Jefke.com

So for some inexplicable reason, i developed a hankering for macaroni salad around 11 am today. I can’t remember the last time i had any, prolly as part of a 39 piece bucket of fried chicken and rat parts meal deal a couple years ago. i dunno, but it hit me like a ton of bricks, (the desire for the macaroni, not the bucket of chicken)

so money’s a bit tight until payday (in er, 11 days) so i’m thinking “hell it’s just pasta and some mayo and vinegar and sugar or something” so i walk over to the bookshelf full of cook books thinking that i’ll be all industrious and make it meself….

I figured i could skip the “naked chef” and the marta stewart books, they wouldn’t know the subtle flavor of a good heart clogging like the macaroni salad. So i looked in the the red and white betty crocker cookbook, thinking what’s more midwester than betty crocker? i got at this particular book at the library “old book sale” right before i graduated undergrad. The book book is missing the front cover and has “Personal Property of Father Earl L. Mayo” stamped all over the ends of it. Oddly enough, it did not have a recipe for it my beloved salad, nor did the frugral gormet, julia child or ‘how to cook everything’. The joy of cooking had some weird version with all sorts of other weird crap in it, so i skipped that one.

baffled, I went to the interweb. A search on foodtv.com returned 5 recipes, and i was amazed that the various crap people do to a simple recipe to make it seem exotic. At this point I realized i’d be spending 10 bucks on ingredients that i’d prolly only use this once, so I decided that it’s better to just head to the deli in the little supermarket across the street and pick up some of the salad there.

So i put on my away message and headed to the store. now it’s been a long while since i entered a grocery store during the lunch rush. memories of my time as super-stock-boy at Peter’s weston market came flooding back. oddly enough, eddie’s market across the street has a manager that looks pretty much exactly like my boss Herb at Peter’s market.

quick aside.
(oh stop moaning, like you have something else to do anyway)

Herb used to work for the ‘chain stores’ in the expansion phase of the early to mid 70’s. I’m not sure what happened, but something pushed him over the edge and he left his position as general manager of a Grand Union (remember those?) and swore off the chain stores altogether. What’s kinda weird is he ended up at this little tiny market where I worked. I can’t figure it out, but somewhere he picked up an “i hate the chainstore/the man” type attitude. It’s not like he was counter culture or anything. Far from it, it was more like he became anti corporate, ala conspriacy theory weird.

That, combined with the hitting normal middle age/old man bitterness, really made Herb a peach to be around. Apparently Herb liked me, because i just kept my mouth shut and did my work. Frankly, it was my first job, and i had no idea that it could be fun. i just stocked the milk cooler, reloaded all the shopping bags for the cashier girls and swept and mopped the damned floors. for some reason herb thought i was the ultimate stock boy. well at least out of the 3 stock boys that he had working for him. I think he started to try and groom me to become some sort of career grocery man, and as such, he started to instill the prinicples of hating the chain stores. again, i dont’ get it, it wasn’t like Herb owned a little shop and they ran him out of business, but whatever. Once i got my license, and my crush for the punk/goth cashier girl that i couldn’t-muster-the-guts-to-talk-to was too much for me to bear, I ended up trying to quit my job at Peter’s. Herb wouldn’t let me go. he kept trying to change my schedule so that I could “study and work”, i had used the “my parents dont’ want me to work during the school year” line. Naturally Herb worked full time and got straight A’s when he was in highschool. but that was before the chain stores. poor herb.

But back to my salad…..

so, i get to the store, and it’s all hustle and bustlin’ i case the salad case (hey look at that–i’m funny) and scope out 2 forms of macaroni salad, Dutch and Amish. The look exaclty the same, a bit more yellow than i’ve seen before, and they have the same price. I wonder if the are from the same receipe from rotterdam or something but one is made with some sort of electric device and the amish one isn’t. i dunno.

so i wait my turn, and then order a half pound of the amish one, figuring it would be better or something. so when the counter lady comes over to the case with a little contatiner, i’m thinking, whoa that’s not enough. so i up my order to a pound, i have no idea why, i just did. so there i am, with my 6 pack of caffine free diet coke, waiting for my POUND of mayo laden macaroni salad, so i can go back home and eat it, with a turkey bolonga sandwich. crazy.

so i came back, made my sandwich and proceded to each about 2/3rds of the sandwich, 5 forkfuls of the salad and 3 potato chips. I can’t decide if i am going to just have a heart attack right here, if i’ll need to go to the bowling alley or to the mud bogging championships for it to happen.

thank got i have 5/8ths of a pound of macaroni salad to ease the passing into the next life.