How to make hot dogs

In the spring of 2020, an angel appeared to me in a dream and presented me with access to a most holy and beautiful artifact: Mrs. Rogers’ Neighborhood, the cooking blog that Emily Rogers, my cisgender self from an alternate universe, writes. What might seem to be a cooking blog at first is, instead, a window into the multiverse. You can read the archives here, and if you need to get caught up on the #lore, she has a Wiki. It is important to note, as always, that photos do not survive the transmission between universes, but the alt text descriptions of those images are provided in place. – ESJ

Blessed solstice and happy holidays, Emmy's Army!

I want to apologize for the sparseness of posts lately! We're just about settled here in the new house, as I'm sure you've seen from David's videos. We're all missing Wisconsin a little bit, but Seattle is wonderful too! Both girls love their schools!

[IMAGE: Two girls in raincoats, one just on the cusp of adolescence, the other still mostly a kid. They wait at a bus stop and do not look like they love their schools.]

And I love all the farmers markets!

[IMAGE: A tall blonde woman in a raincoat, pretending to bite into a peach.]

One nice thing about the new place is that it's got an enormous kitchen since it started life as a boardinghouse. (So many extra bedrooms!) You know how much I complained about how cramped my old kitchen could get. Now, I've got so much more room, which means I finally have the space to let G get a little more involved in mom's projects.

That's right! After all of those years of trying to get M to join me in the kitchen with only fitful success, G has the bug. I taught her how to make grilled cheese, and she immediately started experimenting. Even if her PB&J grilled cheese was... not to my taste, it was a worthy effort. Since then, it's been, "When can we make this? When can we make that? When can I make beef Wellington?" [That last one's a joke, I think.] Oh, of course it's a joke, David. You think I know how to make beef Wellington? [I try to never doubt any of your capabilities!]

What's interesting is that in almost every particular, M is my daughter. And in almost every particular, G is her dad's girl. But here's this one big thing where G is so much more like me, and I was amazed how emotional I got when I realized she wanted to be a part of what I do. My youngest has always been a little more of a mystery to me than my oldest. Like David, there's a lot inside of her that isn't necessarily getting out into the world, whereas M sings constantly. [Yes, only M does that.]

So when Thanksgiving came around, G naturally wanted to be a big part of it. I couldn't indulge her to the degree I might have wanted to, but she helped whisk gravy and bake the pumpkin pie and all those good things. And I've promised her she can be a big part of making our traditional New Year's lasagna.

Two days after Thanksgiving, we had an unexpected knock at our door in early evening. When David answered, he found my big brother Bryan, soaking wet from the rain and shivering. Considering Bryan lives in Atlanta, I half-wondered if he had stepped through a magic portal.

"I was in the neighborhood," he said, before further clarifying that by "neighborhood," he meant "the west coast of the United States." I didn't know what to make of that, and it got even weirder when I asked him if he wanted a turkey sandwich and he said he never wanted to eat turkey again in his entire life.

"I can make hot dogs!" G said, and we all agreed hot dogs sounded great.

So, gang, let's make hot dogs.

[IMAGE: Two beautiful, red hot dogs, cooked to perfection, perched in buns and covered with delicious toppings.]

"Oh, Emmy," you say, "I can make hot dogs. Is this going to be some sort of sponcon?" To that I say, first of all, the bottom has fallen out of the sponcon market, and second of all, email your favorite unorthodox hot dog topping to emmysarmy99@gmail.com by Christmas Day to enter our sweepstakes for a year's supply of Grover Mayer's weiners, brought directly to your house by the wienercopter! [As always, some brand names in Emily's universe seem to be different. In this case, "Grover Mayer's wieners," which is virtually identical to Oscar Mayer wieners, except for the fact that Emily gets a wienercopter. When are we going to get a wienercopter? — ed.]

But once you have your year's supply of dogs, you're going to need to make them taste as good as they can. Growing up, I was never a hot dog girl because nobody ever made them the right way for me until David's mom showed me what was what as part of her ongoing "don't mess up my son too much, okay?" education. Since I have learned these ancient secrets, I am going to impart that knowledge to you from the very depths of my recipe vault!

First, ingredients!

