Nobody.
Political discrepancies, imminent threat of Nuclear war,
world hunger, poverty, all would be globally allayed by the seamless magic she engenders
with the flip of her spatula, the grasp of her wrist as she gropes the handle
of a stainless steel frying pan, sautéing the entrée of note with a spate of
seasonings, a dollop of spices, a ripple of crackling simmers, benevolently basted,
served with a whole lot of cracker-barrel down home love.
It’s how food should taste. Sustenance that is not
blandly doused with oil and listlessly fried, but being honored , venerated in
the seething topography of the pan, tumbling in the sizzling surf of extra virgin
olive oil or incubated in an oven, olfactory-assenting wafts echoing through
the linoleum of her kitchen in thick hovering salivating wisps, a harbinger of
supper.
As the poached flab above my waistline will attest,
I can’t say no to her cooking.
I simply can’t.
I can’t say no to her hot chicken, which feels like
there’s a welcomed pitchfork wielding demon attending an Ozzy Osborne concert
perched inside the screen door of my lips. The hot chicken makes killer wraps
and tastes devilishly delectable, but it’s also great mixed with tortilla chips
flooded with drips of Tapatio sauce or mixed with her homemade potato shit
(that’s what it’s called, ‘potato shit’ and it is sumptuous) which is essentially
a nest of hash browns mixed with a pasture of heavily grated potatoes as well as minced and julienned
flecks, all flagellated in a carbonated pottage prior to being baked, coming
out of the oven as if being born breeched, that is it comes out kicking and
screaming. Mix Valena’s conspicuous hot chicken with a few heaping mounds of
her world famous potato shit and just watch out.
When we went camping she made these meatballs (I
called them campfire testicles) that were covered in layers of mozzarella then kneaded biscuit
dough that were just PERFECT to graze over the snap of the campfire. I couldn’t
get enough of them, on one of our epic tortuous drives we even found ourselves
18 hours away from home and the ice melted in the cooler which stowed the beer
and venom and the Testicles were even wet and even then, I still ate them, raw.
With pride.
She also makes the fucking most esculent turkey I
have ever tasted. I’d boast more but her sister-in-law who hosted thanksgiving
this year may be reading this and may, in the words of Whitman, walk way in the
bitter most envy.
Which indeed, everyone who tastes her cooking
indubitably shall.
There is also her killer breakfasts. She only buys
farm fresh eggs and she only purchases meat from our good friend Brent the
Butcher at Hadddads in West Peoria. I’ve never tastes an egg the way Valena makes
an egg. Add some fried sausage and a vat of sausage and damn (especially over a
campfire) do you a meal indeed.
She makes individualized homemade pizza out of pita
bread that (shit) I just don’t even know where to begin.
Valena is also the lone heir to the recipe of the
Famous Jackson Southern Barbecue Sauce. I’ve never tasted anything like it. The
initial slurp ferries with it a frenetic zang, a mallet smashing whoop on the
tip of your palate. It then explodes, in suicide bomb fashion, down the back of
your throat in zany tickles.
I just can’t get enough of it.
There’s a lot of Southern Illinois blood in the crab
apple tree bark of Valena’s genealogical family tree and the recipe has been
handed down. It’s destined for greatness. For years Valena has implores her
mother to share the recipe and for years her mother graciously refused. Then
the tornado hit in mid-November, decimating entire hamlets in central Illinois.
Washington Illinois was the hardest hit, entire subdivisions completely
ravaged. Valena’s parent’s live in a rural country house off a gravel chipped
road about 20 minutes outside of Washington. The house once contained a barn with horses
and a pigeon coup where her father raised over 200 pigeons. When the
unforgiving tail of the tornadic vortex ploughed into the open farmland she had
always known as home her parents’ house was reduced to a mound of shingles and pared
plywood and detritus. Everything being completely razed (her parents’ being
safe, who were at church at the time).
While we were sifting through debris during the
clean-up Valena found a damp 3 X5 notecard.
On the notecard was the recipe of the Barbecue
sauce.
Like timeless literature, some recipes just refuse
to die.
Sometimes
I’ll mix the hot chicken with the potato shit and mix them with tortilla chips
and add a sputtering drizzle of the barbecue sauce. Oh, there’s something else
we have grazed on every meal like a blessing. We purchase it at Schnucks in a thick rectangular
lactose puck. We graze it on hot chicken. We dice it on various soups. I dare
say, it has not failed to accent a single meal we have had over the last six
months.
We graze it on everything we consume. It is an
arson-invoking delicacy. It sears, beatifically burns and blesses the palate
with a pungent punt of incendiary space. It explodes. Valena will normally pick
up six blocks at a time and I honestly can’t recall a meal in the last six
months which we haven’t consumed w/out consecrating her esculent creation without
hardcore speckles of Habanero.
It compliments everything, but out of every entrée she
makes, there’s one she concocted with culinary finesse that we partake of every
week. It is the Queen Bee of the hive of
the kitchen. It is succulent. It is esculent. It dwarves all other meals in comparison
and, as you can tell form the previous eight paragraphs, her meals are pretty
fucking good.
It is her own creation and it is out of this fucking
cosmological vector of the galaxy good.
It is the taco soup.
I can’t spill into the sleeve of a sentence just how
amazing, how delectable, just how addictive the cultural delicacy that is her
taco soup. I’m privy to the recipe but I’ll remain mute for now. Let’s just say
I gorge on the Taco Soup once or twice, flooded with hot sauce and Habanero and
yes, it’s addictive. It performs sado-masochistic rituals on the tip of your palate.
The moment it slips into the orifice above your chin you feel as if you are
wearing a sombrero, performing a cha-cha dance, finding dual maracas clicking
in your fists before you bite into another chomp.
It beckons. Mix it with Valena’s potato shit, her hot chicken and few drips of
the Famous Southern Barbecue sauce and Christ has a new request as to what is
to be served as a main course during the Last Supper.
***
The last year both her friendship and her cooking have been my best friend.
What happens next is when lil' David tells her that he is going to give all this manna from southern heaven best-cooking-on-the-planet up forty days and endeavor to adhere to a vegan lifestyle.
What happens next is when Valena goes vegan.
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