this dish myself because my cycling teammate didn’t give it a name (though he did write, “I was a chef in college and am happy to pass on my culinary legacy”).

1 can chili con carne, with or without beans

1 pound good spaghetti

Grated cheddar

Onion, diced (optional)

1 egg

Butter

Crystal sauce

Boil the pasta. Heat the chili. While the pasta is boiling, fry the egg in butter (try to sync this so it’s done at the same moment as the pasta). Strain the pasta and smother it with the chili. Grate cheese over the top and add the diced onion (unless you’re hoping to get lucky later in the Language Lab). Lay the egg on top and douse the whole thing with Crystal sauce.

Tip: do use only Crystal sauce, being careful to avoid harmful substitutes, such as Tabasco. Why? Crystal is just better. I don’t know why. Maybe I got turned off because my college roommate had a framed print of a bottle of Tabasco with the caption “HOT STUFF” and I was embarrassed for him. Or maybe it’s because Tabasco has all these varieties now (e.g., “cayenne garlic”) which I somehow find distasteful.

Baked potatoes

Potatoes, perhaps something hunky from Idaho

Butter

Sour cream

Chives or scallion

Diced onions

Preheat the oven to like 400 degrees. (Would 350 work? Probably.) Gouge the potatoes’ eyes out to prevent fatality. With a fork, stab each potato multiple times across pretty much the whole surface. Stab deep. If you’re stressed out, pretend you’re a murderer. Don’t skip this step. If you do, one or more potatoes could explode, which will not endear you to your roommates.

Place potatoes on a baking sheet and bake for a really long time. The most common rookie move is taking them out too early. They should be super wrinkly when you remove them. Otherwise they’re too firm and will not absorb butter properly. I have almost never overcooked baked potatoes and even when I did (due to forgetting all about them), they were still edible (just super chewy).

After serving, and before cutting into your potato, use all your fingers and both thumbs to palpate the potato, making little yipping “ouch” sounds because it’s so damn hot. You’re kind of mashing the potato inside its own skin. Then cut into it lengthwise, unless the skin has burst on its own (which is ideal). Salt it, butter it, add sour cream and chives or whatever (diced onions? sure!) but do not shake little Bacon Bits on there from a jar. That is so disgusting. If you want to fry your own bacon to a crisp and crumble that over your potato, well, that’s fine. Grated cheddar? Yeah, okay. Tip: if you’re trying to diet, overcook your baked potatoes so your jaw will tire out before you’ve overeaten. Bonus tip: don’t diet. Just exercise more.

Escargot

I received the following suggestion from a guy on my bike team who’s from France: “Escargots ? :) ez and yummy.” He didn’t elaborate. This really threw me for a loop. I mean, this dish might be easy if you used canned snails, but isn’t that antithetical to the entire idea of French cooking? I considered that perhaps my friend is getting ready to apply for citizenship and, just in case NSA operatives were eavesdropping on his email, he decided to say something that would establish how American he’d become … but then I realized this is just Covid-era madness on my part. More likely, he’s just so good at preparing escargot that he doesn’t consider it difficult. Assuming that with practice this dish can become easy, here is a good recipe:

50 live snails

Bay leaves

½ cup white wine

¼ cup vinegar

½ cup salt

½ cup light stock

2 cloves garlic

As noted in The Joy of Cooking, “The Romans, who were addicted to snails, grew them on ranches where they were fed special foods like bay, wine and spicy soups as preseasoning.” Think about this. What would a snail ranch look like? Did the Romans brand the snails? How did they keep the snails from escaping in the night? What did the fence look like? Joy goes on to say, “When snails feed in late spring and summer, they may indulge in some foliage inimical to humans and, if used during this period, must be placed in a covered basket in a cool place and starved for 48 hours. For the next ten days to two weeks, feed them on lettuce leaves, removing the old leaves and furnishing new ones every few days.” WTF?! Surely my bike team pal doesn’t take all this trouble. Even Martha Stewart would balk.

