Manolo’s Food Blog

Mr. Henry is not a person of faith. For him, ideology is bunk, and religion is über-bunk. Nevertheless, even cynical hounds have to decide what to eat.

The final sentences of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma read:

But imagine for a moment if we once again knew, strictly as a matter of course, these few remarkable things: What it is we’re eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what, in a true accounting, it really cost. We could then talk about some other things at dinner. For we would no longer need any reminding that however we choose to feed ourselves, we eat by the grace of nature, not industry, and what we’re eating is never anything more or less than the body of the world.

At the instant of this writing Mr. Henry is snarfing down blue corn tortilla chips.

Although organic and without trans fats, these are surely more the product of industry than of nature. Reflecting upon his personal feeding habits, he tries not to despair, for he has not forgotten that despair is one of the seven deadly sins, right up there alongside gluttony.

Should we structure our eating around belief systems? Don’t we do that already even if we pretend we don’t? Isn’t what we call culture or tradition in fact a set of rather arbitrary beliefs, many ungrounded in logic or science?

Cuisine marks culture more distinctly than any other lifestyle choice. It’s the most conservative cultural trait. (Japanese-American families keep umeboshi in the fridge no matter what fashions they wear, music they listen to, or ideologies they favor.)

Organic is good. Local is better. Taste should be your guide. The perfect, most harmonious marriage of these virtues, however, is sustainability.

Eating from a farm like Polyface that achieves a balance of beast and field, of nature and nurture, in which each creature and each plant achieves its full biological potential, is the holy grail of sustainability. The land improves, our health improves, the beasts live happy lives (right up to their moment of demise), and the energy to run the place comes almost completely from the sun.

Prince Charles started talking about these issues years ago. Although in the Diana legend Charles has been cast down as the frosty fogey, the emotional retard, it may come to pass in the long judgement of history that Princess Diana’s media successes will wane and Charles’ push for sustainable development will rise.

Now that he has converted, Mr. Henry feels obligated to pursue the virtuous life. As soon as he finishes this marvelous bag of chips, he will begin casting about for information regarding local farms in the New York City area. (Query to the faithful: Must the convert lead an impeccable existence, or merely a good one? Temptation is everywhere. Sustainable farm products are scarce.)

From time to time Mr. Henry takes the pulse of his foodie friends. He can report that the locavore discussion seems to have hit a national nerve.

When national nerves get hit, arguments rarely stay well-tempered and intelligent. He was especially delighted, therefore, to read this brilliant, concise defense of the local food movement from Chachaheels:

I don’t think the “100 mile” limit is meant to be imposed like law. It’s simply to get you to focus on the food that’s produced locally by local farmers who are very likely small independent farmers (or, part of a food growing co-op, or organic or drug free food producers). I’ve seen people talk about “adopting” this food lifestyle and then crying about how you can’t buy Parmigiano reggiano cheese because it comes from Parma Italy, which is thousands of miles away from Canada, where I live. They are missing the point, and it’s an important one.

I live in one of the best areas of arable land in the world, and we have farmers producing all kinds fruits and vegetables, and all manner of meats and dairy and local specialty foods wherever you turn–yet, every summer, when the fields are laden with this produce and local farmers are trying as hard as possible to sell as much as they can so they can keep farming, our supermarkets are stuffed to the rafters with fruit, vegetables, and meats from anywhere else (usually California or South America)–often exactly the same produce that local farmers are producing literally across the street from their aisles.

The “100 mile” rule is to get consumers to think about buying the fresh, ripe, well prepared foods from the people they live near (because shaming the supermarket conglomerates to sell local foods just hasn’t worked in Canada). Not only do you keep your local economy alive, the stuff just tastes so much better and is so much better for you. And you can find out exactly what your neighbour is doing when the food’s produced. Try doing that with some Monsanto-run agricorp in the US whose contracts for sales with the megalomart in your town has to honour well into the next millennium.

Then, buy the parmiggiano reggiano from Parma because even though it comes from half a world away, it’s still made a lot like it was 800 years ago. To make the local stuff taste great!

This year the novelist Barbara Kingsolver wrote Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, an entertaining chronicle of one year’s attempt to eat local products. This follows in the wake of Michael Pollan’s brilliant exegesis The Omnivore’s Dilemma. After reading the Omnivore, you can never again look at corn through the same eyes. Our national addiction to corn has transformed not only the American palate and the American waistline but the American landscape itself. Most interesting of all is the connection between fossil fuels and corn production. Nitrate fertilizers necessary for the production of such vast quantities of cheap corn come from oil and gas.

