Jeff Johnson's Blog: Will Fight Evil 4 Food

I haven’t had this much fun reading anything since I read True Grit years back.  It’s an utterly original book with a wild strange plot made plausible by voice and setting details and exceptional writing. Overnight I find that I’m a Jeff Johnson fan. -World Fantasy Award Winner JAMES P. BLAYLOCK

“…lowdown drunken partners on the realistic poverty road, what seems like fantasy for most of the story, becomes advanced science fiction at the end, and makes it into unified fiction that works wonderfully.” —Prix Apollo winner and multiple Hugo and Nebula Award nominee NORMAN SPINRAD

“Jeff Johnson is a master of characterization and suspense. I Shop At Laney’s will keep you riveted and enchanted from the first page to the last.” —Hugo Award-winning author of The Oppenheimer Alternative ROBERT J. SAWYER

Laney Bozeman works at a lonely roadside junk shop in a remote corner of New Mexico. He reads old paperbacks and daydreams on his two-week shifts, and by night he stargazes and dabbles in the kitchen of the tiny attendant’s bungalow. He sleeps in his truck during his time off and explores, though lately he’s been carrying on with the beautiful clerk Maria from Big Donut in Roswell, so a different life might be on the horizon. The old carnie Ralston Orley is supposed to be gone when he arrives for their bimonthly sunset shift change, but this time he’s still there, half naked and blackout drunk, and he’s dragged a gigantic belt buckle into the living room.

My wife and I watched this feckless, rambling video game/movie on Thanksgiving Day. We’re in scenic Da Nang, Vietnam, and we reasoned that a corny science fiction movie would be the taste of home we didn’t especially need. We were right. A plot summary-

A handful of oily, greasy dipshit kids have a space ship and they discover some corporate treasure drifting past the shit hole planet they live on. With the help of a glitchy robot (the only actor who can act in the entire ensemble) they break in and make mistake after mistake until they die. The lone survivor poops herself out of the wreckage in case the box office numbers are high enough for a sequel.

The science fiction field is brimming with talent right now, more so than ever. And yet this was not written by any of them. Not one could be coaxed into writing a screenplay on spec, not one of them had the steely fortitude to endure endless rounds of zoom calls, dunce cap meetings, dead ends, and general scheming, and in the end the only writers at the table were politicians. This is why we can’t have nice things.

I’m note sure anyone else has noticed, but we’re in a truly morbid period when it comes to screen entertainment. Madness, isolation, greed, depravity, pettiness, squalor, and as with Alien Romulus, bad writing, have taken the stage. The Golden Age of Smallness is here, and right when we don’t need it. Something good will come of this, I’m sure of it.

I had no idea why I was in Morocco.

            The woman I was dating was maybe ten years older than I was at the time. She was also a belly dancer. This already strains credibility, but it’s sadly true, as anyone who knows me can attest. I was 19 or 20, a stoned punk kid surfing the nerve-wracking beginnings of a tattoo career- exactly the kind of enterprising young shithead who goes to Morocco with a belly dancer. The gal, we’ll call her Mary, was also an artist (a good one), and a Southern California white girl whose hobbies, beyond belly dancing, included other guys and an earnest desire to impress her college pals with travel stories. One night someone knocked the side mirror off Mary’s new pickup truck and a week later the insurance company cut her a massive check. That very night she asked me an important question.

            “Where should we go?”

            “Whattay mean?” I didn’t really want to go anywhere. I was busy drowning at work.

            “With this money?” Mary was so excited. “Europe! Somewhere in Europe. Where did you always want to go?”

            I thought about it. “Maybe France. England would be cool.” I thought about the mohawk punks by the fountain in London, how nice it might be to sniff glue with them.

            That is how we went to Spain and Morocco.

            I was basically accompanying her on her dream trip, she was loaded and I was poor, so it was gonna be awkward. Spain proved to be a lean place for me, but most travelers in their late teens have the same hungry European experience, and I wound up only paying for about half of my ticket, so whatever. But I was delighted when we finally got the Moroccan part of her itinerary. I’d heard the food was cheap.

