These little stories have been encouraged by a very literate poet and friend, who should’ve known better!
My first exposure to fixing food for myself was something of a minor disaster, but had little influence overall because I was too young to recognize certain incidental differentials in ingredients, like the variance between salt and sugar. I was maybe three or four years old and usually got up before everybody else. For some reason, I decided to make my own breakfast which consisted of the “Breakfast of Champions,” a sliced banana, milk and sugar. I got through the first part without any difficulties. I even knew how to peel a banana and cut it without doing any serious damage to my fingers.
Problems began to emerge when I noticed that the sugar bowl was empty. I remember looking in the cupboard and seeing this jar of white stuff that of course had to be sugar. So, being the efficient diminutive devil that I was, even at that age, I filled sugar bowl and spread a generous amount over the bananas and cereal. After the first bite I realized something was wrong, I wasn’t sure what, but thought perhaps the banana was over the hill, or the milk was bad or whatever. It turned out that what I assumed was sugar was in reality – salt.
I threw the whole mess out and decided to go out and play until mom got up and made me some breakfast. I would tell her that something seemed to be wrong with the bananas or the milk, but was personally convinced there could never be anything wrong with the “Breakfast of Champions.” A little later, I heard her pleasant voice calling me in a very unusual harsh fashion. She was a hard case in the morning. I could tell by the tone that likely some earlier usual misdemeanor on my part had been discovered. She was standing on the steps with her cup of coffee asking “why in the hell had I put salt in the sugar bowl.” That had to be a wake-up call! I had no idea of what she was talking about because I really didn’t comprehend the difference. To me they were both white little granules, and under those circumstances had to be sugar.
This turned out to be my first lesson in the proper use of ingredients. I was prohibited from making my own breakfast from that point on, and felt that my youthful independence had just been totally circumvented. I was tempted to load my tricycle and Red Flyer Wagon with all my personal belongings and head for greener pastures. At that point, I figured I’d have to be 20 years old before I could make my own damn “Breakfast of Champions.” Salt should have been colored either green or blue, so as not to be confused with sugar.
The next lesson that had to do with cooking ingredients and can best be described as a concern of indiscriminate use of Black pepper, as opposed to White pepper or in fact, Red pepper, which at that point in my life I did not know existed. I digress! I don’t remember having any aversions to pepper when I was young. It just seemed like a normal part of the foods that we were eating. At some point I overheard a conversation where the statement was made “picking fly specks out of pepper.” I found this somewhat intriguing, because I had no clue what a fly speck was. I knew what a fly was, but what the hell was speck?
So naturally, I asked my rather salt-adverse, omnipotent mother and she explained that “it was the little spots left by flies when they went to the bathroom.” She showed me some examples and my immediate response was why couldn’t they use the bathroom or go outside, instead of all these places that they left these little black deposits. She also explained that it was a sarcastic description of some people that didn’t have anything better to do, which of course made absolutely no sense to me. From that time forward, and to this day, I continually look at food that has pepper in it and wonder “which is a pepper” and “which is a fly speck.” If any of you erstwhile readers know the difference, please contact me.
After a few years, my cooking proficiencies included peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, but I was restricted from use of the toaster or any other devices short of a dull knife. My favorite was an onion sandwich which consisted of Mayo, mustard, sliced onion with salt and pepper, which I diligently inspected for “specks.” I noticed more than once after having eaten my onion sandwich that I was ostracized by my playmates, and when mom came home she told me to go brush my teeth, which I would respond with “Why? I did that yesterday.” Brushing my teeth fell under the same category as taking a bath. My considered opinion was “why?” I was just going to go out and get dirty all over again.
