The second night I decided to do cowboy cooking. They went off to Asheville with my wife, so I had a quiet day to prepare. I had not intended to make chili, because these people are from Indiana. My wife asked if I was going to make chili, in fact, and I said, "Of course not. These Indiana people can't eat my chili."
"That's true," she replied at once.
Nevertheless while they were off for the day I realized I had some hamburger that was getting old, so I decided to make chili for myself for lunch. Since I had it on hand, then, I offered it at supper as well.
When I do cowboy or 'chuck wagon' cooking, the rule is that everything has to be the kind of thing you could either carry on a chuck wagon or source along the trail. You can incorporate some fresh peppers, since you could pick peppers on the trail, and fresh onions travel well in a chuck wagon. Of course you could kill a steer or pluck some trout out of a stream. Butter travels well if packed in flour, as does bacon. Otherwise everything has to be dry goods: dried peppers and chilies, spices, powdered buttermilk biscuits, dried beans, and so forth.
So I ended up serving a bone-in chuck roast, cowboy beans, bacon, biscuits, trout for the ethical vegetarian (who will eat fish 'because it isn't raised in horrible factory farms'), and chili because I had it.
Served all of this, my brother-in-law immediately asked, "Is there some sort of sauce for the meat?"
"Yes," I said pleasantly. "There's this chili con carne I made. You probably won't want to eat it straight, but it would be an excellent dipping sauce for the meat."
(That meat was delicious plain, but there's no accounting for bad taste.)
So he dipped his beef in the chili, and shortly thereafter commenced to making gasping sounds and drinking lots of water. Still, I'll give him credit -- he kept going back and trying it again, even though each time he went on about how it had a lot of bite and burn ("About seven seconds in").
My wife told me that after I left the room for the evening he allowed that it was the best chili he'd ever tasted, even though he couldn't really eat it. I notice he didn't bring his family by for dinner tonight, though.
6 comments:
I wonder ... Here, there's a farm that raises cattle the old-fashioned way and you can buy beef directly from them, especially if you order in advance. It's not factory farming, they're grass-fed, no hormones or etc. Might your niece be willing to eat that sort of beef?
And what about wild game?
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There's nothing more fun than trying to please people who use their food preferences as a weapon.
My favorite is people who decline to warn us off of any particular foods, only to discover to their amazement that they can't even consider eating what we served--as if they'd never dreamed actual people ate these things. Most people, bless them, think Greg's cooking is delicious. If we know they can't abide pepper or have a lactose intolerance or whatever, we obviously accommodate them. No one wants to offer a meal to guests only to have it rejected.
How many more days of this visit? A week total, I think you said?
There's nothing more fun than trying to please people who use their food preferences as a weapon.
I wrote a poem on the subject many years ago: "To Insufferable Guests."
They're here through Saturday. Fortunately a miraculous escape has appeared for me, as my favorite cousin has decided to tour through the area on Friday and Saturday, and I thus have a reasonable excuse to leave my wife's family to my wife and go attend to my own.
@Tex you should try the only truly effective strategy. When you set the food in front of them and they give you the bad news, simply give a completely blank look and say, neutrally, 'Oh' - and then pick the plate back up. No followup. No further mention of the issue, no continuance, no acknowledgement, no suggestions, no apologies. Works like a charm.
Tom, I asked about venison. She didn't give me a straight answer. We have a nice cattle farm down the way, though, where you can get grass raised and grass finished beef that never saw a feedlot for $5 a pound.
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