Why hello there, and…man, is today’s post going to be a weird one. Partly because, in Classic Jon fashion, I forget that Holidays are not in-addition to the rest of the week, and thus it was only at 1 AM this morning that I realized “Oh, wait, yesterday wasn’t just St Paddy’s Day. It was also Wednesday, which means I should have figured something out for Thursday’s post.” And…while I could play up the idea that I’m hungover, I actually didn’t drink at all yesterday. Between trying to lose weight this year, a lot of health-based anxiety, and the fact that (as might impress old college friends of mine) I’m really just a social drinker: Sure, I have, in the past, consumed 3 quarts of cocktail at one St Paddy’s Day party, becoming so intoxicated that my memories of the event became scattered over multiple days as my brain tried to offload the strain of trying to stay alive AND remember things…but that was AT A PARTY. But I’ve gotten off-track. The point is, I didn’t come up with anything, so we’re going to talk about what I had, how I got it, and why it’s an idea you should consider.

A Brief Reminder: Jon is Sometimes Insufferably Bougie

Yes, thank you Title Jon. I do want to preface this discussion with the note that a lot of the advice I’m about to give, and the things I’m going to talk about, require a certain level of baseline income. Like, yes, similar tools and ideas work for those who are struggling, but in general, this might come off a little like when a TV chef says “and of course, this would be best with HOMEMADE Sourdough Foccacia, but if you have to use store-bought, that’s fine.”

Don’t patronize me, Martha!

Because…well, because my family had St Paddy’s Day catered. Specifically, and I will try and make myself look a little better here: there’s a local catering company, actually VERY close to my house: I could walk there and back in about 16 minutes if I needed to. …I just remembered by my Pullman standards that isn’t actually super-close, so allow me to clarify that it is within half-a-mile, and is located in the closest commercial building to my house: it’s not super close, but it’s literally the closest it can be. So a couple months back, as part of the idea of trying out new local places (pre-emptively practicing what I preached two weeks ago) I learned that you could buy individual lunches/meals from them. (At least during COVID. I have no interest in digging through their FB to learn if this was a thing in The Before Times.)  And I said “yeah, that sounds like something to try.” So we got a couple sandwiches and some sides from them, said “Those were pretty good.”(Very emotionally committed responses) And then we kind of forgot about them until it popped up on my FB in January that there had been a minor hit-and-run accident with one of their vans. Knowing how turbulent this time is for small businesses, we decided to help support them by buying up a catered holiday menu they set up for the Super Bo-For Tom Brady’s inauguration into NFL legend. (Not TODAY, NFL lawyers!) We had a very good time with almost all of the food, and so when talking about upcoming holidays in the intervening 6 weeks, we’ve made a point to check out if they’re doing a menu.

Thus we come to today. Or, yesterday. Where, and this was my literal schedule for the day, I had to wake up early in case we needed to drive to Tacoma to get my mother’s Audi back from the mechanic, run to the local Italian deli because for the past 8ish weeks, we’ve gotten lunch (and a dinner for Nate and Mom) there on Wednesdays, and then we had to rush to the caterers so we could get back home in time for me to have my once-every-other-week therapy call. Which…MAN is that is a middle-class set-up. “Rush the caterers so we can get home in time for my call with my therapist”? My only recourse is to undermine this by filling my personal space with untended filth, and just now remembering I grabbed a cheese sample from the deli that’s been sitting in my coat pocket for over 14 hours.

This picture is taken more than 12 hours after I wrote that, seconds before I ate it. My power as garbage monster is unquenchable.

So, what did we get, and why is this in any way relevant to your life? Good questions. We’ll do a bit of a whirlwind breakdown of the dishes, our thoughts, and then why I think this is useful for more than just food porn/Jon humble-bragging.

The Menu

Now, the first thing you need to know is that my family cheated, and we have a fairly maximalist approach to consumables. If my mother likes a particular cider at a cidery we visit every other month, we don’t buy 1-2, we buy 5, and then she doesn’t drink any of them. In the same way, This meal has 2 add-ons built into it, AND we actually had two separate orders, because they don’t allow mixing the main entrée, and I refused to NOT get Corned Beef, so we actually ordered dinner for 6 people, so that we could make some meals out of the leftovers, and get both entrees.

