Does This Taste Funny? A Half-Baked Look at Food and Foodies (30 page)

The side dishes
included homemade mashed potatoes with cumin and roasted Brussels sprouts with
a drizzle of lemon juice, a sprinkle of kosher salt and some cracked black
pepper.

I made my own dressing,
too. I would have made ‘stuffing,’ but apparently stuffing the bird before you
cook it isn’t safe anymore, even though people have done it that way for
hundreds of years.

Here’s where it gets a
little weird: some recipes for stuffing / dressing include eggs, some don’t. I
opted to go with eggs.

As I’ve mentioned, I’m
not very diligent about measuring things, and after guessing at the ‘right’
amount of bread and eggs, I could see it was too goopy. Sorta looked like
Gerber’s.

So, I added more bread.
Great—now it’s too dry. More egg, right? And then, at a certain point, I had no
more room in my little blender. And my ‘dressing’ still looked like baby food.

Since I was worried
about my turkey,
and
I had no experience with Brussels sprouts,
and
my potatoes were going to be finished way too early, something had to give.

Needing a quick
resolution to
the Great Dressing Fiasco of 2011
, I grabbed a meatloaf
pan and poured the putative ‘dressing mixture in.’ Then I shoved it into a
toaster oven until I was ready to deal with it.

The reviews of my first
holiday meal? The turkey was terrific, the sprouts were spectacular, and the
potatoes were . . . well, they were mashed potatoes. Might have been a bit
heavy-handed with the cumin.

And as for my
transmogrified dressing? Well, it
tasted
like dressing. Or maybe it
tasted like stuffing. However, it
looked
more like meatloaf, and you had
to
slice
it like a loaf of bread. So on some level, what I ended up
doing was taking some bread, and turning it into . . . a different kind of
bread.

The most amazing thing
about my first Thanksgiving dinner was that, as crazy as the
experience
was, it didn’t make
me
crazy. In fact, cooking always makes me feel a
little
less
crazy.

I have a feeling Mom
would have been proud of my effort. I wish she could have been there to see it.
She might have been able to help me with the dressing, but then again, she
probably would have just told me to get out of the kitchen while she made it
herself.

This being my first
book, I should probably tell you a bit about who I am. I should, but I think it
would be more revealing to tell you who I’m not. So I went soul-searching.

Actually, I went ‘
ego-surfing
,’
which is typing your own name into a search engine to seeing what’s been
written about you. The great thing about ego-surfing is that it’s both
pointless
and
self-centered.

And, instead of
comparing myself to everyone on the planet (where I would rank somewhere around
3,465,218,107
^th
), I can at least see if I’m one of the most
successful people
named ‘Michael Dane.’

In the process, I found
a site that gives you statistical information on how your name ranks in
popularity, and it tells you where people with your name live.

In fact, there are
thirty-three ‘Michael Dane’ listings in the entire country (making it the
613,590th most popular name), and I/we can be found in twenty states (with five
of us in Massachusetts).

A quick search yielded
almost ten thousand pages on the internet that have at least one reference to a
‘Michael Dane.’

Most of them aren’t
about me. So, it was time to see how my life’s work stacks up against that of
the
other
various ‘Michael Dane’s.

My
research staff, researching things

The first result I
found was for a karaoke singer in Spokane, Washington. Seems like a pleasant enough
guy in his YouTube videos.

Next, I found a guy in
North Carolina who owns
his own company, Dane Construction. The only thing
 noteworthy about this Michael Dane is that federal campaign records show he
donated money to
both
candidates in a recent two-person senate race.
Pick a side, buddy!

Rounding out the first
few, there’s a Michael Dane who’s listed as a ‘voice talent.’ But I went
to his website, and first of all, he’s based in Athens, Texas, which isn’t even
the hippest Athens in the U.S. His bio says that he was a DJ at a club called
‘Toppless,’ so we’re probably not aiming for the same audience.

There is a link to the
MySpace page of a
twenty-one year old girl
in Lorain, Ohio, but I didn’t
like the looks of her friends. She could do better.

I found an actor with
my name, but according to IMDB, his entire resume consists of the roles
‘Transvestite Steve’ and ‘bad guy.’ No disrespect, Mike, but neither of the
characters you played even had last names.

Also in the world of showbiz,
Canadian singer Michael Dane apparently had a minor hit with the 12″
disco single “Let’s Make Love” (the flip side, as we all remember, was “The
Dead Are Making Love”), but that was in 1981, and I’ve seen no evidence of a
comeback. By him
or
Canadian disco.