[IMAGE: A package of Grover Mayer's Super Wieners, a package of store-bought hot dog buns, Heinz ketchup, Franz's mustard, and an assortment of possible toppings, including relish, mayo, pickles, diced onions, cheese, etc.]

Obviously, we're going to use Grover Mayer wieners, but you could use whatever hot dog you liked! I recommend all-beef varieties, but the neat thing about this recipe is that it will make any hot dog suitable for a gourmand! [Do you think gourmands eat lots of hot dogs?] I mean, they must, right? It's important to have a baseline!

First, heat your oven to 400° F. Then cut open as many buns as you need and line them up in baking pans, just hanging open. We'll get back to them in a second.

Now, heat up a tablespoon of a nice neutral oil in a medium-hot skillet! (Yes, vegetable oil works just fine.) We want to fry as many hot dogs as you're going to eat in that skillet. You don't want to cook the dogs all the way through. We're just giving them a little head start before they go into the oven. Just wait until the skin is starting to get a little pucker-y, probably four or five minutes. Like below:

[IMAGE: Six hot dogs with dark red, slightly wrinkled skin sizzle in a skillet. A child's hand with orange fingernail polish holds tongs just at the edge of the frame.]

The great thing about this step is that you can get your kiddos involved if they're like G!

[IMAGE: The girl stands on a step stool and looks down at the hot dogs, brow furrowed in concentration.]

Once they're just hot enough, take 'em off the heat! We don't want to go much further with them at this point. Instead, start putting them into the buns you've already placed in baking pans. Why baking pans? We'll get there! [You did tell them to heat up their ovens. I doubt they're going to be hugely surprised.] clears throat ONCE THEY'RE IN THE BUNS, put your favorite sauces and other toppings on them.

[IMAGE: The girl carefully uses her tongs to place a hot dog in a hot dog bun held open by adult hands.]

At this point, of course, Bryan wandered in, already munching on some peanuts he clearly found somewhere. [Don't look at me!] "Smells good!" he said. Then he nodded at G carefully squirting mustard on the dogs in a thin stream. "Just like you at that age, huh?" he said. When I gave him a little look, he shrugged. "You used to help Mom in the kitchen all the time."

"Yeah, because she thought it was stuff a girl needed to know," I said. "I got to like it. I didn't like it right away. Not like you, G, right?"

She smiled at me and shook her head before returning to her very important task of saucing up the dogs. And then I was hit with the sudden terror that I had pushed this onto G as surely as it was pushed onto me. Was she just here because it was the one place she could make contact with me? Had I guilted her into it somehow? Did she like cooking, or did she just want me to like her?

I didn't feel like saying all of this in front of an 8-year-old, so I said, "Who knows why anyone likes anything!"

Bryan raised an eyebrow but didn't say anything more.

"So the next step," I said to G, "is to take a nice big handful of cheese and sprinkle it over the top of each hot dog. Mozzarella for me, please, but you can do whatever you like!" [Yes, she gives us kitchen instructions like she's writing this blog.]

"No cheese for me, please," Bryan said.

"No cheese? Are you my brother's clone?"

He laughed, and I could hear that he was about to cry. Before I could say anything, he turned on his heel and walked out of the room.

"What's next, mom?" I didn't answer quickly enough, because G said, "What's next?" again, like I was ruining everything.

"Oh, um, so just take the baking pan and put it in the oven," I said, pulling the oven door open. "Careful. We don't wanna get burned. And now we let them cook for about six minutes."

"So the cheese melts?"

I nodded. "And the buns get a little toasty. But not too toasty. We don't want it to be inedible."

"I should have put hot sauce on M's. She likes that."

"Well, you can always add more toppings after the fact."

The whole time I was having this conversation with G, I opened up a few bags of potato chips and a box of salad greens and tried to feel where my brother had gotten off to in the house. When we were kids, growing up in our old haunted house, I think we developed a kind of psychic sense for each other, because we never knew when we might just need to find each other for whatever reason. That's obviously faded as we've become adults who don't spend so much time around each other. Which is a little sad, I suppose!

