Does This Taste Funny? A Half-Baked Look at Food and Foodies (7 page)

I’ve learned over time
that, despite my loving partner’s willingness to play along with my faux-foodie
aspirations, there are things she would rather not eat.

Capers received a
distinctly tepid response; collard greens were NOT the hit I had expected;
she’s not into cucumbers, and despite my belief that broccoli and cauliflower
make a perfect veggie combo, the cauliflower part leaves her cold.

At first I thought she
had some rare psychological trauma involving foods that start with the letter
‘c.’  But it turns out, she’s fine with couscous, and that has
two
‘c’s.

Bottom line,
relationships are about compromise, so I’ve resigned myself to the fact that
she’ll never experience my fabulous caper-cucumber crusted cauliflower, with a
side of collard greens.

We don’t have a lot of
extra cash, so I don’t lobby for a lot of cooking gadgets. Besides, with my
long history of clumsiness, some gadgets are out of the question.

I don’t imagine she’ll
ever buy me an electric knife, for example, since that would simply allow me to
cut myself more quickly and efficiently.

But there is one food-related
device that I have wanted since the first time I saw it. This is a thingamajig
so cool, on so many levels, that
I
would instantly become cooler
simply
by owning one
.

 You probably already
know what I’m leading up to here. It’s a jerky gun.

Some quotes from the
catalog:

“The
one and only Jerky Gun” (
as opposed to all those knockoff jerky weapons you
see on the street
?).

“This
item is made to give years of performance” (
“Kids, this was your great-grandpa’s
jerky gun…”).

“Load
the barrel of the Jerky Gun with lean, seasoned ground meat and shoot out flat
strips of jerky or round snack sticks.”
Because it’s your Second Amendment
right to bear arms . . . that shoot meat snacks
.

In
addition, the barrel will hold three-quarters of a pound of meat, Although I’ve
heard stories of street gangs that illegally modify these to hold a full pound.

Incidentally,
the gun in the picture comes with three nozzles and enough seasoning for four
pounds of meat. ‘Complete instructions’ included, but I’m sure most of us were
taught from an early age how to responsibly shoot meat products out of a gun.

The
same company also sells a Jerky Cannon and, for you fans of overkill, a Jerky
Cannon DOUBLE BARREL! Now THAT would obviously be ridiculous—the Jerky Gun is
all we need.

Fifty
bucks. Yeah, that’s a hard one to pitch:  “Hey hon, how was your day? Cool.
Listen, I went ahead and put fifty bucks on the card for that jerky gun I was
telling you about .”

I’m
not sure exactly what her objection was, but she drew the line. Maybe it was
just the ‘gun’ part of the concept–and maybe she was worried that if we had one
in the house, according to statistics, someone could break in and use our jerky
gun against us.

Or
it could have been the jerky part. In my excitement over FINDING jerky
weaponry, I had forgotten that I actually don’t
like
jerky. The idea just seems wrong.

Eating
jerky is like saying, “I enjoy the
flavor
of meat, but I’d like it to be all dried out, and harder to chew.” Or maybe if
you need food that you can . . . mail in an envelope.

I
didn’t push very hard for the meat musket. You pick your battles when you’re
part of a couple. And we’ve learned to negotiate—we respected each other’s
opinions, and reached a compromise. I agreed to not buy the Jerky Gun, and she
agreed to not let me.

 It
wasn’t anything like that whole ugly Reddi-wip fiasco. Anyway, I figure if I
give up on the gun, she’ll give in on the nifty zester I
really
need.

Until recently, I had
an irrational fear of something most cooks take in stride: baking. And for
anyone who thought the answer should have been ‘blowing up the kitchen in yet
another experiment,’ that’s not an
irrational
fear.

I’m not afraid of baked
goods
,
mind you—there are very few things I
wouldn’t
eat if they came
stuffed inside a pastry. I
have
been afraid of actually
baking
, though.

The shows on the food
channels don’t help, because the projects you see on a show like ‘Cupcake Wars’
are a bit over the top for the aspiring home baker:

 “For
this challenge, we want you to make a cupcake version of the Louvre and
recreate all of its paintings with only frosting and chocolate jimmies–you have
fifteen minutes.”

It’s been said that
baking is a science, whereas cooking is an art. Don’t get me wrong—science has
its place. My problem is, art leaves room for mistakes, and science, not so
much.

