No, I am not going to pile on the details. I’ll save those for the book—either Cooking With Oil, which we hope to issue next month, or Cooking for the Crowd, which will come after all this anniversary celebrating is finally over.

And the War. Please.

These three really cook the books.

My version of frijoles borrachos is, en Anglais, drunken baked beans, which fits my crowd nicely. They are my all-time favorite version of baked beans: super-savory, thoroughly wonderful, and generally convincing by the first spoonful.

The Cornbread Salad is another sure winner. A shipmate of Miles brought the dish to a shift-change potluck several years ago, with copies of the recipe sitting beside the pan. Now I make it for get-togethers—and put copies of the recipe beside mine.

I never have leftovers.

And the Shoyu Chicken? All the Navy guys loved it in Hawaii, with its culinary roots reaching back toward Japan. Shoyu is Japanese-style soy sauce made with soy and wheat, giving it a sweet-and-salty, nuanced flavor. It works beautifully as a marinade, which is where today’s chicken is headed.

I was getting the chicken ready to go alongside the Cornbread Salad for shift change when Miles left me a task before departing for a Pentagon City conference.

“Find me something that weighs 14 pounds.”

I didn’t discover why until I’d put several things on the digital scale in the Galley. The big dog-food bag was too awkward for the counter. A full laundry basket came in around 15 pounds. Two gallons of water were in the same neighborhood.

Then I went looking for something more manageable and found Vic’s bowling ball in the bottom of the Conference Room utility closet.

Bingo. Fourteen pounds, almost dead on.

That answered the question. But what was it supposed to mean?

Happy Hour at Cedar Lanes over in Vienna? I already had the cornbread in the oven and the chicken marinating.

When Miles returned, he thanked me. I asked why we suddenly needed to know what weighed about as much as a large, round, black sporting sphere.

He smiled.

“The latest reporting on the Minnesota fraud cases says some of the money was being carried out as cash. Do you know what 14 pounds of hundred-dollar bills looks like?”

The Production people here at Socotra say that if we try to run the image, we’re going to make the system go down.

So we’ll leave it at that.

The Bureau of Engraving and Printing says a U.S. currency note weighs about one gram regardless of denomination. Fourteen pounds is about 6,350 grams, so we’re looking at roughly 6,350 $100 bills — about $635,000.

Visually, if bundled conventionally into $10,000 packets of 100 bills, that’s about 63½ packets. Think six or seven bricks of ten packets each: a dense rectangular pile that could fit into a carry-on suitcase rather than some Hollywood mountain of cash.

Fourteen pounds of Benjamins isn’t a fortune-sized pile. It’s roughly $635,000 that can fit in a carry-on. And those carry-ons have been flying out of Minneapolis-ST Paul every day for years. We do retain a certain grudging astonishment at a world in which somebody might need to know the carry-on weight of a pile of century notes.
Meanwhile, the chicken is marinating.

Copyright 2026 Vic Socotra