"Do you think Uncle Bryan's sad?" G said. She was down on her haunches in front of the oven, watching the cheese melt under the heat. I felt a weird relief. She does like doing this. She loves the magic of all of these pieces coming together to form something greater than themselves. She'll probably like it even when I'm the last person she wants to talk to in a few years.

"Maybe," I said. "I'll try talking to him, okay?" She smiled and nodded because she still thinks I can fix things.

After six minutes, we took the hot dogs out of the oven, so they looked like this:

[IMAGE: Hot dogs just barely visible beneath a slightly charred mozzarella cheese surface, the buns toasted a dark brown.]

Yum! Baking the dogs gives them a deeper, richer flavor. I've even tried this method with non-meat hot dogs, and they taste amazing. The only thing that really beats an oven-baked dog is one from the grill, but who wants to grill in Seattle in December?

G started setting the table while I went to grab everybody else. M had put on the video of her last revue with her theater troupe back in Milwaukee, and we watched her sing "Suddenly Seymour" from Little Shop. Bryan applauded (because she rocked it), and she blushed and bowed. Then I asked her if she'd taken her meds – because I don't want her to forget! – and I could tell she barely stopped herself from taking my head off before she went off to do just that.

David headed off to help G finish setting things up, but Bryan stayed on the couch, staring up at the frozen YouTube screen. "You moved here for her, huh?"

"No, we moved here because David found this house, and we just fell in love with it. It's pretty great, right?"

Bryan looked away from the screen, back at me. "You moved here because she's–"

"I loved the house," I said before he could say the word "trans" because I hate when that's all people see about M. "And David and I didn't trust the Wisconsin legislature, no. But I did love the house."

Bryan's eyes got watery. "Good. Keep her safe. Good. You're good parents."

"Why are you here, Bryan? You're always welcome, but–"

He looked down at his hands were splayed out on his knees. Behind me, G raised her voice just loudly enough for us to hear her say, "We're ready to eat!"

He did a great job of being fun Uncle Bryan through the whole meal, overly complimenting G on how good the hot dogs were, telling M that she'll be on Broadway someday for sure, even telling David he'd be happy to help out with any projects that needed doing the next day. I just watched him, and somehow, I knew: He wasn't my brother.

No, I don't think he was actually a clone! I just could tell something had happened to him that had fundamentally changed him on an almost molecular level. So after I had gotten the girls to bed, I found Bryan sitting on the back porch, listening to the rain. He was drinking one of David's IPAs, and the last of the hot dogs sat half-finished on a plate next to him. He saw me watching him from the door to the house, then looked back out into the dark. "I'll leave tomorrow night, okay? Just thought I would drop in."

"You can stay, Bry. I just need to know... why?"

He sipped his beer, eyes red. He reached back toward me, hand grasping at the air in what I finally understood was him asking me to hold onto him. So I did. He took a long, shuddering breath, and he said, "I was seeing my birth mom."

"Holy shit, Bry! I didn't know you'd found her." He opened a photo of him with her on his phone and handed it back to me. "Wait. Is that–" (It was someone very famous. No, I'm not telling you who she is! Nosy!)

He nodded and took the phone back. "Yes. It took a while to get her to agree to meet me. She got pregnant at 15 by her high school boyfriend. Her mom made her go away to distant relatives to have the baby – me – and then she put me up for adoption because she wanted to be famous. Which, as you can see, she accomplished. Unlike our mom." He laughed, and it wavered. "So I went to see her for Thanksgiving. Her and her family. And me, the awkward hanger-on, the inconvenient secret, the guy who hired a PI just to sit at the end of the Thanksgiving table by the gravy boat and answer questions about what he made of the life she thought she had gifted him."

I made my way to the porch steps and slid down to sit on them, my legs pulling back from the rain. "You're great, Bry. I'm sure she saw that."

"She said she did, but..." He shook his head. "I don't know. I needed her to be someone else. I wanted to tell her that maybe she had made the right choice for her, but it had broken me."

"Oh, Bry, you're not broken."

"Don't do that, Emmy! You always fucking–" He swallowed something worse and drank a huge swig of his beer, setting the can next to him. "Maybe you experienced our childhood differently than I did, but let me tell you how it was for me. Our mother was indifferent to me, and our father hated me for not being him. If I could erase that life entirely, you'd be the only thing I'd want to keep."

