Does This Taste Funny? A Half-Baked Look at Food and Foodies (2 page)

Then I remembered my
first successful attempt at ‘real’ cooking–it was
meatloaf m
uffins
.
Granted, it came about because I
didn
‘
t
have something I needed, but accident and necessity have always been a part of
my cooking style. And burn ointment.

One day, I was at the
market and I bought a pre-made, pre-packaged meatloaf. This was something even
I
could cook. Just take it out of the package, put it in a 350 degree oven for 45
minutes and
voila
! Comfort food.

Unfortunately, when I
got home, I realized I didn’t have one of those loaf-shaped bread baking
thingies. All I had was a muffin pan
(you’ll notice a lot of my cooking
stories start with the phrase ‘all I had was’)
.

But then inspiration
hit me. What if I simply took muffin-sized pieces of the meatloaf and put
those
in the muffin pan? I’m a kitchen savant! I should enroll in Le Cordon Bleu!

I knew I had discovered something
special – I pictured Gordon Ramsey making my dish a challenge on Hell’s
Kitchen:

“Come on, you donkeys!
I don’t believe you’re doing this to me! These are crap! Where are my meatloaf
muffins!”

Flush
with the excitement of creation, I put the pan in the oven and waited for
Meatloaf Muffins (which sounds like a bad guy from a Dick Tracy story).

I
decided to google the phrase ‘meatloaf muffins,’ just to see if anyone else had
stumbled upon my creation. My search revealed 89,700 hits for “meatloaf
muffins.” I was crestfallen.

I
had allowed myself to believe, for a few shining moments, that I had invented a
new food item. Instead, I found
Mexican
Meatloaf Muffins,
Italian
Meatloaf Muffins, and I think there was actually a link to a page about how
cliché meatloaf muffins are.

Reminds
me of a time I was really stoned. I had a bag of pretzels in one hand and a bag
of chocolates in the other, and I thought – they should make chocolate-covered
pretzels! Turns out, they do, but that’s not the point. The point is, I wish I
had some chocolate-covered pretzels right now.

C’est
la cuisine
. So I
wasn’t
the first person to ‘muffinize’
meatloaf. But I thought of it on my own, dammit, and for purely sentimental
reasons, I paid ten bucks to buy a little piece of cyberspace that I call
‘meatloafmuffins.com.’

On
a deeper level, though, meatloaf muffins may be
the
perfect
food
.
I don’t want to get too technical, but I’ll try to explain why:

1) They taste
like
meatloaf

2) They’re shaped like
muffins

What more could
you possibly want from food? Besides, I’m living proof that meatloaf muffins can
be good for your mental health.

I recently had a
thought I had never had before. I thought, “I wonder where my other whisk is.”

I’ve lived most of my
adult life without so much as
one
whisk, but now that I’m teaching
myself to cook, a lot of strange thoughts cross my mind. And since one of my
whisks was in the sink, I needed the other one.

When I first started my
cooking adventure, I didn’t have many tools, and some friends helped me out
with donations. Mostly, I got a lot of utensils. I could have used a basic
cookbook (since I didn’t really know how to
cook
), but at least I have a
lot of plastic things with handles.

If you need something
stirred, or scooped, I guess I’m your guy. Oh, and I have a tube thingie with
edges that I think is used for…making things into the shape of a tube.

Ahh, so many utensils, so
little time. See, in addition to my other challenges, I have a touch of OCD, so
my problem wasn’t not knowing what these things all
do
so much as how to
organize the drawer.

Seriously, the handles
of my pans are all at the same angle in the cupboard. And my salad dressings
are arranged alphabetically by country. French, Italian, Russian, Spanish . . .

I was also given a
Crock Pot (capitalized, so you know this is actually ‘the original slow
cooker’), and a George Foreman Lean Mean Grilling Machine.

Someone gave me some
sort of mystical electrical device that apparently conjures up omelets. Or
empanadas. I’m not sure. I’ll just keep putting things into it until I figure
out its purpose.

I was given a bunch of
random spices. Now I may be new at this, but I know a little about spices. Your
salt, your pepper. I’ve even been way out on the edge and used garlic salt! And
lemon pepper!

But now I have
coriander, and thyme. And sage. To be honest, I don’t even know what coriander
is, let alone whether I want to add it to my food.

