Does This Taste Funny? A Half-Baked Look at Food and Foodies (5 page)

I’ve only found two
disadvantages to my new old-fashioned fryin’ pan. First, I’ll need to call a
neighbor to help me lift it off the burner, as it weighs more than some
people’s cars.

Secondly, it would have
helped if there had been some sort of warning label saying “IF YOU TAKE THIS OUT
OF A 400 DEGREE OVEN DON’T FORGET THAT IT’S MADE OF IRON, DUMBASS, SO AN OVEN
MITT IS A REALLY GOOD IDEA.”

The friend who gave me
the pan described some eight or nine-step process for properly seasoning my pan
before use, but it sounded like it could involve a lot of smoke filling our
apartment.

Which might be fine,
except the smoke detector at our place is so freaking sensitive that it goes
off if I play the
word
‘fire’ in Scrabble.

So, without going
through the steps, how could I get this Magical Layer of Seasoning. Turns out
that, according to the packaging, my new pan was ‘pre-seasoned.’ I figured I
was good to go.

Thankfully, the pan
came with a sheet of simple instructions to follow before use. I didn’t read
them, but it was good to know they were there.

Also thankfully, I
waited until after making several meals in it before I read the following at an
online message board for cooking questions:

“
A word of caution: Don’t buy pre-seasoned cast-iron. The
“pre-seasoning” is actually paint, and it can and
will
come off if you, you know, actually use the damn thing.”

Well, I appreciate the
comment,
cookingguy1974
. Funny. You would think the
manufacturer
of the ‘pre-seasoned’ pan would give you a heads-up about that. Oh well,
everything tasted good, and that’s what matters. Paint chips be damned.

When I was looking for
things to cook with Iron Mike (yeah, I named my skillet), I turned to the web.
I had some chicken defrosted, so I searched for “cast-iron skillet” and
“breasts.”

Oddly enough, most of
the search results pointed me to Amish porn sites (“
Watch as Sister Margaret
strips down to her last three layers of clothes—while she churns butter!”
).

I eventually found a
recipe that looked promising and I tweaked it a bit. Then I browned the chicken
in my own damned unwieldy cast-iron skillet, and I ‘finished’ the meat in the
oven in the same skillet (for the novice cook, ‘finished’ is cooking lingo—it
means ‘finished’).

My take on going the
cast-iron route? A real old-fashioned skillet allowed me to feel connected to
generations of pioneers who cooked their vittles over a crackling wood fire.

On the other hand
(literally), real old-fashioned skillets can give you some wicked blisters. But
there’s usually a price to pay for authenticity.

Since I do all the
cooking for myself and The Girlfriend, she only sees the finished product, not
the often clumsy steps I had to take to get there. Sometimes, however,
something goes wrong in the kitchen that you don’t realize until you’re already
eating the mistake.

I must say, up until
now, most of my cooking screwups have been, for the most part, original and
creative. I’ve advanced beyond the typical mistakes, like overcooking or
undercooking.

I do things like buying
an oven thermometer and forgetting to put it
in
the oven. Turns out it’s
not as useful in determining the oven temperature if it’s sitting on the
kitchen counter.

The most unusual
mistake I’ve made involved my soon-to-be-renowned Rustic Maple Turkey
Meatballs. Things seemed to be going fine, as I became one with my mixing bowl,
using my hands to knead the egg into the ground turkey.

Then I blend in the
garlic, onion and celery, then some hand-crushed crackers, cracked black
pepper, Himalayan salt, and of course, the maple syrup. You heard me, maple
freakin’ syrup!

I was feeling good
about our overall meatball prospects, because I recently had figured out that
with meatballs, it’s all about the density.

Not dense enough and they
just fall apart. Too dense, and they can develop their own gravitational field,
and suddenly you have bits of your side dish
orbiting
each meatball.

I finish communing with
the pre-ball goop (I believe that’s from the French term, ‘goopée’), put it in
the oven and an hour later we’re enjoying some Rustic Maple Turkey Meatballs©™.

To
be entirely honest, we only enjoyed
nine
of the ten meatballs. As I cut
into my last one with my fork, I unexpectedly met resistance.

I
continued, actually sawing with the fork by this point, baffled by what could
possibly have gone wrong with this one meatball.

Determined to solve the
mystery, I picked up the meatball with my hand, and inside I saw what looked
like a note.

I began imagining elaborate
worst-case scenarios. Maybe someone working at the butcher shop is being held
captive and slipped a plea for help into the ground turkey. Or maybe The
Girlfriend, in a romantic mood, wrote me a poem and hid it in a pound of raw
meat.

The answer was,
unfortunately, much more prosaic. In my zeal to
mix
everything
thoroughly, I apparently neglected to take all of the butcher paper off the
meat. I missed a piece about two inches square.

