I suck at cooking. I suuuuuuck.
The last two of seven days of attempting to make home cooked meals have failed horribly. Yesterday I tried to make a green bean casserole with ham and left over sausage spaghetti sauce, and it came out as some horrifying, crusty clump of dark red gelatinous goo that you’d possibly see in the corner of the screen on Dexter. The day before that, I tried defrosting frozen ground beef in the microwave for hamburgers, and I barfed the second I smelled the wet, luke warm raw flesh when I took it out.
My cooking in essay form.
I didn’t know what’s wrong. Why can’t I innovate like everyone else? I’ve eaten food my whole life, I should be able to make it. But noooooo. Everything I delicately sprinkle with basil leaves turns into some horrific abomination.
Oh, sure, I can do simple stuff, like meatloaf or broiled chicken, but its the even simpler stuff that gets me. Enter Alton Brown, the Beakman of cooking. It turns out that I didn’t know how to cook because I didn’t know the science behind cooking.
Tomorrow night, I will be making Mexican lasagna – a weird mix between corn tortilla enchiladas and the layers involved in the traditional italian dish. It involves mixing tomato sauce with chicken broth and lots of chili, creating my own tortillas out of dry corn with help from my food processor, and not screwing up defrosting and browning meat. And I am confident in doing this because of Chef Brown.
He taught me the recipe in the only way that I could have possibly taken it in and understood: through a narrative involving annoying protesters provoking a magical kitchen fairy to apparate and inspire Alton to throw all his crap in a baking dish and hope for the best, while taking a few minutes occasionally to share the gift of SCIENCE a la Prometheus or Bill Nye. Other adventures have included ten minutes of the show dedicated to proper knife sharpening, and a CSI autopsy like segment on how to properly cut up a chicken, complete with dramatic whispering and dark synth heavy music.
If you have no idea who he is, personality wise, Alton Brown is not so much Emeril Legassi as he is your favorite university professor. A motorcycling enthusiast in addition to a gourmet, he had a limited run on Feasting on Asphalt, a show about cooking stuff while traveling the country on a friggin motorcycle. He also worked cameras for an R.E.M. video and a Spike Lee joint, and conducted a twenty minute interview with astronauts, while they were in space. That’s a guy I want to learn how to cook from.
I highly recommend catching his show on the Food Network, Good Eats, as it is Good Times.
