Big Daddy Paul

I had been on a roll. For the last couple of weeks, we had been eating well. Most notably, we have enjoyed: perfectly cooked pork chops with pureed root vegetables, fried chicken sandwiches, tequila-lime rock shrimp tacos, and spicy turkey burgers with avocado and sweet potato fries (accompanied by fresh squeezed lynchburg lemonade). Heck even the kung pao buffalo, and “I cant believe its not sushi” turned out alright. I have spent a lot of time trying to learn how to cook and I thought it was finally paying off.

Until Friday. We had some friends over for dinner and we haven’t seen them in a while. I thought I would whip up some steaks and impress them with some fancy sauces. It was going to be awesome. I wasn’t expecting them to try and sleep with me, but if things turned out as good as I imagined, it wouldn’t have shocked me if they did.

About 5 minutes before dinner was going to be ready, I knew things weren’t going well. The steaks were looking haggard. The mashed celery root and potatoes were a lifeless pile of goo. The asparagus was coming along fine, but any food whose chief attribute is that it alters the smell of your urine just won’t matter all that much in the grand scheme of things. Worst of all, the sauces (which I had on the stove for around 4 hours reducing down) turned out crappy due to some very poor decision-making at the end.

When we all sat down, I knew my goose was cooked. Everything sucked, and sucked pretty badly. At least our friends were gracious enough to inform me that the asparagus was really doing its job each time they went to the bathroom. Things were noticeably worse because we talked about some fancy meals they had recently enjoyed (The Dining Room at the Ritz Carlton and Craft Steakhouse) while we choked down food that Ronald McDonald would send back.

The real whopper was dessert, in which I tried to make lemon bars without using any dairy. The results were cataclysmic, producing a dish reminiscent of a under-ripe lemon eating some asparagus, peeing it into a pan and topping it off with some rotten raspberries.

The grey carcass on the left is an overcooked rib-eye, which someone had the good sense to not eat. In case you’re wondering, the lemon bars turned green because I ran out of regular sugar and the only sugar I could find was dyed for use in making sugar cookies. I almost had to bribe our friends to eat it, and each bite felt like I re-watching and entire episode of “Jon and Kate Plus 8.” Needless to say, our friends didn’t try and sleep with me, but they did take a dump in our living room on the way out.

I guess it’s good to make a few things for guests that fall flat, because I realized how much I still need to learn. Never again will I assume that I can just throw something together for guests and it will turn out right. How about you, anyone out there every serve nasty stuff to friends?

I am prone to burst out into cooking. I have a culinary form of Turret’s syndrome, except instead of swearing, I start preparing food. Many of the very worst things I have ever made were created in a creative outburst of this type: beet gnocchi that was so bright it resembled a baboon’s ass, [keep your hands off your junk] habanero hot sauce, and apple pancakes so dense you’d have thought I was making antimatter.

Malcolm with the newest member of our family

Even with all this misses, sometimes my experimenting pays off. Last night, while Malcolm was eating his dinner, I made mayonnaise. I think about mayonnaise quite a bit during the course of a day, so the thought was not completely random. Plus, I noticed earlier in the day that we were almost out of what I call the “Great White Goo,” and the thought of our house being void of the super substance was more than I could take. So, I started with Alice Waters’ cookbook and three  minutes later, I had mayonnaise. What have you done with your last three minutes? Do you have a condiment to show for it? If not, I’m about to change your life.

Take an egg yolk, and add a pinch of salt. Add a squirt of lemon and a squirt of water. (Don’t know what a squirt of water is? Put some in your mouth and then squirt it out! ) Start whisking. Slowly pour a cup of oil in the bowl while whisking, and keep whisking until your arm feels like it is going to fall off. Then, switch arms and keep whisking until the mayo is light and fluffy. Add salt to taste. You can use olive oil, but I used canola oil last night. The olive oil we have right now is a little gamey, and I didn’t want the mayo to suffer. When it was done, the mayo was absolutely perfect, and Malcolm used it to wash down his broccoli. That’s right, a vehicle for vegetable intake. Does it get any better?

I am never buying mayonnaise in the store again. This is good, because the mayo I made had exactly five ingredients. I took a quick look at the healthy hippie mayo I got at our healthy hippie grocer and it had 14 ingredients, including something called “soy protein isolate.” I’m not sure what that is, but it’s probably not making me any thinner. Plus, even though it’s organic, my mayo is cheap. It costs around $.50 to make, about 15% as expensive as the hippie stuff. I could elaborate about mayo, how it’s going to revolutionize Malcolm’s education or enhance our marriage, but I won’t. It’s enough to say that making your own is simple, cheap and tasty. And now, back to the kitchen, I gotta feeling I am going to make something kick ass with turnips in it!