From all the good arguments presented in the discussion, the most convincing one to Mr. Henry, the one that persuades him beyond a reasonable doubt, is taste. Indeed, this is the Omnivore’s and Chachaheels’ conclusion, too.

A recent N.Y. Times op-ed piece about “food miles” neatly skewered the reduction of fossil fuel argument. In England it seems that to eat tender and toothsome New Zealand grass-fed lamb leaves a far lighter carbon footprint than to eat local grain-fed lamb. And, of course, New Zealand lamb is tastier.

The common factor here is taste. In science as in art, the simplest solution is the most elegant. Although local may trump organic, taste trumps both. Eating what tastes good makes plain good sense, an argument any three-year old would understand. In the marriage of science and art that constitutes cuisine, taste should be your unfailing guide.

Mr. Henry is wary of preachers, do-gooders, and moral arguments in the public arena. American puritanism runs deep and wide, always threatening to over-run its shallow banks. Is he paranoid to suspect that in this new food fight old-fashioned protectionist arguments may soon arise, as before, from flag-waving America-firsters?

He is reminded of the 1970’s contretemps about imported automobiles. Small, efficient, well-engineered Japanese imports had begun to steal significant market share from hulking, guzzling, Detroit road hogs. A hapless Chinese immigrant, Vincent Chin, was beaten to death by auto workers who mistakenly believed him to be Japanese.

Mr. Henry wants to state here and now that he is not willing to lay his life on the line to undermine the monopolies of American agribusiness. Should he buy local products, he will do so quietly and without claims of moral superiority. Cargill, Monsanto, and Archer Daniels Midland may now remove Mr. Henry from their list of terror suspects. He snacks on corn chips. He loves the smell of combines in the morning.

Like The Manolo, Mr. Henry has been traveling, holed up in a Cape Cod rental bungalo without internet access.

He tried to eat locavore. He made a real mental effort. But as a citizen of the world he believes no neighborhood is truly so far removed from his acquaintance that he cannot partake of its proudest fare. And where, he asks, is the local food exit off Interstate-95?

In the spirit of a summer share, therefore, he would like to offer a few travel tips:

On the highway, don’t drink the iced coffee at Starbuck’s. It’s a guaranteed stomach cramp. Try Newman’s Own Organic at MacDonald’s instead. It’s delicious, neither watery nor burned, and costs half as much as the Starbuck’s one.

As for eating roadside fast food, just don’t. Pack a picnic you can enjoy at the rest stop. Pretend the sound of roaring cars to be Niagara Falls. (Mrs. Henry added a dollop of sour cream to her chicken salad which rounded out the mouth feel and slightly disguised the mayonnaise — altogether a nice picnic choice.)

Don’t go to Cape Cod for codfish, which in every case will be an anodyne, frozen, white fish filet caught months ago far, far away — the very same filet you might get in Peoria or Topeka.

Don’t eat oysters on the half shell in Wellfleet. They are OK, but the clams are far sweeter, especially the littlenecks.

If stuck shopping at the local superette, a quick and easy barbecue sauce can be made from three parts ketchup and one part worcestershire sauce. Slather it on AFTER the ribs come off the grill. (Please don’t even pretend you’re going to do a dry rub marinade. Be reasonable. It’s summer. In the morning, dinner always seems to be a long way away.)

Boil your corn until underdone, a mere seven or eight minutes. Let it cool and slice it off the cob. Mixed with chopped tomato, celery and cilantro (or whatever pungent fresh herb you can find). Splash it with oil and vinegar and you will have a marvelous crunchy salad on hand for snacks or for meals.

For the best possible dinner, take Little Henry and posse out to the marshes. Let them loose in the shallows with buckets to dig fresh cherrystone clams, littleneck clams, razor clams, and mussels. (Rubber gloves are a good idea because clam shell edges can be sharp.)

Sautéed in a big fry pan with onion and white wine, each variety will cook at a different rate. Pluck them out when they open so as not to render them rubbery. Reduce your sauce a touch and add a dab of thickener to help it grab hold of the pasta. (Mr. Henry likes heavy cream but sour cream works fine, too.) Serve over linguine with a chilled bottle of Sancerre close at hand.

Mr. Henry does not leave well enough alone. Even with well-established recipes, he tinkers.

