GOLF HAIKU
Iggy piggy poo.
Stupid ass devil golf club,
I shall destroy you.
Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D.
My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.
INGREDIENTS
3 boneless chicken breasts
7 garlic cloves
1 green bell pepper
1 small onion
¼ cup lemon juice
6 tablespoon Greek or plain yogurt
3 tablespoons olive oil
¾ teaspoon cumin
1 teaspoon ginger
1 teaspoon oregano
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon turmeric
½ teaspoon white pepper or pepper
2 tablespoons red vinegar or apple cider vinegar
¾ teaspoon tomato paste
6 pita loaves
SPECIAL UTENSILS
outdoor grill
6 skewers (If wooden, soak in water for 20 minutes.)
Serves 6. Takes 3 hours.
PREPARATION
Cut chicken into 1″ cubes. Crush garlic cloves. Seed and chop green bell pepper into 1″ squares. Chop onion into 1″ squares. Add all ingredients to large mixing bowl. Mix with hands until chicken cubes are well coated. Cover and let marinate in refrigerator for 2 hours.
Thread chicken cubes, bell pepper squares, and onion squares onto skewers. Turn heat on grill to medium. Add skewers to grill. Heat all sides for 3 minutes each. Place skewers in large pot and cover. Let rest for 10 minutes. (This step helps keep the chicken cubes moist.) Serve on skewers or if using pita loaves, remove all ingredients from skewers and place on pita loaves.
TIDBITS
1) Lebanese chickens do extraordinary things. Amal Rooster designed the tunnel connecting Britain with France. Zaina Hen organized the first mobile, military hospital. Haasim adapted golf clubs for use with chickens. Barbara Chicken or “Babs” played keno. She was so brilliant at it, that she bankrupted the casino at Monte Carlo.. A Lebanese chef created this dish, Chicken Kebab, in honor of her. However, human beings being a foul lot, they always steal the credit from the worthy chickens.
Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D.
My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.
INGREDIENTS
2 tablespoons flour
1 pizza crust
2 tablespoons olive oil
1¼ cups shredded mozzarella cheese
6 prosciutto slices
1 cup arugula leaves
SPECIAL UTENSIL
pizza pan
Serves 4. Takes 30 minutes.
PREPARATION A 15th century map of the world
Preheat oven to 450 degrees. Dust pizza pan with flour. Put pizza crust on pizza pan. Spread olive evenly over pizza crust. Sprinkle cheese over crust. Evenly arrange prosciutto slices over cheese. Bake for 15 minutes or until cheese melts and starts to turn golden brown. Remove pizza from oven. Evenly sprinkle arugula leaves over cheese and prosciutto. Slice and serve.
TIDBITS
1) Until 1492, a wide range of people, 0% to 100%, believed the world was flat. Anything that got too close to the edge of the Earth would fall off. This is why golf took so long to become popular. Enthusiasts could never be sure that wouldn’t drive their golf ball over the Earth’s edge.
2) Pizzas were also unpopular. Look at the above pizza. Look at a map of the Earth. Among other things, both are flat. A hardy few tried to eat pizzas, but a meatball or a prosciutto slice would always fall off the edge. “See?” people would say, “this proves the Earth is flat. Why would I want to eat something that reminds me why I can never play golf?” Golf-deprived populations grew surly. By the 1400s, angry mobs took to the streets, brandishing golf clubs. The aristocrats could see the writing on the wall. The people needed a diversion.
3) Then on 8 am, June 15th, 1399, the Renaissance began all over Europe. Art would pacify, even entrance the mobs. Kings, dukes, and princes everywhere combed the mobs for talented artists willing to trade their useless golf clubs for canvases and paint brushes, marble and chisels. This is how got Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Botticelli, and many others.
4) In 1522, a naval expedition circumnavigated the world. This proved the Earth to be round. People could play golf! Meatballs falling off a pizza, no longer provoked images of golf balls flying into space. However, with the advent of golf matches and pizza parties, the rulers of Europe no longer saw the need to fund the arts, so the Renaissance began to wind down. Oh well.
Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D.
My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.
But the reason for their poor performances lay in the chickens themselves. Remarkably, no one had considered the possibility that a twenty-ounce chicken using a four-inch club would drive a regulation golf ball a considerably shorter distance than would a two-hundred-pound man with a regulation club. Furthermore, for all their attentiveness to their swings, the chickens’ lack of hands proved to be a major obstacle to getting firm grips on their clubs.