            That first day in Tangiers I was surprised. The port area was full of muggers in 1989, and I would have fared reasonably well there if I’d been alone. We rapidly forged on, deeper into the country, and important things began to happen. We hooked up with an older gay waiter from Maine, a guy named Richard, and Richard and Mary began to do the kinds of tourist things Mary lived for- sightseeing, eating at the kinds of theme restaurants that catered to visitors, and visiting museums. More power to them, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that kind of travel, but even then I was a people and culture brand of tourist. I bought a robe and this strange little hat and merged with the crowds. My disguise was half-baked in the beginning, but it got better. My shoes were already crappy, and without sunscreen, my face turned a deep, fried walnut. I grew a beard to protect my skin, but in truth I can’t really grow a beard, so I looked like a malnourished religious lunatic. I don’t know what the local people thought I was, they didn’t ask.

            It was in the mountain city of Chefchaouen that I discovered a breakfast treat that would delight me for years to come. I fell into the habit of spending the early hours roaming far and wide, in the cool period just before and after sunrise. Often, I would see groups of local laborers huddled around tents eating bowls of something served with communal sheets of flatbread. One morning I waited until the tables were emptying and swooped in and took a seat, then ordered with gestures and nods.

            What came was amazing! It was a fava bean soup, slightly spicy, with a thin sheen of olive oil on top and in the center of that, maybe half a teaspoon of white vinegar. I ate it fast. It was by far the best thing I’d had on that trip so far and at the equivalent of 10 cents it was smack dab in the center of my budget. Breakfast for the rest of the trip would be the most important meal of the day. Weeks passed. Great adventures happened. When pressed, Mary turned out to be a surprisingly broad and fast thinker, and she also turned out to be super tough, as in Pirate Bride of Conan gnarly. She eventually took to this soup, too, and woe was the sword-wielding fool who got his fingers close to her mouth while she was eating. Here’s how you make it.

BESSARA

Serves four

2 cups dried fava beans (about a pound)

6 garlic cloves (peeled and finely sliced)

8 cups water

2 1-2 tbs cumin seeds

1 tbs paprika

Pinch of cayenne

2 tbsp olive oil

1 lemon (juice)

Sea salt (to taste)

Soak the beans for 2-3 hours, then rinse well in cold water. Place in a large saucepan and cover with 8 cups of water, bring to a boil, lower to a simmer, and place a lid on. Leave to cook for 45 minutes or until soft, stirring now and then.

Toast the cumin seeds in a separate pan for a minute. You’ll smell it happening. Don’t burn them. Blend in spice grinder.

Add the oil and the garlic to the same pan, cook. Add the paprika, the toasted ground cumin, paprika, and cayenne as the garlic begins to golden. This should smell magnificent. Add this fried spice and garlic mix to the fava beans, stir and simmer for a few minutes, then add the lemon juice and salt. Taste. Good?

Last step, blend it until smooth. You can use a potato masher or a food processor. I use the masher for a rustic texture. You might need to add a little water.

Serve in bowls of course, but before you take them to the table, add a small swirl of olive oil just to be a dick. The splash of white vinegar is optional.

This is served at my house with flatbread, as it was there by the fine chefs who made this. Make that flatbread! It’s so easy you’d be crazy not to.

Visit http://www.greatpinkskeleton.com and check out some sweet cookbook recommendations.