And the only experience
I’ve had with sage was when I had a roommate who would light a big stick of it
on fire and wave it around the apartment to cover the smell of weed before a
visit from his parents.

 Although I’m in my
fifties, my digestive tract is pushing seventy, so I have to be a little more
careful about what I eat (in fact, there’s a good chance that as you’re reading
this, I’m in the bathroom).

For instance, I’m very
skittish when I cook meat. If the recipe says 375 degrees for 45 minutes, I’ll
go a little hotter for a little longer. My chicken might be a little dry, but I
can guarantee it’s salmonella-free.

I’m lucky to have a
couple of friends who I can call if I have stupid questions. Like, “If I’m out
of eggs, can I use mayonnaise in a recipe since mayonnaise is made from eggs?”
(The
answer, surprisingly, is no.)

I’m learning so much
about cooking. Just the other day I learned that, even though you see flour in
a lot of recipes, simply adding it to something ‘as an experiment’ is not a
good idea, since apparently, without yeast, flour just ends up being this
weird, warm, powdery substance on top of the dish.

There is a downside to
my new avocation. Until I started taking food more seriously, shopping was
easy. The stuff nearest to the registers is better for you, right?

Now that I’m a little
more connected to my food, I look at all the ingredients, and that can be very
stressful. Take something as simple as bread.

I know multi-grain
bread is a good thing. But how many grains exactly do I need? Is twelve too
many? Five doesn’t seem like enough—what do those other seven grains have that
I might want?

Maybe I’ll get a
nine-grain. But wait—this other bread has flaxseed! Do I need that? Is that
one of the nine? Shopping takes me hours.

But it’s worth it,
because I know exactly what’s in the ingredients I use. Now I just need to
learn how to combine those ingredients somehow into a meal. I think I have all
the utensils I need.

My First Recipe

After reading a few
cookbooks, I felt I was ready to post my first recipe online. Bear in mind, this
one involved multiple steps, and at one point I was using three of my four
burners
at the same time
, so I was already doing some pretty advanced
stuff.

Since this was to be my
first ‘published’ recipe, it needed a name, but on that score I was stumped. I
decided against ‘Random Cheap Food in a Pyrex Dish,’ since that was a little
too ‘on the nose.’

Eventually, I settled
on something that’s catchy, with a nod to my bookstore past. I think the name I
chose honors the spirit of my ingredients.

Remainder Casserole

This dish is perfect
for a chilly autumn day, or for when you need to eat something but you’re out
of pretty much everything because you’re too lazy to leave the house.

Ingredients

1 chunk of ground beef

1 little bit of olive
oil

1 big-ass white onion
you meant to use before

1
Band-Aid
brand
adhesive bandage

1 bag of flour

½ package
Manischewitz
 wide egg noodles

some garlic powder

a little too much
celery salt

a handful of bread
crumbs

a few globs of
Paul
Newman’s
Vodka Sauce

2 cigarettes

Instructions

First, disconnect smoke
alarm. Cook noodles according to package directions. Remember that you have
noodles cooking.

Next, chop some of the
onion into really tiny pieces. Apply bandage to cut on finger.

Throw onions into a
bowl with the ground beef and the vodka sauce. Add garlic powder and too much
celery salt.

Add bread crumbs.
Decide you didn’t need the bread crumbs. Too late. Mix by hand (ideally, the
hand
without
the bandage).

To a big, hot skillet,
add olive oil and ground beef mix. Sorta cook the beef, but not totally.

Light first cigarette.
Your noodles are done now. You forgot about them, didn’t you? Take them off the
burner.

Drain noodles in
colander. Place in Pyrex© dish, carefully and evenly layering them. Layer beef
on top of noodles.

Now use that spoon to
mix up the two layers, because you’re worried the beef won’t get cooked enough
unless it’s evenly distributed.

Scatter remaining
bigger pieces of onion on top of dish.

Put away bag of flour,
since you didn’t actually need flour.

Place dish in 350
degree oven for at least 45 minutes.

Several minutes later, try
to guess when you put it in, since you didn’t check the time.

Decide you should put a
foil tent over the dish, because you heard something once about using a foil
tent.

Light second cigarette.
Watch a couple of episodes of “The Daily Show.”

Realize it’s been
almost an hour. Start to take dish out of oven. Immediately return dish to
oven. Find potholders. THEN take dish out of oven.