Does This Taste Funny? A Half-Baked Look at Food and Foodies (6 page)

I have never been
hospitalized as a result of my klutziness, and amazingly, I’ve never fallen
down in the kitchen. Although from a safety perspective, I probably shouldn’t
even
be
in the kitchen, since cooking typically involves using fire,
handling knives, and…carrying things.

But this story is about
meatloaf, which, by the way, tasted fine. The presentation wasn’t what I
wanted, and we had to eat it very carefully, but it was good meatloaf.

The more I cook, the
more I’m willing to try something new. I’m not exactly making oxtail soup, but
if dinner at home used to be Denny’s, now it’s a little more Applebee’s. Minus
the mozzarella sticks and annoyingly friendly servers.

Some people enjoy
eating foods they’ve never tried. I’ve never been particularly daring. I liked
escargot (drenched in butter, but maybe I just like butter), but didn’t enjoy
beef tongue (not so much the texture, more the concept, which seemed like
sharing an inter-species French kiss).

I found both buffalo
and ostrich to be disappointing. I get that they’re lean, but I think meat
needs
a little fat for . . . what’s the technical culinary term? Oh yeah, flavor.

Since The Girlfriend
isn’t very adventurous when it comes to food, my mealtime ideas sometimes
require a little convincing. And sometimes I find a great idea for dinner but
don’t execute it very well.

I found a recipe for
meatloaf (of course) that used raisins, and I hyped it pretty hard to The
Girlfriend. Talked about it all afternoon. Then I forgot to put the raisins in,
and ended up serving meatloaf with a
side
of raisins, while muttering
that I
intentionally
deconstructed the dish.

Still, she knows that
the best way for me to learn is to take risks, and most of the time the end
results have been downright edible.

Sure, once in a while
I’ll decide to glaze a chicken breast with, say, almond butter, only to realize
you can’t easily
spread
almond butter on a raw chicken breast, instead
creating more of a…glob than a glaze.

 But I think of what I
do as a kind of kitchen improv
(“I need a suggestion for a vegetable you’d
find in our crisper, and a type of pasta.”
). And like with most improv, sometimes
it clicks, and sometimes you wish you hadn’t sat in the front row for it.

Last
time we were at the market, we bought something neither of us had ever tried,
but
had
seen on the teevee. Polenta. It’s a fun word to say. Has those
warm ‘oh’ and ‘ah’ sounds—it’s a hearty-sounding word.

Turns out it’s cornmeal
mush, which sounded fine to me, but The Girlfriend seemed skeptical.

Now, don’t
misunderstand here—it’s not like I got ambitious and decided to buy some
cornmeal and . . . mush it. No, we bought polenta because IT CAME IN A FREAKIN’
TUBE! ALREADY COOKED AND MUSHED!

We just figured, if all
we have to do is heat it in a pan, at least we’d know our first polenta would
taste like polenta should taste. However that is.

At this point, any
foodie worth his or her
fleur de sel
is muttering “You should make your
own polenta from scratch.” Yes, homemade polenta is simple to make,
and
I’m sure it tastes marginally better, but YOU CAN BUY IT IN TUBES—ALREADY MADE!

The only way the whole
polenta process could be any simpler is if a guy
from
San Gennaro came
to our place and squeezed the tube into our mouths.

To be fair, let’s look
at both methods. I could . . .

“Set
the water on the fire in a wide bottomed pot and add the salt.

When
it comes to a boil, add the corn meal in a very slow stream, stirring
constantly with a wooden spoon to keep lumps from forming…

Continue
stirring, in the same direction, as the mush thickens, for about a half-hour
(the longer you stir the better the polenta will be; the finished polenta
should have the consistency of firm mashed potatoes), adding boiling water as
necessary.

The
polenta is done when it peels easily off the sides of the pot.”

Or, I could

O
pen
the tube. Heat what’s inside the tube. The polenta is done when it’s hot
enough.

In general, I would agree
that making things from scratch is better. You’re more connected to what you’re
eating, and it’s more satisfying to taste something you worked on for hours.

There is one food item
that is so ridiculously labor-intensive, I almost always choose the
store-bought, pre-made version. I suppose I
could

thoroughly
scrub and wash some potatoes

spend
what seems like most of the evening peeling the potatoes

finely
mince several cloves of garlic

boil
some water

add
the potatoes

wait
till the potatoes are mashable

drain
the potatoes

add
some milk

add
some butter

add
the garlic

mash the potatoes

Or, I could just buy
some garlic mashed potatoes. Yes, it might be considered cheating. I know I’m
violating a sacred trust here, but at the end of the day this should be a
private matter between me and my potatoes.

