perfidy

As previously noted, I took a leave of absence last weekend to travel to Savannah in the great state of Georgia to visit my sister and my newly arrived nephew, Sir David the Astonishingly Hirsute. They're both fine.

An added benefit of my trip was that my birthday is coming soon, and therefore I ate particularly well. Every year around my birthday, Chainsaw treats me to a giant seafood blowout the likes of which you have never seen. This year we had a cookout during which I began eating at 4 in the afternoon and didn't really stop until 3 the following morning.

The menu:

• Gigantic bucketsful of three kinds of shellfish (oysters, clams, mussels), steamed with wine and aromatics.
• grilled tuna steaks marinated in soy sauce and sesame oil with ginger and wasabi
• two beer butt chickens
• a spice-rubbed flank steak, medium-rare
• bratwursts
• There was also potato salad. I think.

We also consumed many more beers than seemed likely, or even possible, considering the advancing age of the several participants. While I will incriminate nobody and admit to nothing, a group of six gentlemen consumed between them more than 100 beers plus a glass each Remy Martin (my birthday, you see!) and an odd martini or three.

After a late-night snack of empanadas, I retired. The next day we recovered with a lunch of a gigantic pot of sancocho, a South American soup made with various meats (in this case chicken, beef loin, beef necks, and possibly turkey, though pork, oxtail, and sausages are also traditional) and starches (in this case potatoes, carrots, yucca, plantians, corn on the cob) plus aromatics. Truly there is no more restorative food in the world than a cup of sancocho broth and a nice plate of meat and starch garnished with pico de gallo and hot sauce. Did I mention my brother in law is Colombian, and among our party we numbered two former line cooks, a dedicated amateur (yrs truly) and a restaurant manager?

For dinner that night I made my famous 4-cheese macaroni and cheese, thereby completing the culinary cultural exchange initiated by the empanadas and sancocho, and later I baked bread. I don't often bake outside of my own house, so I was a bit taken aback when I came into the kitchen after taking my loaves out of the oven to find four grow men standing over my bread with a digital camera, pointing and whispering. They turned to me as one, as though driven by some pack instinct, and asked "when can we eat it??" So that was nice.

When my family get together, we eat good.

Then, of course, I came home to my loving wife who was suffering from a deficiency of Vitamin Me.