Maybe you heard, maybe you didn’t.

For Christmas, I got a very cool cookbook — Bucks Cooks: The Artists’ County (or, since the cover is of dubious layout, Bucks, The Artist’s County, Cooks). It’s a cookbook put together by a bunch of locals in 1950 — at this point, a good 60 years ago.

My plan is to — slowly but diligently — work through each recipe in the book. The book is home to some pretty interesting recipes, and the recipes are themselves often quite spare, especially compared to recipes today which are almost obsessive about measurements and process. My grandmother, Mom-Mom, used to follow some recipe that existed only in her head, and the food came out the same (and awesome) every dang time.

So it is with excitement, confusion and trepidation that I start making recipes out of this book. Yes, all of them. Kidneys. Turtle. Rabbit. Somehow.

First up: Spare Ribs Burgundy.

I dunno if there are copyright issues with me giving you the recipe? I’m gonna do it anyway, and feign ignorance, for I am ignorant, and also an ignoramus. Here’s the recipe as written:

Ingredients

3 lbs fresh spareribs

salt and pepper

1/2 cup chopped onion

3 apples

1/2 cup chili sauce

1 cup Burgundy

3 tbsp. brown sugar

Preparation

Wipe spareribs with a damp cloth, sprinkle with salt & pepper, and lay in large roaster. Cover with onion. Pare and core apples, cut in half lengthwise & place around the meat. Mix chili sauce with 1/2 cup Burgundy and spread it over the apples & meat. Dot apples with brown sugar. Cover and bake in hot oven for 450 for one hour; then uncover, pour another 1/2 cup Burgundy over all, and bake until brown (about 15 minutes), basting occasionally.

What I Done Did

I didn’t have spare ribs.

I did, however, have baby back ribs.

Further, I didn’t have Burgundy. My recollections of Burgundy, for right or wrong, was that it was a darker, headier wine. I decided to go darker, headier, and sweeter — I had a bottle of Port that I like to sometimes use in cooking.

So, spare ribs became baby back ribs, and Burgundy became Port.

Further, the term “chili sauce” is a liiiiittle vague. I thought, “Well, I might make my own,” but then I looked at my time, and it did not include the time or inclination to do that. My second instinct was to go straight for the Heinz Chili Sauce and be done with it, but I figured, fuck that business. I like barbecue. Thus, I went ahead I bought Stubbs’ BBQ Chili sauce. Spicy stuff. A kick to your mouth.

Apples, I used three Gala apples, but I could only fit two in the roasting pan.

Now, my trepidation with this recipe was that it was a fairly short cooking time at high heat. Ribs, to me, are best when slowly cooked — low and slow, with a later jump in heat to get a brown bark on ‘em — so I wasn’t sure these would be tender or cooked through properly. Further, here I am already dicking up the ingredient list, so — the potential result remained shrouded in nibbling uncertainty.

The Result

Well, dang. The ribs were delicious. They were tender. The Port cut the tongue-kick of the spice, but still allowed it to retain the edge. The onions on top caramelized just right, yet remained soft and ooey-gooey, further imparting great flavor to the proceedings.

A success.

Not a total success — I don’t know that I was actually supposed to eat the apples or just let them impart flavor, but they weren’t altogether pleasant. Texturally, they were fine. But those flavors slathered on soft apple just didn’t do a lot for my taste buds. But they did impart a little flavor; I just think cider vinegar or even apple juice might have been an easier contribution. I could be wrong.

Here’s an awful picture!

Right. That’s a right shitty pic, because I got lazy. I didn’t want to grab the DSLR and switch the lens and… blah blah blah. You want to see good snaps of food, check out Fred’s post on Mushroom Beef Stew. This pic makes the ribs look like a horse abortion or something. It was, I assure you, much tastier than the pic portrays.

True fact: submitting queries to agents makes me agitated. Butterflies in my stomach, for real. No idea why. I was able to fly to LA and pitch to various High-Level executives, and I felt cool as a breeze, a leaf in the stream, a Zen mantis poised to eat a hummingbird. But putting together a query letter? Sending it out? I feel like it’s the first day of school or something.

