Chicken Strips For The Soul

My wife used to call it "west Dallas soul food," but it's just comfort. We all know about comfort, and if we didn't we do now.

I like comfort. I also like to cook, occasionally, although I'm not a foodie and I haven't been able to work up the energy to get interested. I learned long ago how to do the basics, how to broil and baste and sauté and poach, how to cut an onion and how to make a roux. My education draws mostly from my mother, an excellent cook, and then a book I got for Christmas as a joke, a book for incompetent men who never paid all that much attention to Mom.

It was a perfect book, actually. I made some fancy stuff with that book.

But I have a short-order soul. Give me my druthers, I'll bread and fry and mash until I can slide comfort directly onto the plate, sunny-side up. After a week or so of cooking some fancy entrees that came in our restaurant-grocery order (a local place is bagging up some of their supplies and selling them to customers, and some of the selections are choice), we were ready for Chuck's Diner. I was ready to reopen, too.

We rarely eat beef, although I've got a few pounds of ground in the freezer. Mostly, though, we've got chicken and chops in the deep freeze, and last night I grabbed some frozen tenderloins and went to Tender Town. I mostly cook meat either in the slow cooker or sous vide, so I stuck those tenders in a big pot of 160-degree water for a few hours, then rolled them in Italian bread crumbs and fried for a few seconds on each side, just for the crunch.

Mashed some potatoes. Made rolls using my basic country-white recipe, sweet and yeasty. Pan gravy. Plates were full, so full that I just now realized that maybe I forgot vegetables, you think? Fresh green beans were sitting right there, slighted by our quest for cholesterol.

Anyway. I didn't eat a bite of this, since my food clock has been stuck this way for years now. I start shoveling stuff in my potato hole almost as soon as I wake up, and by 5pm I'm done. Eating later doesn't sit with me for some reason, and reinforces my fantasy of being a hash slinger, making good folks happy with simple food and cleaning as I go. I hover over the table as the two of them go to town, trying not to be obnoxious, reminding them that there's more where that came from.

I'm serene in these situations, or at least I get there. This is my comfort zone, right here. Meager skills that make a difference, and we need all the differences we can swallow right about now.

We're OK. We're better than that, actually. It's a blessing to live on the West Coast, with an organic awareness that we govern ourselves for a reason and this is the reason. We've got plenty of crazy up here but it seems tamped down, and always the usual suspects – white men of a certain age, with red hats and grey beards, faces twisted into expressions normally spotted only on toddlers with full diapers and no idea that they're producing the shit they smell.

People are getting impatient, duh. I sat in the Safeway parking lot the other day while my son did the dangerous work, and I counted: About 75% of the people (and there were only a few) I spotted were wearing masks. The ones who weren't didn't fit a discernible pattern, all kinds of people, old, young, male, female. I dunno. Masks are easy.

We still have jobs. My wife has cleaned up her work space, something I've always imagined happening only after we move or die, whipping through boxes of music and notes, taking advantage of living-room space that won't be seeing visitors anytime soon to act as short-term storage. She's working out the Zoom bugs and holding office hours from home, actually, short talks with individual students to buck them up and, you know. Do what a teacher is supposed to do.

She's also pastoral, and is using the Marco Polo app on her phone to exchange video messages with church people, mostly. Bucks them up, too.

I think I need to get that app.

I'm desperate for people. I'm comfortable with solitude and I have plenty of shyness, but I've never been introverted and it's too late to start. I'm this close to going on a marathon baking spree just so I can deliver cookies to people if they promise to show me their faces. I'll float those chocolate chips over on a balloon and park a block away, but I need to see a familiar face. Preferably with no latency issues.

And when I can do that again? When I can see the people I love or, in some cases, just sort of like, although frankly right now I would take almost anyone and most of my relatives?

I'm gonna want to feed them, and that's how I'll know.