"I'm honored," I said, and I laughed a little because I wanted him to be kidding. But he looked at me, and I cleared my throat. "I'm honored. I know that I don't remember how we grew up the same way you do–"

He laughed once. "Emmy, don't kid yourself about this. I've read your blog."

I didn't say anything. What was there to say?

"So my mom was nice. Her kids were nice. Her boyfriend was nice. They were all nice." He sighed. Somewhere inside of that sigh, I understood he was drunk. "And when I went down to get in the cab to my hotel – because I didn't want to make things awkward for her – she asked me how much money I wanted and if I had anywhere else to go for the holiday. I said I didn't want money, and I said I had a sister in Seattle. So she bought me a plane ticket here that very night."

"Two days ago?" My mind tried to do the math, and that was when I realized he hadn't arrived with luggage, at least as far as I could tell. I assumed he had driven here, but if he had flown...

"I'm just getting started." He kicked his feet up one at a time on the porch railing. Rain spattered against his shoes. "I packed up my stuff, got a car to the airport, sent my luggage through, then..."

His voice drifted out of audibility. I scooted over and put one of my hands out into the rain so it rested on his ankle.

"I didn't get on the plane. It had been years since I had seen the Pacific, and I suddenly needed to. I could catch another flight. So I took yet another cab down to Redondo Beach, and I walked out into the water. I walked, and I walked, and I walked, and then I couldn't feel the seafloor anymore, so I floated for a while, and I could see the moon, and I thought, Gosh, I could die here." He opened another can of beer. I didn't realize he had one. "And that was when I saw the angel."

"Bry, you've maybe had a few too many–"

"No, Emmy. Now, I realize what I'm saying–"

"Sounds like the plot of It's a Very Good Life? Yes."

He laughed once. "Well, I didn't get a friendly old grandma type. I got a big scary guy. He had these tentacles that waved around like–" He flapped his arms around like one of those streamers at a used car lot. "–and a beak that kept clacking wordlessly. It was like I understood him more than he spoke. I told him I was ready to die, and he asked me if I wanted the 'see if you'd never been born' deluxe package, and I said yes.

"Suddenly, there was a window beneath the waves. I could see the sky through it. I swam through, and the angel followed. It was a world like this one, more or less. We walked around downtown Los Angeles for a while. The air felt thick around me, and I didn't know why. People avoided me, and at first I thought they could see the angel, but, no, I was just drenched in seawater, and that seemed terrifying. I realized that they, like us, had taught themselves to be scared all of the time, rather than accept the possibility of some other, better world. I think most of them believed that reality was a bubble that might pop at any moment. Who knows? Maybe it was just a hallucination I had and they were right to worry everything would end.

"I asked the angel to take me to see the people I cared about. He asked who I meant, and I realized the list was just you and your family."

He took a long enough drink that I broke in. "Still honored. But Bry..."

"He said that we were only a few train stops away from you, and would I like to see you, and I said yes, yes, of course. We ended up at a party in somebody's backyard, and the angel told me it was the solstice. People had gathered to try to make light in the darkness. Like you do." He belched softly. "And I suddenly saw these two women and their kid–"

"Wait, do I have a wife? Very modern of me."

He laughed. "You've gotten ahead of me. The taller one looked at me, and something passed through me. I knew she was you, and I knew she was happy and terrified and sad in equal measure, just like you. And I knew she recognized me and didn't understand why. They were throwing pieces of paper into a fire – wishes for the new year – and she lifted hers to her lips and kissed it, and I somehow knew whatever she wished was what you would have too. I hoped it would come true for both of you.

"I got a piece of paper, and I wrote, 'I want to feel safe somewhere.' I threw it in the fire, and the angel told me to keep moving. The closer I got to the flames, the more I could see the window inside of them, the torrents of rain falling from the sky. All I could smell was smoke, and I thought maybe I had caught on fire. But it didn't hurt as much as it should, and then I was through. I was on a street I didn't recognize, outside of a house I had never seen before that felt like home somehow, and I walked up to the front door and rang the doorbell, and David answered, and I understood finally." He laughed but it might have been a sob. "And then I saw you help G make hot dogs, and I saw how you helped her find her own way. You and I got thrown into the darkness, but we got thrown there together. And we learned how to make just enough light to find each other. And maybe you're a little better at that than I am because the hot dogs were wonderful."