The Thursday special Chile Colorado at Esparza’s Tex Mex

Esparza’s Tex Mex in Portland, Oregon had, in my humble opinion, the greatest Chile Colorado ever plated. Esparza’s itself was magnificent, and to roll in there on a January night, when it was raining and cold, was always a treat. There was a mad collection of marionette puppets hanging from the ceiling, stuffed armadillos and beer neon on the walls, and in the early years there might be Hank Williams, Bob Wills, or Bill Monroe on the jukebox. But on Thursdays, at least for a year or two, they had a chicken fried steak special and a Chile Colorado special, and Thursdays, well. I was usually there. Esparza’s closed years ago now, but on a random Thursday a few winters ago I decided to make my best approximation of that fabled Chile Colorado. After a tasty period of trial and error I did it, at least to my memory, and my wife and I have been enjoying it ever since. Here it is, made for 2-4 people.

10-12 New Mexico Chiles

2-4 Ancho Chiles

2-4 cloves garlic

Salt

2 cups water

            Remove stems and seeds from chiles and put into a pot with the water, garlic, and salt (the salt is to taste, I use a double pinch). Bring this to a boil, cover, and remove from heat. Let it sit for ten minutes, then blend well. It should be moderately thick, like pudding.

1 pound beef stew meat or cubed teres major

1 tsb freshly ground cumin

Salt, black pepper

Flour

Season the beef, then flour it. Brown in butter, add the chile puree, then add beef stock. I use classic French beef stock because it’s what we usually have around.

Cover and simmer at very low heat for 3 hours or until beef is tender. Remove the lid for the final half hour to allow the sauce to thicken. Salt to taste.

Serve over garlic mashed potatoes.

Notes-

This is the basic version. You can (I do) deglaze the beef pan with red wine, a robust Petite Sirah is a good choice, and you can brown the beef in bacon fat (I do) for flair. In the past, I’ve added green chiles because I had some at hand and that was good. California Chiles are sometimes bright red, and you can mix them into this to alter the color without really altering the flavor all that much. Experimenting is good. But if you want to put it together fast, you can skip the extra steps and run right at it with the above steps.

Go to http://www.greatpinkskeleton.com if you want to read some crime fiction with more food ideas cleverly concealed inside. Start with I Shop At Laney’s, available now on Amazon and at Barnes&Noble and select bookstores nationwide.

Meatloaf is the kind of food you can fuck with the hardest. I’m making it today and using a recipe that’s changed over time and will likely keep on doing so. For some time, I used half ground beef, half ground pork. Consider it. I added green chili for years but now I don’t. Mess with it, but don’t eat it all the time. And whatever you land on should reflect what you plan to do with the leftovers.

2 lb lean ground beef

12-15 crimini mushrooms, quartered

5 strips thick-cut bacon

½ baguette, cubed

4 egg yolks

Rosemary from the yard, healthy sprig, stemmed and chopped

2 big shallots

Black pepper

Salt

Catsup

Thinly slice shallots, caramelize in small pan, deglaze with red wine, let cool.

Saute mushrooms in butter and olive oil, maybe a little garlic and rosemary, let cool.

Combine everything except the bacon and the catsup and shape into a bread loaf-type mound in a pan, leaving clearance on all sides. Slather with catsup, drape with bacon, shower with cracked black pepper, bake at 350 for one hour or so, the bacon on top will be your guide to done.

When you put this in add a second baking pan, covered, with small potatoes you’ve thoughtfully rolled in a tablespoon of the duck fat you thoughtfully froze over the holidays. Sprinkle with any rosemary left on your board, cover, bake at same time.

The ultimate goal of this is the leftover meatloaf. Sure, you can make a pig of yourself and eat a bunch of it, but if it’s just you and your 100-pound wife, you’ll have leftovers. This is where it gets interesting. My neighbor Steve has a fig tree and every year I get a dozen or so and freeze them just for leftover meatloaf day. (My life is that life, don’t try to shame me that part of my mind has been outsourced). Take one out of the fridge. Frozen, getting a good thin slice is easy, about as thick as a nickel (2mm). Put the slices on a dinner plate, and douse them with balsamic, they’ll thaw and soak for a few minutes while you sear a couple of thick (two fingers) slices of meatloaf in olive oil until crispy. Use them as the guts of sandwiches with the fig slices and shazam baby. The ultimate long airplane trip food! Road trip food! Or just… a sandwich to eat on the front porch the day after the sporting event you didn’t watch.  

