July 2021 – Deep Dark Thoughts

Vegetarian by Accident

I don’t consider myself a chef by any stretch of the imagination, but I do like to prepare nice meals for my family. That does not mean, of course, that I’m unwilling to accept a little help when it comes to searching for recipes and purchasing the necessary items to prepare them.

I periodically receive packages from a company called Blue Apron. Blue Apron selects all the food, measures the amounts that I will need, and includes a recipe with step-by-step instructions for how to prepare the meal in question. I have made several dinners with their recipes that have been absolutely wonderful. I have also had a few disasters as well. To be fair, I will not blame Blue Apron for these events. It may simply be the recipe itself wasn’t something I was going to like, the ingredients were not to my taste, or (as is most likely) I completely f**ked up the meal as I was cooking it.

Or maybe a combination of the three.

The most disappointing meals I have had from this company came a few months ago. This, however, was most definitely not their fault. There were a few problems that occurred that caused the food to be something less than satisfying.

Let me back up and start from the beginning.

One Friday, we received a large box with blue lettering on the side that said, “Blue Apron.” We were expecting this box to arrive. We had paid money for it, so actually would have been disappointed if it hadn’t shown up.

I was on my way out of the house when I saw the box, so I dragged it inside, placed it on the counter in our kitchen and yelled for EM1 to turn off the K-pop video she was watching and help me. About the third time I shouted her name, EM1 turned around on the couch and told me she couldn’t hear me because the music was too loud.

I told her to turn down the music.

She said, “What? I can’t hear you. The music is still too loud.”

I will spare you the ensuing Abbott and Costello routine that followed.

With the television turned off, I asked EM1 to take the food out of the Blue Apron box and pack it in the refrigerator. I needed to go and did not have time to do it, and I didn’t want the food to just wait in the box until I came back home.

She agreed to help.

I went about my errands and returned about two hours later. The box was no longer on the counter. When I asked EM1, she said she put all the food in the fridge, then threw the box into the recycling bin outside. I thanked her for her help and went about the rest of my day.

The following night, I decided to cook one of the pre-planned meals that came in the Blue Apron box. It was a lovely dish with vegetables in rice that went alongside pan-seared, New York cut steaks. While reading the list on the recipe, I dug through the refrigerator and pulled out the ingredients.

Zucchini, bell peppers, jasmine rice, garlic, shallot, steaks…

Steaks?

Where the hell were the steaks?

I asked EM1 where she put the steaks when she emptied the box. Her immediate response made me very sad.

“What steaks? I didn’t see any steaks?”

I looked at the other recipe from the box. It was a chicken dish that required two filleted chicken breasts. I told EM1 the steaks should have been right next to the chicken.

She replied, “What chicken?”

My heart sank.

“Where did you throw away the box?” I asked.

I went out to the recycling bins and located the box in question. I grabbed it and lifted it out of the plastic receptacle where it lay. It was dishearteningly heavier than it should have been. I opened the box and looked inside. At the bottom was a thin icepack that usually is placed on top of any meat items in a Blue Apron shipment. The typical arrangement is meat on the bottom, icepack, all other ingredients on the top.

The icepack was warm and melted by now. It had been sitting outside in a recycling bin for over 24 hours so that was no surprise. I lifted the pack and found underneath a pouch of chicken breasts and two vacuum-packed New York strip steaks.

None of it was safe to eat any longer. I threw the packaged meat into the garbage and returned the (now) empty box to the recycling.

That night we enjoyed our meal of rice with vegetables (no steak). The following evening, we had a nice salad with a side of carrots (no chicken).

I don’t mind occasional vegetarian meals. I don’t have to eat meat every day to reaffirm my carnivore nature. But when I know that the meal I am eating is inherently incomplete, and that a cow died needlessly so I could eat only rice and vegetables, I feel like the world has let me down.

Well, maybe not the whole world. I can’t blame everyone and everything on the entire planet for this disaster.

I can promise you, however, that EM1 will never be allowed to unpack another box without close and careful supervision.

Enjoying Deep Dark Thoughts? Be sure to tell all your friends to give it a read. They can follow me on Facebook so they don’t miss a post. Just go to my page and click the “Like” button to receive updates on my blog and other projects.

Birthday Trip – Day 3

The third day we spent on vacation was my actual birthday. To celebrate the day, we planned to spend a few hours wandering the scenic streets of downtown Carmel By The Sea. That’s the actual name of the town, and there are unlimited t-shirts and hats in every store with “Carmel By The Sea” printed on them to prove it.

