Matty's Ballgame

“Do you know where I can find smoked bacon?” I asked the attractive woman wearing a Dartmouth sweatshirt, large black cat-eyed glasses and blue, striped Converse shoes.

We were both in the ethnic food aisle of my local grocery, Strack and Van Til. I interrupted Dartmouth as she reached for a jar of pepperoncini peppers.

Aside: I LOVE pepperoncini peppers. I also love that pepperoncini must be so ubiquitous that my Spell Checker didn’t even offer to correct its spelling just now.

It was an honest question. I didn’t know where to find smoked bacon, a fact that would probably surprise the Strack’s cashiers and stockpeople. They see me there most every Wednesday, strolling the aisles, red plastic basket filled with sundries: I probably should have developed a working familiarity with the bacon section.

What the staff doesn’t realize, however, is that I rarely buy anything. At the end of my visit, all of my groceries find themselves neatly tucked back into their original positions on their respective shelves.

They served their purpose. Merely props, all.

I’m there to meet women.

I firmly believe that the grocery store is a far healthier dating environment than any bar because the women in the grocery are on average far more approachable, generally more intelligent and further along in their careers.

And, as for you, the dating odds in the aisles of the grocery are much greater in your favor than on a stool at some club. The fact you’re even in the store buying your own food, especially Triscuits, Special K, cauliflower, Tony Canchere’s Cajun Seasoning, collard greens, corn, tomato juice, pepper jack cheese, pasta, cornbread stuffing and tuna, perhaps a Yoga mat for subtle garnish, speaks volumes for your character without you having to say much of anything.

Really, I don’t get why men are so intimidated by women. Maybe it’s a lack of confidence, a confidence perhaps you don’t build until you find yourself in your early thirties. Once you hit thirty you come to realize that women at that point have defined for themselves the qualities they’re looking for in a man – qualities that usually have nothing to do with looks (or, at the least, very little).

You come to realize that a little confidence, intelligence, and sense of humor go a long way and that any Football Brad is eight years removed from the equation.

So when you’re in the grocery (or Super Target – my Thursday night haunt) and you see a woman you think compatible, steel yourself as best you need to, walk up to her  and compliment her on her shoes, hair, sweatshirt, whatever. It’s not disingenuous. You’re thinking it, just say it.

I once told a woman sitting at a bar in New York that I knew she was probably waiting for someone but that she looked fantastic in her dress. The next night, she was there again. Only this time she wasn’t waiting for anybody.

So, after approaching a woman in the grocery, the initial compliment, I ask for directions to a certain food item and if we happen to meet in another aisle, ice broken, it’s easy to further the conversation.

“What are [insert weirdly named food here] anyway?”

Yeah, it’s goofy, it’s Seinfeld, but it works.

If it seems like there’s chemistry, ask her if she’s ever been to BLANK neighborhood restaurant — you already have an idea what she likes to eat.

Perfect example: pepperoncini, as in “Have you ever been to BLANK? Their Bloody Mary bar has pepperoncini.”

Who knows? You just might get to enjoy a brunch over a Bloody Mary bar, learn her name is Michele, learn that she’s a 2004 Dartmouth grad with a degree in Sociology, that she’s originally from Racine, Wisconsin; perhaps you’ll have a good time over four fun dates, but maybe IT won’t quite be there and you’ll both end it on an amicable note.

It’s not a science. Like spiders, women are just as scared of you as you are of them.

Dating secrets aside, why did I really need to know where the smoked bacon lived?

I was charged with preparing the soup course for our third annual Orphan’s Thanksgiving Day Feast, a celebration for the handful of us living in Chicago spending the Holiday apart from our families — unintentionally or otherwise.

I haven’t been home for Thanksgiving in eleven years. Consequently every Thanksgiving I’ve celebrated over the last decade has taken on its own memorable color.

There was the blizzard of 2005, a Thanksgiving spent with my dear friend Emily in New York; our friends were unable to make the trip down from New Hampshire. Left with a six pound turkey and full bar to ourselves, we were drunk and fat by three in the afternoon and more than willing to invite Emily’s cousin’s bartender boyfriend’s co-workers over for a nightcap. When I’ll find myself ending the night talking Proust with a beautiful transgendered Asian again is in God’s hands.

