The Staycation or, Everything Goes in a 425-Degree Oven for Twenty Minutes

Tomatoes suck. 

A tomato is a pupating mass of membranes, seeds, and gelatinous goo so far down the palatability scale for me it’s keeping the New Year’s abomination known as “Hoppin’ John” company. (Seems like the only place “John” is “hoppin’” to is the bathroom fixture that shares his name to spit out what to my tastebuds seems like boiled cat litter.) I will not eat anything that a slice of raw tomato has touched, because its filthy snot has a way of tainting adjacent food items with its unholy “flavor.”

Tomatoes are fit only to be rendered down, laced heavily with sugar and vinegar, and turned into ketchup.

Gross

You may be asking yourself, what has prompted this screed against a perfectly innocent fruit? (Vegetable? Hellspawn?) It’s because for almost three weeks not long ago, I was entirely responsible for creating my own meals. I normally make one meal per year — a shepherd’s pie a few days before Christmas. My wife, Shannon, is responsible the other 364 days for grocery shopping and cooking. Not because we conform to antiquated gender roles, but because she genuinely loves to cook, enjoys selecting fresh ingredients, and is very good at it. (I am Official Pot-Scrubber, Dishwasher-Filler, and Counter-Wiper-Downer, because as soon as she’s done cooking, she does the culinary equivalent of a mic drop and leaves the arena.)

Shannon would be spending twenty days in Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands. The Galapagos portion was a professional development program for educators put on by Stanford University, and the Ecuador portion was a personal vacation that I, technically, could have gone on as well. But the idea of traipsing around the Andes at altitudes over 16,000 feet and careening along narrow cliffside roads in colorful-but-deadly buses with questionable maintenance records and crammed full of live poultry did not appeal. (My Latin American bus-phobia may have been misplaced. Shannon and the friend she went with ended up on some very nice buses. She sent pictures.)

Shannon in Ecuador

So, with a few weeks off work myself, I decided on the glorious situation that goes by that too-cute-by-half portmanteau: the staycation.

Since I was now solely responsible for keeping myself alive, I decided to indulge myself even more than I usually do by making two of my favorite restaurant meals in my own kitchen — a full English breakfast and a Cobb salad. (Not at the same time, obviously.)

Which brings us back to our starting point — both of these dishes feature tomato. In the case of the full English, a fried tomato. Frying them definitely does not offer any improvement. Aesthetically, it makes them so much worse. A discolored, shriveled orange sack that looks like some kind of diseased bladder plucked from a dissected amphibian. Keep it away from my bangers, please.

My full English and Cobb salad would be proudly sans tomato.

With my Films of the Solo Beatles series (temporarily) stalled, why not turn my kitchen experiment into an entry for my neglected website? In fact, why not do the Holy Bee version of a “lifestyle” blog, complete with recipes and touting certain brand names? Maybe even throw in some product links?  

As you’ll see, it’s not much of a lifestyle. And like any good cooking blog, you’ll have to read through paragraphs and paragraphs of personal blather about my backyard, my reading habits, and my adorable pets before you get to the actual recipes. 

True Confession Time: I am a reformed cigar-smoker. Long ago in my single-guy days, from April through October, you would find me on the patio or balcony of whatever bachelor pad I was occupying, enjoying the pleasure of a book and cigar after getting home from work. When the weather turned too cold to sit outside, I would go on cigar hiatus for the duration of the winter. Even in my own place, I never smoked a cigar indoors because I’m not an animal. I was already weaning myself off them entirely (it was getting too damn expensive) when I met and subsequently married Shannon. Shannon abhors smoking in any form, so even though she never outright asked me to, I easily gave up cigars altogether over ten years ago.

Sort of. Almost.

Whenever Shannon leaves the house for two days or more, I immediately dash out and buy a pack of cigars. It has to be a two-day trip minimum, because the smell will not leave your pores after only one shower, and the taste will not entirely leave your mouth in less than 24 hours, no matter how many times you brush, floss, and rinse. Obviously, I enjoy the taste and aroma of a cigar as I’m smoking it, but once the party’s over, the odor that clings to the skin and clothes is not particularly pleasant. I also make sure the clothes I was wearing are washed, or at least completely buried at the bottom of the hamper. If it sounds like I’m trying to keep this a dirty little secret, I assure you I’m not. Shannon is well aware of my cigar-backsliding while she’s away, but why subject my lovely wife to a smell she’s sensitive to and I know she hates? (Almost as much as we both hate patchouli. If you’re one of those people who douse youself in patchouli and then parade around in public like it’s perfectly acceptable, you owe society a huge debt for not collectively vomiting in your presence.)

