So, listen, I know I've been terribly absent and neglectful. I know everyone expected that after making the grand proclamation that I would cease the consumption of fast food, I would have something entertaining to write about. And I would have. Except I didn't.
The truth is, I haven't really missed fast food. There haven't been any insane cravings for tacos dipped in gravy or fried chicken basted with taco sauce. (Although, that sounds great, doesn't it?) I haven't really thought too much about fast food since so heroically claiming that I would not eat it anymore. Plus, I bought a bunch of Lean Pockets the other day, so whenever I crave something sub par and less than food, I pop one of those in the old microwave and two minutes later... Voila! Hot crap in a wrapper! The miracle of modern crisping sleeve technology has really brought down standards and expectations. I'm sorry, loyal readers. I will try to do better.
The good news is, I started school today. (No standing ovation needed. Sit down guys. No, really, it's okay. It was only my first day. You can applaud later. When I graduate. IF I graduate.) If nothing else, my incredibly expensive culinary education promises to bring entertaining fodder for the blog. This is not to say that I met anyone particularly insane today. Which is really too bad. I was hoping to have one hilarious story involving someone sado-masochistic or, in the very least, angry and homicidal. Nothing yet, but I promise to keep my ears and eyes peeled.
The truth is, today was pretty much like every other first day of school (FDOS, for those of you not in the know.) I've ever bothered to be a party to, with the exception of a few "You're all adults, you can make your own decisions" peppered throughout the mundane and bombastic presentation of policies and procedures. Like every other FDOS, it probably could have been condensed into half the time, and we could have been left to our own devices or, God forbid, some actual culinary instruction for the second half of the day. But alas, we, as a society, must compensate for those morons among us that insist upon asking seven hundred questions about every topic that is presented. Morons like, well, me.
Yeah. I guess I'm going to be that guy. Girl. Whatever. It's no different than high school, where, when I bothered to show up, I asked interesting and engaging questions that made the entire class moan out of hatred for my sharp intellect and keen sense of nuance. Except, rather than allowing the taxpayers of this great nation to foot the bill for my ill- spent high school time, I'm paying for it myself (Sort of. Taxpayers are footing the initial bill. Thanks. But I'm paying it back soon.). So I intend to ask even more questions than before. They might even be intelligent, answer- seeking questions like they were today. This is either going to make my classmates hate me, which is, like, whatever, I guess, or it is going to make me the Yoda of L'academie de Cuisine Culinary Arts Class of 2010. I've never seen the movie, but I get the impression that being Yoda is a lot of responsibility, so I don't know which outcome I am rooting for. I'm used to people disliking me. Looking up to me, on the other hand, is really only something I expect of people with very little to entertain them and some of the lesser insects. Either way, it has already elicited a reaction from my chef instructor, who we will refer to here only as Chef (at least until I get permission to exploit him via the Internet.). I asked one of my twenty questions of the day and his response was "Are you in Culinary Arts or Pastry?". My answer was, of course, "Culinary, Chef." His reaction? A very firm, rather pronounced "Excellent." I'm not sure whether I should take that as an affirmation that he is actually pleased to have found me in his class or if it would be in my best interest to ask for a swift transfer to the pastry arts program. Only time will tell, I suppose.
One of the best things about today? Getting my things. My wonderful, beautiful things. I love my things. A brief list of my awesome new things follows below:
1.) The book: On Cooking, A Textbook of Culinary Fundamentals; Fourth Edition. A mere 1406 pages of culinary information that I get the impression I am expected to take as either a latent wealth of knowledge I am not actually expected to utilize to it's full potential or a bunch of culinary fluff that any moron off the street could notice and actualize into a book that weighs nearly ten pounds.
2.) Four top of the line, embroidered (WITH MY NAME), classic chef's jackets. Think Top Chef style, except better because they belong to me me ME! All of them are entirely too big, but that problem will be fixed by Monday with the help of a tailor and over $120 worth of cutting and sewing.
3.) Three incredibly annoying neckerchiefs with the purported purpose of 1) keeping sweat out of innocent people's food and 2) reducing the possibility of me catching the flu in the walk in freezer. I don't know under what conditions, medically speaking, one catches the flu, but the two and half centimeter knot at my throat seems an unlikely barrier to H1N1.
4.) Checked pants. Approximately 17 inches too long, referred to by aforementioned tailor as "pajama pants," hideous. However, they do feature an elastic waistband, which I imagine will come in handy in the coming months.
5.) KNIVES. Beautiful, sharp, Mercer knives. I would be so lucky as to sever my pinkie with one of these beautiful works of art. I have a diamond-encrusted wand with which to sharpen and hone said knives as well as a chef's scissor, sharpener, microplane, vegetable peeler and random blue pocket meat thermometer. But mostly, so far, if all I get out of this is knives, it was mostly worth it.