Two weeks later, eighteen hardy chickens reached the green. Two chickens hit their balls into sand traps and couldn’t get out even though they remembered to use their chicken-sized wedges. Ten other chickens ended their brief golf careers by running into the adjacent woods to search for worms, and disappeared forever.
Play picked up considerably on the green. It turned out that chickens are natural born putters. Aided by cleverly-designed putters, made small enough to be held in their beaks, they dazzled the crowd with one precise putt after another. “I wish I could putt like those chickens,” said Norm Gregson of the PGA.
Observant golfers noticed that the chickens stand so close to the ground that they can figure out exactly which way their putts would break. One of these golfers, John Hona, later suggested to the PGA that chickens be used as “designated putters” in human-golf tournaments. It turned him down flat, “The answer is no.”
Official scorers added up the strokes at the end of the first hole. Roxanne led the pack by thirteen strokes with a score of 397. Technically, Roxanne shot a tricentinonadecadouble bogey, but the press just called it a “chicken bogey.”
Around the third week, while the chickens were half way through the second hole, sarcastic geeks ruffled the plucky poultry by yelling, “Cacciatore,” “Southern Fried,” or by calling their clubs “drum sticks.” The chickens flinched under the pressure of these specieist remarks, slicing more balls than usual. The organizers resorted to handing out free, fresh eggs from the competitors to keep them quiet.
Froussard golf club celebrated the Fourth of July in grand style. Organizers labored all week setting up a spectacular fireworks display. The remaining eleven chickens then contributed to the crowd’s enjoyment when they put on a snappy, morality play based on the daily life of a chicken. Afterwards, all sorts of chicken dishes were served to a hungry audience. “That’ll teach you to miss the cut,” growled Bob Banks as he bit into a hot-and-spicy chicken wing.
Three chickens exited the tournament in August. Vain and high-strung, Sandra, up and left the course clucking about a bad feather day. Nadine, suddenly felt the need to establish her roots and departed to seek her biological mother. Spontaneous combustion claimed the life of Martha as she prepared to putt out the eighth hole. “If she was going to blow up, she should have done it during last-month’s fireworks display,” sniffed organizer, Beverly Hatcher.
Rain fell heavily in late October. The downpour bothered none of the chickens, who clucked, drove, and putted as if nothing was wrong. Seeing this, a golfer’s wife remarked, “They’re just like human golfers.”
Snow fell heavily in the middle of December, and so, play deteriorated rapidly when chickens swung their clubs with difficulty through snow that came up to their beaks. Many chickens could no longer find their balls in the snow drifts. Indeed, the tournament’s officials lost several chickens in the deep snow.
By New Year’s Day, only two chickens remained, Agatha and Roxanne. These two had reached the green and were within only a few hours of finishing the course. Tension and excitement coursed throughout the golfing world as the two chickens were tied, each having a score of 6,127.
Interest in this tournament had grown so feverish that the television networks pushed the New Year’s Day bowl games back one week. Tens of thousands of people lined the rope around the eighteenth hole while helicopters from scores of television stations, domestic and foreign, circled above. “Those chickens upstaged us,” complained Bob Gallina, quarterback of the top ranked, LSU Tigers.
The crowd cheered every well-executed putt of the dueling chicks. Excitement reached a peak when Roxanne holed out with a score 6,157. But Agatha was only four inches from the cup, needing to make her putt for a sudden-death tie.
Agatha intently bent down, surveyed the green, picked up her putter, and set herself to putt. Then, disaster struck! A red fox burst onto the green and snatched Agatha in his hungry jaw. Hundreds of people ran after the fox into the trees to save Agatha, but found only a pile of feathers and a tiny putter.
The crowded peeled away from the course in horror and rage. Its hero had been eaten, an unprecedented event in golf. Things got ugly when many yelled threats at the tournament’s organizers. The more rabid fans produced nooses and proposed hanging the hated organizers. Hearing this, the objects of their hate took off in a flash, jumped into their cars, and sped away.
That was the end of the Great Chicken-Golf Invitational. From nearby Canby, Montana, the organizers declared Roxanne the winner, by default.
The carnage of the tournament appalled golfers and people everywhere. The American Wildlife Federation and corporations withdrew their sponsorships of a proposed second tournament. Interest in chicken golf died off rapidly after that. Now only a few people still think back to the days when chickens had a tournament of their own.
– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef
My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.
Golf had long been a bastion of people, its exclusivity maintained by a silent gentle folk’s agreement. But no longer, for on January 1, 1974, in Kippen, Idaho, chickens finally integrated the game.
The top thirty chickens in Idaho arrived at the prestigious, private golf club, Froussard for “The Great Chicken Invitational.” Earlier, in late August, Froussard enrolled a chicken to qualify as the host.
Skeptics everywhere had maintained that chickens do not have the necessities to play golf. Other critics had argued that even if physically able chickens could be found, they would not have the mental skills required to converse and to make business contacts.
Nevertheless, the Great Chicken Invitational came to pass. The Invitational’s organizers invited the most athletic chickens for miles around. Intrepid entrepreneurs designed full lines of chicken-sized golf clubs. Chicken owners everywhere got into the spirit and demanded full sets of these clubs for their tiny friends.
Golf enthusiasts from all over the world yearned to see the momentous event. Sven Fjaderfa, CEO and owner of mammoth Swedish Furniture, up and left work a day before the start of the tournament. “I want to see chickens play golf,” he told his employees. Thousands of other golfers joined him at Kippen, Idaho, for the greatest exhibition of golf the state has ever seen.
At seven in the morning of January 1, the organizers trucked in the chickens to the golf course. While the officials spent an hour assigning starting times, the spectators admired the chickens’ traditional tartan knickerbockers. “They look darling,” stated Heather Anders of Fashion Magazine.
At eight o’clock, the organizers unloaded the chickens near the first tee. The chickens immediately scattered to peck for worms in the recently mowed course. Eventually, an official, Tom Purdue, caught Agatha and plopped her down at the tee. He gave the chicken a number one wood, as this was a 476 yards, par 5 hole.
The crowd watched in anticipation, as Agatha surveyed the fairway. She carefully held the driver in the traditional chicken grip, the top wing just touching the bottom wing. All expected Agatha to be a serious competitor, as she never smiled. She looked down the fairway once more, clucked a few times, moved the club back, keeping her left wing straight, and then rapidly brought it forward to hit the ball.
Sarah Dindon, was there for the tee off. “I was lying down on the ground looking up at the blue sky, as I have always found this the best way to view chicken golf.” Sarah watched Agatha’s ball soar above her head into the clouds. The ball then came down, landing a yard down the fairway. At this effort, some unsympathetic fans hooted in derision. Agatha reacted angrily by pecking her nearest tormentors.
The organizers hoped for better results from Roxanne, a fierce, muscular chicken, who spat gravel at the poor official who carried her to the tee. Roxanne followed Agatha’s lead by selecting a driver from the tiny bag on her back. She exhibited perfect form, as a lifetime of looking for worms in the ground had given her the enviable ability to keep her darn, stupid head down. Although her drive nearly doubled Agatha’s in length, this still meant she was 474 yards short. Nearly all the attending journalists agreed that her chances of parring the hole were remote.
Chicken after chicken followed the pattern of Agatha and Roxanne. Something had gone wrong. Apologists for the fowls suggested that the media circus attending this first professional contest unnerved the flock. Indeed, Bob Banks, owner of Francine, slugged a reporter who badgered chickens in rather one-sided interviews.
But the reason for their poor performances lay in the chickens themselves. Remarkably, no one had considered the possibility that a twenty-ounce chicken using a four-inch club would drive a regulation golf ball a considerably shorter distance than would a two-hundred-pound man with a regulation club. Furthermore, for all their attentiveness to their swings, the chickens’ lack of hands proved to be a major obstacle to getting firm grips on their clubs.
(To be continued)
– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef
My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.
Guinean Entree
INGREDIENTS
3 pounds boneless chicken
3 garlic cloves
6 medium onions
⅔ cup lemon juice
¼ teaspoon pepper
¼ cup vegetable oil
½ cup chicken stock
1 bay leaf
½ teaspoon cayenne pepper
2 tablespoons Dijon mustard
½ teaspoon salt
SPECIAL EQUIPMENT
Dutch oven
Makes 6 bowls. Takes at least 6 hours, including refrigeration.