On one particular afternoon, mom was away shopping and I went to do the good old standby “P.B. and J.” only to discover we had no milk. I was smart enough to know you don’t want to do peanut butter without milk. I looked in the cupboard and found a package of dried chicken noodle soup that all you had to do was add water and bring to a boil. I had seen mom do this and came to the conclusion that this was a no-brainer. I could read, but only to a point, and wasn’t sure what the directions were really suggesting. Besides, I’ve never been big on reading directions. I dumped a bunch of water in the pan, added ingredients from the package and managed to light the stove without blowing up the house, which was of course a no-no. Things went along smoothly, the water started to bubble, I stirred it a bunch, and turned off the stove.
I got a bowl and shoveled out this chicken noodle stuff. I took a taste and came to the conclusion that this was too watery. Our next-door neighbor shared “gate keeper” duties when one of the two moms was away. I went over to their house and showed her the stuff and she told me I used too much water, and to mix a little flour in it and it would be fine. She didn’t bother to help me because I think she was still unhappy about the fact that I had a few months earlier painted her daughter green. That was another misdemeanor that I don’t care to discuss. So, I went back, found what I thought was flour, which was unfortunately baking powder, dumped in a bunch of this into the pot with the water smelling of dead chicken and reheated it.
The chemical reaction was absolutely amazing. These lazy little noodles began to swell and became about four times their previous size. The water thickened up all right, into what could best be described as a glutinous mass clinging to the side of this pan. I took one taste and decided I would skip lunch. I put this ever-growing pot of soup in the kitchen sink. Needless to say, all hell broke loose when mom got home. Once more, I got my tricycle and wagon ready in case I decided it was time to go seek my fortune. My attitude, which was perfectly reasonable, was that if I had to do the dishes, I ought to at least be able to have kitchen privileges.
The next problem didn’t occur at home, otherwise I wouldn’t be here to talk about it. I had joined the Boy Scouts, and went on a scout jamboree or whatever, somewhere in a nearby wooded area. There were a number of different tasks we had to do to earn merit badges. One of the possible awards was for cooking. The scoutmaster asked us if anyone knew how to make pancakes. Nobody responded and I thought about this and decided, after having watched mom make this stuff, it was pretty easy to do. So I got handed the pancake flour, some milk and mixed this up in one of our Boy Scout mess kits. We had a little campfire going and I proceeded to warm up the pan, and then dumped what I thought was the proper amount to make one pancake. I put in a little too much, but decided it was okay because I would be able to flip it over. I forgot one important thing. I didn’t grease the pan.
The other problem was the fire was too hot and the pancake batter was too thick. The end result was a disaster for my Scouting career. The whole mess stuck to the pan like it had been welded in place and the Scoutmaster decided that I was a first-class idiot, which is not quite the word he used. Needless to say, I didn’t get my merit badge and soon decided that I would rather be in the Girl Scouts, because when they went camping it was on the outskirts of the Mojave Desert in a place called Las Vegas.
Things got a little better as I got older and married – with responsibilities to assist in the preparation of meals and stuff like that, which still included doing the damn dishes. I no longer had my tricycle and wagon, but did have a Nash Rambler, which was close to the same thing. I was reading the paper one day and came across this article that described a cooking technique, and specifically a dish called “Manifold Chicken.” This whole concept struck me as rather unique. Basically, you wrapped a whole chicken in foil a couple of times and stuck it near the manifold in your car. Then, if and when you went for a drive, whenever you got to where you were going, you had chicken ready for your dinner. Neat idea!
So the next time we decided to go up to our cabin in the canyon I went down to the store, got a chicken, put a bunch of salt and pepper on it, still thinking about fly specks, wrapped it up a bunch of times in foil and stuck it next to the manifold in my not-so-trusty Nash. I told Blue-eyes about this and she went absolutely berserk. I think her comment was something to the effect “You don’t really think we’re gonna eat that thing, do you?” I explained that it was perfectly sanitary and that it seems like a really good idea. She just shook her head and said “My mother told me you were weird.”
