You can get whole brisket in cryovac bags at Walmart. That's a lot of meat, and it's cheap - I think $1.59/pound, last time I checked, so it works out to about $20 for a brisket. It's some of the most flavorful beef on the carcass, but you can't hurry it, or it'll be so tough, you won't be able to chew it.
On Monday, I took half a brisket, stuck it in a big cast-iron skillet, and put it in the oven around 9 AM at 200F. Blondie saw the temperature on the oven, and knew I'd goofed, and was incredulous that I was deliberately cooking it at such a low temperature. At 3 PM, I goosed the temperature up to 350F, and tossed some taters and some sweet taters - the yams were wrapped in foil, but the russets were nekkid - into the oven. I turned off the oven at 4 PM, letting the temperature coast back down, and served supper at 5 PM. Blondie was again flabberghasted. Best beef she'd ever eaten, she said. That was hyperbole, of course, but it was really good.
But on Christmas Morning, she didn't think that it was appropriate. There wasn't any time to cook the other half of the brisket before noon, so where did I want to go for Christmas Dinner. I thought for a moment. "The Pho", I said. Pho Thanh Thuy is the real name, but I can never remember the rest. The Vietnamese noodle house is a hole in the wall, a dump, and the service is really spotty, but it has incredibly good food.
Best of all is their pho, a noodle soup which is the national dish of Vietnam. You can get it with pork or shrimp, but I usually get mine with flank steak. There's not much meat in any case, but the small serving is probably 2-3 pints in size. And they serve it with a salad that includes bean sprouts, alfalfa sprouts, and several other greens that I'm unable to identify, but no dressing. You just pick up a piece at a time and chow down. Or some of the people, I notice, put the salad into their pho. I tried that once, and it was good, but I like it better separately.
I can't claim it was worth 60,000 corpses to bring Vietnamese food to our shores, not by any stretch, but I'm glad we got something in exchange for all that blood. But when I called the place, they weren't answering their phone.
"Are you punishing me?" Blondie asked? If a bunch of Buddhists aren't open on Christmas Day, I said, what's the chance we'll find anyplace that's open? I remembered once, trying to take a girlfriend out to a nice dinner on Christmas, in Fort Wayne, which is considerably bigger than Lancaster. We ended up eating a high-priced buffet at a hotel, and the food was terrible.
But facing my wife's wrath, I googled for restaurant after restaurant, and finally found a chinese buffet that was open. And, actually, it's one of the better chinese places in town, good food, very good service, nice surroundings, and even on Christmas, they were only asking $10.99. If I had a nice restaurant open on Christmas, you'd pay $19.99 or more, because the alternative is to go hungry, and that's not profiteering: I'd also overpay my staff generously on Christmas to let them know how much they were appreciated.
Sitting there, I looked at the various tables of patrons. To my left, there was a lady saying that her cat was still wheezing, and she didn't know whether to give him another Lasix or that other pill. The fellow across the table didn't have much to say. Lasix is a diuretic. If I were wheezing hard, the last thing I would want is a dried-out throat. I wanted to say, "Lady, if your cat doesn't have edema, don't give it any Lasix." But I kept my mouth shut, and have wondered ever since then if I contributed to the abuse of a cat by my inaction.
They left, and Blondie wondered to me, do you suppose her husband is a vet, or he's a pharmacist? I didn't think he was her husband, or she'd have referred to the cat as "Fuzzball" or "Garfield" or whatever name the cat had, instead of saying "my cat". I also figured that he had no special expertise in the matter, or he'd have given her an answer. Instead, he simply nodded and expressed sympathy. She didn't want an answer, so much as she was trying to illustrate that she was willing to defer to his judgment.
Or maybe I misread the situation entirely. She was a nice looking lady, well-scrubbed, carefully dressed, and if anything, the guy was even prettier and more presentable. Living alone can be awfully lonely, and I hoped they decide they meet each others' needs.
There was a young woman filling a plate at the buffet. She wore khaki shorts with about a 2" inseam, lots of patch pockets everywhere, over black nylons. Well, I suppose it was pantyhose. She had offwhite boots that came up to her knees, with 3" spike heels. She was wearing a bulky brown sweater that came down halfway over her butt, and she had a vinyl belt, same color as her boots, about 2" wide.
I pointed her out to Blondie. "Costume party, time machine, or have the '60s come back into fashion?" Blondie turned back to me, and laughed inaudibly. "I suppose," she said. She has this way of answering yes or no to multiple-choice questions, and it'd be annoying, I guess, if someone really wanted an answer.
Some say it's rude to do people watching, but I find it necessary to do so, just in case my brother should someday ask me, "As an outsider, what do you think of the human race?" as he used to do, hundreds or thousands of times, when we were growing up.
There was a table of two men and six kids, mostly pre-teens. Every so often, you'd see the two men holding hands under the table. The kids were having fun. Chinese buffets offer such a wonderment of strange and wonderful foods, that anyone with taste buds should enjoy them, but for kids, selecting your own foods, and helping yourself to as much - or as little - as you want is a special treat. The little ones got yelled at, quietly, and they'd instantly slow from a slow run to a careful walk, and they'd come back to the table. Every so often, one of them would slip off his chair and go hug one man, then the other.