PREPARATION
Cut chicken into 1″ cubes. Mince garlic. Thinly slice onions. Add chicken, garlic, onion, lemon juice, and pepper to large mixing bowl. Mix with hands until chicken cubes are thoroughly coated. Marinate chicken in refrigerator for at least 5 hours or overnight.
Remove onion slices and chicken cubes from large mixing bowl. (Keep lemony marinade.) Add chicken cubes, onion slices and oil to Dutch oven Sauté at high heat for 10-to-15 minutes or until onion softens and chicken is no longer pink on outside. Stir frequently. Add lemony marinade from large mixing bowl, chicken stock, bay leaf, cayenne pepper, Dijon mustard, and salt to Dutch oven. Simmer at low heat for 30 minutes-to 1 hour or until chicken is done and most of the liquid is gone. Goes well with couscous or rice.
TIDBITS
1) The Great Chicken Festival is held in December in Cacciatore, Alaska. Chickens from all over the world come to see and to be seen. Highlights of the festival are the clean-and-jerk weight lifting event and the Great Chicken Golf Invitational. You’ll have seen nothing like it.
2) The World Chicken Festival occurs in September in London, Kentucky. Contests include the rooster crowing, clucking, and strutting, survival egg dropping, and chicken-wing eating. London, Kentucky is located in the Daniel Boone National Forest. Daniel Boone was the first man to successfully tame Eastern Kentucky’s huge herds of feral chickens. This is why we know about him.
– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef
My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.
Dutch Dessert
INGREDIENTS
1¼ cups butter (2½) sticks
1⅓ cups brown sugar
1 medium egg
½ teaspoon baking powder
1 tablespoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground cloves
½ teaspoons ginger
1 teaspoon nutmeg
3 cups flour plus some to dust cookie mold
SPECIAL UTENSILS
speculaas mold, other cookie mold, or cookie cutters
electric beater
sewing thread
1-to-2 cookie sheets
1-to-4 glasses of mulled red wine
wine bottle for bopping oafs
Makes 18 cookies. Takes 15 minutes to make dough, to sit overnight in refrigerator, and maybe 1 hour to make the cookies, plus 15-to-20 minutes each time you put cookie sheets in the oven. You will get better and faster at putting the dough in the speculaas mold, trimming the dough with the sewing thread, and getting the dough out of the mold and onto the cookie sheet in one piece. While getting the hang of things, I say chill out and have some wine to calm yourself down. Note, the upper limit of drinks is for those who use speculaas or other embossed cookie molds. If you just plop down some dough, you only get one glass. There you go.
PREPARATION
Add butter and sugar to first, large mixing bowl. Mix using electric beater set on CREAM until butter/sugar mix becomes creamy. Add egg. Mix with electric beater set on CAKE until well blended. Add baking powder, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, and nutmeg to second, small mixing bowl. Mix together with whisk. Add spice mix from second, small mixing bowl and flour to first, large mixing bowl. Knead mixture until it forms a firm dough ball. Refrigerate dough ball overnight.
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Dust speculaas mold for each cookie. Press dough into mold. Gently trim all dough above the line of mold with sewing thread. The top of the dough should be flush with the top of the mold.
Turn mold over and rap it against the cookie sheet. The dough should come out easily and intact if the mold was sufficiently dusted with flour. If not, gently, slowly pull dough out of the mold. If it the shaped dough comes apart in only one or two spots, gently smoosh the pieces together with your fingertip. If someone happens to see this and makes a snarky remark, hit the oaf on its head with the wine bottle. Bake cookies at 350 degrees for 15-to-25 minutes or until cookies turn golden brown.
TIDBITS
1) The first weekend of September is the Redhead Festival in Breda, Netherlands. It started as a local photographer’s quest to find a redhead model. It soon got out of hand. Well, sort of. Redheads walk around seeing other redheads. They even celebrate the color red.
2) It could have so exciting. Why not really celebrate the color red by having tomato fights?
3) Or have ketchup wrestling. That would draw a big crowd.
4) Or have professional drivers race around Breda in red fire trucks instead of race cars.
5) Or let tourists do high diving into a pool of tomato soup.
6) Or hold a contest to build the highest pyramid out of red bell peppers.
7) Or have a contest to eat the most habañero peppers.
8) Or even celebrate ginger. Redheads are often called gingers.
9) Who wouldn’t want to enter a contest to see who could eat the most buttered ginger toast?
