1 of 5
Photographer: Kevin A. Roberts
Pasta with Jam Sauce, with popcorn as garnish. We gave it high marks for...color.
2 of 5
Nothing says Thanksgiving dinner like Pasta with Jam Sauce. Words to remember come November.
3 of 5
Photographer: Kevin A. Roberts
The ingredients for Pasta with Jam Sauce (shown here minus the pasta) were...marginally intriguing.
4 of 5
Photographer: Kevin A. Roberts
Loved the popcorn--by itself
5 of 5
Photographer: Kevin A. Roberts
A politely enthusiastic George Mahe
“It’s almost boiling.” Ms. Weeks urged us. “Can you wait just a couple more minutes?”
Really? Like a dish featuring blackberries, jam, Goldfish crackers, and rotelle pasta has some sort of optimal serving temperature? Like, “Well, the finish provided the broth by that carrot juice would have been a touch more piquant had you allowed the whole thing to come to a boil before spooning it up?” Like the nuances of the palate profile of a recipe designed by a hyperactive four year old child of a Hollywood celebrity is going to benefit from juusst a little more time on the stove?
But who are we to judge? Well, actually, us. We are here to judge.
Oh, yeah. Chocolate. There was also chocolate.
Like many readers, you may assume our life as a professional dining critic is one of sumptuous meals, black tie soirees, unremitting glamor flitting among the beau monde. Lurid tabloid tales, like the one that had us sipping Dudognon Heritage champagne from Eva Mendes’ Jimmy Choos, do much to further these misconceptions. (The photos, we must say here in our defense, were shamelessly doctored.)
The truth is, we live a fairly normal life. Though there are those times when we get, oh, let’s describe them as opportunities. Like when Our Editor sends an e-mail titled, “The strangest request I will ever ask of you.”
There is a lot of latitude in that.
Here’s the best way we can describe what followed:
First, the celebrity. His name is Misha Collins. When told that, nevertheless, we said “Who?”
Turns out he was on a TV program called Supernatural, to which we said, when told that, “What?”
But apparently it’s popular and Mr. Collins has accrued sufficient wealth from it he has time for other pursuits. One of them is precisely that: a pursuit. It is billed as the Greatest International Scavenger Hunt the World Has Ever Seen, or GISHWHES.
Participants enroll from all over the aforementioned world. In 2012, 14,000 participants from 69 countries entered. The idea is to accumulate points for various tasks stipulated by the hunt completed. This year, contestants are required, within a week’s time, to tackle such challenges as playing a game, any kind of game—and winning—with a professional athlete, riding in a jet that loops in flight, and photographing a pink unicorn (presumably a stuffed or toy version; there must be limits) that’s been placed atop a NASCAR car’s hood. Another was to try to pass through a TSA checkpoint at an airport while wearing scuba gear.
Among those participants this year is Ms. Stevie Weeks, who, when she is not scavenging, works for the City of Creve Coeur. Ms. Weeks contacted Our Editor. One of the challenges was to prepare a dish and have it judged by a professional dining critic.
Normally Our Editor’s days are chockful of shredding our prose and rejecting our perfectly lovely article ideas. But he admired Ms. Weeks’ initiative. And wrote to ask if we’d take the job. He said he’d come along. That should have been a clue.
The tasting was to be done in the kitchen of the Creve Coeur Rec Center. We found it. It’s located on New Ballas Road, right behind a small grove of stone obelisks that, etched with indecipherable scribblings, manage to be both odd and pointless, making them nearly perfect modern art.
We wandered around the center, a very quiet one on a weekday morning. We began to suspect Ms. Weeks may very well have decided to attempt the wearing scuba gear while trying to get through the TSA thing and would, consequently and notwithstanding the TSA’s notoriously wacky sense of humor, be otherwise occupied, going through a very personal search of her person. But no, we found her. In the center’s kitchen.
Out Editor was there. Along with SLM staff photographer Kevin Roberts. And a collection of ingredients that, well, “eclectic” doesn’t adequately describe.
“It’s a recipe created by Misha Collins’ little boy, West,” Ms. Weeks’ explained—after first explaining who Misha Collins was—“on a trip to a market.” The boy was supposed to come up with something appropriate for Thanksgiving. This being Hollywood, of course, Thanksgiving is thought to be either a celebration originating in the Punjab region or the name of a holiday special featuring Marie Osmond and Anthony Michael Hall. The poor child’s name is West, after all. So who knows what the kid was thinking?
There is a YouTube video of the evolution of the adventure (above) in case you think we’re making this up.
The towheaded toddler West announces he wants to make “pasta with jam sauce.” If you think that normal parents would explain jam and pasta do not go together, go back and reread the above paragraph, paying particular attention to the word “Hollywood.” Make sense now? West wanders through the market, plucking this item, then that, from shelves. Goldfish crackers. Apples. Blackberries. Strawberry jam. Carrot juice. Orange juice. Rotelle. Tomato sauce. Watching as he shopped for ingredients, we held our breath when little West toddled down the aisle containing laundry detergents.
Ms. Weeks’ had been hard at work, stirring up this concoction. Then it was time for the sampling. A couple of bowls of the stuff, for Editor and moi. The blackberries bobbled alongside globs of strawberry jam, in a viscous, orangeish tidal pool. Nibbles of chocolate chips stayed firmly against the sides of the bowl, as if they were embarrassed to be on the scene, but slowly, slowly melting, giving into the liquid that had already soaked the Goldfish into sad, soggy fish corpses. Wagon wheels of the pasta looked like a tiny traffic wreck had occurred somewhere within the depths. A scatter of popcorn was sprinkled on top, as a garnish. A very sick, very twisted garnish. If you turned a fire hose loose in a grocery, what was floating later in the gutter outside would look a lot like what was in the bowl.
We took a bite. We are, after all, professional in our work. Not a big bite. But a bite.
You know how there are some combinations of tastes and textures where, when you hear about them you cannot fathom how they will all almost magically blend together, nevertheless work in concert to produce something that is simply amazing? This wasn’t one of those.
“It’s not revolting,” we announced. But it was definitely in that neighborhood.
Meanwhile, we note Our Editor is wolfing this stuff down by the spoonful. Our Editor—we have been trying for two years to get him to eat tripe—is going after this pasta and jam stew like it’s streamside salmon bellies and he’s a grizzly topping off the tank before nosing into the den for winter.
“Whoa,” we say, “Slow down there, Brillat-Savarin.” He mumbles, through another mouthful, that he needs to keep eating, “so the photographer can get a good shot.” The photographer, meantime, is looking a bit pale, trying to shoot. We push our bowl his way and demand he have a taste. He’s a mensch. He does.
He says something about his wife’s cooking. It would probably not be in the best interests of his marriage to say in print exactly what. So we won’t.
Ms. Weeks’ noted, with somewhat more enthusiasm than we thought warranted, that the prize for this year’s GISHWHES, would an all-expenses-paid trip to Croatia. Yes. Croatia. According to the website, once there—as if just going to Croatia isn’t prize enough—the winners will “set sail on a pirate ship captained by Misha Collins and be treated to a survivor-style weekend adventure of revelry, mayhem, and wondermentation.”
Ostensibly, there is some distinction here between that and what happens all the time on freighters off Somalia. Not our problem. Our work was done. Ms. Weeks was off to continue the quest, wearing a swim suit made entirely of tea bags or photographing a nun on a water slide. We have concluded never ever to eat anything that combines strawberry jam and rotelle pasta.
Even if it is served in Eva Mendes’ strap-on heels.
Dining Editor's note: If anyone is curious what I thought of the young lad's dish, I will say that it was lacking something...like maybe peanut butter.
