Sumo Cola, Walmart’s semi-live Bio-Animélectronic Ninja Brand Assassin, secured a few stray hairs that had come undone from his topknot.  He wanted nothing to interfere with his drone’s-eye view of the Kennedy compound, a white splash of hotel-sized wooden structures dispersed along the grass and dunes of Hyannis.

What, Sumo wondered, was the Unique Sales Proposition behind the impressive global headspace share of the Kennedys? The compound gave no clue of a master plan. Their homes looked like ordinary seaside cottages that had blown up outwards in an explosion of hedonism, as if a mad carpenter had opened the valve on a huge tank of nitrous oxide in the basement, then tried to keep pace.  

“Wanton self-regard,” Sumo told himself as he brought the drone in closer, “will be their downfall.”

Sumo focused on a backyard gathering.  A buffet line was set up alongside an opalescent swimming pool. Children wearing white, short-sleeved shirts and orthodontics were buzzing around the long table, filling up plates and surreptitiously throwing ice cubes into the pool from their cokes as the adults drank pastel margaritas. It was Taco Night.

Sumo telescoped the drone’s optics down onto the serving dishes.  The guacamole was smooth and pale.  The ground beef in El Paso sauce looked just like the shreds of chicken in El Paso sauce. There was rice with the sheen and brightness of molten orange crayons.  Only the carnitas looked real.  Glistening, burnished skeins of pork sizzled in topaz fat above the wavy blue flames of sterno cans. 

Sumo tweaked the optics until he could see a few pyramidic grains of salt scattered on top.  Fleur de sel. Who would put fleur de sel on a buffet platter of carnitas?

As if on cue a tall, well-muscled woman in a white caftan and riotous red and black poppy-print turban emerged from French doors, carrying a backup tray with yet more chunks of pork.  Not a caterer, Sumo decided.  Too much attitude.  Plus she had those deep-set press secretary eyes.  An auntie, perhaps, with a favorite family dish.  Jackpot bingo.

Back at Big Sam’s Table for the BAD (Brand Analysis Debriefing) meeting in the Walmart Virtual Asteroid Ballroom, Sumo asked his boss if they call them WASPS because they just keep buzzing around and expanding their hive. 

“WASPS are protestant by definition,” said Marketing Sam the 23rd.  “The Kennedys are Catholic. It’s the same, but with incense.” 

“I don’t care how they smell,” Sumo said. “I’ve seen how to absorb their power.  Our new Sumo Cola Carnitas will have genuine Walmart Mexican Cola plus tangerine juice, chipotle powder, cumin, garlic. . . “

“Not this time, Sumo,” said his boss.  “We’re not going to co-opt.  We’re going to create a parallel brand using their name and core values.”

“Which are?”  Sumo asked, incredulous.

“Elegance and simplicity, of course.  But don’t worry, you’ll still be in charge.  It’s actually kind of a lease/purchase.”

“How will that work?  I’m an enormous sumo wrestler.  I can’t look like a Kennedy.”

“You can’t?  Check it out.  We already made our first payment.”

The wall behind Marketing Sam clouded momentarily, then glossed up so Sumo could see his new reflection. He was still eight feet tall and almost four hundred pounds, but his sex was now female, with the same décolletage but an actual waist. The avatar wore a white cotton blouse with a lace-trimmed lapel collar, a poppy-print headscarf around a bun of curly black hair, and a K-shaped monogram pin made of enameled bananas.

“Meet Auntie K!” said Marketing Sam, triumphantly.

For such a big girl, Sumo thought, I actually do look kind of elegant.  Or at least dignified.  Gracious.  Knowing.  Powerful, for sure.  Like I could definitely cook your ass. 

“Not bad,” he admitted. But somewhere in his eidetic memory of brand campaigns, a troublesome synapse sparked.  

“Hey,” he asked, suspiciously.  “Tell me I’m not Aunt Jemima.” 

This recipe is a mash-up of a couple of threads in my personal headspace. One is the blended vegetable carnitas that Pati Jinich (she makes me so proud to be Jewish) uses to make the carnitas that she serves up to JuJu and the boys.  The other is a gorgeous parcel of duck cured in Mexican coke and served up at Cosmé restaurant in NYC.  This particular conglomerate uses fat, knobby sumo tangerines and genuine Walmart Mexican Coca-Cola.  No surprise that it’s citrusy and a bit sweet, and spectacularly addictive.