Why is this? Hell if I know. Maybe it suggests some fear of being silently judged? I do feel like, were I able to sit down in front of these people I could pitch it really well — pitching to people is interesting, because you can feel the way the conversation moves, you can intuit and adjust. The query letter is an alienating process. I don’t know that it could be done differently; I don’t blame anybody. But some element of this makes me feel like I’m sticking my hand in a dark box and wriggling my fingers around.

What’s in the box?

Aye, there’s the rub-a-dub-dub.

Could be a handful of gold coins.

Might be a pile of gopher diarrhea (and if you’ve ever seen gopher diarrhea, it’s… uhh, berrylicious).

Or, maybe it’s a box of angry earwigs.

In fact, it’s probably a box of angry earwigs.

Anyway. I’ll talk more about the query process one day, maybe next week, and tell you how I’m approaching it. Meanwhile, to distract myself from the query-flies that are nesting in my bowels–

Another recipe!

Screw you. Deal with it.

I told you that I’d give you a sauce recipe, so here it is, damnit.

This is the best sauce you will ever ease into your gluttonous maw. That’s probably a lie. But it is very good and will be the Chuck’s Made-Up Tomato Sauce that I will stick with for a while.

This is what you do. Oven to 400F. Into a roasting pan, put the following objects:

• 1 – 1 1/2 lb. of tomatoes, whatever type you so desire
• two small carrots, peeled, then chopped in broach inch-long pieces
• one or two sweet onions (depends on size), chopped big
• one small bulb of fennel (chopped; if the bulb is big, halve it, use that)
• four cloves of garlic (each chopped into three or four pieces)
• a smattering of dry Italian seasonings (y’know, oregano, basil, thyme, rosemary)
• one donkey skull (meat still on it)

You may want to leave out the donkey skull. Your call, coward.

Roast the unmerciful fuck out of it for one hour. Maybe more. You want the tomatoes to shrivel and start to blacken. The roasting pan should look like some kind of vegetable swamp, too. Your house will smell like one of God’s own orgasms, by the way. You can thank me later.

When that’s done, get out your crockpot.

Upend your vegetable swamp broth into the crockpot.

You’re going to add some more stuff into this. Add in:

• 1 cup of a dry red wine (you can go for Merlot or Cabernet, but if you’re awesome? Shiraz)
• eight pieces of bacon (I do four crispy, and four soft-and-fatty)
• (“Soft and Fatty” was my nickname at Space Camp. “Hey, Soft and Fatty,” the other kids would say. “Stick this rocket booster in your O-Ring!” And they’d laugh and laugh.)
• a couple-few TBs of the bacon fat (“the drippings,” another name for “syphilis”)
• 1 TB of sugar
• Pinch of salt
• Dash of crack-black pepper
• A dusting of sage

Let that cook down for 6-8 hours on low.

When you’ve reached Maximum Goodness, you’ll want to season to taste. Maybe more salt. Maybe more seasonings. You can keep adding sugar, one tsp at a time until you’ve cut the acid (keep in mind, though, that the carrots are adding extra sugar in there).

Then, immersion blender it. I do it so some chunky bits (“Chunky Bits” was my nickname in the Coast Guard) are left behind, but you can do smooth as you’d like.

That’s it. If you’re a little uncertain about the bacon, be sure to still add in a little butter. Animal fats, for the win. Not fake butter, either. The real deal.

There you go. Sauce for you, and for me, a distraction from the agita of writing and submitting query letters. Peace out, writerheads and foodfaces.

Get yourself two acorn squashes.

Go on. Do it. What? I don’t mean later. I mean now. Christ, you people. Don’t question the Wendig.

Okay, you have your acorn squashes. Well-done. You’ve just saved yourself from the coming pogrom. Warm your oven. Go to 400F. Now cut those bastards in half. A serrated knife can be good, but I just cleave them in twain with a French knife as if I were bisecting the skulls of my foes. Gut ‘em. Eviscerate. Scoop out the seeds and leave them on your wife’s pillow while she sleeps, and tell her when she awakens that she clearly sneezed her brains out while she slept.