The meatloaf pictured above is not mine.

Visit http://www.greatpinkskeleton.com and check out the new novella I Shop At Laney’s! In that fine work of literature is the how-to on beans, red sauce, and life itself.

Meatloaf is the kind of food you can fuck with the hardest. I’m making it today and using a recipe that’s changed over time and will likely keep on doing so. For some time, I used half ground beef, half ground pork. Consider it. I added green chili for years but now I don’t. Mess with it, but don’t eat it all the time. And whatever you land on should reflect what you plan to do with the leftovers.

2 lb lean ground beef

12-15 crimini mushrooms, quartered

5 strips thick-cut bacon

½ baguette, cubed

4 egg yolks

Rosemary from the yard, healthy sprig, stemmed and chopped

2 big shallots

Black pepper

Salt

Catsup

Thinly slice shallots, caramelize in small pan, deglaze with red wine, let cool.

Saute mushrooms in butter and olive oil, maybe a little garlic and rosemary, let cool.

Combine everything except the bacon and the catsup and shape into a bread loaf-type mound in a pan, leaving clearance on all sides. Slather with catsup, drape with bacon, shower with cracked black pepper, bake at 350 for one hour or so, the bacon on top will be your guide to done.

When you put this in add a second baking pan, covered, with small potatoes you’ve thoughtfully rolled in a tablespoon of the duck fat you thoughtfully froze over the holidays. Sprinkle with any rosemary left on your board, cover, bake at same time.

The ultimate goal of this is the leftover meatloaf. Sure, you can make a pig of yourself and eat a bunch of it, but if it’s just you and your 100-pound wife, you’ll have leftovers. This is where it gets interesting. My neighbor Steve has a fig tree and every year I get a dozen or so and freeze them just for leftover meatloaf day. (My life is that life, don’t try to shame me that part of my mind has been outsourced). Take one out of the fridge. Frozen, getting a good thin slice is easy, about as thick as a nickel (2mm). Put the slices on a dinner plate, and douse them with balsamic, they’ll thaw and soak for a few minutes while you sear a couple of thick (two fingers) slices of meatloaf in olive oil until crispy. Use them as the guts of sandwiches with the fig slices and shazam baby. The ultimate long airplane trip food! Road trip food! Or just… a sandwich to eat on the front porch the day after the sporting event you didn’t watch.  

The meatloaf pictured above is not mine.

Visit http://www.greatpinkskeleton.com and check out the new novella I Shop At Laney’s! In that fine work of literature is the how-to on beans, red sauce, and life itself.

“I haven’t had this much fun reading anything since I read True Grit years back. I Shop At Laney’s is an utterly original book with a wild strange plot made plausible by voice and setting details and exceptional writing. Overnight I find that I’m a Jeff Johnson fan.” –World Fantasy Award Winner James P. Blaylock

Laney Bozeman works at a lonely roadside junk shop in a remote corner of New Mexico. He reads old paperbacks and daydreams on his two-week shifts, and by night he stargazes and dabbles in the kitchen of the tiny attendant’s bungalow. He sleeps in his truck during his time off and explores, though lately he’s been carrying on with the beautiful clerk Maria from Big Donut in Roswell, so a different life might be on the horizon. The old carnie Ralston Orley is supposed to be gone when he arrives for their bimonthly sunset shift change, but this time he’s still there, half naked and blackout drunk, and he’s dragged a gigantic belt buckle into the bungalow’s living room.

