I want to explain what happens when I try cooking something.
Here's a sort-of timeline:
Sometime Between Midnight and "Way Too Late to Start Cooking Something Now" I decide to start cooking something.
Hmm, what do I have in the fridge? This'll be like Chopped! Except with nothing fun or exotic and without any skilled chef-ery whatsoever.
I discover--
1) Pasta (Because I stockpile boxes of the stuff, because...it's pasta. I don't understand the question. Was there a question?)
2) Mushrooms (That still look fresh. A miracle in my kitchen. I buy mushrooms because I'm always like "Yay! Mushrooms!" and then I avoid using them at all costs. It's like that time I got a gym membership.)
3) Butter (I mean, thank goodness. I wouldn't have even bothered if there was no butter. I would have just gone back to watching my 37th daily episode of The Good Wife.)
4) Extra Virgin Olive Oil (Because it's really good for you, and butter is bad for you, so if you pour the EVOO--as me and Rachael Ray refer to it because we're professionals, obviously--the whole thing becomes healthy. That's science, kids. I don't make the rules.)
5) A Smattering of Frozen Vegetables (Smattering [Defintion]: Two crinkled carrots, a few peas, and something that's proooooooobably a zucchini. The label on the bag is really dull, so I wouldn't testify to that in court, but if I had to guess, you know, zucchini? FULL DISCLAIMER: I have absolutely no idea what a zucchini looks like. Doesn't it look like all different things? Why can't it be like a pumpkin? Pumpkins look like pumpkins. That's why people love them--except me, gross, and pumpkin-flavored coffee? GROSS. Kill me--still better than zucchini though because at least I know what I'm dealing with--Get your shit together, zucchini.)
6) "Questionable" Onions
--Notice that I put "Questionable" before the onions, because, unlike the mushrooms, the onions were...possibly not the freshest ingredient in my kitchen. They were pre-chopped (I don't chop onions. Who am I? A village girl looking for a husband?) I mean, they definitely weren't, like, going to kill anybody, but they didn't seem...ideal.
But I figured, Well, if they're not in amazing condition now, then I'd better use them before they really get disgusting and then I have to throw them out, because though I may not be the savviest chef, I do hate wasting food. I'm a child of the 90's. Every time I see somebody throw away a stale eclair, I picture Sally Struthers waiting for them by their car in the parking lot with a child named Uza and a baseball bat.
Back to the Questionable Onions.
I put them into a pot along with all the other ingredients after I've cooked the pasta. I would just like to say, before I continue, that I nailed cooking the pasta. I can cook pasta in my sleep. It's the one thing that would make it seem like I know what I'm doing. Of course, I don't make my own pasta, so the Barefoot Contessa would probably NEVER hang out with me or invite me to a dinner party full of her chef friends, but maybe, like, I could hang out with Jeffrey in the garden or something.
Sidenote: What is Sally Struthers like when she watches the first twenty minutes of any episode of Restaurant: Impossible? Does her head just explode? I'd really like to know.
Back to the kitchen--
Once everything's been cooking for awhile, I put it in a bowl, and try it.
Something seems off.
Now, I want to stress that it doesn't taste bad. It just...
Well...the onions look...wormy.
I'm not an idiot (Well...) I know that when you cook onions they can look a little wormy, but these onions look...extra wormy.
And as soon as I think that--(These onions look wormy.)--I'm grossed out and I can't eat it. But, pursuant to my previous statement about wasting food--I can't just chuck it all either.
Which leads to what always happens anytime I try to cook something and mess it up--
--Which is every time I try to cook something--
--I say to myself:
I CAN FIX THIS.
(I don't actually say it in capital letters, but you get the idea.)
Now, there are definite ways to fix any meal. I'm not the first genius to figure out that if you throw cream and bacon on something, it can go from dog food to delicious.
So I probably should have just gone the Cream-and-Bacon route right away, but I didn't want to take the easy way out.
(Do you ever notice how people who are in way over their heads always decide that the easy way out isn't for them? Yeah, I know I've never taken a violin lesson, but that's no reason to think I shouldn't sit in with the orchestra tonight.)
Here was my problem:
Looking at the wormy onions was grossing me out. I figured as long as I couldn't SEE the wormy onions, I'd be fine.
So--I thought--I'll just make soup.
Because when you're eating soup, who really knows what you're eating? You're basically just drinking murky water with stuff in it. Anytime you eat soup, you're pretty much just ingesting a swamp.
(Great, now soup is ruined for me too.)
That night, I put the pasta with wormy onions and the vegetable smattering in the fridge, and the next day, I go to the market.
While standing the soup aisle, I think--I can't make chicken soup, because that's too clear, it might not hide the wormy onions enough.
So I decide to make beef stew.
