Michael Grant

This is the only Mashed Potato Salad recipe that I know of. I always believed it was unique to Underwood's a chain of West Texas barbecue restaurants in the 1950s and '60s. Then, in the late '80s, when I was working on a cookbook about Texas cooking, a friend named Gene Ainsworth, a transplanted Texan living in California, gave me the recipe that I am using here. It looked like and tasted like the Underwood's salad.

The featured technique is the mashed potatoes, but the featured ingredient is yellow mustard. It has to do with barbecue. Potato salad is a classic side dish for Texas barbecue, particularly brisket, and most Texas potato salads have a good dollop of mustard in them, and also chopped sweet pickles. The sweet snap of the pickles and the mustard's tart bite (sounds like the rocket's red glare), stirred into the creamy potatoes work to complement the brisket's signature, smoked-savory goodness in what must have been, the first time, an accidental way. You couldn't have planned a partnership so agreeable.

As you eat, a little of the potato salad always gets swirled into the brisket juices and barbecue sauce in the bottom of the plate. I always finish everything else first, leaving a couple of bites of brisket with which to mop up this fabulous liquor.

8 medium potatoes, peeled and cubed
Milk
Butter
1 medium purple onion, chopped
5 small sweet pickles, chopped
1 ½ tablespoons vinegar
5 or 6 tablespoons yellow mustard
2 tablespoons mayonnaise
Salt and pepper to taste

Boil the potatoes until tender and mash them in the usual way, with enough milk and butter to make them creamy. Fold in the other ingredients. The salad should be a creamy yellow. If you need to, add more mustard. Refrigerate overnight, and let the salad come back to room temperature before serving.

Late add: Tom Perini was on the "Today" show this morning, competing with two other guys in a hamburger cookoff. All three were named by The Food Network for making the best, and most unusual, hamburgers in their state. It was interesting. One guy wrapped his burger inside pizza dough and grilled that. The second guy breaded his burger and deep-fried it. Perini's burger was routine by comparison: a half-pound of Angus beef, grilled, topped with cheese, mushrooms and onions, and served on a sourdough bun. The "Today" panel voted his hamburger the best. It would go great with Mashed Potato Salad.

Labels: Stretch Cooking

Posted by Michael Grant at 9:32 AM | Permalink | Comments

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Posted by Michael Grant at 9:47 AM | Permalink | Comments

After resigning the Alaska governorship last Friday, Sarah Palin posted this on Facebook on Saturday, July 4, Independence Day:

"The response in the main stream (sic) media has been most predictable, ironic, and as always, detached from the lives of ordinary Americans . . . How sad that Washington and the media will never understand; it's about country."

Palin is wrong. The media IS the country, and the documentation for that is IN Washington, in the National Archives. Most ordinary Americans, including Sarah Palin, don't understand this, because they have never been taught, that they, the people themselves, are the authors of the media principles, and thus the source of all media, particularly journalism, or what Americans have always called a "free press." That connection is consistently revealed by media professionals seeking to define exactly what journalists do. In a 1987 speech, journalist Jeff Greenfield laid it down nicely: "The bedrock theory of the free press is that once society decides to invest ultimate power in the people, they must have access to the widest possible range of information."

Thus the source of the power of the press must be the power of the people, who can access their power through only one source, the power of the press. The natural, enduring strength of this circularity is acknowledged by the deliberations of the nation's founders. The place for their guarantee of a free press was not in the Constitution, which established the government, but right at the top, No. 1 in the Bill of Rights, which protected the governed. The press belongs not to the Constitution, but to the people, who created it. Here's how it happened:

After the 1734 Zenger verdict, which established truth as a defense against libel or sedition, the young American press was free to print anything it wanted to, as long as it was the truth. It meant the public had an unchecked access to the flow of any information they might want, or need. The free press after the Zenger verdict democratized information, and democratized power. This was an astonishing development, in an American colonial society already forming the thought that some truths are self-evident regarding the rights of men, and can only be obtained through the consent of the governed.

The stature of the newspaper as a landmark democratic institution became a daily factor in the American mood in the decades leading to revolution, war, and independence. Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, acknowledged that stature early in 1787, just before the Constitutional Convention, when he wrote: "The basis of government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."

When the framers were finished with their work in September of 1787, and offered it for ratification, you could read the Constitution all the way through, and not come across a word about newspapers, or "the press." Word of "the press" does not appear until the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights, and it is a famous Amendment, on display in the National Archives: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for redress of grievances."

Edited down to the scope of modern media, it reads: "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of the press." Freedom of the press! Not a cornerstone of the Constitution? Just something thrown in out of left field, buried in an amendment? Where is the power in that?

There are three answers.

The first is in the Constitution itself. Making no mention of the press, or its freedom, the Constitution does nothing to create a free press.

