Home Made. 05/29/26

Simplicity. You want to judge a brand of ice cream? Try the vanilla. Italian cooking? Try spaghetti with tomato sauce. If an ice cream maker can churn out a great vanilla and a chef can make a great pasta pomodoro, sign me up. If they can do that well, they can do anything well. My wife and I went to Scarpetta, and tasted the most amazing spaghetti with tomato sauce I’ve ever had. We went back a couple times and it was always great. Then one night, some good friends were coming over to dinner and I decided to try to recreate it myself. In fact I found a YouTube video of the chef, Scott Conant, describing step by step how to make his “simple’ sauce. You start by cutting an “x” in top of 20 plum tomatoes, putting them in boiling water for 5 seconds, then plunging them in an ice bath. Then removing the skin of all 20 tomatoes, halving them and removing the seeds from each. And that’s just the start. By the time our friends arrived I cried, “Helllllp!” and they pitched in. Including making the basil infused olive oil which must be drizzled into the tomato reduction bubbling on the stove at just the precise time, and that ain’t even the half of it. So imagine my surprise when just a week later, I walked into our local grocery store and there was a presentation Chef Scott Conant himself, promoting his new cookbook and line of pasta sauces. And there it was, for just $6.99, the exact same sauce I sent four hours making, in a glass jar labelled Martone Street. Now you tell me?! By the way, the only part I could not do by myself was flipping the pasta up in a pan so it turns over. The chef did this repeatedly without spilling a drop. Show off. I knew if I attempted one flip, there would go 4 hours down the drain, or more precisely, into the grout of the backsplash. But as John and I often say, when life throws you a lemon, make a comic out of it.

While tomato sauce inspired our first comic, the other strip was all about John. John is a collector. I am a chucker outer. John has shelves and shelves of mementoes, collectibles, and miniature versions of everything including a 1/2 inch log harmonica that plays “Oh Susannah.” I barely have shelves. So we combined our two views into the comic. Where John sees whimsy, creativity, and fond memories, I gasp at the overwhelming amount of stuff and think, “When are you going to clean that up? Do you really need a squeaky dog toy that is a replica of Ronald Reagan, an Oscar Meyer Weinermobile whistle and a Mr. Softee Hot Wheels truck? My thought is, “Hell no,” where John would reply, boastfully with, “You wish you had a Jacob DeGrom Rookie-of-the-Year 22-ounce souvenir Pepsi cup.” Having said all that, I must admit it is a very impressive collection. I’m just glad it’s in his house.

Have a great weekend and I just wanted to point out that my slightly muddy softball, commemorating the Idle Minds winning the 1981 New York City Parks Dept Manhattan Championship, THAT is worth keeping.

Andy and John

On tailgating and stuffed drawers 09/25/2020

So I called my buddy Rich up and asked, where are we watching the Giants game Monday night? 3 of us were going to congregate at his house. Then he asked his wife Sue and she was understandably uncomfortable with that idea. Then I offered my apartment and nobody thought that was a good idea either. So we all sat in our individual homes and texted. Not as good. But we have to adjust. No fans, nobody coming over, yikes. I spoke to John about this and offered that they used to have big screens outside Giants stadium, and why couldn’t the guys in our comic get together and tailgate in the parking lot. His response was, “Would they even let you in? I don’t think so.” So we put our heads together and came up with going to the local sports bar. You’re certainly not going to sit inside, but then when you sit outside, could you possibly see the tv inside? Answer: no. Then we thought, if you’ve ever asked to make a call or send a text in a restaurant, you’d have their wireless password, and bingo, our first comic this week was born. The point is, we’re social animals so we’ll figure out a way to get together somehow. But just keep your damn mask on, okay? And around the chin doesn’t count. Neither does under the nose. In the words of Bill Maher, that’s like wearing a condom around your balls. So around your nose and under your chin and then we’re cool, capiche?

Our second comic deals with accumulating stuff. Boxes of stuff, drawers of stuff, magazine racks of stuff, bookshelves of, well, you get the drift. There’s one particular drawer in my kitchen with some knives, a juice-squeezer, tongs, etc. Half the time we open it, it gets stuck. Then you have to root around with your hand to turn something flat so the drawer opens. For instance, we have three pairs of scissors. One of them are the “good scissors”, the ones that work, but we keep the others around “just in case.” When we moved from a house to an apartment we got rid of lots of stuff, like the kids old soccer and baseball equipment, and (sigh) several boxes of lp records, which never made it out of the garage because we just had a cd player.

After all that cleaning out however, we now have new electronic stuff. SInce John is an artist and illustrator, he has even more stuff than I do, but we ran through the list of SWK (Shit We Keep) and came up with the list that appears in this comic. John came up with the electric gooseneck candlelighter, since he actually has one that plugs into a USB port. I still have a butane powered one, though I have no idea where I keep the butane, so when the lighter runs out, I buy more butane to go along with the butane I can’t find, and we wonder how we accumulate so much stuff? How do we avoid getting overrun with it? I have a theory that in every relationship there’s a hoarder and a chucker-outer. I personally have a limit of 3 back issues of any magazine. When we have more than three of any magazine, New York, New Yorker, Bon Appetit, Vanity Fair, I surreptitiously chuck it out. Shhh, don’t tell anyone. But damn, since my wife proof reads the blog every week, she’s going to find out. Oh well.

Have a nice weekend and for our Jewish friends, we hope your fast isn’t too painful (but face it, you’ve probably got a lot to atone for). See you next week.

Andy and John