 And that’s when
Inspiration slapped me in the face
(because my muse is a dominatrix)
. I may
have accidentally created America’s next great snack sensation—Fortune
Meatballs!

Think about it—why are
marginally clever, mass-produced epigrams only available inside
cookies
?
What if you’re craving a more . . .
savory
glimpse into your future? How
about Fortune
Meatballs
! Once again, I’m a visionary!

What if, at that
corporate meeting, instead of the usual cold cuts and pretzels, you could have
hearty
meatballs
with motivational slogans tucked inside? They’re Fortune
Meatballs!

Granted, there are some
technical issues involving how best to get the fortune out of a cooked
meatball, and I should probably have a lawyer look into the risk of litigation
in case someone swallows their fortune
(“Warning: May contain scraps of
paper. Do not swallow paper.”)

Maybe I could use rice
paper—can you write on rice paper? I don’t know. I’m more of an
idea
man.

Can you guess which meatball contains a
special surprise?

If you said second row, third from the
left, you're right!
Congratulations!

I’ve mentioned meatloaf
before (and of course meat
balls
, which, let’s be honest, are just little
balls of meatloaf). At this rate, maybe for my next book, I should write
EXCLUSIVELY about meatloaf.

 I’ll become a . . .
meatloaf pundit (two words which, incidentally, have never been used in the
same sentence before). I could appear on television any time there was breaking
meatloaf news (
“
We’re joined live by CNN’s Meatloaf Correspondent”
).

Maybe it’s the concept
that intrigues me. Let’s take some ground meat, but before we cook it, we’ll
throw in some bread crumbs and…get this–we’ll shape it like
a
loaf of bread
!
It’s…ironic food! My point is, I have another meatloaf story.

I
was making a lamb meatloaf, and when it was nearly done, I wanted to see how it
looked, and I gotta be honest. It looked like a picture from the cover of
Bon Freakin’
Appetit
.
O
r
 
at the very least,
Meatloaf
Monthly
.

It was by far the
meatiest, loafiest-looking meatloaf I had ever made, all different shades
of textured brown with a honey-chile glaze in a pristine white Corningware
dish. Then, I dropped it.

Our language doesn’t
really have an adequate curse word to express what I felt as it slipped out of
my hands and shattered.

I think I yelled some
sort of bizarre compound word like “shitdamnfuckhell,” and for a minute or two
I think time stopped, as I just stood there surrounded by shards of honey-chili
glazed pyroceramic glass.

One of the shards cut a
gash in my foot, making me the only person in the
history
of cooking to
injure his
foot
while
cooking.

note: I DIDN’T HAVE THE FORESIGHT TO TAKE A PICTURE OF THE
MEATLOAF BEFORE ITS DEMISE.

YOU'VE SEEN MEATLOAF BEFORE.

 USE YOUR IMAGINATION.

But frankly, every
injury I’ve ever had has been stupid. And although I’d like to blame the
various neuro-muscular issues I’m currently dealing with, truth is, I’ve just
always been a klutz.

I have taken some
specTACular falls. I’m talkin’ YouTube-worthy, email-the-video-to-your-coworkers
ridiculous. And if I somehow manage to walk from one place to another without
tripping, I’ll usually drop or spill whatever I was carrying at least once.

JOBS AT WHICH I WOULD SUCK

waiter

surgeon

juggler

bomb disposal guy

I
just wish at least one of my scars had come from something I could brag about.I
would love to regale friends with stories of the knee I blew out playing in the
state championship
,
or
the bum hip I got serving in combat.

I’d
even settle for a good bar fight story to explain some of my scars. But no.The
following would be some highlights from my cavalcade of clumsy:

Apparently
(I was three at the time) I thought I could do a magic trick, so I pulled the
tablecloth out from under a freshly brewed pot of coffee.

A
couple years later, a cousin thought it would be fun to swing me around by my
arm, which promptly came out of its socket.

When
I was seven, I was crawling from one box to another and dislocated my shoulder.

At
eight, I tested my pocketknife to see if it was sharp, so I tested it on . . . my
thumb. Our bathroom looked like a scene from
C.S.I.

At
ten years old, I jumped my bike over a hill the other kids were using in the
neighborhood. Seems the other kids, though,
held
on to the
ir
handlebars
,
instead of having their bikes fly out in front of them.

In
college, I was so excited that finals were over, I ran out of a building on
campus, and forgot how
stairs
work.
Broken foot, crutches.

I’ve
broken a toe—the SAME toe—three times. What nimble-footed activity was I
engaged in? Some sort of ‘Riverdance’ jig? Nope. Walking through a doorway.