How to Become a Five-Star Home Cook

I love cooking shows for many reasons.

"Iron Chef", for instance, is useful for those of us
who have unlimited grocery budgets, million dollar
kitchens, and award-winning sous chefs on staff.

"Chopped" is for the more relaxed home cook.
You get a basket of ingredients--typically
something like popcorn, a rubber boot, crankcase oil,
and a fungus amongus from Mongolia.
Or an anchor chain, cotton candy, a pickle,
and a lizard shank; the kinds of things
you might find in the fridge, after work.

It is easiest if you like Italian food.
Make your own pasta, order a $200,000. wheel
of parmesano regiano, and wear rubber clogs.
Tomatoes everywhere. Octopus. Nothing to it!

Some shows have judges: piss ants
who pretend they will die if they find
a fish bone in the food, or that the carrot pieces
are not precisely the same size, by girth and weight.
They like their pasta "al dente"; i.e., cold from the box.
The sternest judges announce, afterwards,
they they do not like peppers. Or salt. Or food,
and that's what you did wrong.

Then there is the Southern Belle
who never cooks anything. She drawls
and stirs and stirs and drawls.
Somebody else--I cannot remember her name--
gives household hints involving paper bags,
and says, "Umm, umm!" to show what good taste is.

There is another cook with a House of Wax face
who combines the best of ingredients with a fixed smile
and a decolletage that causes you to yearn for goat milk.
You know the rules: goat milk, a rope, Hungarian pickles,
and anchovies. Make a dessert! Serve it
to some friends from the Broadway musical!

All of these things have made me a better cook.
They have made me appreciate tripe and rubber band salad.

Tripe, a gopher, rubber bands, and arthroscopic remnants:
make a salad! Truffles, of course!
.

Comments

Caliche Busters and Government Work

When I was young and both stronger and smarter than I am now, I put my might and brain to work doing nothing useful, unless it might be thought that hand/foot/eye coordination might come in handy. Those were skills to be learned and practiced. I found an iron bar our grandfather had shaped in his blacksmith shop. He took old car, truck, or wagon axles, and made tools from them for digging post holes. He sharpened one end to a tip, and the other to a blade. Washington State, like many places, had a hard layer of soil, probably created by water and limestone, or some such materials, that made digging holes a miserable chore. The bar chipped through the natural concrete so that a shovel could take it up. I found Grandpa's iron bar, and since I was young and dumb and strong--or so I thought--decided to punch a hole down to hardpan and ultimate truth. I knew how to do that. Raise the bar vertically with both hands, and then slam in straight down. On the second try, aimi

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. Even when all they wanted to do w

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