Rain Delay Theater

There’s just something about a rain delay.

It occupies a liminal space within the world of sports: a game is happening, or maybe it isn’t. Maybe it never will! Ultimately, it doesn’t even matter. That’s not a criticism of baseball—it’s an endorsement. Regular-season baseball is like the weather itself; sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad, but it’s always there, even when it’s not.

In the ballpark, a rain delay leads people to strange behaviors. Some take shelter in the concourse or simply give up and go home, but others embrace the rain. They focus on the important things, like dancing in the downpour, building a giant snake out of beer cups or slip-and-sliding on the infield tarps.

(Usually, you have to be a player to do the latter, but not always.)

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about rain delays this past week, because it rained a lot here recently. I mean, a lot. The Louisville area received a good months’ worth of rain in the course of four days last week, sending the Ohio River well over its banks and into the downtown waterfront1.

The rain put a solid damper onto the tail end of my kids’ spring break… or, at least, what I thought was the tail end. Even after the rain ended, enough of the county was waterlogged that they ended up with an additional three days off of school.

It felt like a classic rain delay—I don’t know what we’re doing here, and I don’t know when it’s going to end.

Of course, my reaction in times like this is predictable. I get bored, and I make silly things in the kitchen.

Today? I’ve got some silly things.

Friends, it’s Friday again at The Action Cookbook Newsletter.

Today, I’m embracing both the spirit of the ballpark and of rain-delay madness with my own stab at a minor-league stunt food and a Cracker Jack-inspired cocktail.

Beyond that, I’ve got some great new music, a terrific book, a TV-related entreaty, and more!

Roll out the tarp. It’s Friday.

The Mustard Stays in the Picture

It should not come as any kind of surprise that I love ballpark stunt food.

You know what I mean—those ridiculous, attention-grabbing culinary concoctions that baseball clubs roll out each season, blurring the line between sporting venue and state fair—foods that might just be dumb enough to lure you out to catch a game you might not have otherwise attended.

Of course, there’s a wide range of foods in this category.

Some are strictly stunt, things intended less to be consumed than to beheld—items that, if actually consumed, might kill a normal person. I place in this bucket things like the St. Paul Saints’ new “Land of 10,000 Calories”, a six-foot-long hot dog topped with things like pulled pork, macaroni and cheese, french fries and jalapeño peppers.

I do not want that!

Sure, you could share it with a group of friends, but I don’t want to share a hot dog with a group of friends. Just give me a normal one, or maybe a weird one that I can eat myself. That’s where the other kinds of ballpark stunt food come into play—things that are a bit unusual, maybe a bit excessive, but still actually-consumable and maybe even good?

Take, for instance, the Hot Dog Sushi rolled out a couple seasons ago by Albuquerque Isotopes. I’d mentally bookmarked the idea a while back, but as soon as I saw the weather forecast for last weekend, I knew that it was time to give it a go myself.

Have I ever made sushi before? No.

Would that stop me from trying this? Absolutely not.

I started with a batch of sushi rice using most of the steps in Serious Eats’ recipe.

I sauteed down finely-chopped onions, adding a bit of teriyaki sauce at the end. I took a couple jumbo Nathan’s hot dogs, gave them a cross-hatch cut, and pan-seared them until crispy.

I laid out the sushi rice, followed by a sheet of nori. On went the hot dog, the teriyaki onions, and a thin strip of cream cheese to get it a “Seattle”-style twist.

I rolled it all up tightly in a sushi mat, then sliced it thin, topping it with a chili-crisp sprinkle, sriracha and fried jalapeños. Finally, I added a streak of Cleveland’s finest Ballpark Mustard to the plate.

“I don’t like the way the mustard looks,” my wife noted, reviewing the pictures I took.

This is ballpark food, okay? The mustard stays in the picture.

Overall? It was absolutely edible, and even enjoyable? It’s not far off from musubi, just in a different shape. The vinegared rice was excellent, the hot dog fillings played well together, and it was fun to eat. I wouldn’t make it again, necessarily, but I had fun making it, and that was all I was shooting for in the first place.

Hey, everything else is getting more expensive…

Something should be a good deal, right?

Well, I’m here to offer a year of duty-free ACB for 20% off the normal price!

This offer is good for the next week, which means it’s a vastly more stable economic policy than this country has!