Fortunately, I talked to a chef once who described a faster methodology for cleaning out the snails: you feed them anise seed, which scours out their digestive tracts, shoving all the evil stuff right out their little snail anuses. The weird thing, as I recall this advice, is that I can remember highly specific things about the conversation, such as the venue, a tiny café in Aix-les-Bains, with giant windows, so smoke-filled you couldn’t see across it, so I sat outside with my family in the rain. But I don’t remember summoning the chef, nor how we possibly could have communicated effectively with my terrible French and his nonexistent English. It’s possible this conversation never actually happened, though the meal certainly did, and the escargot I ate at that little café were so drenched in butter I couldn’t taste anything else. (I hasten to point out that this was the only meal I ever had in France that wasn’t délicieux.)

So screw it. This isn’t an easy recipe at all. Trust me, you really don’t want to cook escargot in college. Tip: if you feel you must prepare escargot, perhaps because you take this post as some kind of challenge, and you want to look up recipes in Joy of Cooking, don’t bother looking for “escargot” in the index. They’re listed under “snails.”

Indoor “BBQ” chicken

What college kid has time to fire up the grill? And who among Gen Z even knows how? Are charcoal briquettes and lighter fluid even legal in your state, and don’t they cause cancer anyway? With this handy recipe, you don’t need to worry about any of that.

Chicken pieces

BBQ sauce

Butter

Salt

Buy a bunch of prepackaged chicken pieces (unless your campus community has a real butcher who’ll cut up a whole chicken for you, in which case have each breast cut in half while he’s at it). Butter a glass casserole dish. Place chicken in dish. Douse with KC Masterpiece Original barbecue sauce. Bake in the regular old oven at whatever temperature you feel like (when in doubt, just do 350 F, no matter what you’re baking). Bake until you know it’s done because you have a meat thermometer. Test early and often so you don’t overcook it. Serve with Minute Rice unless you have a rice cooker. Or serve with mashed or baked potatoes as above. Your meal should always have a protein, a starch, and a vegetable. Potatoes count as starch but not a vegetable. (“Vegetable” means that green thing you’d never actually buy or cook because college students never do, but I had to try.) Salt to taste. Tip: douse with Crystal sauce if you want a little kick, or if you get a self-satisfied feeling every time you use Crystal instead of Tabasco sauce.

Indoor “BBQ” chicken extraordinaire

Prepare Indoor “BBQ” chicken as above but use better barbecue sauce. I don’t have a specific recommendation but surely your friends and family have strong opinions on this, particularly if somebody buys it over the phone from his or her favorite BBQ joint in Texas or North Carolina.

SpaghettiOs

1 can SpaghettiOs

Two slices soft wheat bread

Peanut butter

Jelly or jam

If you think SpaghettiOs are passé, think again. They are very current and come in all kinds of shapes which change regularly. Right now you can even find Star Wars SpaghettiOs:

Zoom in and check it out: it even comes with Rey-shaped pasta. How would you like to be Daisy Ridley, to know that there’s actually a pasta shaped like your head, keeping in mind that 150 million cans of SpaghettiOs are sold each year? That’s when you know you’ve truly arrived.

This recipe couldn’t be simpler: pour the SpaghettiOs from the can into a saucepan or bowl and heat on the stove or in the microwave. Then dump it straight into the toilet (“cut out the middleman,” to paraphrase James Bond) and make yourself a PBJ. Why do SpaghettiOs exist?

Spaghetti with “special family recipe” sauce

Once a year (at least, when there’s not a pandemic or a death in the family), I host a giant pasta party for all my bike pals (road teammates and fellow mountain bike coaches). I slave for a day over my special Bolognese sauce (here’s the recipe) and serve it on my homemade pasta. When there were more young children at the party (i.e., before everybody got so damn old), I’d try to fill the children up on mac ‘n’ cheese (recipe here) or a more basic sauce that a rhesus monkey could make. (Children cannot appreciate Bolognese so it shouldn’t be wasted on them.) Invariably, I’d get some uncultured grown-up ranting and raving about my “other” sauce and how it’s “even better than the Bolognese.” They’d ask for the recipe, but I’d demur and tell them it’s a closely guarded family secret, since I obviously wouldn’t want to embarrass them by saying how utterly banal and unsophisticated the recipe really is. It’s two freaking ingredients, neither of them even slightly chichi.