The second answer is in the First Amendment. By including it there, we see it is clear that freedom of the press was in the minds of the Constitution's framers. When in the amendment they acknowledge its existence, after ignoring it in the Constitution, it must mean the framers understood that freedom of the press preceded the Constitution, and was as self-evident to them as, in another well-known Jeffersonian phrase, certain inalienable rights, including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The third part of the answer is provided by the word "abridge." Defined by Webster, it means "to reduce in scope, extent, etc." This must mean that the framers saw a free press as so fundamental to a democratic society that it preceded any laws they could create, and that the laws they did create could never be used to reduce the scope of that freedom.

They gave the press permanent, vast – almost absolute – power and then placed that power in the hands of the people. They made the people the overseers of the republic. Why did they do that? What leap of faith was required?

We arrive at a point where it is useful to run history backwards. If you ran all the lines of United States of America history backwards, would they converge in the Constitution, or in freedom of the press? If, in Gutenberg's time, the Bible begat mass media, did, in Jefferson's time, mass media beget the Constitution? Are we really a nation of the opinion of the people? Eighty-seven years after Jefferson's quote, Abraham Lincoln spoke famously of a "new birth of freedom," of government of the people, by the people, and for the people, not perishing from the earth.

One hundred and forty-six years after Lincoln's quote, Sarah Palin speaks of media as "detached from the lives of ordinary Americans" and, "How sad that Washington and the media will never understand; it's about country." Hers is simple ignorance, yes, but also simply dangerous, for a national leader to believe and say such things.

Labels: Media Literacy

Posted by Michael Grant at 9:31 AM | Permalink | Comments

On this July 5, Rush Limbaugh is cursing John McCain for even being born. Bill O'Reilly has gone into 24/7 production mode on his next book, which he knows will be his last. Sean Hannity is polishing his resume to send to The Weather Channel. Ann Coulter is packing her surgical tools. William Kristol is looking into his mirror and saying, over and over, "What have I done? What have I done?"

All of these people make their living in conservative media, and they know, better than anyone, what is happening with Sarah Palin. She is getting out of politics, where she is a relative, low-paid nobody, into media, where she is still going to be a relative nobody, but an extremely wealthy, and visible, one. She is about to become the white, right, Oprah. Bye-bye, O'Reilly.

She already IS the white, right, Oprah, trapped in the wrong business. There are 20 million Americans out there who worship Sarah, who will attach themselves to everything she does, every move she makes, every product she endorses. By comparison, Oprah averages 8.6 million viewers daily, a Nielsen rating of about 5, and those levels have made Oprah an international celebrity and a multi-millionaire. Sarah only needs to switch businesses, from politics to media, and she started that switch Friday, when she resigned the Alaska governorship, which of course is a total waste of her star power.

If "Sarah" could start tomorrow, the show would be pulling a Nielsen of 6 or 7 by September, and I'm not talking about some Fox News production. She would be crazy to go to work for Fox. She has a proven business model for creating her own production company, down to the company's name, which would be Haras, Inc., just like Oprah's Harpo, Inc., which everybody knows is "Oprah" spelled backwards.

She won't have to learn anything, change the way she looks, change the way she talks, change the way she thinks. She is a media star waiting to happen. All she needs is a studio. Look for her to relocate from Alaska soon, to a media center in a conservative part of the country with a hub airport. Atlanta would be my guess.

Labels: Media, Media Literacy

Posted by Michael Grant at 3:35 PM | Permalink | Comments

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Posted by Michael Grant at 9:24 AM | Permalink | Comments

May, 2005 - If X is history, and Y is service, and you plot an ordinary parabola, then humanity has clearly reached the apogee of Service Heaven and is hurtling down a rocket roller-coaster descent into Service Hell.

The apogee was reached, of course, with Nordstrom, whose business model was the service stations (remember when they called them “service stations”?) of the 1940s. At service stations, an attendant came out, asked how much gas you wanted, pumped the gas, checked your tires, washed your windshield, checked your oil and water, and brought you change. The tab for this was never over $5. You can still see service stations in TCM movies.

Nordstrom improved on that model and was in fact Service Heaven. I remember feeling a little “this can’t last” uneasiness in Nordstrom, and sure enough, at the peak of the Service Heaven apogee, in the mid-1980s, banks introduced the ATM card. It was first presented as a “check guarantee card,” making you feel privileged and secure while the banks let you gradually get used to the idea that the ATM card made you your own teller.

When banks proved that human employees could be eliminated, along with the messy salaries and benefits, other businesses jumped on the model and Y started downhill. Slowly at first, ironically with service stations, that regressed to card-operated gas stations, and then the descent picked up speed. Overnight, it seemed, we became our own telephone receptionists and switchboards.

For a long time I assumed the phone tree was the bottom, and that Service Hell had been reached. Then just the other day I went to IKEA. It was very interesting. We walked up some stairs and then began walking through furniture groupings and displays. Our progress was along a sort of trail, well-marked, like you would follow through the great outdoors. Then we reached a stairway taking us downstairs. It was a welcome sight to me, because by then I was hot and tired and imagined we would find the trailhead, if you will, at the bottom of the stairs.

