Broad Swath

I grew up in Wheaton, Illinois - a Western suburb of Chicago.  We moved into a new house on Plamondon Court when I was five months old.  Wheaton has few claims to fame.  It is the home of Wheaton College, a Christian school so conservative that dancing was banned at campus events - unless it was square dancing.  This ban was lifted in 2003, with the statement that dancing was allowed, "as long as students use caution and good judgment and avoid any behavior which may be immodest, sinfully erotic, or harmfully violent." So...        there's that. Wheaton Central, or Wheaton Community High School as it was known before more high schools were built, has at least four famous alumni: Edwin Hubble, Red Grange, Bob Woodward*, and John Belushi.  That list may provide some balance to the college.  John graduated in 1967, appeared in the first airing of Saturday Night on October 11, 1975, and married his high school sweetheart, Judy Ja...

      A few years ago we paid a quick visit to Martha's nephew Max and his wife Jen in their cool San Francisco neighborhood as the start of a family spring break vacation.  We met Lily their boxador and they served us fresh pea soup from their Vitamix.  We had a lovely time, but Monday came and they were not on vacation.  So they directed us to a nearby breakfast place to fuel up before our drive south to Big Sur.  I can't remember the name.  It was a couple blocks away.  I poked around on a Google map but came up empty.  Maybe it's not there anymore.  Anyway...      We were seated near a table at which an African American woman I recognized was finishing her meal with a couple friends.  (Your chances of seeing someone famous are much higher in a cool San Francisco neighborhood than in Madison.)  I pointed her out, and Martha agreed she was somebody, but we couldn't agree on a name. ...

It started here... "Chinese Breakfast" is what Martha and I call it.  This is not in any way intended to be an authoritative introduction to what folks there eat for their first meal. Martha and I have traveled to China twice.  The first was in June of 2000 to meet and bring home our daughter, and oldest child, Lily.  Food memories are scarce from that trip.  The second was in June of 2014 as a family of four with son Owen in tow.  This was an organized tour whose priorities included some attention to food.  Some of our meals would have rightly been called feasts. Owen & Lily (right) feasting. The experience that changed meals at home, was breakfast. Several of the hotels we stayed at would organize breakfast buffets with a ridiculous variety of choices.  They had a Western table with pastries, cereals, an omelette station, sausage, bacon, pancakes, etc.  And then there was the Eastern region.  I suppose it could have been ...

Good tomatoes are coming.  And sweet corn.  It won't be long now... Far and away the most common summer meal in my family was what Dad called "AGR Dinner."  It was a simple one: grilled steak, corn on the cob, and sliced tomatoes with salt and pepper; maybe some Wishbone dressing.  What it lacked in complexity was made up for with quality ingredients; it was timed with the arrival of those first good tomatoes from the garden, or farm stand.   You could say that the history of this meal began about 7,000 years ago in central Mexico when a grass, teosinte, began evolving into maize.  It makes more sense to start in Durand, Illinois in 1942.  In the summer of that year you could have found my dad holding the reins of two horses pulling him and a one-row cultivator through a field of corn.  Maybe it's the Fourth of July, and the corn is knee high.  George is 16, and in a few weeks he will leave the farm for his first year at the Universit...

Today is our silver wedding anniversary.  (Happy anniversary my love.) Twenty-five years ago Martha and I were married at Faith, Hope, and Charity catholic church.  The ceremony was followed by a reception at the Glen View Club where we were entertained by, and some of us danced to, Las Toallitas - a band from Chicago Martha and I had selected.  Doesn't every wedding need a band wearing fezzes with a woman banging on a rack of automobile brake drums?  That was the last O'Brien wedding with music chosen by the wedding couple. We had wanted Brave Combo, a polka band from Texas that we had seen a couple times in St. Louis, but they weren't going to be anywhere near Chicago.  When we asked for a recommendation they said Las Toallitas had opened for them recently and were fabulous.  In our defense we did our research, and went to a show to check them out.  Martha's brother Joe came with us.  He gave them a thumbs up.  That was perhaps a...