All in all, a quality day. I have a good feeling about the next twelve months. Tomorrow, we learn French Onion Soup. That and a bunch of other crap, like how to cut vegetables. My syllabus is chock full of words I don't understand, so you'll have to bear with me as I learn all this myself. In the meantime, go eat a Hot Pocket. It might be the last one you want for a long time.
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Monday, September 14, 2009
To Eat to Live or Live to Eat? That is the Question.
I have just finished my last fast food meal. Well, my last fast food meal for, oh, let's say a month. We'll start with that. That sounds doable. Right?
I went out with one my classic meals: Two extra crispy drumsticks, two mounds of snowy, over-processed mashed potatoes and an extra side of under-salted, slightly gelatinous gravy of questionable origins. This is what I get when I it's 7:30 on a Monday and I haven't given any thought to what I am going to prepare for dinner. Or at least it's what I've gotten since Boston Market started sucking so much.
This is a decision that I considered heavily. Anyone who has ever eaten in a car with me knows that I have a dedication to certain fast food restaurants that could be classified as somewhere between loyal and obsessive. As self examination is one of my less-frequently utilized forms of entertainment, I will leave you to your opinion. The point is, I love fast food. I have a meal at each of my preferred outlets that I will only stray from in the event of alcohol consumption or apocalypse. I have a special way of preparing and consuming each item, down to the fact that I eat my extra crispy chicken directly over the top of my double order of mashed potatoes so that the extra crispies that fall off will land in the bed of potato, creating an interesting textural backdrop for the gravy that is delivered to my mouth via the potatoes. (And I will state here, for the record and in the case of pretty much every mashed potato recipe in existence, that I consider potatoes merely a vessel created for the purpose of delivering gravy. That is not to say that I won't eat mashed potatoes without gravy. I will. And I do. I'm just saying, they were created for the gravy. This is a point that I consider indisputable.)
You may be asking now why, given my inveterate, nearly fiendish love of all things fried or assembled in a line to my specifications, I have decided to forgo the ease and comfort of my friend, the fast food restaurant. There are a few reasons for this. One, I decided awhile ago that I'd rather not consume ingredients that are more than three syllables long. I feel that ingredients like sodium tripolyphospate don't belong in food. I am certain that one word food items that are perfectly natural but more than three syllables long exist, but I can't think of any off the top of my head. Watermelon. That's one. Two, I'm curious to see if merely avoiding fast food result in a miraculous loss of recently acquired weight. I don't know how people get slender, and I'm not buying into this new "exercise" trend, but I am fairly confident that eating tacos prepared with grade F meat is not how this is accomplished. Thirdly, it is expected of me that I shall develop a more sophisticated palate in the coming months and I know for a fact that the Arby's medium beef with cheddar is not high up on the list of sophisticated foods. Nor are the oft-overlooked pintos and cheese at Taco Bell, or the "chicken" nuggets you can find at your neighborhood McDonald's.
I guess, to make a long story short, when you get down it, fast food just isn't that good. There is this concept of "eating to live" running rampant out there, especially here in suburban America. And in Subsaharan Africa. I do not and will not ascribe to this way of life. I ascertain that this concept is accepted due to the constant availability of quickly prepared and thoughtlessly assembled sandwiches containing sub-par ingredients in often inadequate portions (A quarter of a slice of American cheese on the Filet O'Fish? Really?). The line tonight at KFC was at least 8 cars long when we pulled into the parking lot and not a single person was in line inside. It's there, it's cheap, it's easy and, despite the aforementioned sub-par ingredients, it tastes good. Sort of.
But for the purpose of this particular experiment, and many others for that matter, I will strive to live to eat. So, starting tomorrow, Tuesday, September 15, I will Live to Eat Another Day. Or at least I'll try.
I went out with one my classic meals: Two extra crispy drumsticks, two mounds of snowy, over-processed mashed potatoes and an extra side of under-salted, slightly gelatinous gravy of questionable origins. This is what I get when I it's 7:30 on a Monday and I haven't given any thought to what I am going to prepare for dinner. Or at least it's what I've gotten since Boston Market started sucking so much.
This is a decision that I considered heavily. Anyone who has ever eaten in a car with me knows that I have a dedication to certain fast food restaurants that could be classified as somewhere between loyal and obsessive. As self examination is one of my less-frequently utilized forms of entertainment, I will leave you to your opinion. The point is, I love fast food. I have a meal at each of my preferred outlets that I will only stray from in the event of alcohol consumption or apocalypse. I have a special way of preparing and consuming each item, down to the fact that I eat my extra crispy chicken directly over the top of my double order of mashed potatoes so that the extra crispies that fall off will land in the bed of potato, creating an interesting textural backdrop for the gravy that is delivered to my mouth via the potatoes. (And I will state here, for the record and in the case of pretty much every mashed potato recipe in existence, that I consider potatoes merely a vessel created for the purpose of delivering gravy. That is not to say that I won't eat mashed potatoes without gravy. I will. And I do. I'm just saying, they were created for the gravy. This is a point that I consider indisputable.)
