The Idiot's Guide for the Culinarily Inept

[djmcmath]

In the interest of keeping this forum titled "Off-Topic" rather than "Political Cynicism," I post the following:



The Idiot's Guide for the Culinarily Inept
Issue #1: How to simultaneously produce inedible food while making a mess of your kitchen.
(aka Spaghetti and Garlic Bread)

Warning: the following culinary tips are for trained professionals only. If you are not a culinary professional, do not attempt these on your own! All of these items were performed under direct supervision of safety observers prepared for medical emergencies!

Thank you for taking part in this fine guide. This has been prepared to assist you, the culinary inept, in making all of the same mistakes that I routinely make when preparing a basic dinner. Don't worry if you can't reproduce all of these mistakes in a single meal as casually as I can -- I have years of practice, and can skillfully burn myself while ruining food and make it look easy. This episode represents my efforts to produce spaghetti and garlic bread, which is an excellent starting point for our adventure. The more common bachelor foods -- Kraft Easy Mac and Ramen Noodles -- are more challenging to screw up, though with practice you'll be able to destroy even a salad.

1. When starting the stove, be careful to set the pot of water that you intend to boil noodles on to a different heating surface than you turn on. For example, place the 2qt pot with noodles on the back right burner, and turn on the front right burner. 5 minutes later, check the water temperature with your finger, noting that it is still cold. If you were trained in thermodynamics and fluid heat transfer, you might expect this. If you're absent-minded, however, you'll dry your hand with a towel and set the towel on the front right burner. This is important.

2. Wait several minutes. Start preparing the spaghetti sauce, if you must. Note that the kitchen is beginning to smell like burning hand towel. Confuse this odor with burnt Kraft Easy Mac which fell down through the burner during another exercise in culinary ineptitude, assume that the heat from the back right burner is finally coming on, and burning said macaroni. Take no further action at this point.

3. Continue preparing spaghetti sauce, while ignoring the pall of smoke filling the kitchen. Wait for your room-mate to come and ask "Is something burning?" Turn to notice smoke rising from hand towel. Attempt to make an off-handed casual comment: "Oh, I'm just sauteeing a hand-towel, don't mind me." Calmly toss hand-towel in sink, apply running water. Move 2qt noodle-pot to appropriate burner.

4. Preparing garlic bread seems like a mostly innocuous event, but an expert in the science of the culinarily inept can turn even such an innocent event into an opportunity for bad food and pain. My personal favorite technique is to grip the cheese around the sides, rather than from the back, such that as I grate, my fingers get invariably closer to the grater. Any first-time chef can scrape one finger all-to-heck, but it takes a lot of hard practice to catch two or even three fingers all the way down the grater. You'll find that while small bits of finger-flesh add a pleasant saltiness to the bread, blood tends to frighten dinner guests.

5. Back to the spaghetti sauce -- make sure to use a plastic spatula to stir the spaghetti sauce with. This is important, because if you're really excellent at this sort of thing, you'll make sure to turn the burner up just high enough to melt plastic. Rather than setting the spatula down on a plate, paper-towel, etc. on the counter, save yourself the trouble and leave it in the saucepan, which is at a carefully selected temperature just hot enough to do the job.

6. Confuse the smell of melting plastic with the smell of burnt hand towel. Take no action.

7. Wait for your room-mate to come ask, "Is something burning ... again?" Notice the melting spatula. Make another off-handed comment: "Just adding some special ingredients to the sauce, it'll put hair on your chest, you see." Put the melting spatula in the sink. Get a wooden spoon to stir with.

8. By now, you've certainly turned the stove to "broil" in preparation for cooking the garlic bread, which should be ready to place in the stove by now. Remember to check the bread often, as it cooks rapidly.

9. Garlic bread affords more opportunities for ineptitude than most people give it credit for. Many inept chefs would simply leave it in too long, using the smell of charred bread as an indication of completeness. For obvious reasons, such an indicator is less effective in my kitchen, so I chose a far more complex method to demonstrate ineptitude. Remember to check the bread often -- every minute or so. At least one of the times that you check the bread, do so with the dishwasher open (you're multi-tasking in the kitchen -- excellent preparation for a great many mistakes!), so that you can't fully open the stove. With the stove mostly open, but not quite to it's "locked down" position, reach fully into the stove with both hands to remove the bread. Bump the stove door with your legs, such that the "return to shut position" helper-springs pull the stove door rapidly shut on your arms. The door should be intensely hot, and should leave an excellent mark on at least one of your forearms to demonstrate your highly refined level of ineptitude, never-mind the immediate announcement of pain to any bystanders.

