Does This Taste Funny? A Half-Baked Look at Food and Foodies (3 page)

Note: this tasted better than it looks

I haven’t been cooking
long enough to become cocky, but occasionally I can really put it together. The
other night it was nifty wine-poached chicken breasts on a bed of perfectly
fluffy couscous, with steamed broccoli florets that looked like the Platonic
Ideal of broccoli.

That evening
I said to The Girlfriend, “Today, I feel like a chef.” Of course, she’s used to
my pronouncements from the kitchen, but they’re usually along the lines of “I
can’t believe I spilled all of that,” so this was a big deal.

For this one particular
meal, everything
worked
. I did all of my prep
before
things needed to be put in the skillet, and the side dishes were done at the
same time as the main course. I made enough for leftovers; I cooked something
new to me (couscous); most importantly, it tasted good.

Brimming with
confidence, I decided to improvise a dessert. I usually decide what to make
based on what’s in the cupboard and
then
figure out what to do with it.
By now, I was a chef, so how hard could it be?

I didn’t see anything
that screamed ‘dessert ingredient,’ but I saw a can of kernel corn that I had
ignored for weeks. It looked forlorn, continually passed over by the more
popular canned green beans.

I knew what I had to
do. I resolved to make a dessert, with a can of corn. I google ‘corn dessert,’ (again
wondering how people cooked before the internet), and I find something called ‘
El Atol de
Etole
.’

What’s weird, is I had
just mentioned to The Girlfriend how I don’t make traditional Salvadoran
corn-based beverages nearly often enough.

Since I don’t have a
picture to show you, imagine a creamy yellow egg-noggy looking beverage. The
recipe looked to be a breeze—just milk, corn, brown sugar, vanilla, cinnamon
sticks and a pinch of salt.

You start by putting
the corn and milk in a food processor. I only have a little one-button wannabe
blender, but it works just like a grownup blender (as long as I only need to
‘pulse’ things).

In with the corn and
milk I tossed the sugar, vanilla, salt . . . and cinnamon sticks. APPARENTLY I
did something wrong, because after a few normal pulses, I suddenly heard a kind
of ‘ka-chonk’ sound, followed by an otherworldly cry of pain from within my
little blender.

Also, goop was shooting
out of a hole in the top. A hole I had never noticed before, but which is
apparently there to allow goop to shoot out.

Alright, I say, maybe
the cinnamon sticks weren’t supposed to go in. Maybe you can’t, in fact, purée
cinnamon sticks with a one-speed three-cup mini-blender from Target. I take the
sticks out, and fire the thing up again.

This
was going very badly. Put it this way: if a local news crew had been filming in
my kitchen, the anchorman would have introduced the story by describing the
scene as ‘Cornmageddon.’

More
horrific grinding sounds from within the machine, and I realize it had TRIED to
purée cinnamon sticks, leaving lots of little cinnamon sticks mixed in with the
goop.

Now
in my defense, nothing on the machine or its packaging expressly warns
against
trying to liquefy cinnamon sticks, and nothing on the jar of cinnamon sticks
said “DO NOT PLACE IN TINY MACHINES.”

By this point most of
my kitchen and at least one of our cats was covered in sweet, viscous corn
juice, and the kitchen looked like a crime scene
(“At this point, we believe the
suspect leaves clues written in
liquefied corn.”
).

Clearly
I
had
offended the Cooking Gods with my hubris!
Or
,
it was the fact I didn’t really read the recipe that carefully.

Either way, after
cleaning up the carnage (
cornage
?), I looked at the recipe again. I see that
it says “will thicken nicely on the stovetop,” and I think, “Stove?” I don’t
remember using a stove.

Gradually, things
started to become clearer. I finally figured out the cause of the fiasco! Only the
corn
and the
milk
go in the blender—the other
stuff you add later!

I have to admit that
the experience humbled me a little. But I learned something very important–that
if I find a great recipe, I should read the entire thing, as opposed to just
the first paragraph. Maybe even print a copy.

Or
maybe
I just
need a more powerful blender
.

As much as I’ve learned
about cooking in the last year, one thing is preventing me from getting to the
next level.