“Jeff Johnson is a master of characterization and suspense. I Shop At Laney’s will keep you riveted and enchanted from the first page to the last.” —Robert J. Sawyer, Hugo Award-winning author of The Oppenheimer Alternative

How did this novella come about? Years ago, my pal Chico (what up homie) and I rented a car and drove from Portland, Oregon to Roswell, New Mexico. We wanted to see the UFO museum and maybe take a poke around the crash site. There was whiskey involved in this decision. We went the next day, and while we didn’t actually do any investigating, which seemed like a crazy idea when we sobered up, we did see the museum, eat some great food, and explore New Mexico, a state I’d barely escaped once years before as a fugitive runaway teen. It was January, so we had a few storms to outrun because we forgot to rent chains, and while we were inadvisably speeding along under the leading edge of a biblical bummer of black cloud, way out there west of Ruidoso… Shit. That’s where I got the idea for I Shop At Laney’s. I was thinking right then about the essence of the differences between the very small and the very large, how it might be refined, from the wondrous to the bitterly entropic, into a single ghostly thread that ran through everything, always. The outline migrated from computer to computer. I lost it and found it again a few times. A short story version I never dialed in came and went, and short stories don’t pay for shit so who really cares… And then one night about a year ago, right as I was falling asleep, the ghost thread solution came to me. And now here we are. I Shop At Laney’s, A Novella by Jeff Johnson, available 12-5-2023, Radio Lake Press. And I kept the film rights! This is really good, because I wrote the screenplay, too, and my agent Stu is wicked gnarly.

The upshot? If that trip seems like a bad idea, go ahead a take it.

“…lowdown drunken partners on the realistic poverty road, what seems like fantasy for most of the story, becomes advanced science fiction at the end, and makes it into unified fiction that works wonderfully.” –Norman Spinrad, Prix Apollo winner and multiple Hugo and Nebula Award nominee

Coming 12-5-2024

It was a hot 4th of July, and last night I rode it out in the AC, watching TV with my sweet little wife. Around ten the tune Dream Weaver popped into the credits of Killing It and ozone flooded my sinuses. I hadn’t heard that tune in years, and maybe it was the heat of the day, maybe the faint smell of gunpowder, who knows, but for a moment I was transported, quite vividly, back to Buena Park, California, and the summer of 1979.

My brothers were gone that summer, off to my grandfather’s in Missouri, and I was stuck in that fuckin’ place. Johnson Boys weren’t allowed in the house in the daytime, but I lucked out that summer and came into the care of the biker lady down the street, Lana Lane. Buena Park is a suburb of Los Angeles, and in those days there were Vietnam vets to either side of the house I slept in (including super crazy Bobby Willis, who taught me how to box), a guy that worked at the fire department across the street, and at the end of the street some proto Van Halen meth fuckups. Lana’s house was an oasis. Her husband Leroy was an airplane mechanic, or maybe he made tools that were used in the industry, but he was never around. It was just me and towering, magnificent Lana. I was just a kid of course, and I had no hand in steering the events of my life, but together we watched Star Trek and Days Of Our Lives and whiled away the afternoons playing cards. Her daughter was maybe nineteen, beautiful and heartbroken, and early in the summer she came home to stay. She had the puffy face of a gal who cried long and soft, and she spent most of her time in her old room, listening to Dream Weaver over and fucking over again. What was amazing to me, and I can still see it in my mind’s eyes, was the afternoon it occurred to me that the song was finally too much, that this troubled young woman had to be redirected to a different tune before she went from sad to crazy, and as if she’d read my mind, right then Lana began dancing to the music. THAT sway, it turns out, is how I’ll always think of dancing. It was bursting with everything good in life. Halfway through the summer my dad stopped paying her the five bucks a week and I was told to hang out in the back loading zone behind the nearby grocery store in the daytime, but when I snuck into Lana’s backyard to drink out of the hose she made me a grilled cheese sandwich. And she did it every day after that, even though she was ‘steamed’. You may be tempted to think this is a sorrowful tale, dear reader, but I wasn’t working in a coal mine or eating rats I killed on the wharf. That summer I was the only member of the audience at a magic show. Those people, that entire family, seemed effortlessly more ‘of substance’ than mine, as if they were made of real meat and white bones and powerfully numinous soul that would eventually move on to divine ghosthood. The light was brighter in their world, the winds bigger and fuller, and the songs seemed to mean something. In some strange way I’ve been trying to find my way back to that land ever since, and watching the fireworks last night, I realized that at some point I’d crossed the border into it without noticing.

