Seasons by the Sea: Shhhh! Don’t Tell!
I generally eat a very healthy diet. This past week, for instance, I prepared wheatberries and roasted carrots from Quail Hill Farm, and last night I had scallops. A variety of greens are always at the ready in my fridge for a quick saute or salad. I love brown rice and oatmeal and just about any recipe from Yotam Ottolenghi’s “Ottolenghi,” “Jerusalem,” or “Plenty” cookbooks, which are full of yogurt and chili peppers and all manner of eggplant and other vegetables. However, I am occasionally possessed by the desire for something naughty, wrong, not so healthful. In other words, I want a guilty pleasure treat of the junk food variety, or a strange combination of foods that would appall most others.
When I cruise the aisles of the grocery store, seeking Velveeta (which is always hard to find because it doesn’t require refrigeration), I hide the naughty items in my market basket if I see a friend, especially a chef friend, approaching. This is guilt.
Merriam-Webster’s definition of guilt is “the fact or state of having committed an offense, crime, violation, or wrong, especially against moral or penal law,” and “an emotion that occurs when a person feels that they have violated a moral standard.” Pleasure is defined as “a feeling of happiness, enjoyment, or satisfaction, a pleasant or pleasing feeling, activity that is done for enjoyment.” A guilty pleasure is defined as “something, such as a movie, television program, or piece of music, that one enjoys despite feeling that it is not generally held in high regard. The guilt involved is sometimes simply fear of others discovering one’s lowbrow or otherwise embarrassing tastes.” And this is why I hide the Velveeta or Cheetos or Cool Whip under the broccoli rabe and yogurt in my shopping cart.
I recently asked friends on Facebook for their guilty pleasures. Facebook is the most delightful and useful “tool” for lazy but far-reaching research, and everyone likes to talk about food. Now, you would think that professional chefs would be above such lowbrow guilty pleasures, but you would be wrong. Joey loves Frito pie. Deena eats Spaghetti-Os. Ellen has perfected the frozen Mallomar nuked in a microwave for 10 seconds and swears it’s a good facsimile of a s’more. Andrew likes creamed chipped beef on toast with melted Limburger cheese. Colin loves his grandmother’s mashed potato-carrot puree on braised beef topped with Durkee canned onion rings. Even the super-duper talented David Chang of Momofuku and Ssam fame insisted in a March 2014 GQ article that the fried baloney sandwich served at Wilensky’s Light Lunch in Montreal is “a high point of gastronomy as vexing in its deliciousness as a Zen koan.”
Some of my guilty pleasures are peanut butter, mayonnaise, and lettuce sandwiches, the aforementioned Velveeta phony cheese-food product melted into a chile con queso dip, and strawberries dipped in Cool Whip, a chemical concoction made with hydrogenated vegetable oils and high fructose corn syrup that is so artificial and so ghastly I might as well drive without a seat belt.
Some people’s ideas of a guilty pleasure just sounded like delicious treats to me — lobster mac ’n’ cheese, raspberries with heavy cream and brown sugar, chocolate truffles, and cinnamon toast. But some of them are so bizarre, they sound like pica, a serious eating disorder in which people eat such things as soil, chalk, soap, or clay. How does lard on white bread with sugar sound? How about chocolate syrup on leftover Chinese takeout rice? Blech.
And yet, I want to try some of my friends’ guilty pleasures immediately. Amy’s sandwich of baloney, Velveeta, iceberg lettuce, Wishbone Thousand Island dressing, salami, and Durkee’s sandwich sauce on a potato bun wrapped in foil and left in the hot sun on the edge of your beach towel sounds awesome. Maybe it was the “sun” and “beach towel” part that appealed to me. Mike’s description of a hot dog from Hiram’s in Fort Lee, N.J., deep fried on a grilled bun with mustard, sauerkraut, and a Miller High Life just makes me hungry. Mike also happens to be a super healthy athlete so I don’t begrudge him this indulgence.
Hot dogs in many forms appeared frequently as a guilty pleasure. Cocktail weenies, Saucy Susan, and Wispride cheese mentions led me to realize that a lot of these are really childhood memories and, to some extent, comfort food.
If any of these guilty pleasures and following recipes lead you to the store for some naughty ingredients, all I can say is “mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.”
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