Tag Archives: Houston food blogger

MY BIG FAT TEXAS HEARING

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This week I traveled to Midland with my boss for a hearing involving a lot of parties, a lot of lawyers, and a lot of money.

Feel the Energy

Midland, population approximately 170,000, is Texas’s 24th most populous city.  It’s located in the Permian Basin in the West Texas plains.  The view from the plane as we neared Midland left no doubt that this is oil and gas country:

The city rises up out of the flat landscape:

Once there, before getting down to the business of preparing for the next day’s hearing, we got a recommendation for lunch and headed to Abuelo’s (there are numerous locations around Texas).

The interior was cheery, with its sunny courtyard:Chips and queso, followed by fajitas, rice, and beans (all very good) provided ample fuel (feel the energy!) for an afternoon of plowing through the reams of paper filed by the parties in preparation for the hearing the next morning:

Our client arranged for us to stay in furnished corporate apartments (we each had our own — whew!), which were very comfortable and provided a perfect workspace:

There were a few surprises waiting for us:

My client must think I am more fun than I actually am

And a well-stocked fridge:

So thoughtful, and much appreciated 

There was a pumpjack right outside the complex — the first time I’d ever been that close to one:

We worked all afternoon and into the early evening preparing for the hearing.  After researching and writing about the key legal issue for almost a year, it was exciting/nerve-wracking to think about actually having the judge decide it.

We headed out bright and early the next morning for the hearing.

The hearing was held in Stanton, the county seat of Martin County.

Fortunately, the judge is not one of the “old sore heads.”

The Martin County Courthouse is not a grand old Texas courthouse, although there were two previous courthouses that would have qualified.  The present courthouse was built in 1975, and is a modern, concrete building, with colonnades:

On the front lawn is a pergola made from elements of the 1908 courthouse, the first of the three courthouses:

The Old Martin County Jail is next to the courthouse:

Outside the courthouse was a water tower, where buzzards had gathered — not sure if it was a gesture of solidarity with the many lawyers inside, or if they sensed something was about to go down.

The modest interior of the courthouse had a midcentury vibe (at least that’s what they call it at the estate sales I go to):

The circular courtroom reminded me a lot of the Nueces County Courthouse courtroom we had a trial in, with its vaguely “Close Encounters” ceiling:That’s my boss, sitting there by himself, waiting for the hearing to start.  On the one side of this lawsuit is my client, represented by my firm, and on the other side is approximately 140 defendants represented by a platoon of law firms.  We were seriously outnumbered — I joked that I was afraid the courtroom might tip over with all those lawyers on the other side.  In fact, at the start of the hearing, as the defendants’ side filled up, this is what our side looked like:

Eventually, though, our side filled up with representatives from our client’s company, interested parties, and onlookers. Honestly, it felt a lot like a wedding as everyone drifted in and milled about before the hearing — all dressed up, making polite chit chat, taking their seat on the bride’s side or the groom’s side.  Except there were no passed hors d’oeuvres,  no buffet, no dancing.  Well, maybe a little dancing, as the lawyers for each side kinda dipped and swayed as they passionately argued.

My boss did great, as usual, and I was glad he was the one arguing against all those lawyers on the other side instead of me.  The judge was attentive, but didn’t show his hand — I think if you asked any of the lawyers on either side they’d say it went well.  He promised he’d read everything and rule soon.  Until then, the proverbial jury is still out . . . .

UPDATE:  The judge ruled in our favor.  🙂

Everyone at the courthouse was nice.  The court clerk came by and introduced herself, telling us to let her know if we need anything.  The judge took off his robe (I was going to say disrobed, but it sounded inappropriate) and came down from the bench to mingle with the attorneys after the hearing.  And this really warmed my heart — I went to take a drink from the water fountain during a break (what was I thinking — everyone knows you can get Covid from drinking fountains, right?), and the stream of water arced up about two feet and landed on the floor about two feet away from the fountain.  Oops, clean up on aisle two.  I stood there pouting, and a woman next to me, one of the onlookers — I don’t know who she was or which side she was aligned with — said it was probably for the best, because really, we shouldn’t be drinking from public fountains.  I told her what I really wanted was a soda from the vending machine, but it only took coins, and the smallest thing I had was a $20 bill (first world problem, I know).  A few minutes later she tapped me on the shoulder and handed me 3 quarters.  I was stunned/touched by her thoughtfulness — and so happy to have a Diet Dr. Pepper.  If by chance you read this, thank you kind stranger.  🙂

BIG MAC SPECIAL SAUCE

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Back in the summer of 2018, I treated myself to lunch from McDonald’s, and with my change, the cashier handed me this golden coin:

The Big Mac was 50 years old?  Had it really been 50 years of those two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, on a sesame seed bun?  What’s even more incredible to me is that only 1 out of 5 millennials have tasted a Big Mac.  Silly millennials.