There was the Thanksgiving spent in Moscow, in a theater devoid of heat, working with a Stage Fighting Instructor who barked his instructions entirely in Russian, furthering his points with giant smacks across the chest. Later that night we dined on liver and beets in a dimly lit bar owned by our gangster patron.

There was the Thanksgiving spent in Providence, Rhode Island, another blizzard. My friend Erin and I navigated six foot high snowdrifts, dragging ourselves to the Tortilla Flat restaurant. We ate Tex Mex and drank Narragansett beers with the locals until Erin ended up in the lap of a man who claimed to have met Papa Hemingway – never mind that the man looked to be in his late 30’s; never mind that Hemingway died in 1961.

Since moving back to Chicago, I have fallen into a bit of a routine. The Wednesday before Thanksgiving I spend the afternoon at the Jackson and Wells Billy Goat Tavern. The showing of Planes, Trains and Automobiles begins at 2:00 pm. Union construction workers, city employees, traders from the nearby stock exchange all file in to watch the film before catching their commuter trains home to the suburbs at nearby Union Station.

The motley assembly quote every scene along with the film over draft Miller Lites and Billy Goat lagers. They laugh uproariously at the genius of Steve Martin and the late, great John Candy; most of the regulars having sat on their reserved stools and enjoyed the same routine for the past fifteen years.

The next morning, Thanksgiving Day, I make my way down to Chicago’s Macy’s Day State Street parade. After watching the giant inflatable Elmo’s, Big Bird’s, Underdog’s limbo under the Lake Street elevated train, I head home and lock myself in the kitchen.

Each of us attending the Orphan Thanksgiving is tasked with providing a dish for the smorgasbord. This year I drew soup.

I settled on a recipe I had stumbled across in the pages of New York Magazine: an Oyster, Bacon and Beer chowder; done and done  – Take those ingredients and throw in an un-chaperoned night with Bernadette Peters and you could rev up the crematorium, I’d slide in one happy clam.

Needless to say, it was game on.

I don’t know why I receive New York Magazine. I never subscribed to it. Methinks my stay at the Waldorf Astoria one long ago weekend might have encouraged the magazine’s publishers to send them to me unsolicited, obviously mistaking me for money. Every other month I receive a note and a bill asking me to “extend” my subscription. Obviously I don’t respond as I’ve never paid for a single page. And yet they keep coming.

I’m not one to critique business models (I write a blog for God’s sake) but is the magazine industry really pushed to the point of irrelevance that they’re resorting to tricking people into buying their rag?

Okay, let’s cook.

Now, if you’re looking to play along, know this: when I cook, I cook like I mean it. My chosen recipes ain’t cheap nor time sensitive.

Rachel Ray ain’t walking through that door.

Ground rules established, on to the play-by-play.

I started by dropping four pounds of washed and de-bearded mussels into a large pot where I showered them with two bottles of New Belgium’s Ranger IPA beer – though any Midwest IPA would do.

I let the mussels stew in the beer until they opened. Then I let them sit in the pot for a good additional seven minutes. You don’t want the soup to be over-powered by the taste of mussel, but you’ll see that the end product is rich with at least four or five distinct flavors and the mussel beer broth adds a really nice complement to nearly every one, so letting the little guys soak for an extra minute won’ t do any harm.

I removed the cooked mussels with a colander ladle and dropped them onto a waiting platter. I saved the broth in the pot and set it aside for later, but I didn’t need to hold onto the mussels, so I chowed down on a solid twelve of them.

Now, beware eating the unopened mussel. The little guy was more than likely dead before you dropped him in the pot, so he’s probably spoiled. Hell, beware Chicago mussels in general; odds are they were probably collected from a rusted Lake Michigan intake valve.

Mussels consumed, I turned to Beetle Baileying three pounds of Jolly Green Giant golden potatoes. (The work progressed a lot faster after I removed the clear tape covering the edge of the new peeler).