Off we went. It was about an hour’s drive up to the cabin, and during this process I forgot about my new culinary experiment. We were almost there when one of the curtain climbers said, “Dad, I smell something burning.” I couldn’t really detect anything, but decided I’d better pull over and see if something was wrong. I stopped the wagon, and smoke came pouring out of the engine cavity. I had forgotten about my manifold chicken and quickly opened up the hood because I figured I was burning up the engine. My little experiment was on fire. Smoke was pouring out and really smelled bad. I found a little stick, punched it into the side of this smoldering mass and tossed it by the side of the road. Blue-eyes turned to the kids and said, ”Go wash your hands, it’s time for dinner.”
My next little experiment was again with chicken. I should’ve known better because I really had not had a lot of luck with our feathered friends. This idea was suggested to me by a fellow I worked with and was called “beer can chicken.” The concept was really simple, you take a whole chicken, open up a can of beer, stick the beer can into the cavity ( I cleaned that up to maintain my PG–13 rating), and put it on the barbecue, standing up. No way to go wrong with this one!
So one Sunday I tried it, adjusted the barbecue temperature which is easy because it’s gas, not briquettes, and went about some chores in the backyard. About an hour later Blue-eyes came and got me and said she heard a loud noise by the barbecue. I went to investigate, opened up the barbecue and discovered chicken parts laying all over hell and gone. The whole thing had exploded. The only assumption I could make was I had shoved the can too far up the bird’s cavity and trapped all the gases that would develop from what little alcohol there was in the beer. This poor chicken didn’t know what hit it.
After I cleaned up the mess, Blue-eyes came out and asked me if I could be trusted to do some hot dogs. I think that the Anti-cruelty to Poultry Association or perhaps the Chicken Pluckers Union, had decided to target JJ for gross negligence of dead chickens. (For you less astute readers, a plucker was someone that pulled the feathers off of dead chickens. I often thought of this as a possible career.)
The final little dilemma is more current – still involves chicken, but has nothing to do with cooking. Every so often, our local grocery store puts large packages of chicken legs on sale. To me that’s great, because I’ve always been a leg man. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about that statement. I digress! Anyway, these packages have to be divided up before freezing, because you don’t want to freeze 20 chicken legs when you’re only going to eat two or three at a time. So naturally, these have to be wrapped separately, put into a Ziploc bag and done in such fashion as to avoid what Blue-eyes calls “freezer burn.” There’s something diametrically opposed within that last phrase, “freezer burn,” but I think I’ll avoid that issue.
So to accomplish this, we have a product that’s called Saran plastic wrap, or something like that, which clings to itself and forms some kind of a seal. The only problem is trying to get this stuff to hold still long enough to wrap a couple of chicken legs, which like to move around on their own anyway. You pull this stuff out off of a roller and it has a little cutter that sometimes slices off enough wrap to get the job done. The problem is by the time you reach for the chicken leg, the wrap has decided it liked your fingers better and is now securely fastened to one of your hands or is now clinging to itself at the other end with no possibility of getting it flattened out again. So I pull this plastic monster off my fingers, crumple it up and throw away.
This damn stuff has got a mind of its own. I use the cutter and it starts to curl up trying to grab my hand again. I use my other hand to keep that from happening and it grabs that one too. I can’t reach for the chicken leg with this going on unless I was to use my teeth. For every two legs I get wrapped, I have two or three crunched up balls of plastic wrap. My biggest fear is that somehow I will get both hands entangled in this stuff and will be found dead from starvation, because I couldn’t get loose. I think the manufacturer knows this, and it’s a plot by some foreign government to reduce the male population of our country.
Moral of the story – Don’t buy a Nash Rambler; — drink the beer because it’s not good for the chicken; — don’t believe it’s a better world because of plastics; — not everyone appreciates onion sandwiches; — and if you can’t stand the heat stay out of the kitchen.
As just a side note, Mr. Romney’s father ran Nash prior to his running an unsuccessful campaign for President. Nash (of course) like many things, no longer exists.
J.J. Addingnuttin 