My daughter, EM1, who had delayed the departure from our hotel every day since we arrived in Monterey, promised that on my birthday we would be on our way to Carmel no later than eleven o’clock in the morning.

At twelve-thirty, we were in the truck and headed for Carmel.

It was our earliest start all week, so I’m going to call that one a win.

The drive took 25 minutes. Ten minutes to get to Carmel, then fifteen minutes circling and trying to find a place to park. Once we had the truck situated in a parking lot that we were (almost) certain was free and would not result in our vehicle being towed away, we went for a little jaunt.

The first order of business, as it is every day with my family, was to find food. Whenever we travel, we always seem to start our day by roaming randomly like a pack of seagulls circling a dump, looking around for anything edible. We found a tiny cottage-looking place called The Tuck Box, that advertised breakfast, brunch, and tea. It was an adorable restaurant with barely enough room to fit five tables and a couple chairs.

We went in.

A friendly young woman greeted us, then said, “I’m sorry, but we don’t accept credit cards. It’s cash only. Do you have cash?”

Affronted that she had basically accused me of being too poor to eat in her mouse-sized restaurant, I blurted, “Of course I have cash. Who doesn’t have cash?”

She seated us and I spent the next five minutes making the kids dump out their purses looking for enough loose change to have breakfast. Now that I had made an ass of myself, I did not want to have to slink out with my tail between my legs, making some lame excuse like, “I forgot I have a doctor’s appointment in five minutes, otherwise I would totally stay and give you cash like a normal person. Because I have cash in my pockets. Lots of it. You should see how much cash is there.”

Fortunately, we were able to scrape together enough to stay. The kids had plenty of money. Probably from all those years of keeping my change whenever I gave them $20 to buy a three-dollar item.

Breakfast was actually quite nice. And expensive. But we had enough to pay for it. I even left a couple of spare nickels for a tip.

After breakfast, we did a little sight-seeing. There was a lot to see, but most of it was the same thing over and over. I don’t want to claim that Carmel is pretentious as far as towns go, but let’s just say all we found were art galleries and wine tasting rooms, occasionally broken up by pubs, coffee houses, and clothing boutiques.

See? Not pretentious at all.

After about thirty minutes, I was done with art galleries. It was time to hit the stores.

The rest of the day was a shopping day. It was my birthday, after all. Buying stuff on your birthday is a thing, right?

Only problem was, I wasn’t buying stuff for me. I spent a lot of money on my birthday, but somehow it was my wife and kids accumulating presents while I did it. For example: my wife got a lovely, four-hundred-dollar purse. My daughter, EM1, got a slightly smaller purse for only $200. The day before, I bought EM2 a $300 pair of sunglasses after EM1 discovered the glasses she wanted were already gone. Both girls got new shoes, shirts, sweaters with “Carmel By The Sea” emblazoned on them, sweaters without “Carmel By The Sea” emblazoned on them, shorts, tops, and assorted souvenirs.

And guess who got to carry the bags?

At one point, we were in a three-level, shopping complex. My wife and the girls were inside yet another clothing store. I had pretty much given up on life at that point and sat down on a bench in the courtyard, surrounded by pink, lavender, and gold-colored bags. An elderly couple strolled past while I was sitting there. They both gave me a good, long look, then began to laugh.

The man waved a hand at me and said, “Get used to it.” They both laughed again, then disappeared into an elevator which I assume took them straight down to Hell. Or at least down to the first floor of the shopping mall which was where the coffee shop was located.

We were only in Carmel for a few hours, but it was a long, tiring day. I wasn’t completely ignored, however. I got a baseball cap.

It was on sale.

Oh, and lest I forget, EM2 also bought me a churro from a street vendor while we were walking through a farmer’s market. She paid for it with her own money. After the sunglasses, shoes, clothing, and multiple meals she had received over the past three days, a one-dollar fried stick of bread seemed to her to be a fair trade. More than fair, apparently, since while I was eating it she looked at me and said, “Well?”

“Well, what?” I asked.

“Aren’t you going to say thank you?”

And like a stripper on a pole who is just happy to be receiving attention of any kind, I said, “Thank you.”

We returned to the hotel, and that was pretty much the end of the day. We all ended up going to bed early that night. Why? Well, I’m glad you asked.

We all went to bed early because EM1, the lovely child that had consistently delayed our morning departures by two or more hours every morning during our vacation, needed to be at work the next day in Sacramento by eleven o’clock in the morning. This necessitated a departure no later than 6 AM in order to get her home in time to make it to work.