No matter how well one
of my ‘dinner experiments’ turns out, I’ll probably never be able to make that
dish again. Oh, we’ll have something similar, but I never seem to be able to
recreate
my cooking successes.

I’m sure you’re
thinking, “Ooh, he must be an artist, like some jazz-inspired cooking phenom
who improvises something brilliant, but, driven by his creative ambition,
refuses
to make the same thing
twice.” And I appreciate that you think that.

But no, the reason we
won’t be revisiting my Poached Dill Chicken Breasts in Homemade Mushroom Gravy
on a bed of Garlic-Chili Potatoes with Grilled Asparagus anytime soon is
two-fold:

1)
I don’t measure.

2) I never write down
what I’ve done.

Consequently,
I’m always conflicted when I share my cooking—I want it to taste good, but not
so
good that I
have to . . . make it again. Because I’m not sure I can!

A book of
my
recipes would need to say
things like, “Cook until it looks like it did the last time, then let it sit
for a while.” My cookbook would be filled with units of measure like “a bunch,”
“just a little,” and “long enough so that it all sticks together but isn’t
burnt on top.”

I
came across a recipe the other day that required me to convert everything from
metric units. OK, it wouldn’t have
required
it, if any
of my measuring doodads had been metric.

Conceptually,
I’m on board with the metric system (or as I affectionately call it,
Système
international d’unités)
. I just haven’t had much call to use
it.

When
I look back on my high school years, I ask myself the questions we all ask:

“Should I have taken
a foreign language?”

“Was my English
teacher really that
hot?”

“Why did I have to
study the metric system?”

From about eighth grade
on (way back in the last century), it was made very clear that this country
would be changing over within
just a
few years
.

Committees were formed,
deadlines were set, transitional congressional oversight whatevers were
convened. The message was clear.

If I didn’t get with
the program, there would come a day when I wouldn’t be able to cook, or shop,
or even understand road signs.

Well,
they missed that by a country kilometer. Like with so many forward-looking
ideas, most Americans responded to the idea of metric conversion with about the
same enthusiasm I would have for a new Tony Orlando album.

As
a country, we collectively said, “
Nah, we’re good
.
” I
guess we were hoping to convince the majority of the civilized world to switch
back
to an antiquated, klunky system used by fading superpowers and former
empires.

Countries which have
not
adopted the metric system
are shown in red

I
have a theory as to why the U.S. never ‘went metric.’ I think the reason we
stayed with our quaint ‘imperial’ system of measurements is the same reason
half the country is abuzz every time there’s a royal wedding.

My
theory is that, as a nation, we all feel a little guilty about kicking
England’s ass in the Revolution, we’re having second thoughts, and we want to
become a colony again! Take us back, Mother England! We want a figurehead
leader—we want pomp and, dammit, we want it with circumstance!

We
want those cool red phone booths you guys have, and double-decker buses! We’re
tired of trying to run the world! It’s too freaking hard!

I
think I would be cool with us suddenly becoming British again—sure, I’d have to
get used to cooking and eating things called ‘toad in the hole’ and ‘bubble and
squeak’ and I’d have to learn a bunch of different curse words, but at least
I’d have free health care.

I
feel that I’m ready to pull back the kitchen curtain and reveal a little of my
cooking magic. I’ll take you through one meal from ingredients to ingestion,
and along the way, I’ll give you some insight into my ‘process.’

MRI of my brain deciding what to cook

First
of all, I always have a notepad nearby, because at any moment, I might come up
with the next big thing. Like when I woke up and scrawled THREE SLIDERS SEALED
PANINI-STYLE INSIDE A WIDE FRENCH ROLL. It didn’t really matter that we never
buy French rolls, and I don’t have a Panini press.

I’ll
ask myself questions for a jumpstart, like, “Why don’t you see vanilla and
peanut butter together more often?” or, “What if I shredded some macaroons,
threw ‘em in a pan and fried them?”

If
you think something will taste good, why not try to make it? There’ll be some
messes along the way, and you’ll throw out some food once in a while, but
you’ll also, sometimes quite by accident, make some surprisingly good meals.

For example, one
morning, with no set plan, I shredded some potatoes, chopped up some carrots,
onions, garlic and celery, threw it all in a skillet and made the most amazing
vegefied hash browns (I think the key was the dollop of horseradish).