Now, just to be clear, I have no beef and I have no intention of buying beef. I just get the beef broth. I just need the extra-murkiness of beef broth not the actual beef itself. I have no hankering for beef. I just don't want to be able to see what I'm eating. In retrospect, I should have just bought myself a blindfold, but I was trying to be creative.
I go home, I boil the beef broth, I take the pasta in the fridge, and I dump it in the pot with the broth. Ten minutes later, I look in the pot and I can't see anything but hints of now-slightly-overcooked pasta.
I believe I've won.
I make myself a bowl of piping hot beef stew.
(Keep in mind, it's July. It's a hundred degrees out. And I'm eating stew. All because I don't want to disappoint Sally Struthers.)
It's all going swimmingly until I lift my spoon out of the stew and a long, wormy onion is just dangling off of it, damning me with its mere existence.
I instantly gag, and then gag again, and then run out of the room and into the bathroom where I shower and cry and berate myself for thinking that I'm a god who can make his own swamps where he can hide the bastard onion-worms that he, himself, created.
It was then I knew what I had to do--
I'd have to remove the onions from the stew one-by-one and figure out something else I could do with them, but not throw them out, because Uza would never forgive me.
At this point, it's once again "Way to Late to Be Cooking" time, and there I am, with a fork (because forks are better for pulling stuff out of stew) taking onions out of the swamp. Searching for each one like they're little murdered bodies and I have to find the culprit because I'm starving and I want to eat the rest of my slowly-growing-cold river.
I get all the onions out (It only takes thirty-eight minutes, but who's counting?) and I put the rest in the food processor while I eat the stew and, you know, stew while I think about the onion-worms. (At this point, the mushrooms in the stew were probably more in the "questionable" category as well.)
Then I remember how this all started--
Chopped.
There must be something else in my fridge that I can add to the onion-worms to make them not look like onion-worms anymore.
And what do I find?
Avocados.
(Pre-cut and packaged, because again, I'm not Amish.)
This is the most perfect thing that could possibly be in my fridge.
And why, you ask?
One word: Guacamole.
I throw the avocados into the food processor with the onion-words and puree the whole thing.
So how was it? The guacamole?
I have no idea.
It's sitting in my fridge right now.
To be totally honest--I'm a little terrified.
I have no idea what you can do with guacamole if it tastes like wormy onions.
...But I bought some cream and a package of bacon.
Just in case.
Here's a sort-of timeline:
Sometime Between Midnight and "Way Too Late to Start Cooking Something Now" I decide to start cooking something.
Hmm, what do I have in the fridge? This'll be like Chopped! Except with nothing fun or exotic and without any skilled chef-ery whatsoever.
I discover--
1) Pasta (Because I stockpile boxes of the stuff, because...it's pasta. I don't understand the question. Was there a question?)
2) Mushrooms (That still look fresh. A miracle in my kitchen. I buy mushrooms because I'm always like "Yay! Mushrooms!" and then I avoid using them at all costs. It's like that time I got a gym membership.)
3) Butter (I mean, thank goodness. I wouldn't have even bothered if there was no butter. I would have just gone back to watching my 37th daily episode of The Good Wife.)
4) Extra Virgin Olive Oil (Because it's really good for you, and butter is bad for you, so if you pour the EVOO--as me and Rachael Ray refer to it because we're professionals, obviously--the whole thing becomes healthy. That's science, kids. I don't make the rules.)
5) A Smattering of Frozen Vegetables (Smattering [Defintion]: Two crinkled carrots, a few peas, and something that's proooooooobably a zucchini. The label on the bag is really dull, so I wouldn't testify to that in court, but if I had to guess, you know, zucchini? FULL DISCLAIMER: I have absolutely no idea what a zucchini looks like. Doesn't it look like all different things? Why can't it be like a pumpkin? Pumpkins look like pumpkins. That's why people love them--except me, gross, and pumpkin-flavored coffee? GROSS. Kill me--still better than zucchini though because at least I know what I'm dealing with--Get your shit together, zucchini.)
6) "Questionable" Onions
--Notice that I put "Questionable" before the onions, because, unlike the mushrooms, the onions were...possibly not the freshest ingredient in my kitchen. They were pre-chopped (I don't chop onions. Who am I? A village girl looking for a husband?) I mean, they definitely weren't, like, going to kill anybody, but they didn't seem...ideal.
But I figured, Well, if they're not in amazing condition now, then I'd better use them before they really get disgusting and then I have to throw them out, because though I may not be the savviest chef, I do hate wasting food. I'm a child of the 90's. Every time I see somebody throw away a stale eclair, I picture Sally Struthers waiting for them by their car in the parking lot with a child named Uza and a baseball bat.
Back to the Questionable Onions.