Once the potatoes were peeled, I began dicing onions, celery and smoked bacon until I reached 2 ½ cups of each. After a solid half hour of dicing with no real end in sight, I could have killed for that late-night d**che pitchman Vince to walk in with one of those damn chopslappers.

I chopped those f**king onions for so long, I began reciting Clarence’s nightmare monologue from Richard the III trying to take advantage of the Niagara of tears dripping onto my “Chef Matt” apron that I received at a team building retreat six years ago when I worked at American Express. I had to make an upside down cake with hair-lipped Vipul from accounting.

Once chopped, I arranged the ingredients in my set of clear, nesting Emeril Lagasse bowls that I trot out about twice a year: I parse the ingredients into their separate bowls for no other reason than to admire my handiwork. Plus it’s always nice to get a “look at you!” from the roomie and his girlfriend when they wander into the kitchen to appropriate a couple of your Ranger IPAs.

Next, I shellacked a large pan over medium heat with 6 tbs. of butter (who am I’m kidding, I’m Swedish, ain’t never met a recipe you in which you couldn’t double the butter) and dropped in the bacon. I cooked it for about five minutes until it began to caramelize (that’s the recipe’s verb, I don’t know caramelize, I just cooked it for five minutes). Stirring occasionally, I added the celery and onions and cooked them until the vegetables softened just a tad. Don’t overcook the veggies, though the edges of the bacon can be allowed to brown a bit. Then throw in the mussel/beer broth and set the pan aside.

While the veggies simmered, I took to cutting my potatoes into approximated one inch chunks. Don’t stand on exactitude when slicing the potatoes. If you’ve ever had New England style clam chowder you know what general look you’re going for.

I mixed the potatoes with 2 ½ cups cream, 1 ½ cups milk, and three peeled garlic cloves in a another large pan. The recipe calls for the pan to simmer for 20 minutes but my stovetop’s heat is lacking so I needed to keep them over the flame for a solid 30 minutes until the potatoes softened.

Then I removed half the potatoes with a slotted spoon and dropped them into the blender. The recipe calls for an immersion blender. I’m assuming that’s what I had. All I know is that the blender had a puree button and I pressed it repeatedly until the potatoes liquefied.

Then I threw in the pureed potatoes, the remaining cream and milk potatoes still sitting in the pan into my beer/mussel/celery/onion/bacon broth. I stirred it for a good five minutes over low heat.

Then I tossed in 16 shucked oysters. I’m a great shucker. My children will be great shuckers. Seriously, I once spent a whole summer shucking oysters at a Bayside Beach Bar in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. Frank Black of the Pixies tipped me $30 bucks. All things considered it’s been a nice life thus far.

Now, I love oysters. I once devoured two buckets of Apalachicola oysters in under a half hour at a seafood shack on Florida’s Redneck Rivera. I’m not entirely proud of the feat, well, hell, yes I am. I won a hat.

The recipe actually calls for Wellfleet oysters. Okay, I consider Wellfleet oysters to be the greatest oyster on the planet, truly the caviar of the sea. Bar none. Gun to my head: Theeeee Best. And I don’t really feel comfortable wasting Wellfleet oysters in some soup, no matter how good the soup. The recipe also suggests Blue Point oysters, but again, that’s some solid oyster, and I’m reluctant to drop them into a stew in which their nonpareil taste could be compromised.

So I bought whatever oysters the Strack offered up that day and slid them into the cauldron, making sure to add their juice as well. The off-brand oysters proved completely sufficient. I dusted the top of the soup with some chives, pepper, and a healthy dose of salt. Voila. Soup.

I served it right then and it proved bang-on fantastic, but if you have a half day or even a day, throw it into the fridge without the oysters and let everything mix. I’m of the opinion soup tastes better the next day. Just hold off on adding the oysters until you’re almost ready to serve.

So, go ahead, serve your soup, enjoy your last IPA and the compliments that will surely flow your way.

Who knows, you just might impress a University-of-Illinois-Chicago Film Professor and end up enjoying another, more private, showing of Planes and Trains later that night.

“Did you shuck these oysters yourself? Where did you get the shucker?”

“Aisle six, next to the pie plates.”