I remember dating a woman who had a 15-year-old daughter. I offered her some advice when her mother was out of earshot, and she shot at me, "You can't tell me what to do. You're not my father." I told her that I was offering advice, not giving orders, that it's a shame that I wasn't her father, because I thought she would be a wonderful daughter, and that you're allowed to have as many fathers as you have room in your heart for, whether they are married to your mother or not. About a month later, when her mother had left the room, she gave me a big hug, then quickly fled. I guess it takes time to make room in your heart for a dad - but these six kids definitely knew they had two dads, and they were appreciative of the fact.
I couldn't figure out another table. I think there were two parents, three kids, and their dates. The woman had dark, straight hair, an almond-shaped face with fine features, and a tan face. Maybe she was Macedonian? The man had white hair, and a dark brown face, and a large rugged face. Maybe he was Amerindian. The younger generation had a jewish nose, an oriental face, perhaps a Puerto Rican, a blue-eyed blonde with long straight hair and a couple more whose ethnicities were not readily apparent to me. I'm not really good at that sort of thing, I know; that's one reason why I am curious. But when they walked out in pairs, I was really perplexed, because I'd guessed wrong on who was paired up with whom. For instance, the swedish girl and the japanese guy: which one was the kid and which one the kid-in-law-to-be?
Nothing, of course, says that they had to be a family - except that they talked and argued and laughed together like a family. Adopted or foster kids? Perhaps. Maybe all six were their kids, rather than in-laws-to-be.
And that's the thing that I carried away from Christmas dinner. Families look different, but they're all the same. They talk together, they argue, they laugh, they care. It's not just that you've can make room in your heart for more than one father. You can make room for anyone, if you want to.
And all the souls on Earth shall sing,
On Christmas day, on Christmas day;
And all the souls on Earth shall sing,
On Christmas day in the morning.
Then let us all rejoice amain,
On Christmas day, on Christmas day;
Then let us rejoice amain,
On Christmas day in the morning.
Alan Abramsky of Roanoke, Texas, tells a story:
Under a cultural exchange program, my family was host to a rabbi from Russia at Christmastime. We decided to introduce him to a culinary treat that was probably not available in his country: we took him to our favorite Chinese restaurant.
Throughout the meal, the rabbi spoke excitedly about the wonders of our country in comparison to the bleak conditions in his homeland. When we'd finished eating, the waiter brought the check and presented each of us with a small brass Christmas-tree ornament as a seasonal gift.
We all laughed when my father pointed out that the ornaments were stamped "Made in India." But the laughter subsided when we saw that the rabbi was quietly crying. Concerned, my father asked him if he was offended because he'd been given a gift for a Christian holiday.
He smiled, shook his head and said, "Nyet, I was shedding tears of joy to be in a wonderful country in which a Buddhist gives a Jew a Christmas gift made by a Hindu!"
There was a segment on C-SPAN II this morning, where people were talking of Molly Ivins, a bigger-than-life red-headed Texan who covered politics and other news in a highly satirical form.
Bigger than life? Well, she was six feet tall. And while she was open to others trying to convince her that she was in the wrong, she didn't back down when she thought she was in the right.
Everyone accused Molly of being a Democrat, but she was raised in a Republican family, and held the Bill of Rights dear to her heart, like any good conservative. She was willing to be nasty in her satire if the subject was powerful and abusive, and she stood up for those without power or other resources. There was room in her heart for a very big family: darned near the whole human race.
When she was working for the New York Times, she once was called upon to cover a community chicken-killing festival. Her copy-editor didn't appreciate her reference to the event as a "gang-pluck" and she was called on the carpet. Her dog, as a puppy, was so clumsy that he could trip over the pattern on the linoleum. Originally, she named the dog "Shitface", but that name got shortened. When the dog would get away from her on the street, and Molly would call it, she got odd looks. I suspect she reveled in them.
My late first wife, Em, had many of those same traits. I remember Em referring to some snob as looking down on herself and me, as if we had shit between our toes. Well, she fessed up, we probably do have a "little", it being hard to clean it all out, but you've got two choices when it comes to walking barefoot in the pasture, and anyone who is too scared of a little poop to walk barefoot in the luxury of tall grass, well, he's not too bright.
She had similar opinions of men who would yell to the wife that the baby needed changing. "What's the matter?" she'd say. "Don't you have two hands? Are you too weak to lift him up? Are you too ignorant to help your kid do what he can't do for himself? Or don't you care about your kid?"
Molly Ivins usually disagreed with me on most issues, but I loved reading her columns, anyway. You don't learn anything, after all, from people you agree with. And she had such a way with words.
She died last January, and of all the great people we lost this year - there were some real doozies - I suspect we will miss her most. When Gore and Bush ran in 2000 she said, "It's like having Ted Baxter of the old 'Mary Tyler Moore' show running for president: Gore has Ted's manner and Bush has his brain." What would she say of Hillary, Barack, Edwards, Romney, Huckabee, and Thompson?
Within a respectful time after her dog Shit died, Molly Ivins began looking for another pet. She hoped to name it Achilles. "Then I'd get to command 'Achilles! Heel!'" she explains in her trademark Texas drawl.
It's been a respectful time. What's more, we're entering an election year. We need to begin looking for another Molly Ivins.