Amazingly, we did succeed in leaving that morning on time. We got the truck packed and were headed to Sacramento as the sun rose over the hills to the east. Five minutes into the drive home, everybody was snoring in their seats, fast asleep, while I drove and sang quietly to myself:

“Happy Birthday to me…”

Birthday Trip – Day 2

For the second day of my birthday trip to Monterey, my wife announced that she wanted to take a long walk along the coastline and visit a cemetery in Pacific Grove. She had family members that were buried there back in the 1950’s and she wanted to visit the gravesites. I agreed that sounded like a nice use of the day.

There was a paved bike path that we could walk that meandered about five miles along the shoreline to the cemetery. Five miles isn’t that bad when you consider that you have all day to cover that distance. What did not immediately align with my calculations when I agreed to the walk was that after walking five miles west to a cemetery, we would still need to walk another five miles east to get back home.

The five-mile jaunt was actually a ten-mile hike.

The only pair of shoes I brought on this trip were a broken-down pair of tennis shoes that were definitely not up to the task. Knowing this, the previous day while we were perusing shops and stores, I wandered into a shoe store to get some new shoes for the hike.

The first pair I tried on chaffed on the back of my heel. I figured if they were bothering me ten seconds after I put them on, it was likely that blisters, limping, and pathetic whining on my part would follow if I wore them for ten miles.

The designated shoe assistant working the floor advised that the shoes would be just fine if I wore two pairs of socks and tied the laces to the left so that the back arch of the shoe would pull slightly to the side and would not rub against my heel. He was confident that the shoes were the exact ones I needed and with just a few careful tweaks each time I put them on, I would love them as much as he did.

I looked at him like he had begun speaking a foreign language. My response to him was something along the lines of:

“Or… or… here me out now, ‘cuz I’m just spitballing here, but I’m thinking as an alternative, we could just put the crappy pair of shoes back on the rack and find something that doesn’t irritate my feet. You know, something that actually fits in the first place.”

Shoe Guy shrugged his shoulders. He seemed a little miffed that I did not immediately recognize his expertise in the fiddling with shitty shoes arena. I started to remove the shoes and he got up and walked over to help another customer in the store. Perhaps he only got a commission if he could sell that particular pair of shoes. I don’t know. Maybe I’m the dick here. Regardless, I went looking for something that didn’t require extensive modification to prevent pain and suffering.

The next day, we planned to be out and on the trail at ten o’clock in the morning. What actually happened was I sat on my bed wearing my brand new pair of walking shoes while EM1 showered and played with her hair until 1 PM.

Yup. Three hours.

We finally got out the door and grabbed breakfast (lunch?) at a crepe place whose claim to fame was a giant breakfast burrito that was flat, square shaped, and called something French to give customers that authentic Paris café experience. That is if Paris cafes had surfers in flipflops working the cash register and seagulls crapping all over the customers as they left the building. Anyway, the food was actually pretty good.

The next stop was a sunglasses store, because EM1 had found a cute little pair of Prada sunglasses there the day before that were only $400. During the night, she had convinced my wife to buy the damn things for her, so she was eager to purchase them and wear them during our walk.

This was the only stroke of luck I had on our entire trip. When we went into the store, the salesperson told us that she had just sold one pair of sunglasses an hour earlier. Guess what pair.

Yes! It was a cute little pair of Prada sunglasses that only cost four hundred dollars.

With a suitably sad look on my face that did not match my internal emotions, I offered condolences to my oldest daughter, while EM2 went behind my back and used my credit card to purchase glasses for herself for a paltry three hundred dollars.

The word “entitled” comes to mind.

We did eventually make it to the cemetery. The walk was as grueling and painful as you would imagine. It might have gone a little faster if EM2 didn’t stop every ten minutes to ask my wife and I to take her picture standing on one rock or another staring out at the ocean. She would then follow each photo session by looking at the pictures on her phone and repeating, “Nope. Nope. Nope. Delete. Delete. Delete.”

Why bother to take the pictures then?

At one point, she stood on the ledge of a cliff, holding my hand while I took her picture. She started to lean back over the water for a more dramatic pose and I immediately pulled her back toward me. When my heart stopped beating in my throat, I asked her never to do that again. My exact wording of the request had a few four letter words thrown in for emphasis.

Her faith in her father is both touching and terrifying. I could just imagine how jealous all the other fathers in the Coast Guard search party would be as we dredged the waves for her body.

How can a kid that is so smart…? Well, never mind. She’s definitely my kid.