Recipe:  Sumo Cola Carnitas

Can a heart be crispy, and still beat with love and pride?  It can if it is the heart of my carnitas fantasies, in which I am simultaneously raised in the art of the taco by both Pati Jinich and Dianne Kennedy (no relation to the Hyannis Kennedys, so far as I know).  In this dream, I’m always around 12, and I come charging in from the soccer field or shuffleboard court to find Tia Pati or Auntie Dianne presiding over a comal and a big, heavy casserole filled with crispy bits of pork that she only pretends to defend with her machacadora.

Eater friends, coke and tangerine juice are great with pork or I wouldn’t tell you to make carnitas with them, but you need to start here:  meat, water and salt.  This is not a recipe; it’s chapter one of the meat bible:  Tacogenesis.

Recipe:  Kennedy Carnitas

Here is how it begins.  An older couple – not elderly as yet, but old enough for their kids to worry that they’re losing it – are walking up the road from a cul de sac in a lovely suburban street at twilight.

The half-ring of houses in the cul de sac are topped by a glowing sunset arch of curdled sky; highlighter yellow near the horizon, then cherry pepper red and kelpy purple in the folds of the clouds.  It’s getting just dark enough to start imagining things.  

The man and woman walk close to each other, without touching.  The man takes a final look over his shoulder. The houses in the cul de sac are set like shadowed pulpits in a nave of colored glass. Just as he turns his eyes forward again, a single, soft light flips on in each bedroom window.  

It’s not quite dark enough yet for the couple to notice the change.  They keep walking up the street, talking through the nonsense of the day as, just beyond their field of sight,  the windows light up one by one.  By the time they reach the end of the street and turn left towards home, the street looks normal.

It’s still a bit dark the next morning when the man gets up to go shopping.  The supermarket is sweaty and crazed, with everyone in masks, and red arrows pointing the correct way to walk down the aisles.  They’re sold out of every single premium ice cream except for Hȁagen-Dazs Rum Raisin.

Still, the man spends almost three hundred dollars.  He buys a half-ham and a boneless leg of lamb.  He buys a half-gallon of buttermilk.  This shit lasts forever, he thinks.  The plastic bottle is a pretty pale yellow, with a picture of a chubby, rosy-cheeked girl named Kate, same nickname as his daughter.

He keeps his mask on until he is home again, and parked in the driveway.  He’s not sure where to leave the mask when he takes it off but in the end he drops it on the empty passenger seat, where it looks like crumpled lingerie.  

Finally, he presses the big, black button that turns the engine off, but the truck is still not silent.  It feels like there is a larger engine somewhere that is still running.  There is a slow, thrumming note behind the foreground sounds of birdsong and the tick of cooling metal.  

The whole, round world is beating like a gong.  

His wife cleans the jug of buttermilk with a sanitary wipe before it goes in the fridge.

Buttermilk is a good friend to have in your virus pod.  It’s a little like  having a southern relative staying with you; someone friendly and with a natural competence for biscuits.  My buttermilk journey took me on more of a world tour, though, starting with a buttermilk lassi.  You probably know these are normally made with yogurt, and tend to be thick as milkshakes.  This is a lightweight; icy and refreshing, but still muscular.  Top with freshly ground cardamom,  but don’t make a special trip to the store just because of my own obsession for resiny spices; use some cinnamon or nutmeg instead.

Recipe: Buttermilk Mango Chestnut Maple Lassi

One classic thing to do with buttermilk is to make ranch dressing.  It’s boring and familiar, which may be just what you need right now.  It’s easy to make your own, but even a good version will come out about the same as one you make with, say, Penzey’s ranch blend.  You bloom some of their powder in water for a few minutes then stir it into half buttermilk, half mayonnaise.  Or forget the ranch and add leftover pesto instead.  Or guacamole and salsa, if you have enough.  Or decide you want a chef’s salad with the flavor of an Everything Bagel.

