Today's post is brought to you, intriguingly, from the year 2011, which is when this meal was actually prepared. Why did it take us so long to bring this meal to the light, you may ask? Well, I'll tell you: Shame. Pure shame. Let's dive in, shall we!
Simplicity has never been the goal here at Family Füd. This ain’t no “7-Minute Casseroles to Please Your Hubby on a Weeknight” kind of blog. We prefer to painstakingly caramelize onions, go catatonic waiting for homemade dough to rise, spend hours slow-roasting pork, and drive me to the brink of starvation (and to several pre-meal snacks) before finally sitting down to a 9:00 p.m. dinner. Why? Because I live by a simple food code: Always use a recipe for everything or else when you fail you'll have only yourself to blame.
This is the tale of how I broke my code one food-forsaken Sunday, many moons ago...
Karen and I decided to dispense with the complicated recipes and any iota of effort. We decided to create a meal using whatever food and food-type substances Karen had lying around the house. We figured we had accrued enough cooking skill in our lives to throw together a good dish in less than an hour. Did we assume right? As you may have guessed by now, the answer is an emphatic "NO." But on the plus side, we're humble and courageous enough to reveal every detail to our readers. Get ready for a tale of kitchen horrors so gruesome, you'll wonder why the hell we ever thought we were qualified to author a blog about cooking.
Thinking back on that fateful night, I’m surprised by two seemingly contradictory things. One, that this no-energy meal didn’t happen much earlier and more frequently in the course of our blogging since expending zero energy on activities is basically my modus operandi, but I'm equally surprised that Tony ever agreed to let us totally half-ass a meal. It goes entirely against his meticulous food nature. Since this cooking adventure took place like two years ago (procrastination is also my modus operandi) neither one of us can remember what inspired the idea to create a meal from whatever we had lying around the kitchen, but I have a few theories . . .
Theory #1: I may have tried to appeal to Tony’s competitive side by framing this endeavor as a challenge only the best and bravest chefs would ever dare attempt, a Chopped challenge, if you will. For those of your not in-the-know, Chopped is a competitive reality show on the Food Network in which chefs are given baskets with several surprise ingredients and asked to make a snooty judge-pleasing gourmet meal in like 20 minutes, or roughly the same amount of time it takes me to slice one whole tomato. As if that weren't enough of a challenge, the ingredient basket typically contains things like wood shavings, pigeon brain, and garbage butter. If anyone could make a gourmet meal from a pile of garbage, certainly we could make something half way decent out of normal ingredients. Just trust me, Tony!
Theory #2 for what made Tony so susceptible to suggestion: This theory came from examining photographic evidence from the night in question. As you'll see below, Tony seems to be in an inexplicably greasy and disheveled state. Further investigation reveals that the date of this cooking adventure was less than a month after he graduated from college with a degree in screenwriting. Screen. Writing. He may have been going through some sort of recent grad crisis, questioning his place in the grown up world, anxious at the idea of an unknown future, and too overwhelmed to shower, run a comb through his hair, or convince his impulsive sister to take the time to look up some damn recipes that would ensure the production of edible food.
Look at this kid. He's one rejection letter away from selling all of his worldly possessions to go back-packing around Prague so he can "find himself" which we all know is code for "absinthe bender."
Whatever the reason, Tony and I agreed that we would whip together a sort of noodle stir fry using random veggies and a peanut sauce I’d made once before from my roommate's The MediterAsian Way cookbook. And for dessert we would scour the kitchen for sweet ingredients and surely create some off-the-cuff delicious masterpiece. Or, we would create an unspeakable monster. Stay tuned to find out what happened!
I can offer no further insight into my state of mind, but, yes, I appear to have been very recently fished from a year-long stay at the bottom of a laundry hamper. Hot on the heels of attaining a degree in one of the most competitive job fields centered in one of the most cut-throat cities in the world, perhaps I was eager to get a head start on my life of certain failure.
The meal seemed promising, though. I love peanut sauce, but making it at home is damn tough. The best peanut sauces I've had are amazing specimens of balance and complexity. Those I make at home just taste like salty peanut butter soup. (That still sounds delicious.) It’s nauseating wading through the glut of recipes posted by “Kathy L from Tallahassee" which involve cream cheese and Tobasco. Karen’s recipe was an “Indonesian Peanut Sauce” that she vouched for, so we trudged ahead, chopping up a mixture of the only veggies that Kathy L would have deemed appropriate for her “pretty gosh darn” authentic stir-fry: carrots, broccoli and (the most Asian of all vegetables) snow peas! (Sorry, Kathy L, but I live in California; it's only right that I look down on you).