Fill a roasting pan with a half-inch of water.

Put the acorn halves — squishy bisected brain-side down — into the water.

Enter them into the belching maw of your oven.

Leave them be for 40 minutes.

While they’re doing their thing, it’s time to make That Which Will Stuff Thine Squashes. You need something awesome to cram in there. You need something squashworthy.

This is what you do.

Soften some chopped onions and a little sliced garlic — I used two small onions and two cloves.

Take ‘em back out of the pan.

Now, brown up three-quarters of a pound of sausage. One pound is too much. Half-pound ain’t enough. Go figure. And when I say “brown up,” don’t think I mean some fetish where you poop into the squash. Do not poop into the squash. That’s fucked up that you’d even think that. You should really reevaluate things in light of this recent transgression.

Oh, and use whatever kind of sausage makes you happy. I used unseasoned ground uncased sausage. If you have it encased in a tube, un-tube it. Free it from its intestinal shackles.

Anyway, when that’s all brown, or getting close to it, you’re gonna put a whole bunch of stuff up in that pan, bam:

• Two small carrots, shredded.
• One apple, shredded.
• One small gnarly celeriac (celery root), shredded.
• 1/2 tsp sage (I used dried, fresh is potentially better).
• Dash of salt.
• Grind of some kind of peppercorn.
• Pinch of cayenne pepper.
• Sprinkling of thyme.

By this point, you’re probably rescuing the screaming squashes from the oven. That’s cool. Do that. Their howls of misery will please you. Do not, however, turn off the oven. Just lower it to 350F.

Now, it’s time to stuff ‘em. Mmm. Nnnngh. Yeah. Make it happen. Stuff them hard, just the way Daddy likes –

Uhhh.

Yes. Yeah. Right. Moving on.

Now, spoon that stuff into the squash. Mound it up a little bit, but not too much.

Get yourself 1 TB of butter, and 1 TB of genuine maple syrup, and melt them together in the microwave for 15-30 seconds. Stir ‘em up, yum.

Paint the tops of the stuffed squash with this oozing butter-syrup-deliciousness. Just a light painting. With whatever you have handy — paintbrush, basting brush, your fingers, tongue, your dog’s tail, your scrotum, your dog’s scrotum, I don’t care.

Now, cheese.

I used Colby Longhorn. Note that I didn’t say Colby Jack. What are you, a savage? A pedestrian savage? Stop it. Don’t even think it. Don’t make me put your name back on the pogrom list. The Longhorn is mild, and a little sweet, but it still has that nutty dairy edge I want in the end product.

How much cheese? Fuck if I know. Just grate it until it covers the top of your freshly-painted squash halves. Like snow-capped mountains of dairy delight.

Back into the oven for 15-20 minutes.

That’s it. Eat it. And give thanks not to God, but to me, for providing your mouth with a cheek-bulging tonguegasm. Squee. Mmmph.

Next recipe will be my spaghetti sauce. With fennel. Yeah, suck it. I said “fennel.”

What I will do, however, is take elements from three or four different recipes, and cobble them together until they resemble some Frankenstein experiment, some stumbling — yet scrumptious — food golem. He staggers around the room, knocking things over, and we hurry behind, gently biting hunks of tastiness from his backfat.

I’ll give you a second to recover from that, and offer my apologies. Moving on.

Tonight’s lesson in Frankenstein recipes:

Vaca Frita.

That’s right. “Fried Cow.”

My wife ordered this dish at Alma de Cuba in Philly, and it was one of the most delicious things I’ve ever allowed into my body. Seemed like high time to try it.

This is what I did.

I took 1.5 lbs of flank steak, and I laid it in a pot with 7 cups of water, a liberal scattering of salt, two bay leaves, another liberal scattering of black peppercorns (whole), and two small sweet onions, cut up. The steak mooed at me, and I said, “Shut your mouth, animal,” and I set the pot to boil. Once at a boil, I simmered it for… probably close to an hour-and-a-half. Till the beef was getting tender. Not quite fall-apart; this is flank steak.