Recipe: Green Goddess of Everything Bagel Salad Dressing

In a stroke of serendipity so strong it kind of freaked me out, I found a crazy good thing to do with all my buttermilk in the chapter on fuzzy gourds in Elizabeth Schneider’s massive lapful of vegetalia,  Vegetables from Amaranth to Zucchini.  I certainly wasn’t looking for buttermilk recipes.  I think I was on a fantasy break, wondering how she would cook a vegetable that sounds like it could be the host of a children’s show, or maybe a drag queen that refused to shave.  The answer was, you cook your fuzzy gourds with shrimp, in a sauce made with buttermilk and coconut.  It was an even better fantasy without the fuzzy gourds, which are OK in soup.

Recipe: Shrimp with Summer and Winter Squash in Coconut Buttermilk Sauce

If gluten-free is a rock, and dairy-free is a hard place, you can see where that puts us cooks.

“Sure. In Asia,” you might say, and you would be right.  If you can avoid the dim sum, and care less about the bits of wheat they sneak into soy sauce, you could dine throughout Asia for weeks without spawning the reactions you fear.  But Asian food is a vacation for me, and going there takes planning.  And imagination.

For example:  I like to buy regular or firm tofu, and squish it between tilted cutting boards, and let it drain until it’s meaty enough to where the slabs flex like muscles.  I like this better than buying extra firm in the first place.  But then, like as not, I’ll marinate it in herbs and olive oil, top it with shredded provolone, lash leftover pesto onto leftover sourdough and make a tofu panini.

Which is delicious, but a failure of imagination. A concession to the sandwich instinct, with its oozy comfort and grill marks.

When friends with dietary restrictions drop by I do try to rise to the challenge with hospitality and verve.  But you can’t tell that to my achy breaky heart. It’s selfish, ungracious, and globalist.  It wants a cuisine without borders, every day and at every meal.  And as more and more dietary tariffs have gone up among my family and friends, I’ve felt the anxious chagrin of a Scot contemplating Brexit.  Who wants cultural isolation when your national dish is haggis? Or chopped liver.

What pulled me off of my own smug perch was that my daughter succumbed.  On the advice of someone who wasn’t me she went gluten and dairy free, and felt better.  I went from callous to semi-convinced in a paternal heartbeat.  It helped that she looked amazing.  Whatever it was she wasn’t eating, it was working.

“I do a lot of Thai and Chinese,” she told me, as we made a green curry sauce that she promised would be quick and simple. It wasn’t, quite – it involved fourteen ingredients, lemongrass and a blender – but it was delicious, burstingly fresh, and unassailable from a health perspective.  I think we added tofu and bits of leftover roasted eggplant, and served it over jasmine rice.  Topped with fresh coriander and streaks of hot sauce, it had an aroma as colorful and enveloping as a silk bathrobe.

Of course, as soon as she left, I knew I would want the food equivalent of flannel.  And nothing says nappy plaid like polenta, aka grits, aka cornmeal mush.  But what is cornmeal without its slippery soul of butter? And please don’t start in about Earth Balance, or Just Like Mature Cheddar Slices.   The very names imply compromise.   The point is to eat something that’s totally itself.  And nothing is more completely itself than a cow.

Or maybe a coconut?

Among the other new things that tumbled in the pantry backwash of my daughter’s visit was unrefined coconut oil and gluten-free pasta.  The pasta was edible, if you can forget that you’ve ever had real pasta, but the coconut oil was realer than real.  It looked like a jar of cosmetics, and smelled so strongly of coconut it was almost musky.  There was nothing at all sweet about it; it was like sniffing the armpit of the Coconut God.

When you’ve been searching for something without knowing quite what it is and you finally meet, it feels like you’ve been found.  I felt like unrefined coconut oil had discovered me at last.  The flavorful, unctuous non-dairy fat I had never been able to imagine simply materialized on a pantry shelf and told me it wanted to be in polenta.

Extrapolating from that, I decided it also wanted some shrimp in a tropical, tomato-based sauce that would use up the sour oranges and papaya I had picked up in my last visit to Lawrence, MA, and that it also wanted to meet some of my friends, so we could all drink rum together.

So, OK.  Coconut polenta.  Clearly a good idea, gluten and dairy free, and very nice with the shrimp with papaya in sour orange sauce.  It could have been a bit more sour, as no one asked what was in the sauce besides the papaya, but the coconut came through on bite one, and brought smiles.  It thoroughly scented the polenta, which was its usual, comforting self; glistening and just a bit soupy until it cooled into tooth resistance.

