It is a rainy winter day in Washington, and gray and the piles of snow that remain are dirty and weeping. Having been down the rapids of all the email and websites since rising, I am pretty sure I am not going to be able to make it through the rest of this extraordinary silly season.

Honestly, this whole charade is so far off the rails that fear the biggest crane on earth could lift the locomotive up enough to place it back on the tracks.

I was desperately attempting to avoid any commentary on that, and when the Lieutenant was spending some time with me on his leave between overseas tours, he would tune the flatscreen to the Food Network, where (with the possible exception of Antony Bourdain’s surreal food show “No Reservations” on the Travel Network) and promptly lose himself in some aspect of American or World cuisine.

(Renowned chef and raconteur Anthony Bourdain displays his approval. From Rock and Roll Ghost).

One morning we watched an hour presentation on Meat Loafs of the world, followed by a special on Great Diners.

I was reminded of that as I scurried about, getting ready to host the Big Pink Book Group yesterday afternoon. It was fun. I forget sometimes how much I would prefer cooking to political analysis.

I confess that it opened my eyes to sensory input that has nothing to do with the sad state of politics, though it is related. Accordingly, I thought I might highlight a pair of books that basically sum up the state of the American Civilization at the front-end of the 21st century. Here is the coarser of the two:

Clever, right? I enjoyed it, and have been known to be crude myself. But here is the deal: we have produced a society in which the inability to communicate has become pervasive even as the means to communicate have expanded in a dizzying fashion. I confess I am intrigued with the phenomenon, and bought both books to see if there was a trend here that I was missing.

Back in the day, the publishing world had a rule of thumb: if the cover of the book had a swastika on it, it increased sales. I don’t know why- mostly the books that did so were either historical or accounts of derring-do against unspeakable evil. Next up in the sure fire sales tricks was to provide self-improvement, the most popular of which was weight loss, or its mirror image, the cook book.

For the diet side, I tried one of those radically unbalanced diets later pioneered by that Atkins guy, and now popular as the Paleolithic Cave-man regimen. My solution at the time was to skip breakfast, work out at lunch vigorously, and on the way back to the Bureau, purchase a half-smoke smothered in sauerkraut with mustard and sweet relish, which I would bake in a toaster-oven to a delightful crusty exterior with a juicy squishy interior.

I decided I could become vastly wealthy if I just penned a book with a frankfurter on the cover, crushing a swastika and titled “The Super Kraut Dog Miracle Diet: 30 days to thinner thighs and victory over fascism.”

I never got around to it, and the generation who made purchasing decisions based on the victory over Hitler has now passed largely form the scene, so I think that ship has sailed. But as I said, it is raining like hell and dank and chilly. So it is not a bad day to stay inside and do some cooking. This is one of the recipes that really appealed to me, since it includes all the food-groups except vodka. It might very well answer the question posed in the second cookbook above.

I make cheerful attribution to Trisha Yearwood, the remarkable chef who presents via Trisha’s Southern Kitchen on the food network.

Read more at: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/trisha-yearwood/cowboy-lasagna.html?oc=linkback

Copyright 2016 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303