I hope you have a meaningful song-moment this summer. It seems they don’t come often enough.

New Novella coming out soon! Stay tuned for the details on I SHOP AT LANEY’S.

            I read somewhere that most people are never more than eight feet away from a spider at any time in their lives. The arachnids are that successful a species, that prolific and diversified. Even when you’re sitting in an airplane or lounging on the deck of an ocean liner, at least one of them is within easy striking distance. The artist, an intellectual sub-species of humanity, puts these creatures to shame.

            People make things as part of the infrastructure of civilization. We need trains, cars, roads, and telephones. And make no mistake, much like a spider, art has found its way into every corner of everything and set up shop.

            Take the biggest things first, like the Hoover Dam in Nevada, for instance. It’s certainly a monumental feat of engineering, pumping out over two thousand megawatts a day. An old but enduring utilitarian monster of a project, it has a clear design purpose. It took 21,000 men five years to complete, and they created Lake Mead in the process. But look a little closer. Above the graceful, Parisian belly of the concrete is a crown of Art Deco turrets and little stone Deco towers housing who knows what mystery. And of course gamblers and wish makers toss casino chips and coins into the chaotic white froth at the dams groin, surely a form of performance art. When viewed this way, the Hoover Dam is something like a Christmas tree. The transverse bridge being built above it? A thing of wires and light that would tickle the fancy of any self-respecting spider.

            A smaller example? Skyscrapers. What a magnificent pairing of words. These are objects where so many people work and so many others travel in and out of on business. Now you’re inside the art. Neo-Gothic to Deco, International to Post-Modern… It’s so close you’re stepping on it, breathing its respiration, riding around in the elevators of its circulatory system, nesting snugly for hours on end in its very cells.

            Closer still? How does one get to these great dams and towering buildings? In a car or a plane? No matter how you do, someone designed the mode of your conveyance, and little things crept in as they worked. The color scheme between the outside and the inside, the stitching in the leather seat or the weave of its fabric, the tiny frills around the dials and buttons. Logos. The web narrows as it approaches the center.

            Street signs. Who decided their geometry? And who made the font itself? Who picked a shade of red for the classic ruby shape of the stop sign? What ironsmith wrought the template of the head of the fire hydrant on the corner of my street into the shape of a conquistador’s helmet, and why, for that matter, do cop cars bear an unlikely resemblance to cowboy hats? We just can’t help ourselves, that’s why. The deeper you look, the more you see.

            Lets not forget food. Oh, no. You’ll find the creative impulse all over everything that finds its way into your mouth these days. Food is an art almost everyone makes to some degree, and when we don’t others do it for us, sculpting it, teasing it, manipulating it to new heights. Tarantulas.

            And that brings us finally to your home, the area of greatest infestation. Consider its architecture, the design of your furniture. The pattern in the rug in the entryway? What hangs from the walls, what touches your ears from the radio, what skitters over your eyes and then dances down your optic and auditory nerves from your television. Much of it is not only made, but crafted.

            And then last you go to bed, surrounded by furniture, even laying on it. There’s a headboard, maybe a fancy shade on the lamp on the bed stand next to you, and a delicate pattern in the cloth of your pillowcase. What, pray tell, do your pajamas look like? Your underwear? You are surrounded.

Art is closer than any spider could ever dream of. In fact, considering that any article, even the one in your hands right now, is an artful assemblage of words and ideas, you’ve just been bitten again. This time on the inside of your head.

This was originally published in Filling Station #70, a kick ass Canadian magazine. Check ’em out!

Check out new work and more by Jeff Johnson www.greatpinkskeleton.com