My kid doesn’t eat meals. That sounds weird, but in the past few days I have taken a long hard look at what he consumes and have come to the conclusion that Malcolm is unable to eat anything that involves three or more ingredients. Mac and cheese: OK. Cereal: fine, with milk only. A sandwich: acceptable, but only if the original layout is deconstructed and the items (bread, cheese, meat) are consumed individually. I’m not sure how he got here, but I pine for the days when I can give him some chili and he won’t look at me like I just shot his favorite stuffed animal.

I blame myself. Early on, I learned that I could sneak vegetables into places where they could not be detected. I put tiny bits of asparagus in the spaghetti. I put microscopic amounts of red pepper into quesadillas and spinach into places where even Popeye wouldn’t expect it. One day, he asked what all the little green flecks of green in the mac and cheese were. I told him it was broccoli. He burst into tears and told me that he didn’t love me anymore.

If only it were this easy every time

Now, he doesn’t trust me. He knows that big saucy dishes with tons of ingredients have things in it that rabbits eat. I guess he feels the only way to counteract my sneakiness is to simplify things to the extent where he can easily tell what’s in his food. We have come to some sort of truce, and he will eat raw whole vegetables provided he is satisfied with the sexier portions of the meal. His dinner plates look like he’s anal retentive: each separate food group isolated from the others and segregated to different parts of the plate. He then dissects each portion of the plate in descending order of unhealthiness.

I’m a simple man, with simple hopes and dreams. I want my family to be happy and healthy. I want my boy to grow up and realize that eating food is a social and joyful experience. I want cook like Alice Waters, eat like Luciano Pavaratti and party like Tiger Woods. And one day, I want us to sit down as a family and eat the same thing.

Anyone got any ideas?

Now, I am not talking about giant steaks or plates of nachos that will make your colon cringe.  Those things will be around for a long time and for good reason.  I am talking about large agricultural companies that put tons of crap in their food and are secretly trying to poison your dog.  Well, I have no proof of the last part, but still, processed food is not good for you.  I say eat whatever the hell you want, just use real food to make it.  All those companies out there putting crap in our food: look the hell out!

Item #1 – Hashbrowns.  Hashbrowns don’t need to be frozen and taste like cardboard.  I had a bunch of potatoes sitting around from a recent shipment of our produce box the other morning and I thought, “Why not turn these lumpy brown tubers into a tasty breakfast treat?”  So, I did, and you can too! Just peel the potatoes, grate them with a cheese grater, and then cook them in a non-stick pan with oil or butter (maybe four or five minutes a side).  It’s easy, and it is way cheaper than paying a big food company to process the food and make it worse for you.  I think I ended up paying around $.12 for those hashbrowns, and they tasted better than lame excuse for hashbrowns that they freeze and give to you in a plastic bag. Paul: 1, Big Food: 0.

Item #2 -Applesauce.  Don’t go buying a big jar of that expensive, crappy applesauce with a bunch of extra sugar, unnecesary ingredients and the large severed human ear that inevitably makes its way into the batch.  Whenever you have a hankering for what the French refer to as sauce of the apple, just do this: peel an apple, core the apple, put the pieces in a blender, turn blender on, and then enjoy the freshest most delicious applesauce you have ever tasted.  We use fuji apples, but I would think almost any variety would do.  Sure, you’ll have to clean your blender, but you should have been spending more time with your blender anyways.  What kind of blender owner are you?  Cost for a bowl of applesauce: $.69.  Paul: 2, Big Food: 0.

Item #3 Popcorn. A long time ago, when times were simpler, we all drank in the morning and smoked in bed.  Back then, popcorn was not made in a microwave.  I am glad to say that we have broken the chains of bondage and no longer make popcorn in the microwave.  Neither should you.  Add a generous amount of canola oil to a saucepan, and fill the bottom of the pan with a layer of popcorn.  Put a cover on that pan, because there’s gonna be an explosion, a flavor explosion! Shake the popcorn pan every now and again until it pops regularly.  Then keep shaking it until it stops popping.  Pour the popcorn out into a bowl, add a little pat of butter into the pan to melt in, then put back about half of the popcorn into the pan to coat with butter.  After returning all of the popcorn to the bowl, add a couple shakes of salt and toss.  I guarantee that you will not find better popcorn for watching 30 Rock, and it is quicker to make than loading a bag of bizarre orange shit into a tin box and zapping it with invisible rays.  This popcorn is so good it will make you want to drink in the morning and smoke in bed, and a bowl of it costs around $.50.  Paul: 4, Big Food: 0.  That last one was a blowout.

Putting large agricultural businesses into bankruptcy is a fun and tasty way to spend your nights and weekends.  I highly suggest you try it.  You can buy everything you need for these three items in bulk or in the produce aisle, so you will need little or no packaging, making the earth proud of your gluttony.  It is cheaper and may even be quicker than the processed versions.  Better yet, most of this stuff will come to you in a local, organic produce box, so feel free to order one of those.  I am not saying you need to eat perfectly, I sure don’t.  Just doing little things like these three things, though,gets us pointed in the right direction.

Anyone else got any tricks up their sleeves?  Anyone found a severed ear in their applesauce?