Tuesday, April 7, 2015

Childhood, reclaimed?

Growing up in Chicago in the 1960's, I never realized it but I was quite blessed to be exposed to an incredible variety of not-necessarily-traditional-mid-American foods. My family's heritage (on my Dad's side) is primarily Polish- and we're talking 2nd generation, so a fair amount of Polish was spoken in my home when I was growing up (my first "colorful" words and phrases were Polish, in fact!). My Mom's family was German and Swedish, but I did not have a great deal of exposure to that culture- probably owing to my Mom's passing at a very early age (she was in her early 30's- not long after my 5th birthday).

Anyway, fast forward a few years. My Dad and I are living with his parents in a typical Chicago bungalow on a 30' (~10M) lot on the Northwest side of Chicago- Cragin or Hanson Park..., depending on how you demarcate those those neighborhoods. There's a Kroger grocery store (later to be Dominick's) directly across Central Ave. from our house. The prices are good and it's the neighborhood grocery store, and it's across the street, so we shop there fairly often.  Sure, there was Pauli's just a block to the north, and an A & P near our church, and later on a Jewel in the Brickyard Shopping Center. But the Kroger/Dominick's was right across the street, so that's where we did most of our shopping back then.

Remember the T.V. series Quantum Leap? Well, in this post, I'm reprising Dr. Sam Beckett's character, time traveling within my own lifetime! Keep a mental bookmark on that bungalow in Chicago on Central Ave across the street from Kroger/Dominick's, and fast-forward to 2015. For the past few months, I've been looking around for a childhood sandwich staple that my Dad and I used to purchase there nearly every week: minced ham.

As far as I have been able to determine, minced ham was one of those "working class" foods- something that your Mom or Grandma would have made a samwich or two out of for your dad or granddad, which would have been taken to the factory or construction site or some other dirty, honest, blue collar locale. It was a pretty large, as sausages go- probably around six inches (a little over 15cm) in diameter with a medium mottled sausagy/meaty coloring and flavor. It was slightly softer in texture than bologna (where the bologna I'm accustomed to is a bit firmer than einfachwurst), and had a bit more complex and slightly darker flavor. We ate a lot of this in sandwiches for lunch, and it was a fishing trip staple in our family....

A couple of Fridays ago, Jennifer and I were at Shop and Save, and I was perusing their most excellent deli. I had previously established that they do not carry anything called minced ham, but have something which looked very similar called "beer sausage with garlic". I tried a sample, and it was very close to what I remembered minced ham tasting like. We bought some and I had a few sandwiches for lunch. In the "for what it's worth column", balogna has always been fairly inexpensive. Minced Ham, as I recall, was also inexpensive, but the beer sausage we purchased was close to $7 per pound, around three or more times the price of balogna!

Later on at work, I asked on of my coworkers if he had mined ham when he was a kid. Yes, he replied, but he had also not see it for some time. So, I decided to get to the bottom of my puzzle. I started searching online and came to the Crawford Sausage Company's homepage. They make their sausage under the "Daisy Brand". What's interesting is that they make both minced ham and beer sausage, so my next task is to find a local deli that sells the Daisy Brand of minced ham AND beer sausage, and do a taste comparison.

Back in the wonderful world of data...

I've been trying to get back to this blog for a bit, but have been stymied for a number of reasons. There are two main culprits, Twitter being the first and the Secret Underground Lair being the other one. I like to look at Twitter as much more than a way to "toot my own horn"; indeed, very little of what I tweet on @CjoelHarrison is original- my raison d'etre on that site is the exploration and promulgation of Big Data and the Internet of Things (by "promulgation", I mean "to make widespread").

Data work has been slow but has started to pick up lately. I have a project which involves the manual renaming of ~46GB of data (around 15K file names); this project also has some additional file organization involved. I'm also starting to do more programming at work, which is especially nice as my job title includes "Programmer"! I've also started more regular updates of my blog viewers spreadsheet: it's not Big Data by any stretch, but I'm enjoying watching the readership increase. Still no one in Antarctica- shameless plug for someone, ANYONE, in Antarctica to please read this blog!


Lastly, there's the SUL. I've finally reclaimed a corner of the Lair and have a small cluster (a group, not a "real" cluster) of three HP PC's and a workstation. The SUL is more of a no budget operation than a low budget operation- one of the monitors is an ancient 14" CRT! I've got a couple of Trendnet KVMs which enable all of the equipment to operate simultaneously. The two with the silver bezels are Win7 boxes, the next runs Ubuntu and the last one is an unnetworked WinXP box. The only work left in this corner is the spaghetti mess between the two monitors! Well, there's also a spaghetti mess of power cables on the workstation where I'm writing this as well, but that stuff can wait, as this is only the 1st phase of some very exciting stuff going on in the SUL.
(cue the John Wayne voice)-

"So buckle up tight, kiddos, it's gonna be a wild ride!"

As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.


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