Phone a friend? Or not….
Our kitchen is a bit crowded right now. My son and two friends are making french fries. I am making ketchup. (One of those ridiculous things I try just once, for fun, like making bagels, or brioche, or sushi.) My recipe tells me to peel four tomatoes. I don’t know how, and I think,
I should call Anne. She’ll know how.
Meanwhile, the three teenage boys are using my son’s favorite Christmas present, a FryBaby. It hasn’t seen a lot of action lately (woo hoo, says I). My son forgets how to tell when the vat-o-oil is ready. He says,
I’ll Google it.
Now, I Google plenty. My son consults his friends a lot too. But I still thought it was funny that my first thought was to ask a person, and his first thought was to ask a tool. Nothing profound there. I am three decades older than he. But our opposite instincts still made me laugh.
Short random takes:
- Oddly, I’d planned to make the ketchup with no prior knowledge of the french fry plot. I was just eager to try making ketchup with all the juicy tomatoes available at my farm market. I get inspired to try silly recipes when I read them on the dock in Maine. Usually I tear them out and quickly, wryly, tear them up when reality hits me again, back at home.
- Here is my ketchup recipe, from the current issue of Metroplitan Home. I just finished cooking it (albeit neglected and somewhat burned at the bottom of the pan, because I have been simultaneously writing this post.) It’s much spicier than Heinz. More adult. Overheard; son telling friends, “I don’t know what this tastes like. Not ketchup. But it’s good.”
- Oddly, the only place I could find the recipe was on Yahoo! Shine. Two reactions: why are so many magazines so poor at indexing their content? (OK, I know, dying businesses don’t invest.) Second: Hooray for Yahoo! Shine. We have a nice relationship with them at Daily Grommet and I think they are really trying to run good content.
- Here’s one “No-I-am-not-crazy” reason to make homemade ketchup, that I just picked up on Yahoo!….the third ingredient in commercial ketchup is high fructose corn syrup.
- In making this ketchup, I finished up my precious bottle of French apple cider vinegar I bought at an Irish farm market. It’s my secret pie crust ingredient. I hope I can find the same Stateside.
- Teenage boys are changing. Cooking is cool. I took this same trio to the mall last night. Visiting Williams Sonoma was their second requested destination. “Dinner” was first. I was quietly waiting for “Game Stop,” but it never came up.
- OK enough Betty Crocker. There must be a product road map or spreadsheet I should be building.
My end result--took me a month to get the photo inserted here....I still sometimes use a film camera, with the whole processing lag time thing.
Jules Pieri 
2 Responses to “Phone a friend? Or not….”
Hi – I just came across your cool blog from HARO, and I’m loving it – I spent a year in Ireland in the late 70s – sob. One of my fondest memories from my childhood is being at my aunt’s house on the river and deciding to make ketchup. I put a tomato on top of an empty bottle – and figured that it would just slowly drain into it. !!! Dumb, huh? I watched that thing for days!
Cindy….That tomato ketchup story cracked me up. Someday I’ll write a blog post about my childhood belief that I was the only person on the planet who could see molecules in the air. Your ketchup experiment is not all that dumb, comparatively. And kind of creative for a little kid too.