1-pound log of Safeway house-brand Italian sausage

3 jars of cheap spaghetti sauce such as Prego

1 pound of dry pasta, whatever shape you want

Wedge of parmesan

Get the pasta boiling. Extrude the filmy, greasy sausage from the tube into a cold pan. Over medium heat, cook it until it’s not raw (duh!). Drain the fat if you must. Add the cheap sauce. Stir while heating. Strain the pasta and, if you’re feeling really gourmet, toss it with olive oil. Serve the sauce over the pasta and top with grated parmesan (grate it with a zester to be dazzling). If you’re a poor student, sprinkle instead with that horrid powdered parmesan in the green can, but do it ironically to preserve your culinary mystique. Sheesh.

Crock pot extravagaaaanza

Two of my teammates recommended small crock pots for cooking enough rice & beans to last for several meals. Here is a synthesis of their rough recipes.

Dry beans (kidney, pinto, maybe a combo)

Rice (or whatever whole grain)

Random veggies

Sauce (Crystal, soy, Worcestershire)

Spice (your favorite EZ blend, e.g. Mrs. Dash)

Cheese (optional)

Egg (optional)

Get a small crock pot, or a pressure cooker like the Instant Pot. Put the stuff in it in the morning and turn it on. Leave it on. Eat the contents for dinner and for breakfast and for lunch the next day. Add cheese and egg as desired (frankly, I don’t know when … probably at the end?). If you get tired of it, sex it up with more fixin’s or feed it to your roommate.

To be continued…

I received more recipes than I’d expected from friends, and found some old family recipes as well, so I’ve got enough material for another entire post! Click here for more super-easy and tasty recipes, whether you’re a college student yourself or looking to grow your repertoire of go-to lazy-day meals.

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The Food of Norway

Introduction

My family took a trip to Norway recently, during which we ate like kings, for the most part. Given my readers’ obvious appetite for the topic (The Food of London and The Food of Scotland being popular posts), I will share with you what I discovered in Norway.

But first, a caveat: I’m not going to pretend I could give an overall account of how good Norwegian food is, or try to compare it to what I eat in the Bay Area. I was a clueless tourist over there, and judging Norwegian food by the random restaurants I blindly stumbled into would be no fairer than judging San Francisco food by the humdrum fare you get along Fisherman’s Wharf.

Local specialties

I wouldn’t say Norway is a world leader when it comes to cuisine. I just searched Yelp for the best Norwegian restaurants in San Francisco, and it came back with just ten results: Pläj, a Scandinavian place, at #1; Nordic House (a deli) at #2; and a bunch of false positives. The #3 place is classified as “American (new),” #4 and #5 are German, and #6—a place called Dulce Amore—is “modern European.” On to #7 and #8, more delis, and when I got to #9, Safeway (yes, the grocery store), I had to laugh. (By contrast, searching Yelp for top Italian restaurants in San Francisco produced a list of 363 places.)

Still, we did eat some things on vacation that have got to be authentically Norwegian. For example, these meatballs (which are perhaps more iconically Swedish, but still):

And how were they? Damn good! Part of that was the ambience, though … check this place out.

I don’t know what that thing is sticking out of my kid’s mouth. It doesn’t look like a utensil. I hope she didn’t sneak a cigarette. Anyway, I’d definitely eat those meatballs again, but I wouldn’t necessarily take a trip of any length (even just to Pläj) to eat them again.

The next thing that I would say was typically Norwegian was the salmon. More than half of all the salmon eaten in the world comes from Norway. Alas, I don’t have a photo of the best salmon we had there, because I had the stomach flu during that meal and was devoting 100% of my attention toward not projectile-vomiting all over my family across the table. The idea of whipping out my camera never occurred to me (though I suppose I could have captured some breathtaking footage). Anyway, this was at a high-end buffet at a fancy hotel (dinner for three of us was over $140; the fourth family member also had the flu and skipped the meal). So, how was that salmon? My wife said it was the best she’d ever had. I tasted it and thought it was very good, but not as good as what I’d enjoyed in Mallaig, Scotland. (Full disclosure: I did not have the stomach flu in Mallaig.)

Here’s a photo of a nice salmon sandwich I had at the same groovy place pictured above. 