I knew the second I spoke, he would take it all back. I still had to say something, so I said, "That's a pretty wild story."

He laughed again. "Isn't it? The truth is that I fell asleep in the water, but thank God, the waves bore me back to shore. After I woke up, I went to the airport, and I flew to Seattle. I found the email you'd sent with your new address, and I took a cab here, and that also explains it. And hopefully my luggage shows up here soon." He took a drink. His lips made a shaky thp-thp-thp sound against the can. "It is an accident that we know each other, Emmy. We have different biological parents, we have different interests, we have different ways of seeing the world, but you and David and your girls are the only thing I have that feels at all like home."

I sometimes worry that all I do is close the windows of other people's possibilities, that the second they try to open up the world to me, I say something like "That's a pretty wild story" because it takes me a while to figure out that a thing doesn't need to be factual for it to be true, if that makes any sense. So I sat there and tried to figure out what to say to Bryan, how to try to tell him that I wanted to help him however I could without making it sound like I thought he was having a psychotic break (he might have been having a psychotic break), and what I landed on was, "Why don't you stay here for a while? We have too many bedrooms."

"I would like that," he said, and he started to cry.

First, I hugged him. After that, I would show him upstairs to the only room we've managed to make into a guest room. After I got him settled and into the shower, I would go down the hall and tell David, who would be reading in bed, that Bryan was going to stay with us for a while, and David would say, "Sounds good. I could use the help around here." Then I would go and think about knocking on M's door to tell her to go to bed before I would decide that it was the Saturday after Thanksgiving, and whatever, let her live. Then I would go to G's room and find her passed out with Making Merry with Emily flipped open to a page on my famous Devil's Food Christmas Cookie Eggnog Bundt Cake, and I would gently lift her foot from where it lay outside of the covers and re-cover it because the one other thing she has in common with me is that she runs cold. Then I would go downstairs and start a load of laundry, and, unable to figure out how I felt, I would eat that last half hot dog that Bryan ultimately hadn't touched. And then I would go upstairs and shower and hang onto David until I fell asleep.

And in the morning, Bryan's luggage would be waiting for us at the door like magic, and G would say she wanted to try making the cake, and I would say that sounded like a terrific way to spend a Sunday, and David and Bryan would go tackle some woodworking upstairs, and M would have friends over to play Dungeons & Dragons. I would know, deep down, that all of this is a bubble that can pop in a moment, but I would also know that if you try to hold onto a bubble too hard, it just pops anyway. I would re-realize that the only way to hold onto anything is to accept its impermanence, and I would feel as dissatisfied by that answer as ever, so I would, instead, focus on making a cake with my girl, and hope that she would, decades from now, remember me as something other than an obstacle.

But first I hugged him. At first, it felt the same as ever, but then nested inside of it, I found some other version of ourselves that had always been there, tiny, tiny, tiny, its heart thrumming so fast. We are both so old now, but in some ways, we still feel so young because we're only starting to get to know each other.

And as I was just about to release the hug, I took a deep breath in, my face pressed against his coat, and all I smelled was smoke.

[IMAGE: The tall blonde woman, with an even taller, slender man, greying brown hair and square glasses, sitting on a bench overlooking Puget Sound. They're both holding hot dogs wrapped in foil, bought from a street vendor. They look cold but also warm somehow.]

Emily St. James here! Thanks so much to Emily Rogers for taking the responsibility of writing a newsletter off my hands this week. If you are a paid subscriber, you'll see me again on the next few Fridays. If you're a free subscriber, you'll see me again on January 8.

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I hope that you have a wonderful holiday season, and I'm so grateful for your readership this year and all years.

This week's reading music: "White Wine in the Sun" by Tim Minchin

The free edition of Episodes, which (usually) covers classic TV and film, is published every other Wednesday, and the subscriber-supported edition of Episodes, which covers more recent stuff, is published every Friday. It's written by Emily St. James. If you have suggested topics, please reply to the email version of this newsletter or comment (if you are a paid subscriber).