So these days, I smoke a few cigars about twice a year. A pack of five will get me through two days. But this summer, she’d be gone for twenty days. To hell with a pack, I bought me a full box.

I have smoked premium Cuban cigars from Havana. I once smoked a single cigar that cost in the triple digits. And they were just fine. But to me, nothing tops a good, sweet, cheap liquor store cigar.

I was never really a cigarette smoker. As a disaffected hipster teen in the early ‘90s, I sometimes puffed on those black clove cigarettes that popped and crackled as they burned (illegal in the U.S. as of 2009). A little later in life, I discovered everyone I worked with at the video store took smoke breaks in the back alley, and I decided to join them with my newly-purchased pack of Chesterfields (because that’s the brand Christopher Walken gave to Dennis Hopper in True Romance). That lasted barely a year before I decided I didn’t really want to be a “real” smoker. I switched to cigars, which you could puff away on without coating your lungs in tar. (Coating your mouth and throat with aromatic smoke seemed somehow healthier.) My preferred brand for years and years was the widely-known Swisher Sweets. I was mail-ordering them in bulk by the time I decided to curtail the habit.

Nowadays, because my smoking opportunities are much more limited, I need to get as much time and pleasure as possible out of each individual cigar, and Swisher Sweets are on the small side. I switched it up to Phillies Titans. Each one is a solid six inches long, and if you don’t go crazy with it, a slow-burning Titan will last almost an hour. I know I referred to this type of cigar as “cheap” earlier, but a pack of five Phillies Titans will run you $9.99 at your local Rite Aid. Cheap compared to Montecristos, I suppose, but the cost is another good reason to not smoke cigars too often.

In my life, cigars are indelibly associated with reading. I don’t think I have ever smoked a cigar without a book in hand. Since I don’t smoke indoors, that means an outside reading chair is a must. Even without cigars in my routine, reading outside on a nice afternoon has become habitual.

My reading chair is a Realead portable camping chair. After experimenting with a few different types of outdoor lawn chairs and patio furniture, I came to the conclusion that the chair I originally bought to take with us on our annual trip to Lake Tahoe is one of the most comfortable outdoor chairs I’ve ever sat in. The blanket tossed over it gives it that touch of Holy Bee class. Yes, the armrests are filthy, but that’s because they’ve absorbed a lot of sunscreen in the chair’s other life as a beach chair.

Realand High Back Camping Chair with foldable steel alloy frame and covered in waterproof oxford fabric (beige). It has a padded back and lumbar support, can recline a bit, and comes with two accessory pouches (one large zippered pouch on the back, one smaller mesh pouch on the arm) and a cup holder. Available on Amazon for $89.95. Since I prefer a side table to hold my beverage, the cup holder is perfect for holding three tennis balls to throw for the dogs. The chair is covered with a fringed throw blanket of cotton chenille, retail cost unknown because it was tossed in as a freebie when we bought our indoor recliners at the La-Z-Boy store.

I occupied myself during the staycation mornings and early afternoons with long put-off household and yard tasks, a little computer gaming, working on my Films of the Solo Beatles research, and minor errands. But by about three or four o’clock, I headed for the reading chair and stayed there until the sun started dipping below the horizon, and it was time to go in and start prepping one of the feasts we’ll soon get to.

I don’t read quite as voraciously as I used to. I do try to have two or three books going at once, but they take longer to get through as I get older and my mind wanders or my eyes close. I have given up all pretense of taking an interest in “literary” fiction. During the formative decade or so between the start of high school and a few years after college (roughly age 14-25ish), I got through most of the classic works from British and American authors. (Not Russian, though. Didn’t even try.) Nowadays, my reading list is almost entirely historical. Usually I have one book on ancient or medieval history alongside one on more modern history, topped off with something lighter — pop culture stuff, or genre fiction like Star Wars novels or Michael Connelly’s Bosch series. I prefer to read history in actual book form (represented here by Dan Jones’ Crusaders and Robert W. Merry’s biography of William McKinley), and the more lightweight material on my tablet. 

Outdoor reading requires a good side table. Books, tablet, and a glass of ale are all to my immediate right (usually my phone too, but it’s being used to take the picture). The ale is a Fresh-Squeezed IPA from Deschutes Brewery in Bend, Oregon. Flavored with Citra and Mosaic hops, Fresh-Squeezed comes in at 6.4% ABV, and has a mellow (for an IPA) and citrusy flavor. Highly recommended. Retails at $11.50 for a six-pack. Suitable accompaniment for all the meals described below. The tablet is essential not only for its Kindle app, but the history books I read always have me stopping every few paragraphs to look something up on Wikipedia.

