Nice Buns - Not!2/20/08

Ok, I'll admit it. For years, I lived as a marginal vegetarian. Not by choice mind you, but by association. My step-daughter was one of those intelligent kids who saw past the pedestrian attachment our society places on deadly fast food fare and opted out for the less deadly fruit and vegetable fare. This came as a surprise to me coming from East Texas where 95 percent of everything my mother cooked in my childhood was pan fried in bacon grease or lard - or worse. When I met my soon to be wife and her daughter I was under the impression that wrapping myself around a good Burger King double whopper was akin to godliness, or at best, a step in the right direction.

As the years passed before Laura left for college, Diana gradually slipped under our daughter's spell. She too began to prefer tofu to red meat, sprouts over French fries and on and on. Every meal became a two-way street. On one side, I sat either eating flesh or accepting the fact that what I was to dine on foods that never had a drop of blood coursing through its veins. On the other side, the two of them ate with gusto things with weird names like Baba Ghanoush, paneer, tofutti and other even less appealing dishes with even stranger sounding names. Over the years, however, I too began to accept meatless cuisine, but never really giving up that special allure that only a medium-rare, flame-broiled burger can deliver.

Our daughter is long gone and making her own way in the world, living in New York City, and oh yeah, she is now a hearty eating carnivore. College will do that to you. My wife and I moved to Japan then to California after Laura left for the East Coast but found ourselves still eating along the same lines as before: Little red meat, zero fast food and concentrating on eating healthy.

In March, Diana and I ended our seven year self-inflicted exile to La La Land to return to Denver and the wonderful world of red meat. In the beginning, we were working to get our house together and didn't do a lot of home cooking. I should give a disclaimer here: We lived in Napa, CA for seven years gateway to the renowned Napa Valley, Mecca of would be wine connoisseurs and high end eateries.

What most people don't realize, I certainly didn't before I moved there, is that Napa is really Hicksville unless you living on the high end of the hog - essentially a tourist or wealthy land owner or retired - and wealthy. I mean what you expect; Napa is a farming community where two classes of people exist (really three classes if you count the migrant field workers who come and go with the season. Most Napa Valley residents choose not to acknowledge their presence unless they want to employ them as cheap laborers). There are the wealthy, and I mean really wealthy, of the rich and famous variety, and the people who work to support them - i.e. your average working stiffs like most of us.

The culinary hype that goes with the valley's reputation is certainly justified if you've got unlimited platinum credit and the urge to spend large sums of money on what is essentially dinner with frills. It's a see and be seen thing. Most of the culinary outlets for the common folk are just that - common. Average Mexican fare, god awful Chinese, the occasional OK Thai place and a preponderance of your run-of-the-mill fast food places is pretty much what normal people eat when they go out that is if they want to be able to send their kids college some day. A very telling point, a real eye opener for us once we settled into everyday life there, is that besides pizza (read fast food) there was no restaurant that delivered food - na da, zip, none - never. No place to call up at 6 p.m. and say, "Yo, send me over some egg foo young, spring rolls and fried rice and make it snappy." Just didn't happen.

So, once we moved back to Denver the world of food delivery opened its arms to us and we embraced it warmly. We ate out or had food delivered four out of seven nights a week for those first two months. The simple things in live are what make it worth living.

Sometime around our fifth or sixth month here, I came to the point where the idea of adding hamburgers to my diet seemed utterly irresistible. I wasn't ready to start hitting the Burger King, not yet that would come in time, but decided to make an effort to find the best burger in my neck of the woods - north Denver. As a self-professed non-burger eater for so many years, I was up against some serious burger jonesing. I knew I had to pace myself or my quest would be tainted by whatever burger joint I passed without regard to my discriminating standards.

And that is what this blog is about . . . more to come.