Honey Mustard

            Honey mustard: Its peculiarity doesn’t lie in the melding of sweet and spicy or in its designation as a dipping sauce, spread, AND salad dressing. It’s in this sauce’s sheer variety. Different ranch dressings differ slightly in taste and consistency, but in the end, ranch is just ranch. It’s white, specked with spices and it tastes like only ranch can. Hidden Valley tastes cheep while home-made ranch can be a cathartic experience. However, it’s still frickin’ ranch! Honey mustard, on the other hand, can seem to make up its mind about who exactly she is. Sometimes, the sauce is vaguely sweet, with a nice, toned down mustard kick, other times the thick, sticky mess would hold the name, “mustard honey” much more appropriately. Still, in other instances, what’s called “honey mustard” resembles neither part of its composite name (wtf?). No one seems to agree. What parts mustard and honey constitutes the right ratio? What exactly makes honey mustard?

I grew up in the Chicago suburbs with a Puerto Rican family. That means rice and beans. Lots of rice and beans. And being embarrassed when my mom would talk to me in Spanish as I peered through Captain Underpants in the gym on my elementary school book fair days. And riding my bike by the ticky tacky homes on a blistering summer day, chasing down the sound of “Do Your Ears Hang Low” ringing in the air. And lots of ignorant Mexican jokes that didn’t apply to my heritage at all. Once, a good friend’s mother asked me if Puerto Ricans ate tacos and burritos. I had to keep myself from screaming at this otherwise kind woman (mainly because I was sitting next to her daughter in the back of her van. “No, tacos and burritos are more boarder food. Its Tex-Mex. Puerto Rican food is very different.”  

Being Latino in a well-off, predominantly white suburb parallels being an 18^th century time-traveler working management at Best Buy. I learned that my home culture and my school culture were very different, but who the hell was I? Where did I actually fit? My mom would often bash American cuisine and cultural idiosyncrasies. “We aren’t Irish, why would we celebrate St. Patrick’s day?” She’d question when March came around. “These Americans don’t know anything about dinner parties. They play board games all night and everyone’s out the door by 10:00.” But her “us and them” dialogue conflicted strongly with my grade school kid desires to fit in with my peers, whose home lives seemed so foreign to me.

Throughout High School, I played around with the recipe. I’d listen to Reggaeton to feel in touch with my roots. I learned the basic steps of merengue and salsa at quinceañeras by reluctantly dancing with the older women whose husbands would rather sit and converse. These steps became a way to impress my friends with my ethnic-ness, convincing the skeptics about my roots despite my pale skin. Puerto Rican culture became my honey. I spent my four years and Naperville Central High School testing how much of it to mix into the mustard seed suburban culture I’d learned in school. Other students went all out. They became their home cultures fully, wearing flags on their clothing, spackling their vocabulary with Spanish phrases, or working comments about their exotic escapades into every conversation. As high school trudged on I realized that I only need a dab of honey. Representing my family’s culture is important and simply sharing my knowledge with others at appropriate times is sufficient. After all, my culture, the culture of my peers and the people who’ve surrounded me for most of my life, is that of the middle suburban class. I’m honey mustard. Mostly mustard (with a dab of something different).

The Perfect Grilled Cheese

The perfect grilled cheese is easy to achieve. The secret? Heirloom tomatoes! These non-commercial variations of the fruit tend to be a little sweater, which contrasts well with the salty sliced cheese. Heirlooms vary in flavor between strains, so get ready for a taste adventure! If you don’t have access to a farmer’s market or specialty supermarket that carries these coveted fruits, slice up some Roma tomatoes instead.

Nestle the tomato wheels between two slices of your favorite cheddar cheese on two slices of wheat bread. Why wheat? Am I suddenly health conscious? Of course not. Wheat bread tastes better when steeped and fried in oil. But wait! Don’t close that ‘wich up yet. Sprinkle some onion salt and cumin powder over the tomatoes for a tasty twist.

Cover the bottom of a pan in a thin layer of your desired frying oil. Canola is a nice, fairly healthy option, but coconut oil provides a nicer flavor. Set the range to medium and heat the oil with one minced clove of garlic and a pinch or two of cumin seed. Watch the pan carefully. You don’t want the garlic to burn, leaving your sandwich with a resiny bite. Heat for five minutes and remove the garlic and seeds from your pan to the best of your abilities. To make your life a little easier, you could use garlic pounder and ground cumin instead.  Place your sandwich in the pan and turn the heat up to medium-high. Cover the pan to insure that the tomatoes warm sufficiently and that the cheese melts fully before your bread turns into a hunk of oil-sodden charcoal.

From here, continue as you would with any old, Kaft American slice-tainted grilled cheese. Fry each side of the sandwich until its golden brown, plop it on your plate, and enjoy it’s delightful simplicity. 