I cracked open a beer early on (a "Bohemia," go figure) and proceeded to contribute nothing to the process, promising to help out later with dessert. I cut up some veggies, as I do so enjoy, but I’ve never looked less like a capable candidate for knife-wielding. More likely I offered a slew of unhelpful comments from over Karen’s shoulder, such as “Those carrots don’t look done,” "That looks weird" and “Let’s just grow our own food, man, live off the land!”
In between urging Tony to "Shut the hell up" and "Stop talking like a damn hippie," I whipped up the aforementioned peanut sauce, which I still vouch for to this day, and will until my grave!!! It was a delicious concoction of peanut butter, fish sauce, sugar, and coconut milk (full fat, none of that nansy pansy low fat nonesense). I'm still not sure what went wrong except that the sauce was meant to be used on a cold salad of cauliflower, carrots, and sliced egg*(Cold cauliflower and egg salad? Sign me up!). When we paired it with the hot noodles and veggies somehow all the oil stuck while the actual peanut and delicious coconut milk portion just sort of settled at the bottom of the pan. That’s what you get for meddling with a recipe. As long as you made sure to swirl your bite of broccoli and slightly undercooked carrot in the flavor part of the sauce at the bottom of your bowl, it wasn’t bad . . . but it wasn’t great. I think the quality of photos we took of the finished product accurately reflects our enthusiasm for this meal.
“Should we at least put down a tablecloth or move your keys out of the way?”
“Meh. Whatever, dude.”
“Tony, I found some canned oysters behind the sponges!”
“Bring them to me! And the sponges, too!”
Behold our assembled ingredients, like an artist's palette before all those vibrant primary paint colors get swirled together into "poop color."
Looking at this photo, even now, I can't help but think, "There must be a good dessert in there somewhere!" We started with fresh cherries, chocolate, hazelnuts, cinnamon, and various sugars. It all seemed so full of promise at the time. Keep in mind, the Lawry's Seasoned Salt was a joke. We're not complete idiots.
We were off and running, not at a graceful gallop, more of a bow-legged dumbass-stumble, but we were excited. Our vigor wore off a bit though as we took turns listening to each other’s monstrous visions. It should have been at this point that all the no-recipe-peace-love-and-hippie crap wore off and Karen shook me by the shoulders, yelling “Sweeten the whole thing with molasses?! That’s gonna taste like a blood-soaked tire, you IDIOT!” But she didn’t. She just nodded and said, “Ok . . . really? I trust you.” She obviously didn’t, but you know when you let a friend or, better yet, a baby do something really stupid, even when the repercussions will affect you because at least you get that sweet intoxicating feeling of blaming them later? Well, we were trading off doing that with every proposed layer of the Franken-bars we were about to bake. This subtle passive aggressive push and pull did, however, get to the point where I had to draw an anatomical map of all our bad ideas, so we could more efficiently fudge this up.
Here you see the Green Siblings' attempt at cramming four distinct desserts, myriad flavors, and a live monkey into one cohesive dish.
I'm not sure of many things in this crazy, mixed up world, but I am 100% positive that desserts should have chocolate. So it was my belief that the best way to start our dessert was to make a delicious, velvety chocolate spread by melting together some baker's chocolate, butter, sugar, and instant coffee granules (to amp up the flavor of the chocolate). To this day I do not know how this concoction turned into a chocolate blob with the consistency of oily sand. You know when your dog is sick and it poops up something that is partly solid but also looks like it's covered in mucus . . . believe me when I tell you that this picture does not do it justice.
Now let me tell you about my molasses and oat concoction; it tasted the way that stuff looked! In the above Monkey Diagram you'll find it labeled "Home Base." I read an article about natural sweeteners and something about how molasses had a bunch of vitamin E and decided, "We'll just use that." I kid you not, I used to make sweetener decisions based on Vitamin E content. Never mind that as soon as you open a jar of molasses (especially black strap, which is more intense than the "mild" and even "dark" varieties), you're greeted by the noxious scent of sweetened carburetor grease. And that's just it, I was smelling the whole damn jar; molasses should be used in small quantities and almost always in conjunction with a more mild and sane sweetener. Imagine molasses is Mel Gibson's character in Lethal Weapon and any other sugar is Danny Glover. I let a trigger happy, emotionally unstable, masochistic sugar into our dessert unsupervised. And, as predicted, he "F-ed" some "S" up.
The other thing about molasses is that when left alone and exposed directly to heating elements it tends to burn easily. So, of course we just tossed some oats in straight molasses and put it directly in the oven where it immediately got a strong burnt taste to go with its already overpowering spiciness.
Here's Tony's charred, spicy oats covered in my chocolate dinosaur venom:
Hungry yet?
