more about dad than meat.

It didn't come as too much of a surprise to hear, after inquiring about some clanking background noise, that my dad was eating alone at an all-you-can-eat buffet in Mississippi while on his business trip to the chicken farm. "Really, I find it isn't a bad option," he said cheerfully, "when you just want to eat some meat." He proceeded to tell me about the alligator gumbo he had for lunch at a joint in New Orleans that he ducked into that afternoon to avoid a sudden downpour.

Many of the running jokes my family revolve around my dad and I's culinary adventures. When he ran the sound system for ethnic festivals at Hart Plaza in Downtown Detroit, he brought home rescued crates of leftover foods that us lower-middle class Midwestern folk would never have been exposed to otherwise in the early 1980s-- spicy curries, pierogi with thick Polish sausages, Styrofoam containers bulging with hummus and baba ghanoush. Along with his job downtown came trips to Detroit's Eastern Market (the largest public historic market in the country) for piles of cheap produce, leading to an infamous vat of green, lumpy brussels sprouts soup, which was mildly traumatizing for 4-year old me.

A later Eastern Market expedition resulted in a 5-pound box of quickly wilting basil. Two days (and two industrial blenders) later, our cupboards and freezer were filled with dozens of jars of pesto and the house reeked of garlic. During school that year, I faced much ridicule for my green pizzas, but by that time, I knew that my potato chip and bologna sandwich-eating lunch buddies didn't know what they were missing.

When I was a little older, I took up more of an interest in his kitchen experiments. Together, we came up with amazing concoctions. Some of them were simple, like our orzo salad for which tasting the most expensive aged balsamic vinegar was a must or the lavash wraps that always warranted piles of meat and cheese samplings at the deli counter. We will surely be remembered for our more esoteric inventions-- salami and peanut butter roll-ups or our ultimate classic, corn dog bread. Here's the recipe:

1 box of Jiffy cornbread mix
1 package of hot dogs

Follow directions on box for cornbread. Pour batter into casserole dish and drop in hot dogs lengthwise. Bake at temperature indicated on box.

Serve with a knife, fork, and your choice of mustard.

Cheers to my ingenious dad. (Just make sure you brush your teeth when you get home,you know how mom hates it when you have alligator breath.)