Last month, to provide a colonial-era touch of sourness to cornbread, a Mr. Henry favorite that can easily become too sweet, he bought a quart of buttermilk. Later that week he poured a goodly portion of buttermilk into pancake batter. In both cases results were splendid. Buttermilk in baking always yields extra fluffiness. Indeed, when using buttermilk, because of its acidity you may decrease your baking powder.

But ultra-pasteurized buttermilk just lasts and lasts. Not wishing to simply throw away perfectly good buttermilk but eager to free up refrigerator space, from time to time he spirited a dollop of the antique sour and creamy liquid – a poor people’s leftover from the preparation of heavenly butter – into other menu items not born with buttermilk in mind.

To grated celery root remoulade made with an entire bunch of chopped dill he decided that a healthy splash of buttermilk might add an appropriate hint of creaminess without overpowering what in essence remains a light, crunchy, winter salad.

Without permission from Little Henry, master of the vinaigrette, he added a dollop there, too, a bright foil to an acidic Italian red wine vinegar. Flush with success, the next night he let the buttermilk dominate the salad dressing, masked slightly by a final addition of grated parmesan to the finished salad, and no one complained.

Tonight he plans a bolder stroke. Because chicken is such a boring bird, Mr. Henry invariably marinates it before cooking. What will happen to chicken steeped for hours in buttermilk? Mr. Henry recalls southern fried chicken from his youth that carried magical aromas possibly attributable to buttermilk, though tonight he will add curry to the marinade and bake it tandoori-style. And with chicken, without question he will make buttermilk biscuits.

Mr. Henry is thankful for the recurrence in New York of a first-class winter storm. Cold weather grants him special sanction to eat with wild abandon. Rules, after all, are meant to be broken.

The True and Never Before Revealed Facts of Mr. Henry’s First Successes in the Kitchen

There came a day sometime around 1966 when young Mr. Henry excused himself from the dining table and declared voicelessly that he had eaten his last bite of Wish-Bone Italian Dressing. On that fateful day at that fateful hour was born a new, true foodie.

Marketing geniuses at Wish-Bone had recently convinced forward-thinking Americans that a packet of “secret herbs and spices” added to oil and vinegar and shaken in a specially designed 3-Mile Island shaped vessel might constitute “home-made salad dressing.” The Henry family took great pride in their reach into culinary sophistication. Feasting on palate-busting “herbs and spices,” an unholy trinity of oregano, garlic powder, and monosodium glutamate, they sat blissfully together on Sunday nights watching Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color.

But though still a boy Mr. Henry already harbored within his breast the fierce iconoclasm and resistance to authority that would lead him before the age of sixteen to denounce another unholy trinity – church, war, and tackle football – the core beliefs of the USA.

Apart from unwrapping a slice of American cheese, placing it on a piece of bread, and running the exotic ensemble under the toaster oven broiler, young Henry had never before performed anything like real cooking. The kitchen was not the domain of children or even the domain of Mom. It was the domain of Bertha, old Birdie, the cook, whose placid demeanor and enormous girth could not be stirred except by the entrance of children over the kitchen threshold. “Chile, get out my kitchen!” she sweetly yelled in a voice utterly devoid of menace. Bertha’s gravies were the stuff of legend. Her roast leg of lamb fell off the bone and into our mouths like ambrosia from Olympus. Great earth mother figure from whom all life flowed, she was our object of worship.

But Bertha did not do salad dressing.

In those simpler times salad was synonymous with iceberg lettuce, cold, crunchy and virtually flavorless. That bottle of Wish-Bone, therefore, was the salad’s only theme, an insistent nightly insult, a gelatinous sock in the jaw.

In the cupboard young Henry found red wine vinegar, cooking oil (NOT olive oil, and not even nearly close to almost being virgin), French’s yellow mustard (What made it so brightly yellow? Best not to ask.), and honey. Without recipe or guidepost, young Henry through bold experimentation visited upon unsuspecting younger brothers finally arrived at a reasonably tasty salad dressing which in its conception was not too dissimilar from the dressing his own little Henry whips up today, the little darling devotee of Top Chef and Food Network.

Yes, the torch has passed. Chez Henry a new obstinacy has emerged with regard to salad dressing, a new direction under the unfailing guide of Little Henry whose authority must not be brooked.