But the foot of the stairs was only the top of the peak, so to speak. At the bottom we trudged on. And on. I remembered an old movie, “Fantastic Voyage,” in which medical people, Raquel Welch among them, were miniaturized and injected into the circulatory system, from which there was no escape, of an individual whose life needed saving.

It was my situation exactly. I was trapped in a circulatory system, and my life needed saving. Raquel Welch could have run into me naked, at her movie age or her age now, and I would not have noticed. Finally we passed into a cavernous warehouse area where all the furniture and appointments and accessories had been digested into aisle upon aisle of compressed brown bundles, and at last we were extruded through checkout lines into air and sky of a sweetness I didn’t remember.

We didn’t buy anything, but we saw something we liked. A china cabinet. We shopped around and found nothing better. So we went back. We found the item and looked around for someone to do business with. In the next hour came the dawn of the real truth about IKEA: IKEA has taken the phone tree business model and CLONED IT INTO HUMANS.

I must point out that the people who work at IKEA are fine. Friendly, knowledgeable, willing to assume authority and responsibility for your shopping success. But an IKEA employee’s sphere of knowledge and authority extends only about 12 inches outside of his body. An IKEA employee in Lighting or Couches or Pickup has no knowledge of any other department in the building, upstairs or down, or the authority to ask about them.

Thus 99 percent of the shopping knowledge, labor, authority and responsibility became vested in me, the shopper. It was brilliant. Diabolical, but brilliant. Can Y go any lower? I don’t know, but lately I have been in a couple of supermarkets where you HAVE TO CHECK AND BAG YOURSELF OUT. So I think it's spreading.

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Posted by Michael Grant at 10:29 AM | Permalink | Comments

I had a finger and spoon lunch yesterday that I immediately ranked in the Stretch Cooking Top 10 for bang for the buck, measured by the value of the experience against the cost of the preparation.

It was a chunk of leftover barbecued pork shoulder (the finger food) and a bowl of leftover greens (mustard, turnip, spinach, collards) with bacon and turnips (the spoon part). I heated both in a toaster oven at 325 for 20 minutes. The pork was pure carnivore candy. I broke it apart with my fingers and consumed it deliberately, one caramelized, tender, redolent, morsel at a time, a few of them with crispy bits of fat attached. The greens were perfectly cooked to death, Texas style, with a bacon spike, sweet bites of turnip, and peppery pot liquor, and a flavor depth that only four days of refrigerator time could provide. I used a couple of warm, tightly rolled flour tortillas to mop things up.

This pork was the very last chunk of a 12-pound package of boneless pork shoulder I bought at CostCo in May for $17.46. I made "Braised Pork Carnitas" with the first six pounds, for a dinner party. The next three pounds were an experiment, based on a recipe from the "Homesick Texan" blog of Lisa Fain, who has figured out a way to make genuine carnitas at home by letting them render their own fat, and then fry in it.

Last Saturday, I thawed the last three pounds and barbecued them the same way I barbecue ribs. Stack a fire of thirty mesquite charcoal briquets and a handful of hardwood mesquite charcoal, on one side of the Weber kettle. A drip pan on the other side of the grate, just to keep fat out of the kettle bowl. Season three one-pound chunks of pork shoulder with salt and pepper and place them on the grill over the drip pan. Place the lid on the kettle so the vent is over the meat. Every 45 minutes, flip the meat over and place the opposite side toward the fire, and add six or seven briquets. They will be done in 3 ½ hours. Don't bother with sauce; you can't catch enough drippings for the job, and the pork doesn't need it anyway.

You can use a rub on these, but I prefer just salt and pepper. The fattiness in the pork shoulder bastes the meat as it smokes, leaving a signature flavor that you really shouldn't mess with.

I got the mixed greens in a huge bag at Trader Joe's, plus three turnips from the supermarket. Trim and dice the turnips and cook in water just to cover until they are tender. Dice six slices of bacon and place in a large (8-quart) pot with water to cover and place over high heat until the water boils off and the bacon starts to fry. Add one medium chopped onion, cook over high until tender and a brown glaze is forming on the bottom of the pan. Add the turnips and their cooking water and use a spatula to scrap the glaze off the bottom. Turn heat to low, heap the greens into the pot, cover, and let simmer for an hour or more. After 30 minutes, when the greens have shrunk, stir the bacon, onion and turnips into them.

The turnips act like a sweetener. For the longest time, I tried to cook greens like my grandmother Susie used to, and they came out way sharper than I remembered, even bitter. Finally I figured out adding turnips to the greens, and that did the trick. The greens still have a strong flavor, but the turnips cut the sharpness. I think Susie mashed the turnips into the greens, which is why I didn't remember them.

Labels: Stretch Cooking

Posted by Michael Grant at 12:59 PM | Permalink | Comments