I am rereading Brown Dog , by Jim Harrison.  It is the collected novellas that feature the character of the same name, or B.D.  I don't often reread something.  I haven't read anything else quite like it.  It causes frequent bursts of uncontrolled laughter.  It's often a kind of startled laugh, and I think that's due to some recognition, or a kernel of fear, that there is a bit of B.D. in me. The New York Time's Sunday Book Review described B. D. this way: If Brown Dog qualifies as civilized, it’s only a part-time vocation. He is an “anti-magnet for money”; lust flares in his loins every 15 minutes; four days without a drink seems his best record. He plans to fast before going into “battle” (i.e., chucking fireworks at an ex-girlfriend), but a couple of hours later, he gets “distracted by a pail of fresh smelt” and “two cases of beer.” Running from the police, B. D. asks to stop for breakfast. He prefers to sleep outdoors because houses are too wa...

When I was a kid my mother would sometimes wash my hair at the kitchen sink.  I think the idea was, "This kid's hair is filthy and we don't have time for a bath."  You know how at a salon there's that sink with the head rest and you're tilted backwards and it's comfortable if not downright relaxing?  This wasn't like that.  I would stand on the red step stool, bent forward with my head way down.  Mom would scrub away and then use the pull out sprayer to rinse out the shampoo.  One time, with my voice reverberating down in the sink, I asked her, "Am I going to be bald like Dad?"  The question must have caught her off guard.  Her reply was something like,  "Well, Dad grew up on a farm, and... you wash your hair a lot more often."  She was a smart lady, but we all have our moments.  What mother would be prepared to say yes?  She redeemed herself somewhat by adding, "And you brush your teeth more, so you're less likely to...

     This is about something that makes me feel better.  I find myself needing to feel better lately because I'm not yet prepared to run for office, become a climate scientist, open an opioid treatment center, or take down the NRA.  I really love composting.  It's something I can do right now, every day.  It makes me feel good.  Maybe composting makes you feel better too, or could if you did.      I have been composting for over twenty years and have arrived at what is for me the perfect ratio of labor to return.  There are two piles: the one that I'm adding to, and the one that's been sitting there breaking down for about a year.  Our stainless steel compost bucket makes it's journey from the kitchen out to the younger pile almost every day.  In the spring I process the old pile, start a new one, and stop adding to what is now the new old pile.  Now about that joy...      Let'...

      I love my dad to death, something I need to be careful about because he turns 93 today.  I don't tell him that I love him often enough.  He's getting a kick out of this blog, and I'm getting a kick out of him getting a kick out of this blog.       Dad really loved his wife Marilyn.  They had one of those storybook romances that seem to have been more common among our Greatest Generation than the ones that followed.  WWII interrupted Dad's college years, he served in the Navy, and when he returned there was Marilyn in chemistry class almost like she was waiting for him.   They married, started a family, he built a career in agricultural journalism and advertising, she made a home, they raised their kids together, and they loved each other completely every day until Mom died about two years ago.       Dad loved Mom so much that birthdays, anniversaries, and holid...

     Go to Costa Rica for the wildlife, or maybe the beaches.  Don't go for the food, or the culture, or the shopping. Go so that you can stand in one place and within the span of about thirty minutes see three species of monkey, scarlet macaws, parrots, lizards, and a woolly opossum. I can't promise that you will have that experience, but we did. Photo by Martha O'Brien      A little over a year ago my family started planning a spring break trip. We don't usually make a big deal out of it but this time we considered Mexico - we hadn't traveled there before, it was likely our last spring break with our daughter Lily, and both our kids were studying Spanish.  We then realized that Martha's sister Liz and her husband Rich were thinking about traveling to that part of the planet in the same time frame and we started collaborating.  We ended up enthusiastically bound for the Osa peninsula of Costa Rica. Monkey scat on the...

     I'm guessing most serious home cooks have made attempts at making foods that are cheap and readily available at the grocery store just to see if the homemade version is worth the effort.  I have.  My list of experiments includes pasta (not worth it), yogurt (worth it), canned tomatoes (not), bread (absolutely), crackers (nope), sauerkraut (yes, and don't even think of buying the stuff in little green cans).  Maybe I'm a really bad pasta maker.  My latest addition to this list is corn tortillas and the verdict is... two thumbs up.      Decades ago, when Martha and I lived in St. Louis, we went to a Mexican restaurant that made their own tortillas - maybe it's still there.  While you waited for your table you could watch a woman press the dough into thin circles and flip them onto a rotating griddle. They arrived at your table steaming in a special container. They served those instead of chips! As I think about it now ...