It was really good. But did it stand out over all the other salmon I’ve ever had? Well, not necessarily. It’s not like my eyes rolled back in my head. I guess it doesn’t help that everything in Norway is grotesquely expensive. That sandwich above was around $20. The going rate for a burger is around $25. For that kind of money, the food ought to make me cry (like a NYC bagel recently did). By the way, I have more to say about Norwegian salmon but have decided make that into a future post so we don’t lose steam here.

So here is a bona fide local classic: Bergen fish soup.

My wife had read about this amenity before we went on our trip. It really was something else. We had to restrain ourselves from fighting over it. That white stuff? Cream—but not over-the-top like with New England clam chowder. The green stuff? Parsley oil. There wasn’t a ton of fish in this soup (not like with these cioppinos you get that could be stretched to feed a small village), but the flavor was off the chain. It’s also noteworthy that this was in the touristy restaurant atop Mount Ulriken that, had it been in the U.S., would necessarily have been awful and overpriced (as opposed to just overpriced).

If you hadn’t heard of Bergen, there’s an even more obscure place that lays claim to its own soup: the tiny island of Fedje (pronounced FAY-yeh). My wife asked, at Kafé Losen, if the “fiskesuppe” on the menu was Bergen fish soup; the proprietor seemed almost offended. “No, it’s local recipe!” she assured us. Here it is:

It was really good, too. (I should have included something in the photo for scale, though … that bowl was small, maybe five inches in diameter, for $12. Fortunately this was near the end of our trip and I was already numb.)

So what else is classically Norwegian? Well, they’re known for their heart-shaped waffles. You’ve probably even heard these mentioned in the Nirvana song:

She eyes me like a fiskesuppe when I am blue

I’ve been cooked inside a heart-shaped iron, too

I’ve been topped with lingonberry and sour cream

I wish I could eat your price tag when you scream

(Note: no, Nirvana did not really sing about waffles. Ever.)

Here is a Norwegian waffle (four conjoined hearts, which should have been separated IMHO):

How was it? The earth did not move for me. It was not griddled (ironed?) to order … just pulled from a big flabby stack. Still, the aforementioned condiments would be an asset to any waffle. (Full disclosure: no waffle can ever please me, after my mom’s amazing sourdough waffles made with her ancient waffle iron that was crafted, it seemed, of sterling silver. This iron did such a great job, my brother’s family continued to use it for years after it began catching fire due to an electrical problem.)

So, fancy restaurant meals aside, what do Norwegians typically eat? Here’s a good cross section of what was on offer daily for breakfast at the hostel we stayed at in Bergen:

What are we looking at? I’ll start with the sandwich and move clockwise. That cheese isn’t exactly Swiss but it isn’t exactly not. We saw it everywhere. Also ubiquitous was a brown cheese called mysost (“whey cheese”) that is more quintessentially Norwegian. It looked kind of gross, though, and my daughter who tried it assured me it was, so I never partook. (Hey man, don’t judge. You try suffering for days with the stomach flu in a foreign land and see how adventurous you are.)

Atop the cheese is a thin, salami-esque slice of sheep sausage, and a squeeze of caviar, sort of. They call it kaviar, and it’s smoked cod roe. I left it un-spread for the photo but would spread it across the bread normally (in increasing quantities as I got used to it). The kaviar was really quite tasty. I was disappointed to learn that the Bergen TSA considers it a liquid … they confiscated the half dozen tubes we purchased to bring home to friends. Bastards.

To build back my strength after that flu, I tended to eat three or four of these sandwiches every morning, in addition to the other stuff. Next to the sandwich is some pâté (animal unknown); mackerel in tomato sauce; potato salad (quite mayonnaise-y but mercifully non-sweet); pickled herring; and curried herring. Sometimes I had a bowl of cereal as well. None of it was delicious but it was serviceable and came free with our lodging.

Booze

I’m just going to say it: for those who love to drink, Norway is bound to be a bit disappointing. Wine and spirits must be purchased at a Vinmonopolet (“wine monopoly”), of which there are only 315 in the whole country (as compared to almost 14,000 liquor stores in California, where we can also buy pretty much any booze we want in our grocery stores, even vodka). I never did see a Vinmonopolet during my trip (though I wasn’t exactly scouring the place).