The steak hit the cutting board.

Then I let the steak calm down. It was surly. Hot under the collar. It needed to rest.

Once rested (and cooled), I picked it apart with a fork and tongs — shredding that bad little sumbitch. I didn’t get crazy with this.

Into a bag, it went.

Oh, the heady broth from the pot? You do what you want with that. I saved it. Not sure where it’ll go. (I’m taking suggestions.) Maybe I’ll bathe the dog in it so she always gives off the lovely smell of hot beef. Plus, when she licks her feet (which she’s gonna do anyway) — what a treat for her!

Uhhh. Where was I?

Right! Into a big bag goes the shredded beefiness. Also into that bag? Three garlic cloves, minced. And the juice of two limes and one orange. Oh! And more salt.

Boom. Marinate that bag of goodness for… well, as long as you can manage. I managed about seven hours. If I coulda gone longer, I woulda gone longer. The more time it sits in its own mouth-watering guilt — the more time it has to think about what it’s done — the better.

When you’re ready, get out your frying pan.

A splash of olive oil. Medium-high heat. Let it get good and hot. Hot as you can manage it.

Then, ease in a single layer of the shredded, marinated cow. Sparsely portioned. You need it to stay hot; the more you put in that pan, the less heat each beefy bit gets. Leave it in there for five minutes. Don’t turn it. Don’t mess with it. It’ll fry on that one side. (EDIT: It’ll be crispy on that side. That’s totally the point.)

Take it out. Put it on a plate. Do the rest in batches.

Don’t forget to eat it, because it’s going to be a shotgun blast of fatty, citrusy flavor geysering up through your brainpan. Boom. Splurt. Mmmmm.

…

And yes, that cow is supposed to be sideways. Shaddup.

Now, the shit that I make up isn’t revolutionary. The recipe you’re about to read does not comprise instructions to make “cabbage foam” or “pork napoleons smeared in civet shit confit” or anything. It’s simple, and in some ways obvious, but hell with it. It was delicious, so let me tell you about it.

Get yourself some pork tenderloin. Two of ‘em, since you can use the other one for later. On the small-to-medium size. Really, though, any pork roast will work in this regard.

Put them in a crockpot. Into the crockpot also goes:

About 1 cup of cider vinegar

About 2 TBsp of Worcestershire sauce

Two smashed cloves of garlic

Then season the pork: salt, pepper, a little rosemary, a little thyme

Crockpot goes on high for about six hours.

Then go and, y’know, do something. Write bad poetry. Take a jog. Punish the wicked. Fiddle with your balls. Whatever.

Come back five hours later.

Get out one head of cabbage and a bundle of four leeks.

Cabbages can be a whore to cut, so if you have a cleaver, use that. Bisect it, and slice out the thick core, and remove the outer green leaves. Slice half the cabbage like you would for slaw or sauerkraut. “Slaw that bitch up,” my uncle used to say. Except, he didn’t. I’m lying. Save the unslawed half for some other day.

Chop the leeks into rings — just the whites, not the green stems. Also, it’ll need to be washed, as leeks are filthy little sluts. You can’t just wash the outside, though, because the dirt gets all up in there. Like herpes, or tapeworms. Cut the rings, put the rings in a big bowl of water. They’ll float. Pull them apart and wash them with your fingers; the dirt and silt will sink, so rescue the now-clean leek rings from the water with a slotted spoon. You can pretend you’re Frodo, rescuing the One Leek Ring — and when you toss it into the pan, you’re destroying it in the name of the Shire. Whatever.

Getcherself a big-ass sautee pan.

In that pan, heat 2TBSP olive oil. Toss in the leeks to soften, five minutes, over med-low heat (“sweat” them like you would a “perp”). Then, atop it goes the cabbage. Then, atop the cabbage, literally just drizzle a little water (a tsp or two) atop it. Then, atop all that, cut up 3 TBsp of butter into little hunks and spread it around. Finally: salt, pepper.

