March 8, 2006

What's hot at the fire station

       A griller, a baker and a raspberry trifle maker: These are the firefighters of the southside.  It can’t be all emergency response, all the time. Because cooking skill assessment is not part of the hiring process at local fire stations, feeding a group of five to 12 people typically means that meals are practical, simple and inexpensive. Although most meals tend to turn out somewhere along the good to delicious continuum, others are nowhere near it.  Tales abound of ribs burnt on the outside and raw in the middle, rice left on the stove until it was crispy, beans prepared with a spice that should never have been near them. Few of these guys are going to win awards for their cooking.  Then again, some are: Jory Cox and Tony Slusher of White River Township Station 53 produced a gold-medal tenderloin at a competition hosted last year by Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels.  “There were nine judges there,” Cox said, “and all nine voted for ours.”

         For those stations not lucky to have an in-house award winner, deciding who’s going to cook usually boils down to a process of elimination.  “We don’t have a lot of people who volunteer to cook, and I do,” said Luke Brunson, of Greenwood’s Station 91. “It has to be done, but I don’t mind doing it. And I do a pretty good job.”  Others came to the kitchen when they were paying their dues.  “Originally I cooked because I was lowest in seniority,” said Tim Zimmerman of Franklin Township Station 553. “That and I’m the heaviest and I think they assumed the heaviest person would be the best cook.”  The lucky crews have firefighters who take a wholehearted interest in cooking. Mike Jackson of Greenwood Station 93 had considered going to culinary school before he took up farming. He still feeds his interest by watching a lot of cooking shows and finding recipes on the Internet.  He whips up four-cheese spinach lasagna with portabella mushrooms.  “The guys raved about it,” he said. “They’ve been asking me to make that again.”  When he’s really feeling energetic — and when there’s extra money in the station fund — he might turn out a fancy dessert.  “One of the favorites was a lot of work, but oh my God,” Jackson said. “It was a chocolate raspberry trifle with fresh raspberries, raspberry jelly, chocolate cake and chocolate mousse. I actually made the ganache for the mousse.  “I learned a lot by doing that one. It was, oh, it was so good. But I don’t do that often.”

         Fire station dinners tend to be more functional than froufrou, more George Foreman than Jacques Pepin. That’s perhaps due more to necessity than lack of enthusiasm. These guys are working with $5 to $7 per guy per day for a total of two meals. Simpler tends to mean cheaper, according to the firehouse cooks, who cite stews, chili and grilling as great ways to make everybody happy without too much cash or fuss.  “Usually anything on the grill goes over well,” Brunson said. “Burgers, steaks, brats; pretty easy, pretty good.”  Cox talked up his “cheap but good poor man’s lasagna.”  “Basically it’s everything that you would throw in a lasagna dish,” he said, “but you use macaroni instead of lasagna. You put it in a big stew pot to cook, and scoop it up with a soup ladle.  “Another good one is a sewer lid. You take sausage, peppers, onions, get everything cooked up and then put it in a cast iron skillet and fill it up with eggs. You bake that in the oven. That’s a sewer lid.”  His cooking aesthetic is practical and loose. No “pinch of this, soupçon of that” about it. “Basically, you clean out the fridge and put everything in the pot, and you can never go wrong.”

         Steve Moan from the City of Franklin Station 21 takes a similar approach but prefers baking dishes to soup pots. He tends to concoct casseroles and lasagnas — anything that cooks in the oven instead of on top of it.  “I like baking most,” said Moan, who makes wedding cakes for a local catering company. His side business was born of dissatisfaction.  “I was baking all the cakes for family functions,” he said, “and I never liked the way they turned out.”  He ended up taking a cake decorating class that his mother-in-law gave him as a birthday present. Now he’s making painstaking designs on five-layer cakes.  Moan said his record is good so far with his cake clientele, but he can’t say the same of his fire station meals. He remembers making a last minute and imprudent substitution.  “The guys sat down to eat,” Moan said, “and I could tell by their faces it was horrible before I even tried it, but it wasn’t until I said ‘This is pretty nasty,’ that they spoke up. They could have been extremely brutal.”

         Other firefighters had similar tales of culinary woe.  Cox told of accidentally using garlic salt instead of granulated garlic.  “There was one guy who was very nice and a good sport about it,” he said. “He forced himself to eat it. I had to dilute it with an entire can of tomato juice, but it was still really strong.  “I still get made fun of for that but I’ve been forgiven.”  Jackson doesn’t fess up to any specific disasters, but he did say that when duty calls, a dinner might end up suffering for it.  “The only times dinners have gone wrong are when we’ve had to take a run and turn off the stove,” he said. “We come back and things are not as they’re supposed to be. Just ‘cause you turn the stove off doesn’t mean what’s on it stops cooking automatically.”  Mistakes or no, the cooks tend to take some flak from their cohorts.  “Just like in any major family, you’ve got guys who don’t like mushrooms, some who don’t like beans,” Cox said. “But you’re the chef, and ultimately what the chef says goes.”  (Reprinted with permission from the Indianapolis Southside Magazine)

      

     
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