NESHDRs

Once a year or so I visit my family in Florida and I drag my husband along. This year my mom scheduled her annual chili cook off while we were there. Yum! She informed me that my dad (yes my mom and step-dad invite my dad and step-mom to their parties and vice versa. Very adult of them, wouldn’t you say?) has been commissioned to bring the hot dogs, presumably for chili dogs. I said, “Oh I’ll bring the rolls.”

New England Style Hot Dog Rolls are the sort that have flat sides for toasting or grilling or what not. Living in Boston I take the presence of these on my supermarket shelves for granted. Can you imagine a lobster roll on anything but a bun you can butter up and grill? Or never having the option for a toasted or grilled roll for your hot dog? Well, welcome to Florida. The land of sunshine, warm weather and rounded hot dog rolls. My dad has always made it perfectly clear that the NESHDRs are unattainable in Florida. When I said I’d bring the NESHDRs from Boston I could practically hear my parents drooling over the phone. My mom actually mentioned it twice to my sister in one day. Sure I’ll bring the rolls. I mean, how hard could it be to transport exceptionally soft white bread products in an airplane, right?

The day of the flight came and Michael had gotten the rolls the day before. I packed the rolls, as my friend Courtney advised, in the top of a canvas bag and planned to carry them on the plane with me. My plan was to store them under the seat in front of me.

Earlier in the week, I’d sent an email to my dad and step dad with my flight info and my step dad emailed me back saying “Hey you’re in first class! Have a Manhattan for me.” Well our flight was at 7:45am and a Manhattan at that hour is a bit boozy, even for me. I was surprised to learn that we were in first class. It wasn’t something that we asked for. We weren't scheduled to be in first class on the way back to Boston. We certainly didn’t use enough miles to be in first class. It’s a mystery, a very comfy mystery.

The bad thing about being in row 1 on a plane is that there is no seat in front of you and you have to store all of your carry-ons and personal items in the overhead bin. No chance I was putting the precious cargo in the overhead bin. The rolls had already survived being carried through the airport by a man whose boarding pass looked like it had been chewed by a lama after ten minutes (seriously how did he mess that thing up so badly in 10 minutes?), no way was I chancing the overhead bin and it’s contents that may shift during flight. The flight attendant was kind enough to put the bag in the closet at the front of the plane, albeit with some funny looks.

We arrived in FLA on Friday and the chili cookout was scheduled for Saturday night. I love that my parents can schedule a cookout for the 10^th of January and not have to worry about potential snow or sub zero temperatures. In fact they were concerned that temperatures would drop to under 65 degrees that night, which would have prompted my parents and their friends to don their winter coats and my sister to actually put on socks.

The rolls made it from the plane to the rental car, to my dad’s pantry, to my mom’s cookout with minimal crushing and no signs of staleness at all. When I brought them into the kitchen my mom broke them apart and put them into a bowl and took them out to the grill for toasting. Buttering each roll seemed absurd as there were thirty-two of them. The bowl came back into the house as quickly as it left, “The grill is full. You’ll have to butter them and cook them on the griddle or else they get eaten as is.”

I did not bring 4 packages of NESHDRs 1,500 miles to have them eaten raw. So, dear readers, I buttered and griddled the crap out of those NESHDRs, all 32 of them. My grandma sat and watched me from the kitchen table and asked, “Are you cooking the rolls?” When I was done and I set them on the buffet table you would have thought I had walked a unicorn in on a leash.
“What are these?”
“Well, I’ve never seen anything like this.”
“Did you cook these?”

Suffice to say that the rolls were a big hit, gone in mere minutes. I think I saw my dad knock over old ladies and small children to get to the plate of rolls. But the joy of introducing Floridians to a delicacy such as the NESHDR comes with a heavy price. I will never again be able to board a Tampa bound plane without NESHDRs in my canvas carry on.