[laughs nervously]

[sighs]

[stares into middle distance for a while]

I Don’t Care If I Ever Get Back

My rain-soaked cabin fever didn’t stop in the kitchen; I needed a silly cocktail to match.

A few months ago, a reader blessed me with a bottle of Nixta Licor de Elote, a Mexican corn-flavored liqueur. I’ve made a few good things with it already, including the actually-excellent “Fields of Gold”, a corn-inflected spin on the Gold Rush cocktail.

COCKTAIL: Fields of Gold

This cocktail originally appeared in the October 4th, 2024 edition of The Action Cookbook Newsletter.

The Action Cookbook NewsletterScott Hines

Lately, though, I have not been able to shake the sense that I needed to make a Cracker Jack-themed cocktail with it.

This isn’t a new idea—some years ago, Chicago’s famed Aviary cocktail bar developed a Cracker Jack-inspired drink called the “Prize Inside”. They approached the concept with their typical rigor and inventiveness: a popcorn-flavored stock, homemade peanut orgeat, hot buttered rum, flavocol (the movie theater butter flavoring) and a bunch of other ingredients. I attempted to make it during the most boring days of COVID, and… well, it’s a LOT of work.

Not that I was opposed to some work, of course, but I wanted to bring it down to mortal levels. I scaled back the ambitions to a few separate potions and tinctures, including a butter-washed bourbon, a homemade peanut orgeat, a caramel-adjacent syrup, and a salty solution that’d help me hit all the key notes in a box of Cracker Jack.

In honor of baseball’s newest innovation, I’ll call it “The Torpedo Bat”.

The Torpedo Bat

• 2 ounces Butter-Washed Bourbon
• 1 ounce Nixta Licor de Elote
• 3/4 ounce Peanut Orgeat
• 1/4 ounce Demerara Syrup
• 1/4 ounce fresh lime juice
• 4 drops Saline Solution
• mint, for garnish

Butter-Washed Bourbon

• 4 ounces (or more) good butter
• 1-2 cups cheap-ish bourbon, I used Mellow Corn

Get the butter good and cold, and grate it on the large holes of a box grater. Add the grated butter to a glass jar, pour the bourbon over it, give it a good shake, and let sit in the fridge for 24 hours. Strain through a fine-mesh strainer. (If the bourbon looks cloudy, freeze it for several hours to push out any butter solids, but grating should negate the need for this.)

Peanut Orgeat

• 2 cups raw, unsalted peanuts
• 6 cups water (1st step)
• 2 cups water (2nd step)
• 1-1.5 cups sugar

Toast the peanuts on a sheet pan in a 400F oven for 15-20 minutes, shaking halfway through. Boil 6 cups of water, and drop the nuts in to blanch (carefully, as it can cause a boil-over if the pot’s not deep enough) for 20 seconds before draining. Warm the remaining two cups of water, and add it with the blanched nuts to a blender. Pulse down to a fine grind, then allow to sit, covered for 8-12 hours. Squeeze the soaked nuts in cheesecloth, reserving the drained liquid. Add this liquid to a saucepan with an equal amount of sugar, bring to a boil, then simmer and stir until the sugar fully dissolves.

Demerara Syrup

• 2 parts demerara sugar
• 1 part water

Boil and stir until you get a clear, dark brown syrup.

Saline Solution

• 80 grams hot water
• 20 grams Maldon Sea Salt

Add to a small bottle, and shake until the salt is fully dissolved.

Assembly!

Add the butter-washed bourbon, Nixta, orgeat, syrup, lime juice and saline solution to an ice-filled shaker; shake for 20-30 seconds. Strain into a rocks glass filled to the brim with crushed ice; garnish with lime and mint.

This cocktail was good, and I’ll be damned if it didn’t taste a good bit like Cracker Jacks. It was also deeply unnecessary, but again… that’s really the whole point of the effort, isn’t it?

Pull the starry curtains down tonight

Several years ago, reader Jerry H. took a coincidence in the comments as reason to turn me on to Pine Hill Haints, a hard-working East Alabama band that churns out a mixture of punk, rockabilly and blues and traditional music that they self-describe as “Ghost Music”. I’ve been fond of them ever since, and I’m very excited to see that they’ve got a new album, Shattered Pieces of the True Cross, dropping at the end of May.