I worked at McDonald’s when I was in high school.  It was exciting to get a McDonald’s franchise in our town (prior to that it was Hardee’s or nothing), and I was thrilled to have my first real non-babysitting job.  That excitement did not last much beyond my first week of work.  The manager — his name was Harry or Henry — was a little twit of a man, not many years older than me, with a stupid little black mustache, who clearly favored other teen employees over me.

I liked my job, even though I was not one of the cool kids.  (Yes, there was a clique among the teens working at McDonald’s — because in case you haven’t figured it out yet, middle school is never really over).  I learned that food had to be thrown out after sitting around for 30 minutes, and we were never ever to talk to union organizers.  Some nights I worked the shake station, and I’d go home polka-dotted with milkshake splatters.  Sometimes I assembled sandwiches, squirting special sauce out of something that looked like a caulking gun.  The job I liked the least was keeping the dining area and rest rooms clean — which Harry/Henry seemed to delight in assigning to me, not being one of the cool kids. But no matter which station I worked, my dog was happy to greet/hump me when I got home with my $1.25 worth of food in hand — our meal allowance that we could take at the end of our shift.

One day, Harry/Henry called me into his closet of an office.  He sat there in his yellow short-sleeved shirt and brown polyester slacks in his vinyl-covered wheel-a-throne, and informed me that I was being fired because I wasn’t “a McDonald’s person.”  Although he didn’t elaborate, he assured me that they had other employees who, despite not being McDonald’s people, had gone on to successful careers at Jack in the Box.  (Come to think of it, that might have been what I was told when I was laid off from my first law job at the Manhattan law firm.)  Although it was humiliating at the time, it prepared me for many more “you’re not a [fill in the blank] person” conversations in the years ahead.

I tried to find out what happened to Harry/Henry, but not surprisingly, my Google search for “Harry or Henry who was a manager at McDonald’s on Long Island in the 70s,” was not fruitful.

I harbor no ill will towards McDonald’s.  In fact, I still love a Big Mac once in a while.  According to my research, in 1967, a man running a McDonald’s franchise named Jim Delligatti was frustrated.  His customers at his Pittsburgh franchise were primarily steel workers with big appetites, but all he had to offer them was a regular cheeseburger.  He experimented in the kitchen, and came up with what is now known as the Big Mac.  He placed a center bun, known as the “club bun” between the patties to stabilize the sandwich.  (Ironically, the first thing I do when I get a Big Mac is remove the center bun, stability be damned.)  But what really made the sandwich unique was the “special sauce” he created.  With Ray Kroc’s blessing, the Big Mac was introduced systemwide in 1968.  Today, Americans consume 550 million Big Macs a year.

I found a few copycat recipes for Special Sauce on the interwebs, but none of them sounded right, and were really little more than thousand island dressing.  Then I found this recipe for Special Sauce, which is purportedly from the McDonald’s Manager’s Handbook published in 1969 (which presumably also informs managers how to terminate employees that are “not McDonald’s people”), to be used in the event of an emergency if a store ran out of the pre-made sauce (gasp!).  More out of curiosity than anything else, I prepared a batch of the McDonald’s Manager’s Handbook Special Sauce.

The ingredients include a parade of horribles, things I would normally never have in my refrigerator — Miracle Whip, bottled French salad dressing, sweet pickle relish:

I tried ordering a Big Mac with the special sauce on the side so that I could do a side-by-side comparison, but the cashier would not oblige me.  (I think maybe my face is on a “not a McDonald’s person” poster hanging in the break room.) So I scraped off what I could, and here’s the side-by-side:

Copycat on the left, real stuff on the right

I’m not sure if the real stuff has that much more relish than the copycat, or if that is just what I was able to scrape off. And?  Yeah, it’s on point– a little more orange than the OG, perhaps, but the taste was pretty darn close.  Even if you’re not a McDonald’s person, this is still awesome sauce.

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BIG MAC SPECIAL SAUCE
Author: 
Recipe type: Sauces and Condiments
 
Ingredients
  • ¼ cup Miracle Whip
  • ¼ cup mayonnaise
  • 3 tablespoons Wishbone French salad dressing
  • ½ tablespoon Heinz sweet pickle relish
  • 1½ tablespoons Heinz dill pickle relish
  • 1 teaspoon sugar
  • 1 teaspoon dried minced onion
  • 1 teaspoon white vinegar
  • 1 teaspoon ketchup
  • ⅛ teaspoon salt
Instructions
  1. In a medium microwave-safe container, mix all of the ingredients.
  2. Microwave on high power for 25 seconds, and stir well again.
  3. Cover and refrigerate at least 1 hour before serving. The sauce will keep covered in the refrigerator for up to 2 weeks.