all about the Inner tube

Weekend Brunch

Wait a minute what do you mean? You’re saying I can’t eat avocados, no more cashews, sautéing vegetables in olive oil is out?

I’d run into some trouble with my numbers. You wouldn’t know by looking, but under the hood, the engine had issues. The warranty on my chassis had started showing its miles and after a look my mechanic hit me with the news, I was going to have to start doing some preventative maintenance.

Sacred Recipes and Olney Tips

From here on out it would be lettuce and lemon juice for as far as the eye could see. No more cooking Richard Olney’s Veal Sweetbreads and Macaroni Timbale. No more making a gelatinous veal stock with blanched calf’s foot, no more 3 tablespoons of butter in the macaroni, no more egg whites and immeasurable vats of heavy cream.

I am a besotted California cuisine dining French envying cheap red any vintage non-Grand Crus Bordeaux wine drinker. Berkeley is rife with my kind. Turns out the Left Coast liberals get Château induced sticker shock bellying up in the Left Bank for a glass of Margaux and a succulent morsel of Cistercian monk inspired Epoisses.

Breaking up is hard to do

“Excess in everything,” was Ernie Kovacs motto. Not bad, but good to understand the brilliant comedian was dealt a one-way ticket out of here at 45. Voraciousness and longevity are incompatible bedfellows.

Palate shifting takes time. You are not just moving minds you are training stomachs too. Imagine you are one whole integrated tube with a hole at one end and another hole at the other where what goes in one hole comes out the other. In the middle of the tube is a broadcasting company sending information to the most prejudiced bought and paid for criminally negligent judge and jury the human condition can buy. We want what we want when we want it.

Corkage, as in put a cork in it…

That may not be who you truly are, but it comes damn close to describing what I’ve found lurking just beneath the impulse control deficient less preferred parts of this closeted Château Margaux craver.

Because of my biased jury and out of control inner Ernie Kovacs the Executive Producers of my dinner theater demanded the director try editing the big show before it turned into a Mayo Clinic flop.

I rounded up the usual suspects. Dairy, eggs, red meat, chicken and fish were arrested and tossed into the culinary hoosegow. Denial fueled the Mediterranean diets unsubstantiated claims that olive oil was good and more olive oil was even better. As these things went the use of olive oil had to go. I had to get rid of the oil burner under the hood go all renewable or run the real risk of having my very own existential Kodak moment and climate change emergency.

Tools of the Oil Free Trade

Scanpans are a Scandinavian cookware creation. Coddled socialists that our Northern Europeans are during their eternal winter while soaking in saunas the dashing blonde and blue-eyed wonders spent the other part of their day and invented safer nonstick cookware. A ceramic titanium coating over stainless and aluminum creates an oil free cooking tool that unlike Teflon will not harm the homebound chefs. Think Volvo of cookware.

Secret Sauce

Add to your arsenal a scanpan and vegetable broth, low sodium of course, and you are now set to go all oil free all the time. The tyranny of craving will drive behavior at the outset, but with practice the lust for oil cools to a simmering whimpering muffled then muted tummy tickling grumble.

In the sport of survival your referee will be left flummoxed. Instead of putting up the big numbers you’ll be playing in endothelial hardball league. Stints, pig valves and triple bypass will be relegated to the dustbins of John Hopkins Research archives.

Sicilian wine is an affordable must have

That’s it. There you go. Easier said than done. As to be expected my beloved inner Ernie Kovacs is still there, and that’s a beautiful thing. We wrestle with each other, and it’s a fair match, immortal comic versus fragile wise guy. The thing to know is an oil free Kovacs works and I’m doing pretty good too.

Kicked up quite the ruckus when I dove into this dietary quagmire, but now it’s just what we do. As Tony Bennett sings, “I want to be around to pick up the pieces when somebody fixes your heart. Some somebody twice as smart, as I….”