Linner Time

Family habits come and go, but one tradition remained strong in the Suarez household throughout my childhood: linner. When 3:00 came around on a Sunday afternoon, my parents became restless. The house stirred as they finally hopping in the shower after a noon spent with Time Magazine sipping on a fresh roast. “Get ready, it’s time to eat!” My mom’s voice echoed through the house, shaking the gunk still sticking to the corners of my eyes. My brother, Daniel, would fight for a few more minutes in bed, but my mom’s endured nagging always brought him to a grunting stand. On any mid-afternoon weekend’s end, Hunger struck the Suarez clan hard. 

Most families enjoy special nights out at Olive Garden or Outback once in a while, usually on a Friday or Saturday night. Endless breadsticks and bloomin’ onions become short-lived monuments to the week’s end. Chatter reverberates from salad plates and wine glasses in dining rooms brimming with fork-stuffed faces.  We had a different idea of this sacred suburban tradition: timing is everything. Sunday linner is the product of my dad’s abhorrence for waiting lists and my mom’s questionable eatery manners. So there are rules: 1) Wait out the weekend rush and beat out the dinner rush. Friday nights are good for pizza, but avoid the new Italian food joint. 2) Evade the church-goers. Those shiny-shoed, kaki-sporting smiles still high on halleluiahs clear out by 2:00 pm. And 3) If you aren’t in the car by 3:00, you don’t eat. When mom says its linner time, you better turn off the Xbox, grab the least smelly pair of jeans out of hamper purgatory and dart into the back seat of dad’s CRV.

For most middleclass suburbanites, mid-afternoon on the day of rest is for lazing around the football game or enjoying Scrabble with the folks while the smell of green bean casserole rolls through the sun-mottled rooms of home sweet home. For us, this meant empty restaurants and patient waiters. No running between bistros, spending two hours for a place with a wait time of less than one. No spit in our food when mom sends the prime rib back three times because it isn’t rare enough (true story). We sit in our booth thrones, in an empty dining room talking as loud as we please about the week past. The food is always hasty and hot and the flow of diet coke refills is endless. Our cups never go dry.

Free Food! At the ASA's Sights and Sounds

Food tastes best when it’s earned: This is false. There is, in fact, such thing as a free lunch. And breakfast. And dinner too. Neva Sheaffer lives by this mantra. “Do you know what a freegan is?” She once asked me in a string of twelve text messages (we’ve built up a pen-palesque relationship through texting). I had no idea. According to freegan.info, “Freegans are people who employ alternative strategies for living based on limited participation in the conventional economy and minimal consumptional economy and minimal consumption of resources.” In other words, these individuals love free food.

“When does this end?” I groaned at Neva. We’d been standing for an hour and a half at the back of a room filled with shifting bodies, all sneaking looks toward the buffet at the back. The African Student’s Association romped across the stage for mostly unamused eyes. Pain rung my ankles and my calves became stiff clumps of dirt. Neva hogged a concrete column, shooting me a smile as she leaned, relieving the weight on her feet.

“Soon, I hope.” She grabbed my arm and nudged me closer to the food line. We laughed silently through our teeth, too scared to look around for dirty looks from other audience members.

Finally, the show ended and the master of ceremonies announced the food protocol. “Everyone who had to stand in the back through the show, we appreciate your commitment. You’ll get to eat first.” Our faces contorted, giving away our absurd level of excitement. We walked down past gleaming buffet trays filled with homemade dishes from all over Africa. “Would you like some of this?” Of course, I’d love to try some! “Any of that?” Yes, heap that on my plate. At the end of the line, my Dixie plate looked like an over-worked mule struggling to keep its spine from snapping.

We vacuumed down fork-fulls of plantains, spiced beef stew, and red rice, savoring the food as much as we did its freeness. No one bothered to even ask about the dish’s names. We simply ate, high with the feeling that, in some way, we’d beaten the system. After all, two hours in the standing room is a small price to pay for free food.ue relationship through textsionship through textss (we'a

Milkshakes!

Drinking milkshakes is a painful experience. This creamy concoction is wishfully served with a straw and yet, you’d have better luck baking a cake with a space heater. Anticipating your utter failure, the waiter will always bring you a spoon. And yet, I can never resist attempting to drink a shake the intended way: through a narrow, plastic tube. To actually succeed at this ordeal requires the resolve and endurance of a greasy politician contesting the presidential seat.