You may be asking now why, given my inveterate, nearly fiendish love of all things fried or assembled in a line to my specifications, I have decided to forgo the ease and comfort of my friend, the fast food restaurant. There are a few reasons for this. One, I decided awhile ago that I'd rather not consume ingredients that are more than three syllables long. I feel that ingredients like sodium tripolyphospate don't belong in food. I am certain that one word food items that are perfectly natural but more than three syllables long exist, but I can't think of any off the top of my head. Watermelon. That's one. Two, I'm curious to see if merely avoiding fast food result in a miraculous loss of recently acquired weight. I don't know how people get slender, and I'm not buying into this new "exercise" trend, but I am fairly confident that eating tacos prepared with grade F meat is not how this is accomplished. Thirdly, it is expected of me that I shall develop a more sophisticated palate in the coming months and I know for a fact that the Arby's medium beef with cheddar is not high up on the list of sophisticated foods. Nor are the oft-overlooked pintos and cheese at Taco Bell, or the "chicken" nuggets you can find at your neighborhood McDonald's.
I guess, to make a long story short, when you get down it, fast food just isn't that good. There is this concept of "eating to live" running rampant out there, especially here in suburban America. And in Subsaharan Africa. I do not and will not ascribe to this way of life. I ascertain that this concept is accepted due to the constant availability of quickly prepared and thoughtlessly assembled sandwiches containing sub-par ingredients in often inadequate portions (A quarter of a slice of American cheese on the Filet O'Fish? Really?). The line tonight at KFC was at least 8 cars long when we pulled into the parking lot and not a single person was in line inside. It's there, it's cheap, it's easy and, despite the aforementioned sub-par ingredients, it tastes good. Sort of.
But for the purpose of this particular experiment, and many others for that matter, I will strive to live to eat. So, starting tomorrow, Tuesday, September 15, I will Live to Eat Another Day. Or at least I'll try.
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
In Defense of the Food Chain
I have a short list of things that I refuse to eat. This list is composed of items that I find detestable due to mostly emotional principals that border on hypocritical and are generally pathological. To make my point however, I will say that I love dogs. And so I cannot eat them. I love to eat chickens, but at no point in my life have I ever been emotionally involved with anything that could be remotely mistaken for poultry. In fact, it is my opinion that the vast majority of birds that are flying around in a murderous rage (And all birds, no exceptions, are flying around in a murderous rage) are hoping to be humanely murdered and consumed. I call this Manifest Destiny. You call it whatever you want.
I have no problem with vegetarians as a whole. I get it... You can get protein from beans and you see no reason to kill animals for your nutrition. Fine. Whatever. The thing is, beans taste a hell of a lot better when you add bacon to them. Have you ever tried tried to eat lentil stew without the aid of a pork or beef product? It's disgusting. I understand you have your principals but really, you're all missing out.
I have a friend who read a book once. I don't know much about this book, I think it was called Skinny Bitch, other than the fact that it is systematically destroying the food chain as we know it. Immediately after reading the book, she became a vegan. This means that not only did she eschew reason by remaining meat-free, she also vowed to stay away from delightful foods such as dairy, eggs and anything else that tasted good. I visited her apartment once. You know what she had in her fridge? Grapes. Grapes and one half of one cucumber. Curiously, she also had wine coolers, which I am pretty sure kill a dove every time you drink one.
Anyway, this nonsense went on for the better part of two years. She would occasionally break with this insane lifestyle and consume a piece of cheese pizza. Every time, though, she felt guilty. (I want to break away here and make a point. Cows must be milked. If they are not milked regularly, they become ill. Same with chickens. They lay eggs. Naturally. It is what they do. Therefore, I see absolutely no reason why a sane, self-possessed person would avoid cheese or milk or butter or any other dairy product. But then again, I see no reason why a sane, self-possessed person would avoid beef, pork or roasted quail stuffed with sausage and sage, so maybe I am not the right person to ask.) This all ended one fateful night at a little place called Ketchup. I will say one thing about this restaurant and that is that Ketchup's menu is delightfully skewed with an interest toward the carnivore. I realize that technically, humans are omnivores but I do not consider a meal complete without a large hunk of meat that was never any part of a soybean plant. However, if you were to offer me a steak with a side of shrimp, accompanied by a sauce made of chicken, I would consider that to be a balanced meal and would only question the lack of vegetable if I was still hungry when I was finished eating.