In art, you can make
mistakes that end up looking brilliant, as long as people know it was supposed
to be art.

Maybe early in his
career, Picasso just couldn’t draw very well, but people thought he
intentionally drew misshapen faces
(“You wanna call it ‘cubism,’ fine, but
that’s SO not what I was going for.”).

On the other hand, if
you make a mistake with a pie or a cake, you can’t just tweak it as you go
along, and I’m used to some margin for error.

So, I acknowledge that dessert
scares me. Your cakes, your pies. The kind of baking that seems to require
either:

learning
recipes from Grandma that have been passed down for generations, OR

paying
attention to details in following directions exactly as written while using
advanced calculus

Now as for the first
approach, though my mom baked cookies every Christmas, and I suppose I
‘helped,’ all I remember is thinking “I can’t believe I have to crack all these
walnuts. I don’t even like walnuts.”

And as for the other
method, let’s just say I’ve never checked the box marked ‘attention to detail’ when
I’ve listed my strengths on a job application. But I have had enough therapy to
know that you should always face your fears, so I decided to bake a pie . . .

I f
ound a recipe for a ‘
Quick and Easy
Pie Crust.’
It called for flour
and butter (and some
mysterious
process called
‘folding the butter in
.
”
)

The whole ‘folding’
deal
seemed overly fussy
to me
,
so I opted to just
put the butter in
the bowl and mix it all by hand
.

I
n retrospect,
this
was a mistake, and p
robably accounts for the reference in the recipe to using
“two forks or a pastry cutter.”

About a half hour
later, I had removed most of the gooey proto-dough from my hands and had
something in the bowl I could work with.

At this point I
noticed that pie
crust recipes seem to always include
something called ‘baking soda,’ which I didn’t have. Oh, well.

For the filling, I
turned once again to my little one-button chopper. I threw in a bunch of peanut
butter.

After initially
trying to melt some Hershey’s Ki
sses in a ramekin
that turned out to not be ENTIRELY microwave-safe, I finished melting the
chocolate in a saucepan.

Then I added the
chocolate to the peanut butter, along with som
e vanilla extract and
a banana.

Lastly, I pushed the
‘pulse’ button several times, stopping occasionally to shove the banana to the
bottom (I realize that ‘shove’ isn’t a word you find in a lot of
cookbooks
)
.

I tasted it, and determined
it was pie-worthy.
I also determined that if
the crust didn’t come out right,
basically,
I
had made a really good
pudding
.

I
put the dough in my pie dish and spread it more or less evenly. Then I spent
ten minutes repairing holes in the crust, a laborious process during which I
grab some dough to ‘patch’ the holes.

After chilling the
crust for a few minutes, I added the filling and put it in the oven. I had to
figure out how long it should bake, but I couldn’t find anything online for
“Peanut Butter Chocolate Banana Pie in a Crust Made Without Baking Powder.”

So
I
averaged
how long various pies called for and decided on fifteen minutes at 425 followed
by forty-five minutes at 350. Already, baking was feeling like way too much
math.

Here’s the weird
thing–about a half hour in, the apartment started to smell like . . . pie!
Homemade
pie! I’ll be honest–the crust was a little overdone. It was also whatever the
opposite of ‘flaky’ would be.

I felt a little
pressure to make this work. I had used the last of The Girlfriend’s chocolate
to make the filling while she was at work, and you need to be pretty damned
sure of yourself if you’re willing to risk the last of a woman’s chocolate.

But when it was time
for dessert, she and I agreed that, for the most part, it was like eating
actual pie. I’m sure the artificially-flavored, artificially-colored, partially
hydrogenated Cool Whip helped, but underneath
that
was a
real homemade pie.

Update:
Since this attempt, I have tried to make a pie crust twice, and both times they
were slightly off. Then I figured out what I had been doing wrong: I wasn’t
buying pre-made pie crusts.

I’m sure this next
statement will cause me to lose any respect I may have gained from actual
foodies along the way, but here goes: ‘gourmet comfort food’ is a stupid
concept.

I’ve learned to
appreciate the nuances of fine dining, but part of what I love about what’s
called comfort food is the fact that it’s NOT a culinary adventure—I want it to
comfort
me, not make me wonder what it is.

I want it to evoke
memories, not provoke discussions. For me, ‘gourmet comfort food’ is like
‘Congressional efficiency,’ or ‘rowdy James Taylor fans.’