Personally, I can’t wait that long, so today’s musical selection is the lead single off that album, “Drinking With the Prince”:

Pour your whiskey out on the ground 'cause tonight, I'm drinking with the prince
Ayy, and pull the starry curtains down, tonight, I'm drinking with the prince
Can't you hear the moon singing to you? Oh, she's calling out soft and low
Ayy, the candle is burning down, tonight, I'm drinking with the prince

I have never seen them live but I have 1000% confidence that they are a tremendous live act. You can just tell.

Adventures in literary fiction

There are some books where a plot summary does a pretty good job of explaining what you’re in for. Martyr, the award-winning 2024 novel by Kaveh Akbar, is not one of those books.

Acknowledging up front the futility of the exercise, I’ll share the book jacket summary:

Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.

All of that’s in there, for sure, but it’s practically beside the point. Martyr is so beautifully written, so rich and electric throughout, that what happens is practically immaterial. The story shifts perspectives freely and reveals its secrets slowly but deftly, unspooling a meditation on life, loss and and the search for meaning. It’s an unquestionably literary book, but one that earns its pretensions fully.

All of my previous Friday book recommendations can be found on my Bookshop page.

HACKS BACK!

I am becoming a bit of a broken record on this subject, but: if you are not watching Hacks, that is a fundamental failing on your part. The HBO/Max comedy has been the best show on television each year that is has aired—and I do not expect that to change with the fourth season, which kicked off last night.

The story of an aging Las Vegas comedian uncomfortably paired with an internet-brained millennial writer has plenty of what’s-going-to-happen-next prestige-TV drama—the trailer below makes it feel like Succession—but it’s also wildly funny, the star turn that lead Jean Smart has deserved for decades.

I could not be happier that it’s back, and I implore you to get with the program if you haven’t already.

Shout out to Channel 43

There’s an experience that’s been mostly lost in the age of on-demand streaming media, and that’s the experience of watching something simply because it’s all that’s on. I’m going to botch the paraphrase here, but there’s a moment in the superb 2017 documentary Too Funny To Fail—which profiles the future-star-studded but doomed-to-fail Dana Carvey Show—in which comedian Bill Hader reflects on loving the show as a teenager in the mid-’90s. He recalls turning the show on the week it was unceremoniously cancelled and replaced by a rerun of Coach, noting his disappoinment, but following up with “… so, I just watched Coach”.

At the time, that’s all you could do!

Tying this back to today’s rain-delay theme, then: there is a distinct-yet-undefinable genre of film, a Potter-Stewart-esque “I know it when I see it” type of movie that existed only to be aired during a rain delay of a regular-season baseball game. Sometimes these were sports-themed, sometimes they weren’t. The only real defining quality was that they were mediocre and cheap to air, and I watched them because there wasn’t any other option.

Anyways, that’s my question for today.

Please tell me the most “rain delay” movie you can think of.

This need not be an endorsement of the movie—simply an acknowledgement of its place in the history of media.

My choice is Mr. Baseball, a movie I recall with lukewarm fondness despite the knowledge that it’s probably aged even worse than I remember.

What’s yours?

In memoriam

Traditionally, every Friday post here at The Action Cookbook Newsletter ends with a parade of pets submitted by Readers Like You—usually two or three, depending on how full my queue is. These often include memorial posts, and I’m always both touched and honored that you’re willing to share the memories of your beloved friends with myself and other readers here.

Today, I’m dedicating this whole space to an all-time great dog, one I have met personally and whose smiling face graced many Christmas cards on our bulletin board over the years. From one of my oldest and dearest friends, Lee Reamsnyder:

It brings me very little pleasure to ask if I can cut in line, but our little dude is gone.

Otis was a connoisseur of soft surfaces, a great admirer of treats, an expert food thief, and master of many silly tricks that he performed with much gusto and very little grace. Fifteen years ago we paid forty whole dollars to bring him into our home—including a crate and a bag of food—and it will forever be the best exchange rate of dollars-to-joy I’ll ever get. He made our family a proper pack. We miss him very much.

Otis can never be replaced, but may his memory live on forever.

Lee has a longer eulogy at his own site, and it’s a beautiful read.

That’s it for this week, my friends.

In spite of everything that’s not right in the world today, I hope you find some joy this weekend—and if you’ve got some to spare, I hope you spread it.

Thank you for your continued support of The Action Cookbook Newsletter.

—Scott Hines (@actioncookbook)