When it comes to my culinary
exploits, The Girlfriend, to her credit, has been willing to try every crazy
idea I’ve suggested, even the ones that came with disclaimers:

“I think this should taste OK . . .
if not I can add some parsley or something.”

“The recipe calls for three eggs
and we only had one, so I tried to adjust the amount of everything else.”

“I know the crust came out more
spongy than flaky, but hey, the filling has chocolate in it!”

 
She
has also indulged me by being putting up with a lot more of the Food Network
than anyone should have to endure. “They’re doing another season of ‘Food Truck
Wars, honey!”

It would be different
if I were
using
what I learn on these shows in making dinner for us, but
I can’t remember the last time I had to chiffonade some kale.

I really should stop
watching cooking shows on television altogether. First of all, if she knows I’m
watching them, they set up unrealistic expectations on the home front.

Also, it’s frustrating
for me, because I’ll get inspired by something I see, and then I look in
our pantry and fridge and realize I don’t have all of the ingredients the chefs
use
on cooking shows.

But since The Girlfriend
knows what I’ve been watching, we’ll have conversations like,

“What
did you learn to cook today?”

“Oh,
they made a lobster bisque with black truffle shavings. But . . .
we’re
having elbow macaroni with ground beef. Enjoy!”

It must make you a
little crazy to host a cooking show, because there isn’t usually an audience,
and without one, you’re pretty much talking to yourself for half an hour. That’s
what I would be doing anyway, so I guess I’m a natural!

I thought I’d stumbled
on a whole new genre of cooking show when I was in the other room and overheard
the host say, “Let’s take a look at my breasts, now.”

Unfortunately she was
checking on some chicken, not cooking topless, but that would be a great show.
I can imagine the warning: “Mature audiences. Adult content. Mild splattering.”

I also did a double
take when I heard “It’s time for each chef to grab his wahoo,” but apparently
that’s a type of fish.

Cooking shows never
seem realistic to me, because nothing ever goes wrong. Horribly wrong, like
when I’m trying to make a beautiful casserole in carefully constructed layers
and then decide “Screw it, I’ll just mix it all up and bake the hell out of it
for an hour.”

Sometimes when I’m
putting a dish together, I’ll just grab a couple of random spices I haven’t
tried and throw ‘em in, which I suppose could be risky . . .

What if oregano and
say, turmeric, when combined over heat, actually cause some sort of explosive
reaction that takes out the whole kitchen? I just don’t know.

Cooking for two has
been an adjustment, because now my ‘experiments’ are her
dinner-after-a-long-work-day. Cooking for someone else has also helped me
understand why moms for centuries have yelled, “Get out of my kitchen while I’m
cooking.”

It isn’t that I don’t
enjoy some company while I’m working. But for one thing, my kitchen is never as
organized as the ones on TV.

On top of that,
I’m
not organized, so sometimes I end up running around like a lunatic, frantically
flinging things I’ve forgotten into pots and pans until our kitchen looks like
a Jackson Pollock painting.

And sometimes I
might
accidentally drop something on the floor that needs to go in the dish, and
I
might
pick it up
and put
it back in the
skillet.
The heat will kill any germs,
right?
Nobody needs to know
that
happened.

The Food Network hosts
also never swear, which really makes me question their credibility. Showtime
should launch a cooking show in which the chefs are allowed to say the things
real
cooks say at home.

“Where the **** is my rolling
pin?” “What the ****? This is moldy already?” “****, that’s way too much *************
rosemary!”

Despite the swearing
and occasional pain I’ve endured when trying the cooking thing, there’s a part
of me that enjoys it more than writing.

It’s one thing to
create something that,
if
it gets published,
might
become
popular. But if I
cook
something and it
works
, it feels real on a
whole other level.

I’m not deluded enough
to think my writing will have any lasting impact. But The Girlfriend
still
remembers the Garlic and Mustard Brushed Chicken Breast Stuffed with Spinach
that I made
two months ago.

Since I do all the
cooking, I usually put together the grocery list, and so far, we’ve only had a
few shopping gaffes.

I think I’ve finally convinced
her to stop buying things we don’t need
simply
because they’re on sale
(“Yes,
dear, that is a good price for bok choy . . . but neither of us eat bok choy.”)

Likewise, I think she
gets that, for many reasons, if you
must
buy a chemical-laden
industrially-processed fake whipped topping, you get the Redi-wip, not the Cool
Whip, if only because you can squirt it directly into your mouth, bypassing the
need to make dessert at all.