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dcbc

Certifiably Surly
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Everything posted by dcbc

  1. / @Al_4_ISU I kid. I kid. I figured it wasn't meant that way.
  2. Except, in this case, sadly, I think it was true. He would never talk about it. My mom told me about that little nugget of his past. He had four brothers and sisters and they didn't have shit for means. He played football in high school, but had to quit to get a job to support his family. The coach put him on a guilt trip about it and he felt like he let his team down. He never went to college and went to work instead. He was a self-taught engineer (it was the old days, whattayagonnado?), and made it out of poverty and then some. My mom used to ask him if he wanted to move out to the ranch and sell the place in Houston. His response was consistent: "I was born on the farm. I have no intention of dying on the farm."
  3. I still haven't been. It's on my short list. He didn't talk about it much. His dad told him he wouldn't amount to anything, and he pretty much cut ties. His dad was long-since-dead when I came along. I recall being told they were so poor, his mother would make biscuits out of beans. That recipe didn't get passed down. He was more fond of his time in Colorado.
  4. Yep. Hence why I got a vasectomy after two. Mom was a dance instructor/model and Miss Houston 1960. Dad was into oil (and all that implies). They got set up on a blind date. She swore she wouldn't marry a man who drank (her dad had issues with the booze). My dad ordered a scotch and water first thing at dinner on their second date at Vargo's in Houston. He had other things going for him. So she decided to let it slide. I have/had 3 half-brothers, all of whom were around her age, give or take. Two are departed sadly. Other than grilling, the only other cooking my dad did was pancakes, sausage, bacon, and eggs on Saturday mornings. He had a garden at a ranch we had outside of Houston. So there were a lot of fresh vegetables, as well as cantaloupe and strawberries. I used to eat half a cantaloupe with salt and fine black pepper on it. He also was a fan of Blue Bell Cookies and Cream, microwaved for about 20 seconds to soften it, eaten straight out of the half-gallon carton. Lastly, he had his sandwich. He got teased about it a good deal, but he had very humble beginnings (Parents were very poor share croppers). The sandwich comprised two pieces of wheat bread, Oscar Meyer bologna, Coleman's hot mustard, peanut butter, american cheese. I tried it once. It's not bad, but I wouldn't make it for myself.
  5. Well, he had the advantage of a second wife, who was thirty years younger than he was for siring my sister (11 years older/no pics) and me. Also, @UncleBuck Dads from the Dakotas represent. My old man was born in Deadwood. And yes, I have at least one relative featured in the show---his aunt/my great aunt. He came to Texas in the 1940s by way of Denver.
  6. Those church cookbooks are usually a pretty mixed bag. Good on her for throwing some stinkers in there to teach lessons to the uninitiated.
  7. I'm intrigued. What's the advantage here? Is the danger that you'll burn your roux while sauteing the veggies in it?
  8. Earlier today, @South Austin called Trump and Vance "weirdos," and that, as much as anything, really pegs it.
  9. Right on. Now let's hear about the techniques and recipes. Unless we carry that stuff on, it just hangs on the cloud of memory.
  10. Double post
  11. We're on the cook the kid what he wants month of my kid is off to college in the fall. Tonight was steak.
  12. Crosspost: One of the best country songs. Car horn gets me when I'm on the car every time.
  13. One of the greatest country songs ever. The car horn in the studio version gets me every time (on the road)
  14. That's the most perfectly awesome thing I've seen all day. My man!
  15. Whoever came up with that wins the furking internets
  16. I looked this up on my phone, and there was a Trump ad pre-watch on youtube. Maybe this is a simulation.
  17. Vance's mile-high club with a seat cushion that may also serve as a flotation device in the event of a water landing.
  18. Good stuff. Keep them coming. @South Austin Microwave bacon. We definitely went through this phase. My mom even bought special cooking apparatuses for the bacon to sit on in the microwave because . . . healthier. Like I mentioned before some of the recipes are a product of their time with the cream of mushroom soup thrown in for good measure. Others---chicken fried steak, King Ranch chicken, etc.---were incredible, but nothing out of the ordinary. Morton's Nature Seasons was on everything because, as my mom believed, "You cannot oversalt with it." Narrator: You can, but it's a pretty good seasoned salt nonetheless. A lot of the better recipes didn't get made as often because she considered them to be a lot of work and a big mess. But they were good. When she was younger, she took a cue from her second husband (Dad died in 1990), and wrote her autobiography. It was just for the family, but she worked really hard on it, self-published it in a hardbound book, and gave it out to us one Christmas years ago. It's the coolest thing. There are so many great stories. I read it to my kids when they were younger and really treasure it. As a corollary, she also put together a cookbook with a lot of the recipes she made over the years. It's got a spiral binding with the idea that it could be added to, but she never did. The pages all are laminated. The amounts in some of the recipes seem off (she did a lot of cooking on the fly), but my wife has added notes to keep them updated or corrected. The cornbread recipe gets made regularly (it was my grandmother's). But I know that one by heart.
  19. The fertile octogenarian. He was a bad ass.
  20. Pretty good opening bit. The who's yacht is biggest with Ireland jumping on the ass end of Iraq's boat was epic. Them ladies on the poles (not what it sounds like). Overall, pretty cool.
  21. I grew up in the 70s/80s. And there were a ton of awful cooking techniques my mom and dad probably leaned into more than I do. But there were some things they did that were early precursors to what probably is, today, considered a good cooking technique, hack, whathaveyou. So my dad was born in 1910 (I'm 50). He had a ranch and a stainless grill somebody made him. For steaks, he'd throw down a bed of charcoal (usually lump). When it burned to embers, he'd toss some soaked hickory chips and pecans (not wood, actual pecans) from the tree in the yard, stir up the coal bed so it was a circle with a big space in the middle, and toss the hickory and pecans (shells and all) into the fire. The the steaks would go on over this diminished fire. It was like a reverse sear, but kind of all at the same time. Low and slow over direct fire. I don't know if he taught her this, but my mom used to cook brisket back in the early 90s after he died. I assume he did, but I didn't remember too many briskets from him. We still had the grill. She'd get the butcher to trim a brisket and reserve the trimmings). She would load a brisket up with seasoned salt (Morton's Nature Seasons) and do the steak method above. She'd leave it on over the coals for maybe 2 or 3 hours with the fat trimmings draped over the top of it. Then, she'd bring it in and wrap it in foil and cook it in the oven at 250 until done or times up, who knows. It was really good, but the bark was probably so-so. Who can remember? There are more, but what are some cool techniques or recipes you grew up with your parents' putting together that may have been early stages of what we now think of as good cooking or technique.
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