Bored Games
When you have time to sit and think your mind starts to wander. Lately my mind has been wandering to the food memories of my youth. Long before my life became obsessed and absorbed by the professional chef world, I found wonderment in things that came in a cans, boxes, tubes and frozen cubes.
Fish came frozen in a rectangular block and was left to thaw on a round aluminum steak platter. Only after it was thawed could you tell it came from the sea. What I thought was real cheese came in a block, wrapped in plastic and stored in a box in the cabinet - puzzling! Tiny button mushrooms came in a can infused with butter and the terror of botulism. Then there was the magical paper tube with the silver foil lining that you whacked firmly on the edge of the counter and out exploded glorious dough, exuberant to be freed from its confines - a dough that baked into fluffy biscuits and icing slathered cinnamon rolls that filled the house with mouth-watering aromas. Those were the days, or were they?
Those packaged foods were the mainstay of convenience and we lapped them up. Sometimes we gorged on them. Other times we fought over them, particularly those cinnamon buns that I can still taste in my mind. I remember vividly the day my mother took the pop-in-fresh biscuits, rolled them out thinly and wrapped them around a tiny hotdog - sacrilege! How could she take something so simple and delicious as a biscuit and fill it with an extruded tube of meat that had been floating only moments before in a jar of liquid? For me, it was complete ruin.
Turns out it wasnāt quite as bad as I thought. The dough still puffed as before and the meat, wrapped cozily in its tiny blanket, turned plump and juicy. Its ends crisped by the high heat of the oven. It was a transformation into something new and different (I hadnāt yet experienced any meat baked en croute). Salty and juicy in the golden, flaky, slightly sweet dough, dipped in spicy mustard, it was quite all right, actually more than all right. It was a little bit of heaven.
Iām definitely not the first to reinvent Pigs in a Blanket but I wanted something tasty, fun and easy to eat with these big bottles of Abraxas, so why not a pile of juicy smoked ādogsā stuffed in a flaky crust along with some mustard and sauerkraut? It works. Iāve said that Abraxas is my go to hot dog wine. Here is the proof.
Until the Next Wine.... Ā Maria
EAT: Pigs in a Blanket
