Granted, Little Henry’s vinegar is now from Jerez or Modena, oil from California or Tuscany, and mustard pure Dijon, but the impetus to establish one’s own flavor protocols remains pure vintage Mr. Henry, paterfamilias. Such pride.

Little Henry has already mastered fried eggs, almond cookies, carrot cupcakes, raspberry coulis as well as guacamole. Indeed there are no limits. The future is not so dim as we might imagine.

Floating amidst a new season’s hatch of ski bunnies and buckaroos, Mr. Henry found himself distinctly out of place. At the entrance to the Mangy Moose bar, they carded him, a courtesy and a compliment he accepted very graciously.

Seeing that no one among the beer-swilling mob had been born before the completion of Mr. Henry’s undergraduate education, however, he retreated to the mammoth pine log fireside to read Jane Austen’s Emma.

He was surely the only person reading for a radius of many miles.

A hard day of falling down on slick, packed-powder moguls had left his body humming all over. He was thrilled that each of his knees still retained most of their function. He was thrilled that he had not perished on the slopes, flattened by a snowboarder on energy drink. He was sure the glass of Moose Drool Brown Ale was the finest he had ever tasted. The high-hipped, blond waitress of peach complexion, ready smile, muscular thigh and genuine unenhanced American bosom served him with such graceful enthusiasm that all of Mr. Henry’s resistance against empty-headed, slacker youth began to melt.

Mr. Henry chose his position between the fire and the door with care. The afternoon’s beany lunch of vegetarian chili and ‘everything’ quesadilla served mid-slope in the Casper restaurant was working away at his vitals. To best protect the Moose’s good patrons as well as to protect Mr. Henry’s personal honor, a windy corridor was needed. To its credit, the Moose is appropriately drafty.

The Mangy Moose at Teton Village in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, is a paradise for skiers as well as for meat-eaters. Although the roast beef and pork chop are the toughest he has ever eaten, resistant enough for alpine outerwear, once your teeth manage to soften them Eskimo-style they taste quite good, especially the chop. The real treat comes with the salad course – a genuinely old-fashioned, crisply delicious, iceberg lettuce wedge topped with crumbled blue cheese dressing. Mr. Henry was so moved he tasted Mrs. H.’s ‘Ranch’ dressing, a surprisingly toothsome buttermilk mixture.

The Moose’s finest features, apart from the sunny and robustly beautiful waitresses, are the walls and rafters. All manner of frontier detritus hangs there: bathtubs, tractor seats, stuffed raccoons, bedpans, baseball bats, scythes, arrow points. The Moose is the most interesting museum in Wyoming, the only collection that captures the genuine spirit of the old West without a double slathering of hokum. After all, nothing is phonier than the Old West.

Planning a meal is at least as difficult as preparing one. The planner must imagine which flavors and which textures might survive a culinary marriage all the way through the gastro-intestinal tract of each fussbudget friend.

While Mr. Henry believes that each of us is responsible for his or her own colon, he is mindful that out-of-town guests are stuck eating whatever the Henrys prepare. Therefore, menus must err towards the safe and the familiar.

Since over Thanksgiving the Henry household entertained eight (yes, eight) of Mrs. Henry’s relatives for eight days, the feasting never ceased. Mrs. Henry never left the kitchen and Mr. Henry never stopped ferrying food in and ferrying garbage out.

Eight different palettes with eight different dietary regimens did not intimidate the fearless Mrs. Henry. Undaunted by the closeness of respected elders and rivalrous siblings, she brazenly posted the entire week’s menu on the cabinet, declaring that whoever wanted dinner had better show up on time, devil take the hindmost. She is a courageous woman. Martin Luther was not more bold in list-posting.

Everyone came, everyone feasted, and everyone thanked Mr. Henry, though he had done no cooking apart from the cranberries and some prep work. (A moment, please……Were they happy he had NOT cooked?) Whatever the intention, they complimented him as well on his choices of wine, for which he takes full and deserved credit. Given the size of the party and Mr. Henry’s shrinking holiday budget, none of the wines cost more than $18 per bottle. But given the global wine glut, good table wine is among the cheapest of treats today.