Head over medium. Cover that bitch for 10 minutes.

It’ll get all steamy. All sexy-like. Mmm. Sexy cabbage. That was actually my nickname at Space Camp. “Sexy Cabbage,” they’d say, “take your crazy ass into the centrifugal force machine.”

Ten minutes goes by, then you take the lid off.

Toss it around. Mix it up. Keep the heat on medium. And let it go for another 10-15 minutes. Don’t let it brown. Keep mixing it up.

Okay, back to the porky goodness.

Out of the crockpot, it goes — slap it down on your cutting board or kitchen floor or wherever it is that you animals do your prep.

Shred it. You don’t need to go crazy, just pull it apart.

Do not — I repeat, do not — throw away the delicious porky-vinegary broth that lurks in the crockpot. If you do, you will have fucked this whole thing up, and your family will hate you. Your wife will leave you. Your kids will leave turds in your sock drawers. This is true.

So, here’s how the final phase of dinner construction goes: pile up some of your cabbage-leek sautee onto a plate. Make a nest out of it, like for a bird. Then, grab some of that pulled pork, and the pulled pork will become your bird. Nest the pork into the delicious cabbage.

Then, scoop some of that awesome crockpot broth atop the whole thing.

After that, start eating. Eat until your belly bloats.

As a companion, I also roasted some okra (toss okra in olive oil and salt in a pan, oven at 400, roast them whole for 25 minutes) to go with it. Roasting okra diminishes the slime effect.

That’s it. That’s the recipe. Go and do likewise, peeps.

I decided I wanted savory. I looked online for recipes, and I wasn’t sold on any one recipe, but saw lots of good individual components.

So, I set to the time-honored tradition of “Making Shit Up.”

The result? This.

Savory Blueberry Sauce

Ingredients:

• 1 carton fresh blueberries (2-3 cups)
• 1/2 cup red wine vinegar
• 1/3 cup honey (I used orange blossom, locally produced)
• 1/2 cup of berry jam (I used blueberry jam, also locally produced, but I think you could use any kind of berry)
• 2 cloves garlic (minced)
• 3 Tbsp aged balsamic vinegar
• 3 Tbsp butter
• 2 Tbsp dijon mustard
• 1 Tbsp olive oil
• pinch of salt
• pinch of rosemary
• pinch of sage
• pinch of thyme
• pinch of cayenne pepper
• pinch of salt

Preparation:

Soften the garlic in the oil (small to medium saucepan). Not long. 30 secs, minute, whatever. Don’t burn it.

Put all the kids in the pool; everything but the butter. Oh, on medium-high heat.

Let it boil.

Cut up the butter into cubes, stir it around. Melt that shit down.

Then, set to simmer. Let it reduce for 20-30 minutes. Stir often enough, don’t let it get goopy on the bottom.

The blueberries will macerate in the liquid. It’ll break down really nice, and it’ll get a really sweet, but slightly salty thing going on.

I poured it over chicken, but really, it’ll go over whatever you want. Frankly, I think it’d be better over pork chops. On the side, we had pesto quinoa, and the pesto was good, but particularly salty (a danger with Parmesan cheese, I may have used too much?). I made the pesto tonight with almonds (I’ve made it with pine nuts, walnuts, macadamia nut-cashew, and now, almonds). The best is macadamia-nut and cashew, together in the mix. Yum. Yeah.

Next time, I might throw some shallots into the mix, but I used my last one yesterday.

For the most part, this sucker counts as one of my “fresh table” experiments. Honey, local. Blueberries and the jelly, local. Olive oil, locally produced (though the olives obviously aren’t; they’re Spanish). Butter, local. Garlic, no, other spices, no, vinegars, no. Everything else counts, which is a pretty good sitch-ee-ay-shun.

(Oh, real quick: head on over to Jet Pack. New stuff there from Wood and Will you’ll wanna check out.)