The next layer in the diagram was a sort of homemade cherry jam, which on its own was quite tasty, except that Tony put a curse on it!! Yeah, that's right. You see, after I'd already begun pitting cherries for the "Wildcard" layer and had my hands covered in cherry gunk, I realized that I was apron-less and sure to stain my favorite t-shirt with cherry juice. So I asked Tony to kindly find an apron and prevent such a catastrophe. He thought he'd be cute and grab my roommate's UCLA apron even though I WENT TO USC AND OMG WE ARE TOTALLY RIVALS NOOOOO!!!!
Ok, to be honest, I don't have all that much affinity for my alma mater, nor do I give credence to arbitrary rivalries, but Tony was just being a turd, and that made me feel pretty stabby. It's my belief that this sour energy ruined my cooking chi which spoiled the taste of the food. . . is something a damn, new age hippie would say. Mostly we should have just left the dessert to the professionals.
It was at this point, the point at which Karen tried to stab me as usual, that we realized this whole experiment could turn out terrible. But we decided to trudge on because we had to know just how terrible. Conveniently, this phase of the cooking coincides with Karen and myself totally losing our minds. Join me now on a photographic journey entitled "Missing Mallows and Toasted Oats: Karen and Tony Throw in the Sanity Towel."
We ran out of marshmallows to finish our "Wildcard" layer (please, people, consult the diagram), so we had to think quick! Because surely in a dish chalk full of hair-brained ideas, nine missing marshmallows would be the fatal flaw. Let's see what we came up with . . .
. . . a head of broccoli!
. . . a raw egg!
. . . a raw egg with a whisker monkey on it!
I like to imagine that we did make this dish on an episode of Chopped and that the snooty chef judges had to provide commentary on me jokingly adding a raw egg with a monkey drawn on it: "I've never seen this before, and I'm a bit skeptical."
In perhaps our one and only success, we managed to remove our little creature when the marshmallows were at their ideal level of golden crispiness. This was a short-lived victory, however, since after removing the dish from the oven, we left it to cool on the stove . . . on a still flaming burner. This proved to be too much ineptitude for Karen to handle, and she promptly had a meltdown. A funny one, don't worry.
Let's watch Karen totally lose it! Without the contextual information that she's laughing hysterically, these photos might easily be mistaken for scenes of despair, disgust and degradation. I'll explain.
Cracking up or vomiting?
Chortling girlishly or staring at a dead body?
Giggling uncontrollably or weeping shamefully?
The answer to all of the above rhetorical photo caption questions is "both." At this point the meal had gone COMPLETELY off the rails with no hope of redemption and I was past the point of being hungry or caring about all the perfectly good ingredients we'd just wasted (I defy you to try to cook an egg after there's an adorable whiskered monkey face on it. You can't, you monster!) but in a sadly optimistic attempt to see this thing through, Tony and I did dish up a couple piles of spicy burnt dino puke, poked at it, and timidly took a few small mouse nibbles before dumping the whole F-ing thing in the trash, pan and all, dragging the trash can out to the curb, lighting it on fire, and violently kicking it down a hill. Or something like that.
To be perfectly honest, it's embarrassing to reveal how misguided some of our flavoring and cooking techniques were in this experiment. But the moral of the story is that overused axiom: Failure is as important as success. Not only that, but failure is natural (...is something a damn dirty hippie would say). Obviously we had a lot of fun failing that night, but the fact remains that we didn't manage to produce a delicious meal. In the digital age of thousands of readily available recipes, of restaurants living or dying at the hands of a few subjective Yelp reviews, of choices and inputs so overwhelming in abundance that it's tempting to assume one can navigate away from ever having a bad meal again, it's important to remember that food should be fun. Lower your expectations, try new things when cooking and when eating out. And if your waiter tells you they're out of the chicken dish or your sister doesn't cook the carrots all the way through, don't chastise them, hell, don't even sigh. We all love a great meal, but we also have many of them every day of our lives (and keep in mind that some people aren't able to), and they can't all be mind-blowing.
For the love of God, Tony! Will I never hear the end of the undercooked carrots?!?!?!?!
In all honesty, I hope I never do, because that would mean that Tony and I have stopped arguing endlessly about food. Even though Tony Bug and I reside in different states these days, we often share recipes and cooking advice long distance. On those all too rare occasions when we get to visit in person, I hope we'll always enjoy preparing a meal together and sharing the new food knowledge we've acquired in our time apart. There's always more to learn, people, and f***ing up royally is just one way to learn it. So keep at it.
As a final thought, I'd like to leave you with my one of my favorite overused axioms: If it ain't a good time, it's a good story.