You can buy beer in Norwegian grocery stores, but only a watered-down version with no more than 4.7% ABV. Restaurants occasionally have stronger beer, but mostly they serve the weak beer that’s produced for the Norwegian market (such as the Hansa shown in the restaurant photo above), for around $9 US. A 500 ml bottle will cost you $5 at the grocery store. The logo on this beer can pretty much captures Norway’s attitude toward beer drinkers:

(In the background above is the hotel room art I pondered for hours on end, deliriously, during the worst phase of my stomach flu. Did it seem eerily profound to me that the beer and the art both featured mermaids? Yes ... in my fevered state, it truly did. Did I labor mentally over the incongruity of the art obviously featuring a mermaid, but one with normal feet instead of fins? Yes, that too. Is it a good idea to drink beer when you have the flu? Well, during vacation ... yes again.)

There are microbreweries in Norway, but they also tend to make only the weak beer so they don’t have a hard time selling it due to the usurious taxes applied to stronger stuff. I learned this from a tour guide in Fedje, who mentioned that Norwegians will buy beer in Germany where it’s much cheaper and stronger, but they’re only allowed to bring back a certain amount, and the government will actually spot-check at the border to make sure nobody cheats. Man! What a buzzkill! It’s downright un-American!

Well, imagine my delight when I discovered a boozing loophole: a vending machine at the hostel was selling 500 ml Hansa beers for only 20 NOK (about $2.40 US). Score! I bought a couple cans:

Little did I know, “Lettøl” (which I hadn’t noticed at first) means light beer. Very light. As in, 2.4% ABV. This is how they keep underage kids (which in Norway means under 18) from exploiting the vending machine loophole. If some dumb kid were to consume the 4 or 5 of these it would take to get even slightly drunk, he would be too bloated to escape the authorities. His sprint would be reduced to a frantic waddle, his belly stretched tight as a drum.

I did get a stronger drink at the Magic Ice Bar, a very interesting place where the bar, all the furniture, and even the glasses are made of ice. The drink was some frou-frou cranberry thing, fairly tasty and reasonably strong but not exactly a Super Big Gulp. Note the standard issue parka and gloves in the background … if they’d had any Hansa beer in that place, it would have frozen solid.

Highlights

In addition to the groovy restaurant with the meatballs, the local fish soup, and the great salmon, we had some other delicious fare during our trip. One of the best restaurants we went to was the place in Fedje, Kafé Losen. This was literally the only restaurant open on the entire island (and would close for the season a week after we ate there). They had us by the balls and could have served us anything at any price, but both the proprietor and her husband seemed to take great pride in their food, checking in with us during each course and beaming at the praise. Check out this burger:

They don’t make their own buns, but a nearby bakery does. That thin meat, which the menu merely called bacon, was actually prosciutto di Parma. Below that you’re looking at a nice slab of brie. The beef was delicious and probably grass-fed (to be honest, I didn’t dare ask because I really felt like a burger and didn’t want to have to change my order on principle if it had been grain-fed).

Speaking of baked goods, we had really good bread at several places in Norway. They know what they are doing.

Kafé Losen also served this goat cheese salad:

Look at that disk of goat cheese. It’s like an inch thick. Also some caramelized onions, nuts, sun-dried tomatoes, and the whole thing was perfectly dressed.

It’s time to put on a bib. I am drooling down the front of my shirt. Okay, remember that Bergen fish soup I mentioned, at the Mount Ulriken restaurant? At the same place I had this lamb sausage with associated goodies:

The sausage itself was pretty yum, and all the accouterments were surprisingly tasty (as opposed to the rote garnish & sides you so often get).

The final highlight is this salmon pasta:

I wished that thing in the background had been a big hunk of salmon, but it wasn’t—it was a superfluous piece of focaccia. But the pasta itself was really good—the salmon flavor really came through (and made me wish this was my entrée, but it wasn’t—it was my daughter’s and I had to fight the impulse to appropriate it).

To be continued…

Come back next week for “Food ofNorway Part II,” in which I’ll share Cheap Eats; Fails; Things We Didn’t Eat; Weirdness; and Adventures in Norwegian World Cuisine.

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