So, my friend, we'll call her Erin because that is what is on her birth certificate, finally came back to the world of the living. She ordered a pork chop. And she ate the whole thing. Her body did not instantly convulse upon her consumption of said pork chop, she did not drop dead at the table. In fact, if my memory serves me, we went on to an art show and then a night of excessive consumption of alcohol. If she did throw up that night, I assure you it had nothing to do with the pig. As far as I know, Erin is still leading a happy, omnivorous life. She does live in Richmond, so it is possible that those whack jobs down there are trying to reconvert her but the point is, she was happy, for a time, as a meat consumer. And in this way, we complete the circle of life.
I want to make one final point (for this post, anyway) about consuming animals. There is this concept flying around out there that force feeding animals is cruel. I can see why you might think that, but join me, for a moment, in considering the following. Humans force feed themselves and their children every day. How many times have you been out at a restaurant and heard "Come on, Timmy. Three more bites."? And you, you who won't eat foie gras or veal, what did you do last Thanksgiving? Did you say, "Well, I've just had a regular portion of meat and eight kinds of side dishes. I think I'll go ahead and put my plate away." Did you? No. You said, "I may have just eaten my body weight in turkey and mashed potatoes, but somebody's gotta eat that corn pudding and green bean casserole. That somebody might as well be me." My point, as convoluted as it may be, is that maybe, just maybe, those overfed geese are just as happy as your average adult American male after his third plateful of food on Christmas. And just think, they get to be that happy every day.
I have no problem with vegetarians as a whole. I get it... You can get protein from beans and you see no reason to kill animals for your nutrition. Fine. Whatever. The thing is, beans taste a hell of a lot better when you add bacon to them. Have you ever tried tried to eat lentil stew without the aid of a pork or beef product? It's disgusting. I understand you have your principals but really, you're all missing out.
I have a friend who read a book once. I don't know much about this book, I think it was called Skinny Bitch, other than the fact that it is systematically destroying the food chain as we know it. Immediately after reading the book, she became a vegan. This means that not only did she eschew reason by remaining meat-free, she also vowed to stay away from delightful foods such as dairy, eggs and anything else that tasted good. I visited her apartment once. You know what she had in her fridge? Grapes. Grapes and one half of one cucumber. Curiously, she also had wine coolers, which I am pretty sure kill a dove every time you drink one.
Anyway, this nonsense went on for the better part of two years. She would occasionally break with this insane lifestyle and consume a piece of cheese pizza. Every time, though, she felt guilty. (I want to break away here and make a point. Cows must be milked. If they are not milked regularly, they become ill. Same with chickens. They lay eggs. Naturally. It is what they do. Therefore, I see absolutely no reason why a sane, self-possessed person would avoid cheese or milk or butter or any other dairy product. But then again, I see no reason why a sane, self-possessed person would avoid beef, pork or roasted quail stuffed with sausage and sage, so maybe I am not the right person to ask.) This all ended one fateful night at a little place called Ketchup. I will say one thing about this restaurant and that is that Ketchup's menu is delightfully skewed with an interest toward the carnivore. I realize that technically, humans are omnivores but I do not consider a meal complete without a large hunk of meat that was never any part of a soybean plant. However, if you were to offer me a steak with a side of shrimp, accompanied by a sauce made of chicken, I would consider that to be a balanced meal and would only question the lack of vegetable if I was still hungry when I was finished eating.
So, my friend, we'll call her Erin because that is what is on her birth certificate, finally came back to the world of the living. She ordered a pork chop. And she ate the whole thing. Her body did not instantly convulse upon her consumption of said pork chop, she did not drop dead at the table. In fact, if my memory serves me, we went on to an art show and then a night of excessive consumption of alcohol. If she did throw up that night, I assure you it had nothing to do with the pig. As far as I know, Erin is still leading a happy, omnivorous life. She does live in Richmond, so it is possible that those whack jobs down there are trying to reconvert her but the point is, she was happy, for a time, as a meat consumer. And in this way, we complete the circle of life.
I want to make one final point (for this post, anyway) about consuming animals. There is this concept flying around out there that force feeding animals is cruel. I can see why you might think that, but join me, for a moment, in considering the following. Humans force feed themselves and their children every day. How many times have you been out at a restaurant and heard "Come on, Timmy. Three more bites."? And you, you who won't eat foie gras or veal, what did you do last Thanksgiving? Did you say, "Well, I've just had a regular portion of meat and eight kinds of side dishes. I think I'll go ahead and put my plate away." Did you? No. You said, "I may have just eaten my body weight in turkey and mashed potatoes, but somebody's gotta eat that corn pudding and green bean casserole. That somebody might as well be me." My point, as convoluted as it may be, is that maybe, just maybe, those overfed geese are just as happy as your average adult American male after his third plateful of food on Christmas. And just think, they get to be that happy every day.
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