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how to make a 1950s meal more interesting
Wednesday, April 23 2025
When I got home from work today, I immediately took the dogs for a walk, and initially it only seemed like Charlotte was coming. But when I got distracted working at the west extension of the Chamomile Wall and Charlotte settled down to gnaw on one of Crazy Dave's dog's bones, it wasn't long before Neville came shuffling down the Stick Trail. So the walk eventually continued southward, then up the escarpment to the Chamomile Headwaters Trail and home. Temperatures were in the mid 70s and those little gnats, the kind that hover in front of your face, were out in force. (There are precious few warm days in spring without those.)
Back at the house, Gretchen had put out a rice pilaf mix from Trader Joes and had thawed some exotic vegan steaks: "Juicy Marbles" from a Slovenian company that might also have the name Surreal Kitchen, and my task was to make a traditional 1950s-style American meal with them. The pilaf required sautéing in butter and then conventional rice preparation, so I did it as a two-stage task in the InstantPot (starting with its sautee feature). As for the steaks, I just sliced them to make them half as thick and cooked them among mushrooms and onions in a frying pan, flipping frequently. Eventually I added a bunch of water with bouillon and used that to cook broccoli with everything in the pan. Gretchen came home during the later part of this operation and wasn't happy that I hadn't followed any specific directions for the juicy marbles. (These were the first steaks, vegan or otherwise, that I had ever attempted to cook.) You're supposed to rub them with salt and maybe marinade them, and I hadn't done any of that. So Gretchen fished the Juicy Marbles out of the frying pan and cooked them separately while following the directions to the extent this was still possible. I should mention that the juicy marbles really look like meat, though the "blood" they exude is the wrong color and appears to be beet juice.
The resulting steaks had an uncanny meatlike appearance and flavor. I mixed my rice, broccoli, and steak (which was breaking into small pieces) all together on my plate and added Matouk's calypso hot sauce, so in that respect the meal wasn't very 1950s-style American. But I think the rigor of keeping items on a dinner plate separate was part of what made the 1950s bland and uninspiring (in other words, that was back before Loving vs. Virginia affected what dinner items were permitted to do).
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