For those less organized than Mrs. Henry, and Mr. Henry suspects such a list does not exclude the U.S. Army quartermaster general, here is the week’s complete menu:

Dinner 1:
Cuban stew: an aromatic slow-cooked concoction of Mrs. Henry’s device made with pork or chicken which includes onions, green olives, raisins, garbanzos, plum tomatoes (seeded), and a splash of liquid (either white wine or stock will do). Sprinkled with fresh cilantro, it is served over brown rice (basmati is tastiest) seasoned with turmeric for color.
Green salad.
Wine: Rioja

Dinner 2: guests all dining at differing times.
Pizza made by each guest upon arrival using Bruno’s bottled marinara sauce (made smoother by a few moments in the blender) and for toppings a choice of mozzarella, sliced Kalamata olives, sweet sausage sautéed and crumbled, sautéed mushrooms, anchovies, and fresh basil.
Green salad.
Wine: Barbera

Dinner 3: pre-Thanksgiving low-fat meal
Broiled farmed salmon (wild was unavailable), broccoli, baked whole fingerling potatoes, Israeli pickles in rice wine vinegar.
Dessert: mixed berries
Wine: Riesling

Dinner 3: Thanksgiving.
Free range turkey, 8 lbs., cooked in convection oven for two hours at 400 degrees, mashed potatoes, sliced baked yams (NOT candied), green beans, Mr. Henry’s signature orange cranberry sauce, fresh applesauce.
Stuffing: sausage, chestnut, apple, fresh sage, and sourdough bread baked in two whole winter squashes.
Dessert: Pumpkin chiffon pie, apple pie, vanilla ice cream
Wine: Pinot Noir

Dinner 4: Post-Thanksgiving, pre-theater
Turkey soup, squash soup.
Ceasar salad.
Dessert: Tia’s dulce de leche soggy cake with peaches and whipped cream. (Hmmm. Thank you, Tia.)
Wine: whatever was open

Dinner 5:
Leg of lamb, lentils with garlic and cumin, broiled asparagus (just toss with olive oil and salt, broil for 6-8 minutes), brown and wild rice, sliced drained cucumber & dill in yogurt, and iced mint tea.
Dessert: leftover pumpkin pie
Wine: Pinot Noir

Dinner 6:
Winter squash soup (made from the Thanksgiving leftovers), filet mignon, potatoes roasted en papillote, peas.
Dessert: mixed berry tart
Wine: Bordeaux

Dinner 7:
Broiled black cod in white miso, white rice, tsukemono (assorted Japanese pickles), umeboshi (salt plum), green beans
Dessert: mochi ice cream from Beard Papa’s
Wine: Riesling

In response to A Henry Halloween, Joanie requested a recipe for pumpkin stuffing – a stuffing for a whole baked pumpkin, that is. Mr. Henry did not send her one. Instead, he admonished her to buck up, embrace the old pioneer spirit, and just make do with whatever dry ingredients happened to be on hand.

Is this fair? Is this kind? Mr. Henry is having a moment of remorse for his flip dismissal of the good Joanie who, after all, asked only that Mr. Henry come clean with his cooking secrets on his own food blog.

But does he want to share? Does he want everyone to know his recipes?

Does he want everyone to know his deepest kitchen secret of all, viz. that he loathes recipes and never fails to tinker with them and that as a consequence he is a perfectly lousy pastry chef?

Does he want the world to know that he resembles exactly every other testosterone-poisoned male and does not like to ask for directions? That he is a pig-headed old coot?

He argues that there are very good reasons for such stubbornness. Whenever he DOES follow directions, things go badly. When he shops open-mindedly, for example, permitting the freshest vegetable to determine the day’s culinary pathway, then nothing ever fails.

A Mr. Henry Dictum: the freshest ingredient determines the choice of the menu.

If you are cooking fish, you must first peruse the fish counter, next nose around in the vegetable bins, and then return to the fish counter. Ignore the annoyed looks of the fishmongers. They specialize in disdain. It is their birthright, an attitude they feel they can assume as recompense for having perpetually fishy fingers.

Meats don’t vary much from day to day, so you may safely build a menu around a market oddity such as fresh baby okra secure in the knowledge that the lamb chops (rubbed with salt and rosemary, then broiled) will be perfect.

OK, but where are the recipes?

With regard to the question of sharing, Mr. Henry embraces the new spirit of the internet generation, namely, that all knowledge should be free, like books in libraries, and that everything of value should be shared without regard for copyright so long as it is not a Henry copyright.

In the selfless, altruistic ethos of Thanksgiving Mr. Henry here proffers his very own recipe for orange cranberry sauce, a recipe he himself invented and developed for over 30 Thanksgivings. Be forewarned, however. THIS SAUCE IS TART.