And if I thought it was just a bit greasy it’s because, really, I wanted to add a little bit of  butter.

Recipe: Coconut Polenta with Sour Orange Papaya Shrimp

Love may be blind, but it has an amazing sense of smell.  This is why it’s so easy to fall in love in a foreign country.

People are the same everywhere –  we all just keep meeting the same bunch of jerks we got to know in high school.  But new smells hit a part of the brain that goes deeper than anything else, including sight.  I can’t tell you if someone is the exact same color as my washcloth, but I know right away if they smell like diesel fuel, or apricots.

It’s also exciting to travel because you yourself suddenly become exotic.  Your boring American odor of clean sheets, slightly used cars, lawn clippings and polyurethane is suddenly fresh and mysterious.  To the locals, you’re aromatherapy.

They say opposites attract, but love is really a brain stem-level instinct for complementarity.  Take, for example, Arthur Guinness and Doña María.  I don’t think they ever met, but if they did, it’s not hard to imagine the resulting enchilada.  Especially since I decided to make one.

This romantic fantasy, like most, occurred to me while I was lying in bed.  I was fantasizing about the half-jar of Doña María mole sauce that was left over in the fridge.  This bit of concentrated Oaxaca is meant to be mixed with four parts of water, but I felt she deserved better.  The export version of Guiness stout became her dream date.

There are better mole concentrates than the widely available Doña María version, but mingling it with the deeply roasted, malty and bittersweet Guinness took convenience cooking to a new level.  It turned black beans and supermarket spiralized butternut squash into a memorable weeknight-possible meal.

It was almost spooky how well the Irish flavors complemented the Mexican ones, but I shouldn’t have been surprised.  I’m a Jewish boy, and I’ve been married to an Irish girl for decades, with deeply memorable results.  Did I mention that she smells like apricots?

Recipe: Butternut and Black Bean Enchiladas with Guinness Stout Mole

Food Trend Physicists define three Laws of Nutritional Transformation.  The first and most important is the Law of Granola, which states that everything healthy will accumulate sugar and fat until it becomes a cookie.  The other two laws are the Law of Kale, which is that all trendy vegetables shall turn into potato chips; and the Law of Tang, which says that all foods must eventually achieve a form that can be eaten by astronauts.

Some recent events brought these immutable laws to mind.  One is that I ran into a bag of Purely Elizabeth Banana Nut Butter Grain-Free Granola on a communal lunch table, and it was already open a little bit.  This stuff is pure genius.  What struck me was not the old news that it uses all organic oils, sugars and nuts to pack in enough calories to power a sperm whale through arctic ice.  What was really impressive was the clusters.  Each one was perfectly bite-sized, with no broken-off bits.  Yet it didn’t look contrived.  The pieces were all random-looking and unique,  like snowflakes.

Plus, each cluster was paleo-crack addictive.  If our distant ancestors ate like this, it’s a wonder we bothered to invent anything more complicated than grocery bags.

Granola is not naturally clustery.  It started out as muesli mixed with oil and honey and oven-fried to a golden brown.  Occasional stirring kept the oat flakes separate, so they would cook uniformly.  That’s how Wavy Gravy served it at Woodstock, and that’s how I learned it, by gum.

My children grew up on my own cluster-free granola.  But meanwhile, the first Law of Nutritional Transformation was creating mutations.  Whenever we ran out of the homemade article and had to buy some from the store until I re-motivated, the products grew ever sweeter and clumpier.  Eventually, I grew jealous.  And curious.

I tried a number of dumb-ass things to get my original granola recipe to bunch up without adding more sugar and oil.  I even tried egg whites, which goes to show that you can’t believe everything you read on the internet.  You know that, right?  Present blog excepted.

Eaters, I did have to add a little more oil, and quite a bit more sweetening , to get the texture I wanted.  But the big secret was just to bake it longer at a lower temperature so you could cook it without stirring.  Once it’s completely cool you can break it up into oblongs of whatever size you like.

Meanwhile, a random amateur musical theater line about drowning in molasses got stuck in my head, and had me thinking about gingerbread.  If you’re going to transform your kid’s breakfast into a cookie, why not make it taste like something out of a children’s story?  This turned out to be a very, very good recipe.  I hope you run, run, run and catch it, just as fast as you can.

Recipe: Gingerbread Granola Clusters