Jack Curtin’s LIQUID DIET

Since we have all agreed that today was the day of my birth, I thought I ought to honor the occasion with a fine dinner. For some strange reason, I had not prepare to do this, so I had to make do.

I can make do pretty good.

I cooked up a small batch of frozen ravioli from Talutto’s and served them with a really good gravy (what real Italians call “sauce”) that I whipped up last week, using the very cheap but good jarred Marinara from Trader Joe’s and adding fresh garlic, chopped onions, basil, virgin olive oil and flaked hot red pepper, then fresh sausage links and meatballs (a concept which I consider, on the whole, abominable, but these are spectacularly good) from Kolb Bros. Meats, my in-the-middle-of-nowhere butcher shop.

Spec–freakin’–tacular.

I drank a bottle of Sly Fox Saison Vos while cooking and accompanied the meal with the final glass of same—not exactly the suggested accompaniment, but fine in this instance, the spicy yeast standing up to the spicy gravy.

Just prior to doing all this, Buddy the Beer Dog and I made a mad dash for The Farmer’s Daughter, just down the road, to find an appropriate dessert. On a Monday there was little chance of finding a Carrot Cake from my favorite baker on the shelves, but there was a crispy, dark Pecan Pie, a rich dessert which I tend to avoid these days because it has, as far as I can tell, no nutritional value.

But, hey, it just might be my birthday, right?

If I might interject (or, as Saint Michael would say, “digress”), I have a pecan pie story.

My uncle did what was pretty much unthinkable in my mother’s strong-willed Italian side of the family (the most unthinkable, or at least the first such, being her marriage to my Irish father several years before) and brought home a bride from Mississippi from his military days. She introduced, into those day-long, multi-course meals which were in many ways the only reasons the family ever hung together at all, her momma’s pecan pie, a sweet treat far removed from anything which had been part of those events in the past.

Where were the tomatoes and garlic?

Somewhere, the Pope shuddered.

I still remember those tooth-ache inducing pies from long ago, before it all fell apart. My uncle was a half-brother to my mother and her sister, as was his sister (a half-sister, not half-brother, pay attention) and, long after my grandfather  died and his will had been, with my father’ s help, overturned to provide sufficient support for his widow (second wife obviously, the first having died), the younger siblings convinced their mother in her final years to secretly change it yet again and leave everything to them.

It tore the family apart.

I hate money and all the crap it brings with it.

In any case, and asking your forgiveness for a slightly tipsy correspondent’s need to ramble on, I had me this pie to top off the meal tonight. And, hey, you know what goes absolutely perfectly with all that good, sugar-y sweetness and those rich pecans?  A perfect counter-point, yang to their ying?

A bottle of Stone Arrogant Bastard 2009, offering similar and seductive malty sweetness up front and then an insane bitterness which transforms the entire experience with each bite.

Fortunately, as you may recall, I had me one of those.

Yowzah!

A delightful evening. I think I’ll go lie down now.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 9th, 2009 at 9:52 pm and is filed under Craft Beer, Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.