Anyway, the point of the story is we trudged ten miles back and forth from our hotel leaving me in a physical state so battered and fatigued that I was envious of all the dead people we visited sleeping peacefully in their graves. I almost didn’t have the energy to eat my dinner that night.

Almost. I somehow managed to choke it down.

I also managed to drink a bottle of wine while I was at it because a guy has to rehydrate after such a grueling workout.

Back in the room, we planned a short trip south to Carmel for the following day.

EM1 promised that she would get up early and we could leave at a reasonable time.

Did she?

I’ll talk about that next week.

Spoiler alert: she did not.

To be continued…

Birthday Trip – Day 1

As my 55^th birthday was rapidly approaching, my wife decided that it was time for our family to take a little vacation along the California coast. Specifically, we booked a hotel room for a few days in Monterey.

We drove out to the coast late Saturday night, escaping record breaking, triple digit heat in Sacramento and finding a much more pleasant climate in which to hide for three days. The first night, we arrived and had just enough time to unpack a few things, eat some snacks while watching television in the room, then go to bed. Our plan was to get up early the next day and start our vacation with breakfast on the pier and a leisurely walk along the beach staring out at the ocean.

With no alarm set, we woke on Sunday morning at about 11 in the morning, then spent the next couple hours sitting around waiting for EM1 to get her hair just right so we could go outside. Breakfast on the pier had now become lunch.

Not a problem. I figured I could make the adjustment.

When EM1 finally looked in the mirror and pronounced herself fit for public view, we wandered down to the Monterey pier. We decided to eat first before doing any sightseeing or shopping, and we picked a restaurant that we had visited before and knew that we liked their food.

Sometime between January 2020, and June 2021 it appeared that the restaurant had fired their old chef who had taken the recipes for anything edible along with him when he left. They then hired someone with culinary talents that had never advanced past the skillset of cutting the crusts off a peanut butter sandwich. In short, the meal was a horrible disappointment.

I ordered clam chowder in a bread bowl. The soup was barely room temperature and tasted like the clams hadn’t been fresh since they were canned as surplus rations for Korean War soldiers. EM1 ordered fettuccini alfredo, which was at least better than the clam chowder, but only because it is difficult to judge the flavor of a food that has absolutely no flavor of any kind.

My wife ordered her favorite item on the menu: crab cakes. She ate about half the food on her plate and pronounced it, “okay.” This is about the equivalent of asking how the maiden voyage of the Titanic went, and having a surviving passenger say, “it was fine.”

We left the restaurant sorely disappointed and a hundred dollars poorer.

The family and I wandered along the Monterey coast for about thirty minutes after lunch and found a small group of outlet stores. Attached to the stores was a small café that served sandwiches and deep-fried snacks. I suggested we go in and order something.

My wife looked at me and asked, “You’re still hungry? We just ate.”

We all had a good laugh at her clever joke, then went inside and ate our first decent meal of the trip.

The rest of the day was a blur of shops and stores and buying items for the kids. I’m not sure exactly how much money we spent, but I do recall that the credit card company called me three times that day to make certain my card hadn’t been stolen.

In the evening, we again elected to visit a restaurant we knew and had previously liked. While the chef at this establishment was more accomplished than the busboy apparently doing all the cooking at our lunch destination, the ingredients he had to work with were rapidly dwindling. They must have had a busy day prior to our arrival.

I ordered the french dip sandwich, only to be told that they had run out of roast beef and I would need to select something else. I rallied from my disappointment and settled for the club sandwich instead.

“Can I get that on white toast, please?” I asked.

The waiter gave me a sad pout. “I’m really sorry. We’re also out of white bread.”

What? How the hell does a restaurant run out of white bread? If there is one staple that no restaurant should ever run out of, it’s white bread.

I opted for sourdough instead. Then I ordered a long island iced tea. I figured a large amount of alcohol would help me to eat the sandwich I didn’t want, served on the bread I didn’t want.

Turns out I was right. Booze makes lots of things way more tolerable.

When the meal was over, EM2 decided she wanted something for dessert. She ordered the crème brulee. Our waiter hissed through his teeth, doing his best David Rose impression, then said, “Gee, I’m really sorry. We don’t have any.”

We skipped dessert and I asked for the check.

When the waiter handed us the bill, I slapped my hands to my cheeks and told him, “Oh, no. Gee, I’m really sorry, but we don’t have any more money. We ran out.”

Not really.

But I wish I had.