This is neither of the entrees, despite being maybe the best looking item in the bunch.

The first course was a wedge salad, with blue cheese, sliced almonds, apples, and a honey mustard dressing. It was, in a word: CRISP.  Given how chilly it is right now (at least in my neck of the woods), the cool lettuce was bordering on too cold, but otherwise, I felt it worked admirably well. I liked a couple small details, like, on its own, the dressing was a little too strong, in order to balance out when drizzled on the leaves.

Ah yes, the ever photogenic Soup.

Second course was a Cheddar and Stout Soup, which my family were all impressed by: beer cheese soups are often too cheesy and too beer-y. Like, “oh good, my bowl of hot IPA stirred with slightyly-grainy cheese-grease is here.” From a technical standpoint, I’d say it’s a dish with a “very low result floor”: when it’s bad, it’s BAD. This one, however, was good! There were some very finely processed vegetables (like, ‘pieces measured in millimeters’ small) a little bit of bacon, and the balance of beer and cheese was spot-on.

Just to pacify you, as I had to pacify Nate: that is pre-steamed cabbage. We did not heat up a sandwich with lettuce in it.

Third, we had our first add-on, “Irishman Sliders”: a pretzel-bun sandwich with ham, cheese, steamed cabbage, mustard, and a parsley-tarragon sauce. Now, I knew I was going to be fine with it, because the non-slider version of it was actually one of the first sandwiches we tried from them. (Speaking of, these ‘sliders’ were big-ol’ boys. We’re talking “5 inches across” size. We cut them in half, and they were still pretty solid “sliders”.)

I confess that, while eating, I got distracted, so I had to take this picture and the next of the leftovers.
which, yes, means this is the LEFTOVER corned beef and Colcannon.

Next up, we were into the entrees, which actually had some minor issues: turns out their shepherd’s pie was so dense, and our oven so old, that we had to DOUBLE the warm-up time for it, and even then, we gave up when it was heated to 158 instead of the recommended 165.  So first, we had the corned beef, cabbage, and colcannon. Which, for my verdict, was a little underwhelming. As Nate and I discussed, corned beef is a tough cut to get right. I think I’ve only had like, 3-4 corned beefs I really rate as great, and one of them may have sent me to the hospital. And hey, maybe this was our fault: we were heating it in an oven that was struggling to heat several things, so maybe we didn’t get it back to temp and let the connective tissue break-down enough. The Colcannon had good flavor, I wish it just had a little more texture from the veggies, but even with that critique I’d rate it highly.   

It’s a very nice crust that tells us nothing about what’s inside.

Next up, the second add-on, which were beef-lamb pot pies. These were, in my book, pretty impressive. I had NO critique of how well broken-down the meat was in these suckers, the sauce tasted pretty good, and the puff-pastry top was good. My ONE little nit-pick was that the sauce was maybe a little too thick: it was almost closer to a spice paste on the meat than a full “sauce”.

Behold our goop wave.

Then came the Shepherd’s Pie, which was quite good, if a little problematic in the other direction: probably thanks to our old beat-up oven, the interior was closer to soup than stew, so as we scooped our portions from one end, the filling flowed over and filled in the gap. Still, quite tasty.

By this point, I was roughly balloon-shaped, and my hand was unsteady photographing the finale.

And lastly, we had a bread-pudding dessert with whiskey caramel. Which didn’t have any of the little textural issues we’d been running into: it was just a good bread pudding with a very good caramel.

And because we ordered so much, we’ve got plenty for lunches, dinners, and snacks for a couple days. So…why am I telling you all this.

The Point of the Pitch

You may have noticed that I never mentioned the name of the business we used. That’s for a couple reasons. For one thing, I didn’t talk to them about reviewing their product, nor do I see this as a review. A lot of our readers don’t live where they could take advantage of the business even if they wanted to. And because who this specific company was isn’t the point. If you want to know, it wouldn’t be too hard to figure out with like, 10 minutes on Google. I’ve already said where I live, there’s only so many caterers in town*, and with this menu you could find them fairly easily. No, the point is more built into that asterisk, and in its general applicability. It turns out that, between my town and the closest next one, there’s over 12 small caterers not connected with a national or international franchise, which is VASTLY more than I anticipated. And it plays into that same idea I talked about 2 weeks ago, of learning about the options in your area. And something a little…deeper, if murkier.