Loyal dog Penny will usually settle in the leaf litter a few feet away, or directly behind my chair. Less-than-loyal dog Troy prefers the air-conditioned comfort of the house, and will come out through the dog-door to bark at me when he feels it is time for dinner. 

“Is it time yet?”

“It is TOTALLY time!”

My chair is parked under a broad-leaf privet tree in the far corner of the backyard. Additional shade comes from two trees just over the fence in the neighbor’s yard — a black locust and a valley oak. The centerpiece of the yard, directly in my field of view, is a ceanothus “shrub” that is really more of a tree. It’s twenty feet high if it’s an inch. The advantage of this is that it completely blocks me from seeing the god-awful oleander bushes that mark the far edge of the property. Oleanders are fine for freeway medians. They shouldn’t be in yards.

The view from my chair, dominated by the ceanothus, which in the last few years has thown so much shade onto the garden planter boxes that Shannon has been unable to cultivate her favorite crop. You guessed it — tomatoes. A small victory for the anti-tomato contingent of the household.

On the far side of the ceanothus is the bird feeder, which, let’s face it, is more of a squirrel feeder. When I zone out while reading, I do enjoy a bit of birdwatching, but my humble suburban subdivsion backyard does not provide a parade of variety. Nine out of every ten birds that visit are your basic irascible scrub jay. 

Towards dusk, mourning doves come to splash around in the decorative pond. I’ve seen red-tailed hawks wheeling around at high altitude, and every so often an Anna’s hummingbird with its fluorescent pink head will flit by. One time I spotted a black phoebe on the edge of the roof, and another time a western bluebird graced the fence with its presence. That’s really about it.

Scrub jay

Mourning dove

Anna’s hummingbird

Black phoebe

Western bluebird

What about our four-legged friends? Well, there’s the aforementioned squirrels. By their coloring, they appear to be fox squirrels, an invasive species native to the eastern U.S. In addition to draining the bird feeder, they also drive the dogs nuts by scampering along the fence just out of reach. Penny will crouch patiently on the ground for a half-hour at a time, thinking she’s invisible, waiting to make a pounce that will inevitably miss by a mile. Once the sun is setting, the fence highway is occasionally utilized by roof rats (or more accurately in my case, “oleander rats”), who move so quickly the dogs rarely notice them. (Possums will also trundle along the fence, but only well after midnight, so not during outdoor reading time.) On the reptilian front, the western fence lizards (or “bluebellies” as we used to call them when I was a kid trying to catch them) are so ubiquitous, the dogs have long ago stopped caring about them. 

Fox squirrel

Roof rat

Western fence lizard

The latest episode of That Darn Squirrel

Penny crouching in wait

Troy, less invested, observes from afar

OK, let’s head indoors. To the kitchen!

THE (NOT QUITE) FULL ENGLISH BREAKFAST

A proper “full English” breakfast consists of bangers, back bacon, fried eggs, fried bread, baked beans, mushrooms, and a fried tomato. Black pudding seems to be optional, as a lot of people don’t like it. I don’t mind it.

I decided to make do with what I could find at my local chain grocery store, and not go to any specialty markets, so that pretty much eliminates black pudding. The only thing I struck out on was the “back bacon,” which combines portions of both pork belly (where American strip bacon comes from) and the pork loin (which gives us the leaner Canadian bacon). British back bacon is basically a small, super-thin smoked pork chop. I got Niman Ranch Canadian bacon as a reasonable substitute. Luckily, the store carried Heinz baked beans, a product line that seems scarce in my neck of the woods. I’m reasonably certain the Heinz brand is what is used almost exclusively in full English breakfasts over in the U.K., and the more common American brands (Bush’s, Van Camp’s) don’t have quite the same flavor. Real English bangers are also pretty rare in the Sacramento area, at least in pre-packaged form, but San Francisco’s Evergood Foods saves the day. Just above the Union Jack label is the caveat “made in California,” which may upset purists, but I’ve had many English bangers in actual England, and they taste identical. (Lots of bread crumb filler is the secret.)

The fresh mushrooms were bought by Shannon before she left, so I have no idea what type they are. They appear to be regular, garden-variety mushrooms. Remember, this isn’t health food, so the bread should be white bread, not the whole-wheat-full-of-nuts-and-birdseed kind. Nature’s Own makes a good loaf of white bread. 