Mr. Henry foregoes all royalties now and forever, all hard-won remuneration, all possible legacies bequeathed to the Henry generations to come. Yes, he is giving it away.

Take note.

Buy a bag of cranberries and one navel orange. (Here Mr. Henry is not taking chances with imaginative cooks. Trust me, dear reader, follow this recipe, if indeed it IS a recipe.)

Rinse the berries, pick off any annoying little stems, and throw out the mushy ones. To a heavy pot add the berries, half the sugar and half the water recommended on the package, that is, half a cup of each. (For more orange oomph you may substitute orange juice for water.) Over a medium to low flame bring the berries to a boil and stir, stir, stir. Don’t be gentle. Each berry must pop to let its sour juice mingle with the sugar. Those few recalcitrant ones you can mash with your wooden spoon. Don’t cook it until the berries get leathery, for God’s sake. Do it just enough to get them popped.

While your berries are cooking, grate all the orange skin off the navel. (Mr. Henry prefers the navel because it has thicker rind and more concentrated juice.) When all the berries have popped, take the pot off the fire and mix in the grated orange peel. Slice your navel in half and squeeze with your fingers all its juice into the pot, too. (A bit of orange pulp in the sauce is good.) Transfer it to a large glass bowl and place it on the terrace to cool. (Cover it with foil, by the way, so that the afternoon blue jay doesn’t get more curious than he already is.)

Mr. Henry is not one to call names, casually hurl insults or take cheap shots.
His friend Michael, also a Southerner, took issue with Mr. Henry’s writing style saying, “Why don’t you come clean with your reading public and stop pretending to be this urbane New York sophisticate ? Out yourself as a true chaw-bacon, cousin-humpin’ cracker!”

Mr. Henry takes no umbrage. He feels, however, a twinge of envy at Michael’s fluent command of invective. Also, he has every confidence that even if not in mid-season form he could best Michael at tennis, golf, or bridge.

When Mr. Henry recently visited Jacksonville, Florida, however, he began to sputter and spit at the truly disgusting fare offered up as cuisine.

To be fair, it was not as bad as what Frances at the 87th Street dog run, having just returned from Dallas-Ft.Worth, confronted at the Texas State Fair. Is it really possible that in Texas they serve deep-fried Coca-Cola balls with fake whipped cream topping? (Yes, the Henry research team uncovered just such a monstrous concoction. First soak dough balls in Coca-Cola. Next………….no, please! Make it stop!)

Jacksonville may specialize in fried food, too, but this year Mr. Henry made a discovery that set him back on his big city heels – a brand new upscale eatery called “Chew” on an old block centrally located in the heart of Jacksonville’s languishing downtown. This is not Hooters. This is not Whitey’s Fish Camp, accessible only by motorboat, where every entrée is fried and served with a side of hush puppies. (At Whitey’s the specialty of the house is “cooter.” Opinions are divided on whether that is alligator tail or turtle).

The staff at Chew do not speak with a southern accent. (The chef trained at the Culinary Institute of America.) The braised short ribs sandwich was a tender, rich and subtle creation that clearly took hours to prepare. Mr. Henry believes there is hope for America after all.

Last week’s Halloween Special on the Food Network featured the noted “popular lifestyle professional and author” Sandra Lee – Make it Semi-Homemade! – preparing pizza with canned tomato sauce, pre-shredded cheddar cheese, and sour cream topping laced with ‘cheap’ caviar.

Mr. Henry thinks Sandra should be working for Homeland Security in the terrorist interrogation unit. How did this wasp-waist Wisconsin University blonde get into a position of food authority? She is striking at the Heartland, that’s for sure, and from Sandra’s sinister recipes we shall all need fast, permanent relief.

At first blush Mr. Henry assumed that Sandra was some kind of Saturday Night Live character. But this show, like Rambo, is parody proof. Even Meryl Streep couldn’t portray a more plausible dunderhead than the genuine, all-American Sandra. When she scooped out the innards of a store-bought pumpkin pie, squished them around, mushed them into a big plastic baggie, cut off the bag’s tip, and squirted the abused result into petit four shells, well, Mr. Henry shook his head with deep regret at the astonishing nonsense that passes for sound advice on television.

When she put the caviar on the cheddar cheese and tomato pizza, however, the whole Henry family screamed in horror. It was a suitably Halloween total gross-out. Even now Mr. Henry nearly hurls at the thought of it.