10. The noodles should be nearly done at this point. Place the collander firmly on the countertop and dump 2 quarts of water with noodles into the collander. Note that the noodles will be retained in the collander, while the water will not. If you prefer extra-showy demonstrations of ineptitude, you may prefer to do this with the dishwasher open, so that the noodle-water flows through the collander all over the clean dishes. Those more skilled may also prefer to place the collander on the same counter as the freshly cooked bread, though this is not a maneuver for an inexpert chef to attempt.

This is the majority of high-quality procedures for demonstrating your culinary ineptness while preparing a simple dinner. For the more experienced, it may also be desired to attempt to produce espresso-based drinks with dinner, affording numerous additional opportunities -- spraying wet pressurized coffee grounds or hot milk all over the kitchen, burning yourself on any of the hot components, etc. Ah, but we'll discuss the many and varied means of damaging yourself while producing bad coffee in another article. We hope you enjoyed this installment of what we know is your favorite periodical entertainment, and we're sure you look forward to the next installment as much as we do.

[masraum]

Excellent, I'll try that tonight!

[Drago]

Nice write up.

Two things:

Kraft Easy Mac is a microwave meal. Regular Kraft Mac 'n Cheese is the stove top variety.

Stoves don't broil, but they can boil...., ovens mainly broil but I've seen water boiled in them too.

[djmcmath]

Drago -- spoken like a true bachelor. I'll have to try boiling water in my oven tonight for my Kraft Easy Mac.

[vash]

you can broil with a stove. broiling is just 100% radiant heat, so i bet you could broil with it. just upside down.

[juanbenae]

you left out the part about burning a doob upon entering the kitchen. i always used to burn the bread after that, if i remember correctly thats why i stopped. funny thing about bread too, you can scrape the burnt top off and it still taste burnt.

an X of mine used to burn stuff often. she had a trick, say you burn some rice and bean mix. she used to take news paper and put it between the pan and lid and let it sit for 5 or 10 minutes. somehow it would take the burnt taste away. you still had the pan with the burnt layer of rice and beans to clean, but what was not burnt didt taste so bad.

[Drago]

Originally posted by djmcmath
Drago -- spoken like a true bachelor. I'll have to try boiling water in my oven tonight for my Kraft Easy Mac.

Many years as a bachelor for the regular Mac...two kids for the Easy Mac

[island911]

Easy Mac ? . . .isn't that stuff packed with MSG? (an addictive neurotoxin) link

[djmcmath]

MSG? Dude, who cares, I'm like, a f-in' bachelor, man! Pschaw...

[djmcmath]

Ok, I read the link ... you've got to be kidding me. Our government lets big corporations put drugs in the food that make it taste better, but that will kill us? No wonder I like Mac 'n' Cheese so much ... 30 years from now, I'll end up filing a class-action lawsuit, and the world will laugh at us: "Oh, those silly buggers, they should have known that MSG was an addictive neurotoxin..."


Dan

[island911]

I don't know if it will kill you. . .but it will likely make you stupid. (seriously)

Thus the desired "Dude, who cares, I'm like, a f-in' bachelor, man! Pschaw..."-effect.

Nasty stuff. YMMV

[djmcmath]

Well, alrighty then. In our next episode of "How not to produce edible food," we'll be making an organic salad!

[john70t]

There's also the technique of cracking the pot lid to strain the noodles, resulting in all the noodles shifting at once and ending up in the garbage disposal.

[djmcmath]

Ah, the much vaunted "crack the pot lid" technique, favored by amateurs in the trade. Yes, for many years I produced pasta in this fashion, occasionally losing some of it. It wasn't until very recently that I developed my newest technique, which though it does salvage all of the pasta, makes a significant mess. In retrospect, it's a tradeoff -- the memories of digging pasta out of the garbage disposal really take me back... (teary eyed) Thanks, John.


Dan

[911ctS]

That was a great write up!! funny as hell, can't wait for the next one.

As far as the noodles going down the drain... I've been there many times. Actually I began to purposely make more noodles expecting to have a 15-20% loss during the rinse cycle.

and yanking the battery out of your smoke alarm is always a good precautionary step to cooking bread.

[tabs]

DJ..they actually allow U on a Nuke sub...Oh my I think our country is in deep trouble......

[oldE]

The lady SAID she wasn't the world's greatest cook. Sometimes she forgot a pot on the stove or something in the oven. When her kids came home from school on fire prevention week, full of chatter about emergency escape routes and fire safety, she was impressed with their new knowledge. When the smoke detector went off (again) while she was making supper, she expected to see the kids pour our of their rooms to check out the alarm. When they didn't, she went down the hall to see just what they were doing. Seeing them calmly watching TV, she demanded "The smoke detector just went off. Don't you know what that means?" "Yeah" responded the eldest, "supper 's ready!"
Can't win em all.
Les

[djmcmath]

My smoke detectors have been uninstalled since the first week in this apartment. I'm counting on the sprinklers to catch a problem, if it's really serious.

Nuke subs are easy, man -- I don't have to cook!