The process couldn’t be simpler: FRY EVERYTHING!

Including the buttered bread. This is not toast. This is fried bread. The bacon and bangers can simply be tossed in the pan and flipped around until browned and heated through. Slice the mushrooms into quarters and fry in 2 tablespoons each of butter and olive oil until thoroughly browned. You really cannot overcook them. After removing the mushrooms, use the remaining butter and oil to fry the bread. The beans can be microwaved. 

Your last step should be two sunny side up eggs. To help with yolk breakage (my biggest issue), make sure you crack the egg on a flat surface (never the edge of a pan or bowl) and into a bowl. Gently slide the eggs from the bowl into a frying pan liberally coated in melted butter. Let them fry, untouched, for about 2 minutes (or less if you’re into super runny eggs). Salt and pepper to taste. Then slide them from the pan to the plate.

The completed dish. Notice there’s no goddamn tomato. 

Sadly, the one item I’ve searched high and low for on multiple occasions continues to elude me. And that’s the absolutely wonderful British condiment known as HP sauce. Nothing in the U.S. tastes exactly like it. It is the perfect sauce for breakfast bangers. I finally ended up mail-ordering it, but it didn’t arrive in time for my initial serving. I did have it on hand for the second round the next day.

Salsa the cat is living proof that not all felines live up to their reputation of moving stealthily, almost silently. No, Salsa waddles down the hardwood-floored hall with all the grace of a bushpig. I can hear her coming two rooms away, with the dryer running and the TV on.

COBB SALAD A LA HOLY BEE

There are varying stories about how the Cobb salad came to be. The only thing that people agree on is that it was named after the owner of Hollywood’s famous Brown Derby restaurant, Robert Howard Cobb, and that it was hastily thrown together out of leftovers. I use a mix of iceberg and romaine lettuce, baked chicken breast, hard-boiled eggs, avocado, blue cheese, bacon bits, and traditional Cobb dressing.

Brine your chicken for at least 20 minutes in a bowl of lukewarm salt water to prevent it from drying out in the oven. These are Rosie organic air-chilled chicken breasts. Definitely seek out air-chilled if you can. Even I can taste the difference.

Once you’ve removed them from the brine and patted them dry, place in a baking dish. Brush with melted butter, and sprinkle with a mix of salt, pepper, paprika, and garlic powder. Bake at 425 for 20 minutes.

I’ve still yet to dial in my hard-boiled egg game perfectly, but at least I’ve learned not to overcook them. Place the eggs in a pot of cold water. There should be several inches of water over the eggs. Crank up your stovetop — as soon as the pot comes to a rolling boil, turn off the heat, cover the pot, and let them sit for about 10 minutes. Strain out the hot water, and rinse the eggs with cold water until they’re cool to the touch. Peel the eggs under running water. (And that’s where I always botch things, gouging out depressingly large chunks of egg white as I pick off bits of shell. Luckily the eggs will be sliced in half and placed on the salad yolk side up.)

I decided I didn’t want to deal with grease splatters, noisy range hood fans, and smoke alarms, so I used the underrated method of oven-baking the bacon. Unlike the full English, the Cobb utilizes regular American strip bacon. You can go super-fancy with bacon, but I prefer Farmer John — high quality at a reasonable price. Put several strips on your baking rack and put it in a 425-degree oven for at least 20 minutes. Beyond that minimum time limit, it’s really up to your taste. Keep an eye on it until it looks like it’s done to your preferred level of crispiness.

At this point, I figured it was time to turn the bacon into bacon bits using the handy mini-food processor. Initially, I thought I was just too enthusiastic about mashing that chop button because I ended up with something akin to “bacon paste.” Upon after-the-fact researching, it turns out that ideally you should cut the bacon into bits before cooking. Live and learn. Anyway, flavor trumps aesthetics in the Holy Bee kitchen, and there will be three strips’ worth of bacon-y goodness mixed into my salad, even if it’s not in photogenic “bits.”

No.

I’m not much of a blue cheese fan, but if I’m going to deliberately leave out a certain red, spherical ingredient, I should bow to authenticity in other areas. I opted for Point Reyes blue cheese, but I went pretty light with it.

