Sick of Being Sick*

We're falling apart around the Haddock household. A few weeks ago I was amazingly ill from (I believe) an infected, impacted wisdom tooth. The oral surgeon only removed the crown of the tooth, as the nerve was wrapped around the root and removal of the entire tooth could have caused either my lips to go numb, or for one side of my mouth to lose taste. Neither sounded like an appealing option. Leaving the root in however, creates its own potential problem. It's possible my body may decide that the root is a foreign object and try to get rid of it.

I asked the surgeon if it might be more likely that this would happen given that I already had an infection there. He assured me my chances of it happening were just the same as anyone's; the prior infection shouldn't be an indicator. Guess what?

I woke up Wednesday evening shaking uncontrollably, feeling remarkably like I did before the crown was removed. There are a couple of differences though. This time I have a cough and sore throat. Also, the Sardine was ill a few days before with possible ear infection and possible viral infection in the throat. So it's conceivable this is something different. The oral surgeon is an hour and fifteen minutes away. One of the drawbacks of our location is lack of specialized medical care. I called him and of course he was reluctant to diagnose over the telephone. I went to my regular dentist's office, only to discover he was gone and wouldn't return until Monday. His assistant called in anti-biotics, so we'll see what happens.

In the meantime the GM, who has been dealing with a stressful family situation, has developed mastitis. Between the Sardine being ill, and my being ill, her routine has been disrupted and only added to the stress. So, here we are, parents on pain pills and the Sardine now feeling better and raring to go.

The only good thing about this all is I've got a lot of reading done. For those who notice, the "Recently Finished" sidebar has grown considerably.

I have to rave about "Happy in the Kitchen". MIchel Richard demonstrates a wonderful sense of humor and playfulness, grounded in classicism but always questioning its tenets and looking beyond in ways that make sense to me. Much modern cooking does not make sense to me. Perhaps it's my hippie upbringing, but adding things to my dinner made by Dow Chemical just seems wrong. How is the use of methocel fundamentally different from Mssr. Richard's use of gelatin? I can't answer that. I could say because gelatin is a naturally occurring product. I could say because I am familiar with gelatin. I could say that even though I practiced better living through chemistry as a young man, I do no longer.

Ultimately my line in the sand is the famous one about pornography. I know it when I see it. Cooking something sous-vide makes sense to me. "Cooking" something with liquid nitrogen, does not. I am happy there are people out there expanding the boundaries of cuisine. I know useful information will come to me because of their experimentation. But I'd much rather eat a meal cooked by Michel Richard, than  Ferran Adria, based only on examining their printed works.

I also have to praise Frank Stitt's Southern Table. It's hard to mess with tradition. How do you honor something, while updating it in ways that work? Others may disagree, but for me Southern cooking is our country's most identifiable and strongest regional cuisine. As a lad I lived up and down the Eastern seaboard, Texas and a bit in the Mid-west and it was in the South I found people passionate about their food. Sure, there were a few rabid barbecue enthusiasts in Texas, which though in the southern part of our country is not the South, but what we think of as a European attitude toward food and hospitality was only found in the South. Northern California in the post-Chez Panisse era has caught up but at a time when most of our great land was a culinary wasteland, people all over the South were eating well.

Mr Stitt's book takes the best of lessons learned from Richard Olney and Jeremiah Tower, leaving aside their arch bitchiness, fuses that with the spirit of Michel Guerard, but without the proclamation of inventing a new cuisine and stirs that into a pot of collard greens and ham hocks. He is grounded enough by his sense of place to know when to leave things alone and intelligent enough to see how to modernize a dish without compromising it. Too often attempts to gussy up Southern food just fall flat, like the dishes I've had at Blue Jay Cafe in SF. Adding a bunch of zucchini to red beans and rice does nothing for either the zucchini, or beans and rice. Mr Stitt however succeeds. At least on paper. Perhaps one of our frequent fliers like Fatemeh may have dined at Highlands Bar and Grill and have a different tale to report.

OK, back to healing.

* Gratuitous late 70's punk rock reference.

Comments

[Ben]

Cooking with liquid nitrogen: it can be as sensible as sous-vide or cold smoking if you keep in mind what you are trying to do. If, for instance, you want perfect strawberries to fold into homemade ice cream, the best strategy in existence is a quick slice followed by a world-class quick freeze. The actual fastest way to do this would probably be a dry ice-ethanol slurry, but that would introduce too much alcohol, unless you were willing to then transfer it to a freezer under vacuum to boil out the alcohol. A blast chiller isn't a bad strategy either, but it won't be as fast as the liquid N. So, you get a container of liquid N, do your dunking, and then keep the slices in the freezer until you can stir them in to the ice cream. It makes perfect sense, not much chemistry or insanity involved.