10) Go bowling with tomatoes. Professional tomato bowlers recommend a perfectly round. The flattish, not entirely round ones do not go as straight as the perfectly round ones. You’ll never knock down any pins with your tomato if it heads straight for the gutter. Oh, it must be said that the typical tomato has no finger holes as opposed to the standard three-hole bowling ball. This makes tomato bowling even more challenging.
11) Play golf with ginger root! Be careful not to hit your ginger in the woods. It blends in with the leaves. You’ll never find it.
12) Even better, play basketball with tomatoes! Given that tomatoes would make a big splat the first time the ball handler batted the tomato to the ground, fears of players getting away with uncalled double dribbles would be thing of the past.
12) Play football with tomatoes! Since tomatoes are so fragile, soft hands for the quarterback and receivers would be a must.
13) Stage your own bullfights. All you need is a red tablecloth and fast feet.
14) What about ten tons of tomatoes and a bulldozer? Revelers get five minutes on the machine, or fewer if they miss the tomatoes and run into a building.
– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef
My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.
Much has been made of the communist nations horrific repression of their own peoples. Ne’er do wells such as Stalin and Mao come to mind. However, there is another evil side to communism that the mainstream media is afraid to report, the lack of golfing opportunities. Why just in our own hemisphere, we have Cuba with its two golf courses. Two. That sun-swept land would have had hundreds of golf courses if the country had only been a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, a telemarketer junta. Anything.
I blame communism completely for this lamentable lack of golf courses. Year after year, Cuba embarrasses itself with its non-existent production of world class golfers.
The United States, a democracy, is fertile ground for golfers. So are the countries of western Europe. Not many top golfers come from eastern Europe. However, eastern Europe is still coming out from the effects of Soviet communism. Producing golfers will take time.
I watched a South Korean golfer on T.V.–what’s his name?–win a major tournament. South Korea is a democracy. Sure, it was a dictatorship for decades before that. The point remains, though, South Korea was never communist and so is a credible global golfing power.
Sure, Thailand gets hit with tsunamis and suffers periodic military coups and frequent prolonged bouts with widespread civil unrest. However, this country too was never communist. Indeed, at least for a while, it mandated that all officers in its military become proficient in golfing.
So, if you value your golfing freedom, and I hope you do, in which country would you prefer to live and golf, South Korea or Cuba?
Fortunately, a new day dawns. A few years ago, Cuba announced it would let foreign investors take 99-year leases on Cuban lands. Right away, at least one foreign company announced plans to build up to 10, or was it 100 golf courses; I forget which. But either way, Cuba will be free to golf. The world has gotten brighter. Bluebirds sing.
But the horror of communism continues elsewhere, witness the hair style of North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un. Be afraid, very afraid.
– Paul R. De Lancey – political commentator
My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.
GOLF HAIKU
“@#$@ ^&%# $#@ @#$&*(+
“#V%^! $%#_+( @@@#$$%% !$&^*)
“j#X!.? @#@ <>,. $#%!!”
– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef
My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.
My run for the office of El Presidente of Venezuela nearly derailed when I momentarily forget how to spell “candidacy” for this blog’s title. But I 
remembered. Whew! Anyway, I’ve been telling you, the Venezuelan voters, how I will help you or at the very least inflict the least harm of any candidate. But why take the word of someone who has run for political office, golfed, and fished? Look at the glowing endorsements below.
“You are much more qualified than the Chavista bus driver (Maduro), and offer better perks (Bacon & Chocolate- For the People!) than the other challanger (Capriles). DeLancey for El Presidente!”
– Jonna Pattillo
“You have the full support of The Cookie Party.”
– Wayne DePriest
“Glad to know the BCP has gone post-nationalist.”
– Blaise Marcoux
“Vote Early, vote often!”
– Jonna Pattillo
“You have my endorsement. As a token of my endorsement I am sending you a fish with an endorsal fin.”
– Steve Kramer
“I really think the people of Venezuela should vote for you instead of that morally compromised bus driver turned politico. After all – You offer bacon and chocolate instead of just popular television….”
– Jonna Pattillo
“You have my endorsement, but don’t be in any hurry to cash the check.”
– Wayne DePriest
“The Lascaux Review officially endorses Paul De Lancey of the Bacon & Chocolate Party for the office of President of Venezuela.”
– Stephen Parrish
– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef
My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.
Paul De Lancey's Blog 