Cobb salad dressing ingredients:

⅔ cup olive oil

⅓ cup red wine vinegar

¼ cup water

1 teaspoon Dijon mustard

1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce

¼ teaspoon salt

¼ teaspoon fresh ground pepper

1 small garlic clove

Juice from ½ lemon

A tiny pinch of sugar

You can painstakingly drizzle the oil into the other ingredients as you hand-whisk them in a bowl to create a perfect emulsification. Or you can just dump everything into your mini-processor and hit blast. (I went with option B.) And it turns out I misread “tsp” as “tbsp” for Dijon mustard and Worchestire sauce, so my resulting mix may have been a little heavy on those. It still tasted identical to any other Cobb dressing I’ve ever had. The dressing should rest in the fridge for at least a couple of hours. If you’re getting hungry, help yourself to the extra strip of bacon and extra hard boiled egg I know you had the foresight to make.

Shred a 50-50 mix of iceberg and romaine lettuce into a serving-size salad bowl. Mix in the bacon and blue cheese crumbles. Slice up the chicken, avocado, and eggs and place attractively on top. Drizzle liberally with dressing. Take a picture. Then mix it all up and wolf it down while watching Top Gear.

The finished dish. Trust me, there really is plenty of lettuce under all that. You know what there isn’t any of? No goddamn tomato. 

Leftover bacon can be incorporated into sandwiches, including THE BL[*]. No goddamn tomato.

So those are my signature dishes. I did those in the first few days. The rest of the time I was on survival rations, relying on a lot of throwbacks to my college apartment era.

CORN DOGS with MUSTARD and BABY POTATOES

If you leave this website remembering nothing else, at least remember this: NEVER MICROWAVE A CORN DOG! It will be mushy and awful.

Chop baby potatoes in half and place on an 18” x 13” baking pan. Drizzle with olive oil, and season with salt and fresh ground pepper. Throw a couple of Foster Farms chicken corn dogs on the tray as well. Put the whole kit in a 425-degree oven for 20 minutes. (An air-fryer is good for corn dogs, too.) Accompany with home-made artisinal spiced brown mustard. Don’t ask me about the mustard. Shannon makes it.

HOT DOG with SAURKRAUT

Caspers Famous Hot Dog (“famous for the signature SNAP”) on a Francisco International sweet French roll with artisanal home-made sauerkraut. Don’t ask me about the sauerkraut. Shannon makes it. 

PORK RAMEN with SPAM

Between the Spam and the powdered broth packet, there’s enough salt here to take down a bull moose. I suppose there’s a way to make this in a low sodium version, but hell, something’s going to kill you eventually. Cut up the Spam. Use a wire cheese slicer to ensure uniform slices. (Or don’t. See if I care.) Fry it up on the stovetop until browned on each side. For the ramen, it comes with instructions on the package. Dice up some green onion to add a little color. The chopsticks are for photo purposes only. I use this amazing new invention called the “fork.”

GRILLED CHEESE

“Plain.” “Vanilla.” “White bread.” All used as pejoratives from time to time denoting something unexciting or uninspiring. But comfort food is not supposed to be exciting nor inspiring, and grilled cheese is the ultimate comfort food. Shannon does a really nice grilled cheese with Gruyere cheese on French brioche. Reader, this ain’t that. This is the plain, vanilla (in spirit), white bread grilled cheese I ate as a preschooler.

Butter two slices of white bread and lay one butter side down in a frying pan over medium heat. Give the side facing up a quick swipe of mayonnaise (or Miracle Whip if you were dropped on your head as an infant). Slap down two slices of Kraft processed American cheese food. Cover with the second buttered slice (butter side up). Flip when the bottom side is golden brown. It won’t take long, so don’t wander off. I use a panini grill to make the process even faster. (If you want to be a high-roller, you can get Kraft’s “Deli Deluxe” American cheese for a dollar more. The Chicago Tribune raved about it.)

KRAFT MAC & CHEESE

Ah, the ultimate college dorm/apartment meal. As with ramen, there are clear instructions on the packaging — just follow those and you can’t go wrong. And Kraft has finally let go of the absurd fantasy that you can open a corner of the box by simply pressing a small perforated tab. Anyone else have multiple experiences with smashed-in, unopenable box corners? I can’t be the only one who’s ever hacked open one of those stupid things with a steak knife. The modern-day Kraft Mac & Cheese packaging no longer has that “feature.”

So I survived. Shannon brought me back some Ecuadorian aguardiente:

Made in this still built from WWII army surplus parts:

And the Holy Bee doesn’t always do “staycations”:

In the U.K., 2018 — Read all about it starting here. I ate bangers for almost every meal.

In Costa Rica, 2021. No bangers, but hats off to their Imperial beer, which I drank by the literal bucket.