We slogged back to our hotel room and rummaged through the junk food we had packed along with us for the trip. I had brought a bag of miniature powdered donuts. It wasn’t crème brulee, but we also didn’t run out.

In terms of food, day one had been something of a failure. We went to bed hoping that day two would be an improvement.

How did it go?

Well, we’ll get to that next week.

To be continued…

It Was Only One Beer

Sometimes people will lie to you. That is just a fact of life, especially when you are a police officer and you’re talking to someone who does not want to go to jail. And sometimes they will be telling the absolute truth, but it sounds so ridiculous you have a hard time believing them. You have to keep an open mind. We all deserve the benefit of the doubt until all the facts are known.

I was reminded of this once many years ago while working a patrol shift in the early evening. I was dispatched to a call of a person lying down in the middle of the road, forcing traffic to drive around him. The dispatcher advised that two other people were at the scene trying to help the person, but he was refusing to get out of the street.

I arrived a few minutes later and was pretty confident I had found the correct location when I saw a sixteen-year-old kid lying supine in the middle of the street, arms and legs spread wide and looking like a starfish stuck on a high rock during low tide.

Two other kids were grabbing his arms and trying to drag him to the curb, but he kept thrashing and pulling out of their grip until they gave up. The two kids still on their feet saw me and ran over to my patrol car.

They told me that their friend was sick and he needed an ambulance. As they told me this, I watched the kid in the street roll onto his side and vomit. From the wet mess around him (and all over him) it was clearly not the first time he had done this. My own dinner made a quick bid for freedom, but I forced myself to swallow it back down and approach the scene.

As I got closer, I could smell the odor of alcohol. There was also an empty beer can in the gutter of the roadway. The picture was suddenly much clearer as to what had happened. I turned back to the guys by my car.

“How much has he had to drink?” I asked them.

“It was only one beer,” said one kid.

“He didn’t even finish it,” said the other.

As a police officer, the people I talk to will generally underestimate exactly how much alcohol they have put into their bodies. It seems no one wants to admit to the cops that they had too much to drink. I have arrested dozens, maybe hundreds, of people for drunk in public and driving under the influence who all swore to me that they only had “one beer.”

“No, really,” I said. “How much did he drink. He looks like he almost killed himself.”

“One beer,” they both reiterated.

Okay. One beer, or a hundred and one, it didn’t really matter at the moment. What mattered was getting the sick kid help. I grabbed my radio and called for an ambulance.

The ambulance showed up a few minutes later and tossed the kid in the back to transport him to the hospital. Since he was only sixteen, and his parents had not yet been located, he was technically my responsibility until I could hand him off to a legal guardian.

Lucky me.

I followed the ambulance and walked into the emergency room with my new temporarily adopted son. They wheeled him into a room, stripped him to check for injuries that were not immediately obvious, then rammed a tube down his throat to pump any remaining contents from his stomach.

“Grab his feet,” said a nurse standing next to me.

“Why?” I asked, unsure why I was being dragged into the medical portion of the show.

“Just do it,” she said.

I complied. It was then that I realized the nurse was holding a catheter tube in her hand big enough to cause a full grown horse to shy away in fear. She was going to insert the tube to empty the kid’s bladder. And I had a front row seat.

I closed my eyes and thought, “Better him than me.”

As I stood there with my eyes closed, holding the kid’s feet, I heard him retch and cough. As the only person in the room not wearing a surgical cap, mask, and scrubs, I was treated to a light shower of God knows what on my head and face. I can still recall the experience today.

Not in a good way.

I asked the nurse if I could let go of his feet. When she said, yes, I walked out to the waiting room and called my dispatcher to find out what was taking them so damn long to find the kid’s parents. I was assured they had been notified and were on their way.

A few minutes before mom and dad arrived to relieve me of babysitting duties, the doctor walked out to the waiting room to talk to me.

“We drew some blood and checked to see how much alcohol he had in him.”

“He was pretty far gone. So how much did he drink?”

“He was 0.005.”

My eyebrows rose. For those unfamiliar with the Blood Alcohol Content (BAC) test, that number is almost non-existent.

“Then what happened to him?”

The doctor told me a small percentage of the population is highly allergic to alcohol and drinking any amount of it is toxic. For those few people, they would be better off drinking drain cleaner rather than booze. It would do less damage.

I thought back to what the kid’s buddies had told me earlier.

“So, he really only had…”

The doctor nodded.

“Yup. About one beer.”

What do you know? They hadn’t been lying to me. It almost restored my faith in humanity.

Almost.

I was still covered in puke, after all.