Did somebody say “Murky”?

There’s a saying that gets bandied about in discussions of the habits of the powerful/rich, and in self-help literature, which is generally framed in something more or less summarized as “The rich buy time, the poor spend it.” Like, let me highlight an idea for you: I used to make an average of $15 an hour, back in 2012-2015. It is, mentally, how I measure the value of my labor (though, technically, I should have adjusted for inflation by this point.) And that’s useful, because it tells me what tasks are worth my time.

Like, let’s say your lawn gets covered in leaves, and you don’t enjoy raking leaves. If you make say, $30 an hour, and it takes 2 hours to rake the leaves…is that task worth $60? Or would you “save money” by paying someone $30 to rake it for you? It’s a concept I’ve been reflecting on a lot: take the downstairs fridge, for instance. We bought that fridge in part because we decided to hold my 30th Birthday Party at my house rather than rent out a party-approved AirBnB for $1,000. But cleaning the downstairs room took my mom, Nate and I like, 20 hours apiece. Nate makes like, twenty-something an hour, my mom makes over forty, so if you work the math out, Just by taking up Nate and my mom’s time for that long, it technically “cost us more” to clean that room than if we’d just rented the house, BEFORE we bought the fridge.

He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white fridge agent, or be the white fridge principal, I will wreak that hate upon him

Now, of course, it’s a messy abacus: cleaning the room for my party also let us hold several more social events there over the following year and a half, the fridge has been useful for other events as well, and there’s a certain reduction in value of labor for  things you can do in your spare time, or that you enjoy doing (like, I don’t think of the time I spend watching a MOVIE as ‘costing X amount of money’) But like, if I spend 3 hours hunting through my house for an allen wrench I could go to the store and buy with $10 and 30 minutes of effort, that math doesn’t add up. I traded $45 for $17.5.  And that same concept can be applied to food.

Many chefs will tell you that it’s best to cook your own meals, to use the least processed ingredients, and so on and so forth. And yes, those are ‘best’ practices. But do you have any idea how long it would have taken me to replicate this menu? Paying for ingredients, trying to cook 5 different dishes in the oven and on the stove? It would have been DAYS of work for me. Or I could pay roughly $40 per person for it, and know that all I need to do is pop the dishes into the oven and pull them out when they’re ready. Will they be “perfect”? No, but they wouldn’t be if I made them either, and by using this company, my family ‘saved’ 12+ hours of labor that I was then able to spend just enjoying the week. And that’s a pretty solid investment.

So, in the end, what I’m saying is, as I’ve said before, it’s perfectly understandable to need days where you DON’T cook. And even when you are, it’s nice to have days where you make it easy on yourself. There’s a middle ground between “my 9th Big Mac of the week” and “homemade sourdough focaccia”. You can buy pre-shredded potatoes, or nice lasagna, and just pop it in the oven, maybe spend 20 minutes making a vegetable side to go with it.

One of the mental health things I struggle with is what I call “temporal padding”, which is kind of an off-shoot of executive dysfunction: I’ve got an appointment tomorrow at 2:30. So I should leave around 2:15. So I need to stop doing things around 2. So I shouldn’t START anything after 1:30. So maybe I should skip breakfast entirely. I understand that cooking can be a weight on the mind. And it’s okay to offload some of that weight on people who make a living doing it. It’s alright to pamper yourself, or to spend a couple hours of pay to save yourself more hours of turmoil.

MONDAY: JON MAKES “CHICKEN” THAT’S NEVER SEEN AN EGG.

THURSDAY: LOOK, IT’S PRETTY CLEAR SINCE THE START OF 2021 THAT JON HAS NOT HAD A HANDLE ON THE THURSDAY POSTS. LET’S JUST ACCEPT WHATEVER SHOWS UP IN THE SPIRIT OF FRIENDSHIP.