The rest of the top
‘Michael Dane’ results include:

A
Goth kid who takes
far
too many pictures of himself

A
lawyer in Kirtland, Ohio who in 37 years of practice has never had an instance
of professional misconduct (and has apparently never left Kirtland, Ohio).

A
man who owns an ‘architectural products’ company in Phoenix with a sharp-looking
website. Curiously, twelve of the sixteen links are ‘Under Construction.’

A
guy credited on the album
“A Victorian Christmas For Brass”
who is
listed as the ‘bell ringer.’

Pretty eclectic group,
aren’t we? And I think I more than hold my own. Although I do wish I had ‘bell
ringer’ on my resume.

The next contender was
fun to read about. An English professor at two colleges in Hawaii, he’s listed
on ratemyprofessors.com. Here are a few quotes about Professor Dane:

“Sometimes he
seems like he’s weird but he’s very helpful.”

“He is
entertaining to listen to, but jokes can be repetitive.”

“First
impression makes Dane seem intimidating. He has a strange sense of humor.”

Weird. Those are all
really accurate descriptions of
me
. I had to think back, because I
wondered for a few minutes whether I had simply forgotten that I had been an
English professor in Hawaii. As it turned out, it wasn’t me.

My favorite search
result referred to a
movie character
named ‘Michael Dane,’ and from now
on, I’m gonna tell people that I was named after him, just to give myself a
more interesting backstory.

In the 1923 western
“North of Hudson Bay,”cowboy star Tom Mix played a rancher named Michael Dane.
Sadly, according to the book
‘John Ford,’
‘only portions’ of the film survive,
‘with titles in Czech.’ I have no idea why.

Here’s a synopsis of
the plot:

“Rancher
Michael Dane falls in love with Estelle while en route to Northern California
where his brother Peter had struck gold. But there he finds his brother dead
and his partner MacKenzie sentenced to walk the ‘death trail.’

Dane
tries to help MacKenzie, earns the same sentence, but both escape, battling
wolves, and meet Estelle, pursued by her uncle, the real murderer, who dies
after a canoe chase over a waterfall.”

It’s absolutely uncanny
how much that sounds like my life. Just replace ‘rancher’ with ‘writer,’ and
replace ‘battling wolves’ with ‘writing.’ Oh, and instead of a ‘canoe chase
over a waterfall,’ picture me . . . making a meatloaf.

All
content ©2009-2012 by Michael Dane

Some
excerpts previously appeared online at

OpenSalon.com
and MisterComedy.net

All
images used are in the public domain, except:

Title
page, ‘Kitchen Mistakes,’ ‘I Dropped the Meatloaf,’ ‘I Know It When I See It,’
‘The Pot Pie Pizza Process’  
Kara A. Bray

‘Cooking
Through the Crazy,’ ‘Where’s My Other Whisk,’ ‘Tempting the Fates,’ ‘A Splendid
Conversation’ (picture of spatula), ‘I Need a Catchphrase,’  
Michael
Dane

‘Behind
the Cooking’  
Noran Neurological
Clinic
,
Minneapolis

‘Sometimes
I Cheat’  
San
Gennaro
Foods

‘The
Girlfriend Draws the Line’  
Weston
Supply

‘The
World According to Stan’   
Stan’s Doughnuts

‘In
Which I Pester a Real Chef’  
Bret’s Table

‘As
Seen on TV’  
SlapChop

‘My
Dinner With Marjoram’  
Steve Schwab

‘You
Should Hear the Zucchini’ (first two pictures)  
Zoefotografie

‘Fear,
Loathing and Porridge’ (first two pictures)  
Hell’s
Kitchen

‘All
the Music You Can Eat’ (fudge)
  
Janice Milnerwood

 ‘Cooking
With Testosterone’ (Talos Outdoor Cooking Suite)  
Frontgage

‘Hot
Dogs and Haggis’ (picture of haggis)  
Edinburgh
Blog

‘A Splendid
Conversation’ (picture of L.R.K.)  
Lynne
Rosetto Kasper

‘Careful
With That Blowfish!’ (black garlic machine) 
 
BlackGarlic.com

‘Modern,
Schmodern’ (‘Modernist Cuisine)  
The
Cooking Lab, LLC

‘Cooking
Is Believing’ (picture of Rabbi)  
Temple
of
Aaron
,
Minneapolis

‘Oatmeal
for Supper’ (picture of Mary Olson)  
Mary Olson