I put them into a pot along with all the other ingredients after I've cooked the pasta. I would just like to say, before I continue, that I nailed cooking the pasta. I can cook pasta in my sleep. It's the one thing that would make it seem like I know what I'm doing. Of course, I don't make my own pasta, so the Barefoot Contessa would probably NEVER hang out with me or invite me to a dinner party full of her chef friends, but maybe, like, I could hang out with Jeffrey in the garden or something.
Sidenote: What is Sally Struthers like when she watches the first twenty minutes of any episode of Restaurant: Impossible? Does her head just explode? I'd really like to know.
Back to the kitchen--
Once everything's been cooking for awhile, I put it in a bowl, and try it.
Something seems off.
Now, I want to stress that it doesn't taste bad. It just...
Well...the onions look...wormy.
I'm not an idiot (Well...) I know that when you cook onions they can look a little wormy, but these onions look...extra wormy.
And as soon as I think that--(These onions look wormy.)--I'm grossed out and I can't eat it. But, pursuant to my previous statement about wasting food--I can't just chuck it all either.
Which leads to what always happens anytime I try to cook something and mess it up--
--Which is every time I try to cook something--
--I say to myself:
I CAN FIX THIS.
(I don't actually say it in capital letters, but you get the idea.)
Now, there are definite ways to fix any meal. I'm not the first genius to figure out that if you throw cream and bacon on something, it can go from dog food to delicious.
So I probably should have just gone the Cream-and-Bacon route right away, but I didn't want to take the easy way out.
(Do you ever notice how people who are in way over their heads always decide that the easy way out isn't for them? Yeah, I know I've never taken a violin lesson, but that's no reason to think I shouldn't sit in with the orchestra tonight.)
Here was my problem:
Looking at the wormy onions was grossing me out. I figured as long as I couldn't SEE the wormy onions, I'd be fine.
So--I thought--I'll just make soup.
Because when you're eating soup, who really knows what you're eating? You're basically just drinking murky water with stuff in it. Anytime you eat soup, you're pretty much just ingesting a swamp.
(Great, now soup is ruined for me too.)
That night, I put the pasta with wormy onions and the vegetable smattering in the fridge, and the next day, I go to the market.
While standing the soup aisle, I think--I can't make chicken soup, because that's too clear, it might not hide the wormy onions enough.
So I decide to make beef stew.
Now, just to be clear, I have no beef and I have no intention of buying beef. I just get the beef broth. I just need the extra-murkiness of beef broth not the actual beef itself. I have no hankering for beef. I just don't want to be able to see what I'm eating. In retrospect, I should have just bought myself a blindfold, but I was trying to be creative.
I go home, I boil the beef broth, I take the pasta in the fridge, and I dump it in the pot with the broth. Ten minutes later, I look in the pot and I can't see anything but hints of now-slightly-overcooked pasta.
I believe I've won.
I make myself a bowl of piping hot beef stew.
(Keep in mind, it's July. It's a hundred degrees out. And I'm eating stew. All because I don't want to disappoint Sally Struthers.)
It's all going swimmingly until I lift my spoon out of the stew and a long, wormy onion is just dangling off of it, damning me with its mere existence.
I instantly gag, and then gag again, and then run out of the room and into the bathroom where I shower and cry and berate myself for thinking that I'm a god who can make his own swamps where he can hide the bastard onion-worms that he, himself, created.
It was then I knew what I had to do--
I'd have to remove the onions from the stew one-by-one and figure out something else I could do with them, but not throw them out, because Uza would never forgive me.
At this point, it's once again "Way to Late to Be Cooking" time, and there I am, with a fork (because forks are better for pulling stuff out of stew) taking onions out of the swamp. Searching for each one like they're little murdered bodies and I have to find the culprit because I'm starving and I want to eat the rest of my slowly-growing-cold river.
I get all the onions out (It only takes thirty-eight minutes, but who's counting?) and I put the rest in the food processor while I eat the stew and, you know, stew while I think about the onion-worms. (At this point, the mushrooms in the stew were probably more in the "questionable" category as well.)
Then I remember how this all started--
Chopped.
There must be something else in my fridge that I can add to the onion-worms to make them not look like onion-worms anymore.
And what do I find?
Avocados.
(Pre-cut and packaged, because again, I'm not Amish.)
This is the most perfect thing that could possibly be in my fridge.
And why, you ask?
One word: Guacamole.
I throw the avocados into the food processor with the onion-words and puree the whole thing.
So how was it? The guacamole?
I have no idea.
It's sitting in my fridge right now.
To be totally honest--I'm a little terrified.
I have no idea what you can do with guacamole if it tastes like wormy onions.
...But I bought some cream and a package of bacon.
Just in case.
Comments
Post a Comment