           

Now, once I’ve given up on these foolish pipe dreams, I pick up that spoon and scoop into the cold silk. While the worst milkshake amounts to nothing more than watered down ice cream and that pickled maraschino cherry slopped on top often holds less life than a cat floating in formaldehyde, the perfect shake is synecdoche for the perfect summer night spent taming the day’s sun burns with jokes among friends. It’s watching the freckles beginning to peel off a new love’s tender, maroon shoulders as your spoons clank together within the blooming glass cup that holds a sweetness between you. We trade smiles and spoon-fulls across the table, recounting tales of sun-basked triumphs. A milkshake is youth held frozen within velvety crystals. And the comfort it brings, the fragrant memories it conjures, is worth all the brain freezes. 

Comradery

            I did a terrible thing the other night. I threw all caution to the wind—well, to the hurricane—and resigned any notions of health, restraint, or decency that I may have once held. And, believe it or not, I learned something through the experience: Life is about rebellion. It’s about standing up and doing what’s wrong because it feels oh so right.

It’s about cheddar turkey sausages and peanut butter. No, not side by side, carefully kept segregated on a plate. Together. This is a food affair. This is a sultry desecration of the holy sanctity of food rite. And it was amazing.

I started off by throwing two Johnsonville cheddar turkey sausages onto the Foreman until those wieners wore black cloaks of charcoal. We’re talking seconds away from being ash, people. Carcinogens? What about them? I sliced those two magnificent meat scepters into wheels, seeping processed yellow cream like treacly sap from a sugar maple. A glob of honey peanut butter garnished my plate. Reluctant, I scooped the thick paste up with my first sausage wheel and brought the blasphemous concoction to my lips. The first bite flooded me with a single idea: companionship. These foods were meant to be together.  The salty-sweet butter enveloped that spicy morsel like a goose, keeping her egg warm. My chewing folded the cheese and meat into the peanut dough, bringing two lost friends closer than they’d ever been.

The contrast nourished some feeling of comradery, a vague remembrance of a time when heavily spiced and salted foods sustained the mob, when eating was a commodity and stuffing meat into your gullet rang through your body more vibrantly than the church bells ever could. In this place, I’m one amongst so many. I mean nothing alone. It’s the men and women sitting beside me that give me breadth.

I once cried, a tipsy slob, at the edge of my brother’s bed. The watches claimed 2:00 a.m. A girl I’d loved had just screamed words that once meant damnation into my ears. He held my hand as I writhed in my lonesome pity, dwelling on a night three years before when I had spent the dark away with her sitting at the edge of a river, watching the moonlight flow in place. My brother, normally stoic and unamused, cried with me.  

The Salt of Odin

My roommate and I live by a very simple food mantra: onion salt makes everything better. Everything. It’s magical flavor fairy dust, bringing salty bliss to every dish. And, as a college student, it’s a great way to spice up any cheap, poorly executed meal. Toss some on your popcorn, sprinkle it on a salad, pummel any bland plate in a hailstorm of onion salt. It will improve your life.

Stop what you’re doing. Forget all other plans you've set out for the day. They’re meaningless now. Go to your closest grocery provider, stumble impatiently into the spice isle, and pick up a shaker of onion salt. Throw the indicated amount of money at the cashier and sprint the hell out of there. Pat yourself on the back. You've done well. Take a minute to soak in the moment. From this point on, your life will be radically better, more significant. Now get back home and begin infusing yourself with the salt of Odin. You will continue this process until your muscles become jerky. Don’t settle for less.

Incorporating onion salt into your life is actually very easy. Just follow three simple steps. 1) Locate onion salt in the myriad of unorganized cabinets in your college apartment. If you’re like me, this is the most difficult step. 2) Fiercely slam the shaker against your counter top  Smash the sucker with all you've got. Don’t hold back. Onion salt has a pesky habit of aggregating into an unusable hunk. This tends to be infuriating. Step two reestablishes the salt’s powdery consistency and relieves the anger caused by this annoying penchant. 3) Open the shaker, invert, and salt your sustenance to taste.

 Several simple recipes can benefit from the addition of a little onion salt. It goes great on fried eggs or on sliced tomatoes with a little bit of olive oil and balsamic vinegar.  One of my favorite recipes is cheese-less cheesy bread. Simply drizzle a little olive oil on some ciabatta bread and top it off with onion salt. The combo results in a distinctly cheesy flavor with much less saturated fat and cholesterol. Olive oil and onion salt also goes great on run-of-the-mill toast and provides a healthy alternative for butter or margarine. If you’re in the mood for a simple Mexican dish, grate Chihuahua melting cheese onto a yellow corn tortilla, fold, and pan fry in your favorite oil until the shell is crispy and golden-brown.  Top it off with onion salt and a little chili powder. Now feast on the perfect quesadilla.

You can use onion salt in place of table salt whenever possible. Get creative! Forget the irreparable damage to your arteries brought about by the dangerous spike in blood pressure that will occur if you actually take my advice. Live by the onion salt and you will achieve gustatory nirvana.